Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was established to confront genuine antisemitism and help repair social division, but what happens when an inquiry intended to promote cohesion appears to elevate politically useful testimony, interrogate dissenting voices and leave the underlying causes of public anger largely unexplored?

We examine the double standards emerging from the Royal Commission, including the contrasting treatment of conservative Zionist organisations and progressive Jewish and pro-Palestinian witnesses such as Sarah Schwartz and Yasmine Johnson. The problem is not that testimony is being tested – it should be – but that it’s being applied unevenly.

We also examine Special Envoy Jillian Segal’s proposal for greater external scrutiny of ABC and SBS reporting on Israel and Palestine, alongside pressure for the public broadcasters to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism. Asking independent journalists to produce more favourable coverage of Israel is not a defence of accuracy or balance; it risks turning public broadcasting into a farce and an instrument of political influence. It would threaten editorial independence, free speech and legitimate democratic debate.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Gaza’s schools and universities, the killing of students, teachers and academics, and the wider reasons Australians are protesting receive comparatively little attention. Of course, antisemitism needs to be confronted wherever it appears. But expanding its definition to include criticism of Israel, Palestinian activism or uncomfortable political speech will not protect Jewish Australians or strengthen social cohesion: All it will do is erode public confidence, deepen resentment and import the most repressive features of American political culture into Australia. A Royal Commission that listens selectively, tests evidence inconsistently and treats disagreement as prejudice risks becoming the very thing it was created to prevent: another source of division.

The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is – yet again – descending into a forum of “hurt feelings” from anonymous speakers, and advancing the political agendas of Zionist groups in Australia, at the expense of everyone else. The Commission was ostensibly created to address antisemitism in Australia and strengthen that favourite catchphrase of the Prime Minister – “social cohesion” – when, in fact, it seems to be working in the opposite direction, and fewer people understand what this social cohesion is meant to achieve.

As we suggested earlier this week, the latest evidence provided by Special Envoy Jillian Segal is a prime example. Segal has called for an independent body to scrutinise the ABC and SBS over their reporting of Israel and Palestine, arguing that the broadcasters should adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and, by implication, substantially alter their editorial approach to the conflict. More troubling is the suggestion that Australia’s public broadcasters should report more of “the good things Israel does” because their coverage has been “too negative”, as if the media should only operate in an environment where human interest stories and the supposed goodness in the heart of Israel should be presented to the Australian public.

But why should the media go searching for the “positive news” from Israel – under the direction of a body created by Segal – when all it’s going to do is to support a colonial–settler enterprise that’s stolen the land of Palestinians and destroyed so many lives? A state which has killed at least 70,000 people in Gaza – figures which Segal has disputed, even though the state of Israel broadly agrees with the number – and, according to some epidemiological assessments, up to 680,000? Where can this “positive news” be found?

Ironically, Segal’s broader criticism of Australian media is difficult to reconcile with the coverage that has actually been provided. If anything, mainstream reporting has frequently reflected official Israeli perspectives while devoting relatively little attention to the humanitarian consequences of the war in Gaza. Yet even this level of reporting is now regarded as excessively “negative” of the state of Israel.

Segal’s term as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism expires in July next year, and it’s unfortunate that we’ll have to tolerate her misinformation and the promotion of an extremist ideology for the next 12 months. A better outcome for social cohesion would be achieved if her tenure was terminated immediately, but given the current state of affairs and the Prime Minister’s lack of backbone on anything to do with Israel–Palestine affairs, that’s unlikely to happen.

The other hearings at the Commission have also shown a similar imbalance. Of course, genuine incidents of antisemitism need to careful examined but what exactly are we hearing at the Commission? What legal checks and balances are being used to verify the evidence, given that most of is being revealed under the cloak of anonymity?

Among the evidence presented was the testimony of a UNSW academic, who described four students allegedly performing Nazi salutes towards him during a business class in 2024, before going on to suggest that it wasn’t clear if they knew he was Jewish, or not. How carefully was this evidence scrutinised by counsel assisting? Other students claimed that friendships dropped off when they revealed themselves as Zionists and supporters of the state of Israel – as if, somehow, we’re meant to try really hard to maintain the relationships with those who condone the actions of a state that’s been committing genocide, war crimes and apartheid since at least 1948. Life is not as easy as that.

Of course, if this is what people are feeling and experiencing, that is real and it can’t be denied. But these are feelings and this is a Royal Commission, not an intimate counselling session where the feelings of hurt can be listened to by a paid psychotherapist, remain unexplored and not interrogated in any way.

Compare this with the material presented by co-convener for Students for Palestine Yasmine Johnson, who was continually questioned by counsel assisting. Johnson said that Israel is a “political project”, and that Zionism is an “ideology which supports the existence of the state of Israel, and that is a racist project”, and every piece of evidence provided by Johnson – who is Jewish – was constantly stalled, interrupted and queried. Of course, this is what a Royal Commission should do, but why is it that the information that runs counter to the narratives supported by Zionist groups is always carefully scrutinised, but no such scrutiny for the endless hurt feelings of Zionists who feel that any opportunity to portray themselves as the victims in their quest for an exclusive supremacist greater Israel project always needs to be taken up?

Nobody should feel that they are being harassed in a university environment – or any environment at all – but we need to get real about this. Although the Royal Commission has tended to focus on evidence of “hurt feelings”, the presence of Johnson – and the testimony provided last week by Sarah Schwartz, human rights lawyer and executive officer at Jewish Council of Australia – shows that there is a broader understanding and different opinions of the Israel–Palestine question within the Jewish community in Australia, than the ones that we are being led to believe through this Royal Commission.

So why do we mainly hear from the extremist elements within the Jewish community? Soon after Schwartz provided her testimony, News Corporation predictably lead the attacks on her, and this follows on from criticism from Zionist lobby groups describing her as “a self-hating Jew”, a “traitor”, as well as distributing memes depicted her as a rat. Why is this behaviour never called out?

And while there’s been a big focus on the hurt feelings on campuses in Australia, not all campus experiences around the world are the same, and these have received very little attention during these proceedings.

Since October 2023, Gaza’s education system has been devastated on a scale without precedent in modern times. Many experts and international human rights organisations have described this destruction as “scholasticide” – the destruction of an entire education system through the killing of students, teachers and academics and the demolition of schools and universities.

During this time, more than 18,000 students, around 780 teachers and education staff, and at least 120 university academics have been killed. Around 97 per cent of school buildings have been damaged, more than 430 school buildings have suffered direct hits from the Israel Defense Forces, and around 92 per cent now require major reconstruction or a complete rebuild. Gaza’s higher education sector has effectively ceased to exist, with 22 of its 38 university campuses completely destroyed, another 14 seriously damaged, and 195 of 206 university buildings are now unusable.

UN experts have also suggested that these attacks will have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental right to education, culture and freedom of expression for an entire generation of Palestinians, as well as creating long-term trauma. It’s a pattern of destruction that amounts to an intentional effort to erase Palestinian educational and intellectual life altogether, which is one of the clear and internationally recognised definitions of genocide.

But despite this scholasticide perpetrated by the state of Israel, can we still be friends? And please don’t call this out, because something that might have resembled a Nazi salute on campus – can’t be too sure, your honour – really hurt my feelings.

This catastrophe has barely been featured in a Royal Commission ostensibly concerned with social cohesion. The destruction of an entire education system, the deaths of thousands of students and hundreds of academics, and the elimination of Gaza’s universities raise profound questions about human rights and the application of international law. Yet, here in Australia, we have a public forum for some of the most privileged people in society, oblivious to the detrimental and genocidal actions of the state of Israel that they dearly love, complaining that nobody wants to be their friend anymore. It’s absolutely pathetic.

We also heard evidence – if that’s what it can be called – from Professor Josh Keller, representing the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A), who claimed that using the word “anti-Zionism” with a hyphen is anti-semitic (oops, my mistake – that should be antisemitic) but then failed to explain how this could ever be detected in the spoken language, rather than text on a page.

Yes, we’ve reached the realm of the truly bizarre and insane, where even the innocuous hyphen that has endured without charge since the 1600s, is now apparently guilty of antisemitism. Let’s see what the good professor has in store for the en dash, em dash, and other forms of punctuation, for their alleged crimes against the state of Israel.

This is now extreme overreach – as well as foolish – and the danger is that social cohesion and the opinions that we are told that we need to listen to are gradually being redefined according to the political priorities of particular interest groups, rather than existing as a universal democratic principle. A Royal Commission established to reduce division is now moving towards a situation where criticism of the policies of a foreign government is itself becoming subject to official scrutiny.

Australia’s democratic institutions depend upon free and open independent journalism, open debate and the ability to criticise governments – whether Australian or foreign – without fear of political sanction. If those principles are weakened in the name of “social cohesion”, then the Commission will ultimately reach the opposite of what it was established to achieve.

Every day we’re overwhelmed with political headlines. There’s a new opinion poll or another leadership rumour; a minister who’s under sustained pressure or another round of developments in the Strait of Hormuz. Social media gets fills up with instant reactions, TV panels debate the issue for a few hours, and then by tomorrow, the entire cycle begins again.

But the machinery of politics doesn’t really work like that.

The biggest changes in Australia happen ever so slowly. Governments make hundreds of small decisions that accumulate over the years, institutions change at a glacial pace, political parties evolve – or decline, as we’re currently seeing with the Liberal Party. Civil liberties are chipped away one law at a time, especially in New South Wales, and by the time most people realise something has fundamentally changed, the change has already taken place.

That’s why we created New Politics Quarterly. Rather than producing another collection of opinion pieces, we’ve spent months researching and writing a substantial 90-page quarterly report that steps back from the daily news cycle to explain the deeper political forces reshaping Australia.

This first edition – The End of Political Certainty – examines the structural changes now unfolding across Australian politics. Inside you’ll find detailed analysis of:

• Why the Liberal Party’s crisis runs much deeper than poor leadership or bad election campaigns.

• Whether Labor’s overwhelming parliamentary majority is being wasted through a politics of caution and incrementalism.

• The growing tension between democracy, civil liberties and the politics of “social cohesion”.

• Australia’s deepening strategic integration with the United States through AUKUS and what it means for our long-term sovereignty.

• The way the Gaza conflict has reshaped Australian political debate, media coverage and freedom of expression.

• Housing, inequality, democratic institutions, foreign policy and the long-term trends that will define Australian politics for years to come.

This is not journalism written to fill today’s news cycle: it’s a long-form political analysis designed to remain relevant long after individual headlines have floated off into the ether.

Throughout the report, we connect developments that are usually reported separately, identify emerging political trends before they become obvious, challenge conventional assumptions, and place current events within their broader historical and political context.

