Changing voting patterns are no longer a reaction to short-term events, they are a rebellion against inequality, says Kos Samaris.

Our new Multilevel Regression and Post-stratification polling doesn’t show a swing. It shows a sorting. And it has its roots in the end of Australia’s long postwar boom.

For most of human history, children lived as their parents did. And their parents before them.

This is not a sentimental observation. It is a structural fact.

From the Neolithic adoption of agriculture through to the end of the 18th century, the lived experience of one generation was not meaningfully different from the next. Wages, calories, life expectancy, mortality– the great markers of human prosperity barely moved.

Robert Gordon, in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, called the period from roughly 1300 to 1800 five centuries of glacial growth. The historian Gregory Clark, in A Farewell to Alms, made the same point with more force – the average inhabitant of England in 1800 was no better off, materially, than his Mesolithic ancestor.

The Industrial Revolution changed this, eventually, but not at first.

For the first half-century of British industrialisation, real wages were largely flat. Economists call this Engels’ pause – the period in which capital accumulated, output exploded and workers absorbed the costs.

Generational improvement was real, but slow. A man born in 1820 might live a little better than his father. His son a little better still. Compounded across decades, this produced the modern world. But within a single human lifetime, the change was usually modest.

What changed, decisively, historically, exceptionally, was the period from 1945 to roughly 1975.

Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, documented this period in detail. Across the developed world, the share of national income captured by the top decile collapsed. Wage growth ran at multiples of inflation year after year.

Two world wars, the Great Depression and the postwar social settlement had achieved what no peaceful political movement had achieved before – the compression of inequality to historically anomalous levels.

The historian Walter Scheidel, in The Great Leveler, makes the harder case. Across recorded history, he argues, only catastrophic events, mass-mobilisation warfare, revolutions, plagues and state collapse have ever produced meaningful reductions in inequality.

The postwar settlement was not the product of enlightened policy, it was the product of catastrophe. The bill for the world wars came due in the form of redistribution.

For three decades, Australia rode this wave. Wages grew. Home ownership spread. The connection between a single income and a suburban quarter-acre block was the great democratic compact of the postwar era. A wharfie could own a home. A boilermaker could send a child to university. The country’s egalitarian self-image was, for a brief and historically exceptional period, anchored in something real.

The story of the past 40 years is, at its core, a story of reversal. The Hawke-Keating reforms, the........

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