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

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

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

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

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

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

The teals become a part of the establishment

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

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

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

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

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

The limitations of Hanson’s monoculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missing in action: Where have the Greens gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The electorate just doesn’t care anymore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the hidden implications of AUKUS and integration into US military structures; a housing crisis that governments continue to talk about but seem unwilling to solve; and growing pressures on universities as international students and migrants become political scapegoats for policy failures.

AUKUS and Israel: The alliance Australia was never asked to join

Australians have spent the past five years arguing about the cost of AUKUS, the viability of the submarine program and whether the United States can actually or will deliver what has been promised. But those arguments are distracting from a much larger and far more divisive issue.

We now know that AUKUS was never just a program about submarines – although that’s what successive governments have kept telling the public – it’s a program for embedding Australia even more deeply into American military, intelligence and industrial systems, and it will be embedded so deeply that it will be impossible to get out of. And once we’re in there, we’ll also inherent all of America’s strategic relationships, whether we like it or not.

This is a big issue because the United States is now moving to deepen its military integration with Israel, with proposed legislation before Congress which will connect defence technologies, intelligence systems, research programs, logistics networks and weapons development between the two countries to an unprecedented level.

For Australia – already integrating itself into US military structures through AUKUS and other agreements – the implications are pretty clear. If Australia becomes a part of the American defence ecosystem, and the US defence ecosystem becomes integrated with Israel, then Australia becomes a part of Israel’s military and strategic framework too.

There’s been almost no public conversation about whether Australians are comfortable with this deeper military connection with Israel. And sure, most of this is being decided in Washington behind closed doors and will be voted on by US Congress, but it’s all wrapped in the language of the alliance, the interoperability and national security bullshit that’s espoused by the defence minister Richard Marles and, most importantly, we’ve been told nothing at all about these developments.

Given the direction the United States has taken under the Trump regime, it’s debateable whether Australia should maintain good relations with the United States. But diplomatic relationships should be able to survive catastrophic administrations. If AUKUS is bringing Australia closer into the expanding web of US–Israel defence integration, then the public deserves an honest debate about it. So far, we haven’t heard anything at all.

The housing crisis nobody wants to fix

House prices across the nation have fallen by around 1 per cent since the federal budget was announced last month, and for many, this is a sign that the housing market might be cooling down. But the problem is that this is only a small drop and with a national median house price of over $1 million – a drop from $1,000,000 down to $990,000 still makes that house unaffordable – it’s not clear if this will make too much of a difference at this stage. Sure, it’s better to have prices decrease than increase, but they’ll have to drop by a lot more if housing is to become affordable again.

The problem is that housing is stuck between two political realities. Governments regularly acknowledge younger people are being locked out of home ownership, while simultaneously pushing policies that are designed to ensure existing property values never fall significantly. Politicians then talk about affordability, but panic at the prospect of genuinely affordable housing.

Inflation is still high at 4.2 per cent but has moderated somewhat, although groceries, rents, mortgages, and energy costs do remain high. For many households, official economic improvements exist largely on paper while financial stress remains a daily reality.

Housing sits at the centre of this because it’s become a symbol of an economic system that has increasingly rewarded the asset class over the working class. Those who bought decades ago have often accumulated extraordinary wealth through little more than the luck of timing and the many policy changes from successive governments that have rewarded this luck, while Millennials and Gen Z face larger deposits, higher debts and increasingly insecure rental markets.

Housing affordability should remain a major political issue during the week – the majority owner of RealEstate.com.au – News Corporation – will be watching to see if property prices do drop even further, which, of course, will be reported as a calamity for the asset class, rather than a step in the right direction for housing affordability.

Falling universities standards and the migrant as the convenient scapegoat

Australia’s university sector is discovering the consequences of policies they should never been forced to introduce in the first place. For decades, governments steadily withdrew public funding while encouraging universities to behave more like corporations, forcing them to chase international student revenue to fill the gap.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having international students – it broadens the diversity of campus life, works as a two-way process of cultural exchange. Even if international students only stay for the term of their course, they engage locally and take their experiences and knowledge back to their own communities in their home countries.

If we can ignore the fact that most universities used these students as cash cows and did very little to support them through additional language skill courses and pretty much left them to their own devices, now that migration reduction is becoming a political target – including international students – universities are being punished for a dependency that successive governments have actively encouraged over the past 30 years or so, even though they were warned not to.

And just as it is with housing, the Albanese government is caught between two competing political pressures. There’s a great deal of hostility towards migrants being hurled about by One Nation, and this is being amplified by all the right-wing political opportunists who blame migrants for virtually every social and economic problem, real or imagined.

On the other hand, universities have been warning about budget shortfalls, academic job losses and declining research opportunities if international student numbers continue to fall. And with the education minister, Jason Clare, asleep at the wheel – and possibly distracted with trying to shore up his leadership credentials in a post-Albanese environment – the government is not defending the university system that has been falling apart for some time.

The housing debate is good example of government shirking its responsibilities. International students have become a convenient scapegoat for a housing crisis that has been decades in the making. The evidence points overwhelmingly towards tax concessions, speculative investment, planning failures and chronic underinvestment in public housing as the primary reasons for unaffordability. Yet blaming international students and migrants is politically easier than confronting a property market that has enriched investors while locking younger generations out of home ownership.

Meanwhile, Australia’s universities are showing signs of a broader decline. Falling global rankings, governance scandals (a big hello to Julie Bishop), controversies over executive salaries and the growing casualisation of staff all points to institutions struggling to reconcile their public responsibilities with private-sector business models that were foisted upon them in the early 1990s, where it became more important for universities to look like the business quarters of Sydney and Melbourne, than to have academic rigour and credibility, and act like centres of education, research and critical inquiry.

What we’re seeing at the moment is the culmination of years of neglect of the university sector: more international students to help pay for the high remuneration packages of poorly qualified chancellors (once again, a big shout out to Julie Bishop); and a new fancy building here and there to keep up appearances – it’s a bit like all those parents who complained to the NSW Department of Education about demountable buildings at primary schools, although in this case, it’s the vice-chancellors who are doing all the complaining. The message always has to be: it’s not the look of the building that matters, it’s all about the quality of education that occurs inside the building.

And what we’re seeing is that old familiar political pattern: a political class searching for easy targets while avoiding difficult reforms. Students become statistics, migrants are kicked into and blamed for everything, and universities become collateral damage in a debate that rarely has anything to do with education at all.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the growing pressure on the Albanese government over Gaza; questions about the future of the teal independents; the AUKUS debacle continues; and the ongoing credibility crisis facing the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

The slow-burn war Albanese and Wong don’t want to talk about

The Gaza conflict is becoming a more politically difficult issue for the Albanese government, not because it’s difficult to understand – everyone else in the world can see what’s going on – but because it’s an issue that is becoming too difficult to keep ignoring.

While the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong continue to carefully word their diplomatic messaging so they don’t offend the government of Israel and their Zionist supporters here in Australia, there have been allegations from the film-maker and activist, Juliet Lamont – who was illegally detained by Israel for attempting to bring aid to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla – of psychosexual abuse, torture and rape by members of the Israel Defense Forces.

As if it wasn’t bad enough for the Australian government to constantly ignore all the war crimes, collective punishment and the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted by Israel upon the people in Gaza, it’s obvious that even when the punishment is inflicted upon Australian citizens, the government will continue with the self-imposed blind spot when it comes to Israel.

In the case of Zomi Frankcom, the Australia aid worker who was killed in the targeted attack by the IDF in 2024, Senator Wong expressed some outrage but then went on to say that it’s “hard to judge from afar”, which surely will the included on the Senator’s political epitaph, whenever that’s written up. Thoughts and prayers were also offered at the time by the Senator, that mealy-mouthed response that’s so meaningless that it’s almost offensive – up there with sympathy trolling of I’m sorry you feel that way – that’s offered at those times when there are no witnesses to explain what really happened.

But thoughts and prayers won’t be enough this time around. Lamont’s evidence is a bit more problematic for the government. She’s alive and well – as well as can be after such an ordeal – and well enough to give her accounts of the torture, sexual abuse and rape perpetrated by the IDF. There’s also 10 other Australian citizens who were on the flotilla, who have provided their documentation of the abuse and their allegations to the International Criminal Court, a far more reliable arbiter of these types of crimes than the Australian government will ever be.

The message for many years within the Australian community has been that women have to be believed when it comes to sexual violence but, obviously, there are many asterisks, exclusions, subclauses and other assorted fine print: women are not believed when the actions of sexual violence and rape are committed by the Israel Defense Forces; the likes of Albanese and Wong will make sure of that.

Are the teals independent or a party in disguise?

The discussion about the teal independents forming a political party has been floating around ever since so many of them were elected at the 2022 federal election – and many of them still remain – but it’s becoming more pertinent with the increasingly fragmented political landscape, especially on the centre-right side of politics. In reality, it brings up a question that critics have been asking since the teals first emerged: how independent are the independents? And if they form a party, does it really matter anyway?

The teals – like all other independents – benefit from being able to campaign as the representative of the local community, free from the talking-point discipline and the factions that dominate the major parties. But in the case of the teals, they’ve been able to benefit from a party-like structure, by receiving support primarily from Climate 200, and shared fundraising networks, similar policy ideals, especially on climate, and a similar political brand, although there have been several independents regarded as “teal” who haven’t used the colour teal at all.

The suggestion that they may now formalise those arrangements into a party structure raises the possibility that the distinction was never quite as clear as it was once claimed. But, then again, how much will the voters in these electorates be concerned about whether the successful member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, arrives at the next federal election campaign as the teal independent candidate, or as a member of the Teal Party? Will the idea of the “small-t Teal” become a part of the political vernacular, to replace the “small-l Liberal”?

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – who we can easily imagine either handing out leaflets for a prospective Teal Party or, indeed, as a candidate – sees the formation of a party as an opportunity for the teals. With the major parties suffering declining primary votes and public trust continuing to erode – as it has been for many years – there is room for a new force to occupy the political centre ground, to counter the actions of One Nation on the centre-right. Yet creating a party could also destroy much of the teal movement’s unique selling point. Voters who backed local independents in elections past, may not sign up again if they see the teals as just another national political machine. And maybe they just won’t care.

The irony in this case is that the teals emerged as a reaction against the many failures of party politics and the two-party duopoly. If they now become a party themselves, they risk inheriting exactly the problems they once condemned: centralised decision-making, strict “talking points” messaging and discipline, factional disputes and the inevitable gap between grassroots rhetoric and political reality. And wouldn’t that be as boring as the proverbial batshit.

AUKUS: Pay more, get less

The latest adjustment to the AUKUS submarine program has been presented Defence Minister Richard Marles as a “sensible simplification” of an “extraordinarily complex defence project”. But we just have to have a good laugh here: whenever Marles crosses paths with the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth – as he did last week at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore – he always returns with ridiculous gifts that we have to pay for. Last year, Hegseth demanded a lift of defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP; this year, Australia quietly lifted defence spending from 2.3 per cent to 3.0 per cent of GDP, with more promised spending coming soon.

This year, Marles has announced that Australia will now purchase three second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the United States rather than the promised newly built vessels. The argument put forward by Marles seems straightforward: fewer submarine classes mean less costs, less complexity and a more manageable transition.

But beneath the bureaucratic language and talking points is the reality that we’re not being told about. After years of announcements, reviews, summits and promises of a “sovereign submarine capability”, Australia appears to be moving closer to becoming a long-term customer of American military hardware – and from the used car junk-yard section in front of the scrap metal division – rather than an independent defence power in its own right.

Take your pick: A Bug’s Life, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, or the even the Three Amigos!. In our version of the story, Australia is the endless servant of the United States, sending off Australian taxpayers money to Washington, and getting scraps in return. But no-one comes to the rescue: we’re stuck in this endless subservience until at least 2070. And by that stage, we’ll be so embedded in the military architecture of a diminishing American power, that it will be too late to change anything.

Thank you Scott Morrison for signing Australia up to this calamity. And thank you Anthony Albanese, for continuing with this debacle. Future generations will look back and be ashamed of your actions.

The corruption of the anti-corruption commission

The resignation of Commissioner Paul Brereton is a reminder of how quickly one of Australia’s most anticipated integrity bodies has fallen by the wayside and moved so far away from public expectations.

