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.

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.

Subscribe to read the full article

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.

Read more

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.

Has AUKUS only ever been about the submarines? For many years, this is what the focus has been on: new/old submarines, will they arrive/won’t they arrive… and during this time, the political class and mainstream media has corralled the discussions in a child-like way towards the costs, delivery timetables, industrial capabilities and whether the United States will ultimately provide the nuclear-powered submarines that successive Australian governments have been promised. Yet underneath this charade – which has primarily been led by defence minister Richard Marles – is a much bigger development that has received almost no public attention at all.

And it’s something that we do need to pay more attention to and be deeply concerned about, because, if it all proceeds, it could be the end of Australia’s independence and sovereign defence capabilities, and a one-way funnel of taxpayer funds to prop up the US–Israel military industrial complex(es) that continues forever.

There’s a new provision before the US Congress at the moment – Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act – and it proposes a significant expansion of defence technology co-operation between the United States and Israel. Known as the “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, it will establish new frameworks for joint research, development, testing, production and integration of military technologies across a broad range of emerging defence sectors, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems such as drones, cyber warfare, missile defence, quantum computing and networked military operations.

It means that even simple Israeli innovations such as “skunk water” – a liquid spray with an odour worse than raw sewage and excrement combined, and can linger for weeks after being sprayed from armoured water cannons – can be used equally on the streets of the West Bank or at a No Kings protest in Minnesota, as the circumstances require.

This might seem like the logical extension of a nefarious and clandestine defence relationship that has existed for decades, certainly since the Second World War, but it will make the Israeli and US defence forces almost indistinguishable. Of course, the proposed legislation has been strongly supported by pro-Israel and Zionist organisations in the US, but there’s something more disturbing about this that’s taking place.

Since the state of Israel was created in 1948, the US has transferred over $330 billion in military aid directly to its defence forces, including two additional support payments of at least $34 billion since October 2023, authorised by US President Joe Biden, and continued by Donald Trump.

While their defence forces will technically remain separate if the Act is passed, the legislation will remove that requirement that Congress needs to approve any expenditure or aid granted to Israel, military spending essentially becoming a line-item in the US defense budget that can be increased at whim – and at the behest of the US Defense (War) Secretary, as though Israel exists as a special (and expensive) military outpost of the United States. And like a spoilt and demanding nepo-baby, the state of Israel will no longer need to ask for the funds to perpetrate its endless genocides, it will just take.

This is also an outcome that will fast-track Israel’s expansion into other parts of the West Asia region as well, something we’re already seeing in Gaza and southern Lebanon – at last count, 3866 civilians have been killed by the IDF; in response, just four Israeli civilians have been killed by Lebanese forces – and it will also bind the two countries’ defence industries, research programs and technology ecosystems together for decades to come, if not permanently.

It’s a strategic partnership so deeply embedded through a de facto merger that it would be extremely difficult for any future government to unravel. And after US President Donald Trump’s statement to Israel to say that “he is the one calling the shots” – a US president who was genuinely calling the shots would never need to make such a statement – it’s clear which country would create the difficulties if the United States ever sought to bring the arrangement to an end.

That’s where the issue lies between US and Israel, but it’s not where it ends. For Australia, that distinction about who is calling the shots might not matter too much, because it might end up being a case of Australia receiving the shot calls from either the United States or Israel. And this is the bigger question for us: what happens when Australia increasingly embeds itself so deeply into the American defence ecosystem at the same time that the United States is seeking a deeper integration into Israel’s defence systems? It’s also where AUKUS becomes a key part of this narrative, although it’s clear that it’s not one the Australian government wants to speak very openly about.

Since it was announced in 2021, AUKUS has gone way beyond submarines. Pillar I covered the much-maligned nuclear-powered submarines that we are never going to receive, but Pillar II encompasses the far broader agenda involving AI, autonomous systems, cyber capabilities, sophisticated undersea warfare and advanced military networking. These are exactly the same kinds of technologies outlined in Section 224 of the Act that’s now being discussed by the US Congress, and it’s not a coincidence that Pillar II is almost a replica.

The Albanese government, like the Morrison government before it, has argued that Australia must become “more interoperable” with the United States, in response to a “deteriorating strategic environment”, which has deteriorated only because they keep saying it has, ably supported by the hawks of hack journalism at the Sydney Morning Herald and News Corporation.

“Interoperability” has become one of the key buzzwords of Australian defence policy and it’s the word that Marles and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese like to keep using in the context of AUKUS: it might seem like a fancy and innocuous piece of defence terminology, but it also means that Australian defence forces will be communicating, operating and fighting seamlessly alongside US forces and, if the Act is passed by Congress – which is becoming increasingly likely – alongside Israeli F-35 fighter jets as they bomb yet another village of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon, or decide to revisit Gaza and continue with the genocidal campaign there. Or perhaps expand into the other areas that are outlined within their Greater Israel project.

This is what “interoperability” is in reality, and it’s something that has never been clearly discussed with the Australian public. According to Pew International, 79 per cent of the Australian public has a negative view of the state of Israel, including 49 per cent who hold a “very unfavourable” view. Before the accusations of “antisemitism” start to appear, the Australian public also has a similar view of the state of Russia – 79 per cent hold a negative view – but the Australian government is not about to forge a permanent military alliance with the Russian defence forces.

How would the Australian public react if its government did ally with Russia to perform massacres in the Ukranian cities of Mariupol, Kherson or Zaporizhzhia? Or ethnically cleanse the regions of Donbas or Crimea? Swap these Ukrainian regions with the Palestinian regions of the Gaza Strip, Khan Younis – or many of the hundreds of cities that have obliterated from the map by Israel – and this is what “interoperability” will look like for the Australian Defence Forces after 2027, if this Act is passed by the US Congress.

When military systems become so deeply interconnected, decisions that are made in one country increasingly do affect smaller partners elsewhere. Australia will never have the stature or relevance within the AUKUS deal – or Pillar II – to be able to object to the involvement of its forces in any US- or Israel-led war activity anywhere in the world. It will be a case, to paraphrase former Prime Minister Robert Menzies, where if the US or Israel declare war upon any country in the world, as a result, Australia will also be at war.

If the United States proceeds with deeper defence technology integration with Israel, Australia will also be directly connected to those same systems, programs and industrial systems developed by Israeli technology and expertise. Of course, this won’t mean that Australia will instantly become responsible for the actions of the Israel Defence Forces, but it would mean that it becomes a part of a defence system that reaches far beyond the Indo–Pacific region. And this is the reality that’s likely to become increasingly controversial within Australia once the public finds out what this AUKUS – Pillar II deal is really leading us towards.

Public attitudes towards Israel – as shown by the Pew International research – have shifted dramatically across much of the Western world since the beginning of the Gaza war. Allegations of war crimes, collective punishment and breaches of international humanitarian law have generated intense criticism from governments (not many but definitely not Australia), many human rights organisations and large sections of civil society. Whether these allegations are upheld by international courts is, of course, a matter for the respective legal systems, but the political controversy surrounding Israel’s conduct is undeniable.

For Australians who oppose the policies of the Israeli government – and it seems that 79 per cent of the population does – this deeper integration between the United States and Israel raises some serious questions. If Australian military systems increasingly rely upon technologies developed through joint American–Israeli programs, what level of political scrutiny should become a part of that process?

Should Australians have a say in whether their defence infrastructure becomes connected to partnerships extending into the Middle East/West Asia region, especially for a country they view so unfavourably? Shouldn’t Parliament be the national forum where the implications of these issues are debated and fully inspected before they become so deeply embedded that we’ll never be able to get away from them?

This is the issue that needs to be explored and it’s really concerning how little attention and coverage both AUKUS – Pillar II and the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act have received in Australia. Sure, the Act is an American piece of legislation debated in faraway Washington but the consequences – unintended or otherwise – will have great long-term implications for Australia.

The future of AUKUS isn’t just about boats in the water, or even not in the water. This is about how much autonomy Australia really has in its defence capabilities, and how much its government is prepared to inform its own public on what it’s just about it embark upon. And before these foundations become permanent and are set in stone, the public deserves to know exactly what we’re in for before it’s far too late to do anything about it.

It’s clear that Israel’s war and genocide in Gaza – now rapidly expanding into southern Lebanon and beyond – has revealed the cowardice and complicity of the Albanese government, but it’s a political issue that’s becoming harder to keep hiding away from in the hope that it all just goes away.

Every atrocity and war crime that the Israel Defense Forces have inflicted in the region – whether it be the destruction of entire villages, killing civilians, medical staff or journalists – is waved away as Israel’s right to defend itself, a brief show of concern or serious concern (depending on the gravity of the situation) or, in the case of IDF’s killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, a phone call of feigned outrage to the Israeli ambassador. And then, a few days later, it’s back to business as usual: running cover for the state of Israel and the Zionist cause, which seems to be the true purpose of political leaders, not just in Australia, but in the United States and many other Western nations around the world.

The result is the perpetual caution the Albanese government is well known for: expressions of concern, calls for restraint, carefully worded statements about humanitarian suffering, and repeated appeals for diplomacy that no-one seems to listen to, or barely do anything about it. Even when it comes to Australian citizens, the government can be depended on to avoid the issue entirely, and so it came to be when serious allegations of rape and sexual violence were made last week against military personnel from the IDF.

The allegations made by filmmaker and activist Juliet Lamont, following her detention by Israeli authorities after participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla, should change what many leaders in Canberra would prefer to forget about and regard as a distant foreign policy issue, and turn it into a serious domestic political problem. But we just know that it won’t happen: the Australian government is just too compromised by Israeli and Zionist interests to allow this.

Lamont has publicly alleged psychosexual abuse, torture and rape while in Israeli custody. And she’s not the only one – ten other Australian participants in the flotilla have reported beatings, mistreatment and sexual abuse, and have submitted their evidence to the International Criminal Court.

For the Albanese government, this creates a dilemma it has largely avoided, and will do its best to keep avoiding. Supporters will argue that the foreign minister Penny Wong has described the actions as “shocking and unacceptable” and “reinforced the government’s displeasure” to the Israeli ambassador Hillel Newman but, as we saw in case of Zomi Frankcom, there’ll be no follow up and certainly no further action. Wong will wait for the issue to blow over and continue to support Israel and the right to defend itself.

During the case of Brittany Higgins – who was sexually assaulted in Parliament in 2019 by Bruce Lehrmann – Anthony Albanese said in Parliament that “women who come forward should be believed… I encourage women to speak out”. And this always has to be the case. But here we have at least 11 Australian’s who have made the claims of sexual violence and abuse by Israeli military personnel, and the Australian government doesn’t have too much to say about it. It’s obvious that for Albanese and Wong too, wearing the keffiyeh or supporting the cause of Palestine nullifies that right for women to be believed or the right to speak out and be heard.

This issue is no longer just about Gaza. It’s about whether Australia’s leaders are prepared to apply the same standards of human rights, justice and accountability to the state of Israel as they routinely apply to their adversaries. Israel is continuing its terrorist campaign into southern Lebanon and beyond – overnight, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu issued an instruction for Israel to attack the capital Beirut as well – and the world, including Australia, is just standing by and allowing these crimes against humanity to continue.

The search for accountability

The Global Sumud Flotilla was a humanitarian mission where more than 400 activists from around the world attempted to deliver much-needed food, medicine and baby formula to Gaza by sea, and were hoping to break Israel’s naval blockade of the occupied territory. This ended on 18 May when Israeli forces violently and illegally intercepted the flotilla in international waters and detained those on board.

According to those submissions lodged with the International Criminal Court, the activists have alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and other violations of international law perpetrated against them. Several of these people have publicly described physical assaults, degrading treatment and sexual abuse during their detention, and there are other statements from the flotilla organisers which claim dozens of participants suffered injuries severe enough to require hospital treatment, with some requiring further hospitalisation after their release.

Of course, Israeli officials have categorically denied these allegations, which is what they always do because Israel, apparently, has the most moral army in the world. But whether Israel disputes the evidence or not is immaterial: what matters the most is whether governments are prepared to treat such allegations seriously enough to warrant an independent investigation.

The involvement of the ICC changes this significantly, and substantial documentation to support these allegations has been provided to the Court. It’s up to the ICC to make a determination about these actions but we know that irrespective of how well and independently the Court proceeds with its work, Israel will always deny the charges – if it comes to that – and fabricate material on the background of judges involved in the case, or any other legal personnel who worked to support the allegations. Why? Because this is what Israel always does, and it abides by different rules, as adjudicated by itself and by the United States.

For the Australian government, the question is whether it intends to support those processes when they involve an ally, if, indeed, that’s what Israel is. Albanese and Wong have routinely been the grand champions of the international “rules-based order”, the authority of international courts and the importance of human rights protections and now is the time to show whether they really mean this or not.

The problem of double standards and hypocrisy

Since the onset of the #MeToo movement in the late 2010s and the sexual abuse committed against Brittany Higgins in 2019, many political leaders have rightly pointed out the importance of taking allegations of sexual violence seriously; that victims need to be heard, and that allegations need to be investigated, rather than dismissing out of hand, which, historically, institutions in Australia have tended to do. These principles have become embedded within public debate, although there has been predictable resistance from the right, most notably the free speech warriors over at News Corporation.

But the double standards have become particularly acute when it comes to Israel and Gaza. If these actions of sexual violence and rape had been committed by the militaries of Russia, China, Iran or another geopolitical adversary, the responses by the Australian government would have been swift, and the respective ambassadors would have been expelled before day’s end.

But for Israel there are no such issues: a quick phone call from Wong to the Israeli ambassador to reinforce the government’s displeasure, probably ending with a confirmation of dinner for two at the Water’s Edge on the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin, just to make sure the Australia–Israel relationship is solid and the delivery of F-35 parts and explosives to Tel Aviv will continue according to schedule.

This is what our Australian government is supporting: silence on war crimes and sexual violence committed by Israel; silence on the supply of military parts and explosives to Israel that are then used to bomb civilians in Gaza (yes, a ceasefire is in place; but no, it’s not a real ceasefire), Lebanon and Iran. And who knows where there will end: Israel has made no secret of its Greater Israel project based on the biblical claims from 3,000 years ago that most normal and mature countries have grown out of. How much of Lebanon will Israel invade and annexe? When will they invade Iraq and continue up to the Euphrates? Or invade parts of Egypt?

According to the old proverb, possession is nine points of the law and once these territories are seized and ethnically cleansed, it’s very difficult to return those lands, especially when the international community is almost inactive to stop it from happening in the first place. Who will stop the government of Israel acting this way, the most aggressive, racist and maniacal government in the world, when it has its general elections coming up over the next few months?

These issues are becoming more apparent to more voters in many countries in the Western world, even if their political leaders won’t lift a finger to stop Israel and, in the case of the Australian government, actively support Israel’s genocidal actions and war crimes with the supply of military parts and explosives. These are the concerns that are becoming increasingly widespread among younger Australians, progressive voters and many multicultural communities.

And it’s an ongoing pattern: the case of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom remains symbolic of these concerns. Frankcom was killed in a deliberate Israeli strike in Gaza in 2024, prompting the expressions of “concern” from the Australian government but no consequence. And now, we have Australians themselves alleging abuse while in Israeli custody, and the same concerns have come up.

If this government believes in accountability, when will it demand it of Israel? There’s no accountability when Israel kills over 70,000 Palestinians, or reduces 80 per cent of Gaza to rubble. There’s no accountability when Israel deliberately targets an Australian aid worker, and then claims it was an accident. And it seems, there won’t be any accountability when Australian citizens allege torture, rape, sexual violence and mistreatment perpetrated by the IDF.

