Australia wants a seat at the UN table but it will need to stand up for international law

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has returned from New York after launching Australia’s campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council seat from 2029, accompanied by the usual language about observing international law, global cooperation and Australia’s role as a constructive middle power, punching above its weight.

Of course, Australia should try to land this seat: it’s a prestigious position, but it’s also a question of whether there’s anything behind the branding of we listen, we partner, we protect, and what Australia would do if it did gain that seat.

At the UN, there were the selfies with Donald Trump and other world leaders, which might be great for the post-politics family album but invites another round of “Airbus Albo” ridicule from the media and invites questions about Albanese’s political judgement: why attach yourself to a political leader who’s failing in the United States, and only 21 per cent of the Australian public has any confidence in? Why give the media some additional fodder when you’re already an unpopular leader in Australia?

Diplomacy will never be measured by the amount of selfies taken or the number of kilometres travelled on a plane, but the best foreign policy is often conducted quietly behind the scenes, with the achievements – if that’s what it comes to – speaking far louder than any photo op with an idiot king.

Palestine is also the big contradiction that Albanese and foreign minister Penny Wong seem to be going out of their way to avoid. Prior to this UN sojourn, Australia had joined in the discussions with Britain, France, Canada and European governments about stronger measures and trade bans against illegal Israeli settlements, only to withdraw at the last minute. Can’t stand in the way of a prestigious seat at the UN table… Australia wants to be a champion of international law when it’s convenient but ignore it when it’s not.

That contradiction becomes harder to defend as Palestinian civilians continue to be killed. Just the other day, a confused 80-year-old Palestinian woman was shot dead by Israeli forces near a checkpoint Ramallah. Considering Wong has done close to nothing about the death of the Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, we can hardly expect her to be concerned about an old and frail Palestinian woman, especially when it’s just so “difficult to judge from afar”, but it’s the cumulative effect: what exactly will it take for Australia to move beyond expressions of concern, and is this all it will do if it does gain that seat on the Security Council, the one it says it so fully deserves?

Perhaps the more important question is whether its selective application of international law demonstrates that it does actually deserve that seat.

Who’s accountable for the Medicare AI breach?

The recent Medicare breach should at least put a pause to all the breathless optimism surrounding Australia’s rush into artificial intelligence. In an incident that is giving us a small taste of the dystopian future we might all be facing, an autonomous AI agent gained unauthorised access to the Services Australia portal, yet Sam Altman’s OpenAI took three months to notify the government and, only then, through a public email address, rather than speaking directly to the minister.

As a result, a taskforce has been set up, there will be a Senate inquiry and we’ll receive the familiar assurances that lessons will be learned. But the real question is whether anyone – a real person – is actually in control here.

From the weekend…

The Prime Minister wants Australia to embrace AI as an engine of productivity and economic growth, and is encouraging investment in the enormous data centres required to support it, even if these centres are proceeding without public consent.

They also consume massive amounts of electricity and water, require major infrastructure, but there’s been little public discussion about who benefits, who pays and which communities will be affected.

Meanwhile, the regulations are chasing the technology rather than deciding what this technology should be, and is being created – and implemented – by political leaders who know close to nothing about this technology. Yes, there is room for AI technology and the developments that are leading to super intelligence, but we have to be seriously alarmed if this future is being determined by the Altmans and Zuckerbergs of the world.

That what makes the Medicare incident more than just an embarrassing story about cybersecurity: it’s a lesson in what happens when governments enthusiastically adopt technologies they don’t completely understand – which is exactly what Albanese is doing at the moment – and when it’s supplied by the corporations that are far more powerful and sophisticated than the governments that are supposed to be regulating them.

If AI really is going to transform Australia in a positive way, we should have a greater say in how that transformation occurs – before all of the data centres are built, the long-term contracts are signed (the ones that will probably not be in our favour), precious resources are extracted and used up, and the problems that government will discover afterwards.

The return of another political problem

The Reserve Bank meets on Monday and Tuesday with another interest-rate rise on the agenda. It will be the familiar story: inflation is too high, demand needs to be restrained and some of the “heat” needs to come out of the economy. Translated into every-day language, this means households should spend less, mortgage holders should pay more, and more people might need to lose their jobs.

There’s something perverse about unemployment rising to 4.6 per cent while the RBA contemplates making access to money even more expensive. Workers didn’t create expensive electricity, the housing shortages, a highly concentrated supermarket sector, or the disruption in global supplies, yet the RBA’s policy keeps returning to the same blunt instrument: squeeze and strangle household budgets even further, until they stop spending.

The government can’t just stand back and keep saying that the Reserve Bank is independent and do nothing about these issues. If rates rise again, the political question becomes whether government policy is doing enough to reduce or remove the structural causes of higher prices – housing, energy, market concentration and inadequate competition – rather than leaving it all to the RBA and suggest that there’s not much more that can be done.

The RBA Governor, Michele Bullock, can keep arguing that inflation has to be defeated, and that’s fair enough: that’s her job to argue the case within the parameters that she is restricted to. But there should be a lot more debate about who’s being asked to defeat inflation, because it always falls back onto the same people: workers.

One Nation calling the shots, once again

The relationship between the Coalition and One Nation is becoming less about whether they’ll cooperate with each other, and more a question of how much of their populist politics the Coalition is prepared to adopt.

Barnaby Joyce claims that the discussions about possible sharing arrangements involving One Nation and the Liberal Party have already occurred – a coalition of a coalition – although senior Liberals deny it. So, someone is telling the fibs. Either way, Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor faces an uncomfortable situation, which is possibly going to become even more uncomfortable.

He needs those conservative voters who have switched over to One Nation, but chasing them also risks allowing Pauline Hanson to set the Coalition’s agenda on migration, climate, energy and superannuation – which, to be honest, is very close to Taylor’s own ideological persuasions – while further alienating those moderate voters the Liberal Party needs to win government.

While there is evidence that there are some in the electorate who are so thoroughly sick of establishment politics and their behaviours that they will support anyone else, even if it a disorganised rabble of a party, One Nation hardly represents a better alternative that these people might be seeking.

One Nation is now trying to explain why $56,000 of the party’s money was spent building a shed on James Ashby’s private property – which goes against the grain of a right-wing movement that’s spent so much time railing against the political elites and their sense of entitlement – and it’s a episode that show themselves to be more of the same, but dressed up in orange.

Of course, Labor will try to exploit these contradictions and hypocrisy, and will try to turn Hanson into the unofficial face of the alternative government. But they also should be careful about pushing this too enthusiastically.

One Nation’s growth, as least in the opinion polls, also reflects genuine economic insecurity within the community, distrust of institutions after being let down so many times in the past, and an alienation from the major parties after their constant flow of lies, broken promises and corrupt behaviour, even if One Nation is likely to deliver more of the same.

One Nation is not the answer, but how can the government get out of the situation where it feels it needs to replicate the politics of Hansonism, in the same way as the Liberal Party is doing? Perhaps addressing the conditions that allow Hanson’s brand of politics to fester would be a good place to start, instead of constantly pandering to the vested interests that have dictated the political agenda for far too long.

Australia was on the verge of sanctions against Israel… and then walked away

The problem for the Albanese government isn’t just about Australia moving too slowly against illegal Israeli settlements – it walked up to the negotiating table but then decided that it was all too much and just walked away.

Australia was a part of these negotiations with Britain, France, Canada and European governments over action that would target trade with illegal West Bank settlements, and at that stage, was open to “more aggressive action”. Foreign minister Penny Wong, who never misses the opportunity to miss an opportunity – as well as leaving her morals behind – then instructed Australia to remove itself from the table and advised its partners that it wouldn’t be joining this action.

Britain has declared Israel’s occupation of the West Bank unlawful and described the forced displacement as ethnic cleansing. Canada and France are also joining action on settlement imports. These countries created the pathway for the sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements, so all Australia had to do was flow in the slipstream.

The obvious question is: what actually changed in those last moments?

The government did cite all these concerns about enforceability and unintended consequences – Australian businesses losing export revenue – but, as we’ve explained before, this is a Labor government that is beholden to Zionists interests and donations to the Labor Party, and despite its rhetoric, will do nothing at all that acts against the state of Israel. Absolutely nothing. Even when it engages with unlawful activity and ethnic cleansing.

It will be interesting to see how Australia’s current bid for a seat on the UN Security Council proceeds, because this type of behaviour of walking away from a critical issue and leaving its partners in the lurch shows a complete lack of courage and exactly the type of behaviour that the United Nations doesn’t need at this point of history.

The migration numbers debacle continues

Australia’s political leaders have finally discovered who’s responsible for the housing crisis, overcrowded hospitals, congested roads and falling living standards. Migrants!