When the National Anti-Corruption Commission was established in 2023 – just three years ago – it was sold by the Albanese government as a powerful watchdog that would restore trust in government after the many years of scandals, questionable procurement decisions and controversies, especially those committed by the Morrison government. Instead, many Australians now see it as an organisation that’s more comfortable managing expectations than investigating actual corruption.

The decision not to pursue any referrals that came out of the Robodebt Royal Commission was perhaps a turning point for NACC. The most egregious cases of deliberate departmental mismanagement and overriding the law in the history of Australia politics was detected within this Commission, but no-one was held accountable for a scheme which ultimately killed over 2,000 people, and cost the Australian taxpayers $2.4 billion. Not one person.

It’s a complete failure, and if an anti-corruption commission can’t pick such low-hanging fruit – and fail to determine such obvious corruption, that was evident to everyone else except for the Commission itself – then there’s not much reason for that commission to exist. Best to start again.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the growing housing and inequality crisis, the continuing collapse of the Liberal Party and rise of populist politics, the emergence of independents and teals as a new political force, and the widening political fallout from Israel’s actions in Gaza and the debate surrounding Australians serving in the IDF.

The Parliament of property owners

Federal Parliament returns this week facing the political reality that neither the government nor the opposition particularly wants to address: the old economic “compact” between the current and former major parties is falling apart, and younger people now understand that the system no longer works in their favour and, perhaps, it never has.

After decades of the bipartisan worship and genuflection at the altar of property speculation, privatisation and “market efficiency”, the Albanese government now finds itself managing the consequences of a housing system that has transformed that basic human value – shelter – into a money-making machine and an extortion racket for the banks.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers uses the words of “intergenerational inequality”, but the deeper problem is that Australia’s political class spent well over 30 years creating an economy designed to protect asset holders at almost any social cost. Now that millions of younger Australians are locked out of housing altogether – even renting is becoming difficult – the same political and media establishment suddenly wants to sound concerned – really concerned – even though, in reality, they’re only pandering to vested interests – while mainly avoiding the serious reforms that will genuinely threaten entrenched wealth.

Predictably – as we’ve seen over the past two weeks – even the modest discussions about tax concessions, negative gearing, capital gains or housing investment will continue to trigger all of these hysterical warnings from lobby groups, property investors and conservative commentators claiming Labor is launching an “attack on aspiration”. But in reality, their panic is based on something that’s far easier to see: the Australian economy has become dangerously dependent on permanently rising property prices.

It won’t happen this week, but the real question facing Parliament in the long term is whether the government is actually prepared to challenge any of this in a meaningful way – or whether it just wants to give the appearance of being “reformist”, while actually protecting the structures that created all the problems in the first place.

The continuing collapse of the Liberal Party

Something which is a lot more serious than a temporary protest vote is now developing in Australian politics. The rise of One Nation is no longer just about culture wars, anti-immigration rhetoric or discontent on the fringes – although that’s a big part of it – it’s reflecting a much deeper malaise within mainstream politics across large parts of the country – particularly the voters who feel like they’ve been left behind economically, and are socially insecure and culturally ignored by both major-ish parties.

For years, Australia’s political and media establishment comforted itself with the belief that unbridled populism was something that happened elsewhere: Brexit in the UK, Trumpism in America, Europe’s nationalist right, and assorted “convenient idiots” in South America, who pave the way for vested corporate interests to take up the role that’s usually provided by government.

But after decades of wage stagnation, collapsing housing affordability, privatised public services and widening inequality, the social conditions that produced those movements now exist here too. As much as we might detest the prevailing attitudes of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the real surprise isn’t so much that it’s a fringe party on the rise – at least in the opinion polls – it’s that the major parties still seem shocked and confused by it.

The Liberal Party’s crisis is especially profound because it no longer appears to know what it actually stands for. It spent years fluctuating between corporate neoliberalism for donors and culture-war populism for voters, eventually satisfying neither of these groups. One Nation is now starting to grab the same territory the Liberal Party once occupied: railing against the elite and “woke”, fearful nationalism, distrust and resentment toward institutions.

Meanwhile, the Labor government risks making the same mistake many centre-left parties overseas have been making for some time: making that assumption that voters experiencing economic anxiety will automatically reject right-wing populism because it seems to be too unhinged. And wearing the clothing of conservatives – the same Tories Anthony Albanese claimed to fight against, because “that’s what I do” – means that the Labor Party will also one day suffer the same fate the Liberal Party is currently experiencing, and then wonder how it got to that point.

The Teal machine and the hole in the centre

Australian politics might be entering a strange phase where the structures that supported the traditional major parties are falling apart, but not sure what’s to replace them. We can see how One Nation is currently filling that gap on the centre-right side of politics, but what about the centre-left?

There’ a growing discussion about independents forming a stronger parliamentary force – either as a party or a far stronger alliance – as a counter to the rise of One Nation. Representatives such as Senator David Pocock represent a broader shift among affluent, highly educated urban voters who have become politically homeless inside a Liberal Party consumed by culture wars and increasingly disconnected from metropolitan Australia.

The “teal” movement started off as a revolt against the dysfunction, climate denialism and political corruption of the Liberal Party, but it also reflected a mood within the electorate that they wanted to see politics built around competence, moderation and stability – those same areas that the Liberal Party were ignoring.

Of course, there are going to be inherent problems – independents often present themselves as “post-political” figures who stand above party-based ideology, yet they also operate within the same economic framework that produced many of the frustrations now fuelling populist anger in the first place. Already, several teal independents have ruled out forming a party, but what will happen if the rise of One Nation becomes unstoppable?

The Labor Party might be in the ascendency at the moment – and there’s no space for a new progressive party to occupy right now – but that can always change. In the middle of 2021, with the Liberal Party already in government for eight years, the Labor government was told to just forget about the 2022 election, and prepare for campaign after that, with a new leader in either Jim Chalmers or Tanya Plibersek: that’s how confident the establishment was about the continuing dominance of the Liberal Party. That was 2021: have a good look at the current stocks of the Liberal Party, less than five years later. They are totally dysfunctional.

The independents should have a good look and assess that history, before it becomes too late to take up the opportunity when it presents itself.

The flotilla and a small crack in the Western consensus

The political fallout from Itamar Ben-Gvir’s treatment of the Gaza flotilla activists is becoming far more than just about the actions of a demonic and provocative Israeli minister going viral on social media. For many years, governments all around the world – including the first-class denialists, the Australian Labor government (a special mention to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong) – have spent more than two years defending, rationalising or carefully avoiding confronting Israel over its war crimes in Gaza and southern Lebanon, and kidding themselves that the international “rules-based order” still means something, when it obviously doesn’t.

It’s not a new style of imagery: detained civilians kneeling with zip ties aboard a seized aid flotilla in international waters, while one of Israel’s most violent, vile and extreme ministers publicly mocked them online. This is Ben-Gvir’s modus operandi – he’s been doing this for years and, along with Bezalel Smotrich, is among Israel’s most despicable parliamentarians, in a field of many.

That creates an increasingly dangerous political problem for governments all around the world. Official statements continue to express “concern” or “shock”, but it’s not really new material from Israel that we’re seeing, and the broader diplomatic and strategic relationship with Israel remains fundamentally intact. The contradiction is becoming harder to sustain though, particularly among younger Australians who consume international news outside traditional media frameworks and increasingly distrust establishment narratives surrounding the conflict.

The Foreign Minister Penny Wong infamously said that it’s hard to “judge from afar” when Israel cut food and water to starving Palestinians. Although Senator Wong did condemn Ben-Gvir – not the government of Israel, but only Ben-Gvir – she needs to start making more judgements about Israel’s war crimes, genocide, illegal actions and occupations in Palestine and southern Lebanon, and stop treating the public as fools. We can all see what’s happening and what Israel is doing and, yes, we are also afar and standing at the same distance from Gaza as Senator Wong is.

The IDF fighters amongst us

More people are now asking the question: if Australians who have travelled to fight in conflicts linked to Islamist groups, separatist militias or hostile foreign causes are subjected to intense national security scrutiny – as they should be – why is the involvement of people who have served in the Israeli Defense Forces never subjected to the same scrutiny?

The growing debate surrounding Australians serving in the IDF is exposing that glaring inconsistency at the heart of Western foreign policy and counterterrorism rhetoric. Federal governments have spent years expanding foreign fighter laws, surveillance powers and national security frameworks in the name of upholding international law – the so-called “rules-based order” – and preventing Australians from participating in overseas conflicts. Yet now, amid mounting allegations of war crimes and ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court into Gaza, the question is being totally ignored by the government.

One of these people – IDF volunteer Russell Campbell – was freely roaming the streets of Sydney, violently disrupting and attacking people who showed any evidence at all of supporting Palestine. Even though his actions were well-documented through social media, police officers were “unable to identify any offences”, doing nothing about it until he was arrested six months later. Would an Australian citizen with a Palestinian background returning from the region be afforded the same leniency?

Officially, the Albanese government insists serving in a recognised foreign military is not automatically illegal, and legally, that is correct. Politically, however, the issue is becoming harder to ignore as evidence and imagery from Palestine and southern Lebanon continue to shock international audiences.

Once the criticism transcends the scope of activists and legal groups and moves into the mainstream electorate – and especially the younger members of the electorate, the cowardice that has always been there, just becomes more obvious and more difficult to sustain.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the political panic over Labor’s property tax reforms… the concocted backlash to the federal Budget… the fragmentation of conservative politics… and how rising fuel and cost-of-living pressures are exposing deeper problems in Australia’s economy.

The great Australian property panic

Australian politics has tried to set foot in that sacred temple of property speculation, and the reaction from the conservatives has entirely predictable. Labor’s modest attempt to wind back negative gearing concessions – and that’s what it is: modest – and reduce the capital gains tax discount has triggered a full-scale panic from the establishment, as though the government had announced the socialist takeover of Toorak, Dalkeith and Mosman all at once, rather than a small recalibration of tax policy that overwhelmingly favours wealthy asset holders.

For decades, Australia’s political and media class has built an economy around inflated house prices, tax minimisation and intergenerational wealth transfer, while younger Australians were told to stop buying coffee and smashed avocadoes if they wanted to live in their own home. Now that even a very limited reform is being discussed, the same vested interests that have benefited from the system are suddenly warning of “economic collapse”, “housing shortages” and “investor flight” – without any evidence to back their claims – despite investors already treating housing less as shelter and more as a wealth creation mechanism.

What makes the politics even stranger in this case is the collapse of traditional party loyalties beneath the surface. Despite their political dominance, the Labor primary vote remains soft. The Liberals are still imploding, although Angus Taylor has appeared as the preferred prime minister in the latest Resolve opinion poll, commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald, a rag that’s been consistently pushing the “broken promise” narrative.

And One Nation – a permanent protest vehicle powered up by resentment, grievance and media stunts – is harvesting disillusionment from the conservative base at an extraordinary level. The recent defections of figures like former Liberal Party figures Teena McQueen and Hollie Hughes confirm what has become increasingly obvious: much of the Australian right is no longer interested in debating and implementing policy that’s to the benefit of the country, but seeking a more destructive form of oppositional politics, as if what they’ve provided over the past 30 years or so hasn’t been destructive enough.

The bigger question – as always – is whether any of these parties are genuinely prepared to confront the structural failures of Australia’s housing sector – or whether this is just another reshuffling of the bipartisan factions inside a political system that’s still terrified of upsetting the propertied class and vested interests. The Australian Greens seem to be the only ones prepared to take on these issues, but the mainstream media is far too interested in pushing the case of vested interests and getting on with attacking the Labor government: who’s got time for fairness and equity?…

The Budget and the collapse of the old consensus

The Budget narrative that’s being pushed by the mainstream is increasingly becoming negative, as they try to find a way creating that inane commentary of “winners and losers”, and “what’s in it for you”, rather than focusing on what’s best for our society.

What was presented by Treasurer Jim Chalmers as a small attempt to rebalance an overheated housing market is now in conflict with the decades of political mythology about property, wealth and economic management. The reaction has been ferocious because the reforms – albeit small – expose the harsh truth of Australian politics: the economy has been structured for years around protecting asset inflation while wages for workers have stagnated, inequality has widened and younger Australians were increasingly locked out of economic security. Governments do have choices, and there are the choices they have made.