The real question has to be: what would it take for the Australian government to finally speak up against the many crimes of the state of Israel? If international law is worth defending – the so-called “rules-based order” – does that commitment extend to politically inconvenient cases?

Every new allegation, every new report from humanitarian organisations and every new civilian casualty increases pressure on governments to move beyond their rote expressions of “concern” and work towards responses that are far more tangible and meaningful. The longer governments refuse to act, the more their silence reinforces their complicity.

And this issue is becoming more difficult for Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong to keep avoiding. It’s not going to go away, and they have to explain why they’re not prepared to defend Australian citizens when crimes are committed against them by Israel, as well as why they keep supplying the Israel Defense Forces with military parts and explosives that are then used to kill civilians.

They might feel that this is a distant foreign policy issue, but it’s becoming a domestic political test to find out who they really are, and if there’s any skerrick of moral consistency, political courage and credibility that still lives inside them.

The political fallout from the treatment of Gaza flotilla activists by Israeli authorities is becoming a much bigger issue than the actions of one extremist minister posting humiliating videos on social media. What occurred on the Global Sumud flotilla – where civilians were illegally detained in international waters, kneeling with zip ties around their wrists, while Israel’s extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir mocked them publicly – has exposed more openly what Western governments have spent nearly two years defending, or carefully avoiding confrontation with Israel over the destruction of Gaza and the broader collapse of international law.

For leaders such as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the problem isn’t just about Ben-Gvir, it’s what he represents. Ben-Gvir is no longer the maverick outlier who can conveniently be dismissed as an embarrassing extremist operating on the fringes of Israeli politics. Whenever Albanese and Wong claim Israel does have a right to defend itself, this is the Israel that they’re also expecting us to defend as well.

What is frequently ignored is that he is a part of the Israeli government and holds enormous influence over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s splintered coalition and represents a growing concern within Israeli politics that’s becoming harder for Western leaders to explain away while still pretending Israel remains a beacon of democracy – the only one in the region, apparently – and supposedly operates within the boundaries of international laws and protocols.

Ben-Gvir’s behaviour is grotesque, but it’s not new: this is who this guy is. Public humiliation, dehumanisation and his theatrical display of dominance have long formed the main part of his political identity, and he humiliates Palestinians in the same way each and every day. Recently, he celebrated his birthday with a cake decorated with a golden noose, after he mandated the death penalty by hanging for Palestinians deemed to be engaged in “acts of terrorism”. And we know that in Israel, “terrorism” could mean anything, even a Palestinian child throwing a stick at a police officer after being arrested for an unknown and concocted criminal charge.

Ben-Gvir is heavily influenced by the banned fascist movement, the Kahanists, who openly advocate Jewish fascism and supremacy, violent nationalism and the expulsion of Palestinians. In 1994, one such Kahanist – Baruch Goldstein – murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ben-Gvir also displays Goldstein’s portrait in a prominent position in his home – an illegal settlement near Hebron – and has constantly lauded and admired him throughout his political career, claiming that “he is my hero”. These are the values Albanese and Wong want Australians to defend when they say Israel does have a right to defend itself.

What makes this difficult for Western governments to continue to ignore is that Ben-Gvir is not irrelevant within Israel, or some kind of fringe activist. Polling over recent years has shown significant levels of support for his rhetoric and actions among the Israeli public – according to Pew Research, 36 per cent of Israelis support his actions – and his party, Otzma Yehudit – Jewish Power (of course) – remains influential because Netanyahu’s government depends upon figures like him to survive. This destroys that convenient fiction frequently used by Western governments that Israel’s maniacal behaviour can simply be blamed on a handful of rogue extremists detached from broader Israeli political culture, when they are actually a central part of it.

Of course, Ben-Gvir has behaved in this way for many years, but the recent incident on the Sumud flotilla has placed a greater focus on his outrageous and unhinged behaviour. The Australians who were a part of the flotilla were stripped naked, assaulted, denied legal access and subjected to psychological humiliation. They were also held at gunpoint, hidden and beaten inside shipping containers, and terrorised after Israeli forces illegally intercepted the flotilla in international waters, just outside of Cyprus.

Israel – as it always does – has denied all allegations and insisted detainees were treated lawfully, while Israel’s ambassador to Australia – Israel’s propagandist-in-chief Hillel Newman, has dismissed all accusations of violence and abuse. Yet these denials are increasingly at odds with the reality of what people can now see directly through videos, the testimonies and the vast volume of independent reporting emerging from the region itself.

Why is it that we are expected to believe every single unsubstantiated word that’s uttered at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion – yet dismiss all the documented evidence and statements from over 400 people on the flotilla who were simply trying to bring much-needed aid to the people of Gaza?

We’re not expecting things to change that much – after all, the Australian government, like many others around the world, seems to have an infinite level of tolerance for the many crimes and misdeeds of Israel – but this could develop into a deeper crisis that all governments will need to face up to.

For decades, almost every Western leader has managed the domestic perceptions of conflicts within Israel–Palestine through lugubrious and slippery diplomatic language, massaging the media messaging and deliberately making it all seem too ambiguous for anyone to understand. And haven’t Albanese and Wong – along with so many others in Australia – been the masters of this, with different messages flying out from each side of the mouth on every occasion, with the key words filtering through to the leaders of Zionist lobby groups, because they are the ones who all of this language is directed towards.

Public outrage is softened through carefully crafted talking points about “both sides”, “security concerns”, “complex regional dynamics”, “difficult to judge”, and the classic go-to talking point: “Israel does have a right to defend itself”, a concept that isn’t afforded to many other countries in the region, and certainly not for the state of Palestine.

But as much as they will continue to show their weaknesses with these tactics, Israel’s actions Gaza and now in southern Lebanon have shattered that strategy and makes it more difficult to sustain. Social media, independent journalism and the unprecedented scale of destruction in the region have made that method of influencing public perception far more difficult, particularly among younger audiences who increasingly distrust mainstream political institutions and corporate media narratives. And because of this, the Albanese government now finds itself trapped inside this political balancing act that is becoming more unstable with each and every week.

Australia’s strategic alliance with the United States and longstanding diplomatic support for Israel sits on one side, but that’s becoming increasingly unpopular. On the other is the mounting public anger over the actions of the United States and Israel, a public that increasingly sees Western responses to the conflict, including Australia’s, as morally bankrupt and hypocritical.

This is why the situation in Gaza, southern Lebanon and now Iran has evolved into something far larger than a foreign policy issue, even if most people can’t fully comprehend these conflicts. It’s now cutting directly through to Australia’s domestic politics: universities, the media, arts organisations, sporting bodies, councils and workplaces are increasingly being drawn into a battleground over Palestine, protest rights, censorship, with the usual accusations of antisemitism and political intimidation.

That erosion of Australia’s legitimacy on these matters also carries enormous long-term consequences for the body politic, which seems to be so easily discarded by many countries around the world, in their quest to support the rouge and out-of-control state of Israel which, essentially is being governed by the likes of Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are the modern day versions of Himmler, Rosenberg and the brownshirts from the Nazi era.

Once domestic populations begin to realise that governments are applying human rights, democracy and international law selectively rather than universally – bearing in mind that all politics involves a certain level of duplicity and double-speak – the damage to the body politic doesn’t end up being restricted just to the field of foreign affairs. That collapse of trust then begins to permeate through to other areas – if this hasn’t already been breached – the media, political parties, universities, courts and democracy itself.

That’s what makes the flotilla incident so significant in Australia. It wasn’t just about a few hundred activists who were illegally intercepted at sea, it’s a symbolic representation of the clash between two versions of events, and only one of those is being believed. In one version, Albanese and Wong – and others – will continue speaking the concocted language of diplomacy, alliances and restraint (i.e. the outrageous lies) primarily because they’re close to hopeless and know nothing better.

In the other version, millions of ordinary people are watching graphic evidence of war, occupation, starvation and humiliation – not just of Palestinians and Lebanese people, but of their own citizens – in real time while political leaders insist the situation remains too “complex” and “far away” for them to offer any kind of meaningful and moral position.

The danger for Western governments is that the old language of diplomacy that’s been in use since the 1800s no longer works. It’s all high-level bullshit and people can see this for themselves. Every new image from the region, every viral video of humiliation by extremists such as Ben-Gvir, every allegation of abuse followed up with even more evasive statements and denials just keeps chipping away at the credibility of the political establishment, if there’s any left at all.

The issue is no longer about whether governments support Israel: they obviously do, and will continue do so, despite everyone’s protestations. There must be some serious-level kompromat being held on all these political leaders – or threats being made to their family members or other types of blackmail – because no leader in their right mind would support the actions and activities of the state of Israel, especially taking into account the actions of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, unless these types of threats against them are being made.

And it’s also obvious that large sections of the public no longer support the state of Israel, and its behaviours in the region. For the Australian government, that’s the real political crisis that it’s facing – not just the collapse of faith in Israel, but the slow collapse of faith in the entire Western political and moral framework that protected it for so long. The real question is why it has come to this.

What was meant to be a Royal Commission to examine antisemitism and social cohesion in Australia has quickly become much broader and far more politically dangerous: the attempt to recreate the boundaries of acceptable political debate and dissent surrounding Israel, Zionism and the destruction of Palestine.

While it was established to address allegations of rising antisemitic abuse following the October 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, the inquiry was initially framed as an effort to protect vulnerable communities after the Bondi terror attacks in December 2025. However, it’s now morphed into an attempt to blur that distinction between antisemitism, and criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Much of the testimony presented at the Commission is basically suggesting that any form of solidarity with Palestine is inherently antisemitic. The presence of Palestinian flags, watermelon symbols, university encampments, fundraising drives for children injured by the barbaric actions of the state of Israel, artistic exhibitions and slogans such as “from the river to the sea” are all now being claimed as acts of antisemitism. In this kind of environment, even describing the actions of the Israeli state as “barbaric” risks being interpreted as antisemitism, and the overall effect of this is to create a climate where legitimate critique of a specific nation–state will result in the criminalisation of those making the criticisms.

Much of this is arising from the application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which too easily combines opposition to Israeli government policy or Zionism, with antisemitism. This Royal Commission has adopted the IHRA definition rather than more sensible alternatives such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which clearly distinguishes between antisemitism and criticism of Israel as a political entity. This is an enormous distinction in a democratic society such as Australia, if that’s what we claim to be. If opposition to nationalism, occupation, military and state violence or extremist ideology can be twisted and re-presented as racial hatred just because Israel is involved, then we may as well give up on that claim and just let legitimate political debate disappear for good.

The inconsistencies are more obvious once we compare the acceptance of the actions of Israel with the treatment of other communities during similar international actions. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Australians of Russian background experienced hostility and social stigma, yet few political leaders or media outlets warned against conflating ordinary Russian people with the actions of the Vladimir Putin; in fact, the social stigma seemed to be encouraged. Yet criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon – despite the massive amount of civilian casualties, widespread destruction and mounting international condemnation – is increasingly treated as a unique political situation or brushed off as “Israel’s right to defend itself”, and protected from the scrutiny that’s directed at every other country in similar circumstances.

The bigger danger here is that the Commission risks transforming legitimate concerns about the actions of the state of Israel – which includes war crimes and genocide – and the extremist ideology of Zionism, into a state-sanctioned process for regulating speech, and delegitimising protest and political activism. Democracies ultimately become unstable when institutions decide to protect one group from legitimate criticism of a state they support – or even criticism of their own actions, such as fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces, or supporting Shevet Onnot, a scout’s group in Melbourne that actively recruits and prepares young people to serve in the IDF.

This is something that has already shaped the media commentary surrounding the Commission. Former editor of The Age Michael Gawenda argued in his testimony that many journalists within the mainstream media have become activists who are hostile to Israel and Zionism, and that the incidents of antisemitism have been too easily dismissed by them.

There’s very little evidence to support this. Yes, over 600 journalists signed a letter of solidarity in November 2023 for the many Palestinians journalists who had been killed by the IDF and to condemn Israel for the killing of so many civilians, but almost none of these sentiments – which were registered in their capacity as journalists outraged by so many of their peers being killed – have filtered through to the coverage provided by the mainstream media.

Major outlets such as the ABC, SBS, Seven West, Nine Media and News Corporation have, with very few exceptions, generally framed events that are broadly sympathetic to Israel’s political narratives, almost to the point of regurgitating Israeli propaganda verbatim. In comparison, coverage of Palestinian suffering has often been neutered by more cautious editorial language and suspicion, while pro-Palestinian activists have routinely been portrayed as being socially disruptive or politically suspect – and on occasions, beaten by police or arrested for holding up a “river to the sea” sign at a protest rally.

Yes, there are any many Jewish Australians who have experienced fear and trauma since October 7, and those emotions – whatever they might be – need to be heard and recognised. But what are we actually hearing at this Royal Commission? Complaints about watermelons; feelings of being unsafe after seeing the flag of Palestine – as if seeing the Israeli flag doesn’t cause any discomfort at all for Palestinian communities – complaints of bullying over a Minecraft exchange online; concerns about seeing fundraising activities for victims (which are usually accompanied with the aforementioned offending Palestinian flag); objections to children’s drawings in public spaces (with flag, again).

Many of the testimonies provided at the Royal Commission, such as Gawenda’s, rely heavily on personal commentary and subjective interpretation rather than verifiable evidence, or blanket statements that appear to be at odds with reality. Also, there’s been almost no reference at all to the existence of Palestine, or reference to the brutal actions of Israel, including the occupation of West Bank, genocide in Gaza, the illegal expansion of settlements, or the practice of apartheid.

Of course, these issues will never be mentioned because it undermines the narrative that Israel wants to present of itself at the perfect and “most moral” state, and cover over the extreme ethno-nationalism that is subjugating and attempting to remove an entire group of people from their homes. Best to limit the conversations to Minecraft, or offensive comments that might have been made at a netball game in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

The musician Deborah Conway also complained to the Commission about being excluded and “cancelled” from performances and venues, but failed to mention that it’s the result of extreme Zionist views and callously suggesting in an ABC interview in 2024 that the Palestinian children killed by the state of Israel were not even children, and “depends on what you call kids”.

The Commission has become – at this stage at least – a one-sided receptacle for every perceived slight against Zionists and supporters of Israel in Australia, with the ultimate intention of making these slights – real or perceived – punishable in the court of law. The Royal Commission was created as a result of the Bondi terror attacks – and to explore the issues of antisemitism – but the victims of these attacks seem to have been forgotten about, and the social cohesion that it was meant create, is as far away as it has ever been.

While the Royal Commission continues to hear the one-sided evidence and perspectives, others who have been left out are using other ways to have their voices heard. At Sydney Town Hall last Friday night, pro-Palestine supporters gathered to mark 78 years after the Nakba – the other holocaust that never gets mentioned and Israel doesn’t like to talk about, where over 700,000 Palestinians were violently removed and displaced by the infamous and brutal Zionist paramilitary group, the Stern Gang – an event that is a key cause of the generational trauma that exists until today.

One of speakers was 87-year-old Fouad Shriedy, displaced from northern Palestine as a child during the 1948 Nakba, and he provided a lived historical memory that rarely fits within Australia’s discussions about “social cohesion”. “The Palestinian dream will never die… my heart is still in Palestine,” he said. “The Nakba did not end in 1948, it is still happening today, and the genocide is still going on in Gaza. We will never forget Palestine and one day, Palestine will be free.” Palestine will be free. Is that now deemed to be antisemitic as well?

Voices such as Shriedy’s are entirely absent from mainstream discussions surrounding the Royal Commission. The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network requested leave to appear, but was refused on the grounds that it didn’t have a “direct and substantial” interest in the public hearings, even though the Commission is ostensibly about social cohesion.