Labor’s decision to drive net overseas migration down to 225,000 by 2028 is being presented as careful calibrated management of population growth but, politically, it’s a lot more cynical than that: it flows directly into this idea that Australia’s problems can be solved by turning migration into race to the bottom between the government, the opposition, and One Nation.

This is how the game goes: the Coalition says Labor’s numbers are too high. Then One Nation then says the Coalition’s numbers are too high. And just like a silly little game in the school playground, the downward bidding continues until Australian politics becomes a ridiculous competition over who can produce the smallest number and most punitive system, without providing a reason why.

Conveniently disappearing from this argument are the governments that failed to build enough public housing, allowed property speculation to distort the housing market – thank you, John Howard! – underinvested in infrastructure and services, and constructed an economy increasingly dependent on insecure migrant labour.

It’s not like migrants sat down and created a committee to design this system: elected governments did, and it’s what they’ve done over the past 30 years or so. If there’s problems with the migration program, blame them, and not the migrant.

There are perfectly legitimate arguments for lowering migration numbers when housing and infrastructure can’t deal with rapid growth in population. But that’s very different from pretending migration has caused all the problems after the many decades of political failure.

The bigger political issue is that Labor’s accepting the central premise of the arguments presented by One Nation and the Coalition. And once migration is presented as the big scary villain, every rent increase, traffic jam and hospital queue becomes yet another argument for cutting it even further.

And Pauline Hanson doesn’t even have to open her mouth anymore – the Labor government and the Coalition are doing all the hard work for her, even though they collectively hold 136 seats in the Parliament of 150 – or 90 per cent of the seats – and One Nation holds… oh, just the two. It shows all the signs of a weak government spooked by the first sign of a mirage.

Education standards declining? Put a flag in the classroom

Australian schools have genuine problems: there are many teacher shortages, there’s declining educational outcomes, staff are exhausted, there are unequal resources across the country, and a public system that is increasingly expected to do more with less funding.

These are big concerns and we do need to work out the solutions. More funding for teacher education? More educational resources? Higher funding for public education, instead of funnelling most of it into private schools? No, forget all of that, the Liberal Party has discovered the solution: more flags in classrooms and more “Western values”.

The shadow education minister Julian Leeser has proposed a “root and branch” overhaul of education system – stronger discipline, reducing excessive screen use, improving civics education, the Australian flag flown in every school, and pushing that old conservative catch-all theme, Western civilisation. Setting aside the fact that no-one has really asked for any of this, all of these been bundled together with the familiar conservative argument that Australian education has somehow lost its way because students hear too much about Indigenous history, sustainability and Asia, and not enough about Britain’s contribution to Australian institutions. And, of course, it’s too woke.

It’s the steady old hand of politics and vote chasing, and will do nothing at all to improve educational standards in Australian schools, or provide teachers with more support. One Nation is increasingly competing for conservative voters, and the Liberal Party needs to show the world that it too can fight the culture wars over national identity, history and supposedly progressive institutions.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with teaching students about democracy, Western political traditions, or British colonisation in 1788. But Australia’s history didn’t begin there: we need to know about the time before that, and the invasion and destruction of Indigenous people and culture from 1788 onwards. We need to understand all the values and communities that make up Australia, not some half-arsed garbage that a conservative politician wants to use in his battle against One Nation.

And putting up another Australian flag in the classroom or preaching jingoistic nonsense in our schools won’t teach a child to read or equip them to deal with an increasingly complex world in the future.

The Albanese government is coming across that uncomfortable rule of politics: a rort doesn’t become acceptable and respectable, just because it’s your side that’s doing it. The $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure program is becoming a serious integrity problem, with analysis showing around three-quarters of its funding flowing to electorates held by Labor before the 2025 election, while 45 electorates received nothing at all.

The $6 million promised to Marrickville Golf Club makes the optics of this program considerably worse. The club is in Anthony Albanese’s electorate of Grayndler and had granted the prime minister an honorary membership that he failed to declare. Albanese says he doesn’t play golf, but that’s not the point. The question isn’t whether the prime minister owns a set of nine-irons; it’s why an invitation-only grants process was distributing millions of public dollars to politically advantageous projects with limited competition and scrutiny.

The Labor Party spent years and year – quite rightly – attacking the Morrison government’s “sports rorts” program administered by Senator Bridget McKenzie and promised to end the politics of pork-barrelling. Yet, here it is several years later, implementing the same scandalous and partisan programs it once accused the Liberal Party of.

The Australian Greens are pushing for a parliamentary inquiry in this issue – if the grants were allocated entirely on merit, the government needs to demonstrate this. Otherwise, voters can reasonably conclude that pork-barrelling hasn’t disappeared from within the federal government, it has only changed from one side of politics, to the other.

Pressure on Labor for real action on Palestine and Israel

Australia’s recognition of Palestine continues to be a diplomatic pantomime, with the government actively undermining the Palestinian state that it claims to recognise as an independent nation.

The foreign minister Penny Wong says further targeted measures against illegal settlements and settler violence are being considered, yet the government remains reluctant to embrace restrictions on trade associated with those settlements. The contradiction is becoming impossible to hide from: if the settlements are illegal – as stated by the government on many occasions – and Palestinian sovereignty is genuine, why should economic relations connected to that illegality continue?

Senator David Pocock is urging the government implement “red lines” legislation to ban Australian goods from being used by the Israeli military – it makes sense if Australia claims to uphold its international human rights obligations, especially on a day when Israel has killed another 10 Palestinians near Khan Younis, including a pregnant women. So much for Israel’s so-called “cease fire” agreement.

Meanwhile, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is working towards the release of its December report, in the midst of an argument that goes far beyond definitions of antisemitism. The critical question for the Commission is where legitimate action against genuine anti-Jewish hatred ends and restrictions on anti-Zionism, Palestine advocacy and criticism of Israel begin. These are important distinctions and ones that need to be clearly separated.

Taken together, these debates expose the central dilemma for the Labor government: it wants recognition of Palestine without a disruption to its relationship and military trade with Israel, and wants to have a strong opposition to antisemitism without appearing to suppress political dissent. But, so far, it’s taken the more unscrupulous path, one that will end up pleasing no one at all – except Zionist interests, of course – primarily because it failed the basic test on supporting human rights for Palestinian people, when they have been clearly breached by Israel.

One Nation shows who they really are

The most significant story on the Australian conservative right is no longer One Nation’s rise during this year, but the political pull it’s exerting over the Liberal and National parties. Pauline Hanson doesn’t need to become prime minister to transform Australian politics – she’s in the wrong chamber of parliament for a start – but all she needs to do is for the Coalition to keep adopting the territory on which she wants politics fought.

And it’s a spectacle that’s becoming increasingly chaotic. Andrew Hastie has called Hanson and Barnaby Joyce “lying cowards” after being branded a “traitor” in a juvenile cartoon – best described as Politics for Two-Year Olds – while Hanson’s comments about Anthony Albanese’s late mother and public housing show the mindset and the inner thoughts of this grotesque woman.

Yet the Coalition’s response to Hansonism remains strategically confused. Migration, tobacco excise, government spending and the familiar culture-war complaints all offer opportunities to chase those voters who are drifting off towards One Nation. But every time Angus Taylor shifts in Hanson’s direction, he reinforces the argument that she identified the real issues first. And why vote for the imitation when the original is available?

The alternative – confronting Hanson front on and calling out this fool whenever possible – carries its own electoral risks of creating sympathy, irrespective of how much bile she sends out the other way. And that’s always going the trap. Of course, there’s also many people who are supporting One Nation because they’re being totally turned off with both Labor and the Coalition, and want to send a message that the business-as-usual politics that’s presented by mainstream politics isn’t enough anymore.

But the surprise will arrive when they realise that while One Nation wants to rattle the cage, it’s not there to change the system: under One Nation, there’ll be more neoliberalism, not less; more control by corporations; more support for big business and less support for workers; more fascism, not less. And definitely less public housing.

Cost of living, housing and the opinion polls

Behind almost every political argument sits the same old reality: too many Australians feel they are working harder simply to stand still and, in many cases, going backwards. Housing, mortgages, rents, energy and groceries are consuming household incomes, and voters are becoming increasingly unimpressed by assurances that the economic fundamentals are sound and everything is going to be alright.

The political consequences for Labor are becoming – to borrow a few phrases from Penny Wong – very concerning.

In the latest opinion polls, Resolve has Labor on 28 per cent of the primary vote, with One Nation just behind on 27 per cent, while confidence in the government’s economic management has deteriorated. Around 74 per cent of people are concerned about federal debt and 48 per cent want spending cut. Whatever economists and the Reserve Bank board might say about the complexities, voters are delivering a far simpler message: the economy isn’t working in their favour.

