The main parties are so uninspiring but I can’t risk the alternatives

If I’m being honest, I’m not feeling particularly excited about the upcoming election.  Like so many Australians, I look at the major parties and struggle to see much substantive difference between them. In my humble opinion, neither is offering anything groundbreaking or visionary. That’s frustrating, because there’s so much low-hanging fruit that could genuinely improve life for ordinary working people.

My husband and I are middle-class professionals, and parents of several young children. Most of our friends are a similar stage of life. And yet, almost everyone I know in their early thirties feels under financial pressure. The cost of living is crushing. Our weekly grocery shop has blown out by hundreds of dollars, and I’ve watched the price of a simple latte creep up again and again. This past Passover, we skipped the chocolate altogether. I couldn’t believe it was $8.40 a block at Coles!

My husband and I, we’re lucky, apparently. Without intergenerational wealth and up to our eyeballs in debt, we’ve managed to buy a home in Caulfield. However, since inflation began, our mortgage repayments have more than tripled due to interest. Since the last election, it’s been an exhausting few years just trying to keep up. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for people further down the economic ladder. If professionals are struggling, how is everyone else supposed to cope?

It’s pretty to clear to any Gen Z and millennial that this country desperately needs tax reform.

There’s no denying that earlier generations, particularly the baby boomers, benefited from a very different Australia, one where university was free, housing was affordable, and jobs were plentiful. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the reality of the time.

But for younger Australians today, that kind of stability feels increasingly out of reach. The housing market is cooked, education is expensive, and secure work is harder to find. We need meaningful reform to ensure that future generations can thrive too, not just scrape by in a system that no longer works for them.

It shouldn’t be this hard for two working people to buy their first home, or to raise a family without drowning in debt. It’s no wonder so many people are delaying having kids. If life just doesn’t feel sustainable or affordable before kids, why would it be easier after?

And yet, I find myself deeply conflicted about who to vote for this election.

There are some genuinely compelling policy ideas emerging from the fringes of politics, from candidates like Jordan van den Lamb (known online as Purple Pingers), to parts of the Greens platform. I’ve followed the housing debates closely, and I think van den Lamb’s focus on vacancy taxes, public housing, and reining in investor speculation is bold and overdue.

He’s a Victorian Senate candidate who’s gained attention for exposing vacant Aussie properties, some left empty for decades, during a national housing crisis. His approach is provocative, and while he doesn’t openly call for squatting, that’s clearly the implication.

While I don’t particularly like his methods, he has rightly identified a broken housing system that neither major party has been able to tackle properly. His activism has shown the dismal state of many rentals and the unchecked power of landlords. As a millennial, I think that these are conversations we should be having.

Similarly, the Greens are offering serious proposals on paid parental leave, climate action, and tax reform, areas where the major parties have repeatedly failed to be imaginative or courageous.

But here’s where it gets complicated, because I think that these ideas often come wrapped in the broader, radical ideologies of the far-left that I, and many other Jewish voters, don’t subscribe to. It’s not just about Israel, although that’s part of it.

It’s about how some progressive spaces have embraced a kind of all-or-nothing politics that can be alienating, even for those of us who deeply want change. There’s a risk that good, practical policy gets entangled with more extreme rhetoric, leaving voters like me, who are hungry for reform but wary of dogma, with nowhere to go.

Van den Lamb has accused Australia of participating in genocide for supporting Israel’s actions in Gaza. On a webpage from the Victorian Socialists announcing his candidacy, he says, “Labor’s red doesn’t represent social-democratic values anymore. It represents the blood of Palestinians killed in Gaza while Labor has signed deals with weapons companies that are arming Israel.”

That kind of language doesn’t just lack nuance, it flattens an incredibly complex conflict into a dangerous and divisive narrative.

Likewise, the Greens were the only party to refuse to condemn Hamas for the October 7 attacks. I won’t support a party that refuses to endorse the IHRA definition of antisemitism or has MPs that flirt with conspiracy theories about Jewish influence in politics.

I wish the major parties had taken up the mantle of bold reform themselves. I wish I didn’t have to choose between uninspired centrism and activist platforms that sometimes feel like political ultimatums. But that’s the choice we’re left with, and for voters like me, it’s exhausting.

When I ran for Parliament as a Teal independent in the 2022 Victorian election in the seat of Caulfield, I did so because I wanted to make the place, I live in better for all people here. I care about climate, housing, education, and equity.

But I also care about being safe in my own country, about my kids growing up in a place where they don’t feel like outsiders. When the major parties fail to offer bold or meaningful solutions to long-standing policy issues, it leaves frustrated voters, who want to see meaningful policy reform, with few options.

Sometimes it can mean that people become so fed up with the status quo that they can end up voting for fringe candidates, not because they support the radical ideology, but because they’re desperate for change. That kind of political drift can have dangerous consequences.

My grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, who came here because it was a safe refuge, and it terrifies me that some of the most progressive voices in our politics have forgotten how to talk about Jews and Israel without suspicion, cynicism, or hostility.

So where does that leave me?

Politically homeless. Bored and uninspired by the candidates from the major parties.

I live in Macnamara, one of the most Jewish electorates in the country, and I want to vote for someone edgy and bold, someone who can see the system is broken and wants to fix it. But I worry that these choices would offset my safety in this country. Instead, I feel boxed in by the safest, most conventional choices, not because they excite me, but because I can’t risk the alternatives.

As a proud Jewish Australian, I don’t think voting for radical social reform should mean that I gamble with my place in society or minimising the very real threat of antisemitism.

And yet, here we are. For many Jewish Australians, especially progressive ones, this election feels like a slow walk through a minefield. We want to change the world. But not if it comes at the cost of being erased from it.