Why can’t we recognise the perspectives of Fouad Shriedy or from the representatives of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network? If the goal is to achieve “social cohesion”, we should be hearing from as many people as possible, even if it is to give the Commission a veneer of credibility – and to avoid the accusations of just being another avenue to entrench the viewpoints of a privileged group of people who already have strong connections to the existing power structures in society.

So, what will become of this Royal Commission? Perhaps it has already done its work through the release of its interim report, and its activities from this point onwards are to allow people to vent their frustrations, experiences and perceptions about how they feel the rest of the world is against them, while the incidents of real antisemitism will slip by.

None of this is to deny the existence of antisemitism in Australia. As a child growing up in a working class migrant family in a dysfunctional, predominantly white-Anglo lower socio-economic and angry outer suburb in Perth, I’m not going to deny whatever people might be feeling, because I’ve felt it myself, and so many times.

It’s not just the fuck off and go back to where you came from – so much of racism and discrimination doesn’t always reveal itself in obvious ways, and even when it is overt and obvious, if there’s no one there to record it or report it, it’s as though it never occurred in the first place.

These testimonies should be heard, even if we’re not quite sure what we’re listening to. Jewish Australians, like all all other minority communities, deserve safety, dignity and protection from abuse, harassment and violence. And when an event such as the Bondi terror attack occurs, we need to work out ways of reducing the chances of this ever happening again, and improve protections for all peoples.

Australia does face challenges in addressing these concerns at a time when the nationalistic far right is gaining a foothold in many parts of the community. But if the solutions end up suppressing hard-fought political rights and are used to protect the state of Israel from criticisms of its war crimes and genocidal actions, then Australia will be trashing the same democratic freedoms that it claims to be defending.

On Tuesday night, Treasurer Jim Chalmers will deliver what is being regarded as one of the most important federal Budgets in many years, promising action on housing affordability, productivity, cost-of-living pressures and long-awaited tax reform.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to see whether this will be the case or not, but behind all of this talk about “structural repair” and “reprioritisation” lays a deeper political issue: after four years of caution, hesitation and carefully managed expectations, is the Albanese government finally prepared to confront the vested interests that have distorted the Australian economy and worked against too many people for far too long, or is this another round of choreography designed to look “transformative” without actually changing very much at all?

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has spent most his time in office acquiescing to many powerful groups in Australia. For example, there was great debate about the introduction of a 25 per cent gas exports tax, only for Albanese to rule it out after pressure from the resources sector.

To support Albanese’s position, Chalmers has indicated that the petroleum resources rent tax has raised additional revenue in this financial year, so there’s no need to worry about taxing gas exports at an appropriate rate. But Chalmers is trying to be too clever, and not even by half: yes, the revenue PRRT has increased from $1.41 billion, to $1.5 billion, but a gas exports tax – even if it fully replaced the PRRT – would raise around $17 billion per year, a sum that’s 188 times greater than the additional revenue Chalmers has claimed. This is the price the public pays – $17 billion in this case – when governments pander to the vested interests in Australia.

For well over a decade, the major parties – if we can still call the Liberal Party a “major party” – have avoided the serious reform of negative gearing, capital gains concessions and the massive wealth accumulations gained through property, despite the mounting economic and social evidence that shows how the existing system overwhelmingly benefits older asset holders while locking younger Australians out of home ownership.

Everyone seems to know about this: Labor, Liberal, Treasury, most economists. Yet governments continue treating even the mildest reforms as political kryptonite, terrified of stirring up yet another scare campaign from the property industry, the mainstream media and the opposition parties who defend a system of intergenerational protectionism that makes millennials and Gen Z pay for the largesse of the older and already wealthy propertied class. This is not to pit different generations against each other but the reality is that is unsustainable economically and socially – and politically.

The government’s language in the lead up to the Budget suggests that something will change, but many governments over the past 30 years or so have perfected the art of leading the “bold conversations” before the Budget that somehow end up in mouse talk, modest adjustments, a raft of review panels and carefully diluted compromises, once the final decisions are made.

The Housing Australia Future Fund is an excellent example of this – after much parliamentary debate, political grandstanding and delay, it was introduced in late 2023, 18 months after the Albanese government was first elected in May 2022. As of May 2026, just 889 dwellings have been completed: only 889, in four years of office; or an average of one dwelling per 17 suburbs across Australia. Whichever way it’s calculated or viewed, this is a pathetic number.

Sure, there are a further 9,500 currently under construction and 55,000 social and affordable homes are due to be completed by mid-2029 – but it’s around 500,000 dwellings short of where it needs to be, and that’s according to the government’s National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. There was a “bold conversation” in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election but, on housing at least, the strong words have been matched up with very weak action.

The bigger contradiction here is that governments talk endlessly about productivity and fairness – or in the case of the Prime Minister, “no one left behind” – while preserving the tax structures that overwhelmingly reward the wealth class and speculators more than work itself. A salary is for mugs: the real support from government goes to the people whose real work is deciding the best time to sell a property to maximise the profit, or at which point rents should be raised on a working and struggling family.

Will any of these areas be addressed in Tuesday night’s Budget? Will the Labor Party remember the people who brought it into office in 2022, and returned it again in 2025 with the greatest majority a government has ever held in the lower house? The Labor Platform can’t just be a document that Albanese uses for his bedtime reading at The Lodge, as a reminder of yesteryear and the possibilities that can exist for a progressive government; it’s something that has to be lived and breathed by the entire Labor Caucus.

If Albanese still holds these core Labor beliefs of “no one left behind” and has simply been waiting for the “right time” to fully introduce them, then this is the time. Otherwise, no one left behind will just become a football-type slogan and that’s used ironically against the Labor Party, in the same way the “honest John” moniker was used against former Prime Minister John Howard, when he was anything but.

The point is that there probably never ever will be a greater time for the introduction of a true Labor agenda within federal Parliament. The early signs, however, are not good – Chalmers promising “spending restraint” on the eve of the Budget, including a $37 billion cutback for the NDIS over four years – but if Labor genuinely wants to claim a mandate for reform after its substantial 2025 election victory, then this Budget will determine whether it intends to start governing differently – and that would be about time – or just continue with the business as usual approach and manage the continuing divides within the Australian community slightly more softly and less savagely than its conservative opponents.

The conflict now expanding across Iran and Lebanon – and forced on by Israel and the United States – is no longer a short-term regional crisis; it’s placing a great deal of pressure on the global order that countries like Australia have depended on for many decades. What began as the regular cycle of violence by Israel in the Western Asia region had now evolved into something far more dangerous and unpredictable: a breakdown in the ability of the United States to influence the outcomes, control either the escalation or deescalation, or even to articulate a coherent objective that can hold up for longer than several days.

Sixty days into this conflict, and while it can be argued that at least the zone of the warfare has been restricted to a relatively smaller region, the instability has affected almost every country in the world – the economics version of coronavirus that threatens to collapse the many economies that are dependent on energy and resource supplies from the Persian Gulf.

Israel’s campaign of war and genocide against Gaza since October 2023 has drawn widespread international condemnation for the scale of the harm to civilians and the humanitarian disaster, and its extension into southern Lebanon with almost the same tactics has only deepened those concerns of a broader regional war.

Each new escalation by Israel at this stage creates opportunities for military miscalculations and tit-for-tat retaliations, and a new scope for bringing in other countries into the conflict. Initially, the United States stated that its main goals were “regime change” in Iran, feeding an internal revolution and containing the conflict, with the hidden agenda of asserting its influence and seizing the resource assets of Iran. Yet after months of confrontation with Iran and its regional allies, none of those objectives have been achieved. Other unwanted consequences have arrived, however: oil prices have surged internationally, American diplomacy has disappeared, allies are confused, and the adversaries – Iran and Hezbollah – have easily adapted with their long-developed style of asymmetric warfare that is showing up the limitations of America’s traditional military dominance.

The problem for the United States is that it assumed that all it had to do was project its power – as it had done on so many occasions throughout its history – but the lack of a clear plan or a strategy has exposed its limitations and weakened it in the eyes of many leaders around the world. Yes, the United States still commands immense military and economic resources, but all the power and economic resources in the world won’t guarantee success if the people who are guiding this strategy are incompetent and have no idea what they are doing. And this has created the paradox where the more aggressively the United States behaves in this situation – as well as sacking many of its experienced military generals – the less effective it appears to be.

It’s hard to separate this international decay of American authority from the political environment that’s been created under the presidency of Donald Trump. While previous administrations, for all of their flaws, at least attempted to frame interventions such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 through a weak but persuasive narrative and went through the process of building up alliances, Trump’s approach has been defined by ad hoc improvisation, the lazy spectacle and inherent contradictions that appear on a daily basis. While US presidents in the past might have argued the case for war – Lyndon Johnson, George H. and W. Bush – Trump just goes to war, with the same nonchalance of ordering a pancake from one of his Trump Tower diners.

Trump is the prime example of someone who firmly believes in American exceptionalism, but the gap between his empty rhetoric and the reality on the ground is just becoming too difficult to ignore. The recent assassination attempt against Trump – if that’s what it actually was – illustrates how deeply this dysfunction has infiltrated domestic politics. In another era, an assassination attempt would have produced shock within the electorate and a unified national response. Instead, half of the world questions whether it was a staged or manipulated event, and it has generated division, suspicion and resulted in different versions of what actually occurred. It’s almost as though whatever actually did happen doesn’t matter anymore: once a political culture has its trust so significantly eroded, it’s hard to believe anything that occurs in the White House and, perhaps, that’s what the Trump regime would prefer.

For many years – during the four years of his first term and now into his second – Trump has attacked institutions, discredited the media and blurred the lines between truth and outright lies. It’s not just an incidental by-product of his political style; this is the strategy. The outcome is a public domain where no single account is credible but, friends and foes alike, pick the narrative that suits them the best. When the reality itself becomes the bigger contest rather than the contest over policy and ideas, every crisis becomes an opportunity for it to be exploited for political gain.

It’s not a new strategy – history is littered with examples of clown shows and idiocy within political leadership, such as Caligula, Benito Mussolini, and the more modern versions of Silvio Berlusconi, Boris Johnson, Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro – extravagant fools who wasted space and became the convenient idiots creating the pathways for more corruption and vested interests. Trump is no exception in this field.

But it’s a strategy that leads to a state of permanent instability, with no clear boundary between the normal state of politics and the emergency; every day creates a drama, and a created drama then needs to be resolved. Over time, this creates a high level of exhaustion and fatigue within the electorate: can’t we just have a normal government for a change? The risk for any government that relies on constant disruption – whether it’s Trump, Johnson, Milei or Scott Morrison – is that it eventually loses the capacity to distinguish between legitimate action and foolish improvisation, where they are just trying to wing it each and every day. Eventually, people just want governments to resolve the problems of society, not to create more of them.

The economic conditions – which Trump has actually caused – are now compounding this instability. The rising energy costs, increased living expenses and stagnant wages create an environment that is unlikely to favour incumbents who engage in this type of behaviour. Political messaging – in the style of flooding the zone with shit – can reshape perceptions, but it can’t indefinitely bend the rules of the lived experience. If the electorate begins to associate chaos with dysfunction – and the current polls suggest that this is currently the case – then everything in politics shifts dramatically. The midterm elections in the United States have historically acted as a corrective mechanism for weak or incompetent Presidents, and there are indications that a similar dynamic will emerge again.

The consequences of this behaviour, however, go far beyond the cycle of midterm elections, or even what might happen in the 2028 presidential election. There’s a great deal of uncertainty over the future of NATO. There’s also a great deal of uncertainty surrounding of the future of AUKUS, although, as we’ve argued many times before, cancelling this ill-thought-out deal would be beneficial to all parties, and save Australia at least $368 billion over the next 30 years or so.

The central issue here is not just that the chaos exists – governing is difficult and there’s always going to events that fall outside of the control of a leader – but that it has been embraced as a governing principle. We frequently complain about the Albanese government and its lack of ambition, but it’s not a government of chaos; the main job of government is to reduce chaos, not to create it, and the Prime Minister has largely avoided that.

Markets – and societies – also require a certain level of predictability to function efficiently. Money is the eternal coward, and will follow the path of least resistance and shy away from conflict and chaos. But if the crisis becomes permanent though, the conditions for economic recovery disappear.

The Trump presidency – Marks I and II – has highlighted this contradiction, but how can the system be rebuilt after the state of chaos has been normalised? Joe Biden managed to end Trump’s chaos in 2020, but was a weak president who didn’t know when his time in politics was up. Similarly, Albanese ended the chaos of the Morrison years, but is yet to work out how to use his massive mandate constructively, except for his goal of making Labor “the natural party of government”.

The answer to all of this is not so obvious: Trump was voted out in 2020, only to reappear in 2024. He might not be eligible for re-election in 2028 but, as history has frequently shown, there are always new clown-show leaders who can replace the old. Trump won’t be the last to appear in the exhibition hall of disgraceful political leaders who distract the electorate with their laugh-out-loud routines, and allow the corrupt to fester in the background. But their influence can be diminished.

The world has entered a period in which the consequences of American disorder can no longer be isolated, or tolerated. From the bombs being dropped on the villages of southern Lebanon and Iran, to the corridors of power within the White House, we can see the same pattern repeating itself: a loss of control is presented by Trump as a strength, there’s a reliance on the spectacle over substance, and a belief that the chaos can continue forever. But it can’t: eventually, the chaos stops being a useful tool when the public has had enough of it, and that time is approaching very quickly.

And when that time arrives, there won’t be any winners – only those left to pick up the pieces afterwards, trying to rebuild a sense of order from the ruins of a post-World War II system that once promised stability but, instead, delivered uncertainty on a grand scale. That is Trump’s legacy.

The debate over taxing Australia’s gas exports has returned with the same predictably and, of course, the same paralysis. At Senate Estimates last week, the question of a 25 per cent export tax on liquefied natural gas was the centre of attention again, not as some radical leftist idea but as a long-delayed correction to a complete failure in how Australia taxes its natural resources.

This argument should be pretty straightforward: gas is a finite resource formed over millions of years, owned collectively by the Australian people, and extracted largely by multinational corporations for export. The only meaningful mechanism through which the public can benefit from this arrangement is through the taxation system, which can then be used to apply to other public benefits for the entire community. Yet as we enter the third decade of the LNG boom, Australia continues to receive far less value from its resources than many other countries in the world.

At Senate Estimates, Ken Henry, the former Treasury Secretary and architect of the 2009 Henry Tax Review that produced a comprehensive blueprint for reform, provide a simple but blunt assessment – “stop the crap”, “just do it” and raise the taxes on gas: governments license private companies to extract public resources, and if the tax system fails to receive an appropriate return, the public loses out. In Australia’s case, domestic consumption of gas is only a small fraction of total production, meaning the overwhelming economic benefit should come from how these exports are taxed.

It’s not clear if the Albanese government hasn’t got the ability read, or is too politically dumb for its own good, but it has signalled strongly that it will not be proceeding with a new export tax. The Prime Minister has emphasised the importance of maintaining Australia’s reputation as a reliable trading partner – once again, a Labor government prioritising the markets rather than the community – particularly during recent diplomatic engagements in Southeast Asia, where both Albanese Trade Minister Don Farrell has reiterated that existing export arrangements will be kept.

The argument from government and industry is that LNG producers already contribute tens of billions in taxes and royalties, and that raising the burden risks undermining investment and supply. It’s a weak argument – countries apply new taxes on existing arrangements all the time, and the government of Japan applies a tax on Australian gas for its own domestic market, resulting in the outrageous situation where Japan raises more taxes on Australian gas, than the Australian government does. Gas is working in the interests of the countries of Japan, China and South Korea, but not in the interests of the Australian community, and for this, the Albanese government should be admonished for allowing this bizarre situation to continue.