That frustration within the electorate creates the perfect conditions for populist economics. One Nation’s proposal to let workers divert compulsory superannuation into mortgage repayments, rent or current income is seductive: it’s easier to forget about that retirement in 30 years’ time when the electricity bill is due this Friday. But raiding future retirement savings to compensate for today’s unaffordable housing just transfers the failures of the economy from one decade to another.

Labor’s problem is that structural reform takes time, while the patience within the electorate is quickly evaporating right now. But this is where that cliché of the political narrative comes into play: if the electorate can see that while the circumstances are not favourable right now, and they develop an understanding that there is the template for creating better circumstances for the future, they will reward the government.

But this is a government that’s been in office for four years, and it’s had enough time to create the narrative – and the policies to support this – but hasn’t done enough in these areas. A weak Housing Australia Future Fund just isn’t really going to solve anything. As a result, economic insecurity is becoming political insecurity, and One Nation is keen to exploit this gap.

NDIS cuts are about to become real

Nothing reveals a government’s priorities quite like the things it decides Australia can afford, and those that it cannot. From 1 October, the harsh NDIS reforms will become real for many participants, with support budgets changing – more than likely, decreasing – as their plans are reassessed.

Labor insists that the expenditure growth needs to be controlled to preserve the long-term viability of the NDIS. Of course, that’s a reasonable objective, but “sustainability” becomes considerably less abstract when an individual with a disability loses the financial support that their lives actually rely on.

And at exactly the same time these cutbacks are coming in, another $2.4 billion has been found for air and missile defence, contributing to the $30 billion planned for an integrated system over the next decade.

Add the ridiculous AUKUS deal and Australia’s broader military expansion, and suddenly the language of budget restraint that’s applied to the NDIS, becomes remarkably flexible when it applies to military spending.

Apparently, social programs of any nature must continually demonstrate their affordability, eliminate waste and justify individual expenditure, because it always has to represent value for money for the taxpayer, while defence projects involving astronomical amounts of public funds are unavoidable strategic necessities that need to be paid to support the industrial military complexes in the submarines dock of the US and UK.

The involvement of Lockheed Martin Australia in this military spending also raises another obvious question: as defence spending increases at this astronomical rate and without limits, how much public money will ultimately become revenue for multinational weapons manufacturers?

Governments will always say that budgets involve the difficult choices. But it seems that there are certain areas that are far easier to cut, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable people in society.

Marching to the beat of One Nation’s drum

One Nation might be slipping in its opinion poll numbers – now that more people are looking at who they are and what they represent – but it’s still setting the agenda for conservative politics. Angus Taylor’s answer isn’t to differentiate the Liberal Party from Pauline Hanson, but to chase her further into the deep rabbit hole of the culture wars.

Taylor’s latest proposal to criminalise the burning and desecration of the Australian flag and entrench 26 January as “Australia Day” is pure political theatre and a classic conservative diversionary tactic: identify an offence according to the laws of culture war – real or imagined, it doesn’t really matter – then exaggerate the importance of the issue, and promise severe punishment for the culprits. It’s not exactly the tail wagging the dog, but it’s along the lines of the dog chasing a car and not knowing what to do with the car once it gets there.

And of course, it does nothing to address housing issues, wages, healthcare or inequality, but it does provides a cheap and easy performance art piece of hand-on-heart patriotism.

The same approach with the Coalition attacks on the Respectful Relationships education package, this time it’s coming from National Party leader Matt Canavan. These programs are intended to support education on consent, equality and non-violent relationships – commendable objectives, one would think – but are, according to Canavan, “woke” indoctrination that supposedly makes boys and men feel inferior. Rather than confronting the attitudes that contribute to harassment and gender-based violence, critics like Canavan manufacture these political-correctness-gone-mad grievances among men and then offer themselves as its political defenders of the right-wing faith. They’re insufferable.

In the most recent opinion polls – from Essential – Labor and the Coalition are now level on 26 per cent of the primary vote, with One Nation at 23 per cent, and Anthony Albanese recording his lowest approval rating ever as prime minister. This might give some encouragement for the Liberal Party but it seems that they just can’t help themselves: they keep chasing the agenda of One Nation but every time they do this, it sends the message out to the electorate that maybe One Nation was right all along.

And this doesn’t really ward off or defeat One Nation, it just validates it and shows that it’s becoming more difficult to discern the differences between them and the Coalition.

Lighting up for big tobacco

And if the Coalition is marching to the beat of One Nation, why stop at criminalising the burning of the Australian flag, when there are other things to burn, such as cigarettes?

The Coalition is promising to cut tobacco excise by 80 per cent – outbidding One Nation’s proposal to cut it by 75 per cent – and this is being sold as a way of targeting organised crime. Angus Taylor’s argument is that cheaper legal cigarettes will destroy the illicit cigarette trade, even though there’s no strong evidence to support this claim, not that this has ever been a problem for the Liberal Party.

The black market is in any sector is going to be a problem but the Coalition’s proposal looks very similar to the policy tobacco companies have been after for decades: cheaper cigarettes, a weaker price deterrent and a brand new market for nicotine. And if this proposal was ever implemented, it would be a nice return on investment the tobacco industry provides to the National Party – $225,500 in the most recent political donations year.

Cutting this excise would not remove the enormous profit margins available to criminal suppliers, who can then go on to lower their prices as well. And it would also make legal tobacco far more profitable and undermine Australia’s most successful public health policy ever. When Australia began its campaign to reduce smoking levels in 1976, the daily smoking rate among people aged over 16 was 38 per cent: that level today is around 6 per cent. It’s an amazing statistic that has prevented 500,000 premature deaths, and has saved billions of dollars over the past 50 years in societal, health and economic costs associated with tobacco. Even today, with low rates of smoking, the costs are estimated to be $155 billion per year and if these measures had not been introduced in 1976, that cost would be close to a trillion dollars each year.

Under Taylor’s proposal, these costs would rise and filter through to the health care system, while the tobacco companies – of course – would bank the immediate profits. After years of being treated as a discredited industry – which is fully deserved – big tobacco has returned to Canberra as a respectable policy adviser. This is exactly how this insidious corporate influence works: exploit a crisis, redefine the problem and offer a supposedly “obvious” solution that, by the way, just happens to improve the profits for the industry.

What was the recognition of Palestine all about?

Palestine is likely to return to Question Time as the pressure builds on Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Prime Minister Albanese over Australia’s response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and the totally unresolved issue of the attack that killed Zomi Frankcom in 2024.

Israel keeps rubbing the dirt – and the genocide – in Australia’s face, and the federal government keeps asking for more. This time, it was former Israel Defense Forces reserve colonel Nochi Mendel said he would do “exactly the same thing” again and that Frankcom and her World Central Kitchen colleagues were “not innocent”.

This is the commentary of an extremist and rogue state – as it has been since 1948 – and Wong and the rest of the federal Cabinet just sit there and take it all in, sending meaningless words of “outrage” and swatting away calls for stronger action against Israel. And as time goes by, we can see that Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood in September 2025 is a meaningless as it ever was.

Sure, it was symbolically important, but it was also politically convenient symbolism: in cases like this, it’s Palestine that’s treated like the pariah state – even though it has been recognised by Australia – when all the actions should be against the state of Israel.

Australia’s recognition of Palestine hasn’t resolved any of the questions about sanctions against Israel, the military exports of F-35 parts, humanitarian assistance and support for Gaza, or Australia’s relationship with the Netanyahu government.

Nor has it stopped the destruction and dispossession of Palestinian communities, or stopped the proposal by senior Israeli politicians for the supposedly “voluntary emigration” of Gazans, which should be recognised for what it is: ethnic cleansing of a population whose homes and society have already been devastated, and clearly in contravention of international law and any semblance of humanity.

These are the realities and truths that the Australian government will need to face up to: recognition means something, or it means nothing at all. And at the moment, it’s clear that Palestine means nothing at all to the likes of Wong and Albanese.

The migration blame game

Migration continues to be the convenient explanation for almost every Australian policy failure: if there’s unaffordable housing, congested roads, overcrowded hospitals, stagnant wages or deteriorating public services, it’s never the fault of poor policy development and implementation by government, blame the migrant: it’s all their fault. Always.

Labor, the Coalition and One Nation are now in this undignified competition to promise lower migration numbers – and that’s understandable: most of these MPs are undignified people – while being vague about which migrants could be excluded and how the economic consequences of lower numbers would be managed.

It’s a debate that always confuses permanent migration, temporary visas and net overseas migration – and all rolled into a massive number that is always misused and misquoted, provides a very alarming news headline, and create the impression that it’s a simple as the government turning a tap off, and with no flow-on effects.

