George Megalogenis on the three shocks reshaping Australian politics

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Mark Humphreys (0:07)

It's 1983, and Alan Bond has just won the America's Cup.

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The race of the century.

George Megalogenis (0:13)

I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not setting up the diet is a bum.

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Bondy becomes a national hero, but quickly goes from hero to zero. Bond was at the centre of one of the biggest political scandals in Australian history. I'm Mark Humphreys, and I am here to tell the full Alan Bond story. Search ABC Rewind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

Natasha Mitchell (0:36)

Political commentator and journalist George Megalogenis crunches the numbers and sees the nuances in the Australian electorate like few others. Our demographic shifts, our changing realities, work, home, relationships, opinions. How all of those influence our mood at the ballot box. He's got a new book out. It's called Three Shocks, Who We Are Becoming in the 21st Century. And it really offers a clear-eyed view on our present moment.

And on trends like the death of the two-party system.

And a whole lot more. Our big thinker today on Big Ideas.

George Megalogenis (1:22)

The two of them are contesting on an old set of rules. When the game is concluded and somebody just won. The crowd left years ago.

There's another game ready to be played. But just because the two of them are still operating on the old assumption, neither side could really release themselves from that particular way of thinking. Because it had ever been thus.

Natasha Mitchell (1:42)

Yes, today on Big Ideas, Australia has changed. How are our politics changing with it? Welcome to the show. I'm Natasha Mitchell. Big thanks to Claire Nicholls, host of our book show here at ABC Radio National, for taking the reins while I had a bit of a bush break.

George Megalogenis joins you today and an audience at the Hawke Centre on Garner Country at the University of Adelaide with senior reporter for Guardian Australia, Tory Shepherd.

Tory Shepherd (2:13)

Hello, George.

George Megalogenis (2:15)

How are you, Tory?

Tory Shepherd (2:16)

I'm pretty good. Thank you.

I think last time we caught up we talked about how immigration brings prosperity and I thought, oh, wouldn't you like the guys in Canberra to think about that a bit right now?

George Megalogenis (2:27)

I've just written, I'll give you a heads up, I've just written a column for The Monthly to run next month and it ends with a policy suggestion, which I don't want to spend too much time on now, but it's an electorate level trial. You can guess the electorates if you feel like it. There'll be a group of voters who clearly are not keen on migration, so they should hand over their diverse Australians to an electorate that wants them, and in return maybe some British backpackers can go the other way.

Tory Shepherd (2:58)

A migrant market.

George Megalogenis (2:59)

Yeah, and then see, Tony Burke would need to be holding the checkbook, make sure there's living away from home allowances, and so nobody's gonna be worse off, materially, and then we'll get a news poll to check at the beginning and the end of the process, and maybe the ABC could run the People's Forum, and it'll save us 30 years, I estimate. 30 years is a heartache if we just go cold turkey.

Tory Shepherd (3:27)

I love it, I love it, but let's get to your current book. So, the Three Shocks, as soon as I heard Three Shocks, I started thinking, oh, what are they gonna be?

And now that I've read it, it makes total sense. So for the first time since Federation, we have a population that's a majority of migrants and their children. Professional women are now the largest segment of the workforce, replacing blue collar men. And on the world stage, both our allies and our key trade partners have proven unreliable, which is a slight understatement there. I wanted to ask you this procedural question first, which was, so you went metaphorical pens down in May. How often since then have you gone, oh, I wish I had snuck that one into the book?

George Megalogenis (4:05)

Good question, good question. So, you know, the elephant in the room, which is the complete disintegration of the two-party system, which has sort of manifested itself in various ways in both the 22 and the 2025 federal election. There seems to be an acceleration in that process in 2026 I did know about the South Australian election result and I did know about the Farah by-election.

No, I didn't want to keep writing because the book ends, and I tend to do this pretty much with every non-fiction book. I have very, very strict, in my head, before I hit sand, a kind of beginning where the story starts to unfold and an event that ends it. And so when you pick up the book, if you pick it up a week, a month, a year later, that event is still interesting, I hope that event is still interesting enough for you to then use whatever it is on the tools of the book to then interpret your present, the present in which you're reading it. And the problem writing this year into this year, it's quicksand. The story is going in every direction. And we're still two years out from a federal election. So it was easy for me to end the story in 2025 And because you allude to the Three Shocks, the 2025 election, even more so than the 22 election, has all the Three Shocks intersecting at the same time with a very, very final judgement on at least one side of politics, which is the liberal side of politics.