When Your Ally Becomes Your Problem
BYV: The polling is in. Australians across the political spectrum are watching who puts their interests first - and who doesn't.
Numbers have a way of cutting through the noise. Last week, some numbers landed that every Australian voter - and every Australian politician - should sit with.
RedBridge Group director Kos Samaras, one of Australia’s most rigorous electoral analysts, has released polling data that tells a clear story about where public opinion actually sits right now.
Sixty-one per cent of all Australian voters blame Trump for rising fuel costs. Only 14 per cent blame Albanese.
In an environment where cost of living is the dominant political issue - where petrol prices are hitting household budgets hard, where people are genuinely struggling to afford to drive to work - nearly two thirds of Australians are looking at Washington, not Canberra, and saying: this is on you.
The petrol price crisis has a direct ancestry - one that runs through decades of Western governments deciding their oil interests mattered more than other nations’ sovereignty. We are paying for those decisions at the bowser.
The number that changes the calculus
The headline figure is striking. But the number underneath it is the one worth sitting with too.
Thirty-nine per cent of One Nation voters blame Trump for rising petrol prices. To be precise, 38 per cent blame the Australian Labor government. The base is split almost evenly. That is not a clean win for anyone. But it is a profound vulnerability for any politician who has bet everything on the populist right’s loyalty to Trump. Nearly four in ten of their own voters are looking elsewhere for the cause of their pain - and that fracture is where accountability enters.
As Samaras observed: this is the environment any Australian politician has to navigate when they are seen nodding along to MAGA world. An environment where an old ally has created a fuel crisis significant enough that people cannot afford to drive to work. An environment where that same ally now treats Australian companies worse than Russia.
Then came the pharmaceuticals
The Trump administration has imposed a 100 per cent tariff on Australian pharmaceuticals - hitting our medicines harder than almost any other nation. The PBS system, which has kept medicines affordable for millions of Australians across generations, is now directly in the crosshairs of a foreign government’s trade policy.
As of this writing, negotiations are underway, however no carve-out has been secured. Every day without an exemption is a day Australian families face the prospect of paying more for the medicines they need to stay alive. Any political figure who spent the last year cosying up to Trump’s orbit now has to answer this. Not in theory. In specifics. Why did Australia get hit at the maximum possible rate? What did that relationship deliver for ordinary Australians?
These are not partisan questions. They are the minimum accountability questions a democracy requires.
The culture war win that wasn’t
Certain Australian political figures calculated that aligning with Trump - adopting the language, the posture, the culture war framing - would deliver a political dividend. What they did not calculate was that the same movement would impose tariffs on Australian medicines, drive up petrol prices felt by their own voters, and create a sovereign risk that walked straight through their front door.
As Samaras put it: they may have thought they scored a culture war win. Instead, a cost-of-living liability just arrived at their address.
There is a way out - but not overnight
Sun and wind do not pass through the Strait of Hormuz. No war has ever been fought over sunshine. No cartel can price-gouge the wind. Once a solar panel is on a roof or a community battery is charged, no foreign government can weaponise that energy or hold it hostage.
The transition to renewable energy is not just an environmental imperative - it is a sovereignty strategy. It’s a cost-of-living strategy. But let’s be honest about the timeline. No solar panel will replace the diesel in a combine harvester tomorrow morning. No wind farm will fuel a road train crossing the Hay Plain next week. The short-term pain at the bowser is real.
What renewables will do, over time, is reduce the money leaving Australian communities for global oil markets. Every kilowatt-hour generated locally is a dollar not sent to a cartel. We can already see what this looks like in practice. In Indi - the federal electorate in north-east Victoria (next to Farrer) - eleven community energy groups are keeping energy dollars circulating in local shops, services, and families rather than flowing to distant power companies. In the Bega Valley, a circular economy is taking shape where local energy, local food, and local business reinforce each other. These are not experiments. They are blueprints.
The petrol price crisis has done something years of climate advocacy could not quite achieve: it has made fossil fuel dependency personal, immediate, and impossible to ignore. The spell is breaking. The question is what we build next - and how honest we are about the timeline.
What this means in Nepean and Farrer
In Farrer on 9 May - a federal seat in regional southern New South Wales - the cost of petrol, the price of medicines, and the future of the Murray-Darling are the daily reality of communities voting. One Nation’s David Farley is polling at 28.7 per cent. The question for every Farrer candidate is not who they blame for the petrol price. It is what they would actually do about it - and what their relationships and allegiances have already cost.
In Nepean on 2 May - a Victorian state by-election - the direct federal levers are one step removed, but the cost of living, the pharmaceutical safety net, and the question of who puts local community interests first are just as present.
Ask every candidate in both contests: what do you say to the nearly four in ten voters who blame Trump for their petrol price? What do you say to the family whose medicine costs are now at risk? What exactly would you do differently - on fuel, on medicines, on sovereignty - starting tomorrow?
A vote is not just an expression of anger or identity. It is a decision about who you trust to put Australia’s interests first - in a world where that question has never been more consequential.
Apply the five questions. The answers are there if you look.
Your Vote. Your Future.
You know what to do.
Onward we press
Sue Barrett is the founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote. Before You Vote publishes every Tuesday and Friday. If this was useful, send it to five people.