Sometimes screeching activists trying to con students with socialism … have a point.

Rich people are often out of touch and create problems for the poor.

No, I am not going to dye myself green, pierce available fleshy parts, and carry a hammer and sickle to the next CPAC meeting. Nor is The Spectator Australia starting an ‘eat the rich’ BBQ on election day.

Relax.

All I am saying is that wealth creates a ‘priority gap’ between voters.

And that this can manifest larger problems if left unchecked.

Poor people want somewhere to live, something to eat, a job, and an education for their kids. Maybe even a modest holiday.

The wealthy want a third car to identify as electric, a moral cause to abate the guilt they feel for their lavish lifestyle, and competitive virtue stats to brandish at harbour-side cocktail evenings.

Virtuous causes are collected by wealthy voters as Old Money once amassed luxury cars. It is a status symbol, not an intellectual argument.

You cannot reason a Teal out of their climate vote any more than talk a bloke out of his mid-life crisis Ferrari.

Where excessive lashings of wealth once sickened the stomach of working-class revolutionaries, so too do the voting habits of rich voters. You can sense it in the streets when the shirt-wearers hand out How-to-Vote cards and receive a side-eye in response.

Previously, the idle hands of the guilt-ridden rich were re-directed into harmless causes.

They donated to charities, supported the Arts, owned sports teams, fed the poor, chained themselves to trees, climbed Everest, and – if they were feeling particularly guilty – went on a gap year in Africa to unload aid trucks.

Heck, even hanging out on each other’s yachts is considered a neutral activity.

Since the turn of the millennium, Islamic terrorism’s rapid spread through the humanitarian corridor has frightened white saviours away.

It does not take many stories, such as the Islamic State beheading two Scandinavian women hiking in North Africa, to frighten the virtue chasers.

Domestic protest culture is the rebound affair.

Australia’s most privileged people don’t mind championing the niche desires of scary regimes, so long as the ideology confines itself to sanitised chants, flag-waving, and the comfortable Marxist victim narrative.

The less that is known, the better.

Black and white morality. Victim vs the Oppressor. Good and evil. It’s all disappointingly shallow. No wonder Charlie Kirk found activist culture to be easy pickings for his re-education movement.

At least the African gap year brought ideological virgins into contact with a few home truths. The globalised world has never had a bigger gap between propaganda and reality. This ignorance has repercussions for foreign and domestic policy that grows worse every year.

By 2020, the feed the children trope had been replaced by climate action now!

Mind you, I have never seen anyone do a 40-hour famine to help a solar panel.

Why go to the trouble of feeding starving children when you can save the whole world by adding a few solar panels to the roof and voting for someone who wears pearls with their green-ish shirt?

Eco-chic.

There’s no need to get a splinter while being glued to a tree and you can forget about saving wildlife that, honestly, probably wants to kill you anyway. If a few rainforests have to be bulldozed, it doesn’t matter, because Net Zero is the mantra that absolves everything. It is the guilt-free ice-cream of politics.

What’s in Net Zero?

No one knows the ingredient list or how the calories are calculated. It’s a label that people pay for which is stuck onto the side of pretty much anything to keep shareholders happy. The fact that nations keep consuming Net Zero and getting increasingly sicker is … probably just a coincidence.

Sussan Ley’s listening tour has asked questions about the nature of modern politics.

What do elite voters, which the Liberals desperately need returned to the fold, want from politics?

Mostly, they want their education virtual, their shopping virtual, their sex virtual, their identity virtual, and their activism virtual.

They want Australia to work perfectly on unicorn dust without acknowledging any of the uncomfortable reasons why the place is falling apart. Australians will go homeless a million times over before a virtue-voter repents. Their political religion needs a reformation and to exorcise its vanity demons.

Not an easy vote to chase.

Daniel Lewkovitz made an excellent observation while running against a Teal MP.

‘These are people who are fabulously wealthy … they feel terrible about it. And once upon a time, people who were very wealthy and they maybe felt a bit guilty about that, they’d go and work at a soup kitchen. They’d give money. They’d be philanthropic … now they want to fix the whole world … [They] are gonna repay [the working class] by supporting policies that mean these people who, some of whom are working three jobs just to put food on the table, are going to see everything they pay in life go up so that someone who’s fabulously wealthy in the Eastern suburbs can drive their kid to a private school in an electric car and that’s not right!’

In 2022 I ran in an unwinnable race against Allegra Spender's $2 million campaign. I called out the 'Luxury Beliefs' of Wentworth locals and the 'Guilty Rich'. Those chickens are coming home to roost. For the record I am not against immigration at all. I am for the right kind of… https://t.co/kAVxTd80TN pic.twitter.com/8PJolhv4jt

— Daniel (@VoteLewko) September 26, 2025

In Australia, there is no need for the rich to harm the poor. Wealthy voters do not have to preference parties whose policies make energy more expensive, taxes higher, businesses more difficult to run, food harder to grow, homes more unaffordable, or streets more dangerous.

It is a choice.

A choice based upon misplaced priorities.

Politics is not a spiritual journey to Utopia … it should be calm, reasonable, and practical.

For those who feel guilty about their wealth, spend your money on Australian businesses so they can hire more Aussie kids and give their lives meaning. Invest in the people standing next to you, not the omnipresent entity of Davos.

A wind turbine is never going to love you back and a solar panel won’t absolve your sins.