Imagine a young man living in an Australian city today. He wakes up in a rental that costs him hundreds of bucks a week. It's mouldy, it's draughty and it's freezing in winter, but, if he complains, his lease won't be renewed, so he doesn't complain. When interest rates go up, his rent goes up. When interest rates don't go up, his rent goes up. His taxes subsidise the obscene tax breaks his landlord receives. He gets huge electricity bills from a privatised energy company charging exorbitant prices to heat a home that should never have been so cold in the first place.

For breakfast, he eats groceries from the supermarket duopoly. He knows he's being price gouged, but what choice does he have? Somebody needs to fund their billions of dollars of profits. He drives to the station to catch a train to work. He's going to work 11 hours today just to give himself a chance of economic survival, but he can't drive to work because petrol is two bucks 50 a litre, and, if he could drive to work, he'd be paying Transurban, a company that pays absolutely no corporate tax, 20 bucks for the privilege of using roads.

He gets on the train and he opens his phone. Social media companies serve him gambling ads. They know to serve him gambling ads because they're surveilling his data and selling it to the gambling companies. The other thing he gets served on his phone is extreme right-wing content funded by many of the same interests profiting from the economic misery that he and his mates are living through. That message is always the same: blame migrants, blame trans people and boo the welcome to country. Direct your anger sideways and down and never direct it upwards to where it actually belongs. The billionaires and the big corporations, the one per cent in this country, have got one hand around his throat, and their other hand is pointing him towards anyone except the actual people responsible for his immiseration. When election time comes, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and their orange, racist rival keep it that way. At best, Labor will promise to investigate potentially loosening a single finger of the hand at this young man's throat, but only if the hand agrees.

But there is another way: break the hand, break the fingers and give people more power. We need governments that are prepared to act in the public interest, including a publicly owned supermarket to take on the supermarket duopoly. Get power out of the hands of the one per cent and back in the hands of everyday Australians.