When the political class keeps choosing to squeeze outer-suburban, mortgage-stressed, salaried workers, we shouldn’t be surprised to see these people turning to One Nation.

On the night of his ‘miracle’ in 2019, Scott Morrison stood before a euphoric room and thanked the quiet Australians. It was a masterstroke of political poetry, a phrase that meant everything and therefore nothing, a Rorschach blot onto which the entire commentariat could immediately project a face.

Kos Samaras

And what a face it was! Within hours we were being shown who these people supposedly were: the aspirational mortgage-belt couple, the small-business owner pushed around by red tape, the franking-credit retiree, the tradie who didn’t want to lose his ute to a Labor climate policy. A new generation of Howard’s battlers, reverently sketched. The quiet Australian, we were told, was disciplined, self-reliant, faintly aggrieved and, crucially, exactly the kind of person who reads the opinion pages and might one day be persuaded to write for them. Note my sarcasm here.

There was, of course, zero data behind any of it. Morrison’s line was an instinct dressed up as an insight, and the images that followed were not the product of research but of imagination. Nobody could point to a survey that isolated this voter or proved they swung the result. The “quiet Australian” was a story the winners told themselves about why they had won, subsequently taking that imaginary voter type to the 2022 election campaign and being roundly beaten.

The exercise was revealing all the same, just not in the way it was meant to be. The faces we were shown told us very little about who actually decided the 2019 election. What they told us, in exquisite detail, was which Australians the political and commentariat class are willing to lend agency to. Who gets to be a protagonist in the national story. Who is imagined as having interests, grievances and a vote worth courting. And it is almost never the people who are genuinely quiet.

The real quiet Australians are not quiet because they’ve been anointed with a flattering label. They’re quiet because nobody is looking. They do the work the rest of us would rather not think about, let alone do. Aged care. Disability support. Cleaning. The night shift in the meatworks. And the one profession that has done as much for the health of this country as any nurse or any doctor, and gets a fraction of the gratitude. The garbo.

We have built an entire civilisation on the back of a job we are faintly embarrassed by. To understand how much we owe the people who collect our waste, you have to imagine the city that exists without them and we don’t have to imagine very hard, because for most of human history that was the only city there was.

A short history of drowning in our own waste

For thousands of years, the great killer of dense human settlement was not war or famine. It was the simple fact that people produce waste, and waste left where it falls becomes disease. Cholera, typhoid and dysentery were not acts of God; they were the predictable arithmetic of cities that had no systematic way of getting rid of what their inhabitants discarded and excreted.

The turning point came not with a vaccine but with a sanitary revolution. In 1842, Edwin Chadwick’s report on the condition of the labouring poor in Britain made the then-radical argument that filth and disease were linked, and that the state had an interest in removing the first to prevent the second. London’s Great Stink of 1858 finally shamed a reluctant parliament into building proper sewers. Across the industrial world, the most consequential public-health intervention of the nineteenth century was not a drug. It was organised removal: of sewage, of refuse, of the everyday accumulation of our human life.

Australia learned the same lesson the hard way. Before sewerage reached the suburbs, the unglamorous hero of public health was the nightman, the dunny man, who came in the dark to empty the pan from the outhouse so that families could wake up to something other than their own effluent. When bubonic plague broke out in Sydney in 1900, killing over 100 people, the response was not a miracle cure but an army of men cleaning, clearing and carting away the filth of The Rocks. We beat the plague with labour, not magic.

This is the lineage the modern garbo belongs to. Every week, without ceremony, they remove the thing that would otherwise kill us slowly. They are the reason a child in Camden, Logan or Box Hill can grow up without ever once worrying about cholera. Strip the doctors and nurses out of a suburb and people will sicken and, in time, die. Strip the waste collection out of that same suburb and you get exactly the same result, just faster, and far more visibly. The work is invisible precisely because it works. We only notice it in the gap, in the week the bin doesn’t get emptied. And that brings us to the present.