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The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was established to examine exactly that – antisemitism and social cohesion – but it has become a vehicle for advancing political agendas from Zionist groups in Australia, rather than fostering the social cohesion that was promised. The latest round of material presented by Special Envoy Jillian Segal – calling for an independent body to scrutinise the ABC and SBS over their reporting of Israel and Palestine – is yet another step in the policing and censoring political debate.

Segal’s argument rests on her proposition that Australia’s public broadcasters should adopt the understanding of antisemitism based on the IHRA working definition (which they have so far not adopted, and for good reason) and, by implication, substantially change their editorial approach to the conflict. But this isn’t where her criticism stops. Complaining that coverage is “too negative” towards Israel and asking why broadcasters do not report more of “the good things Israel does” is moving journalism far beyond the goal of accuracy into an attempt to influence editorial decisions. The reason why public broadcasters exist is to make those decisions independently of governments, lobby groups and political appointees, but perhaps that’s something Segal either doesn’t understand or is not overly concerned about.

Her dismissal of the deaths of over 70,000 from Gaza raises the same question. If figures issued by Palestinian health authorities are to be rejected outright – even through Israel agrees that this number is broadly accurate – what independent evidence should replace them? Other reputable bodies such Lancet Global Health believe the figure is actually far higher – around 186,000 – and an epidemiological modeling study published by Australian researchers Dr. Richard Hil and Dr. Gideon Polya, suggests the number could be as high as 680,000.

The coverage of events in Gaza by the ABC and SBS – in fact, all mainstream media in Australia – has been weak and inept, and has generally supported Israel’s narrative and undermined that of Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, or anyone else who offers support for this cause. Yet this is not enough for Segal and even this poor coverage has to be stamped out, where only propaganda promoting the Zionist cause is acceptable.

The broader danger is that social cohesion is being redefined according to the whims and desires of certain people and groups in Australia. A Royal Commission that was expected to reduce division increasingly appears to be generating new grievances, fuelling disputes over free speech, media independence and political influence. Rather than lowering the temperature, it risks creating the impression that criticism of a foreign government – Israel – is itself becoming subject to official scrutiny. If that continues, the Royal Commission will become less about social cohesion and more about the ability of Australia’s democratic institutions and the independence of the media to hold this type power to account. And that needs to be protected at all costs.

The price of speaking out

The Federal Court might have settled the legal dispute between pianist Jayson Gillham and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – ruling in favour of the MSO – but has done nothing to resolve the deeper issues that were revealed by the case. If anything, this judgement has reinforced the reality that Australia’s cultural institutions are increasingly being cowered and only willing to accommodate political speech when it falls within acceptable boundaries that are applied selectively.

Justice Graeme Hill accepted the MSO’s argument that Gillham’s concert was cancelled not because of his views on Gaza, but because management were concerned about the damage to the orchestra’s reputation and commercial interests. That might have been a line-ball legal argument but does little to answer the broader question of why some political statements are regarded as expressions of moral concern, while others blow up and become a major national crisis.

The court also suggested that the MSO would have responded in the same manner had Gillham spoken in support of Israel – which surely caused millions of eyerolls around Australia in unison and shouts of you have got to be kidding – and it’s also a suggestion that flies in the face of the orchestra’s own recent history.

MSO chair Edgar Myer publicly condemned Hamas following the October 2023 attacks without attracting any sanction or provoking claims that he had compromised the orchestra’s neutrality. Gillham, by contrast, briefly introduced a contemporary work by explaining that it was dedicated to Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.

That short statement resulted in cancellation by the MSO and ultimately led to years of litigation. Whether or not the legal circumstances are different, the contrasting responses show that political speech is tolerated only when it aligns with the preferences of a cultural institution and, obviously, that needs to align with that of Israel and the Zionist movement. Does anyone really believe Gillham would have received the same sanction had he issued a short dedication about the journalists killed in Ukraine? Or if he had offered his support for the Israel Defense Forces? We all know what the answer is.

The wider consequences go far beyond the one pianist or the one orchestra. Arts organisations increasingly present themselves as champions of diversity, inclusion and fearless artistic expression, yet become cautious and cowardly when the subject matter veers over to Palestine. In this type of environment, the greatest threat to artistic freedom is not so much the formal process of censorship but the inherent understanding that some opinions carry serious professional consequences while others are welcomed as evidence of moral leadership.

When politics of protest runs out of road to drive on

Pauline Hanson has spent nearly three decades turning public frustration into political capital, even when she’s been outside of politics, but the latest polling suggests there are limits to how much the same formula can be recycled. After weeks of rising support, One Nation has lost ground following Hanson’s call for Australia to return to a more “monocultural” society – a reminder that while many Australians might be deeply dissatisfied with the political establishment, they are not interested in revisiting these ridiculous and dated culture wars.

The result also exposes a common misunderstanding in Australian politics: the anger in voter land is about economic issues, not cultural issues. Housing issues, wages, less public services and the belief that younger Australians will have a lower standard of living than their parents are structural failures within the economy. Diverting the attention towards identity, immigration and culture war battles might generate the headlines but resolves nothing.

For One Nation, this has become a trap. Every time the party appears to gain credibility by tapping into this economic discontent, it eventually returns to the rhetoric that reminds voters why they kept it at the political margins in the first place. Protest parties succeed all around the world when they expose the failures of the establishment; they then fail when they become consumed by their own ideological obsessions and show to the public that they really have nothing to offer.

The Coalition will be watching closely to this because it knows many conservative voters who previously supported them but have gone off to One Nation, still remain restless. Angus Taylor’s warning that One Nation’s policies would bring “a world of pain” suggests that he’s come to the realisation that it’s better to fight One Nation, than to simply copy their rhetoric and policies, which exist in a threadbare cabinet.

The lesson here is that Australians are still searching for alternatives, especially on the conservative side of politics. One Nation might have been a beneficiary of some of this discontent but its drop in the polls suggests that it won’t be a serious contender until it starts to develop serious policies. Eventually, even protest voters expect more than just the slogans.

When the joke becomes more serious than the politicians

The spectacle of Count Binface in the UK emerging as Nigel Farage’s main opponent in a byelection says far more about the condition of modern politics than it does about satire. The Reform UK leader’s resignation was carefully choreographed as another act of anti-establishment theatre but, instead, it’s become the theatre of the absurd, where the campaign will be dominated by a man wearing a silver bin on his head.

Count Binface’s policies are intentionally ridiculous – nationalising the British singer Adele, capping croissant prices and promising to build “at least one affordable house”. And like all satire, it works because it reflects what many voters understand as the failures of mainstream politics. Politics has been increasingly performative, and highlighted by personalities and outrage, rather than having serious debates about declining public services, inequality, housing affordability or falling living standards.

There is a lesson here that goes far beyond Britain. Politics depends on the public having enough confidence to believe that elected representatives and governments can solve real problems, rather than ignore them or create new ones. And there is a belief that the political class is going out of their way to ignore them. When a man dressed up as a bin can dominate the political conversation, the joke isn’t on him – it’s on the system itself that has failed to live up to any of its promises.

China’s latest ballistic missile test generated predictable headlines warning of an escalating security threat across the Pacific, but the reaction revealed as much about Australia’s political culture as it did about Beijing’s military ambitions. While missile testing is hardly unique to China – with the United States, Russia and other major powers conducting similar exercises on a regular basis – the identity of the country involved often determines the level of public outrage. The result is a debate driven less by strategic analysis than by political narratives, media framing and long-standing assumptions about China’s role in the region.

We look at what the missile launch actually means for Australia’s national security, whether it was directed at Pacific nations at all, and why the primary strategic audience was almost certainly the United States rather than Canberra or Suva. We explore how Australia’s foreign policy has become increasingly intertwined with the broader US–China strategic competition, the significance of Australia’s new security agreement with Fiji, China’s growing influence through the Pacific, and why regional diplomacy increasingly revolves around infrastructure, development funding and climate policy rather than military symbolism alone.

Australian political debate frequently exaggerates the immediacy of the China threat, from speculative claims linking Beijing to unrelated domestic events through to recurring predictions of military conflict that rarely withstand serious scrutiny. As Australia deepens its commitment to AUKUS and strengthens its strategic alignment with the United States, we ask whether Canberra is developing an independent foreign policy or increasingly viewing every regional development through Washington’s geopolitical priorities.

The NSW Labor Conference was designed to project unity ahead of the party’s national conference, but it instead exposed a deeper question confronting Australian politics: what does the modern Labor Party actually stand for? While grassroots members pushed for gambling reform, affordable housing, civil liberties and a stronger response to Gaza, the defining image of the weekend became the removal of members displaying a Palestinian flag bearing words taken directly from Labor’s own platform, raising uncomfortable questions about the relationship between the leadership and its membership.

As Premier Chris Minns warned that One Nation could become Labor’s biggest electoral threat, he also highlighted housing affordability and cost-of-living pressures that governments already have the power to address. It reflected a broader dilemma facing both Labor and the Coalition: voters increasingly believe governments recognise the country’s problems but lack the willingness to solve them.

This episode explores Labor’s identity crisis, the gap between its platform and its record in government, the politics of gambling reform, housing, civil liberties and Palestine, and whether electoral success has become an end in itself. As Labor dominates Australian politics, the bigger question is no longer whether it can win elections – but who, and what, it now governs for.

Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy was right to argue at his National Press Club address that Labor should not surrender patriotism, defence or national security to the conservative side of politics. He was also right that Menzies’ record on appeasement is considerably more complicated than the polished version preserved by the Liberal Party. But once the debate shifted from saying Menzies supported appeasement towards Nazi Germany to describing him as an “appeaser”, and then suggest that he was a “coward”, the historical argument gave way to the standard fare of political theatre. And that’s a distinction that really matters.

Appeasement itself is a judgement about policy. Cowardice is a judgement about character, and in the case of Menzies, it brings up one of the ugliest episodes in Australian parliamentary history.

Conroy’s National Press Club speech wasn’t really about the 1930s, it was meant to be about national security today. By invoking the spirit of Labor leaders from Andrew Fisher to John Curtin, he argued that progressive politics has its own patriotic tradition and that Labor governments have repeatedly defended Australia in moments of crisis. These historical references were intended to strengthen Labor’s contemporary defence credentials, particularly around AUKUS.

That, of course, is a perfectly legitimate political undertaking. But history reconfigured to serve the purposes of current-day politics is often simplified until it becomes a part of a myth. Menzies is particularly vulnerable here, because there are really three versions of him.

Three Menzies, three different legacies

There is the pre-war Menzies: brilliant, ambitious and intellectually formidable, but still finding his political footing. Then there is the post-war Menzies: the founder of the Liberal Party, a builder of modern Australian conservatism and still Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. Then there is the memorial Menzies: the sacred Liberal ancestor, invoked by today’s members whenever the party needs legitimacy or a tradition to lean on.