Migration does increase demand for housing and infrastructure, there’s no denying that. But migrants aren’t the ones who decide policy: they’re not the ones who privatised essential services, suppressed or removed public investment, turn housing into a speculative asset, or allow employers to exploit insecure temporary labour. These are political choices made by successive neoliberalist governments over many decades, and there are very few solutions that are on the table.

The Labor Party is exposed on this issue because it allowed migration to rise without providing a serious plan for the housing and services that are needed to support such a rise, preferring to boost housing through incrementalist policies and housing development funded through a close-to-useless Housing Australia Future Fund.

The Coalition attacks migration numbers even though they were largely responsible for creating the economic model that is highly dependent on higher levels of migration. One Nation offers dramatic reductions in numbers without explaining the effect that these reductions would have on universities, aged care, agriculture, construction and government revenue.

It’s united approach and an auction through to the bottom of the pile which has one sole purpose: it creates public anger towards migrants and deflects from the governments and corporations that designed the system in the first place.

The political charade with Israel continues

The Sydney Marathon controversy – where around 40 Israel Defence Forces personnel from the infamous Golani Brigade and Unit 8200 participated – presents the Albanese government with that same old question it has repeatedly avoided for almost three years: when will condemnation of Israel actually produce some consequences?

There were protests surrounded the participation of these Israeli runners, including people connected to Israeli military operations in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, and the Australian Centre for International Justice did call on the government to investigate these runners but those calls were ignored, and the sportwashing of Israel’s genocide was allowed to continue.

Some of these IDF soldiers, including First Lieutenant Roy Oryon, were involved in the killing of 15 Palestinian paramedics, rescue workers and a UN employee, and are complicit in war crimes, human rights abuses, and genocide. Their visit to Sydney and participation in the Sydney Marathon was sponsored Zionist Council of NSW and the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, and the timing is absolutely abysmal.

A few days earlier, Israel’s military cleared its personnel of criminal wrongdoing over the strikes that killed Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom and six World Central Kitchen colleagues in 2024. The foreign minister Penny Wong responded with the usual “outrage” but it’s a pantomime that’s becoming Australia’s cheapest form of diplomacy: strongly worded, repeated at a regular cycle, but ultimately meaning nothing and achieving nothing.

There is real outrage within the Australian community about the lack of clear of response to the killing of Zomi Frankcom and the complete lack of accountability for the Israel Defense Forces and responses from our political leaders, even when the commander who ordered the attack, Colonel Nochi Mendel, proudly announced to the Australian media “I’m not sorry for what I did”.

This is Zionist arrogance at its regular and extreme levels: appearing on national television in the country of the citizen who was killed, not to apologise, but display all the behaviours that has made the state Israel one of the most despised countries in the world. It’s rubbing dirt into the faces of the Australian public.

And the government’s response? Keep on going with the weasel words, invite soldiers who have been complicit in a genocide to run around the streets of Sydney – even affording them a police escort and protection – and make it seem like this is normal behaviour. It’s the best advertisement to suggest that Australia is a capture state. It couldn’t be made more obvious.

Labor keeps misreading the surge of One Nation

One Nation’s emphatic victory in the Secret Harbour byelection in Western Australia on the weekend should worry the Labor government, but not for the reasons Anthony Albanese seems to think. Calling Pauline Hanson’s politics “dangerous” and “divisive” might be the message that the party faithful needs to hear – and saying this over the past 30 years doesn’t seemed to have worked – but it does nothing to explain why an electorate that’s been held by WA Labor for 37 years had an 18 percentage point swing against it.

There are many issues going on here: WA Labor has been very successful for almost a decade, and despite being a long-term government of nine years, it doesn’t show the signs of decay that have been apparent with the Victoria Labor government. The economy in Western Australin is strong, and has the benefit of a very favourable GST deal instigated by the Morrison government, which it has used to build infrastructure right across the city.

So why does a safe Labor electorate swing so drastically against a strong government that’s doing relatively well?

It’s the business-as-usual approach that’s the problem: the public is demanding different response from all governments, even voting for a party that is just a culture of complaint and offers no solutions at all, to send a clear message. And that’s the message that the federal government is failing to understand.

Housing remains unaffordable for many, rents are punishing, wages have struggled to keep pace, public services are stretched and economic insecurity has become normalised. The Albanese government has made attempts at many of these issues, but it’s been piecemeal and so insignificant that it’s hardly made any difference at all.

When governments fail to attend to these problems adequately, populists will always arrive with a simpler explanation: the problems exist because of immigration, the elites, bureaucrats, multiculturalism, Canberra, everything going woke, or far worse – communism!

It’s a cynical approach and deliberately inflammatory but it works: just ask Nigel Farage in the UK, who has turned this level of stupidity into an artform. And, essentially, it works because the underlying dissatisfaction is real.

Labor faces that dangerous path which it has already started going down: chase One Nation into an argument about immigration, rather than focus on the economic conditions, which then allows Pauline Hanson to set the agenda. And allowing a political idiot to set the agenda ends up getting us into this vicious and endless cycle of doom and despair that can never be remedied.

But there’s also an opportunity here, once the Labor government can work out what the message is. One Nation is discovering that winning seats is easier than governing and, of course, at this state, it doesn’t have to worry about governing.

But David Farley’s recent dispute with Hanson and Barnaby Joyce over migration numbers exposes the gap between slogans and workable policy, where Farley realises that regional economies – such as one in his seat of Farrer – need workers; that the infrastructure needs to be carefully planned; housing needs investment. None of this can be solved by shouting from the rooftops that everything is a disaster, and placing a bumper sticker on the back of a ute in the back streets of Albury.

Obviously, Secret Harbour was victory for One Nation, but it only holds one seat in a parliament of 59. That needs to be put into perspective. But the greater message is that it was a vote of no confidence in establishment politics, and that’s the issue that needs to change.

Climate catastrophe is no longer waiting for politics

The catastrophe across Nepal and Tibet is another reminder that climate change doesn’t act according to election cycles, opinion polling or the whims of governments. Global warming is destabilising glaciers, permafrost and mountain slopes across the Himalayas, increasing the risks that already vulnerable communities are expected to somehow idly sit by and just let it all happen.

The political cycle is painfully familiar and pretty much always the same. There’s a disaster that strikes – whether it’s floods or fires – leaders express sympathy, scientists explain the growing risks, governments promise to do something about it – but the economic system of unlimited growth that produced the problem continues undisturbed.

This contradiction will be difficult for Australia to avoid at the Pacific Islands Forum in Palau. Pacific governments have spent years trying to convince larger Western countries that climate change is their biggest security threat, while these far wealthier countries have been very good at producing communiqués – and organising the next international climate change conference – than providing the finances and support to reverse climate change that’s threatening to swallow up the whole world, not just the communities at the Nepal–Tibet border.

Australia’s position is problematic and hypocritical. The government wants to be regarded as the indispensable security partner in the Pacific region, while remaining a massive fossil-fuel exporter and opening up new mines. It keeps warning Pacific nations about China’s expanding influence but then is surprised when those countries look at what Australia does on climate change and then decide that their future is better guaranteed through the support of the Chinese government.

The events in Nepal provide the disturbing background to this situation and is a clear example of what climate scientists have been predicting for well over 50 years. The climate emergency isn’t something that’s approaching over some kind of distant horizon: it’s already here.

The AI comes with an enormous power bill and more greenhouse gases

According to the Prime Minister, Australia wants the investment, productivity and technological prestige that’s being promised by artificial intelligence. But what he seems to be far less enthusiastic about is discussing is the extraordinary amounts of electricity required to make the AI boom possible, where it’s going to come from, and who ultimately pays for the infrastructure behind it.

The federal government is proposing that these new data centres offset their enormous electricity demands with additional renewable generation – and wouldn’t it be great if Australia could do this by being the “renewable energy superpower” that Albanese promised in 2022 but has failed to deliver – but pressure from the Queensland and the Northern Territory governments has pushed the policy towards “technology agnostic” – a very convenience piece of terminology that keeps coal and gas as a part of the deal without politicians having to explicitly say so.

And, once again, we have more inherent contradictions within government policy, that is all about the politics and very little about community.

The public has been told many times that decarbonisation of the economy requires changing cars, their household appliances and energy consumption, while the government is doing its best to attract multinational technology companies that will add enormous new loads to the electricity grid. And guess who will be paying for it: it won’t be the government, and it won’t be the multinational tech companies. It will be the public that takes up the bill through higher retail energy prices. Perhaps sometime soon, the Labor government will understand why they are in line to lose more seats to One Nation.

Of course, there is a legitimate economic case for expanding Australia’s data-centre industry, and many countries are looking at developing domestic AI systems and software that can or will result from these data centres. But there are equally legitimate questions about the conditions that will be attached to these data centres.

