‘The PM was talking about my migrant parents when he spoke about the ‘quiet’ Australians’

Nicole McInnes nearly cried when Scott Morrison made his victory speech because for the first time a politician was speaking about her parents — the ‘quiet Australians’.

On Saturday night newly re-elected Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the “quiet Australians” had won a great victory.

“It has been those Australians who have worked hard every day,” he said.

For the first time in my life I nearly cried at an Australian politician’s speech. You see, my parents are quiet Australians.

My father worked for 40 years as a truck driver, three shifts a day, 6 days a week, one that started at 1am. Mum tells a story from before I was born where they found Dad asleep on someone’s doorstep during a milk run, because he was doing that and two other jobs including driving a taxi.

When his company made their employed drivers contractors, he only got holidays when he could find a subcontract driver to do his shifts. So we didn’t go on many and when we did we stayed in a caravan on a small block of land he’d bought near Tea Gardens.

He earned enough to send me to a Catholic girls school, but private school was financially out of the question. I got many things, but my childhood was one of meagre living, so that when I left high school he could support me through five long years of university.

I was the first in my family to attend.

He is retired now and due to his hard work and ability to invest in some property, he is self-funded. My parents live in a small house on the Central Coast, having moved from Sydney just before the property boom. They are still not rich, and live without luxury, but they are comfortable and free.

Scott Morrion says he spoke for the ‘quiet Australians’ in his election campaign. Picture: Matt King/Getty Images

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If successful this election, this was a family that the Labor Party would have deemed wealthy enough to punish for their hard work, preferring to reward those that are a drain on society taking a pension.

But on Saturday night the quiet hardworking Australians spoke. They spoke words the loud left-wing have never let them say.

These are quiet ones that have never taken a handout. Even when they arrived in Australia after months on a ship from Europe to escape the war in 1937, they didn’t expect help.

Even when he was pulled from school at 14 despite showing promise in maths, and forced to work in his father’s fruit shop, my father never expected others to look after him.

When my mother left a loveless home at 16 and began work as an usher in a city theatre, she didn’t expect anyone to help her either.

They understood their own strength, the power of their ingenuity, the get up and go the lucky country inspired in them. They knew that if they worked hard they could make a life for themselves and their future family. They lifted themselves from immigrant working class to somewhere in the middle.

There are people like my father in this country now and they also don’t want a hand out from guilt-ridden, eastern suburbs residents who look condescendingly on anyone outside the 5km ring from Bondi Beach.

While opposition leader Bill Shorten wanted change, it wasn’t the sort of change ordinary Australian believed in. Pictured here with wife Chloe outside their home in Moonee Ponds, Melbourne. Picture: AAP

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They don’t want a Vaucluse, Chanel-wearing, ex-CEO turning up in the western suburbs to help their daughters, because she needs to be generous to those “poorer” than herself. It is an insult and it is demeaning, the attitude from these well-meaning yet misguided Mercedes-socialists who while proffering support are hiding their wealth in some tax-haven.

Helping the oppressed is really just a way to keep their own mixed-up guilt suppressed. And frankly, people like me and my family don’t want anything to do with their delusions of grandeur, and their assumptions that somehow their lives are better than ours because they have more money.

But “helping” people who they assume can’t help themselves because they weren’t lucky enough to go to Kincoppal or the like, is actually even more sinister — it is a form of power and control. It ensures the poor are never enabled to look after themselves as they take the payout that yells to them “you are useless without me, your generous benefactor”. It maintains the status-quo, and keeps clear space between the rich and lowly poor. It is the opposite of Australia, where everyone is equal and movement through the classes is possible, a beautiful egalitarian promise that needs protection.

Delusion, hypocrisy and a complete lack of understanding of the Australian spirit is why Labor lost on the weekend.

People don’t want “help” from those with ocean views, they want to stand on their own two feet and provide for themselves and their families, and maybe one day buy a view of their own.

The Libs have enabled people to be independent and grow, like a parent that recognises painfully that they have to stand back and let their children live their own lives, no matter the consequences.

If they don’t, they know the child will never become a useful adult and will remain dependent on them. It is easier to rush in and help, to believe they need you and want you, and it makes you feel good.

It is so much harder to watch them fall and hope they will pick themselves up. And worse to become unnecessary in their lives. But that is the most loving thing a parent can do for a child and a government can do for their people.

Believe in them, push them to be more, trust they have what it takes to be whoever they want to be within themselves and do everything they can to clear the path to self-sufficiency, pride, dignity and freedom.

Today my faith in Australians is restored. I hope my Labor friends — I have many in inner-city Sydney — will come to understand too that the “kindness” of Labor is actually unintended cruelty. Especially to those that work hard, pay their taxes and expect the government to be responsible with what is their hard-earned money.

And until Labor recognises that hitting the lower middle-class with higher taxes, more levies and no incentives to save or invest is akin to biting the hand that feeds them, they will continue in the political wilderness. The middle class is the engine room that makes this country lucky, punishing them is not only nasty it is nonsensical.

So this week is the first week the loud know what the quiet really think. I wish for many more days like this and less silence in this bright future from all of us quiet Australians.

Nicole McInnes is a writer and marketing executive living in Sydney. Continue the conversation @wideeyedgirl

Originally published as ‘The PM was talking about my migrant parents when he spoke about the ‘quiet’ Australians’