The third version of Menzies is the one that dominates modern politics, and the Liberal Party is more interested in preserving this part of him, rather than examining his full legacy. But it’s the first Menzies who matters most in this current debate. In 1939, Menzies did support British appeasement towards Nazi Germany – sealed by Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s so-called “peace in our time” declaration. It doesn’t mean he necessarily admired Hitler or wanted Germany to prevail, but it meant that he shared the assumptions of much of the British political establishment, which believed negotiation might preserve peace while the military preparations continued behind the scenes.

Those assumptions also reflected the trauma of the First World War, the weakness of the League of Nations and the widespread fear of yet another European catastrophe, so soon after the previous one. Australian foreign policy remained deeply tied to Britain, and Menzies naturally viewed Australia’s interests through this imperial perspective.

When Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war in 1939, Menzies announced that Australia was also at war. His famous broadcast reflected this imperial loyalty that was common at the time, but not sympathy for Nazism.

However, his private correspondence reveals that the appeasement thinking lingered after the war had begun. Writing to Stanley Bruce, Australia’s High Commissioner in London at the time, Menzies speculated about possible German peace proposals and questioned whether Britain and France could sustain a prolonged war over Poland. His remark that “nobody really cares a damn about Poland as such” remains a sore point. So too does his suggestion that Britain should not dictate what form of government Germany ought to have. But these comments don’t make Menzies a Nazi sympathiser, rather they show that he continued trying to understand Hitler through conventional diplomacy when events had already demonstrated that Hitler could not be managed by conventional diplomacy.

That is the real historical criticism. There are other areas where Menzies commentary proved to be controversial – in 1938, as Attorney–General, Menzies went on an extended tour of Europe, suggesting that Hitler was “a dreamer, a man with many good ideas”, and observed that there “is a good deal of a real spiritual quality in the willingness of young Germans to devote themselves to the service and well-being of the state”. He also went on to address audiences in Australia by describing as a positive “the exalted and almost spiritual worship of the state by many Germans”, and that he looked forward to a system of democracy where “we can have real discipline and real efficiency and real cooperation”.

This is where Conroy’s argument is strongest when carefully framed, and weakest when exaggerated. Saying Menzies supported appeasement is historically defensible. Suggesting he remained open to negotiation after the invasion of Poland is also defensible. The more accurate statement is also the stronger argument: Menzies supported appeasement, seriously misjudged Hitler’s intentions and entered the war as the loyal leader of a British dominion. That is serious criticism without descending into caricature.

The word “coward”, however, belongs to an entirely different historical argument. The origins lie in one of the most vicious speeches ever delivered in the Commonwealth Parliament. After Prime Minister Joseph Lyons died in April 1939, Earle Page refused to serve under Menzies and launched a deeply personal attack. Rather than criticising Menzies’ policies, Page questioned why he had not served overseas during the First World War., where Menzies had remained in Australia while his brothers enlisted abroad, a decision made within his family.

Page transformed that private decision into a public accusation, suggesting Menzies lacked the courage necessary to lead Australia in another war. The speech horrified Parliament and even Labor members came to Menzies’ defence. And ironically, Page damaged himself far more than his intended target. Before the speech, Menzies was often regarded as brilliant but aloof. Afterwards, he appeared dignified under attack – Page has unintentionally given Menzies something he had previously lacked: public sympathy.

The lessons modern politics refuses to learn

Today’s Labor Party doesn’t need to question Menzies’ courage, as it already possesses a stronger historical case based on his political record. The greater irony is that the real Menzies is far more interesting that the mythical Menzies. The first Menzies ended his term as Prime Minister as an abject failure, suffering the ignominy of losing government from the floor of parliament rather than through an election, ultimately resigning in 1941. Yet it was these failures that the laid the foundations of his post-war success.

The second Menzies learned from defeat: he realised that anti-Labor politics required more than just parliamentary numbers. It needed institutions, a new form of political language, organisation and a social coalition that could withstand the test of time. His famous “Forgotten People” speeches reflected lessons learned through political failure as much as ideological conviction. His authority and influence over Australian politics arrived not because he had never been wrong, but because he understood why he had failed.

That is the greatest lesson that the modern Liberals have forgotten: learning from their failures.

Today’s Liberal Party invokes Menzies constantly while forgetting the qualities that made him successful. Menzies did the hard work of building institutions, rather than slogans. He understood building coalitions within the community was far more important than the politics of grievance.

However, Labor shouldn’t become complacent on all these issues either – it has its own tendency to transform history into political mythology, and is very good at it. John Curtin was undoubtedly one of Australia’s greatest prime ministers, but he also had many flaws and shouldn’t become just a symbol used to legitimise every contemporary defence policy proposed by Labor.

Curtin’s greatness wasn’t based around patriotic rhetoric but in his willingness to rethink Australia’s strategic position when circumstances demanded it. He broke with old assumptions because Australia’s security at the time required independent judgement.

Conroy is right to argue that Labor possesses a serious national security tradition stretching from Fisher and Curtin, through to Chifley, Evatt, Whitlam, Hawke and Keating. Progressive politics has never been incompatible with patriotism, despite what the conservatives want everyone to believe.

But reclaiming that tradition requires more than invoking names from the pages of history. Placing AUKUS within Curtin’s legacy doesn’t suggest AUKUS itself is strategically wise, affordable or genuinely enhances Australia’s sovereignty. However, the left should claim national security by doing what conservatives too often refuse to do: to think historically.

That means understanding alliances without worshipping them, recognising the threats without abandoning independent judgement – as Curtin did during the Second World War – and treating defence policy as part of a broader democratic national project rather than political symbolism.

Menzies deserves criticism, and a lot of it. He supported appeasement, seriously misread and misjudged Hitler and approached the war primarily as an imperial loyalist rather than the leader of an independent Australian nation.

But that isn’t the whole story: he also rebuilt Australian conservatism after a devastating defeat, created the Liberal Party, developed a political language that shaped Australia for a generation, and managed to transform his personal failure into enduring political success.

To acknowledge those achievements is not to endorse his style of politics or his ideology: it’s really a matter of taking history seriously, through the prism of its unvarnished truth. And that is what Australian politics too often refuses to do.

The current controversy initiated by Conroy serves a useful purpose. It reminds us that “coward” is the wrong word to use in the case of Menzies, because it repeats a discredited personal attack dating back to Earle Page. It reminds us that “appeasement” is a serious historical judgement that requires the correct evidence and context. And it reminds us that history becomes most dangerous when political parties transform it into mythology.

Menzies doesn’t need protection from history, as he becomes a far more interesting character when history is allowed to speak honestly, even if he’s not valued highly from the perspective of the left. What we know is that the first Menzies failed, and the second Menzies learned from that failure. The memorial Menzies teaches us almost nothing. That is the Menzies we are too often prevented from remembering – not because the facts are hidden, but because the myth is politically more useful.

Labor’s task isn’t to replace one myth with another. It’s to do something much rarer in Australian politics: tell the truth carefully.

Labor conferences are carefully stage-managed affairs. The delegates will cheer, the leaders will deliver their polished speeches, and all the awkward debates are quietly buried behind procedural motions – except for a few orchestrated and tolerated tiffs – and everyone leaves declaring unity has been achieved. But there are far deeper issues that are bubbling beneath the surface.

The warning from Premier Chris Minns about the rise of One Nation wasn’t so much a piece of political commentary, but an admission that large sections of Labor’s traditional electoral base have become impatient. Cost-of-living pressures, housing affordability and declining faith in institutions have created fertile ground for political outsiders, while governments continue promising caution and stability instead of transformation.

The conference also exposed Labor’s increasingly difficult balancing act, where many delegates demanded stronger action on gambling reform, improvements in civil liberties, and housing reforms, while the leaders continued to highlight caution, discipline and incremental change. Truly inspirational stuff. Government has become an exercise in managing vested interests without disturbing the traditional centres of economic and political power, and conferences like this show that there’s unlikely to be any change in this position.

The challenge for Labor – both in NSW and federally – is that electorates rarely reward the slow careful management forever. Voters usually understand when governments are restricted in what they can do, but they also recognise when “caution” just becomes an excuse for avoiding difficult decisions and postponing this for another day. As Labor heads towards its national conference in late July, the bigger question isn’t about whether the party can maintain internal discipline and unity, but whether it can still convince Australians that it governs for something larger than just remaining in office for the sake of it.

The party of protest removes the protestors

The Labor Party was born out of strikes, picket lines and people making those in power deeply uncomfortable. These days, it calls in the police to remove the protestors.

The defining image from the NSW Labor Conference wasn’t Anthony Albanese outlining the government’s agenda or Minns warning about One Nation: it was the spectacle of Labor members unfurling a Palestinian flag from the gallery within Sydney Town Hall, only to be escorted out by security and police while delegates applauded their removal. We’re still not sure why: Australia recognised the state of Palestine in 2025, so it can’t be because it’s an unofficial flag. Perhaps a certain group of privileged people who donate heavily to the Labor Party found it offensive?

Somewhere in the atmosphere at this moment, the ghosts of the labour movement probably looked on in astonishment and bewilderment, barely able to recognise what their party had become. It takes a special kind of political evolution – and an infiltration by Zionists – for a party built on organised dissent to applaud the removal of dissent from its own conference.

Palestine has become a lot more than just a foreign policy debate – it’s become a mirror reflecting Labor’s broader political identity, and it’s not a pretty sight. Outside the conference, thousands continued to demand an end to the slaughter in Gaza, and the application of foreign policy that’s guided by international law rather than the politics of convenience. Inside, the leadership offered the carefully constructed language of bullshit, more expressions of concern and another reminder that these matters are, naturally, “complex” and so so far away. And they always seem to become remarkably complex whenever powerful allies, donors or uncomfortable geopolitical realities are involved.

The real argument isn’t just about Israel and Palestine. It’s about whether principles can survive within the Labor government and broader labour movement, where the established leaders deflect and make excuses for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and war crimes in Lebanon, while the wannabe leaders within unions simply keep quiet about it. Can’t jeopardise those chances of preselection in a safe Labor seat, can we Sally.

We can predict it now: the National Conference later this month will undoubtedly feature passionate speeches about Palestine, a few procedural compromises and carefully negotiated wording designed to offend as few people as possible. Or perhaps the police will arrive to ensure that nothing is discussed at all.

That’s also the modern art of politics, especially within the modern Labor Party: silencing dissent and turning a moral issue into the language of the committee, just like Arendt’s banality of evil. But no amount of carefully massaged resolutions can disguise the growing divide between a leadership determined to downplay controversial issues, hoping they just go away, and a rank-and-file membership asking why a party that once prided itself on challenging power now seems so comfortable accommodating it.

