There is something strange going on in Australian politics.

Usually, the last thing a sitting government wants is an angry electorate. Worse still if it’s angry at them. But something’s not tracking: Australians are angry at this government from every direction, and it just doesn’t seem to matter. I think I know why. The anger has nowhere to go.

Follow it for a moment.

Through late 2025 and into Australia Day this year, tens of thousands of Australians rallied over migration. The federal government’s response? Condemn the organisers. The protesters’ anger wasn’t a concern.

After the Bondi shooting in December, the Prime Minister reportedly wasn’t invited to some of the victims’ funerals, and the Governor-General was reportedly inundated with demands to sack him. Three months later he was heckled out of Lakemba Mosque at Eid. Two communities with different grievances but the same anger were met with the same shrug. A couple of people heckling in a crowd of 30,000, Albo said, should be ‘put in that perspective’.

Then came the Budget. Negative gearing and capital gains changes that were ruled out before the election. Newspoll ranked it the worst-received Budget since 1993, worse than Abbott’s 2014 Budget. 52 per cent of voters said they’d be worse off. And Labor’s primary vote? Unchanged. Albanese’s response to the memes mocking him: they’re ‘very flattering’.

And it hasn’t stopped. Just recently the Prime Minister was asked in Parliament to apologise for his ‘couple of melons’ joke about a gift from Japan’s first female Prime Minister, a joke a former Japanese ambassador called insulting. His answer: ‘I reject the assertion in the question.’ No denial, no explanation. Just a refusal to even engage.

He hasn’t really backed down since. Asked again on ABC’s 7.30 more than a week later, the closest he got to saying sorry was this: ‘If I had my time again, which you don’t, then I wouldn’t have done that podcast … clearly, that was an error.’ Not the joke. Not the gesture. Not the hurt it caused. Just the choice of podcast. A government that can admit a booking mistake but still won’t say sorry for what he actually said isn’t sorry, it’s just managing the story.

Compare that to what anger used to do. I remember the response when Abbott put a $7 Medicare co-payment in his 2014 Budget. The backlash was so intense that he was forced to drop it, and it still cost him the job. Turnbull was Prime Minister within 18 months. That’s how it normally works in this country: a government angers voters, the opposition collects the votes, and the government either backs down or gets replaced.

So why isn’t it working this time?

Here’s my theory. When this government does something unpopular and the opposition rightly calls it out, the votes don’t go to the Coalition. They go to One Nation. Angus Taylor gave a strong Budget Reply amid all that anger, and in the very Newspoll that trashed the budget, the Coalition fell to 20 per cent while One Nation jumped to 27. By June they’d hit 31, ahead of Labor itself.

And for now, none of it seems to bother Labor, because whilst the anger might be enormous in the polls it’s almost invisible in the parliament. One Nation might be polling in the high twenties to low thirties, but in the House of Representatives they hold two seats, and Labor has a majority. All that anger translates to nothing where legislation actually passes. Abbott backed down on the co-payment also because a hostile Senate could actually stop him. Nothing in this parliament has stopped Albanese, because nothing collecting the voters’ anger has the ability to.

Anger only disciplines a government when it empowers the alternative government. This anger doesn’t. It flows straight past the Coalition, and the story every week becomes the Coalition’s collapse instead of Labor’s failures. They just won Farrer, a seat the Liberals held for decades, and the Treasurer called it a ‘bloodbath’, for the Coalition. He wasn’t worried, he was gloating.

The timing also works in the government’s favour. The next election isn’t due until 2028. That’s two years where the government expects to face the same weakened opposition, and two years for the anger to fade before they put some sweeteners in a pre-election budget and hope for the best. So Albanese figures why should I bother to care right now?

Nevertheless, I don’t think Albanese has missed the anger. I think he’s looked at the numbers and worked out that, for now, it can’t touch him.

But that anger isn’t going anywhere. It’s sitting at 29 per cent, level with Labor’s own primary vote, and by 2028 it will have to go somewhere. Whether it stays with One Nation or shifts to the Coalition, we’re yet to see. What I highly doubt is that it swings to Labor. Keating won in 1993 and thought the numbers would hold. Abbott’s colleagues thought the same after 2013. It never holds.

Australians are angry, and this government has decided that’s not its problem. Come the election, it will be.

Osher Feldman is an Australian Rabbi and Lawyer