CommentEconomy· Apr 25, 2026· 7 min

Cost of living is not a slogan. It is, increasingly, the only conversation.

Three governments have now lost office, in three countries, on the strength of one phrase. The language did not invent itself.

Harriet Shaw

Columnist

A weekly shop on a kitchen counter, late afternoon.

Three governments have now lost office, in three countries, on the strength of one phrase. The phrase, in case you have somehow missed it, is 'cost of living.' The language did not invent itself.

It was first used in this configuration, in modern Australian politics, around 2022. By 2024 it had become the single most polled three-word combination in any pollster's standard battery. By 2026 it has become, for working journalists, almost too tired to write — and yet impossible to avoid, because nothing else captures the way voters describe their lives.

What the phrase does

Photograph · World Media Journal · Apr 25, 2026

The phrase does several useful pieces of political work in one move. It compresses a complicated story — about supply chains, about energy markets, about wage and price dynamics — into a single, voter-legible label. It implies, without quite saying, that the government in office could change the situation. And it makes a great deal of complicated economic argument feel like a refusal to listen.

All of this means it is, electorally, an extremely difficult phrase to argue against. The honest counter — that most of the underlying drivers are global, slow-moving, and not amenable to short-term policy — is correct, but it does not fit on a billboard.

What changes the conversation

Two things would shift the conversation. The first is a sustained fall in headline inflation, accompanied by a wage round that demonstrably outpaces it. The second is a piece of policy — almost any piece of policy — that voters can credibly attribute to their own situation getting better.

"The cost of living becomes a slogan when policy becomes invisible. It stops being a slogan when policy becomes visible."

A note for the press

It is tempting, after enough cycles, to treat the phrase as a stale piece of campaigning. It is not. It is, at the moment, the single most reliable predictor of voting behaviour in the available data. The press has an obligation to keep writing about it, even when — especially when — doing so begins to feel repetitive.

The repetition, after all, is itself part of the story.