Labor often reminds Australians of its proud history. But it’s not a history that’s being added to, and it’s unlikely that the photograph of the unfurling of the Palestinian flag at this conference is ever going to feature in the archives at Trades Hall.

When the centre of politics is empty, someone else moves in

The most revealing comment from the NSW Labor Conference wasn’t even about policy – it was Premier Minns describing the electoral challenge at the 2027 state election facing Labor is “Everest” and identifying One Nation as the party climbing the mountain, an admission that something far deeper is happening in Australian politics and political leaders have yet to work it out.

For years, especially since the onset of neoliberalism in early 1980s, both major parties have reassured voters that economic growth was necessary and would eventually solve everything. Everything. Instead, many Australians have watched housing drift out of reach, secure employment become far less secure, public services stretched thinner to the point where they’ve almost gone, and regional communities steadily hollowed out. The electorate was always told that globalisation would create winners, but what they’ve discovered instead is that someone else in the upper echelons usually collected the rewards.

The political establishment has spent years treating One Nation as an unfortunate outbreak of voter irrationality, rather than asking why so many people have concluded that the established parties are no longer speaking to them. The irony is that the Labor Party was a part of the process that created these frustrations in the first place, and continues to create policies that concentrate wealth.

The Coalition, meanwhile, offers familiar slogans dressed up as fresh thinking. Neither side appears especially enthusiastic about questioning the economic orthodoxy that has dominated Australian politics for the past four decades, and they are suffering. It’s the Liberal Party that’s suffering the most at the moment, but Labor’s turn will arrive at some point in the future.

This leaves a political vacuum, and politics has an iron law about this: vacuums never stay empty and are always going to filled with something else. If mainstream parties refuse to channel public anger towards concentrated wealth, corporate power and structural inequality, others will happily redirect that anger elsewhere – towards migrants, refugees, public institutions or whichever convenient target happens to be available that week.

One Nation’s rise is not the disease, it’s the fever. The disease is a political system that continues asking voters for patience while assuring them that the very economic model producing their insecurity just requires yet another minor adjustment, and everything will be okay.

Eventually, enough people will stop believing this and will be eager to look elsewhere. The fact that One Nation offers no solutions at all is an indictment on the current state of politics: it’s so far gone that the electorate is prepared to consider a party which is led by a dilettante, is incomprehensible, and unworkable. It will take a long to recover from this.

The house always wins, especially in politics

Every few years, Australian politics rediscovers poker machines. Politicians speak earnestly about the harm caused by gambling, the families devastated by addiction, and the billions quietly disappearing from household budgets into rows of brightly lit machines that go ka-ching. As usual, there are the speeches, the promises, and carefully-worded motions of commitments. But then the clubs industry reminds everyone who really holds the cards in this game.

The Labor Conference has at least shifted the conversation somewhat, or around 0.1 per cent. Delegates backed a moratorium on new poker machine licences, higher taxes on large club operators and a long-term reduction in machine numbers. On paper, it’s one of the strongest anti-gambling positions adopted by Labor in years. On paper. The question now is whether it becomes government policy, or glanced at by the relevance minister, a wry grin, before carefully disposing the recommendations in the bin.

That is where politics has become considerably less courageous. Clubs NSW has spent decades cultivating extraordinary political influence, wrapping one of Australia’s most profitable gambling industries in the language of community sport, local charities and family entertainment. Yes, we have families devasted from the effects of gambling, but have a look the local football team receiving that sponsorship cheque. Look at the RSL hosting Anzac Day, and wow, the junior netball club has just received their new uniforms. Meanwhile, billions of dollars continue to quietly disappear through poker machines in Western Sydney, with a disproportionate share coming from communities least able to afford the losses.

The remarkable achievement of the gambling industry has been convincing governments that regulating poker machines is somehow politically riskier than allowing the social consequences to continue. Few industries enjoy such a successful arrangement: private profits, public costs, and politicians forever searching for reasons why now isn’t quite the right time to act, because we can’t jeopardise those new uniforms for the netball juniors, can we?

If the Minns Government follows through on these reforms – and sorry to point this out, but it’s a hypothetical: this will never happen – it will inevitably be accused of attacking community clubs. Expect the familiar warnings about job losses, struggling sporting organisations and threats to local communities. It is a script that’s been final tuned over many decades. Yet conspicuously absent from the industry’s public campaigns are the people sitting alone in front of poker machines at midday, the families emptied by addiction, or the suburbs where gambling losses function as a silent tax on financial desperation.

This is how government operates in NSW: there’ll be retreat from these recommendations – if it even gets to that stage – and we’ll be reminded yet again that in politics, as in gambling, the house usually wins.

The politics of outrage is no longer just a style of campaigning – it has become one of the dominant business models within modern media and democracy. As podcasts, social media and creator platforms replace traditional gatekeepers, the algorithms increasingly reward anger, conflict and cultural warfare over the evidence and public interest. The result is a political environment where outrage is monetised, division is amplified and complex public policy is reduced to a simple battle between heroes and villains.

In this episode, we examine how journalism, political communication and digital media are undergoing one of the biggest transformations in modern history. The shift is no longer just from newspapers and television to podcasts and online platforms: it’s a shift in who decides what millions of people get to see every day. Editors and journalists have increasingly been replaced by recommendation algorithms designed to maximise engagement, rewarding the most inflammatory content regardless of whether it informs the public or just provokes it.

Karl Stefanovic has moved from mainstream television into political podcasting, and it represents a much broader trend rather than an isolated career change. As high-profile media personalities embrace the creator economy, the commercial incentives increasingly favour controversy over scrutiny, personality over journalism, and spectacle over analysis.

The conversation explores how outrage politics has influenced democratic debate across Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and beyond. From Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro to Australia’s own culture-war politics, conflict has increasingly replaced governing as the central performance of political leadership. The challenge is that anger can be a powerful force for exposing injustice, but when outrage becomes permanent it ceases to solve problems and instead becomes an industry sustained by clicks, advertising revenue and endless political grievance.

We also examine the growing influence of wealthy political donors, advocacy organisations and billionaire-backed campaigns that increasingly shape public opinion long before Australians ever cast a vote. Political influence is no longer confined to political parties or traditional media organisations. Financial power now operates through podcasts, digital platforms, lobbying groups and sophisticated online campaigns capable of dominating public conversation without ever standing for election.

Australian politics has entered a winter of discontent, and nowhere is the chill being felt more sharply than inside the Liberal Party. Angus Taylor leads an opposition with 42 seats in the House of Representatives, yet the party often appears to be chasing One Nation’s agenda rather than setting its own. The result is a strange political reversal: the official opposition looks spooked by a party with only two lower-house seats, while Labor governs from a position of overwhelming parliamentary strength.

In this episode, we examine the Liberal Party’s identity crisis, its talk of rebranding, and why changing a name or logo cannot fix decades of political decline. From the loss of inner-city moderates to the teal independents, younger voters drifting towards Labor and the Greens, and regional conservatives flirting with One Nation, the Liberal Party faces a deeper problem than leadership instability. It no longer seems able to explain who it represents, what it stands for, or what kind of Australia it wants to build.

We revisit Robert Menzies and the “forgotten people”, not as a nostalgia, but as a reminder that successful political movements need purpose, narrative and moral authority. Taylor has yet to offer any equivalent vision for modern Australia: instead, the Liberal Party appears to be caught between multicultural reality and monocultural anxiety, between economic conservatism and right-wing populism, between rebuilding trust and pandering to fear.

But this is also a wider story about Australian democracy. Labor’s caution, the Greens’ in difficulty gaining traction, One Nation’s politics of resentment, and the hollowing out of public institutions all point to a political system struggling to renew itself. Australia does not just need better branding: it needs better politics.

There are two answers to the question of whether Angus Taylor is finished. The first is the usual Canberra answer, which is the least interesting. No, he’s not finished in the narrow sense: he’s still Liberal leader, and his deputy still backs him, which is what we’d expect him to say, publicly at least. His colleagues haven’t walked into the party room and removed him. Not yet. Politics is filled with leaders who looked terminal one week and indispensable the next, and the Liberal Party is hardly overflowing with alternative leaders capable of uniting its factions, of rebuilding its suburban vote and confronting Pauline Hanson and the threats from One Nation at the same time.

But the second answer is more important. Taylor might not be finished as leader, but he is perilously close to being finished as a plausible alternative prime minister. Opposition leaders can’t just simply survive; they need to define the political contest. To be effective, they must make governments react to them and convince voters that they represent the next government. At the moment, Taylor doesn’t look like that leader. Instead, he appears to lead a once-dominant political movement that has lost both its political argument and its emotional connection with voters, while increasingly finding itself dragged behind One Nation, despite the fact they hold 42 seats in parliament, One Nation with just the two.

The great opposition leaders who became prime minister did more than exploit government fatigue – they redefined Australian politics according to their will. Robert Menzies rebuilt the non-Labor side around security, enterprise and stability after the war. Gough Whitlam modernised Labor around education, cities, culture and national confidence. Kevin Rudd defeated John Howard by making Labor appear competent, moderate and ready to govern.

That is the standard by which Taylor must be judged on. The question is not so much whether he survives another bad poll or another week of internal criticism: it’s whether he’s making the Coalition look like a government-in-waiting. He isn’t and, instead, he leads a diminished party still trying to work out how much of Hanson’s politics it can adopt without admitting they’ve become dependent upon her.

From opposition to political emergency

The latest polling indicates the scale of the crisis. A primary vote in the high teens is not just a bad result; it’s an emergency. Labor remains comfortably ahead, One Nation continues to poll strongly, and Taylor now trails not only Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister but also Pauline Hanson. That should concern every single Liberal strategist out there. The party that once regarded itself as Australia’s natural party of government is now struggling to remain as the main force on the non-Labor side of politics.

To be fair, Taylor inherited a party already in a steep decline. The Liberals have been losing inner-city moderates to teal independents, younger voters to the Labor Party and the Greens, and many outer-suburban and regional voters to One Nation, and it’s a damage that stretches back well before his leadership commenced. The party never fully recovered from the Morrison years, when political marketing replaced trust, culture wars overshadowed basic competence and political management increasingly lacked any form of imagination at all.

Nor can this be blamed on Tony Abbott, however tempting that might be, who became leader in 2009. In opposition, Abbott engaged in a nihilistic and permanent state of political warfare – extraordinarily effective as an opposition leader, but dragged this behaviour into government, and never really articulated a coherent vision of what Australia could look like. His priorities were ideologically driven, and he struggled any form of trust with the electorate.