Albanese might be the master of incrementalism, but this is proceeding so slowly, that it’s actually going backwards: a weak prime minister in a powerful once-in-a-generation position, who refuses to take an easy option that will clearly be a benefit to the public interest. The core proposition – that Australians should receive a fair return on their own resources – is a very clear principle, yet repeatedly ignored by our political leaders.

Instead of implementing this reform, there’s the ongoing consultation and listening to debate; instead of action, Treasury produces new modelling; instead of the introduction of policy, there’s the political management of the issue and, ultimately, the deferral of this idea to the neverland. And that gives time for industry groups to mobilise quickly and create the fear campaign to suggest that any change at all will be a form of economic self-harm on everyone. The result is this meandering policy vacuum in which the public interest is clearly acknowledged by everyone – except by the government and the resources industry – and the loss of tax revenue continues.

These are not trivial amounts that we’re talking about. Estimates suggest that a 25 per cent gas export tax could raise in the order of $15–20 billion per year, depending on the market conditions. Even at the lower end, that’s a level of revenue that would transform public finances: funding the health and education systems that are currently under strain, stabilising the National Disability Insurance Scheme, funding housing supply properly instead of using an inadequate housing future fund or, if the government is not prepared to do that, reducing the structural deficits that have been building up for almost two decades.

Australia’s approach is in contrast to other countries such as Norway, which has built a sovereign wealth fund exceeding US$1 trillion by capturing the value of its petroleum resources through clear taxation and public ownership policies. Every country is different, and a Norwegian solution might not fit perfectly into an Australian context, but it shows that the resources of a country can be converted into long-term national prosperity if governments are willing to assert the public claim over it and, at the moment, we have a Prime Minister who is supposedly from the left of the Labor Party, totally unwilling to do this.

The failure to act also reflects a deeper reluctance to engage with the broader reform agenda outlined in the Henry Review all the way back in 2009. Only three of the 138 recommendations were implemented – since removed – but had those reforms been phased in during the early 2010s, and kept, Australia’s budgetary position would have been significantly stronger today, with higher and more stable revenue streams, better resources management, and a more efficient distribution of capital. Instead, the country has accumulated rising public debt while leaving major revenue sources underutilised.

The point is not to bemoan the fact that nothing of the Henry Review exists today – the water under that bridge passed a long time ago – but that governments always have to consider future generations, and a future that they will actually be a part of. Anthony Albanese was a senior member of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd government between 2007–13. This is not to suggest that he alone could have pushed for the implementation of tax reform, but how much easier would his task have been 13 years later as the Prime Minister, if all these reforms were already in place? He’s unlikely to be Prime Minister in another 13 years, but how easier will the task for Prime Minister Jim Chalmers be in 2039, if a new 25 per cent gas export tax was implemented now? How much would the public benefit over that time from this greater source of revenue?

Applying a 25 per cent tax on gas exports would at least address some of the anomalies and inconsistencies in the application of government revenues. The Albanese government is willing to commit billions of dollars to defence spending at the drop of a hat – $53 billion in new spending announced last week – or maintain the outrageous tax concessions in negative gearing that benefits the already wealthy, while every other area of government spending such as education, health, aged care, disability support, is debated, argued for, and finally drip-fed with a range of caveats that demand that every cent is accounted for, because we simply don’t have enough money.

This isn’t just something that relates to economics, it’s the management of powerful industry stakeholders in the resources and media sectors. It’s the government’s preference to manage that risk, rather than electoral risk, bearing in mind that governments face the electorate only once every three years, but they have to deal with the revolving door of industry lobbyists pestering them every single day of the year. And this is Albanese’s focus – managing the risk of these key stakeholders, rather than acting in the interests of the public.

The timing for reform – in the unlikely event that anything will happen – is also critical. We have now completed the first third of this term of government and, historically, the second year of a government’s term offers the best opportunity to introduce major policy changes, allowing time for implementation and adjustment before the next election cycle. If a gas export tax is not implemented in the upcoming budget, it’s increasingly unlikely that it will be introduced at all in this term, if ever.

There’s also the question of political legacy. Leaders enter office with finite time and finite opportunity, even those such as Albanese who have been a part of the parliamentary woodwork for over 30 years. The choices they make – or avoid to make – not only define the legacy of their governments but the future of the country.

In 2022, soon after he became Prime Minister, Albanese spoke about the importance of leaving office with a sense of purpose, rather than regretting the opportunities that were missed. Albanese is veering into the second part of that equation, four years in office, with not too much to look back at with a sense of purpose. Albanese has often talked about wanting the Labor Party to become the “natural party of government”, but this is just empty rhetoric and is code for a party wanting to be in government just for the sake of it and enjoy the trappings of office.

Australia remains one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but prosperity without the correct political leadership will just follow the laws of a diminishing return. We don’t want “natural governments”; we want governments that will govern in the national interest, not pander to vested and powerful interests and give them exactly what they want.

Albanese is the incrementalist, he’s made that point very clear. But he’s not even moving incrementally at all on the management of our stock of natural resources which, just like his own political career, is finite, and to continue exporting gas under the current terms is a failure of political will. The question that now faces the Labor government is no longer whether it understands the problem, but whether it’s prepared to solve it – and so far, it has shown that it’s unwilling to do so.

The Liberal Party’s push for a so-called “values-based” immigration system, including proposals to scrutinise migrants’ social media accounts, is a real troubling development in Australian politics, not so much because we think it’s a politically winning strategy – it’s not – but because one of Australia’s mainstream political parties – and, supposedly, representing the essence of true liberalism – feels that this is its way of reaching electoral nirvana.

Framing its policy as a necessary defence of national cohesion, in reality, it’s a reflexive move to the culture war politics that have hampered the Liberal Party for well over 30 years, and an attempt to import elements of the ideology associated with figures such as Donald Trump in the United States, albeit without the extreme edges that we’ve come to expect from Trump’s new dystopian world.

Yet even in diluted form, the strategy is very similar: confuse the questions of Australian identity, loyalty and belonging, while constructing a narrative of the eternal threats that demands a constant vigilance and the perpetual fear of the migrant.

What is difficult to comprehend is not just the contents of this Liberal Party policy, but the timing of it. Less than a year after the Australian electorate so thoroughly rejected this style of politics at the 2025 federal election, the party has decided to double down with a different leader, Angus Taylor, and go further to the right in the search for the voters that have been stolen by One Nation, and unlikely to ever return.

At the centre of this draconian shift is the effort to draw a distinction between what Taylor describes as migrants of “noble and patriotic intent” – reflective of the racist undertones of 18th-century European philosophy and the noble savage – and the migrants of “subversive intent”. He doesn’t need to name these subversives or indicate where they actually reside: not providing these details means his audience can fill in the gaps with their own imaginative construct of the other, and insert the specific migrant group of choice that they dislike.

Of course, Taylor is all big on the rhetoric but intellectually shallow, reducing complex social realities into an easy to digest binary that invites suspicion and division in the electorate that can easily be shouted at. Taylor’s rhetoric also relies on a deeply questionable premise, making a causal link between the Bondi terror attacks and pro-Palestinian protests and antisemitism, and then further extending that link between criminal acts, political expression and immigration itself.

Bereft of any other ideas, Taylor feels that he’s hit the political jackpot, encouraging the electorate to associate migration with insecurity, and dissent with disloyalty to Australia. The political logic behind his approach is easy to see: the Liberal Party is still trying to work out how to deal with the new world of a splintered conservative base, challenged on one side by Labor’s complete electoral dominance, and on the other, One Nation, and other creatures lurking in the shadows of the far-right mindset.

Historically, the party has navigated pressures from the far-right by absorbing elements of their rhetoric. Under John Howard in the 1990s, this strategy proved to be electorally effective, neutralising Pauline Hanson’s early rise by adopting a harder edge on issues of national identity and immigration, even though the Howard government actually maintained high levels of immigration for most of their 11 years in office.

But that was many years ago – adopting the politics from 30 years ago, is not going to work in 2026, especially when the stocks of the Liberal Party are so low. For sure, it worked for Howard in the 1990s and early 2000s, but Taylor seems to be testing his lines in public to see what floats, rather than offering coherent policies. And, as a result, the Liberal Party is behaving like a fringe party, shouting at the clouds, and searching for electoral relevance.

The entire premise of moving towards a “values-based” immigration system implies that the values are currently not there, but Australia has always operated with a values-based system in practice, as does every other country in the world. Visa requirements, character tests, and the citizenship process already provide expectations about adherence to the rule of law, democratic values and social participation. Short of suggesting executions, there’s not much more that Taylor could recommend.

Migrants coming to Australia are not entering a value-free space; they are entering a society with established institutions, legal frameworks and civic expectations. Taylor’s suggestion that Australia has somehow abandoned these standards – without indicating which standards, or how they have dropped – is not supported by evidence, but it doesn’t have to be. All it’s doing is serving a political purpose: it’s the classic case of identifying a problem that doesn’t exist, and then offering the solutions that won’t work anyway.

But what is new – and concerning – is the proposed policy of enforcement. The idea that prospective migrants should have their social media activity examined introduces a level of state surveillance that sits uneasily with the very values being claimed by Taylor. Freedom of expression, belief and the right of individual dignity can’t be reconciled in a system where individuals are assessed on their opinions, associations and surveillance of their digital history.

In a direct paraphrase of Howard’s words from 2001, Taylor claims that “we will decide who deserves protection and the circumstances in which that protection is granted”, but who will decide what constitutes acceptable speech, either on the streets or through social media? What level of dissent will determine someone’s ability to become an Australian citizen? How will such judgements be insulated from political bias and interference? It’s simply not good enough to declare a commitment to that jingoistic “fair go”, while creating exclusions that are based on subjective interpretations devised by a team of bureaucrats.

Australia’s post-1788 history is quite different to the one that Taylor wants to promote. From the presence of Muslim cameleers in central Australia, to the waves of European migration after World War II, to the removal of the White Australia policy in 1973, the country’s development has been shaped by successive waves of inclusionary migration policies. These processes were often imperfect and up for debate – Howard always claimed multiculturalism was “a mistake” – but these processes also established a broad consensus about Australia’s national identity. Crucially, that consensus – ignoring the shallow men like Howard – has been more or less bipartisan.

In political terms, the social risks are considerable, considering that an opposition party – irrespective of how poor its electorate position might be at the moment – is only one election away from returning to office. By adopting the language and the rhetoric of the more extreme actors in Australian politics, the Liberal Party is hoping to recapture those voters who have drifted off further to the right. But in doing so, it legitimises those very narratives, and all it does is reinforce the fragmentation that it’s seeking to reverse.

The recent South Australian election, where the Liberal Party fell behind both Labor and One Nation on primary votes, confirms that splintering of the right that started off with the 2025 federal election. Rather than consolidating the conservative vote, strategies such as the ones promoted by Taylor will split it even further, leaving the party squeezed between a more moderate centre and a more radical fringe. Chasing the votes garnered by One Nation – a fringe party of right-wing white noise – means that the Liberal Party will also become a fringe party, and this continuing pursuit is unlikely to result in the renewal that the party so desperately needs: it will just cement its continuing decline.

Yet the implications for this go far beyond the low number of seats held by the Liberal Party, or how difficult it will be for them to return to office at the next federal election in 2028. Policies that frame sections of the population as inherently suspicious – and we know who Taylor is talking about when he brings up the rhetoric of the “migrant of subversive intent” – that equate dissent with disloyalty, and expand state surveillance on a select few, have lasting effects on the social fabric of society, and sends a strong message that they… them… the other… and whoever is deemed to not fit in, just don’t belong to that white Australian construct.

In a diverse society, cohesion is not achieved through suspicion, but through shared institutions, mutual recognition and the consistent application of the law. “Social cohesion” seems to be the fashionable phrase of the day, but excluding the brown and black people from our society, just because Taylor wants to decree this to be the case, doesn’t make social cohesion any easier: all societies are difficult to manage politically, irrespective of how homogenous they might be, but the Liberal Party wants us to believe that social cohesion is achieved by ironing out all the kinks of colour, and achieving pure white, if not literally in appearance, but through a colonisation of the mind. It’s a corrosive style of thinking.

What is ultimately at stake is not simply the direction of immigration policy, but the character of Australian democracy itself. Taylor is a tin-pot leader who might not even be the leader of the Liberal Party at the next election, but he’s likely to implement a system that treats values as something to be policed rather than lived, and prioritises political expediency over principled governance, undermining the very foundations that he claims to defend.

The challenge for all political leaders is not to manufacture division in the hope of short-term gain – which is obviously what Taylor is attempting to do – but to articulate a vision of national identity that is confident enough to accommodate difference and celebrate and accept it. After all, no two people on this planet are the same. Anything less than this is not a sign of strength, but Taylor’s own insecurity masquerading as policy – and voters, as recent elections have shown, are increasingly unwilling to reward it.

The arrest and charging of Ben Roberts-Smith on five counts of war crimes has exposed yet another schism within Australian politics, and it reveals just how quickly the principles of justice can be thrown away when placed against nationalism, power and myth. The response from prominent conservative figures has ignored the seriousness of these allegations – the unlawful killing of Afghan civilians – and has focused on defending the reputation of a decorated soldier, at the expense of the rule of law itself.

Figures such as Pauline Hanson and Gina Rinehart – a mining magnate who really should have no role in political life – have publicly questioned and condemned the charges, while media proprietor Kerry Stokes – who financially backed Roberts-Smith’s failed defamation cases to the tune of $30 million – is using his substantial media assets to push for his innocence. What’s emerging from these responses is not a careful assessment of the available evidence, but a knee-jerk defence of Australia’s war symbolism and jingoism.

The legal reality of this case should be very straightforward: Roberts-Smith, like any other accused person, is entitled to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial, and that’s exactly what he’ll receive. The charges against him will be tested in a criminal court, where the burden of proof will be high and the consequences will be announced by a judge, if he’s found guilty. In other words, it will just like any other case that runs through the Australian courts, every single day.

The nature of these allegations is also important. It’s not a question of split-second decisions made in the chaos of combat – the so-called “fog of war” – where tragic mistakes can occur. Instead, the list of accusations includes deliberate acts of violence, including the alleged execution of detainees and the practice known as “blooding”, where junior soldiers are ordered by their superiors to kill prisoners. These claims, supported by testimony from fellow soldiers, go to the heart of military ethics and discipline: all is not fair in love and war, and murder – by any other name – is still murder, irrespective of where it might happen in the world.

The fact that members of Roberts-Smith’s own regiment came forward is particularly significant in a culture that’s often characterised by loyalty, silence and subservience to rank, suggesting a level of concern that goes far beyond what could be assumed to be internal disagreements or personality conflicts.

The political defence of Roberts-Smith by conservative figures also reveals a deeper issue with accountability. For some, the idea that a recipient of the Victoria Cross – the nation’s highest military honour – could be implicated in war crimes is simply inconceivable, especially when placed next to that Anzac narrative that has come to dominate Australian identity for well over 100 years.

This narrative, propped up by Bob Hawke in the 1980s, and supercharged during the Howard era, has elevated military service to an unrealistic level of national virtue. To then acknowledge any form of wrongdoing within this narrative is regarded as sacrosanct by conservatives and is seen as a huge blow to national pride. Yet this is precisely why accountability in this case matters: if the law is not going to be applied equally, then it stops functioning as the law.

There are also the usual racist undertones in this reaction from conservatives, particularly in the indifference shown towards the victims. The Afghan civilians at the centre of these charges are totally absent from the rhetoric of the defenders of Roberts-Smith, always navigating back to his status as a “war hero” and national figure. And they are so absent that we’ve barely heard their names before: they are Ali Jan, a farmer and father from the village of Darwan; Ahmadullah, a man with a prosthetic leg – the same leg Roberts-Smith used as a trophy to drink alcohol from; Mohammed Essa, the father of Ahmadullah; an unnamed elderly man; and another unnamed detainee in Chinartu.