When the bins stopped in Hume

This year, the people who empty Melbourne’s bins decided they had had enough. Across eight metropolitan councils, around 7,000 Australian Services Union members came together to pursue a single multi-enterprise agreement and a 22 per cent pay rise over four years. When bargaining stalled, the bins stopped, in Merri-bek, in Darebin, and in my own municipality of Hume, where the union says 17,000 wheelie bins were left sitting on nature strips, unemptied.

The response from the political class was a clinic in how to make a worker disappear. The councils said their hands were tied: it was the Victorian government’s rate cap, you see, starving them of revenue, leaving them no room to pay people more. The state government replied that the councils were crying poor, while sitting on healthy surpluses of at least ten per cent of revenue. Each side pointed at the other, and the garbo, the actual human being who wanted enough money that they didn’t have to pick up weekend shifts just to break even, was reduced to a line item in a jurisdictional argument neither side intended to lose.

This is the bet the political class makes, over and over. It is the bet that, if you can muddy who is responsible, the public will eventually shrug and move on. It’s not our fault, says the council; it’s the state’s. It’s not our fault, says the state; it’s local government. Responsibility evaporates into the gap between institutions, and the worker’s claim quietly slides under the carpet.

Here is the part the political class consistently gets wrong, and here is where the research is genuinely encouraging. Ordinary voters are not fooled.

When you sit with normal punters and put this kind of dispute to them, two things come through with striking clarity. The first is respect. People like the garbo. They understand, in a way the commentariat does not, that this is honest, hard, essential work, and they instinctively feel it should be paid like it matters. There is no resentment here, no sense that these workers are gaming the system. The contempt our politics reserves for “rent-seekers” is simply not extended to the bloke who lifts the bin.

The second is corrosive disbelief. Voters do not accept the line. They hear “we’d love to pay them but our hands are tied” and they translate it instantly into what it actually is: a choice. They know councils make decisions about where money goes, and they know that “we can’t afford it” is a sentence that gets deployed selectively. They have watched too many local examples not to see the pattern. They will, unprompted, start listing the things their council did find money for. And they are not wrong to.

In Hume, the council that told 17,000 households their bins were a casualty of the state government’s stinginess is the same council that found $24 million to redevelop the Broadmeadows Town Hall, a heritage project that won architecture awards and was praised for restoring a sense of civic grandeur. It is the same council whose budget runs north of $300 million a year and which, in a single recent year, allocated tens of millions to new and upgraded buildings. None of this is corruption. Most of it is even defensible on its own terms. That is exactly the point. It’s about choice. Buildings for the managerial class, not better pay for the worker.

The money is always there for the building, the precinct, the plaza, the civic statement. It is the people who keep the suburb from drowning in its own waste who are told the well has run dry. Voters do not need a forensic accountant to feel the asymmetry of that. They live in it. They drive past the renovated town hall on the way home from the job that doesn’t pay enough, and they file it away.

This is the mistake at the heart of so much of our political commentary. We imagine the turn to One Nation and the wider revolt against the major parties is a story about culture or grievance or misinformation, a moral failing in the voter to be corrected by better messaging. It is nothing of the sort. It is, in large part, an entirely rational response to a thousand small experiences of exactly this kind.

The outer-suburban, mortgage-stressed, salaried working class that is reshaping Australian politics is not voting against its interests. It is voting against a political class it has watched, repeatedly, find money and agency for everyone except people like them. The flattering “quiet Australian” of 2019 was always a fiction. The actually quiet Australian, the garbo, the carer, the cleaner, has spent a decade watching the people who govern them treat their labour as the one cost that can always be squeezed and the one claim that can always be deferred.

You cannot tell people their bins didn’t get collected because of a jurisdictional dispute, while a beautifully restored town hall sits gleaming up the road, and expect them to keep faith in the arrangement. Each such moment is small. But they accumulate. And it is the accumulation, the slow, grinding sense of being neglected by every institution, which is supposed to serve you, that is driving the revolutionary vote.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/06/the-quiet-australians-who-actually-empty-the-bins/

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