The leadership of Malcolm Turnbull offered an opportunity for the Liberal Party to reconnect with a modern and multicultural Australia, yet he also failed to bridge that gap between aspiration and political reality. He understood many of Australia’s long-term challenges but possessed neither the authority nor the determination to carry his party with him. On issues such as climate policy, energy and institutional reform, he appeared trapped between personal conviction, party constraints and political caution that seems to afflict prime ministers once they get to their cherished goal. Scott Morrison ultimately held the Coalition together longer than many expected, but his emphasis on marketing, resentment and permanent campaigning further narrowed the party’s appeal rather than renewing it as a broad and acceptable government.

That’s the crisis that Taylor has inherited and now confronts. He’s attempting to lead a party that has spent years encouraging distrust of moderation, expertise, compromise and institutions and it’s hardly surprising that many conservative voters now decided that if they want the politics of grievance, they may as well go to the original supplier. One Nation doesn’t need to get into government to inflict lasting damage upon the Liberal Party – all it has to do the emotional home of the anti-Labor vote.

To Taylor’s credit, he is totally correct when he says the trust with the electorate needs to be rebuilt. Since the pandemic commenced in early 2020, many conservative voters felt that governments had become too intrusive and dictating how people should live their lives. Some of those concerns might be genuine, others have fallen into the deep hole of conspiracy theories and following the grievances pushed by media, but they are politically significant. Taylor is attempting to speak to these voters without surrendering the agenda of the Liberal Party entirely over to Hanson. It’s an incredibly difficult balancing act and there is no easy path.

The multiculturalism test Taylor couldn’t pass

Leadership is judged not by whether the circumstances are difficult but by whether leaders still understand the country they are seeking to lead. Taylor’s handling of the recent debates over multiculturalism suggests he cannot. Australia’s multicultural makeup is not some kind of abstract slogan that can be sneered at by the far right, but exists as a lived reality: it’s who we are. It’s visible in our schools, in workplaces, businesses, sporting clubs, religious communities and families all across the country. It’s not an optional addition to an older Australia; this is modern Australia itself.

That is why Taylor’s equivocation has proven to be so damaging to his standing. It wasn’t an issue about trying to avoid Labor talking points, it was as issue about whether he can speak comfortably about the country as it exists today. Instead, he appeared trapped – by Hanson, by internal party pressures and by fears that any defence of multiculturalism would be interpreted by sections of the right as a sign of weakness. For a Liberal leader, this is a serious political problem, and the party that once claimed to represent aspiration across all communities now appears uncertain about the social reality of contemporary Australia.

What would a leader of a mainstream political party seek to curry favour with such a dilettante, ignorant and uninformed politician such as Hanson? Her politics is divisive and historically dishonest, yet it remains emotionally coherent, despite it being a patchwork of thinking-out-aloud though processes. People know what she believes, whom she blames and whom she claims to defend. That clarity gives her political strength, even when the story she tells is misleading. Taylor, by contrast, hasn’t offered an equally compelling alternative. Instead, he has assembled his own fragments – removal of “toxic” taxes, smaller government, warnings about spending and cautious cultural messaging – but no broader national story.

This is Taylor’s greatest weakness – it’s a cliché, but he lacks a cohesive narrative. The Albanese government has genuine vulnerabilities, with cost-of-living pressures severe for many people, housing affordability continues to deteriorate, and health, education and aged care all face significant challenges. On top of this, Labor’s caution and timidity on policy frustrates many people in the community. There’s so much material for a strong opposition leader to work with, yet the main political story today is not about Labor’s shortcomings: it’s all about the collapse of the Liberal Party and the rise of One Nation. That reflects poorly on Taylor’s leadership.

Survival is not the same as leadership

“Finished” is a dangerous word in politics. Hanson herself has repeatedly been declared politically dead before returning after an 18-year hiatus from politics. Albanese spent years being underestimated. Even John Howard, who once compared his prospects to “Lazarus with a triple bypass”, eventually became Australia’s second longest-serving prime minister. Politics is dictates by timing, circumstances – Harold Macmillan’s events, dear boy – internal factional movements and the absence of obvious alternatives.

Taylor may survive because there’s no rival who offers a clearly superior difference, in the same way that caused the insufferable survival of Peter Dutton: there is no alternative. Andrew Hastie might energise parts of the conservative base but that could further deepen the same strategic dilemma. A moderate revival might appeal to teal voters while further alienating conservatives drifting over to One Nation. The Liberal Party isn’t choosing between the good and bad options; it’s choosing among different versions of a decline, or the least-worst options. It’s such a bad political position for a party to be in.

That may ultimately be Taylor’s strongest protection – not public enthusiasm (because there is none), political momentum or confidence, but simply the absence of a more convincing option.

So is Angus Taylor really finished? Not yet, despite all the evidence that have been provided to support his removal. But the more significant question is whether he has already failed the essential test of leadership. He hasn’t made the Liberal Party appear ready for government. He hasn’t established himself as the obvious alternative prime minister. He hasn’t contained the rise of Pauline Hanson: if anything, he wants to become Hanson. He hasn’t forced the government onto the defensive. Above all, he hasn’t given disillusioned voters a good reason to return to the Liberal Party fold, rather than continue that slide towards degenerative grievance politics.

Taylor might yet recover. Might. Menzies and Howard are the constant reminders that political comebacks are always possible. But the odds are increasingly against him.

That’s the real danger. Taylor can remain Liberal leader while losing the only authority that ultimately matters: the authority of the electorate. He can retain his title while surrendering the political arguments over to One Nation. He can survive inside the party room while losing the rest of the country. And in doing so, he risks leading the Liberal Party into a vortex that’s becoming larger and deeper: a conservative politics in which One Nation supplies the anger, Labor supplies the government, and the Liberal Party supplies only the mirage.

The Liberal Party’s latest bout of soul-searching has arrived at a very familiar point: the problem isn’t the packaging, it’s what’s inside the package. Following another round of disastrous opinion poll numbers, senior figures of the Liberal Party are openly discussing a rebrand, with suggestions that the party’s name may have become an electoral liability.

In the advertising drama series, Mad Men, Peggy Olson asks: “If this was a dog food, we’d change the name, so why don’t we just change the name?”. We’re not suggesting that the Liberal Party has reached the point of dog food – others might – but it’s a remarkable admission for a party that once regarded itself as Australia’s natural party of government, having held office for 51 years since it was formed in 1944, or 63 per cent of that time.

Changing the name is far easier than confronting the reasons why the electorate has walked away from the Liberal Party. After making the endless push for privatisation, deregulation, tax cuts for high-income earners and an increasingly market-driven approach to housing, wages and public services, many people associate the party with a system that has delivered unprecedented wealth to those already at the top while leaving everyone else facing stagnant living standards and diminishing economic security.

The problem for the Liberal Party is that they continue to make that mistake that the lowest point in its history is therefore an opportunity to bring in a marketing solution to a political crisis, instead of looking directly in the mirror and realising that they are the actual problem.

The irony here is that the Liberal Party – in the Menzian tradition – once saw itself as the party of aspiration and opportunity, but also providing a modest safety net for those who might be lagging behind. Today, many younger Australians see it as the defender of inherited wealth, property speculation and entrenched privilege. And something that’s been created over many decades, coupled with the nasty right-wing hate promoted during the Howard era, is not going to be repaired by a fancy new logo or a name that continues to deceive the electorate. Isn’t it bad enough that the use of “Liberal” in its name disguises what is essentially is a hard-line conservative party?

Rebranding might end up produce a few favourable headlines and a few look-here moments, especially from their friends in the mainstream media, but will the voters buy it? Olson’s question in Mad Men captures the basic instinct of advertising that a brand refresh can change perceptions. In politics, though, voters generally look beyond the label: if the product behind the name remains the same, a new name by itself won’t deliver any long-term political benefits.

The teals become a part of the establishment

The launch of Community Strong Australia is a sign that the teal movement – some of them, at least – has decided to become what they’ve always opposed: the structures of a political party. It’s not exactly a name that rolls of the tongue – something like the Teal Alliance would have been far more suitable if that’s the path they were going to go down – and it has all the hallmarks of being market tested to the point of being meaningless, but that’s beside the point. What started off as well-funded community independents campaigning against the excesses of the major parties is now showing all the signs of the political establishment it has always claimed to challenge.

The rationale being offered by current independents Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall is fairly straightforward: Australia’s electoral funding laws have always favoured the formal party structure, making it difficult for like-minded independents to form allegiances and hold more political influence. It’s always going to be a trade-off – is it better to have clear independence, or form a party that will enable the pooling of resources, manage co-ordinated campaigns and build a national brand, and hold power to account more effectively? How independent are the teals anyway, considering the massive support they receive though the Climate 200 group?

The bigger question is what the teals actually represent. They have successfully positioned themselves as competent, moderate and evidence-based, and their appeal relies heavily on integrity, climate policy and professional management – all highly desirable attributes for political operatives – but the far more contentious issues about wealth concentration, housing speculation, corporate influence and growing inequality seems to have been overlooked. The seats that are occupied by teal independents are also the most affluent in Australia and that might be the reason why they’ve paid lip-service to some of these issues.

This might end up being both their strength and their weakness. They do offer reassurance to voters frustrated with the major parties without asking for fundamental changes to the system that produced that frustration in the first place. But the economic insecurity that is affecting many people across Australia is hardly felt at all in the seats currently held by the teals.

If these electorates feel that the main point of difference for the teals was the fact that they are truly independent from the party structures, the day Community Strong Australia was announced last week could end up being its high-water mark and hard work performed by these independents over the past decade runs the risk of being lost.

The limitations of Hanson’s monoculture

The latest opinion polls contain an uncomfortable message that neither major party seems particularly eager to confront. Labor has stabilised after its post-budget wobble, the Coalition has sunk to historically weak levels, and One Nation continues to command support that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, albeit with a slight drop. Yet beneath the headline figures is a different reality: there’s not much enthusiasm for any of the parties or leaders, and it seems to be more a case about choosing the least-worst option.

Anthony Albanese is comfortably ahead of Angus Taylor as preferred prime minister, but much of that advantage reflects the Opposition’s inability to present itself as a credible alternative rather than any excitement about the government’s agenda. Meanwhile, the Coalition appears trapped in a cycle of self-inflicted decline, searching for better messaging while avoiding the harder conversation about whether any of its political and economic offerings matches up to the lives Australians are actually living.

Meanwhile, support for One Nation has dropped slightly, and we suggest that it will continue to drop, as each new bizarre announcement is made by Pauline Hanson, to give us an idea of what’s really going on inside her head. The latest from her “monocultural series” is that Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston (who, incidentally, is not a real person) are the classic definition of the monoculture that she is espousing, even going to the extent of claiming that the current World Cup Socceroos team, is also an excellent example of “monoculture”.

