Stop Giving the Right the Language of Strength

Progressive movements attract a certain kind of person.

People who care about harm. People who notice unfairness. People who do not want politics to become cruel, degrading, exclusionary, or careless with people’s lives. People who are often more comfortable preventing damage than projecting power.

That instinct is one of the best things about progressive politics. It is why our movements fight for people who are ignored, excluded, exploited, or scapegoated. It is why we care about public health, education, climate, housing, civil rights, and democracy. It is why we do not casually sacrifice people to slogans.

But that same instinct can become a weakness when it turns into fear of touching anything that has ever been used by the Right.

Words like freedom. Strength. Security. Responsibility. Nation. Family. Work. Ambition. Pride. Order. Power. Even common sense.

Too often, progressives hear those words and flinch. We treat them as contaminated because conservatives or reactionaries have used them badly. So we retreat into softer, safer, more procedural language. We talk about frameworks, inclusion, consultation, mitigation, sensitivity, and awareness. None of those things are bad. Many are necessary. But they are not enough to move people who are angry, tired, insecure, and looking for someone who sounds like they can actually change the direction of the country.

This is how we lose ground.

The Right does not own strength.
The Right does not own freedom.
The Right does not own security.
The Right does not own national pride.
The Right does not own the language of ordinary life.

If we refuse to use these words because our opponents have used them dishonestly, we are not being principled. We are surrendering political territory.

A word is not right-wing because the Right uses it. A policy is not conservative because it speaks plainly. A message is not populist in the destructive sense because it is simple, forceful, and emotionally legible.

The question is not whether a phrase has ever been used by the Right. The question is what we use it to do.

That is also why the ballot name Reignite Democracy matters.

Some people will ask why progressives would use language that has also been picked up by fringe groups shilling for the far-right populists. But that question gets the problem backwards.

Democracy is not theirs. Reform is not theirs. Freedom is not theirs. The language of renewal is not theirs. If anti-democratic actors wrap themselves in democratic language, the answer is not to retreat from that language and leave it to them. The answer is to expose the fraud by using those words honestly, openly, and with policies that actually mean them. Purity politics that avoids every “tainted” word or frame is not a path to moral victory; it is a path to electoral failure.

Reignite Democracy is not a slogan floating free of substance. It connects directly to a program of democratic reform: rebuilding trust, strengthening representation, improving accountability, and making government answer to people rather than entrenched interests. That is exactly the terrain progressives should be contesting.

If a lunatic fringe group uses the language of democracy to launder support for authoritarian populism, then abandoning that language would be self-defeating. It would let them occupy one of the most important political spaces in the country without a fight.

The test is not whether bad actors have touched a word. The test is whether we can give that word real democratic content.

And in this case, we can.

There is a world of difference between saying “freedom” to mean corporations should be free to exploit people, and saying “freedom” to mean politicians should stay out of your bedroom, your doctor’s office, your library, and your private choices.

There is a world of difference between saying “security” to justify cruelty toward migrants, and saying “security” to mean people should be able to afford a home, see a doctor, keep the lights on, and trust that their democracy will not be sold out from under them.

There is a world of difference between saying “national pride” to exclude people, and saying it because Australia should be ambitious enough to build cheap clean energy, world-class public schools, decent homes, strong industries, and communities that are not left to rot.

If we abandon that language, the populist Right gets to define it. And they will define it in the most fearful, resentful, destructive way possible.

That is not moral clarity. That is strategic self-harm.

The danger is especially acute now because people are not living in a calm political environment. Living standards are under pressure. Housing feels impossible for too many people. Essential services are stretched. Work feels less secure. Institutions feel remote. People can see that the system is not working properly, and they are looking for someone willing to say so.

If progressives do not speak to that anger, the populists will.

And the populists have a simple offer: your life is harder because someone beneath you, beside you, or foreign to you has taken something that should have been yours.

It is a lie. But it is a lie with emotional force.

We cannot beat it with bland reassurance. We cannot beat it by sounding like the communications department of a failing institution. We cannot beat it by implying that people are wrong to be angry. In many cases, people are right to be angry. The question is where that anger goes.

Our job is not to drain the anger out of politics. Our job is to direct it toward the systems that are actually failing people.

Why are homes unaffordable in a country this wealthy?
Why is clean energy still treated as a culture war instead of a national advantage?
Why are public schools under-resourced while talent is wasted?
Why are workers squeezed while monopolies and rent-seekers do fine?
Why are we letting bad tax settings, weak competition, and stale politics hold the country back?
Why are culture-war obsessives allowed to distract us from the failures that actually make life harder?

That is where progressive politics should be strongest.

Not as the politics of apology.
Not as the politics of managed decline.
Not as the politics of “please be nicer while things get worse.”

Progressive politics should be the politics of fixing what is broken.

That means being socially free and economically serious.

Government should stay out of people’s private lives. It should not be policing who people love, what books they read, what medical decisions they make, how they identify, or how they build their families. A confident country does not need the state to protect it from difference.

But government should be serious where systems are failing. Serious about housing. Serious about health. Serious about education. Serious about energy. Serious about wages, infrastructure, industry, competition, and corruption. Serious about giving people the tools to build a decent life.

That is not a contradiction. It is the point.

Freedom from interference where people should be left alone.
Power to succeed where the system is rigged or broken.

This is the language progressives should be using. Not because it sounds right-wing, but because it is true.

The Right should not get to pretend that cruelty is strength.
They should not get to pretend that scapegoating is courage.
They should not get to pretend that nostalgia is a plan.
They should not get to pretend that banning books, attacking minorities, or clinging to failing systems is some kind of moral backbone.

It is not.

It is fear dressed up as toughness.

The progressive answer should be sharper: if your politics depends on blaming people with less power than you, you are not brave. If your plan for the future is to drag the country backwards, you are not strong. If you cannot talk about housing, wages, energy, health, education, and corruption without starting a culture war, you are not serious.

Progressives do not need to copy the Right’s cruelty. But we do need to stop being afraid of forceful language, emotional clarity, and popular appeal.

We need to stop treating every strong word as suspicious. We need to stop mistaking softness for virtue. We need to stop assuming that the safest language is the most ethical language. Sometimes the safest language is just the language that changes nothing.

The moment calls for something stronger.

A fair go with ambition.
Freedom with responsibility.
Reform with teeth.
A politics that leaves people alone where they should be free, and backs them hard where the system is failing.

That is not a move to the Right. It is a move toward relevance.

Because if progressive politics cannot speak to people’s anger, insecurity, pride, ambition, and desire for control over their own lives, then the populist Right will keep doing it for us.

And they will keep turning that energy toward cruelty.

We do not need to become them.

We need to become strong enough to beat them.