This government finds itself trapped between these competing issues – on the one hand, voters are angry about housing affordability and economic inequality, and are demanding a change to this. On the other, older investors, financial commentators and property interests – the ones with the loudest voices – are treating even this level of reform and tinkering at the edges as a political heresy. The result is this strange environment where the Labor government is being accused simultaneously of reckless and overly cautious. It can be one or the other, but surely it can’t be both.

At the same time, the government’s push to “slow growth” in the NDIS – or massive cutbacks in anyone else’s language – has deepened that cynicism that “budget responsibility” still means asking ordinary people to absorb the burden while defence contractors and corporate interests remain unscathed.

Meanwhile, the political system continues on the path of fragmentation – it’s affecting the conservative side of politics at the moment, but it will affect Labor and progressive politics, it’s just not clear at this stage how that will occur. The danger for Labor is that while it attempts to cautiously retreat from parts of neoliberalist thinking – ever so slightly – the public may already have already worked out that the entire political class remains incapable of delivering meaningful economic security for as many people as possible, or the social change required to do this.

Petrol politics and the crisis economy

Australian politics is once again discovering how fragile the country’s economic model really is. The continuing instability in Western Asia/Middle East has immediately reignited the fears about fuel prices, inflation and supply chains, exposing the uncomfortable reality that one of the world’s largest energy exporters remains deeply vulnerable to global oil shocks.

After decades of privatisation, refinery closures and “market efficiency”, Australia now imports most of the fuel that it needs to keep the economy functioning, while governments quietly scramble to secure emergency diesel shipments every time geopolitical tensions escalate, as they have done on this occasion, with agreements made with Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysis, Brunei and Japan.

And, of course, the political opportunities that this crisis presents to leverage against are already being exploited. Conservatives are attacking the government’s energy transition plans, insisting that Australia should double down on fossil fuel dependence in the name of “energy security”, despite the fact that decades of deregulation and corporate consolidation helped to create this vulnerability in the first place. Meanwhile, the government is attempting to present itself as economically responsible while carefully avoiding any serious confrontation with the market structures driving price instability across housing, energy and transport.

Underneath all of this is a far greater problem: the electorate is exhausted by this permanent economic anxiety and continuing crisis. Mortgage stress, soaring rents, grocery prices and electricity bills have created a political mood far more volatile than our political leaders would be willing to admit. The government talks about “productivity”, “supply constraints” and “fiscal discipline” – the old language of neoliberalism that pleases the markets – but voters increasingly see a system where massive defence spending, corporate profits and speculative wealth remains protected while ordinary households are told to accept sacrifice.

Even the housing debate now reveals a larger crisis in the delivery of essential services. Politicians endlessly announce housing targets and infrastructure plans, yet governments struggle to physically deliver projects on time or at scale, as has been the case with the Housing Australia Future Fund – 839 dwelling created after 18 months.

Labour shortages, planning chaos, developer speculation and collapsing construction firms have turned the idea of “nation building” into a kind of permanent Powerpoint presentation that’s dragged out on Budget night and then put back into the archive. Real change needs to be activated right now, not tomorrow, next month, next year. Right now.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: Labor’s defining Budget test over tax reform, housing affordability, gas exports and cost-of-living pressures, as the Albanese government faces growing demands for economic change while navigating the rise of One Nation, deepening tensions with China and mounting questions about whether caution has replaced genuine reform.

The federal Budget and Labor’s reform agenda

The Albanese government’s upcoming federal Budget will dominate political discussion this week, particularly around whether Labor is willing to pursue serious budgetary reform in its second term, even though it’s process that it will be starting around four years too late. Better late than never though. The pre-Budget debates have focussed on housing tax concessions, budget repair, energy policy and whether Labor has become far too cautious politically for its own good.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese are facing pressure from the more progressive MPs on its backbench, from many economists, and the independents on the crossbench, to pursue broader tax reform; while business groups – who represent the many vested interests across Australia – are warning against any major change, aside from their erstwhile demands for “lower taxes”. And why not: they’re doing very well from the existing arrangements, and will always work to protect their own interests, and not in the interests of the community. Questions around gas exports, fuel security and the government’s broader economic narrative are likely to define the week: it is, after all, Budget week.

Gas exports, energy prices and the “windfall tax” debate

The political fight over gas exports and domestic energy prices has been escalating, and the debate had focused on whether Australia should implement a 25 per cent gas export tax or expand reservation schemes to lower domestic prices and increase government revenue.

While the Albanese government has announced a 20 per cent reservation that will be implemented in 2027, it has ruled out a gas exports tax, arguing it could damage certainty in investment – even though there’s much evidence out there to suggest that it won’t – and it’s a debate that’s taking place at the same time that multinational gas companies keep extracting enormous profits without a sufficient return to the Australian public. Independent MPs, unions and the Australian Greens are expected to intensify pressure this week ahead of the Budget.

Housing affordability and negative gearing

Housing affordability remains as one our most politically volatile issues, especially for millennials and Gen Z. There has been much speculation about changes to negative gearing and capital gains taxes, but there’s other issues that relate to housing supply as well, and it will be interesting to see what the government will announce on Tuesday night. The government faces a number of pressures – younger people demanding housing reform, so at least they can live somewhere, while industry groups are lobbying hard to resist these changes.

And it’s usually the industry groups that win out, irrespective of the government of the day. The Coalition and the Australian Greens will continue to frame the Labor government as being either too weak or too cautious on the housing crisis and, in this case, they are absolutely correct.

The rise of One Nation and right-wing populism

One Nation’s growing electoral support is becoming a major political issue for both Labor and the Coalition, but especially for the Liberal Party, which was almost wiped out at the Farrer byelection on the weekend. One Nation won the byelection and this suggests the party is increasingly attracting rural working-class voters frustrated by housing costs, migration levels, energy prices and economic insecurity, even though the party offers no real solutions to any of these concerns and is primarily an avenue for the electorate to funnel their grievances and anger, emotions that are usually whipped up by the likes of One Nation in the first place.

It’s a classic case of vote for us, because we will fix the problems that we created.

While it’s not clear at this stage how this splintering of the conservative side of politics will affect the Labor Party – it didn’t run a candidate in this byelection, and the recent state election in South Australia suggests that there hasn’t been an negative effect so far – it does appear to be a reorganisation of the deck chairs, primarily at the expense of the Liberal Party.

The eternal cost-of-living pressures

Inflation has risen to 4.6 per cent, and cost-of-living pressures have the potential to cause major political problems. Rising insurance costs, rents, mortgages, groceries, fuel prices and electricity bills continue to drive voter dissatisfaction, although it’s not being vented directly towards the Labor government.

The Leader of the Opposition, Angus Taylor – facing his own pressures after the Liberal Party’s diabolical performance at the Farrer byelection – is attempting to frame Labor as economically weak and ineffective, while the government is arguing that global conditions and energy instability are major contributing factors.

But as the British Prime Minister Harold McMillan once said, the role of government is to manage events: whether they’re expected or unexpected, it’s up to the government of the day to resolve them. We should expect to see more arguments this week around wages, supermarket pricing, tax relief and energy bills.

Australia–China relations and more tensions in the Indo–Pacific

Australia’s relationship with China always bubbles under the surface – amplified and magnified by conservative politicians and the right-wing media – and it again is being whipped up to the forefront of political debate, particularly around issues relating to defence spending, regional security, trade dependency and the expanding and secretive AUKUS arrangements with the United States and Britain.

Recent military activity in the South China Sea and growing concern about instability around Taiwan are putting pressure on the Albanese government to clarify Australia’s long-term strategic position while at the same time, business groups and sections of Labor Party are continuing to push for stable economic engagement with China, given its importance to Australian exports and the strong cultural and social relationship between the two countries.

The Coalition is likely to argue Labor is not moving quickly enough to prepare for a war with China – a war that has around a zero per cent chance of materialising – while the government will attempt to balance national security concerns with economic pragmatism. It’s a debate that’s likely to intensify this week because, in Australian politics, there’s always room for jingoism and a healthy dose of racism.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the truths being withheld in the antisemitism inquiry… a US strategy unravelling in the Middle East… a federal Budget shaped by fear rather than reform… and a Liberal Party victory that masks the deepening fractures on the right.

The blind spots and closed doors: What the antisemitism inquiry isn’t telling us

The interim findings of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion were announced at the end of last week – and while most of it at this stage seems to be uncontroversial, the actions of the NSW Police seems to have been underplayed, and the information that ASIO and the Australian Federal Police may have held on the two Bondi shooters, and how their inactions may have contributed to the tragedy in December 2025, has been withheld.

The nine recommendations that have been released seem to be unremarkable, and have suggested a tighter co-ordination of security and police resources, modest reforms to firearms control and a gun buy-back scheme, and the suggestion that existing legal frameworks are adequate, albeit with some strengthening of laws in certain areas. Yet there’s an uncomfortable reality that’s sitting under the surface: if the legal framework is already adequate, then why did these failures occurs? What exactly did ASIO know, and will we ever find out?

Just like in the Lindt Café attack in 2014, the Bondi attacks have become another example of failures within our security systems. The Lindt Café attacker – Man Haron Monis – was an ASIO “asset”, where he was useful in creating the links to other miscreants and possible terrorists, and was tolerated while he served this purpose. It’s quite possible that the two Bondi attackers also served a similar role – their weapons were legally obtained, intelligence agencies had been aware for some time of the risks they posed to the community, and warnings about these vulnerabilities seem to have been identified but not acted upon.

That, of course, leads to a bigger question: what exactly is the point of ASIO and the Australian Federal Police if it can’t transform the information they hold on these people that are a danger to society, into prevention and protections for the community?

The five unreleased recommendations have been withheld because of national security and ongoing criminal proceedings – in the case against Naveed Akram, that is certainly justified, but national security grounds? It could be a secrecy that’s been used to protect security agencies institutions from embarrassment and cover over their ongoing incompetence, rather than about protecting the public from harm.

There needs to be accountability here, and the Royal Commission should look at leadership within these security agencies, what their priorities are, and what’s happening to all the massive increases in funding that both ASIO and the Australian Federal Police always receive when they agitate about security threats, the same threats that they never seem to be able to stop. The hearings in Sydney will continue and keep the pressure on, but the central issue remains: how much of the truth is being withheld, and when will the public will ever be allowed to see it?

A war without the endgame: Australia watches as the US strategy collapses

The expanding conflict involving Iran, Israel, Lebanon and the United States is placing more pressure on the fragile global order that Australia has long relied upon. Israel implemented a genocide and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and they’ve exported this campaign into southern Lebanon, with a growing sense that Israel is totally out of control and more humanitarian disasters are going to be created, certainly in the lead up to the next Israeli general election.

The stated objectives from the United States – deterrence, containment and increased influence in the region – is now looking less like a coherent plan and more like a set of unrealistic ambitions and foolish overreach. Sixty days into this war against Iran, and none of the US objectives have materialised. Instead, oil prices have risen sharply, allies are unclear about what their relationship with the United States is – or even if there still is one – and adversaries such as Iran and Hezbollah have adapted during this war through the use of asymmetric warfare tactics.

And this is no longer a projection of American power; it’s been an exercise in the limitations of its power. Perhaps some time ago – or under a different President – the United States could have shaped these events in its favour. But this time around, it’s wallowing like a weakened and diminishing power, with an incompetent buffoon as a President, who’s only too happy to talk about his exceptionalism, while the authority of the United States burns in the background. At least Nero fiddled on his cithara during the Great Fire of Rome; Donald Trump waxes lyrical like a stand-up comedian, hoping no one will notice the calamity that’s swallowing up his Presidency.

A budget on the brink? An international crisis, a domestic compromise

The coming federal budget has promised much, but is becoming less of an economic blueprint for change, and more like an outline of the Albanese government’s political priorities. Of course, there are many pressures on the federal government due to weakening economic circumstances, and an increase in global instability created by the unstable Trump regime.

There’s issues related to cost-of-living relief, healthcare, housing, and national security spending all competing for attention, but the bigger question is whether the upcoming Budget will result in a coherent plan for much-needed economic reform.