This claim would be a surprise to many people, as the squad is made of players from Italian, Scottish, Cypriot, Ugandan, Sudanese, Tanzanian, Serbian and Dutch backgrounds, which would seem to be the true essence of multiculturalism, but perhaps we’ve been wrong all along and Pauline knows best. We is all Straylian now.

But this politics of nostalgia is starting to wear thin. For years, Hanson has built her political brand around the promise of returning Australia to an imagined past: a simpler, more familiar, more “Australian” nation supposedly before multiculturalism, migration and social change arrived unwantedly on onto the scene, and ruined the national story. Right at this moment, it’s an effective political strategy because calls for nostalgia rarely requires evidence; it just requires people to believe that yesterday was much better than today (narrator’s voice: no, it was not much better than today).

It’s not possible to feed the public this constant line of fact-free bullshit and expect they will fully accept this rhetoric forever. Nostalgia does have its limits: as the cost-of-living crisis deepens and housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, voters are beginning to ask more practical questions.

How will a return to Norman Gunston help to reduce grocery bills, lower rents or make it easier for young Australians to buy a home? And by the way, who is Norman Gunston? Played by Garry McDonald, the character of Gunston hasn’t appeared for over 45 years. He might have been the precursor to Da Ali G as far as his style is concerned, but how many people in the electorate would know who he is?

It’s cyclical, but this culture-war politics has probably reached its limits too. Hanson insults the intelligence of the public by offering inane and outdated cultural references as solutions to the big problems the country faces. The public might detest many of our politics leaders, but they too can see that Hanson is the fool on the stage who is being seriously exposed as her audience grows.

Political theatre can attract attention, but eventually voters expect substance. If economic insecurity continues to dominate public life, there’s not much of a future for the likes of Hanson and One Nation, despite what the opinions polls might be saying today.

Keir Starmer’s resignation as British Prime Minister after just 18 months in office is more than another chapter in the United Kingdom’s revolving-door leadership. It raises a much bigger question for centre-left governments across the democratic world: why do parties elected on promises of transformational change so often end up governing as cautious managers of the status quo?

We examine the striking parallels between Labour in Britain and Labor in Australia. Both parties inherited government after long periods of conservative rule, both secured commanding parliamentary majorities despite relatively modest primary vote support, and both promised to tackle deep economic and social problems. Yet once in office, the politics of reform quickly gave way to the politics of caution.

Rather than confronting entrenched concentrations of wealth and power, governments increasingly rely on reviews, inquiries, consultations and incremental policy adjustments. Major reforms are softened, delayed or abandoned altogether, leaving many voters with the impression that elections change governments but rarely change the direction of the country.

The consequences are now becoming clear. As Labour’s support collapsed in Britain, Reform UK filled the political vacuum. In Australia, One Nation is experiencing a similar surge in opinion polling. These developments are often dismissed as populism, misinformation or protest voting, but those explanations overlook a more fundamental issue: when mainstream parties fail to deliver meaningful change, frustrated voters inevitably begin searching elsewhere.

We also explore how political accountability has fundamentally changed. Governments are no longer judged primarily against the failures of their predecessors but against the promises they made before taking office. Starmer campaigned on renewal but was quickly associated with austerity measures, while Anthony Albanese increasingly faces criticism that Labor has retreated from many of its reform ambitions, from the National Anti-Corruption Commission to broader structural economic change. In today’s political environment, broken expectations carry far greater political costs than unmet historical comparisons.

Starmer’s downfall is a reminder that overwhelming parliamentary majorities can evaporate quickly when governments are seen as managing problems rather than solving them.

The lesson extends well beyond Britain. Modern electorates are becoming less patient, more demanding and increasingly unwilling to reward cautious incrementalism. If governments elected to deliver change instead preserve the existing political and economic settlement, they may discover that the greatest beneficiaries are not their opponents in parliament, but the insurgent movements waiting outside it.

Pauline Hanson is often described as angry, but the anger in itself is not the problem. We’ve seen historically that anger can be one of the great drivers of democracy: it has exposed the humiliation, exploitation and abandonment of people by terrible governments in the past, will continue to do so in the future. The question isn’t whether anger belongs in politics, but what that anger is hoping to achieve: is the purpose to shine a light on the behaviour of the powerful, or is there to hide the power? And is to identify who has caused these problems, or is it transforming this anger into resentment towards those who have even less power in society?

Hanson’s politics belongs firmly to the latter tradition. Rather than helping Australians understand the economic and political structures that have produced this sense of insecurity, it offers a simpler story in which migrants, Muslims, Indigenous Australians, trans people, public broadcasters, academics and assorted “elites” become the cause of a national decline. It’s a politics that creates problems without offering resolutions and solid grievance without an analysis, transforming genuine frustrations into suspicion of the people in the community who least responsible for creating them.

The common defence of Hanson is that she has identified real grievances but has misdirected them. But even that is being too generous. The grievances might be real, but her explanation of them was wrong from the beginning. Over the past four decades Australians have experienced insecure work, weakened unions, privatisation, regional neglect, housing speculation, declining public services and the growing power of the wealth class over democratic institutions.

Hanson has seen these developments over the years, but instead of identifying the political and economic order that produced them – and the underlying principles of neoliberalism – she has racialised their consequences.

The legacy of racial nationalism

In this sense, Hansonism didn’t emerge from nowhere in 1996. Australian political commentary often treats each eruption of right-wing populism as a shocking deviation from an otherwise tolerant national story, but the historical roots are much older. Australia was federated with racial exclusion close to the centre of its national identity, where The White Australia policy wasn’t a side issue of the newly created Commonwealth; it was one of its founding principles. Race, labour and nationhood were bound together through the promise that white workers would be protected, not by democratic control over economic power but by racial boundaries based around citizenship and employment.

Hansonism has inherited this tradition in a degraded form. It’s an style of thinking that speaks constantly of protection, but not protection from economic insecurity or concentrated wealth. Instead, it promises protection from cultural and demographic change, and nothing else: that’s it. The result is a politics that preserves existing economic arrangements while directing popular anger away from those who benefit most from them.

There is also a deeper lineage running through sections of the Australian far right, from the League of Rights and anti-communist conspiracies to the fear of international institutions, hidden elites and a betrayal of the nation. Hansonism is not just a continuation of those movements, but it draws upon the same political vernacular. Ordinary Australians are imagined as virtuous producers, constantly threatened by the external forces that do not truly belong: internationalists, bureaucrats, globalists, multiculturalists, human rights advocates or whichever group currently occupies the role of national enemy: they are not monoculturalists. The names change, but the structure remains the same.

Queensland provided much of the political theatre for this tradition. Former Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen demonstrated how anti-Canberra resentment, hostility to unions, suspicion of the ABC and an aggressive law-and-order politics could be repackaged as “common sense”. Hanson has inherited many of these instincts and adapted them for the age of television, talkback radio and social media.

Her rise coincided with the onset of neoliberalist thinking in the 1980s and 1990s, where protection for critical industries was removed, many public services were privatised, unions were neutered and employment became far less secure. At the same time, political leaders suggested that the third wave of globalisation that arose from neoliberalism was inevitable. Hanson’s “achievement” was to separate multiculturalism from neoliberalism in the public imagination, where she has persuaded many Australians to blame cultural diversity for economic changes that had little to do with migration and everything to do with political choices.

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This article continues by examining how Hansonism operates as a form of “racist neoliberalism”, why culture wars benefit powerful economic interests, the myth of a monocultural Australia, and what a genuine alternative to Hansonism might look like.

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One of the big developments in Australian politics has been the growing influence of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart and a small circle of ultra-wealthy political donors. As we all know, very little in life is free, and that’s certainly the case when it comes to politics; it’s always a question of what the trade-off is. While political influence has always followed the money, the relationship is becoming increasingly more obvious. What was once conducted through clandestine and private meetings, industry associations and backroom lobbying, is now taking place in full public view through media ownership, political donations, advocacy campaigns and direct intervention in national debates.

Rinehart’s growing support for figures such as Pauline Hanson raises a broader question about the health of Australian democracy. If ordinary voters are increasingly struggling with housing costs, lower living standards and a reduction in economic security, why do some of the loudest voices in politics belong to those who have benefited most from the existing neoliberalist environment? The language they use is often one of freedom, the so-called “common sense” and standing up to elites, even though these campaigns themselves are funded and amplified by some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Australia has liked this idea of being more resistant to the excesses of American-style politics. Yet the arrival of billionaire wealth, media influence, the endless culture-wars and increasingly personalised political movements suggests that this assumption is starting to fray at the edges. As public trust in institutions weakens and traditional parties struggle to inspire voters – the Liberal Party, and Labor too, even with their massive majority – the wealth class is finding new opportunities to direct the national conversation towards their line of thinking, which seems to be based around a hard-right style of extremism.

The question isn’t about whether money influences politics – that has always been the case, despite the desire from the public to remove it completely. The question is whether politics is gradually becoming another asset class for the wealthy, and only available to them, because they’re the only ones who can afford the price of entry.

Missing in action: Where have the Greens gone?

If money coming in more obviously from the wealth class is one development within politics, another one is the party which spent years positioning itself as the conscience of Parliament has become remarkably difficult to find within the current national conversation. The Australia Greens still have significant influence in the Senate and, according to national opinion polls, still attract a significant level of support – yet while One Nation continues to dominate the headlines with their inane outrage and culture-war narratives, the Greens seem to be missing in action, just a time when they should be finding their place in the sun.

Of course, part of the problem is structural, where the Albanese government has successfully occupied much of the centrist political territory, leaving the Greens struggling to distinguish themselves without appearing either obstructive or irrelevant. At the same time, the mainstream media remains far more attracted to outrage, conflict and political spectacle than detailed policy debates, where a fight about immigration, national identity and transgender issues – where the debate has been reduced to a man is going to steal a women’s Olympic gold medal – will always get more coverage than a discussion about public housing construction or tax reform.

Many of the economic anxieties that are driving politics at the moment – housing affordability, insecure work, declining living standards and rising inequality – are tailor-made for a party advocating a major overhaul of the political system and seeking positive social reform. Yet public frustration is increasingly being channelled towards far-right populist movements rather than the progressive alternatives that are out there, even though the likes of Pauline Hanson offer no solutions and essentially represent a culture of complaint. Whether this is a failure of messaging, poor leadership, a weak political strategy or just because of the mainstream media is going to be a matter of debate. But whatever the case is, the Greens need to work it out, and work it out now.