It also sets up that partition between whose lives are really valued – our own Anglo-heroes – and whose suffering is deemed irrelevant and easily ignored – barely known people on the other side of the world, with a different coloured skin, culture and language.

What should also not be forgotten in this case is the profound contradiction in the Australian justice system. David McBride, the former military lawyer whose disclosures helped bring allegations of war crimes committed by Roberts-Smith to light, is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for leaking classified information, despite acting in what he has consistently argued was in the public interest.

His relatively quick prosecution – and Australia’s constant pursuit of whistleblowers – is in contrast to the slow process of holding alleged perpetrators of war crimes to account. The message this sends should be highly concerning to the Australian community: exposing wrongdoing is punished more swiftly and severely than actually committing the wrongdoing. There’s also that long tradition of Australia glossing over war crimes and accepting war criminals, as was so clearly documented in Mark Aaron’s concise publication on this issue, War Criminals Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945.

The role of government in this situation should also not be ignored. The Attorney-General at the time, Mark Dreyfus, had the authority to intervene in cases like McBride’s, but declined to do so, an action continued by his successor, Michelle Rowland. This reluctance reflects a broader pattern where national security considerations – however flimsy – are prioritised over transparency and accountability, even when the serious allegations of misconduct are involved, and it’s a position that risks undermining public trust in both the legal system and democratic institutions.

Beyond the immediate legal and political implications, the Roberts-Smith case should also force a stronger debate about Australia’s broader military engagements and whose interests they serve. From Vietnam in the 1960s, to Iraq and Afghanistan in the 21st century, Australia has repeatedly aligned itself with United States-led conflicts, often with limited public debate and without much scrutiny.

The consequences of these decisions include lives lost in other countries, communities destroyed and, as the case of Roberts-Smith suggests, potential war crimes and violations of international law. The question is not only about whether individual soldiers should be held to account, but whether the political decisions that place them in these situations are themselves subject to adequate scrutiny. That’s not to excuse the allegations against Roberts-Smith but, perhaps, he shouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in the first place.

Then, there is the question of national character. A mature democracy doesn’t try to shield itself from the uncomfortable truth; it confronts it head on. That willingness to investigate, prosecute and, if necessary, convict those accused of serious crimes – even when they are celebrated figures – shouldn’t be seen as a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength. It reaffirms that the rule of law doesn’t depend on the medallions that someone pins on their chest, but is applied equally, and that no individual is above it.

The outcome of Roberts-Smith’s criminal trial will ultimately be determined in court – and we assume, a jury chosen from the public – and this is as it should be. But there’s a greater test that’s already going on in the background. It lies in whether Australia chooses to uphold the principles it claims to defend, or whether it allows myth, power and political expediency to override justice. So far, it’s upholding those principles when it comes to Roberts-Smith – if not to David McBride – but the case itself will be test of how far Australia is prepared to hold itself to account.

Share

Subscribe now

One month after the United States and Israel attacked Iran, the conflict has expanded far beyond its undefined objectives and into well into the unknown, reshaping the landscape of the Western Asia/Middle East region – perhaps forever – and dismantling the long-standing assumptions about deterrence, control and the regional order. What was being pushed in Washington as a supposedly short-term and limited operation designed to create stability has instead triggered a sustained retaliation by Iran – with Yemen now joining the conflict – and putting the global oil and energy markets under extreme strain.

Iran’s response has been direct and deliberate, and should have been entirely predictable. Thousands of missiles and drones have been launched over the past month, targeting Israeli and U.S.-linked military bases in the region, as well as other critical infrastructure across the Gulf. While missile defence systems have intercepted many of these attacks, a significant number have actually gone through, inflicting material damage and suggesting that there’s a new reality within this region: Iran retains both the capacity and the willingness to escalate this conflict far beyond what Israel and the United States expected and the scale of their response has challenged the assumption – which seemed to be widely held within the U.S. military – that Iran would act with restraint to avoid a broader war, mainly because they didn’t have the capacity to retaliate.

As we’ve seen, the major issue to arise from this conflict has been Iran’s effective disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, which has created chaos through global energy markets. And it’s also difficult to accept that the United States could not have seen that this would be the logical action for Iran to take on, unless it’s part of a longer-term agenda that not even the United States seems to be aware of.

Around one-fifth of the world’s oil supply goes through the Strait of Hormuz, and this level of disruption has driven up insurance costs, clogged up the shipping lanes, and created volatility with global energy pricing. While the strait has not been formally “closed” in a legal sense – strictly speaking, it’s not in international waters, as the 12 nautical mile zone for both Oman and Iran intersect each other at the 21-mile width of the strait – the practical effect has been the same: an increased risk and a clear demonstration of the type of leverage Iran does have over the global economy.

Across the Gulf states, the conflict has led to many flight cancellations, displacing thousands of passengers and complicating the movement of labour forces that support the economies in the region. Missile strikes have also targeted areas hosting foreign personnel and military infrastructure, especially those facilities that are linked to U.S. operations.

Despite this, the Gulf states haven’t responded with direct military retaliation against Iran and their responses have instead called for diplomatic solutions. Publicly, these governments have condemned Iran’s actions as violations of international law and threats to regional stability but privately, they’re furious with the United States for undertaking this war, and undertaking it without any warning, and leaving their states vulnerable.

For decades, the presence of American military bases across the Gulf has been framed as a guarantee of security in a volatile area but, essentially, they’re primarily about the U.S. keeping that strong control in the region, even if it is mainly using Israel as its proxy. Also under consideration is the situation that these Gulf states are now bearing the costs of decisions made by the United States – and not having any guarantee of security – and if that’s the case, what is the purpose on these long-standing alliances?

Four weeks into the conflict, the severity of attacks has diminished, but the frequency hasn’t. Iran has almost played out a textbook asymmetric war game here, and the United States has been caught with its pants down, figuratively speaking, although with Trump, you’re never quite sure, and it could literary be the case.

But what has emerged during this first month is the short and sharp conflict the United States promised has failed to materialise and, instead, a widening crisis has exposed the limits of U.S. military planning and an underestimation of the motivations of the government of Iran. The United States and Israel initiated this confrontation, but it’s no longer theirs to control, and this is where the dangers lay for them.

The cost of following Washington into the abyss

Locally, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been exposed politically on this issue, not because of the war itself, but because of the way he responded when the United States and Israel first attacked Iran. By aligning himself too closely, and too quickly, with Trump in the early stages of these attacks, Albanese gave up the opportunity to create an independent political narrative at home, an approach that would have insulated him and the Labor government from domestic criticism and the subsequent and costly policy responses on fuel excise.

The initial decision to back U.S. strikes and commit Australian military personnel and resources to the region, of course, is a familiar bipartisan pattern in Australian foreign policy: the quick action to support the United States in these circumstances, without having the foresight to think about how it might affect domestic politics. And in this case, Albanese has made a serious misjudgement.

Rather than drawing a clear distinction between Australia’s national interest and the actions of the United States, Albanese tied himself to a radically changing and often strange U.S. strategy. His recent calls for “greater certainty” around American objectives further highlighted the foolishness of his quick jump to side of Trump and raised the obvious question: why did Albanese not demand this greater certainty before Australia offered its support?

This is in contrast with someone like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney – who has demonstrated a willingness to publicly push back against unpredictability of Trump, even going on to win an election based around this – just highlights the political advantage Albanese chose not to take. In a climate where voters often reward strength and assertiveness, the Prime Minister appears reactive and weak, asking the pertinent questions way after the consequences had begun to appear.

Those consequences are now not just rhetorical. The government’s decision to halve the fuel excise for three months – at an estimated cost of around $2.6 billion in foregone revenue – represents a first direct response to rising fuel prices linked to the U.S. attacks on Iran. While such a measure might provide short-term relief to households, it also exposes the Budget to additional strain at a time when structural pressures on spending and revenue are already quite significant. Aside from this, Albanese seems to excel at implementing plans that benefit the public, without getting a political win: consumers will save 26 cents per litre, but no one will thank him for it, and the government will lose $2.6 billion in forgone revenue.

By failing to establish a clear and independent position early, when he should have attacked Trump and apportioned all blame onto him – as Carney did in Canada – Albanese has reduced the political space for him to move around in. The fuel excise cut, while politically expedient, can be seen as the cost of his earlier hesitation – a reactive policy designed to manage domestic fallout rather than a proactive strategy grounded in defined national objectives and principle.

In the end, the issue is not simply whether Australia should support its allies, but how and when that support is given. Leadership in such moments requires more than saying “yes” to everything the United States wants; it requires clear thinking, clever timing, and an ability to anticipate the domestic consequences of international decisions.

On all three fronts, Albanese’s approach has left his government carrying both the political burden and a multi-billion-dollar hit to the Budget. It would have better for him to listen to what the former Labor leader Simon Crean said to U.S. President George W. Bush in 2003, that “on occasions, friends disagree… but, such is the strength of our shared values, interests and principles, those differences can enrich rather than diminish, strengthen rather than weaken, our partnership… friends must be honest with each other.” And it would appear that aren’t many votes lost in attacking Trump, as Mark Carney has already discovered, but, it appears, Albanese has not.

Toward an uncertain future: The limits of American power

How this conflict ends is still an open question, but the shape of a resolution is beginning to form – and it won’t be through a decisive military victory, but through a gradual reworking of the regional alignments and careful mediation. It’s obvious that the belligerents in this case, the United States and Israel, won’t be capable of offering mediation as a solution.

The war has also exposed not only the vulnerabilities of American bases in the region, but also the political limits of these regional alliances, which now appear to be fraying at the edges, and certainly not helped by Trump suggesting that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass”.

One critical consideration for the Gulf states is whether this alignment with the United States – which also means an alignment with Israel – enhances their security or increases their risk, and it’s been clearly shown that the promises of American protection have not come to fruition.

This has prompted a quiet but significant shift in thinking within these Gulf states, where rather than acting as passive hosts under coercion from the United States – which is causing internal anger within the region – there is a growing argument and confidence that they should pursuing more political independence, which includes removing these foreign-controlled bases, while opening up diplomatic communication with Tehran.

The government of Iran has consistently stated during this conflict that its main adversaries are the regimes of United States and Israel, not the Gulf states themselves. By taking these statements at face value, Gulf countries can create a certain level of insulation from the conflict, repositioning themselves not as lackies of the United States but as regional players acting on their own behalf. Whether that would be allowed to happen is another matter, but direct dialogue with Iran, even if it is limited, could be the tool that prevents further escalation on their own territories.

This is where another external player could have a role in this war: China. Unlike the United States, China has maintained economic relationships across the region without the same level of direct military involvement as the United States. Its dependence on Gulf energy supplies means that it has a large interest in a de-escalation, while its diplomatic history of restraint and longer-term speculations allows it to act without the short-term political pressures faced by Western governments.

Ever since these attacks on Iran commenced, China has been relatively quiet, but as these disruptions affect global markets and China’s own economic interests, the incentive to take on a more active role – diplomatically – will increase. China is also one of the few external powers capable of engaging all sides in a conflict with a degree of credibility, as was shown in 2024 when it brokered the Beijing Declaration, a unity deal with Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions, an act that no other government had been able to achieve.

China is the ultimate pragmatist on the world stage, and its role wouldn’t be driven by altruism alone, but through a range of interests including securing energy supply chains, stabilising markets, and reinforcing its status as a global diplomatic actor. Not that the United States will simply roll over and allow China to intervene in an area where it’s had a strong sphere of influence and control over – and hasn’t that been a disaster over the past 80 years or so – but it’s clear that the geopolitical structure of the region needs to change.

Even so, mediation might not produce an immediate or clean resolution, as this war has already gone down a path that can’t be easily reversed. The involvement of an external mediator such as China – if it comes to that – might establish the frameworks for communication and restraint, but it won’t eliminate the underlying tensions that gave rise to the conflict, and not while the malevolent influence of the United States remains in the region.

The United States still remains the central actor here but the unexpected retaliations by Iran have shown that it’s in a weakened position and has never had a long-term interest in securing a lasting peace anyway: that’s not the American way. What began as a show of short-term force by the United States and Israel has now evolved into a test of long-term endurance, strong diplomacy, and adaptability, and history has shown that these are not the types of conflicts where America prevails.

Share

Subscribe now

After the South Australian election last Saturday, the Liberal Party was reduced to four members. While it could be a few more seats after the counting is completed, this is not just a poor result, it’s a systemic failure. The Liberals have lost their urban base, and that loss is now better understood as further electoral evidence is presented, rather theoretical speculation. It shows what parliament becomes when a major party can no longer convert voter support into seats, and what follows when no other party is able to take its place.

In a Westminster system, the opposition is expected to scrutinise government, create and test its policy offerings, and present a viable alternative to the public. Those are the practical functions of opposition, but it depends on time, numbers and the ability to spread out their responsibilities against the full range of government activity. The Liberal Party is likely to be official opposition in South Australia because it will hold the second-highest number of seats in the lower house – albeit a low tally – but what kind of opposition will it be?

A shadow ministry has to cover the areas of treasury, health, education, infrastructure, police, energy and the other major areas of government, but with just four members – again, with that rider that it could be more – those responsibilities need to be combined to a degree that limits their depth. This leads to the amount of time for policy development being constrained, the scrutiny of legislation becoming less sustainable, and the ability to maintain pressure across multiple portfolios becomes reduced. Of course, the scrutiny continues, but in a much narrower form. It the scrutiny is more easily managed or deflected by the government, and that is what really matters in practice.

This would ordinarily be read as a cyclical failure. Historically, parties have lost heavily, regrouped, and rebuilt across one or two election cycles as political conditions change and their leadership is renewed. But we can’t make that assumption in this case. The problem isn’t simply that the Liberal Party is weak; the conditions under which it would ordinarily recover are no longer available to it. The loss of its urban base isn’t just a temporary electoral setback, it’s a structural shift in where its political support is located and how it’s being expressed. Under these new conditions, recovery is not a matter of time or small adjustment, because the underlying circumstances on which the recovery depends on have already changed: there’s no obvious path back.

The scale of this result and what it means is best understood by looking beyond the result itself. What has occurred is more than a large swing – it’s a change in the location and form of political support. The Liberal Party has lost the modern urban voter – metropolitan Adelaide has shifted towards a form of politics that rewards competence, stability, and credibility, rather than confrontation or the culture wars of identity politics. This isn’t so much a clear ideological shift but more of a preference for a style of governance that appears functional within a complex, service-based environment, and is less about policy detail and more about delivery. And that distinction is very important: the electorate wants governments to do things for them, not argue about whether a woman is a man, or the endless and futile debates about renewal energy.

The modern urban voter looks at the Liberal Party and doesn’t see themselves in it, and this mismatch isn’t just cultural, it’s a structural issue. What they encounter instead is a political language oriented toward an older suburban ideal that departed the scene a long time ago, or towards forms of grievance that rarely appeal to this type of voter. Under these circumstances, a recognition of what the Liberal Party represents is failing, and when recognition fails, the pathway to electoral success doesn’t follow. The connection between the two just doesn’t form.

The problem is not only that the Liberal Party is offering policies that the voters have rejected, it’s just that these policies are no longer credible within the conditions of contemporary urban life, not just in Adelaide but anywhere in Australia. In a dense, service-based economy, voters expect government to operate as a continuous presence, capable of managing systems that are interdependent and complex.