Rising oil prices and disruptions to many supply chains are already filtering through to household budgets, and while federal Budgets can’t create immediate change, this one has to be more than the window dressing and the “abundance of caution” that the Prime Minister has become well-known for. Temporary fixes like extending fuel excise cuts may ease short-term pain, but they will do little to address the structural problems that exist in the Australian economy.

However, there might some unexpected announcements by the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. Speculation about winding back negative gearing and capital gains concessions has dragged on for many years, and it appears that the federal government might make some reforms here. But why now? As we know, Anthony Albanese is not one to risk any of his political capital, even when he holds a massive amount of it, but there’s a clear political incentive: younger voters now outnumber the older propertied classes that built their exorbitant wealth through the outrageous policies implemented by the Howard government.

Changing these policies to make them fairer for younger voters now might make also them forget that Albanese failed to stand up to vested interests by blocking a 25 per cent gas export tax. But it could also end up being a case of trying to satisfy everyone, but convincing no one – and making the Budget look like the usual game of politics, rather than doing anything economically meaningful.

Despite the win, there’s still a weakness in the Liberal vote

The win in the Nepean by-election in Victoria has been celebrated by the Liberal Party as a major victory, but underneath all the theatre is still an uncomfortable reality. The prominence in this campaign of the Victoria leader of the opposition, Jess Wilson – effectively treated as the main act in what should have been a routine by-election – suggests a party stretching itself to manufacture a new-found momentum when it actually doesn’t exist. Declaring herself to be the “next premier of Victoria” after a single by-election win might energise the Liberal Party faithful, but it’s also a sign of hubris when a lower-key reaction would have been more useful.

While the result was relatively meaningless – Nepean is a traditionally safe Liberal Party seat, and Labor didn’t run a candidate in this by-election – it did reinforce a longer-term trend: the fragmentation of the conservative vote. Increasing reliance on preference flows from far-right parties like One Nation seems to be becoming a necessity for the Liberal Party, but all it’s going to do is drag both the Liberal Party and One Nation from the seat numbers that are needed to form government.

With another electoral test coming up in the federal seat of Farrer – the by-election there will be held on 9 May – the broader picture is becoming clearer: the control of the two-party system by the major parties is still breaking at the seams, and it’s just a question of who picks up the pieces. For conservatives, the challenge is not just about winning seats – it’s about holding together a coalition of interests that increasingly looks like it doesn’t agree with itself.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: ANZAC Day hijacked by extremists… the continuing culture wars… gas profits… book censorship by the Zionists and the rise of extremist politics.

The ANZAC Day culture wars continue

The Welcome to Country ceremonies on Anzac Day continue to be hijacked by the extremist culture war warriors, led by actors such as the anti-immigration and nationalist group Fight For Australia and the conservative political lobbyist Advance Australia – and we provide our regular reminder that John Roth (the husband of Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal) donated $50,000 to Advance – so much for social cohesion.

While there has been some outrage from political leaders, it’s a predictable outcome when these highly organised and well-funded groups based around grievance politics come across a political class that’s far too cautious to confront it directly. It’s also to be expected when people such as the unrepresentative billionaire Gina Rinehart delivers a scathing address on the steps of the Sydney Opera House on Anzac Day eve, offering her unhinged opinions of school children “being taught to hate Australia”, calling for a crackdown on immigration, attacking environmental laws and trans women in sport.

What place has this type of grievance politics when commemorating the deaths of over 8,700 Australian soldiers at Anzac Cove? What gives Rinehart the right to inappropriately provide her right-wing bile and whining at such an important event?

The right has carefully manufactured Anzac Day into a quasi-religious day over the past forty years or so, and now feel that they own the day so much that they can drown out an Indigenous offering to welcome people to a commemoration of fallen soldiers – which includes 1,300 Indigenous soldiers who served during World War I, with around 300 of them killed in action.

There are zero-tolerance policies within many elite sporting codes where spectators who exhibit racist behaviour can receive a life-time ban, with a clear message that their racism is not wanted here. It’s time to apply these policies to Anzac Day events, and perhaps apply even harsher policies for billionaires – especially one whose father wanted to poison Aboriginal water holes so they would breed out – who use these special national moments to platform their own racist views.

Australia’s $20 billion gas giveaway: Who really benefits?

A long-simmering problem in Australia’s economy is starting to break out into the open: the mismatch between the country’s vast gas exports and the small return flowing back to the public, and working towards a change which would make our lives substantially better off.

The idea of a 25 per cent export tax isn’t radical – similar schemes operate in many other resource-intense economies around the world – and it would correct a problem that’s been evident for many years, and so obvious to many people. For years, economists such as Ken Henry have argued that Australia is giving its natural resources to multinational corporations at bargain-basement prices, allowing gas giants to create enormous profits while tax revenues fall far behind.

There are many budget problems in Australia, and these have been developing for some time. With funding constraints in essential services such as the NDIS, this anomaly is becoming harder to ignore: a government that keeps talking about the need for budget restraint on one hand, while ignoring the billions that it could be reaping on the other, with some estimates suggesting that it’s at least $17 billion per year, but could end up being close to $20 billion. The resources industry keeps scaremongering about “sovereign risk” and the flight of investment, but this follows the familiar script that’s always brought out by these vested interests.

This is not so much a tax debate, but more of a test of political will by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and the Treasurer, Jim Chalmers. Will the government confront these entrenched corporate interests, or will it retreat back into Albanese’s infamous incrementalism that ends up achieving nothing? The stakes in this debate are very clear: it’s not just about gas policy – it’s about whether Australia manages its resources in the national interest, or continues to subsidise private profit at the public’s expense.

The Zionists cancel and attack yet again: the Bila children’s book

The withdrawal and pulping of Bila: A River Cycle has revealed the more sinister influences by Zionist groups and says a lot about how cultural power is exercised in Australia. Written by the Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money and illustrated by Matt Chun, the book itself is not controversial – the controversy is the decision by University of Queensland Press to remove this book from circulation and destroy the 5,000 copies that have already been printed, due to external political pressures led by News Corporation, and supported by groups such as the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies and the Australian Jewish Association.

Chun published an article in early January 2026, titled “Never mourn a fascist”, and it’s a clear and succinct analysis of the fascist tendencies that reside within the Zionist Jewish-supremacist group, Chabad, and outlines the hypocritical nature of the media narratives which solely focus on Jewish grief, while totally ignoring the sufferings of the Palestinian people. The views of Chun are totally unrelated to the illustrations contained within Bila, and there is no reference at all to Palestine or Israel in the book.

But this is never enough for Zionist and pro-Israel groups in Australia, and the issue isn’t about standards, it’s about controlling the narrative and punishing anyone who may hold a view that is contrary to theirs. University of Queensland Press should be admonished for its weak-kneed response on this matter, and the actions by these groups – as usual – were designed to inflict maximum damage. Bila cost around $25,000 to print, with lost revenues of over $130,000 – and this is in line with previous behaviour by Zionists, where events are cancelled way after tickets have been issued and the venues have been booked and paid for. It’s the ultimate act of nihilism: punish everyone, even if Zionists ultimately end up punishing themselves.

Preferencing One Nation: How low is too low for the Liberals?

Speculation is growing that the Victoria branch of the Liberal Party will preference One Nation at the upcoming election in November – it’s being framed as tactical and clever electoral pragmatism, but it’s likely to end up in tears, just as it did in the recent South Australia election.

Since the federal election in May 2025, minor parties have been fragmenting the conservative vote and while the temptation to pull together a winning campaign through preferencing is obvious, what this coalition is starting to represent is a real problem. One Nation represents a racist culture of complaint and grievance – our intention isn’t to hurl insults, but clear and obvious racism is the key brand for the party, so it should accept and take responsibility for that.

That a previously mainstream party such as the Liberal Party – remembering that the Menzian philosophy of liberalism and moderation originated in Melbourne – is prepared to preference One Nation, and possibly form a coalition or alliance with them if it comes to that at the Victoria election, shows how far this party has fallen.

Chasing votes on the fringe might deliver short-term electoral gains, but it risks hollowing out whatever remains of the party. And trying to replicate the behaviour of a fringe party means that the Liberal Party is also now a fringe party. There’s also a broader consequence where major parties that morph into more extreme actors in order to secure power, tend to develop a policy agenda that follows this level of extremism. The South Australia result suggests that it’s a strategy that won’t succeed – dragging down both the Liberal Party and One Nation into a cycle of doom, winning the votes but not enough seats – but even without a victory, it reshapes the political landscape in a way that’s very hard to reverse.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: more useless military spending by the Australian government… Queensland arrests for pro-Palestine banners… Trump’s on-again, off-again war… the slow decline of One Nation.

Australia drifting towards another round of futile defence spending

Australia’s stance in the on-again/off-again/on-again US–Iran confrontation is once again exposing the duplicity of a political class that tries to convince the public about its independence but, in reality, defaults to the position of acquiescence to the United States.

The Albanese government has publicly resisting pressure from US President Donald Trump to participate more forcefully in a conflict created by the United States – which was essentially for the main purpose of boosting the profits of the oil barons and vested interests in the US – but we have to remember that they previously resisted the calls from Trump to increase military spending, only to announce on the weekend that – you guessed it – military spending is going to receive a significant boost.

The Defence Minister Richard Marles – who casually makes these announcements as though he is cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new fountain at the local park – has released the National Defence Strategy, which will increase defence spending by $53 billion over the next decade, taking defence investment up to 3 per cent of national GDP. While it’s short of the 3.5 per cent demanded by the United States, it’s still a 50 per cent increase, just at a time when we keep being told that there isn’t enough government revenues to support housing reform, better public services, public infrastructure, public school funding, hospitals, mental health, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, measures to reduce domestic violence.

Why is it that every dollar for essential services has to be argued for incessantly, assessed whether it represents value for money by an endless stream of committees and bureaucrats in Treasury, and reluctantly released by government as though the public is extracting a deeply embedded tooth – yet $53 billion for defence and appeasement of an idiot king in the United States is given away with alacrity. Not as cheerfully given away as the $368 billion price tag of AUKUS, but still frittered away without any of the usual checks and balances that are applied to every other measure of government spending.

Who has time to support vital public services and social investment when we’re on the verge of backing an aimless war in a distant country – waged by an even more distant ally that doesn’t know what it’s doing?

The slogan police in Queensland and NSW

While the conflict in Iran has consumed most of the world’s attention and pushed the conflict in Gaza into the background – the issue of Australia’s commitment to free expression when the political pressure grows is once again in the spotlight.

Since October 2023, the Albanese government has made poor attempts at a delicate balancing act: signalling “concerns” about humanitarian conditions in Gaza, while avoiding a diplomatic conflict with Israel, and catering for the extremist pro-Zionist groups that is resulting in further controls over university curricula, what’s permitted within cultural institutions, and what type of political expression is allowed on the streets. Just like the spending on defence, there isn’t a coherent position provided by the government, just this endless appeasement and acquiescence to this pro-Israel lobby, and then trying to contain any political fallout that arises from it.

Queensland’s tightening of protest laws, particularly on Palestine solidarity, reveals how quickly governments reach for new laws and restrictions when dissent becomes inconvenient for them, or their supporters. Twenty people were arrested in Brisbane for holding up a banner with the phrase “from the river to the sea”, words that are banned in Queensland because it’s part of an expression that is – according to these new laws – reasonably expected to menace, harass or offend a member of the public.

At least in New South Wales, the attempts to criminalise the use of “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada” have stalled because advice to the NSW government is that to enact such laws would be unconstitutional. This follows on from the removal of the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration laws, after the NSW Supreme Court deemed them to be unconstitutional, due to the restriction of political communication, and threatening fundamental civil rights.

The broader issue is not so much the draconian banning of such certain words – as bad as that is in itself – but that we have weak and careless leaders such as Queensland Premier David Crisafulli and NSW Premier Chris Minns who are only too happy to throw away democratic rights and freedoms, just so that an exclusive and powerful group of people in Australia don’t have to have their consciences pricked when they do their Sunday shopping, or be reminded of the crimes of genocide being acted out by the state of Israel.

