To all those that have served — thank you for your service. To those about to serve — thank you for your service.

It’s early on a Saturday morning and I’m already thinking about Anzac Day. About the Diggers of our past. About my grandfather. And about a question I can’t shake.

My grandfather was born in 1913. My grandmother in 1915. Both long gone now. My grandfather left us when I was only eight – before I was old enough to think critically about the world, before I could see what I see today. I was just a kid.

If he were alive now, I’d love to sit with him. Really sit with him. I’d ask: what was it like growing up during World War One? Being a young adult through the Great Depression, then World War Two, then all the wars that followed? What was the financial stress of that era like – did it carry the same weight, the same dread, that so many Australians carry right now?

What was it like being a single-income household – where a father went to work and a mother could stay home, raise the kids, put a clean meal on the table? What was it like to grow your own food because there was simply no other option? No convenience. No credit. No buy-now-pay-later.

My grandparents lived in a world most of us will never see. A world of making do. Of resilience that didn’t need a hashtag. Of values that have quietly slipped away from a generation that was handed far more – and somehow ended up with less to show for it.

And yet – so much feels familiar.

Because here we are in 2026, and everyday Australians are fighting a war. Not overseas. Not on a beach somewhere with a rifle and a prayer. But at home. At the kitchen table. Every single day.

There’s a daily war going on in Australian households right now.

It’s the parent lying awake at midnight doing mental arithmetic – mortgage repayment, power bill, school fees, groceries – and realising the numbers don’t add up again this fortnight.

It’s the couple that stopped talking about buying a house because the conversation got too painful. It’s the single mum choosing between the electricity bill and the fruit and vegetables. It’s the tradie who works sixty hours a week and still can’t get ahead because everything he earns gets swallowed by a cost of living that rises faster than his invoice rate.

It’s the quiet shame of a full-time working family quietly sliding backwards. Too proud to ask for help. Too exhausted to fight. Just trying to hold it together until next week.

This is the frontline. And nobody is calling it a war – but that’s exactly what it is.

Interest rates that don’t budge – or worse, keep rising. Groceries that keep creeping up regardless of which party is in power. Petrol. Power bills. Rent. A housing market so broken that an entire generation has quietly given up on ever owning a home – not because they’re lazy, not because they’re not trying, but because the system has been structured to make it nearly impossible for them.

And what does our leadership offer in response?

Talking points. Carefully managed press conferences. Policy announcements timed to election cycles. Promises made to cameras that quietly disappear once the votes are counted.

Let’s be honest about our leaders – on both sides of the aisle. We’ve had government after government that has presided over the hollowing out of the Australian middle class while claiming to be its greatest champion. They talk about the cost of living at election time and forget about it the day after. They talk about housing affordability while sitting on investment portfolios that benefit from prices going up. They talk about looking after Australians while the people doing everything right – working hard, paying their taxes, trying to save – keep going backwards.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed. Just not for us.

And now – with tensions rising globally, with conflict brewing on multiple fronts, with the drums of war getting louder – our leaders are turning their gaze outward. There is talk of commitments. Alliances. Obligations. The language of duty is being dusted off and polished up, ready to be pointed at a new generation of Australians.

“They want us to be ready to fight a war overseas while they’ve done nothing to win the war at home.”

While Australian families are choosing between heating and eating, while young people have abandoned the dream of owning a home, while small business owners are working longer hours for thinner margins – our political class is positioning itself on the world stage. Attending summits. Making commitments on our behalf. Talking about what Australia will do, and what Australia will contribute, and what Australia stands for.

Meanwhile, back at the kitchen table, the calculator doesn’t lie.

My grandfather had a support role during the Vietnam war. He saw enough. He understood that when governments send young men and women to war, it is rarely as simple as the story being sold to the public. That the propaganda machine – the posters, the speeches, the sense of national duty – has always been the engine that moves ordinary people toward extraordinary sacrifice on behalf of interests that are not always their own.

That was true then. It’s still true now. The names change. The technology changes. The justifications change. But the structure of it – ordinary people paying the price for decisions made by powerful people – that hasn’t changed at all.

“Fix Australia first. Win the war at home before you ask us to fight one abroad.”

The conundrum: how do you ask someone who can’t afford their grocery bill to pick up a rifle for their country? How do you ask a generation that has been priced out of housing, buried in debt, and told to be grateful – how do you ask them to sacrifice everything for a system that has given them so little?

A lot of Australians are starting to see it clearly now. That the economic pressure we’re living under isn’t an accident. It’s a consequence of decades of policy choices. And the people those choices didn’t prioritise are the ones reading this right now.

So, before I ask the question that’s been sitting with me all week – I want to name something first.

Is this country — as it stands today, under the leadership we currently have – worth fighting for? Not worth living in. Not worth loving. Worth fighting for, in the way those Diggers understood fighting. With everything. With your life.

Because I think that’s where a lot of Australians are sitting right now. Not unpatriotic. Not ungrateful. But awake. And angry. And asking something that used to feel unthinkable:

Do we save this country, or do we wipe the slate and start again?

Do we keep patching a system that keeps producing the same outcomes for the same people? Or do we demand something fundamentally different – new voices, new structures, real accountability from those who ask for our trust and then spend it on themselves?

I don’t have a clean answer. But I know the question matters.

Which brings me back to my grandfather and the question I would ask him.

Would the Diggers of yesterday step up today?

Part of me thinks they would – because that generation had a stubbornness about them, a sense of duty that didn’t depend on the worthiness of those giving the orders. They showed up anyway. They always showed up.

But I also think they’d be furious. At the waste of it. At watching a country they bled for become a place where the average family can barely keep the lights on. At politicians who drape themselves in the flag on Anzac Day and then spend the other 364 days making decisions that grind the very people they’re supposed to serve into the ground.

What would the Diggers of yesteryear think of the Australia they fought so hard for? Would they feel their sacrifice was honoured? Or would they feel it was spent?

This Anzac Day, I’m not just remembering the past. I’m thinking about right now. About what it actually means to fight for Australia in 2026 – not on a battlefield overseas, but at the kitchen table. In the mortgage repayment. In the supermarket aisle. In the quiet, grinding, daily war that millions of Australian families are fighting without recognition, without support, and without their leaders even acknowledging the battlefield exists.

We are our own frontline.

We remember them. But honouring them means more than a dawn service and a meat pie. It means demanding better. It means holding our leaders to account. It means refusing to accept a system that sends the bill to ordinary Australians while those at the top keep their portfolios ticking over nicely.

Win the war at home first. Then talk to us about the one abroad.

Lest we forget — and lest we stop fighting for each other.