The danger for the Greens isn’t so much that they’ll disappear – they’ve had a strong and consistent vote over the past 15–20 years, with a strong representation in the Senate – but they seem to be silent, just at a time when the conditions would seem to be favourable to them.

A party can hold seats – or lose them, as the Greens found out in the lower house during the 2025 federal election – win votes and exercise parliamentary influence, but if it no longer defines the national conversation, its capacity to influence the future begins to fade. In a political environment that’s becoming increasingly dominated by anger, grievance and political personalities, the question is whether the Greens have been sidelined by the circumstances that politics is currently in – or whether they’ve lost the ability to tell a compelling story about what kind of country they would like to build.

Letters from Britain: Is Albanese sleep-walking towards oblivion?

One of the most important political questions might not be about the Liberal Party, the Greens or even One Nation. It’s about whether the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is following in the same path as his British counterpart, Keir Starmer. Starmer is widely expected to resign as Prime Minister, and the parallels with these two leaders is remarkably similar.

Both leaders won enormous parliamentary majorities that looks impressive on paper – Labor won 94 seats of 150 on offer; British Labour won 411 from 650 – but these results hide a far more complicated reality. In both instances, voters were not necessarily enamoured by the choices on offer, but were far more repulsed by what was being presented by the conservative alternatives. Of course, it can’t be denied that the Labor/Labour results were incredible, but there was very little public enthusiasm for either Albanese or Starmer.

Some of this is because political parties from the centre-left find themselves trapped, once they win elections. They spend years in opposition arguing that government should be there to improve people’s lives, but once they get there, they govern in the interests of the status quo. Decisions end up being deferred, everything that was promised gets watered down, and issues are managed rather than resolved. Or in the case of Australia’s National Anti-Corruption Commission, things turn to shyte.

In Britain, this is producing a political revolt. The soon-to-be-gone Starmer government seems like they won an election for no good reason, except to kick the Tories out – which, of course, is usually the good enough reason, but it’s only the first part of the equation. Public frustration is no longer directed only at the Conservatives; it’s increasingly directed at Labour itself.

Australia might be heading towards a similar moment. The danger for Albanese is not an immediate leadership challenge, in the way that newly-elected Labour MP Andy Burnham has presented himself against Starmer in the UK – but that continuing public perception that his government is presiding over a decline rather than stopping it, and avoiding the better future that they promised to build.

Meanwhile, protest politics continues to gather momentum. Just like the Reform party in the UK, the rise of One Nation is not necessarily an endorsement of its policies, it’s mainly a symptom of a broader belief that established institutions are currently incapable of delivering meaningful change. When voters understand that mainstream politics has become just a choice between different managers of the same system, they begin looking elsewhere.

The lesson from Britain isn’t that Albanese will suffer Starmer’s fate: while they’re respective circumstances are similar – Albanese doesn’t have Jim Chalmers lurking in the background creating havoc for him, although that could change. The lesson is that governments elected to deliver change, have to deliver it. And if they don’t, the electorate will turn towards the people who will deliver that desperately needed change.

For years, the public was told that conflict with Iran was unavoidable. Successive governments in the US and Israel have argued that diplomacy had failed, sanctions had reached their limits, and military action was the only remaining option. When the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran in February, the consequences arrived quickly: oil prices surged, shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was disrupted, inflationary pressures intensified, and global markets braced for a wider regional war.

Four months later, the United States and Iran have signed a memorandum of understanding, with a broader ceasefire agreement expected to follow. Yet the central question remains: what exactly was achieved?

Despite repeated claims that Iran represented an existential threat requiring military intervention, the Iranian state remains intact. The government survived the conflict, sanctions are being eased, frozen assets are being released, and Iranian oil exports are set to expand. The outcome appears remarkably similar to what could have been achieved through diplomacy from the outset, raising serious questions about the strategic rationale behind a war that imposed enormous economic and human costs while producing few tangible political gains.

The political implications are equally significant. Donald Trump abandoned the international nuclear agreement with Iran, arguing that it was too favourable to Tehran. Nearly a decade later, Iran is on the verge of securing a more advantageous settlement than the one Washington rejected. At the same time, Israel’s strategy of pushing for confrontation has drawn greater international scrutiny of its broader regional conduct, including its genocidal actions in Gaza and Lebanon, while increasing public scepticism toward Western support for Israeli policy.

As governments debate regional security, nuclear negotiations and future sanctions arrangements, ordinary people have experienced the consequences through higher fuel prices, increased living costs and prolonged economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, defence contractors, commodity traders and financial speculators have emerged among the few clear beneficiaries of the conflict.

We explore the strategic failures of the United States and Israel, the changing balance of power in the Middle East, the role of diplomacy in ending the conflict, and why so many observers are now asking whether this war achieved anything at all.

But Hanson’s speech also highlighted a broader issue in Australian politics. As economic pressures, housing affordability and declining trust in institutions continue to frustrate voters, simplistic slogans and culture-war politics are finding a larger audience. The challenge is that while these messages identify targets for public anger, they rarely offer solutions to the complex problems Australians face.

The rise of One Nation reflects both the decline of the Liberal Party and growing dissatisfaction with mainstream politics. Yet recent elections have shown there are limits to fear-based campaigns that paint Australia as a nation in decline. Voters may be frustrated, but many remain unconvinced by narratives built on division and nostalgia.

We examine Hanson’s National Press Club appearance, the media’s role in normalising fringe politics, the contradictions within One Nation’s economic agenda, and why bad ideas should be challenged rather than ignored. As populist movements continue to gain attention around the world, the question is whether grievance politics can offer anything beyond anger, scapegoating and a vision of Australia looking backwards rather than forwards.

For months, if not years, the world was told – mainly by the United States and Israel – that a confrontation with Iran was totally necessary and inevitable. When the attacks on Iran commenced in late February, the markets reacted accordingly, oil prices surged and the shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz were thrown into total chaos. At the time, there was a possibility of a wider regional conflict within the West Asia region and dragging the entire world economy into a catastrophe – and while there were several attacks on US bases in the region, the conflict has been limited to Israel’s unwarranted and illegal aggression in southern Lebanon and attacks on Beirut.

There is now a memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran – and of course, we’ll have to wait until the conflict fully ends before we can believe that this MOU will actually end this war – but there’s an even bigger question that needs to be answered: what exactly was the point of this war?

Neither Washington nor Tehran has publicly released the full text of the agreement, which is due to be finalised in coming days and, as a result, much of this is speculation. However, there seems to be a broad outline from various diplomatic sources that frozen Iranian assets will be released, there’ll be less restrictions on Iranian oil exports, and new security arrangements over the management of the Strait of Hormuz will be implemented. The Iranian government is also pursuing compensation for damages from the United States, although it’s unclear how this would be achieved, or even if the US would be willing to proceed with such a reparation deal.

The US, of course, sees things differently – with a focus on reopening of the Strait of Hormuz (even though Iran did open it up, only for the US to close it down again for unknown reasons), stabilisation of global energy markets (even though it was their actions that created the instability in the first place), and guarantees from Iran that it won’t obtain or develop nuclear weapons.

On the evidence before us – and as been suspected for some time – this appears to be a massive loss for the United States (and Israel) and a major victory for Iran. And neither the United States or Israel have gone through the usual bravado of claiming a strategic victory – and certainly nothing like George W. Bush prematurely announcing “mission accomplished” in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq – and this comes after months of idle threats of escalating tensions and military confrontation.

US President Donald Trump has pushed the memorandum on Truth Social as a “diplomatic success”, but has wanted to move on from Iran very quickly, shifting attention back to domestic issues such as border security, infrastructure and economic policy. Yet the speed with which he appears to be “moving on” and eager to close off this saga raises a few uncomfortable questions for him.

If the outcome is a negotiated arrangement that allows Iran to continue exporting oil, gain access to frozen assets, avoid direct military action and remains a major regional power – and if anything, its power and stature in the region has increased – then it’s difficult to see what precisely the United States has gained through a confrontation, where the end result could have been achieved through diplomacy in the first place.

It’s even more difficult to understand the purpose of this war, when compared to the Iran nuclear agreement that Trump abandoned in 2018. At the time, Trump argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – agreed to in 2015 by the five permanent Security Council members of the United Nations, and the European Union – was fundamentally flawed, and promised a tougher approach on Iran. Yet this new agreement – if it comes to that – will delivers a deal that is significantly better for Iran than any previous deal. Once again: what was the point of it all, aside from acquiescing completely to the unrealistic and maniacal demands of Israel, the one country that might end up being the biggest loser out of this?

For years, successive Israeli governments have argued that Iran represents an existential threat requiring constant pressure, isolation and, when necessary, military action – a pissant country of 9 million people, demanding action from a country of 350 million, ultimately to be used against a country of 93 million people, and destabilising an entire region in the process. The assumption here is that Iran could be deterred, weakened and eventually forced into concessions, which of course, didn’t happen – and anyone with basic understandings of geopolitics and military strategy, could have easily predicted this outcome.

Instead, Iran has shown that it retains substantial military capabilities, significant regional influence – which has now been boosted – and enough leverage to force major powers back to the negotiating table. Whatever the effectiveness of Iran’s missile operations, the broader political outcome has reinforced Iran’s position as an important regional player, rather than an isolated pariah the United States has been telling the entire world for over 47 years.

Israel now also faces a deeper strategic problem. This conflict has drawn more international attention to the instability of the region, including the ongoing genocide and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, longstanding questions about the rights of Palestinian, and Israel’s current illegal invasions and military actions in southern Lebanon.

Increasingly, for global audiences, including those in Australia, the more the military escalation dominates the headlines, the more difficult it becomes for Western governments to maintain that deception about Israel’s “right to defend itself”, when the public can see for themselves which countries are causing this conflict. And for those in the electorate who are prepared to tolerate or overlook Israel’s assorted war crimes and invasions of neighbouring countries, they can certainly feel the effects of their actions at the petrol bowser or at the supermarket check-outs

The United States is also now finding itself on the outer in international circles, although for the current Trump administration, they’re possible not overly concerned about this. Most major European powers failed to support the US and showed little enthusiasm for a prolonged military confrontation with Iran. Of course, their lack of enthusiasm for conflict would have been based around self-interest, rather than any humanitarian concerns about Iranians or Palestinians – they understood that a major war in the region would threaten global energy supplies and have a significant economic impact – but the fact that they didn’t support the US at all, is quite telling.

These economic consequences also raise another uncomfortable issue that deserves far greater scrutiny, an issue that we previously explored in “The kings of chaos: Who really profits from war”. Major geopolitical crises such as this create enormous opportunities for speculation and profits, where significant movements in oil futures, defence stocks and shipping markets create winners and losers – mainly winners among the captains of industry – long before any diplomatic settlement is reached. Was this war all based around creating these winners in the United States? When will the important questions start being asked by the US regulators?