Trump’s continuing crisis

“We’re going to knock out every single power plant, and every single bridge”. No, these are not the words coming from the mouths of Iranian “mad mullahs”, or a mass of anti-American protestors on the streets of Tehran; they are coming from the keyboard-commander-in-chief, US President Donald Trump.

It’s now a cliché to suggest Trump is not of sound mind and, therefore, time to invoke the articles contained with the 25th amendment of the US Constitution, but it’s clear that he’s neither fit nor appropriate to be President. No US President should ever behave like this, irrespective of their political leanings.

The Iran crisis is obviously a failure of diplomacy and a case study in how instability can be manufactured, amplified and politically exploited by a corrupt leader. Under Trump, the United States has vacillated between threats made on Truth Social, grandstanding and vague claims of negotiations, creating a volatile mix that makes him look more like a convenient idiot manipulated behind the scenes by his powerful and leeching benefactors.

Iran’s moves to close the Strait of Hormuz again are being framed by the US as provocation, yet they are the ones who refused to end their blockade after Iran opened up the strait. It’s almost like the politics of the playground acted out by a geriatric leader, but instead of a bruised lip or a black eye in a fight caused by a 10-year-old overgrown bully, this has far greater consequences – to global shipping routes, energy markets and civilian lives – with scant regard being given to any of these issues.

For Australia, the crisis exposes a familiar story: dependence on global energy flows and an obedience to a US alliance that limits our autonomy. We are tied to decisions made by others, and elsewhere: the Prime Minister can claim some success in being able to obtain the supply of 100 million litres of petrol from Malaysia, but this is the equivalent of one day of consumption in Australia. Once again, Australia finds itself reacting to a crisis it has no role in affecting, yet, inevitably helps to sustain it by not calling out the actions of the United States.

One Nation meets the limits of outrage

The latest round of opinion polls shows a dip in the support for One Nation, and this suggests that there are limits to a style of politics that’s built primarily on grievance.

After surging earlier in 2026, One Nation is losing momentum, with voters drifting back toward the major parties, as economic anxiety begins to outweigh the protest of being permanently “pissed off”. Cost-of-living pressures, global instability and the “serious” policy questions have always been the roadblock for One Nation, and this tends to expose the gaps between political anger within the electorate, and political credibility. Yes, the electorate can get angry about key issues that they feel are not being addressed by government but, ultimately, they will choose candidates that can solve problems, not just sit down and complain about it endlessly.

What makes this dip more crucial is the timing. The decline coincides with more scrutiny of the quality of One Nation candidates, including the ones who won seats at the recent South Australia election – management of electoral funds, and the kinds of controversies that are arising, including the employment of a staffer who was jailed for rape in 2018.

Populist movements such as One Nation do thrive on a reputation as political disruptors, but now the electorate has kicked the tyres and looked under the bonnet, they are seeing a political movement that enlists some unsavoury characters, seems to be pilfering public funds, and offers few solutions to the many problems they like to complain about, which usually focus on those issues that tend to bring out the worst in people.

Voters might flirt with outsider politics when their frustrations reach a breaking point – and some may remain there – but many others will retreat to familiar institutions when the uncertainty deepens, especially when they can see that these outsiders don’t have much to offer to the public.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the collapse of US–Iran talks… volatile oil markets and Australia’s continuing fuel insecurity… growing questions over foreign policy… freedom of speech curtailed on campus… the Roberts-Smith case… and the Greens push to become a serious political force.

Peace talks collapse, the profits of war rise

The collapse of the talks between the United States and Iran in Islamabad is being presented as a diplomatic failure – but that’s only half the story. While a fragile ceasefire had been agreed to – if the continuing bombing of Lebanon by Israel and the killing of thousands of civilians can actually be called a ceasefire – the Strait of Hormuz is still clogged up, physically and geopolitically, the global oil markets are still highly volatile and will continue like this for some time to come. For Australia, this translates into the usual vulnerabilities: exposure to volatile energy prices because we haven’t guarded our own reserves, more security panic, and a government that continues to behave like an outpost of the United States.

US President Donald Trump is manipulating the global markets with a conductor’s baton in one hand, with a yo-yo in the other and, one day, we’ll realise that this is exactly what he’s doing. The oil barons and the warlords managing the military corporations all around the world will be the ones to benefit from these manipulations, and it seems like the rest of the world will just have to put up with it until these guys – and they are mainly guys – have accumulated enough profits, which will surely find their way into the pockets of the Republican Party, and Donald Trump himself.

Australia has limited autonomy in this situation, yet bears real economic and political costs – from fuel prices to domestic electoral unrest. The public scepticism keeps growing, and questions will continue to be asked about whose interests our foreign policy is actually serving. Diplomacy may have failed in Islamabad – and perhaps that was the real purpose of the visit by Vice-President J.D. Vance – but the mechanisms of the conflict continue to spin around, and Australia will continue to suffer, along with the rest of the world.

Silencing the voices of Palestine on campus

The University of Sydney’s low-key rollout of a dedicated antisemitism advisor and “trainer” raises more questions than it answers, especially about the processes involves, the power behind the scenes, and the precedent that it sets. Appointing the academic Michael Abrahams-Sprod to the role before formal approval, then disclosing it only after the fact, is the sign of a university that’s more concerned about managing its reputation and unrepresentative powerbrokers, than maintaining academic and administrative transparency.

But the deeper issue lies in what this role of Abrahams-Sprod is supposed to do. His role includes implementing training programs targeting HR, security and senior staff on what antisemitism is, and how complaints are to be interpreted, how the university responds to incidents – presumably determined by Abrahams-Sprod – and, ultimately, how freedom of speech is defined on campus. Abrahams-Sprod is a senior member of the pro-Israel Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A), which considers Palestine activism as antisemitic, has co-ordinated attacks on university staff who hold pro-Palestine positions, and was behind the debacle of the Bendigo Writer’s Festival, targeting the academic Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah and causing the mass boycott of the festival by 50 writers.

This is being forced upon the University of Sydney by Zionist groups in Sydney, and once these systems are in place, they are rarely wound back. And, of course, it’s only a matter of time before this program of severely curtailing academic freedom is implemented at many other universities around Australia, a further dumbing down of our educational institutions, just at a time when they need to be smartening up.

Running on empty: Australia’s fuel reality

Australia’s fuel insecurity is no longer something that exists in theory – it’s a significant weakness that’s exposed every time there’s global tensions anywhere in the world. The collapse of the US–Iran talks and pressure on the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Iran have highlighted this situation yet again, and despite many years of warnings, Australia still operates with fuel reserves of around 29 days – well below the recommended level of 90 days – and this will barely sustain the country through a disruption that’s likely to be a lengthy one. Governments have talked up this idea of stockpiles and energy “resilience”, but much of that capacity sits offshore or remains incomplete – and seems to be more about political management, rather than actually doing something to rectify the problem.

There’s also an uncomfortable contradiction at play here. Australia positions itself as a stable, resource-rich nation, yet depends heavily on imported refined fuel with minimal domestic backup. We’re not suggesting the odious “drill baby drill” approach of Donald Trump, Gina Rinehart or Pauline Hanson but the question needs to be asked about why a wealthy, energy-exporting country has failed to secure something as basic as its own fuel supply, or at the least, look at alternative energy sources at a comprehensive level.

No more heroes

The arrest and impending prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith has become more than a legal case – it’s also a question of how certain political figures on the right view the rule of law, and how entertained they are by the myths of war, and the continuing Anzac legend. For decades, the Anzac tradition has been treated almost like a sacred event, shielding soldiers from scrutiny under the banner of sacrifice and service. But allegations of war crimes don’t fit neatly into that story, and the instinct is to protect this sacred legend, even if it means sidelining the truth and ignoring the rule of law.

This isn’t just about the one individual – it’s about whether Australia is willing to confront the more sordid parts of its military history. The allegations against Roberts-Smith concern the killing of five Afghani civilians, and a court of law will determine if this constitutes murder and, therefore, war crimes. And murder, irrespective of where in the world it happens, is still murder. If five Australian civilians had been murdered in Kabul at the hands of Taliban fighters, would we suggest this is a “fog of war event” and just ignore the calls for justice?

A form of accountability that’s selective and decided by a panel of conservative politicians, mining magnates and media proprietors, is not worth hanging onto. Let the courts decide if Roberts-Smith is guilty or innocent, not the barrackers who are shouting too loudly from the sidelines and don’t know any better.

The Greens are starting to realise they need to get serious

The relaunch of the Green Institute with the former MP Max Chandler-Mather as the CEO, isn’t just another juggling exercise – it’s a sign that the Australian Greens are done waiting for right political or electoral moments, and are now trying to force these moments and create them.

The Greens had a big electoral reality check in 2025, when they lost three of their four seats in the lower house – including the leader, Adam Bandt – and it seems that they are moving to a more populist model that’s currently being used successfully by the Green Party in Britain, under the leadership of Zac Polanski. The new model seems to be much clearer: build a permanent campaigning process that operates all year-round – and not around election time – shapes the narratives, build a base of activists, and develop policies that can build a wider electoral base.

One Nation has become a populist movement on the right of politics, and it’s clear that the Greens want to replicate the splintering of the right, and apply that to the centre-left of politics. It’s surprising that it’s taken them so long to come to this realisation: every major political party eventually had to build a strong institutional backbone – a research centre, a discipline on their messaging, and an analysis of electoral voting patterns in a far more coherent way. And the policies.

It seems to be a highly ambitious change, and it doesn’t seem to be about poking Labor from the sidelines anymore and being a minor irritant; it seems to be about replacing them. And this means appealing not just to the disillusionment that exists in the community, but developing a stronger sense of economic credibility, and working towards becoming a party of government, not just a party of dissent. It will take a great deal of work, but it can be done.

Share

Subscribe now

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: a global conflict hitting the hip pocket… gambling policy shaped by vested interests than the public… and a government with unprecedented power but reluctant to use it.

The US and Israeli war against Iran has quickly transitioned from a faraway geopolitical crisis into something far more tangible for Australians: the price shock delivered at the petrol bowser. Donald Trump’s maniacal foreign policy – coming from a belligerent and abusive fool who sounds like he’s the last drunken sod left in a Texan saloon bar at dawn – has become an economic and political domestic problem for Australia, with rising fuel prices showing just how exposed Australia is at times of global volatility. The federal government’s response – cutting fuel excise by 32 cents per litre and releasing some reserves – might lessen the immediate impact, but it’s a sign of a more concerning reality: Australia is still too dependent on forces way beyond its control, despite years of rhetoric about security of domestic energy supplies.

There’s also an uncomfortable balancing act going on – while leaders such as Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong keep talking up stability and commitment to the US alliance, public sentiment appears to be fracturing and becoming more resistant to Australia’s involvement in this conflict. The gap between what is coming out of the mouths of politicians and the instincts of the electorate seems to be widening, raising questions about how much this strong alignment with the United States is actually in Australia’s national interest. Meanwhile, the economic pain is being globalised – absorbed by many households and small businesses not just in Australia but all around the world – while the broader strategic goals of the US, and Australia’s involvement, remain unresolved and still unclear.

An imported crisis, with local consequences

It’s not so much a case of cost-of-living issues returning – these issues have never really gone away. But, of course, there will always an explanation that can be offered. Where inflation was once pinned on wages, supply chains or the aftereffects of the Covid pandemic, this pressure is now being blamed on global conflict. Fuel prices, transport costs, and food supply disruptions are all being reframed as the unavoidable consequences of the events that are far beyond Australia’s control. Of course, these are all valid reasons, but they are being used to mask over a lot of problems within the economy that successive governments have ignored for far too long.

While this global instability is real, the degree to which it translates into household pain is still shaped by domestic policy choices: the domestic energy supply, market concentration and oligarchies, an inequitable taxation system, and the very thin margins for error that exist in the economy. Years of neoliberalism, privatisation and the reliance on global markets have left Australia exposed to the vicissitudes of unbridled capitalism, and that’s what we’re feeling at the moment. The war is just making a bad problem far worse.