A policy language geared toward a reduction, withdrawal, or just the occasional intervention by government – classic neoliberalist thought that’s still popular within the Liberal Party – doesn’t register as a viable alternative within that environment. And under those electoral conditions, the votes don’t transfer cleanly or consolidate into a single alternative, they disperse across parties and candidates that register dissatisfaction without being able to form a coherent parliamentary force, which is exactly what happened in South Australia.

Mayo: Where it all began

This fracturing of the centre-right didn’t begin with this election. It’s more obvious now, but it can be traced back to the earlier breaks in metropolitan seats that were once held firmly by the Liberal Party in Adelaide. The defeat of Georgina Downer in Mayo by Rebekha Sharkie in 2018 marked a moment in which the link between a party and its policy offerings failed to automatically reassert itself within the electorate. While Sharkie had defeated Jamie Briggs at the 2016 federal election, this byelection (caused by the 2017 citizenship crisis) was meant to be the returning of an establishment figure – both Downer’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were senior members of parliament for the Liberal Party – to federal politics.

The significance of that result was not just the loss of a seat, but what it revealed about the electorate, who chose a candidate running outside the system of the major parties and was able to attract voters who were not prepared to move to Labor, but were also not willing to return to the Liberal Party. And we can see that this development has not been confined to the seat of Mayo, it’s become a broader pattern of electoral behaviour that has since become more visible across Australia, particularly through the emergence of community independent candidates in urban seats who occupy a similar space.

But these candidates don’t draw their support from a single ideological position, they’ve created it from voters who are economically and socially diverse, who share a dissatisfaction with the way the major parties, particularly the Liberal Party, represent contemporary urban life. In that sense, what is now described as the “teal movement” is a continuation of a pattern that was already evident.

Some voters have moved over to Labor because it appears competent and recognisable within many of these urban seats. Others have moved to One Nation or to smaller parties and independents, because those options will at least acknowledge their dissatisfaction more directly. The Liberal Party now sits in between these positions, offering neither reassurance of the normal behaviour of an established political party, nor a clear outlet for electoral discontent. And, as we’ve seen, this is not a temporary problem – it’s a failure of political language and communication, where the Liberal Party no longer speaks effectively to the place in which most of the electorate now lives.

Labor’s parliamentary current dominance is something that follows on from this change. Its primary vote is solid, but it’s low and not overwhelming, yet its seat tally is strong because its support is concentrated in metropolitan electorates, which is where elections are won – in the cities and from the centre. In contrast, a large share of what we’d normally consider to be the centre-right vote has dispersed across regional areas and divided among multiple parties, and in a preferential voting system, this won’t convert into seats won.

It’s this dispersion that prevents a high primary vote – the Liberal Party and One Nation received a combined primary vote of around 41 per cent but will only win about 10 per cent of the seats – from having any meaningful parliamentary power. Of course, conservatives are complaining about the preferencing system now, but they never seemed to be overly concerned when the Australian Greens consistently pick up 14 per cent of the primary vote, but only win less than 1 per cent of seats, or have too many complaints when the Coalition wins seats and government on the back of preferencing deals.

There are many lessons for the Labor Party too

This was a good result for the South Australia Labor Party, but the strength of this result should not be mistaken for uniform support in the electorate. While its primary vote was solid and the number of seats won was substantial, there’s a large number of votes that sit elsewhere within the community, dispersed across minor parties – which the Liberal Party is now one of – and independents.

That distribution changes the way that political capital is acquired, stored and spent. Decisions that would ordinarily generate sustained opposition might not produce immediate reactions, not because they are widely accepted, but because the dissent and opposition against them is not organised in a way that can be acted upon effectively. Because of this, a government can move on its policy platform with less resistance – this seems to have worked reasonably well in Western Australia, which has effectively governed without a function opposition since 2021, but not so well in Victoria, where the Liberal Party has been more intent fighting amongst its own membership, rather than holding the government to account. A tension between governments and oppositions needs to exist within a democratic system and an imbalance between these two can skew the system of governance towards incompetence – not always, but in most cases, it does.

Ambulance ramping was a defining issue at the 2022 state election and still remains unresolved despite the outrage the Labor Party created against the Marshall government at the time, yet it no longer generates sustained political pressure of the kind that would ordinarily be expected. A separate political issue occurred early this year, where political pressure from the opposition was also absent. Premier Peter Malinauskas interfered with due process, when he sent a letter to the board of the Adelaide Festival, which subsequently led to the removal of a pro-Palestine speaker, which then led to other writers withdrawing their support, and the cancellation of the Adelaide Writers Festival. In parliamentary terms, this issue also appeared to have been carefully choreographed, but there was no sustained pressure from the opposition, nor did the government change its position.

While this was a smaller issue when compared to ambulance ramping, the absence of sustained pressure from the opposition suggests a failure of the mechanisms through which dissatisfaction would ordinarily be organised and expressed through parliament, and the consequence is that the government faces less resistance where it is expected to face it, as well as issues related to complacency and a government less willing to do the hard work expected of it, because the pressure is simply not there.

The implications for federal politics after a state election are always played down and, even if the implications are indirect, there are many consistent patterns that are being formed. In metropolitan seats such as Sturt and Boothby, the Liberal position is already weakened and may remain so if urban voters continue to disengage. In regional seats such as Grey and Barker, the more immediate issue is the distribution of conservative votes across multiple parties rather than a direct shift to Labor. The federal parliament continues to operate with a clearer two-sided structure, but the same underlying pressures that have arisen from the state election are present.

South Australia now operates under conditions in which the relationship between votes, seats, and the opposition has broken down. A substantial share of the vote sits outside the winning party that goes on to win government, but it’s not coagulating into a parliamentary force that’s capable of acting on it, and this is resulting in a weak opposition. Of course, our parliamentary system always results in an opposition, but it’s hard to see this one being an effective one.

And this is the big problem: until the Liberal Party – or any other political party – recognises these fundamental and seismic changes that been underway for some time within Australian politics, that normal cycle of defeat and recovery can never be assumed again because the conditions that made that cycle possible no longer exist.

Subscribe now

Share

Australian politics is entering a period of increasing volatility – as if to replicate the current instability that seems to be afflicting the rest of the world – and while it’s obviously happening on the centre-right side of the political spectrum, there’s every chance that it will affect all sides of politics, not just the right.

What was once a relatively stable conservative Coalition is now beginning to fragment into competing interrelated parties, each vying for the same voters in the electorate. The journalist Paul Kelly predicted this fragmentation in his salient book, The End of Certainty, and while it has been a long time in coming – his book was written in 1992 – it appears that his prediction is finally coming to fruition.

The Liberal Party and the National Party were the strong institutions behind the conservative bloc, but since the demolition of the Liberals at the 2025 federal election, they are increasingly being challenged by smaller populist parties such as One Nation and possibly the United Australia Party. The result is a style of politics that’s becoming far more unpredictable and, potentially far more dangerous, considering that politicians such as Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce were actually once a part of the Coalition, and are now attempting to move politics further to the right.

The tensions between the National Party and One Nation have been building for many years, but they have intensified since the defection of Joyce over to One Nation in December last year. Parties do invest significant resources into getting their candidates elected, and when a member crosses the floor to join a rival party, the act is never forgiven or forgotten, especially when it’s a member of the Labor Party.

The Nationals see the defection of Joyce as more than just a personal betrayal – it’s a direct challenge to their survival in regional Australia, and it’s a brawl that could get quite ugly – and it’s a competition for the same part of the electorate: the farmers, regional small-business owners, and the conservative voters in rural communities.

Over the past five election cycles, the National Party has relied on this constituency to secure a stable block of seats in the House of Representatives, hovering between the 15 seats won in 2013, to the recent batch of 14 seats won in 2025. But despite this stability and relative electoral success – especially when compared with the recent fortunes of the Liberal Party – the party’s agenda no longer matches up with the interests of regional communities.

Support for large-scale mining developments, agribusiness corporations, and persistent opposition to climate policies and renewable energy investment have become defining features of the Nationals’ political identity. For many voters in rural Australia – particularly those concerned about environmental sustainability, water management and the future viability of family farms – the positions of the National Party are becoming more disconnected from the realities facing regional economies.

One Nation has attempted to capitalise on this discontent by presenting itself as a defender of rural interests – even though, in reality, it’s not – reviving themes were once a key part of National Party policy, and of the Country Party before it. Hanson’s messaging focuses on the idea of protecting farmers, defending regional communities, and pushing back against the perceived dominance of large corporate interests, without ever outlining how she intends to this this.

Whether One Nation fully understands the complexities of agricultural policy is another issue, but the political effectiveness of Hansonism is based on its simplicity. Whether it’s correct of not doesn’t seem to matter, but when voters feel ignored by the major parties or economically insecure, a political narrative that makes these types of promises will always resonate, despite the policy detail behind it.

But while One Nation has built up a momentum in recent opinion polls, the party has a long history of instability and problems with internal discipline, attracting controversial candidates and making many mistakes in their campaign strategies.

At the same time, the possible re-emergence of Clive Palmer adds another layer of unpredictability to the conservative side of politics. Palmer’s United Australia Party, which spent enormous sums on advertising during the 2019 federal election, demonstrated how a well-funded minor party can disrupt elections. While his campaign in 2019 hurt Labor’s chances in key marginal seats, a new Palmer intervention could just as easily fragment the conservative vote instead, and preference deals could become increasingly chaotic – with chaotic and unpredictable electoral outcomes.

Preferences can become difficult to predict, especially when voters are presented with a crowded field of candidates who share similar conservative messages, and it’s quite possible that this kind of competition can inadvertently advantage the opposing side of politics, allowing Labor or other parties to win seats with lower levels of the primary vote, as occurred in the 2022 and 2025 federal elections. The conservative vote is now splintering across a range of populist and minor parties, with each of them claiming to represent the “true” voice of regional or conservative Australia, but these alliances appear to be unstable and it’s difficult to predict what the outcomes will be.

The realignment will spread beyond the conservatives

The fragmentation that’s now visible on the centre-right side of politics might be the first big step of something much bigger – when political realignments occur, they rarely remain confined to just the one side of politics.

Read more

The temptation after an election defeat like the one in 2025 for the Liberal Party, is to search for a single, decisive cause, and in contemporary politics that almost always means focusing on the leader. The former opposition leader Peter Dutton centralised authority within the party, made too many misjudgments, overestimated the quality of favourable polling, and ran a campaign that appeared at to be too rigid and haphazard. Of course, these are all critical points, yet to reduce the Liberal Party’s failures to the shortcomings of one man would be a mistake. Leaders are symptoms as much as the causes, as they are selected by parties that reveal who they really in the act of choosing.

Political parties don’t collapse just because they lose elections, and the Labor Party offers the most obvious example. Between 1949 and 1972 Labor had 23 years in opposition. After the 1996 election, it remained out of office for eleven years and after 2013, it waited for another six. Those stretches were not terminal illnesses but they were periods of malfunction, internal contests, and an eventual recalibration, or at least, enough to get back into office. During these times in opposition, Labor argued fiercely with itself about policy, identity and leadership, it became fractured and then reassembled itself. What it didn’t do was treat defeat as an aberration that requiring only a few pieces of tactical change, and it went through some serious soul-searching and questioned its own long-held assumptions.

The question facing the Liberal Party isn’t whether it can survive being in opposition. It’s really about whether it retains the flexibility required to produce leaders capable of expanding its reach, rather than going through a reduction, which is clearly what has happened over the past three years. A party in good health selects leaders who can extend its appeal beyond the parliamentary party room. A party in a defensive mood selects leaders who exert internal control, become anxious and don’t offer the confidence required to improve the party’s stocks.

Dutton’s elevation in 2022 occurred during one of these defensive moments. The party had just lost government, the erosion of metropolitan seats had been visible for several election cycles. The teal independents had cut into seats once regarded as permanent fixtures, and there was unease about fragmentation and distrust of internal dissent. In that climate, steadiness inside the party room could look more valuable than to the electorate looking in from outside. Dutton was a known entity, unambiguous in his ideological outlook, and aligned with the dominant faction of the party room. Those qualities satisfied the immediate need for consolidation of the Liberal Party at the time.

That choice, however, reflected a longer devolution within the party. The internal realignment that began during the Rudd–Gillard period and crystallised in 2009, started to reshape the Liberal Party’s political centre. Nick Minchin played a central role in that turning point, and his support for Tony Abbott’s elevation over Malcolm Turnbull wasn’t just an internal tactic over an emissions trading scheme – it was a statement about which conservative instincts would define the party. Abbott’s victory energised the conservative base and restored its aggression approach in opposition. It also signalled that the parliamentary party would prioritise ideologically-based positions – such as the never-ending climate wars – if it was ever forced to choose.

Read more

There’s a new pattern that’s emerging in Donald Trump’s version of the “new world order”, first of all in Gaza, and we’re now seeing it in Iran: the language of so-called “peace” is replacing the language of war, and de/reconstruction is becoming the new strategy of influence. Build it and they will come, but first of all, it needs to be destroyed, just like the United States did in the village of Bến Tre during the Vietnam War.

The template was created during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, where there was much rhetoric about stabilisation, democracy and rebuilding, with the country opened up to foreign contractors and, of course, implementing American geopolitical interests according to George W. Bush or, more accurately, former Vice-President Dick Cheney. More than two decades later, it’s a similar logic applied to Gaza under the “Board of Peace” initiative created by Trump, and although it’s being formally framed as a benevolent tool for new governance and reconstruction, it’s about something completely different: a consolidation of post-war authority that erases Palestinian people and creates the next attempt in changing the regional balance of power, particularly in relation to Iran.

The proposed structure for Gaza as presented by the Board of Peace has raised issues among many Palestinians and international critics who argue that any long-term settlement – if that’s what the intention is – needs to include meaningful political participation of the Palestinians and comply with international law, which has so far been absent.

There’s also the controversy about who’s involved with this Board of Peace. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is now a part of this group, but will be forever linked with the 2003 invasion and war in Iraq, which was launched on the basis of the now-discredited claims of weapons of mass destruction – which were never found and confirmed to have never existed – and resulted in the deaths of up to 600,000 Iraqis. Blair shouldn’t be anywhere near the reconstruction of Palestine and, if anything, should be securely locked up in The Hague, for his role in the destruction of Iraq.

In classic doublespeak, Blair has outlined a vision of rebuilding Gaza with functioning institutions and economic opportunity – for the people of Gaza – and while these goals wouldn’t be controversial if they were being mentioned by most other people, Blair’s reputation was shredded during invasion of Iraq and is not to be trusted. Anything he claims will be created for the benefit of Palestinians should be taken with a grain of salt, especially when considering the biggest donor to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change is one of the biggest supporters of Israel and Zionism, Larry Ellison – donations of $US375 million – and he’s hardly going to donate these large finances for Blair to create anything that could benefit the people of Palestine.

The core problem for this Board of Peace is its well-shrouded geopolitical ambitions and where it goes after the reconstruction of Gaza commences. Since 1979, Iran has been a major thorn in the regional dominance that the United States and Israel has wanted to impose, and is now the only country in the region that hasn’t acquiesced to the bullying tactics of the West.

Any reconstruction model that sidelines the future of Gaza and Palestine, while consolidating Israeli land grabs, will inevitably cross over into the issue of Iran. Taking this into account, the “Board of Peace” isn’t a humanitarian and well-intentioned body at all, it’s just an attempt to institutionalise a new regional order using the language of peace that Orwell would be applauding from his grave.

The United Nations should also be accountable for its inaction as well. Of course, it’s clear that in 1945, it was set up to fail and act as a tool for the benefit of the five permanent members of the Security Council. In the case of Gaza, all the power now resides with the Board of Peace, and it’s clear that the United Nations won’t be able to do much to stop it, or have influence over, and it’s evident that despite the strong language from the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, it won’t be able to do anything about Iran.

