Price gougers. Bandits. Parasitical Profiteers. Spend just a few minutes scrolling through the X account of firebrand Greens senator Nick McKim and you might get the sense that Australia’s biggest businesses are teetering on the edge of criminality. Indeed, McKim repeatedly threatened former Woolworths chief executive Brad Banducci with jail after the pair clashed during a heated parliamentary inquiry in April.

But while it’s easy to dismiss McKim’s outrage as so extreme that it’s almost cartoonish, this is a line of attack that has run across party lines in the past 12 months, underscoring how diminished the influence of Australia’s corporate sector really is. As cost-of-living pressures from elevated inflation and interest rates have ripped through the most vulnerable parts of the economy, populist politicians have gone looking for the chimera of easy solutions.