Why shouldn’t companies creating massive new electricity demand be required to fund new renewable generation, storage and necessary infrastructure rather than pushing those costs and pressures onto consumers?

Australia can’t declare that climate change is an emergency, promise an energy transition and then quietly loosen the rules whenever large corporate investments arrive.

The killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom in 2024 should have produced a major crisis in the relationship between Australia and Israel. Instead, two years after Frankcom was killed by Israeli drone strikes – along with six other World Central Kitchen workers – the Israeli military has cleared itself of any wrong-doing and its repulsive ambassador is still defending the indefensible and unapologetically churning out his pro-Israel propaganda.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said that she is outraged and has “no confidence” in Israel’s investigation but these are the same weasel words that she’s used over the past two years which resulted in no action at all against Israel. Ambassador Hillel Newman has indicated that he won’t be offering an apology to Frankcom’s family and will continue to support the actions of the Israel government.

If Australia – and Wong – genuinely regarded the killing of Frankcom as unacceptable and were seriously “outraged” about it, Newman would already have been booted out of the country and on his way to Tel Aviv. At the very least, the Australian government should be pursuing a high-level independent investigation and pressuring the Netanyahu government, release all available evidence and review its military arrangements with Israel, which includes sales of weapons parts.

Instead, Prime Minister Albanese will probably make yet another announcement after yet another futile consultation. It’s an official outrage which the government has no intention of forcing Israel to accept the consequences of its actions.

And this follows on the usual behaviour and acquiescence of this government: defence-industry relationships, the likely flow of dark money and the fear of a backlash from Israel always hampers Australia’s responses, even when it’s so obvious what their responses should be. We all know what the responses would be it if was any other country, but when it comes to Israel, power and political cowardice always go together.

Another legal victory against the forces of Zionism

There was a peculiar case in New South Wales where anti-Israel graffiti painted in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney by Mohommed Farhat was wrongly identified as “antisemitic”. Farhat was paid by “unknown foreign actors” (usually code for Mossad) to perform these acts – and also provided with the exact text to use – and Justice Desmond Fagan found that evidence of his sole financial motivation (and not ideological) was not provided in earlier court hearings, and this resulted in a serious miscarriage of justice.

Fagan’s findings also challenged the IHRA working definition of antisemitism – which is not applicable in any legal system in Australia – where he described it as “verbose and imprecise” and rejected the proposition that hostility towards Israel and opposition to Zionism is automatically a hostility directed towards Jewish people. This also follows on from Justice Angus Stewart’s findings in 2024, that criticisms of the state of Israel and Zionism cannot be deemed to be antisemitic.

As a part of a pro-Israel and Zionist Labor government in New South Wales, the Attorney–General Michael Daley is now taking steps to launch an appeal – of course he is – and pro-Israel groups in Australia have denounced the findings. Apparently, the independence of the judiciary is always sacrosanct, except for when they make a decision the Israel lobby doesn’t like.

Antisemitism is real and must be reduced – we always have to keep pointing that out. But expanding its meaning to stop the criticism of the state of Israel or Zionist zealots won’t do anything at all to protect Jewish people. In fact, it will only do the opposite.

A royal commission in search of the right answers

Justice Fagan’s recent rejection of the IHRA definition within the legal system will hang heavily over the final hearings of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which are due to wrap up this week.

The Commission has adopted the IHRA definition, and it will be interesting to see how this affects its final findings, which are due in December. It’s also coming under more pressure from Coalition figures and Jewish organisations to extend its hearings, call on more ministers and community leaders to appear, and also interrogate the organisers of pro-Palestine actions and protests.

But those who are making these demands don’t want to find out what’s happened in the past, but wish to overwhelm the Commission and get the main conclusion they were always expecting to receive: that any criticism of Israel and Zionism is antisemitic.

These demands should be ignored: an inquiry that purports to inspect the issue of “social cohesion” can’t lump the advocacy of Palestine, criticism of Zionism or opposition to Israel’s genocide as inherently suspicious, and then relegate Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism and threats against Palestinian Australians and push it over to the margins.

A real royal commission should test all of these viewpoints and arrive at conclusions that benefit all the community, and not just allocate special privileges to a select few at the expense of everyone else.

Gambling reform: Terms and conditions apply

The Labor government wants take credit for taking gambling out of sport but, as usual, there are many terms and conditions that do apply – and these seem to be taking more precedence, because it’s giving the gambling industry six more years to keep selling the same product to the same audience, and then give it ample time to target new and younger groups of people.

Gambling logos will remain on many sporting jerseys – mainly within the National Rugby League – until 2032 because existing sponsorship agreements have been granted a remarkably generous transition period.

The legislation does introduce some worthwhile restrictions on advertisements during sporting events, inside stadiums and to children online, but waiting for six years before the impacts come fully into effect is an indication that the government has caved in to vested interests, as it usually does.

The package offered by this government falls short of the much stronger recommendations made by the cross-party parliamentary inquiry that was led by the late Labor MP, Peta Murphy. In the meantime, media companies have already started complaining about age verification, compliance costs and the proposed national opt-out register, as if protecting corporate revenue is far more important than a clear public-health objective.

This is the familiar pattern of the modern Labor Party: announce a position based on principle and promise to do everything possible; then negotiate extensively with the industries causing the harm and arrive at solutions that do as little as possible, and then provide them with several years to get to this point of doing not much as all.

Gambling advertising will eventually be restricted – just a little bit – but only after everyone who needs to profit has gained their filthy lucre, and people who are susceptible to gambling, have been harmed.

Migration policy from the One Nation magic wand of racism

Labor is doing its best to imitate Pauline Hanson’s racist magic-wand politics, sending out the message that migration numbers will fall dramatically, without causing any pain at all, without damaging universities, without making skill shortages worse or weakening an economy that has been calibrated to sustain itself through a certain level of population growth.

Hanson, though, wants to cut net migration much further and has singled out international students as her latest scapegoat of choice. The Coalition seems to have also decided to join this nihilistic race to the bottom, hoping that the voters out there will forget that governments of both persuasions built the migration and university-funding systems that they’re now denouncing.

These arguments over migration are always presented as a dispute over the net numbers, but there are much larger policy failures that lie behind the scenes. Housing shortages are now being blamed on migrants, rather than decades of government underinvestment, and the favourable tax concessions that gave rise to speculation in property in the first place.

Pressure on infrastructure is blamed on population growth, rather than incompetent governments who have failed to build the infrastructure that was needed to support this demand. Falling wages are blamed on foreign workers instead of the environment that was created to weaken unions, more insecure employment and a deliberate suppression of wages. Universities were starved of public funding and encouraged to seek fee-paying international students, and are now being condemned for relying on these students.

The most bizarre part of this how One Nation has spooked the major parties and now – led by a political dilettante who bellows uninformed opinions through a megaphone but offers no solutions – is dictating policy for both the government and the opposition. Labor holds 94 seats and the Coalition holds 42 – and this makes up around 90 per cent of the seats in the lower house – yet a party that holds just two seats in Parliament, in conjunction with the News Corporation machine of outrage, is determining migration policy. It’s a sad indication of what politics in Australia has become.

Buying back guns is meaningless without major reform of gun laws

The new NSW gun buyback scheme that was created as a result of the Bondi terror attacks in December last year, will become a major federal and state political issue after Prime Minister Albanese and Premier Chris Minns announced that up to 274,000 firearms could be removed from the community when the scheme commences later this year. The Commonwealth will partially fund this, but there’s already resistance from Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia, which has started to undermine a comprehensive national response to gun ownership.

And this exposes that age-old problem of Australia’s federation: political leaders will declare a national emergency on a particular issue, create national principles, which then produce eight different systems.

One Nation and the Nationals – who are travelling down the same hysterical path as the American gun lobby – are now claiming that the lawful owners of guns are being punished for a terrorist attack they had no role in, conveniently overlooking the fact that the perpetrators of the Bondi terror attacks owned six legally-obtained guns.

The real test will be whether this buyback actually removes high-risk weapons, rather than generating a number that Minns can try and impress the public with, in the lead up to the 2027 NSW state election. That’s great if 274,000 guns are removed from the community, but we have to remember that it was just three guns that were used to kill 15 people in the Bondi massacre.

Without consistent national gun laws, NSW risks buying back all of these firearms while other states enable the conditions that allow their numbers to grow. And that, is not a great example of national leadership.

Stealing from disabled kids to pay for AUKUS

The government’s Securing the NDIS for Future Generations legislation will this week place disability policy in the spotlight. The government has argued that there needs to be tighter eligibility and assessment criteria to control expenditure and preserve the NDIS scheme – an argument that they have never put forward for the outrageous $368 billion AUKUS program – but why bother supporting the people that genuinely need support, when we can pay for submarines that we’ll never receive in 20 years’ time.