If this confrontation with Iran intensifies, the region won’t see anything that consolidates peace but will just continue Israel’s preference for their “forever wars” and entrench that perception that its existence is under threat – and it will end up being another chapter in a long cycle of attack, intervention and resistance.

Why the Trump’s strikes won’t deliver regime change in Iran

If the first phase of this emerging “peace through war” strategy involves reconstructing Gaza through imperial intervention, the second phase is aimed the one regional power that has consistently resisted American–Israeli dominance since 1979. Iran has consistently humiliated the United States – as did Vietnam and Cuba in the 1960s – and irrespective of how wrong and maniacal its behaviour was in these cases, America implemented punishing trade embargos as a payback against these countries, and its actions against Iran for deposing the West’s favoured despot, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, continues in this vein. Resistance to Western imperialism needs to be punished at every opportunity.

These new U.S–Israeli strikes were accompanied by an ultimatum from Trump, who urged the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to surrender or face “certain death”, which he hoped would result in the regime collapse that the U.S. and Israel has been trying to manufacture for some time. Instead, Trump got a different answer: Iran responded with co-ordinated missile and drone attacks on Israel and a 27 U.S. military bases in the region. Did he really expect that a country as large as Iran was going to roll over and let these attacks go unanswered?

The killing of Supreme Leader Khamenei was also a key military and political error, and was based on the assumption that removing an 86-year old spiritual leader would cause confusion within Iran and create an uprising. But Iran hasn’t been biding its time and waiting for an attack to arrive without any preparation – like many other leadership groups in the region, Iran political structures are not based on a single figure, and the authority has been distributed across a wide range of clerical networks, leadership groups, intelligence agencies and, more importantly, the Revolutionary Guard.

Whatever the West might think of the Revolutionary Guard, it’s a powerful and dedicated force of around 190,000 personnel, and if it is to be defeated, the U.S. will need to commit the ground troops that it’s so far been unwilling to commit. And with the mid-term elections coming up later this year, the news coverage of U.S. personnel returning in coffins is something a sitting President would want to avoid at every opportunity.

The other issue is that bombing Iran just reinforces that domestic Iranian narrative of being under siege and, historically, the external pressure through sanctions and assassinations has strengthened the positions of hardliners rather than weakened them. Although Iran faces genuine internal turmoil – economic hardship caused by sanctions, youth discontent and protest movements – domestic dissatisfaction doesn’t mean strong support for a foreign intervention and, historically, whenever support for this gains traction, it usually dissipates whenever the West has interfered in Iran.

Yes, the Iranian population wants internal reforms and change, but they don’t want a return of Western intervention and political influence. Although the Iranian revolution occurred almost 50 years ago, many people remember the oppressive regime of The Shah and the exploitation of Britain and the United States of its resources, and would hardly want to see a humiliating return of that.

The demolition of international law

If strikes on Iran are unlikely to result in “regime change”, they raise a number of other questions: what is their purpose, and whatever happened to the international legal order that was meant to deter this kind of unilateral action? It’s clearly an illegal act – as was the recent United States act of kidnapping the President of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro and stealing Venezuelan oil – so why has the Australian government been so supportive?

The rules governing any use of force comes from the United Nations Charter, drafted in 1945 to prevent unilateral military aggression which had caused the Second World War, and prohibits force against the territory or political independence of any state in the world.

Australia has long presented itself as a defender of this rules-based order – it was instrumental in the creation of the League of Nations in 1919 and its successor, the United Nations – condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and calling on the observance of international and maritime law in the South China Sea. But following the strikes on Iran, Foreign Minister Penny Wong couldn’t outline whether this action was according to international law or not, and said that the legal justification was for those states to articulate, not her.

Perhaps Senator Wong should have a closer look at the UN Charter: force against another member state is lawful and permitted only in two circumstances, either through Security Council authorisation, or self-defence in response to an armed attack, neither of which occurred in the case of these attacks on Iran.

Along with Australia, the international responses have been inconsistent, some governments support restraining Iran’s nuclear ambitions – even though they were supposedly wiped out by previous strikes in 2025 – while others have clearly questioned the legality of these attacks. But the point is that the selective application of international law erodes its credibility, as it does within any legal system. A rules-based order can’t function correctly if a power such as America acts unilaterally and attacks countries at a whim, based on the wishes of Israel. If the U.S. can decide – either by itself or through its Israeli proxy – to attack a sovereign nation, why can’t Russia continue its military actions in Crimea and Donbas? Or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or another country in the South China Sea?

For Australia, this inconsistency does have a risk. As a middle but increasingly weaker power, it relies on stable legal protocols and practices to protect its own sovereignty and strategic interests, and these are the reasons that it was so instrumental in the creation of the United Nations. If legal principles are ignored in one region, they are weakened everywhere else. And over time, the erosion of these practices normalises unilateral force.

Recent conflicts – from Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza – have already exposed the post-war system and the international compact that has existed – more or less – since 1945. Australia’s political dilemma is now a two-fold strategic and philosophical issue: how can it uphold the Charter of the United Nations, while maintaining commitments of the alliance with the United States, which is now operating as a lawless and rouge state?

If the escalation against Iran entrenches its current leadership – which seems likely – it will also weaken the legal order that is meant to preserve global stability. The test for Australia – and for all states claiming to defend international law and the “rules-based order” – is whether these principles remain when its allies, and not its adversaries, become the ones that are bending the rules so blatantly and forcefully.

All the way with Donald J. Trump

Australia moved quickly to endorse the American–Israeli attack on Iran – subordinating itself to the whims of Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in his quest for the Greater Israel Project – with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese framing it as a “necessary response” to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and consistent with defending the “rules-based order”. But what does this mean? Invoking a “rules-based order” – which killed well over 100 school children in southern Iran during the week – while refusing to say whether an attack on a sovereign country was legal or not doesn’t inspire much confidence in those rules.

Albanese once again linked Iran to hostile acts in Australia, including the 2024 firebombing of the Adass synagogue in Melbourne, attributing responsibility to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, even though no evidence has ever been provided, nor was it clear why Iran would want to attack a synagogue over 12,000 kilometres away.

It’s becoming more evident that this link was created by Albanese to reinforce the perception of Iran as a “direct threat” – the same language used by Trump – and provide the groundwork for a future attack against Iran, but it also raises questions about Albanese’s ethical and political standards, which have deteriorated rapidly in recent times.

It’s also clear that Australia doesn’t have any independent thinking when it comes to many of these international issues. While Australia’s opinions might not make that much difference, whether it be in Palestine or within Iran, we have to remember that it once did have great influence and prestige in international circles – in 1945 at the United Nations, and one of the key instigators of the Gleneagles Agreement in 1977 that precipitated the end of apartheid in South Africa. But it’s now a minnow in world influence, and the only prestige that it seeks is to sell its rare minerals, gas and iron ore to whoever wants it, and at the cheapest price.

Australia has traditionally maintained at least some space for independent judgement with its allies, but there has been not one slither of independent thought on this illegal American–Israeli attack on Iran. Perhaps this government is more interested in ensuring it doesn’t jeopardise those U.S. mineral deals that don’t even work in our favour, or affect the contracts with Israel to supply parts for their F-35 fighter jets, some of which might have been used to kill those innocent children in southern Iran.

Selective application of international law and protocol – and not being able to call out allies when they’ve gone rouge – is eroding Australia’s credibility. Of course, supporters of these attacks will argue that Iran’s actions over the past 47 years justify taking this harder military path but, essentially, this is a concocted imperialist act that is based on the geopolitical and territorial ambitions of both Israel and the United States, and it’s a narrative readily supported by its allies, including Australia.

These issues – an imperialist reconstruction in Gaza, and an escalation against Iran by those same players – are setting off the world towards a more transactional-based international system, rather than the so-called “rules based order” that Albanese frequently refers to. But there are no rules and, perhaps, there never have been. Australia has chosen to support an international law of the jungle where the powerful countries decide for themselves what’s right and what’s wrong, and is watching on and allowing the system they so carefully constructed over the past 80 years, to completely fall apart.

Subscribe now

Share

In Australian politics, debates about immigration usually flare up in ways that say more about political posturing than anything to do with clear-headed policy, and this week was a good example of one of those moments. The Liberal Party has sharpened its rhetoric around “good immigration/bad immigration”, language that reflects the long tradition of the right of dividing migrants into who’s acceptable and who we need to be suspicious of. As usual, the spark for this came from the leader of One Nation Pauline Hanson, who once again has put Muslim communities at the centre of a national controversy, for no other reason than to score political points.

Hanson’s political fortunes rely on bagging suburbs such as Lakemba in south-west Sydney – a suburb often portrayed by right-wing commentators as an example of the supposed failures of Australia’s multiculturalism. Lakemba is one of Australia’s most visibly multicultural communities, with a large Muslim population and people of Lebanese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indonesian descent, and if you’re after a white bread life or traditional Australian monoculture, this is not the place to find it. During Ramadan, the main strip of Haldon Street is home to the Lakemba Nights festival, a council-approved food and cultural event that draws tens of thousands of visitors from all across Sydney, and it’s one of the best public expressions of contemporary Muslim Australian life.

Yet Hanson always frames the suburb not as a thriving multicultural community but as evidence of social breakdown and the collapse of “Australian values” which, of course, she seems to be the sole arbiter of whatever this might mean. She repeated long-standing claims that Muslims are seeking to impose a “caliphate” and suggests that Lakemba is one of those scary places in Australia where ordinary citizens feel they’re unable to go to.

These simple and false assertions have been a feature of her rhetoric since the 1990s, when she first rose to prominence arguing that Australia was being “swamped” by Asian immigration. Over the past 30 years, her targets have shifted from Asian migrants to Muslims, but the premise of the argument has remained the same: immigration isn’t presented as a necessary policy that works in Australia’s favour, but as a threat to civilisation.

The reality of Lakemba is quite different to Hanson’s narrative. It’s a working-class, diverse suburb with all the usual hallmarks of urban life – it’s busy, there’s lots of traffic and related parking issues, there’s a diverse retail strip – but it’s not closed off to anyone, nor is it lawless. The Ramadan festival is open to everyone. It’s a well organised event, well regulated, and co-ordinated through local council. And the key is that many non-Muslims attend in large numbers – Christians, Hindus, secular Australians and visitors simply drawn by the food and the festive atmosphere.

The more significant political development was not Hanson’s comments themselves – we’ve come to expect this over the years – but how quickly the broader immigration debate has shifted. Within days, senior Liberal figures intensified their language about migration levels, supposedly “low standards” and how this relates to social cohesion. Opposition leader Angus Taylor has argued that overall migration numbers are too high and that the government has lost control of our borders. Those arguments should be framed as economic issues – housing supply, a strain on infrastructure, visa backlogs – yet they often follow the cultural agitation that’s initiated by the far right.

This is the pattern that has defined parts of the Liberal Party’s relationship with One Nation for years. One Nation articulates the more extreme version of grievance – often couched in terms of Western civilisation coming to an end. The Liberal Party then transforms this anxiety into more a formal language about “standards”, “capacity” and “integration”. It’s a rhetoric that’s less openly racist but retains the underlying implication: that any form of migration is socially corrosive, and destroys our way of life.

Australia’s immigration system is already highly selective, and has been like this under different governments for many decades. Permanent migrants are chosen through points-tested skilled streams, family reunion categories and humanitarian programs. Net overseas migration varies each year, depending on economic conditions, student numbers and temporary visa holders, and is always in Australia’s national interest.

Governments don’t just open the doors and let people in for no reason, it’s based on the requirements of the nation at a given point of time, and predominantly based on the economic needs of this country. It’s not an open-door system, nor is it structured along religious lines, there’s certainly no official distinction between “good” and “bad” faith within migration law, and any government that reduced Australia’s immigration intake just to pander to the extreme right or to the idiot whims of One Nation would be shooting itself in the foot, as well as destroying the economy. But explaining this to an already radicalised audience takes up too much time, and it’s clear that this is an audience that’s not up to the task of listening to clear reason.

What arrives in moments like this is not the law, or economic sense, or commonsense, but the dulcet and soothing tones of racism and the far easier task of blaming migrants. When suburbs such as Lakemba are singled out as somehow a warning to the rest of the country, entire communities become symbolic battlegrounds for the right. Muslim Australians – most of whom are citizens – are portrayed not as participants in national life but as symbols for whether multiculturalism has gone “too far” and part of the never-ending culture wars that the right keeps fighting, even though they keep losing these battles.

There’s a certain electoral logic behind all of this, despite how despicable the tactics might be. As the Liberal Party searches for a pathway back to electoral competitiveness, particularly after losing so many metropolitan seats at the 2022 and 2025 federal elections, there is a temptation to consolidate support in outer suburban and regional areas by leaning into cultural conservatism and the hostile pathways created by One Nation. Immigration has become a convenient tool for that strategy, as it’s easier to use these emotionally hooks, than doing the hard work of formulating clear and coherent policy.

But it’s a disaster of a strategy. The risk is that once immigration is inserted into the public debate through race or religion, that’s where the nuance ends and the hysteria begins. Communities that have been here for generations have their loyalty questioned, and whether they really should be here, even after all that time. First, it was the Italians, the Greeks, and then the other peoples of Eastern Europeans. Then it moved over to the Chinese and South-East Asian communities. Now it’s the Islamic world and Western Asian communities who bear the brunt from the right, eager to move on to new convenient scapegoats, once they’ve extracted as much political poison out the debate as possible.

Read more

The Liberal Party has a new leader in Angus Taylor, but whether this represents renewal or just an exercise in political rebranding is unclear. As someone who’s had ambitions for a long time, Taylor now holds the leadership just at the moment when the party is at its lowest point in its history. He has promised to refocus on cost-of-living pressures, home ownership and immigration, trying to position himself as the figure who can restore the party of Menzies and Howard. And good luck with that. But the main question is whether Taylor has the authority and the strategic skills to reverse a deep and structural decline that’s been in place for over the past decade or so for the Liberal Party.

The recent split between the Liberal and National parties – the second within the past year – over proposed gun law changes following the Bondi attack exposed massive fractures within the parties, ultimately destabilising the leadership of Sussan Ley and leading to her resignation. But this wasn’t so much about the legislation – there’s been long-standing tensions over direction and the ideology of the party, and this was another example of the internal dirty laundry displayed in the public view, and it was not a good look. Political professionalism was once again cast aside in preference of a public showing of disunity, reinforcing the perception that the conservative side of politics is splintering and falling apart and quickly becoming a rabble.

Taylor has inherited these problems, some of which he has created, and it’s now a question of whether he’s capable or even has the inclination to fix up these problems, which essentially commenced during the time the Liberal Party was in government between 2013 and 2022. Of course, electoral success will always conceal a party’s problems but the leadership transitions – from Tony Abbott to Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison – reflected a deeper instability about the party’s ideological identity. Even after losing office in 2022, internal reviews suggest that there was not enough serious policy development and a shadow cabinet that was reluctant to undertake the hard work that was required to offer credible alternatives to the electorate.

This has happened before for a mainstream conservative party. After a landslide defeat, the conservative United Australia Party (the precursor to the Liberal Party) collapsed and was reorganised by Robert Menzies into the modern Liberal Party. In the mid-1990s, the long a period of leadership instability – John Howard, Andrew Peacock, John Hewson, Alexander Downer – ultimately gave way to Howard’s second leadership stint, who returned the party to office in 1996. The difference today is the absence of a comparable figure waiting in the wings. Of course, Taylor could yet surprise us all – which seems unlikely – but he is now leading a far diminished parliamentary team with limited depth and a shrinking voter base in urban Australia.