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the entire episode is how little appears to have changed despite the enormous risks involved. We’ve long argued that there was a distinct lack of a strategy in this attack on Iran. Many military commentators and experts were bemused by the direction of US action in the region, and could not quite follow the tactics, because it seemed to defy the history of successful military campaigns. There were some suggestions that Trump was utilising Richard Nixon’s madman theory of bizarre and unorthodox strategies to bamboozle and confuse the opponent, but in the end, it was the sign of a madman who simply didn’t know what he was doing.

Just look at the results: Iran remains governed by the same political system, and while the regime change that Trump openly espoused resulted in the assassination of Iran’s spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the government remains the same. The US is deeply entangled in the Middle East and can’t pull out, even if it wanted to. Israel is despised even further, not just in the region, but not all around the world, and remains locked in an even deeper competition with its neighbours. There’s still a wide range of disputes concerning sanctions, regional influence, nuclear technology and security issues that remain unresolved, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Nothing has changed. The rest of the world, however, has paid the price for this foolish intervention, through destabilised fuel and energy supplies, shipping and supply chains disrupted, and yet another period of global fear and uncertainty, as if the world hasn’t had enough to deal with over the past decade. And for what reason?

Of course, history will be the final arbiter of the merits – or otherwise – of Trump’s foolish war, but it proves that a show of strength and injecting a large dose of testosterone rarely wins the war, unless it’s supported by strong diplomacy. But this in itself, is an inherent contradiction: strong diplomacy in the first place would have avoided this conflict, but the likes of Trump, Peter Hegseth and Marco Rubio had other ambitions, which were not clear to anyone else, and perhaps not even to themselves.

The real losers here are those who occupy the White House and the Knesset, and the war mongers who were too stupid to save themselves from their own ignominy. And they will continue to convince themselves, and their supporters, that they really did win the war, even when all the evidence suggests the opposite. For all the talk of imaginary victories, the final verdict is very easy to make: a massive amount of damage was done to the global community and economy, a great deal of unwanted risk was created, and in the end, America’s idiot king has arrived back to the point where he started. That really is a special skill.

Recent polling showing strong support for One Nation continues to generate fear on the left and excitement on the right across Australia’s political class. These numbers won’t hold up until the 2028 election – still two years away – but that’s almost beside the point. The real story is a political system that appears to be incapable of responding to the concerns of the electorate, even when they’ve been given so many chances to do this.

It’s easy to try and explain One Nation’s rise through the issues that they keep pushing – with great support from the mainstream media and assorted right-wing hangers on – housing, blaming migrants, cost-of-living pressures, distrust of institutions and growing disillusionment with the major parties – but this is more about the exhaustion of the current political system and its inability to adapt itself to the needs of the modern-day world.

The Liberal Party is still a shell of its former self – in terms of seats held and in the opinion polls – and is struggling to articulate a purpose beyond toxic politics and opposition for opposition’s sake – and it’s obvious that One Nation has moved into that space, positioning itself as the vessel for protest and grievance, a space which the Liberal Party is also trying to occupy, albeit unsuccessfully.

The Albanese government also bears responsibility for the rise in One Nation. Having achieved a massive victory in 2025 – one of the biggest ever in federal history – the Prime Minister appears to have convinced himself that his trademark caution and severe incrementalism is not just an electoral strategy worth pursuing further, but has become his entire philosophy of governing.

Reform has been slow and fragmented, and usually abandoned at the first sign of resistance. The lesson Albanese drew from that election victory – an incorrect lesson – was not that voters wanted change, but that voters wanted snail-pace stability and a level of conservatism that would make John Howard proud. But as governments often discover – and usually far too late – standing still in politics is just another way of moving backwards.

There’s a lot of comparisons going on at the moment with the Coalition after its surprise 2019 victory. Scott Morrison interpreted that election victory as a public endorsement of the status quo – and of him personally, only to discover that political sentiment rapidly deteriorates when governments mistake short-term approval for a long-lasting enthusiasm. An ill-timed and surreptitious trip to Hawaii wouldn’t have helped either. And a quick read of Machiavelli’s The Prince would have been far more valuable to Morrison than penning the words of Plans For Your Good, his post-prime ministerial book that gave an insight into his bizarre leadership.

Albanese risks falling into the same trap that most prime ministers fall into, probably now keeping a tally of when he’ll overtake Bob Hawke’s record of 3203 days in office (by the way, he’s up to 1484 days, so still a long way to go). While prime ministers might congratulate themselves on managing the headlines and achieving great results from their focus group testing, voters are looking around and wondering why so little seems to be changing.

That helps explain the extraordinary result of this week’s Resolve poll showing Pauline Hanson leading Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister, with a figure of 33 per cent to 29. We can argue the point that the figures are ultimately meaningless so far out from an election – and that the figure is pretty much a vanity number – but it’s astonishing that a prime minister with every institutional advantage at his disposal has found himself trailing to a politician who is a racist, who has obvious limitations, whose appeal is built almost entirely around complaint, resentment and perpetual opposition to everything. That’s 33 per cent of people – every third person that you walk by – when given an option, will say they would prefer Hanson to lead the country.

Yet One Nation’s own contradictions deserve far more scrutiny than they usually receive from the mainstream media. Hanson presents herself as a champion of ordinary Australians standing against powerful elites, but kicks down on the ordinary people who don’t fit into her narrow world view. At the same time, she takes policy advice from Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest person, while maintaining a close relationship with well-heeled donors (usually racist as well), endorsements and access to private resources. For a movement that picks up a lot of support through its anti-establishment rhetoric, it’s a contradiction that never gets the serious attention.

And One Nation’s broader agenda is rarely subjected to the level of examination routinely applied to other political movements, mainly because it’s an agenda that fits into that of the establishment media: climate denialism, hostility to women’s reproductive rights, culture-war campaigns against trans people, vulnerable communities, minorities. When challenged on the details, Hanson always veers back to outrage and grievance, which is then lapped up again by the media. It’s a success that relies less on solutions, and more on identifying the targets that can be weaponised for political advantage.

That’s why Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club this week matters. Despite our reservations about the support the club receives from the same donor pool as One Nation, this type of forum at least provides a level of scrutiny that Hanson has evaded for far too long. If Hanson believes that she’s “ready to be prime minister”, let’s put her up on that pedestal and see how far she gets with her racist squawking on the stage. She won’t be able to ban journalists from the ABC or from SBS from the club, as she has with other One Nation events, so let’s see how she fares once the full blowtorch is applied.

For decades, Hanson has benefited from a media environment that often treats her as a political curiosity rather than a public figure whose dubious claims, alliances and contradictions deserve intense forensic examination. The real question is whether Australia’s political journalists are finally prepared to subject one of the country’s most influential protest politicians to the same level of scrutiny routinely directed at everyone else.

The electorate just doesn’t care anymore

It’s the story that now sits under almost every political issue in Australia. The rise of One Nation; the collapse of trust in institutions; hostility towards immigrants, anger over housing and a cynicism towards government are all a part of the deeper breakdown between voters and the political establishment.

For decades, politics operated on a social pact. Governments couldn’t solve every problem in the world, but they needed to convince people that the system was broadly working in their interests. It’s obvious that the Australian electorate no longer believes this to be the case: stagnate wages, unaffordable housing – whether it’s housing purchases or rent – public services deteriorating and governments consumed by the management of headlines rather than dealing with the difficult problems. And voters are arriving as a simple conclusion: political leaders either cannot fix things or don’t want to.

Australia is beginning to resemble the same traits that have been visible for some time in the United States, Britain, Canada and parts of Europe, where it seems that the traditional contest between “left” and “right” is being replaced by a struggle between establishment and anti-establishment politics. For sure, that left/right divide has been waning for some time, and replaced with multiple divides – market–state; individualism–communitarianism; global–national; social progressiveness–conservativism – but this appears to be a new divide that the political system has yet to work out a way of dealing with.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of this shift is that even major international crises appear to have no influence in building confidence in political leaders. Traditionally, periods of uncertainty give rise to the “rally ’round the flag” effect, where voters gravitate towards governments for stability and reassurance: it’s certainly what occurred during the onset of COVID, where many incumbent governments received a boost in their political support and went on to achieve re-election (not the Morrison government, however).

Yet as conflict and instability escalate in the West Asia/Middle East region, and global economic uncertainty continues to grow, many voters appear to be unconvinced. They are just so alienated from the political class that competence, experience in office and even basic credibility don’t seem to matter that much anymore.

And that’s the danger for Australia’s political establishment. When voters lose faith in institutions, they don’t necessarily become more ideological or more informed, they just appear to not give a shit anymore, and are willing to take risks.

In this kind of environment, political outsiders, protest parties and professional peddlers of grievance politics don’t need to offer any convincing answers. And whether they are capable of governing has become almost irrelevant. The greatest threat to Australia’s politics is not that voters have found a better alternative in One Nation – they haven’t – it’s the increasing numbers who have decided that they no longer care.

For much of modern Australian political history, federal politics has been defined by a stable contest between Labor and the Coalition. While minor parties have sometimes disrupted the landscape, they have rarely threatened the dominance of the major parties in any sustained way. That is why recent opinion polls showing One Nation leading the primary vote in surveys conducted by Newspoll, YouGov, Roy Morgan and RedBridge have attracted so much attention. Polls conducted two years before an election are snapshots rather than predictions, and Australian voters have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to change their minds when campaigns begin in earnest. But the broader significance of these results is what they reveal about growing dissatisfaction with Australia’s political system.

The rise of One Nation might be less a reflection of widespread enthusiasm for Pauline Hanson and more a manifestation of frustration with the political establishment. Across Australia, voters are confronting persistent cost-of-living pressures, housing affordability problems, stagnant living standards and declining trust in institutions. For many, support for One Nation functions as a protest against the major parties rather than an endorsement of a coherent ideological project. The party has become a vehicle for political dissent, attracting voters who believe Labor and the Coalition are increasingly disconnected from their concerns.

The more realistic scenario is that a stronger One Nation could exert influence through the balance of power or by supporting a conservative government from outside cabinet. That possibility raises important questions about the future direction of Australian politics. Is One Nation genuinely creating a new political movement, or is it simply providing another outlet for voters frustrated with the existing system? More importantly, can a party built around protest sustain support once it is required to offer practical solutions rather than simply criticism?

The current polling may ultimately prove to be One Nation’s high-water mark, or it may signal the beginning of a longer realignment in Australian politics. At this stage, nobody can be sure. Whether that sentiment strengthens One Nation, produces new political movements, or forces Labor and the Coalition to adapt is set to become one of the defining questions of Australian politics over the next decade.