Disability organisations have already suggested that current NDIS recipients, particularly those children with autism or developmental delays, will lose their individualised support through the so-called Thriving Kids program that’s due to commence in October. There’s many questions remain about the program’s design, workforce requirements, funding and consistency across the states and territories, and these have yet to be answered.

Of course, governments never use the brutal language that’s associated with cutting essential services – this round of cuts to these desperately needed funds preach the language of “sustainability”, better “pathways”, “preservation” and “appropriate supports”.

But the key word here is exclusion, because that’s what Labor’s new legislation will do. Using weasel words doesn’t create the speech therapists, the occupational therapists, early-childhood specialists or provide accessible community programs that are needed to sustain this program.

The government is attempting to remove children from the NDIS, but we have no idea what happens to them afterwards. Thriving Kids might end up repairing some of the gaps in the existing system, but it seems to be more of an austerity measure that’s couched in feel-good language of bureaucracy.

Let them eat tents: The Coalition’s housing policy for low-income people

Housing is still a big talking point within the community and it seems to be that political connecting point between migration, inequality and the cost-of-living. The shadow housing minister Andrew Bragg’s answer is the typical free-market libertarian approach to everything, believing that every social issue can be solved by removing regulations, in this case, reducing the National Construction Code and making energy-efficiency and accessibility standards optional, rather than mandatory.

And if this wasn’t enough, Bragg suggested that lower-income people just have to accept “substandard homes”. It’s the Coalition’s housing vision built for the dystopia: one standard for the privileged people who can afford the comfort and easily manage their energy bills and cost of living, and another standard for everyone else in the chaff class, who may as well live in tents.

What Bragg is proposing is clearly a false economy. A cheaper building with inadequate insulation will cost more to heat and cool; any fool will be able to tell you this. A home constructed without taking accessibility into account will need expensive modifications later on in life – usually at a cost to government – especially if an older person develops a disability or suffer an injury. Once again, it’s the Coalition’s short-termism on display: developers will receive the immediate saving; but residents are the ones who will inherit the long-term costs.

Bragg’s rhetoric during the week also replicated that of the US Republicans, veering into the language of the mad uncle or the ravings of the drunken man at the local bar, where he described Labor’s economic interventions as “communism” and “neo-Marxism”, while he described compulsory superannuation as a “repressive system” controlled by unions.

And this would be a surprise to the superannuation sector, because there are no superannuation funds that are legally controlled or owned by trade unions in Australia, and even more of a surprise to all of those retail and self-managed super funds that are so far removed from the presence of “communist” or “neo-Marxist” unions that they wouldn’t be able to spot one in a McCarthy-ist era show trial.

Bragg is supposedly a moderate within the Liberal Party, but this isn’t serious housing policy at all, it’s just an ideological demolition job that very few people are going to take notice of.

Australia does needs cheaper and faster construction in the housing sector, but affordability doesn’t mean building inferior housing for people on lower incomes.

The Liberal Party’s holy war at ICAC

The NSW ICAC investigation into the conservative Christian “Reformers” faction is increasing the pressure on Angus Taylor, although we do have to point out that he is not accused of any wrongdoing – yet.

ICAC has heard evidence that some of these associates wanted to “shake down Angus for 10k”, and had secured an initial $15,000 contribution followed by monthly payments. Taylor has categorically denied paying anything at all, while other evidence has suggested that these associates might have been boasting or lying about gaining the commitment.

While this issue has the potential to end Taylor’s leadership – not that too many people would notice – that bigger issue is the attempts of this Reformers faction to recruit thousands of conservative Christians to the Liberal Party, take over Liberal branches, and drag the party backwards on abortion, euthanasia, transgender rights and same-sex marriage. As if the Liberal Party doesn’t already have enough problems trying to regain electoral credibility, and this will damage the party even further.

Taylor’s problem – at the moment – is more of a political problem than a legal one, but he needs to come clean about what he knows about the Reformers, what sort of involvement he’s had with the organisers of this faction, and if he supports their objectives. This group is a maniacal and zealous subgroup that has very little mainstream support and is trying to fight the culture-war battles that were lost some time ago. Why does the Liberal Party keep wanting to fight these losing battles over and over and again?

Melon-gate: The enshittification of mainstream journalism continues

Fear not: we’re not trying to keep kicking this story down the road, but focussing on how the mighty – if that’s what they ever were – have fallen.

The continuing media fixation on Albanese’s hand gestures while discussing melons on the obscure Bush Deep podcast has become less about the Prime Minister and more of an indictment of Australian political journalism.

The increasingly irrelevant Insiders program – supposedly the pinnacle of political analysis at the ABC – spent more than a quarter of its program discussing this issue (sorry folks, we just ran of time to discuss migration, housing, gun laws, NDIS cutbacks, the disaster of AUKUS, but OMG, will you just have a look at those melons!), in a clear indication of the paucity of intellect on display from Australia’s mainstream journalists.

The melons were presented by Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in May, and Albanese appeared on Bush Deep more than a month ago, and Japan has clearly stated that it does not regard the incident as a diplomatic problem. Yet the Coalition has encouraged the pantomime – and supported by the mainstream media – by suggest the Australian Federal Police need to investigate the leaking of confidential Japanese material, making sure that this manufactured scandal that doesn’t have any legs at all, will be able to walk into another week of Parliament.

Albanese deserves criticism for appearing on a podcast that’s based around smutty humour and sexual innuendo – it’s the same podcast where he made the “shagging Kylie Minogue” comments recently – and if this is Labor’s idea of connecting with younger Australians, it needs to go back to the drawing board and stop this patronising view of young people as unsophisticated and obsessed with smutty sex and useless double-entendres.

Of course, if he decided to appear on the New Politics podcast, he would never have arrived at this point, and we’d be able to discuss all the important things within the realm of politics. But it’s his choice.

The media’s response to this has been far worse. Parliament is dealing with gambling reform, a war in Iran and Australia’s response to it, cutbacks to the most vulnerable people in society, immigration policy and housing deregulation, while ICAC is examining attempts of a Christian conservative group to take over the Liberal Party. And the list goes on. Instead, journalists keep wasting everyone’s time by re-analysing a hand gesture and a piece of fruit.

Australia’s political journalism keeps going down the path of “infotainment” and presents the garbage they should be discussing at their dinner parties in Canberra – and keeping it there – as serious analysis to a national audience. It’s an absolute disgrace. The media is the main joke in politics, and it’s now become the punchline too.

A US base by any other name

The arrival of up to 2,300 US naval personnel, civilian employees, contractors and their family members, should finally end the political charade that HMAS Stirling in Perth is only hosting a short-term submarine rotation. The US Navy has established “Naval Support Activity Stirling” to provide housing, healthcare, childcare and recreation for this personnel, which suggests that it’s not creating the infrastructure of a brief visit or short-term holiday; it’s more along the lines of a permanent community.

The region of Rockingham will need to soak up additional pressure on housing, schools, roads and public services, while the US will gain a strategically valuable submarine hub underwritten by Australian taxpayers – which, of course, we were never asked about. Yet the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles continue to hide behind duplicitous language: the submarines are only “rotational”, the base will remain “Australian” – whatever that means in this day and age – and every decision that’s being made here somehow keeps our national sovereignty intact.

The Minister for Defence Industry Pat Conroy suggested this arrangement would only last “five years”, but quickly retracted that, and said that it an “enduring element” of American military presence in Australia. So, what are we meant to believe? Perhaps we should speak to the people of Okinawa, where 80 years of US surveillance and military operations on the islands has resulted in many social and crime issues, toxic pollution, noise disruption, poor economic and business opportunities for local Okinawans, and completely taken over by American interests.

The central question isn’t whether Australia technically owns HMAS Stirling and whether it’s on Australian soil – Okinawa is Japanese territory but a de facto subordination to the US – but whether we could refuse to partake in any American operation during a regional war on our doorstep. And given the maniacal behaviour of the current US regime, it’s not a fanciful as it sounds.

This AUKUS deal – which we know very little about but will soon be seeing the physical evidence of it – is gradually linking up Australian territory, infrastructure and military planning to the strategies of the United States – which would also include Israel – and it’s taking place without any parliamentary debate, without a public mandate or honest account of the risks. It’s all just being rolled out, whether we like it or not, and this is the real danger.

First, they went for the gangsters and then everyone else

The Minns government in New South Wales insists that the surveillance powers that it wants to introduce is all about targeting organised crime. We’ve heard this story before: identify a nebulous and frightening enemy, promise exceptional powers to combat this enemy, and dismiss anyone who asks the awkward questions as being “soft on crime”.