Governments will always argue they are managing a crisis that’s not of their making, and taking into account the volatility and instability of the US President, there is an element of truth to this – one more time: Open the Fuckin‘ Strait, you crazy bastards. But for the electorate, the distinction doesn’t really matter, or how far a potty-mouthed US President throws out the bile, or his cot toys. A government is there to lessen the impact of external events when they do arise, not just panicking into grabbing the low hanging fruit of fuel excise and avoiding the harder task of making the Australian economy far more resilient and equitable than it is at the moment.

The house always wins

Gambling reform has landed in federal politics with that very familiar sound: a big outrage, a careful compromise that Anthony Albanese is now well-known for, and a policy that seems designed to offend everyone just enough (except for the gambling lobby, of course) but which avoids addressing the problem in a serious manner.

The government’s proposal to limit advertising – capped placements, restricted hours, and the removal of logos from sports jerseys – has been framed as a serious step forward, yet it falls short of the sweeping ban recommended by its own inquiry that came about from the passionate lobbying of the late Labor MP, Peta Murphy. This all raises another obvious question: if the evidence presented at the inquiry – and the final recommendations – was so clear and succinct, why the hesitation?

Of course, much of the answer lies in the structures that have grown around gambling revenue. Commercial television, professional sport and community sports are all financially enmeshed with gambling companies, as well as the political donations and largesse provided to federal ministers. And that’s even before we get to the massive amounts of government revenue from gambling – that governments themselves are now addicted to.

Pull this funding away too quickly, and the entire business model falls apart. But leave it in place, and the social costs of addiction, financial stress, and the normalisation of gambling, will continue to grow. The federal government is trying to balance these two factors, but its actions will always favour the gambling companies, which often means preserving existing arrangements with some tinkering at the margins. The house will always win.

The federal government often speaks of harm minimisation, but they’ve done very little to confront the very activity that they claim to be regulating. They’re shallow words, of course. The debate should now be about how to force governments to address this serious issue because, so far, there’s been absolutely no will or backbone to end this dependency on the gambling industry.

The complacency of leadership

The Prime Minister’s response to developing issues – the conflict in Western Asia, rising fuel costs, and domestic reform – has been tightly controlled, procedural and managerial, culminating in a bizarre national address last week which, when stripped down, was sending out a message of please use less petrol and catch public transport.

Sure, it was only three minutes in length, but it probably would have been more effective to produce a government advertising campaign – Albanese attempted to assure the nation of stability at a time of instability, but all he did was send the nation to sleep set and himself up for ridicule.

Governments will often default to language about stability when the underlying choices that they have in front of them are politically uncomfortable or unpalatable: aligning too closely with an unstable and deranged US ally will create public unease; not being close enough invites the accusations of weakness which, as we know and expect, will always be made by the conservative legacy media and the Sky-After-Dark brigade. Which then extends into debates about the economy: too much intervention is communism™ and poor fiscal discipline; not enough is the sign of weakness and political inaction. The result for Albanese is a kind of ambiguity that satisfies no one, but still, an ambiguity that Albanese seems to specialise in.

Contemporary political leadership always has to involve risk management – risks do have to be taken by governments, but it’s a process of avoiding mistakes, minimise the volatility, and trying to stay true to the values of the government. But a crisis like this one, provides a different type of reward for a leader if they can provide a strong and clear sense of direction.

The danger for the Prime Minister and his government is that it appears too wimpy and cautious at a time when the events are moving so quickly. And in politics, perceptions can set like concrete at a far greater speed if decisions are delayed, and are poor and weak decisions when they are finally made.

All the power, but not the will

Australian politics is entering a strange phase: a government that is in an incredibly powerful position, but led by a Prime Minister who is unprepared to use that power in a meaningful way, aside from the business-as-usual approach. The gambling debate is an excellent example of this.

Pressure for stronger action has come not from within the government – even though there are some backbenchers who were trying to force change, without success – but from independents and minor parties, forcing a response that was determined by parliamentary numbers, rather than any sort of conviction on policy. The same dynamic is emerging in foreign policy and economic debates, where other voices are not heard within parliament and there’s not much pressure on the federal government to change tack on the many key issues that do need to change.

Yes, there is a quieter shift underway, as we can see in opinion polls, where voters are fragmenting from the major parties because they no longer see themselves reflected in the broader party platforms, but these are opinion polls – at this stage – and we’ll have to wait until the 2028 federal election to see if this shift translates into change. At the moment, we have a political environment where influence from unelected lobby groups is far too strong, accountability is concentrated, and the gap between community expectations and delivery by government continues to widen.

Share

Subscribe now

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the blame game on fuel… silencing dissent and “river to the sea”… neoliberalism coming to an end… and Penny Wong putting Australia last but America First.

Fuel scarcity and the blame game

Australia’s emerging fuel crisis is slowly exposing some long-standing vulnerabilities – falling oil reserves, a heavy dependence on imports, and a political class that’s more interested in managing the optics of politics than managing the risk. The disruptions linked to wars in the Western Asia/Middle East and the Strait of Hormuz have resulted in this complacency from governments of all persuasions being smashed by global instability.

The political responses so far are reading from a very familiar script that we’ve all seen before. The government has been quick to float around ideas of the short-term relief – the possibility of a tweak to fuel excise, anti-price gouging legislation, emergency diesel guarantees – while carefully avoiding the bigger questions about why Australia is so exposed on its energy supplies in the first place.

Blame is likely to be apportioned quite liberally by the critics but the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has done himself no favours by placing himself too closely to the creator of this global chaos, Donald Trump. Most of the electorate is starting to blame Albanese for high fuel prices, but he could have put himself on the front foot immediately by calling out the United States for this foolish war, and saying that Australia could not support this action against Iran. Instead, Albanese was one of the first leaders to commend the attacks by the United States and Israel, even sending Australian personnel and an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft to show he was going all the way with Donald J. Trump.

A more politically astute politician would have been able to play both sides of the political fence – like Mark Carney in Canada – get the best of both worlds and inoculate himself from this damage, but it’s further evidence that “astute” and “Albanese” are words that do not fit so easily together. Albanese will receive all the blame and opprobrium for the rising fuel prices and, once again, he’s showing great skill in getting the worst of all worlds, not the best.

Meanwhile, the Liberal–National opposition seems determined to treat the crisis as a political opportunity, rather than a challenge to themselves to offer something decent and adult-like to the electorate. Calls for increased domestic production and reserve capacity are hardly new – and are at least five years away – but their sudden urgency carries a whiff of convenience and hypocrisy, having had many refineries close under their watch, and being in office for 20 out of 26 years between 1996 to 2022 but never feeling that there was a need to do anything about this issue. Nothing, until today.

But this is a risky strategy for the Liberal Party – the voters who are facing rising prices and shortages tend to have limited patience for political opportunists who offer nothing more than slogans and photo-opportunities at the petrol bowser, while demanding the Labor government do all the things they never had time for when they were in office.

However, underneath this political noise lies a far more uncomfortable truth: Australia’s energy insecurity and weak levels of reserves – 29 days at the moment – is the product of bipartisan neglect and the constant worship of neoliberalist policies. The real question isn’t so much about who is to blame for these price spikes – they all are – but why successive governments have allowed the system to remain so fragile. Until this issue is confronted, the cycle of crisis and blame is likely to continue for some time to come.

The new world of policing dissent

“From the river to the sea” now sits at the centre of a bigger debate about protest, political identity, and the limits of what we are allowed to say in Australia. The police order to remove a public mural from the streets of Brisbane – using lyrics from a John Farnham song written in 1988 – shows how quickly cultural expression has become a political threat when it becomes inconvenient to a select and powerful group of people. And it’s reached the point of the ridiculous, where even news broadcasts were covering over and bleeping out the words “river to the sea”, surely the most egregious overreach by the Zionist movement in Australia, a limit that keeps being expanded.

The dispute over “river to the sea” itself is a well-rehearsed one by the Zionists and is now bordering on the cliché: everything, apparently, is antisemitism. But the more revealing issue here is how our politicians and institutions are responding. In Sydney, a Polish bagel house had a barely visible swastika lightly etched into its window and appears to be about two centimetres in size. Most people would clear it off and get on with life but within minutes of their report, three police officers were swiftly dispatched to inspect the scene of the crime and assess its gravity: yes officer, this window is antisemitic, guilty as charged. It would be interesting to see how this compares to the response times of rape, domestic violence, robbery or theft, especially when the victim is an Aboriginal or Islamic person.

Governments and police, especially those in New South Wales and Queensland – have moved decisively toward restricting cultural expression and free speech, tightening protest laws, increasing penalties, and showing a lower tolerance for any form of dissent. These measures are being framed by Premiers David Crisafulli and Chris Minns as the standard tools of public order, yet it’s obvious that their application is targeted towards particular causes: Palestine, climate activism and anti-war demonstrations.

Crisafulli and Minns are weak and pusillanimous leaders who have succumbed to the pressures from the Zionist groups in Australia, and they have this tendency to frame these issues around “public safety”. The risk here is not just the overreach but the selectivity of these issues, where some forms of protest are treated as legitimate expression – neo-Nazis protesting in front of NSW Parliament House, for example, is okay – while others are legislated and criminalised beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable.

Australia is not unique in this pathway of appeasing right-wing Zionist groups – the British Labour Government was humiliated when it enacted legislation banning the words “Palestine Action”, only to be saved from itself by the UK High Court which deemed the legislation to be unlawful – and there is likely to be a quick move here. Legal challenges to these restrictions seem almost inevitable, primarily because they are so ridiculous and disproportionate, but the bigger question is why these laws are being introduced and what the political transaction is – and financial – between these lobby groups, and Australian governments actually are.

Budget games in an age of scarcity

The fuel price rises have arrived just in time for the federal Budget cycle, and we’ll soon find out whether the Albanese government will act decisively in a crisis, or hide behind the language of “discipline” and incrementalism, the Prime Minister’s favourite pastimes.

Rising energy costs are feeding directly into concerns about inflation, interest rates and a recession – yet the policy noise that’s coming out remains cautious, almost to the point of inertia. Of course, governments hold their cards close to the chest in the lead-up to a Budget, but it also might be a case of no news at this stage is not good news.

There’s no shortage of budgetary options that could be on the table. A domestic gas reserve, tighter controls on exports, or windfall taxes on energy producers would all generate revenues for the government coffers, while easing pressure on households. None of these ideas are especially radical in international terms, yet they continue to be treated as hazardous in Australian politics, and if anything that resembles a reform to capital gains tax, or negative gearing or – the shock of horror, mining taxes – the entire sky will collapse and pestilence will arrive to eat away at everything that’s left over.

What makes this moment awkward is the rhetoric that’s taking place on the other side of politics. When Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie says “no one’s going to reward us [the Liberal Party] for a final last stand on neoliberal politics”, and openly questions the legacy of market-based orthodoxy, it feels like it’s the Labor government that’s being left behind, wedded to the altar of neoliberalism, when even its main proponents are signalling that it be a time to rethink this commitment to a failing ideology that has left most people behind. Start listening Labor, it’s time for a change: neoliberalism is dead, and no-one is mourning.

America First, Australia last

The war and rising tensions in Western Asia/Middle East are following a familiar pattern in Australia: a tightening up of national security issues, quickly followed by a narrowing down of political debate. The prospect of a wider conflict – the United States, Israel attacking Iran and Lebanon, and now with the Houthis joining the wars – has heightened public anxiety, but it has also shown how reactive and conservative the Australian government is with its support of the United States.

We had to clear out our ears and listen to this over again, just to make sure we heard correctly, but the Foreign Minister Penny Wong – fresh from condemning Iran after Iran was attacked by the United States – said “the relationship with the United States matters more than some domestic political issues about environmental reform”.

While we have always suspected it, just at that moment, we were given a clear idea of where the priorities in foreign policy are for this Labor government – with the United States and Israel – and as with Crisafulli and Minns, it would be worth finding out the value of the Faustian pact Wong has made, surely a substantial one, considering how much of her ethics and principles she has discarded since October 2023.

The AUKUS agreement must be sitting at the centre

of this unprincipled support of the United States. We know so little about this deal but it’s becoming clearer – without it every being stated – that Australia has signed away its military independence to the United States, because no-one in their right mind would behave the way Albanese and Wong have, without having straightjacketed and pushed so hard into such a tight corner where they couldn’t respond in any other way. There’s no other explanation.