The Liberal Party’s most serious loss since 2022 might not be so much in the number of seats but in its lost constituency. The inner-metropolitan electorates that were once central to its identity have shifted toward independents and the Australian Greens. Traditional “small-L” liberal voters, particularly those in metropolitan areas, have drifted away.

Without reclaiming an urban base, the electoral recovery will become more difficult with each election cycle. A party can’t rebuild its base by just opposing – as the Liberal Party has done for well over a decade, even when it was in office – it needs to offer a coherent vision. This focus on dismantling things, or always articulating what they oppose, is something that might encourage protest, but it’s rarely an approach that can sustain long-term political success.

There is also a broader concern for politics overall. The Labor government is in a position of strength – although it rarely displays or uses this strength – but a weakened opposition creates a vacuum. In these kinds of unusual circumstances, it’s tempting for a government to expand into this empty space and rework their own positions to occupy parts of the centre-right space.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has frequently spoken of positioning Labor as the “natural party” of government, and if the Coalition fails to rebuild itself in a meaningful way, Labor might consolidate its current dominance not just on the electoral map but its own ideological positions and move even further to the centre right. Australian political history shows that mainstream political parties rarely disappear permanently; they will always lick their wounds from electoral defeats, reorganise and return, even if it does take some time for this to occur. But political recovery requires discipline, talent recruitment and patience – and these seem to be qualities that are currently in short supply within the Liberal Party.

One Nation and the fragmentation of the right

While the Liberal Party is now going through that difficult process of trying to re-establish itself politically, the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is a new development that’s reshaping the conservative landscape – for the time being – and the defection of Barnaby Joyce to One Nation suggests that there’s more problems to come. Although Joyce lacks credibility due to his many indiscretions and allegations of sexual harassment in the past, his defection appears to have given One Nation a boost, which suggests what kinds of characters are acceptable to their new-found supporters.

Though One Nation has struggled historically to translate their culture of complaint and protest into a sustained parliamentary presence – they’ve never actually won a federal lower-house seat under the One Nation banner – its current opinion polling numbers suggest a strong dissatisfaction with politics among conservative voters.

These kinds of populist movements often thrive on this grievance. One Nation’s appeal relies less on detailed policies and more on a culture of complaint directed at political elites, immigration and the insufferably long culture wars. This style of politics can be electorally disruptive, as is now proving to be the case in Australia, but converting that protest into an ability to form government – and if this was ever to be achieved, a competent government – is another matter entirely. Australia’s preferential voting system and entrenched party structures make it very difficult for a party to leap from marginal representation – at this stage, holding one seat following a defection from the National Party – to being able to form government.

Political realities should also put a check on the ambitions of One Nation. Inner-city electorates such as Grayndler, Watson, Kooyong and Wentworth are unlikely to ever fall to One Nation and if any gains do occur, they would be more likely to emerge in outer-suburban or semi-rural seats traditionally held or contested by the Nationals. Any wholesale shift toward One Nation would represent not so much a broad national surge but a reconfiguration within the existing conservative bloc.

And this is where the danger for the Liberal Party lies: the cannibalisation of the right. Every percentage point in the opinion polls flowing over to One Nation weakens the Coalition’s capacity to present itself as a government-in-waiting, even if on current standings, that might be two or three election cycles away anyway.

For Labor, the political calculations are going to be different: to be alert but not alarmed. One Nation’s ceiling appears limited in metropolitan Australia, and its voter base overlaps far more with conservative areas rather than progressive. Nonetheless, dismissing the movement outright would be a mistake, as this fragmentation on the right can alter preference flows and reshape marginal seat contests in ways that are difficult to predict.

The change from Ley to Taylor also raises that old question of whether leadership alone can reverse decline. Of course, leadership itself can change a party’s political fortunes, but after the 2025 defeat, the Liberal Party required a stabilising leader rather than a saviour – someone willing to rebuild organisational structures, develop a depth in policy and accept that a recovery might take more than one electoral cycle. Instead, the pattern of rapid leadership turnover is reflective of earlier periods of instability within the party, although this time around, it’s arguably on a far more severe scale.

Don’t mention the corruption…

As Taylor settles into the leadership he’s craved for such a long time, sections of the media have emphasised his academic background – a Rhodes scholar – and his economic credentials, which have never been evident in any substantial way. Yet despite the glossing over and collective amnesia in the media, his ministerial record and behaviour remains contentious.

During the 2018 water buy-back approved by the Coalition government, $80 million was paid to Eastern Australia Agriculture, a company in which Taylor had previously been a director of before entering federal politics. This deal generated significant profit for the company and drew attention because one of its major investors was associated with one of Taylor’s former Oxford rowing colleagues. Taylor’s involvement has never been fully explained.

In another issue, the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption sought information regarding a $107,000 grant allocated in 2018 to Monaro Farming Systems, an organisation linked to Taylor’s family, a grant related to agricultural land management and native grassland identification. There were other controversies that also followed Taylor. In 2016, protected native grasslands were illegally cleared on a property part-owned by Jam Land Pty Ltd, a company in which Taylor and his brother had interests.

Another episode in 2019 involved Taylor circulating false figures regarding travel expenditure by the City of Sydney under Lord Mayor Clover Moore – and evidence provided to the NSW Police suggested that the PDF document online had been tampered with. Given all of these incidents, is it any wonder that when Taylor was in government, he also voted against the establishment of a federal anti-corruption commission?

These episodes, should be forming part of the backdrop to his leadership and whether they represent political misjudgments, or controversies that usually surround any sort of government decision, or deeper ethical concerns that are verging on corruption will continue to be debated. But what is clear is that the mainstream media has so far refused to mention any of these issues in great detail, and that they’re keen to make a clean break from Taylor’s past failures.

Taylor’s early rhetoric as leader has focused heavily on “bad immigration” and cost of living management, themes that also resonate within One Nation’s base. In seeking to reclaim conservative voters, he risks reinforcing perceptions that the Liberal Party is competing more with populist insurgents than with the government itself, although to stop the bleeding to the far right might be his biggest task at this stage. This strategy might consolidate parts of the right, but it also goes to show how far the party has fallen from its once dominant national position, remembering that the Liberal Party was in government, less than three years ago.

The Liberal Party’s predicament is not just about numbers in the current opinion polls, or how many seats in holds in federal parliament, although all of these issues are interrelated. It’s an existential question about its identity, credibility and its ability to renew. A leadership change might alter the tone and messaging that’s given out to the media each day, but rebuilding trust – within Parliament and within the electorate – will require far more than a new name at the top.

Share

Subscribe now

In recent months, Australia’s hate-speech laws have been expanded, with state governments moving in quickly behind new federal legislation offered as supposedly necessary responses to a claimed upsurge in antisemitism. The Queensland government – suffering from a classic case of the fear of missing out – has followed the changes already made in New South Wales and at the federal level, by introducing legislation that will criminalise the public use of phrases such as “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada”, with penalties of up to two years in jail.

The speed at which these measures have been introduced raises many questions about their intent, how this legislation will be applied and, of course, the freedoms that they will restrict. Queensland’s political history, particularly under the long-running Bjelke-Petersen era between 1968 to 1987, suggests that the state is very comfortable using public order laws to suppress dissent rather than manage it proportionately, which is what we would expect from a normal functioning democracy. But it’s clear that many jurisdictions in Australia are currently dysfunctional when it comes to political rights and freedoms of expression.

The practical implications of these laws are still unclear, and it may take a while before they are fully tested, although one member of the public was arrested for shouting out “shame” at the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, who is currently in Australia on an official state visit, for reasons which we are yet to fully comprehend. We now have a peculiar situation where identical speech – such as “from the river to the sea”, or perhaps even the word “shame” – may be lawful in one state and criminalised in another, depending purely on where the statement is made.

Protest slogans shouted in Perth – as they were today – may attract no sanction, while the same words uttered in Sydney or Brisbane could lead to arrest. The logic of this is legally incoherent, particularly in a country with national media, online communication, and international audiences. This will have dire consequences on political expression that extends far beyond the stated goal of supposedly protecting a specific community from harm, where that same community is, instead, using it to further their own political interests and supress the interests of others.

What these laws are ultimately protecting is not “social cohesion” – as the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and NSW Premier Chris Minns keep claiming – but protecting and legitimising the criminal actions of the state of Israel, as well as the ideology of Zionism as it is currently stands within Israeli policy.

What is really being protected?

It’s worth having a short look at history to see exactly what is being protected here. The ideology of Zionism appeared in the early part of the twentieth century, with the view of creating a Jewish state in a land that was predominantly Arab – when the Balfour Declaration was released in 1917, the population in the region of Mandatory Palestine was 94 per cent Arab, and just under 6 per cent Jewish.

Over the next century, through war, displacement and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Israel and fully supported by the imperial powers, that demographic number has changed dramatically. The mass expulsions associated with the Nakba from 1946 onwards, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, successive military conflicts and the ongoing occupation and Israeli settlement of Palestinian territories has produced a radically different population balance and further entrenched inequality.

This historical and brutal transformation of the population is, for many people, at the heart of the strong contemporary criticisms of Zionism as a political project. It’s a colonial-settler project – not unlike the one Australia established all the way back in 1788 – that has relied on displacement and the systematic denial of Palestinian self-determination, culminating in the recent actions in Gaza that a growing number of international bodies and human-rights organisations have articulated quite clearly as a genocide.

Within this context, the slogans that are now being criminalised in Australia are widely understood by many of their users – not all, but many – as expressions of a resistance to mass violence, murder and dispossession of Palestinian people, not as calls for harm to Jewish people. Conflating these clear political expressions with antisemitism is deliberately tactic by Zionist groups to remove the clear differences between Judaism, Jewish communities, and the actions of a nation–state, in this case, the state of Israel.

Australian governments keep saying that these laws are necessary to combat antisemitism which, of course, must be addressed in those cases where it does exist. Yet the political function of these accusations can’t just be ignored and washed away. In practice, the liberal accusations of antisemitism are often used to narrow public debate, delegitimise any criticism of the state of Israel, and enforce a specific type of narrative across politics, media and many other institutions.

Pro-Israel advocacy within Australia operates through conventional lobbying channels, the strong influence of mainstream media narratives, and the close relationships with political leaders, to push through particular agendas, such as the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism that blurs the line between prejudice against Jews and opposition to Israeli state policy.

This influence and concentration of influence is not some secret cabal, it’s very real, we can see it happening with our own eyes, and can see it exercised with considerable force, as we can have seen in New South Wales and Queensland.

Pointing out this power and influence is always labelled as an antisemitic trope, yet the evidence is visible in the extraordinary measures that have been put in place during this visit of President Herzog. Large parts of Sydney have been effectively shut down and gated up, protest rights have been curtailed, and new laws have been rushed through parliament, all in the name of deflecting from the genocidal actions of the state of Israel. If this is not the extraordinary use of power and influence, what then is it?

The New South Wales Labor Party has gone as far as threating internal disciplinary action and removal of pre-selections over speech that’s deemed to be “unacceptable”, creating an atmosphere of fear and compliance within the party, although that didn’t stop Labor MLCs Cameron Murphy, Stephen Lawrence and Sarah Kaine from attending the Sydney protests.

No comparable restrictions have been provided during visits by other foreign leaders, including those responsible for wars, occupations or human-rights abuses, and Australia has never criminalised slogans criticising the United States, China or any other state. The fact that this exceptionalism that has been applied to the state of Israel suggests that something more than safety for the Jewish community is at stake here.

Israel’s standing internationally has deteriorated remarkably since its actions in Gaza commenced in 2023, yet Australian governments have responded by granting its head of state an elevated level of protection and deference, even to the point where Premier Minns was holding an umbrella to protect President Herzog from the rain as he gave his speech at the Bondi Pavillion. Symbolism is important in politics, but for Minns to give out this visual metaphor to the public was quite astonishing.

The invitation itself was gladly accepted by Israel, in its attempts to reverse its poor international standing, and it provides a level of respectability to the Israel government that many people in Australia just cannot accept – including many non-Zionist Jewish people – and it’s just more evidence that the charade of politics is far removed from the reality that exists within public sentiment.

Politics could have been avoided with an ethical alternative

The visit by President Herzog was promoted as a gesture of solidarity following the Bondi terror attack in December, but it’s clear that this was yet another politicised act. Only one of the victims was actually an Israeli citizen – three were not Jewish – and while it was clear that it was an antisemitic attack, we’re not clear about the full motivations of the alleged killers.

In this case, why was it necessary to make the invitation to a political figure? If the intention was to genuinely support Jewish communities in a moment of grief in Sydney, a different choice should have been made. A senior religious figure such as Rabbi David Rosen, who resides in Israel and is known for separating Jewish ethics from the state violence of Israel, and for engaging in dialogue between Judaism and Islam, would have provided the space for mourning without the politics that came to surround this event.

Instead, the decision to host a serving head of state ensured the event became inseparable from Israel’s conduct in Gaza and from Australia’s own political choices. Surely this would have been known by Albanese, and we can see that this was a foolish political choice to invite Herzog, even if it was primarily made at the behest of Zionist groups in Australia.

This was a moment when the Australian government could have drawn a clear line between respect for Jewish Australians who are grieving, and endorsing the actions of a foreign government. If Albanese had chosen an alternative based on ethics and reconciliation – and a clear choice on religion, rather than politics – the prime minister could have avoided the turmoil that erupted on the streets of Sydney.

Instead, Australia officially offered Israel a platform of respectability and legitimacy at a time when it faces unprecedented international criticism over war crimes, genocide and its practices of apartheid, reinforcing the perception that domestic political considerations and pressures coming in from lobbyists has far outweighed any judgments that should have been based on principle.

Sydney’s police brutality continues

Despite the legal uncertainty over the protests in Sydney – the Supreme Court handed down its decision to block the protest just one hour before its scheduled time at 5.30pm – and despite the heavy policing, the action against the Herzog’s visit did proceed peacefully, with thousands gathering in Sydney and many other demonstrations across 30 cities and towns across Australia.

That was until the NSW Police decided to provoke the crowds in Sydney, incited their own violence by throwing punches and using pepper spray, and went on to brutalise and arrest 27 people, including 20 Muslim men, who were praying outside Sydney Town Hall, an elderly man who had raised his arms up to surrender, a 71-year-old woman, pepper spraying a disabled woman, and then went on to punch a few women in the head, all video recorded and shared on social media.

There were also police snipers on rooftops surrounding Sydney Town Hall, although it was never made clear who they were actually going to be protecting, because the protests – until the NSW Police sought provocation – were absent of any violence or disorder. And once again, it raises further questions about why such a restrictive approach was required by the NSW government and police, where the responses appeared less about public safety and more about controlling the narrative for the state of Israel and suppressing dissent.

It also shows a continuing pattern over the recent years in Australian politics, all implemented by Labor governments, with the exception of Queensland: a clear alignment with powerful interests and lobbying groups who will use their power in extreme ways, a rapid legislative response to constrain protest even if these laws are found to be unconstitutional later on, and an unwillingness to challenge foreign governments even when doing so carries a high political cost.

State and federal leaders have been corralled into providing credibility to a foreign government that many regard as an international pariah, and in the process, they’ve severely curtailed fundamental freedoms at home. The result has been a week of division, distrust and disillusionment – far from the “social cohesion” supposedly desired by Albanese and Minns – and another reminder that Australia’s political class remains vulnerable to pressure just at a time when it should be acting with principle in the national and public interest.

The decision to invite and diplomatically protect an Israeli president accused of inciting genocide, while using police brutality against those protesting Israel’s actions, may yet cost Premier Minns and Prime Minister Albanese far more in the long run. In good time, they might realise the errors of their ways – by which point, it could end up being too late for them.

Share

Subscribe now