Under these laws, police can obtain a Digital Evidence Access Order, compelling anyone to provide their PIN, password or biometric access to a lawfully seized device, bypassing the conventional warrant that’s currently required. And refusing to do this, could end up in jail time. If you decide to avoid this jail time by giving up your passwords, then once the device is unlocked, forensics such as those supplied by Israeli company Cellebrite can extract everything on this device: photographs, long-deleted material, location histories, contacts, metadata and any form of communications that has left a digital footprint over many years.

This NSW government has a habit of doing this. Alongside access to toll-camera images and adding NSW driver-licence photographs to a national face-matching data system, this represents a substantial development of state-led surveillance of its own citizens.

The question here is not about organised criminals use encrypted phones – clearly they do. The issue is whether suspicions about organised crime should create a gateway to state overreach in the digital domain, and whether there are enough legal protections in place once police discover how convenient these powers are, which they can then use against anyone.

History suggests that once these powers are in place, governments refuse to give them up, unless they’re found to be unconstitutional – as was the case with the Public Assembly Restriction Declaration to silence pro-Palestine action. Governments always make the claim that they’re building surveillance systems for the worst offenders in society, but then quietly use these systems to silence protesters, journalists and anyone else they don’t like. This is another example of that.

Labor’s betting on doing nothing

Gambling advertising legislation is providing another test of whether the Albanese government governs for the public interest or for the vested interests, and just like every other test, this one will be provided in the favour of the latter.

The current bill in Parliament will restrict inducements, promotional odds, stadium advertising and betting logos on uniforms, while allowing commercial television to broadcast up to three gambling advertisements an hour between 6am and 8.30pm, which will still end up being 45 advertisements during that time.

This is well short of the comprehensive recommendations proposed by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy which, incidentally, received unanimous parliamentary support. And now, instead of working towards these recommendations, the government is considering shelving the legislation completely rather than accepting reasonable amendments from the Greens, Coalition and crossbench.

The familiar excuses for the government’s recalcitrance will then be offered – sporting clubs, netball teams, and the commercial media depend on betting revenue, and if the revenue were to disappear, many jobs would be lost and industries would collapse. But this is exactly the problem. Bookmakers finance recreational and professional sport, advertising sustains the broadcasters, gambling taxes add substantial amounts to state budgets, and political access is opened up to the gambling lobby to preserve this entire nefarious arrangement.

It’s not a conspiracy: just follow the money. The evidence is there in plain sight. The government needs to decide whether gambling harm is a public-health crisis or just another revenue stream that will continue once all these issues are managed through political spin and making it look like something is being done, without doing anything about it. At the moment, Labor’s public position is that reform is absolutely essential, provided nobody too powerful is seriously affected.

Migration as the convenient scapegoat

The Immigration Minister Tony Burke’s postponed his migration speech last week, and this suggests there’s a lot of internal dissent within the government about this package. The proposed restrictions will affect temporary residents, working holidaymakers, family migration, the work rights of asylum seekers and access to appeals, which apparently are all measures designed to prove that Labor is “doing something” about housing and cost-of-living issues.

Of course, migration does affect demand for housing and services, but there are many other issues that do contribute, most notably poor and inconsistent planning and building regulations across all three levels of government: federal, state/territory, and local council. But doing something about this requires hard work and patience – better to blame the migrant, instead of doing the hard work that would provide more meaningful solutions in the medium-to-longer-term period.

Australia’s continuing housing crisis has been created over many decades of underinvestment in public housing, massive tax concessions for property investors, privatisation and neoliberalism, weak planning and governments relying on the market to supply homes that it has no real incentive to make affordable. Migrants didn’t create insecure work, suppress wages, privatise essential services or neglect transport and social infrastructure, it was the fault of successive governments.

Business groups, of course, will defend migration because it supplies labour, consumers and results in economic growth. Their self-interest needs to be scrutinised too: employers should not be permitted to use temporary workers as a low-paid, easily controlled option for training and paying local workers a fair wage.

But the biggest issue is that this is all coming from the rhetoric of One Nation – the party that holds only two seats in federal parliament, while the government holds 94 seats. The greater political danger is that Labor adopts Pauline Hanson’s simplistic banter while offering a more palatable version of what she’s proposing.

Once migration becomes the excuse for every economic failure, the onus on governments to produce meaningful solutions falls away. Burke’s eventual announcement will reveal whether Labor can define migration in the national interest, or if the tail is wagging the dog, and it’s now One Nation that’s developing immigration policy, even though its relevance within federal parliament is insignificant.

Fighting prejudice is now becoming a struggle over democracy

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has become something far bigger than an inquiry into antisemitism. What began as an examination of discrimination and social cohesion is now becoming a plot to reshaping education, public institutions and the boundaries of acceptable political debate. The proposal by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, for a National Centre for Education Against Antisemitism with its curriculum commencing in preschool is highly contentious and needs to be resisted as much as possible.

As we need to always point out, antisemitism need to be confronted wherever it occurs. The real question is now about how this Commission is quickly moving from addressing genuine prejudice into dictating a broader ideological framework that reaches deep into schools, universities and public life. Once governments begin deciding not only what children should learn but how contentious international conflicts should be understood – and according to one side of the conflict – the debate is moving far beyond combating discrimination to one of regulating opinion.

That presents Prime Minister Albanese with a dilemma. Public sympathy for the Israeli government has collapsed, as the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and Israel’s rogue behaviour continues, with opinion polling suggesting 79 per cent of Australians now hold an unfavourable view of Israel. With this in mind, Segal’s proposals are more about restricting the scrutiny of a foreign government, as well as further restricting political protest, public criticisms of Israel and implementing a comprehensive curriculum at the behest of an extremist activist subset of 0.14 per cent of Australia’s population.

No group of people in any country should have this level of control, or be in a position where they can dictate the educational requirements for the rest of society.

The danger is that, in trying to protect one community – and it’s doubtful whether Segal’s proposals will lead to greater protections for the Jewish community anyway – governments create precedents that weaken democratic freedoms for everyone else.

The game the president never stops playing

Donald Trump’s latest claim that he’s called off planned military strikes against Iran because nuclear negotiations are progressing, and because the Strait of Hormuz has reopened, sounds simple enough. But the problem is that this is all following a very familiar pattern: create a crisis, threaten a catastrophe, declare victory when the catastrophe is temporarily avoided, and then move on before anyone asks what actually happened. And then rinse and repeat. It has become the defining modus operandi of Trump’s foreign policy – escalation followed by de-escalation, crisis followed by not a crisis, mayhem again, and a lack of a coherent long-term strategy beyond dominating the news cycle.

Since the confrontation with Iran commenced in February, Trump has treated the Middle East/West Asia like a geopolitical reality television show, where unpredictability is mistaken for strength, and confusion is presented as some kind of strategic genius. The markets react, allies all around the world panic, military planners prepare for war, and then, on cue, the White House announces another diplomatic breakthrough. Yet these breakthroughs have an extraordinary habit of becoming another round of threats within weeks, and sometimes within days, or hours.

Ironically, one consequence of Trump’s brinkmanship is that the rest of the world has begun adapting around it. Energy markets have diversified, alternative shipping arrangements have been explored, and governments have become less inclined to believe Trump’s threat. And that might end up being Trump’s greatest foreign policy achievement – normalising the idea that American ultimatums are now a part of a political pantomime act.

The danger is that one day, the pantomime will become real. Trump’s credibility is already shot, but international stability can’t be built upon this kind of insane improvisation. Eventually, allies will stop believing the warnings, and the adversaries will stop fearing the threats – and perhaps they already have.

Corruption could swallow up another Liberal leader

The NSW ICAC’s Operation Rosny hearings are once again exposing an uncomfortable truth about Australian politics: scandals involving money, influence and internal party power are becoming so common, it’s as though the entire political system is based on scandal and corruption.

The allegations surrounding the NSW Liberal Party’s religious-based conservative Reformers faction, together with questions about fundraising and developer influence, are significant, not just because of who might have broken the rules, but because they show that modern politics increasingly operates through donors, factional operators and private influence that goes far beyond the reach of public scrutiny.

The Leader of Opposition, Angus Taylor, has not been accused of wrongdoing so far, but politically, the inquiry is placing more attention on the culture surrounding the faction he has been associated with, and will inevitably raises broader questions about judgement, transparency and the company political leaders keep.

Whether or not Taylor has any role in this directly is not the main issue here – the bigger issue is that Australian politics now has a funding model that depends on wealthy donors, factional warlords and access granted to the vested interests with deep pockets. Politicians regularly declare that they support integrity – and who wouldn’t – while also defending a political culture in which fundraising dinners, private lobbying and well-connected go-betweens have become appendages to government.