Share

Subscribe now

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the fallout from Labor’s massive victory in South Australia… cost-of-living and fuel prices… Australia pays the price for being too close to the US… and retail politics of immigration.

The collapse of the Liberal Party and the take-up by One Nation

The South Australian election result has revealed something far more than just a bad night for the Liberal Party – winning only 19 per cent of the primary vote and just four seats – it reflects the continuing crisis on the conservative side of politics. What we are seeing is not just voter anger, but a fracturing of the identity of the centre-right in Australian politics. The Liberal Party is increasingly being caught between its traditional base – economically liberal but socially conservative – and a more volatile, grievance-driven electorate now drifting toward One Nation. Which of course, makes sense: One Nation offers a culture of complaint but not much else, except for more doom and gloom for the Liberal Party.

Collectively, the Liberal Party and One Nation gained 41 per cent of the primary vote, but so far have only won five seats out of the 47 on offer. There are still nine seats in doubt, but this is an awful result for both Liberal Party and One Nation, in contrast to the way the mainstream presented this election as a “surge” for One Nation. Although coming second in the primary vote seems impressive, elections are based on the number of seats won, and having one seat in a general election is actually a poor result, even if One Nation might end up winning several more seats by the time counting is completed.

For years, radical elements within the Liberal Party – federally and within South Australia – have flirted with the culture wars, empty flag-waving nationalism, and anti-establishment politics, partially because there the members such as Senator Alex Antic who want to drag the party in this direction, and partially to neutralise threats from the right. But the election results show that this strategy is backfiring. Voters on the right, when given an option, are opting for the “real thing” rather than a softer version of the far-right. The rise of One Nation is less about coherent policy and more about an expression of discontent, from the parts of the electorate that are feeling economically insecure, culturally anxious, and are politically disengaged.

Yet One Nation’s 22 per cent of primary vote that resulted in just one seat – at this stage of the counting – is a reminder of the limits of this style of protest politics within Australia’s electoral system, but also the limitations within the preferencing system. Without a broad and sensible appeal or better political strategies, One Nation will remaining loud but ineffective. That might change over time, but as the Queensland electorate found out in 1998, when One Nation won 11 seats, but was shown to be a disorganised rabble – which is a consistent factor in its electoral history – the politics of grievance and complaint can only take you so far.

And in case people didn’t realise because of the media’s focus on the Liberal Party and One Nation – two parties that won five seats between them on the night – the Labor government was returned with 38 per cent of the primary vote, and 33 seats, with an estimate 65 per cent share of the two-party preferred vote.

However, despite the crushing victory, Labor also has to understand that political fortunes can change very quickly, remembering that just four years ago, the Liberal Party held government federally, and in South Australia, they’ve gone from holding 25 seats, down to four. Historically, the Labor Party has found itself in this situation before, and while looking at the political horizon at this moment might makes this suggestion seem implausible, events in politics can change very quickly, and when they are least expected. It seems that volatility is the key defining feature of Australian politics and what is now afflicting the centre-right of politics, can easily start to affect the centre-left.

The increasing cost-of-living and fuel prices

The global fuel shock which is linked to the war caused by the United States and Israel in the Middle East is now affecting Australia’s economy. The warnings from Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Energy Minister Chris Bowen about supply disruptions and rising prices are, on one level, to be expected from political leaders, who are always keen to make that link between economic pressures and external events they have no control over, but it seems to be a prudent way of letting the public know the likely effects of this futile war on Australia.

The bigger issue is that it does show that not much structural resilience has been built into the economy by successive governments over the past few decades. Encouraging people to work from home and use public transport to ease fuel demand is a sensible course of action, but it also sounds like that familiar shifting of responsibility, from governments and markets over onto individuals.

As we keeping point out, many of these issues are the product of decades of market liberalisation, privatisation, and an ideological commitment to treating energy as a commodity and geopolitical tool rather than a public good, not just in Australia, but all around the world.

We’re at the endpoint of neoliberalism, and with the United States led by President Donald Trump – who is also the end product of this market liberalisation – it’s like the thrashing about of a violent beast on its last legs, using its remaining energy to fight the wars that it’s never going to win, rather than conserving its power to stabilise itself, save itself, and accept that it’s no longer the king of the jungle. But that would require political wisdom, and this is a commodity that’s in short supply in the United States at the moment.

Politically, perception will be everything. Even if fuel shortages don’t fully materialise in Australia, the psychology of scarcity – the panic buying, rising transport costs, creeping inflation – will dominate local headlines and influence voter sentiment. The opposition will inevitably frame this as a failure of long-term planning, but that’s a critique that will need to be very short and selective, remembering that the current Liberal Party leader, Angus Taylor, decided to store Australian oil reserves in the United States in 2020. While this oil was released or sold off in 2022 by the Labor government, there’s no prizes in guessing what would have happened to that oil if it were still in the United States under the current regime.

Australia and the Iran conflict: Are we at war or not?

Australia’s involvement in the United States and Israel’s war on Iran is slowly becoming one of the more consequential, but least clearly explained, military developments in recent years. The Australian Defence Force has made a deployment of reconnaissance aircraft and military personnel to the Middle East, yet the Albanese Government continues to avoid describing the situation as a “war.”

If Australia is participating in a conflict, even in this limited capacity, then questions of parliamentary oversight and democratic accountability need to be cleared up, and this risks making the same mistakes of the past, where the language of avoidance resulted in incremental military involvement, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and governments keep obfuscating the truth to obscure the reality of these engagements. Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong are showing that on this issue, they are up there with the likes of Scott Morrison and John Howard when it comes to distortions of reality.

On the weekend, Chris Bowen announced the cancellation of six fuel shipments that were destined for Australia, and it seems that more cancellations will continue to occur. If the disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz continues to affect Australia in this way, we need to start re-evaluating that close relationship with the United States and, more specifically, Donald Trump, to see whether becoming a part of war that’s been initiated by American and Israel is really in our interests.

The Iranian government has suggested that nations that are not a part of the hostilities against Iran will be allowed safe passage of ships destined for their countries, but it seems that even if the Australian government is not going to frank with the public, Iran will decide for us: yes, we are at war. Australia has assisted the United States in a war against Iran, as well as expelling the Iranian ambassador to Australia on spurious grounds, that seemed to be at the behest of Israel. The question for the Prime Minister and the Australian government is: has this support for the United States and Israel been worth it, when all it’s doing is creating damage to its own people and the Australian economy?

Immigration and the retail politics that leads us nowhere

Immigration keeps appearing as a political issue, and is likely to keep coming up as certain parts of the electorate keep looking for a scapegoat for the deeper anxieties about identity, national security and belonging.

The remarks by One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce comparing migration to “buying cattle” soon after he was asked if his party is racist, were not just offensive, but revealed the true character of Joyce. Reducing people to cargo animals and stripping them of dignity, their history, or understanding the social complexity of immigration, is a classic example of the retail politics of Joyce, and the views that he wishes to represent: again, it’s the culture of complaint, and the politics of no solutions. It might rile people up and get them to vote for One Nation, but where does it leave us all?

If the Labor government decided to act against One Nation – and so far, it’s more interested in attacking the Australian Greens – all it would need to do is highlight Joyce’s record in government.

As deputy Prime Minister, leader of the National Party, and as minister for agriculture, water resources and infrastructure, his tenure was marked by a long list of self-serving actions, many of these bordered on corruption, sexual harassment, and inappropriate drunken behaviour. His record offers a clear indication of what life in Australia might look like under a government led by One Nation, so why doesn’t Labor attack this, instead of constantly being fixated on the “Greens Political Party”?

The Labor government is also attempting to walk a careful line – paying lip service to supporting diversity, while tightening migration policy and national security. But it’s a balancing act that’s becoming harder to sustain.

The hostile reaction by the Islamic community to Albanese and Tony Burke appearing at Lakemba to commemorate Eid al-Fitr and the end of Ramadan – which should be a part of Labor’s natural constituency – shows a government that’s struggling to maintain credibility across different communities. Albanese has provided endless and unlimited support to the Jewish community – and based on their own hostile responses to his presence at the Bondi memorials – it has been a support that has provided him with no political benefit at all.

Of course, Albanese should have provided this support to the Jewish communities after the Bondi terror attacks, there’s no question about this. But the neglect of the Islamic community and in some cases, outright hostility, by his government, has resulted in the Prime Minister receiving the worst of all worlds. If only he had decided to do the right thing by all communities, instead of just acquiescing to Israel lobby and Zionist groups, he would have avoided all of this political pain, but we do have to remember that Albanese is a managerial politician who deals with problems when they appear, rather than making sure the problems don’t arrive in the first place.

Meanwhile, the right will continue to weaponise immigration as a cultural wedge, while Labor frames itself as a defender of multiculturalism, however wimpishly it might do this. But unless either side of politics engages honestly with the structural drivers of these issues – housing, wages, the economy and foreign policy – this debate will remain stuck in that endless loop of culture wars, grievance and political opportunism.

Subscribe now

Share

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: fuel prices and energy security in the wake of the illegal war waged by United States and Israel… the continuing rise of the minor parties… the reluctance of governments to do very much to reduce Islamophobia… and the upcoming election in South Australia.

Fuel prices and energy security

Energy policy has suddenly become a massive political issue after the federal government released fuel from Australia’s emergency stockpile and temporarily lowered fuel-quality standards to increase supply. It’s a move tied to the instability in Iran – forced upon everyone else by the United States and Israel – with the government allowing additional imports of higher-sulphur fuel for 60 days and releasing six days’ worth of fuel reserves to try and stabilise the fuel market. It indicates how weak Australia’s fuel security is and how it relies too much on global supply chains – like many other countries – although the government will say that this is needed to protect motorists and businesses from price spikes. Perhaps it would have been better to persuade US President Donald Trump to avoid a mindless war, instead of being one of the first countries to support the United States and send military support and personnel to the region?

After decades of refinery closures, market liberalisation and weak energy policy, the country now imports the overwhelming majority of its refined fuel. There’s also emergency reserves stored overseas, supply chains are stretched all over the Indo–Pacific region, and governments are kidding themselves to assume that global trade will function smoothly, even during times of massive geopolitical upheaval, instead of doing something about it. This might stabilise the fuel market in the short term, but it reveals more about the deficiencies of Australia’s resource and energy policy over many decades.

Another energy fight is emerging over the proposal for a domestic gas reservation, which would demand producers set aside a portion of gas for Australian consumers. It’s our gas, so why not? Manufacturing groups are pushing for a reservation system of around 25 per cent of production to reduce gas and electricity costs, while energy companies – the ones who continue to extract the massive profits under a government-sanctioned system – hysterically warn that such an intervention will undermine investment and export contracts.

It’s a debate that reflects that continuing conundrum in Australia: we sit on enormous energy resources, yet households and industry pay top dollar and are always told that cheaper domestic supplies will somehow threaten confidence in the market. The real problem, of course, is a disastrous policy framework – created by the Howard government, supported by the Rudd–Gillard governments and continued by the Albanese government – which prioritises corporate returns and the exports that act in the interests of the wealthy miners, shareholders and political donors, instead of energy security that acts in the national interest.

The continuing rise of minor parties

The resignation of Nationals leader David Littleproud and the election of Matt Canavan as the new leader will continue that uncertainty on the conservative side of politics, and follows months of tensions within the Coalition as well as the many disagreements about the strategies used in the disastrous 2025 election defeat. While there’s certainly more internal divisions within the Liberal Party than the Nationals, the struggles of the Coalition are likely to remain as a key story for some time as the opposition attempts to rebuild its credibility and hold some semblance of unity.

This leadership change – following on quickly from the shift to Angus Taylor for the Liberal Party – also reflects a deeper confusion within conservative politics, still in denial about what went wrong at the last election. Some MPs believe that the Coalition needs to double down on regional grievances and a culture of complaint, and anti-Canberra rhetoric – in otherwords, dialling up the issues reflected in Sky News After Dark – while the moderates believe the Coalition’s problem is that it drifted too far into culture-war politics and alienated many voters in metropolitan seats, who have swung over the teal independents.

Another structural issue shaping politics is the continued rise of minor parties, particularly One Nation, which is now polling at 24 per cent of the primary vote, according to the recent Resolve Poll. That means that one in four people consider Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce to be a voice of reason and offer all the right solutions that are required to solve all the problems in the complex world we live in.

It’s difficult to know whether this is a failure of political leadership in all of the other mainstream politic parties, or a failure of civic education, but it’s probably right to say there’s many people in the electorate who hold low expectations of government and its propensity to change people’s lives in a meaningful way. It’s less about ideology and more about the slow erosion of trust in Australia’s political institutions, who just seem to be careless and disinterested in changing this situation.

Social cohesion and Islamophobia

Questions around racism and social cohesion are again rising in the national debate. While it’s the Jewish community that’s been the focus of much debate since the Bondi shootings in December last year, Australian Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi says that Islamophobia is becoming “dangerously normalised” in Australia, referring to a significant increase in Islamophobic incidents and calling for a stronger response from the Albanese government.

If governments all across Australia are so keen to provide as much support and legislative protection for the Jewish community, why are they reluctant to do very much at all about incidents that are drastically harming the Islamic community?

It’s seven years since the Christchurch mosque shootings – 15 March 2019 – and while these incidents occurred in New Zealand, community tensions within Australia are high, and it seems both the government and opposition aren’t that interested in stronger anti-Islamophobia rhetoric or policy proposals to protect social harmony, aside from the Prime Minister’s weak comments to “turn down the heat”, as though he’s running the side commentary on Masterchef, rather leading an important national debate on social cohesion.

Issues of racism and social cohesion rarely appear in isolation and, indeed, it is up to our political leaders to “turn down the heat”, but it has to be more than soundbites that might sound good on the evening news and are left at that. So many parts of the political and media establishment have spent decades framing cultural differences in ways that legitimise suspicion toward minority communities – Seven West, Nine Media, 10 Network, Sky News and the ABC all specialise in this – and when that rhetoric flows into talkback radio, social media and the tabloids, it shifts the boundaries of what’s considered to be acceptable public discourse.

The uncomfortable question lingering under the surface – and occasionally appearing in full view above the surface – is whether Australia’s political class genuinely wants to resolve these tensions or simply manage them: Albanese is considered to be a manager of issues as they arise, rather than an agent of change, so perhaps we already know what the answer is, and it’s an insipid and weak response.

South Australian state election

The South Australian state election is coming up – 21 March – and will dominate political attention this week, at least within that state. The SA Labor government is widely expected to win comfortably – very comfortably – with opinion polls suggesting Labor has a two-party preferred lead of around 60 per cent or even more.

Meanwhile, the SA Liberal Party faces the possibility of a historic collapse, with its primary vote languishing even behind One Nation. The opposition has experienced leadership turmoil and the control of its branches by ultra conservative Christian groups, culminating in Ashton Hurn becoming leader in late 2025. It’s a very similar situation the WA Liberal Party found itself in during the 2021 state election – a party in turmoil against a confident first-term Labor government, a new young leader appointed several months before the election, resulting in total wipe-out of the party, and reduced to just two seats in a WA Parliament of 59 seats. Much of the focus has been on whether the SA Liberal Party will be reduced to this level, and whether it will hold any seats at all after next Saturday night, remembering that this is a political party that was actually in government in 2022, just four years ago.

From a broader perspective, the likely scale of Labor’s victory says as much about the weakness of the opposition as it does about the popularity of the government. The SA Premier Peter Malinauskas has governed cautiously, positioning himself as a pragmatic, managerial premier rather than an ideological reformer, although he was instrumental in damaging the Adelaide Writer’s Festival to the point of it being recently cancelled, after complaints from the Jewish Community Council of South Australia were received about one of the speakers, Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah.

This was one of the more bizarre interventions from a state Premier – Malinauskas is in such as incredibly powerful position that he didn’t need to act in this way, but perhaps it’s a sign of the compromised hold that Zionists have over many Australian politicians; either way, he wasn’t prepared to take any risks.

For the Liberal Party, this election threatens to expose deeper structural problems. It’s always argued that political issues are unique to each state, but the problems are so evident and so consistent in many of the state divisions – as well as within the federal Liberal Party – that’s it more than just state issues that’s at play here: it’s the Liberal Party itself that’s the problem, and it’s not just in South Australia.

Subscribe now

Share

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the implications of the escalating wars between the United States and Israel, and Iran… the impact of high global oil and gas prices on domestic energy costs and the cost-of-living debate… the continuing argument over migration levels and visa policy… and the ongoing rise of minor parties and the splintering political landscape.

Australia and the escalating conflict in Western Asia

The attacks by the United States and Israel on Iran – and the retaliations – are beginning to weave their way through Australian politics, not because Australia is a central actor in this new war, but because of the reality of its commitments to the alliance. Australia has long tied itself to the United States through the ANZUS Treaty, now further embedded with AUKUS, and successive governments have always offered the defence force to US-led operations across Western Asia, irrespective of what they might be.

That reality became more real after an Iranian drone damaged the Al Minhad air base in the UAE, where Australian personnel have been stationed as part of coalition operations. What will Australia provide in this case? This issue also raises those same old questions about the assumptions within Australia’s foreign policy and strategic interests. For too many years, Australian governments has argued that the participation within US-led military operations is the necessary price of maintaining the alliance, but how is this relevant to Australia’s key interests? This looks like becoming another war that Australia is being dragged into, without considering what the Australian public opinion might be, or even what the merits of this military action are, considering that it seems to be in the interests of the US and Israel alone, and not too many participants.

It also continues that cynical pattern that we all recognise when we see it. Australian governments frequently focus on the alliance and solidarity with the United States during these types of interventions – legal or illegal – while downplaying or ignoring the political case for these overseas deployments in the first place, and a fine example of this was displayed by the Foreign Affairs Minister, Penny Wong, on the ABC’s Insiders this Sunday morning. It’s obvious that decisions made by an out-of-control and maniacal President Donald Trump in Washington, are going to be the same decisions made by governments in Australia. We don’t seem to have a choice.

Energy prices and the return of the 1970s global oil shock

Energy prices are once again being debated in Australian politics (as usual), as war in Western Asia threatens to destabilise the economy and push global oil and gas prices higher. While Australia is physically far away from the conflict, as we found out when the war between Russia and Ukraine commenced in early 2022, international energy markets are highly interconnected, and any disruption affecting major producers such as Iran or the shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz will quickly flow into commodity markets all around the world.

For Australian households already dealing with persistent cost-of-living pressures and inflation, these higher energy prices always have to be a reminder of politically irresponsible and ridiculous decisions from the past. Australia is one of the world’s largest exporters of liquefied natural gas, yet domestic electricity and gas prices are still heavily influenced by international markets. This is clearly a policy failure, where Australian resources are exported on a large scale to countries such Japan, China and South Korea while domestic consumers pay prices linked to volatile global markets, even buying back Australia gas that was sold to these countries at an exorbitant price.

The expansion of LNG exports over the past two decades has effectively tied east-coast gas prices to international demand, prioritising corporate export profits over long-term energy security for Australian industry and households. The question in times of global instability such as we are experiencing right now is very simple, as it has always been: why should a resource-rich country suffer energy price shocks driven by conflicts on the other side of the world that we have nothing to do with?

An energy crisis will always produce predictable political responses. Governments blame global markets – as Albanese has for cost-of-living issues – the Liberal Party will blame government policy (even though they created the same policies that they are now criticising), and the poor design of Australia’s energy system has rarely had the reform that’s desperately needed, because the politics always gets in the way. And we’ll see it continuing this week –a geopolitical crisis overseas will trigger the same domestic debate at home, without resolving the vulnerabilities in Australia’s energy policy, and consumers will be the ones who will continue to suffer.

Immigration policy and migration levels

Migration is once again returning to the centre of political debate, as the government confirms changes to visa rules and salary thresholds for employer-sponsored migrants, while the Liberal Party has signalled that it will pursue a significantly harsher approach, as part of their proposal for visa appeals to be held outside of Australia, as well as a reduction of the annual migration intake to below 200,000. With net migration currently running above 300,000, this issue sits neatly within housing shortages, labour supply issues, infrastructure, making immigration one of the most politically contentious issues going around in Canberra.

This migration debate is played between those goalposts of economic pragmatism and the theatre of politics, and with those goalposts shifting around quite frequently, it’s difficult to keep an accurate score. Business groups always argue for high levels of migration to address shortages in the labour market and governments of all persuasions in the post-war period, have supported this view, based on supporting economic growth and alleviate the issues that are arising from an ageing workforce.

If immigration is framed around economic issues, it’s always a positive story to tell. But when it veers into empty rhetoric, that’s when the problems arise. The Liberal Party and parties on the right such as One Nation, always look at immigration though the issue of border security, and that idea of protecting our way of life, usually making the specious claim that immigration makes housing more unaffordable, and adds to cost-of-living pressures. Of course, immigration adds some pressure on infrastructure and public services, but blaming the migrant for all the ills of the world is an age-old political tactic from the right, and it’s usually a message that resonates with voters, irrespective of how inaccurate the message is. Who’s got time to explain the benefits of migration, when an easily manufactured mistruth can be blasted out through a megaphone?

This is a dynamic that leaves Australia caught in an endless political debate that leads us nowhere except for the drainpipe, a message readily amplified by the mainstream media. Governments rely on migration to sustain economic expansion, while the right blame migration for the more visible of issues such as housing affordability, infrastructure and… traffic jams.

The continuing fragmentation of politics in Australia

Recent polling suggests that a growing number of voters are open to supporting parties outside Australia’s the traditional two-party system – Labor and the Coalition – including One Nation. Surveys such as the Essential Poll indicate that a substantial number of voters would at least consider voting for the party, reflecting a broader splintering on the right that has been building up for more than a decade. While the major parties such as the Labor Party and the Liberal Party have traditionally been the ones who have been able to form government, their share of the primary vote has eroded in recent times – especially the Liberal Party, which is facing a big litmus test in the upcoming state election in South Australia, and the federal byelection in the seat of Farrer – and this erosion is creating the space for minor parties and independents to influence the national conversation.

Although Labor is in a dominant position federally, it’s not immune from these electoral shifts, and its challenge will be in larger regional and outer-suburban Australia, where economic insecurity and related cultural and “anti-woke” sentiments seem to be on the rise. Historically, these areas have formed Labor’s working-class base, but the general disillusionment with mainstream politics has opened up politics to populist alternatives.

The appeal of figures such as Pauline Hanson doesn’t rely on the details or grand manifestos, but harnessing that grievance that people feel – whether that’s justified or not – challenging political conventions, and giving the messages that people want to hear. This is great retail politics but eventually results in poor governing – Exhibit A: The Abbott government, 2013–2015; Exhibit B: The Morrison government, 2018–2022.

As we’ve seen over the past few months, this political banter from One Nation, and other players on the right, is causing the Liberal Party all sorts of problems. While parties such as One Nation are drawing on support from voters on the right, they are fragmenting the conservative vote and complicating the preference flows, although the preferencing from One Nation to the Coalition has shifted dramatically since the 2022 federal election, up from 64.3 per cent, to 74.5 per cent, according to Anthony Green.

These preference flows will benefit the Coalition electorally, but it means that it’s also forcing the Liberal Party to adopt harsher political positions and rhetoric in order to prevent voters drifting further right, as we’ve seen ever since Angus Taylor became the leader of the opposition last month.

This growth of populist rhetoric isn’t just about ideology but it’s also about certain realities that are happening within the workforce and the economy. Over the past three decades, many voters have experienced stagnant wages, declining job security and rising housing costs, while political elites have often talked about the wonderful state of the economy in terms of gross domestic product, or avoiding recessions. That’s all great, but if people feel like they are not benefiting from governments avoiding recessions, the anti-establishment thinking can become politically powerful, even when the policy responses that are offered lack the detail, are contradictory and, if they were ever implemented, would make problems even worse than they are.

The people who feel excluded from the economy and the social compact that should exist in Australia, are more likely to look elsewhere politically. Whether that leads to a more sustainable support for minor parties such as One Nation – which has always been dogged by incompetence, mismanagement and opportunists – or just continues a broader fragmentation of the two-party system, is currently an unpredictable dynamic in Australian politics.

Share

Subscribe now