The hearings within Operation Rosny will be running for another seven weeks but it’s more than just about whether certain individuals have acted improperly – it’s about the issue of the normalised activities within politics that would be considered to be corrupt in any other profession.

Until political finance is completely reformed, every new corruption inquiry will follow the same script: expressions of outrage, huge promises of making reform, weasel-word denials – and then another investigation a few years later to prove that nothing has actually changed.

A new Premier, but the same rulebook?

Ben Carroll’s elevation to the position of the Premier of Victoria has been presented as a fresh start, but Australian politics has this great ability of confusing a change of leadership with genuine political renewal. Change the Premier, reveal a new slogan, reshuffle the frontbench, make the grand promise to “listen”, and everything will be alright. Except it won’t. The years of political fatigue, declining trust and assorted failures won’t simply fade away just like that.

Carroll has emphasised integrity, competent economic management and restoring public confidence. Of course, these are sensible objectives, but they’re also the motherhood statements that we’ve heard so many times before. Every incoming leader promises honesty, competence and accountability – how could they not – but voters are unlikely to be persuaded unless those promises translate into visible changes on housing affordability, overstretched public services, transport, cost-of-living pressures and the growing perception that governments spend more time managing the headlines than solving problems. And with a state election due in November – just four months way – it’s hard to see many inroads being made into any of these issues.

The broader political lesson goes far beyond the borders of Victoria. Modern political parties are increasingly like marketing organisations, convincing themselves that poor opinion polls are a sign of a branding problem, rather than a problem with the government.

Federal Labor will be watching to see how political events unfold here, because Victoria has long been one of its strongest electoral bases. It’s never a clear correlation between state and federal politics but a decisive rejection of the state government will inevitably fire up the questions about whether the broader Labor brand is beginning to wear thin. The real test for Carroll isn’t so much about not whether he can project an air of competence, but whether he is prepared to change the political lethargy that produced the government’s problems in the first place. A new Premier can always buy some time, but only new and workable ideas can rebuild trust.

This might be the point where Labor’s massive parliamentary majority develops the complacency that eventually destroys all governments, irrespective of which side they come from. Anthony Albanese is facing questions over an exclusive fundraiser at a $40 million Point Piper mansion, where guests were “encouraged” to contribute $10,000 each – no pressure – although, of course, nobody was purchasing influence: dinners of this kind can be quite expensive and the prime minister does have to eat at some point.

The dinner was hosted by businessman Felix Lee, whose billionaire father, Phillip Dong Fang Lee, has been accused by the Australian Taxation Office of tax deception and funnelling money from China, and why not lobby the government go easy on this case, in between servings of lobster mornay.

The double-standards are quite predictable. Labor has spent weeks attacking Pauline Hanson for her relationships with Gina Rinehart and other wealthy benefactors, presenting those relationships as evidence of One Nation’s fraudulent claim to represent the working classes. Yet Albanese’s defence – that he attends many dinners and does not discuss these private engagements – suggests Labor’s concern is not that billionaires enjoy privileged political access, but the wrong billionaires are accessing the wrong politicians.

We can recall that former Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton attended a Vaucluse fundraiser before the 2025 election at $25,000 per head – and didn’t he cop a hiding over this, and rightly so – so this isn’t a practice that’s restricted to the Labor Party. And that is exactly the problem. It’s a stinking stain on Australian politics, but no one – except for the Australian Greens and independent MPs – has the fortitude to stamp it out.

Political access goes to the highest bidder, while the hoi polloi are kept at bay, their political involvement restricted to fundraising emails from the parties begging for $20 donations, or carefully managed community forums, where it’s all about talking, but no listening.

This has got the potential to become a full-scale scandal for Albanese but, even if it doesn’t, it’s a sign that Labor’s massive parliamentary majority might be causing complacency within the government.

Labor fears One Nation, but also feeds it

The aftermath of Labor’s national conference has revealed a glaring contradiction: the party is terrified of the impact of One Nation but is unwilling to address many of the economic conditions that seems to be feeding it. Labor leaders repeatedly warned that Hanson threatens social cohesion – which is correct – yet Anthony Albanese has ruled out a 25 per cent gas-export tax that could raise billions for public housing, regional investment and targeted cost-of-living relief, an action that could remove some of the key planks of One Nation’s support.

Apparently, One Nation is an existential danger to Labor – but asking enormously profitable gas corporations to contribute more to the public good is just a step too far.

Although the conference is more about Labor’s overall principles and the Labor Platform – the one that Labor MP’s laud over when they’re in opposition but ignore when they finally get into government – it produced no transformative program for blue-collar workers, struggling outer suburbs or regional communities hollowed out by privatisation, insecure employment and decades of withdrawal of government and public services.

Instead, Labor seems to think Hanson is a branding problem that can be defeated through speeches, denunciations and warnings about extremism. Scare the rank-and-file membership enough through an email campaign, and surely they’ll cough up an extra $20 “to prevent One Nation from turning polling momentum into seats”. That’s far easier than standing up to the gas corporations.

It’s a sign that the Labor government is ignoring: people rarely abandon the established parties because they suddenly develop an enthusiasm for grievance politics of One Nation. They do so because wages are stagnant, housing is unaffordable, public services are deteriorating and nobody in government – or the opposition, for that matter – appears willing to challenge gas corporations at all.

Condemning Hanson’s racism and divisive rhetoric is necessary, but that’s not an economic remedy. Unless Labor materially improves people’s lives in a substantial way through gas export taxes and taxes on wealthy interests, it will continue supplying One Nation with precisely what it needs: angry voters, abandoned communities and a political establishment that’s more frightened of taxing gas exporters than losing its own working-class base.

The “look-but-don’t touch” democracy

One of the clearest examples of Labor’s national conference lack of practical authority was over the issue voluntary assisted dying. Delegates did endorse removing federal barriers that prevent telehealth consultations for lawful voluntary assisted dying – an especially important reform for terminally ill people in rural and regional Australia, who are physically incapable of travelling long distances. It seems like a straight-forward proposition.

Anthony Albanese responded almost immediately by opposing the proposal, citing the importance of face-to-face “protections be placed around it” – try telling that to the terminally ill cancer patient in rural and regional Australia who can no longer tolerate the pain, even after endless supplies of morphine – making a mockery of his belief that “people have a right to die with dignity”.

The Australian Greens and independent MP Kate Chaney are now preparing legislation to change these laws, leaving Labor’s parliamentary executive resisting the policy endorsed by its own conference. So, what’s the point of a national conference, if there’s no meaningful relationship between the membership of the party, and government?

Members are invited to debate, amend the platform and celebrate their participation (without the brawls, of course) – until they endorse something the leadership finds politically inconvenient which they then end up ruling out – leading to the conference just becoming a very expensive box-ticking exercise.

And it’s not just VAD: it’s the same process that applies to Gaza, AUKUS, gambling advertising, gas taxation and standing up to corporate and vested interests. Delegates might express dissatisfaction – as Labor MP Ed Husic did – but not much is going to change.

We’ve been told that the food was good though: networking lunches sponsored by Macquarie Group and Conexus Financial, a large 400-plus-person dinner funded by law firm Maurice Blackburn, and bar tabs and coffee carts hosted by corporate groups like Endeavour and CropLife.

These conferences will continue to be a waste of time and just an exercise in travel and gastronomy, until they provide a more meaningful link between the rank-and-file membership and executive government.

The long goodbye in Victoria

It’s the worst possible way to approach a state election, and it seems that the parliamentary members don’t care. Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan faces the most dangerous point of her leadership, with Labor MPs considering whether to demand her resignation or force a spill. Disastrous polling, the government’s handling of alleged CFMEU corruption and organised crime – and now this potential leadership spill – is leading to the growing expectation of a defeat in the November state election.

Deputy Premier Ben Carroll is the most frequently mentioned replacement, although Allan might survive because her opponents can’t agree on who should inherit the political wreckage and the lead the party to a likely defeat. Will changing leaders improve the prospects for Victoria Labor? Scott Morrison managed to do it federally in 2019, taking on the leadership eight months before an election – which he won – but generally, these types of leadership changes mainly signpost a far deeper problem: a tired, faction-dominated government trying to resolve a crisis by rearranging the deck chairs.

And despite their best intentions, it always works out this way. In New South Wales, Labor between 1995–2011, the Coalition between 2011–23; federally, the Coalition between 2013–22; and now Victorian Labor, in office since 2014. It always happens when long-term governments stop acting in the public interest, and start acting in their own interest.

Unpromoted backbenchers discover principles that they should have acted upon years ago, factional operators start counting numbers, and ministers insist everything is under control. It’s a form of complacency that leads to reactionary defensiveness; and that defensiveness then leads to paralysis.

Allan has tried everything to hold onto power, including offering a toast to the state of Israel at an event hosted by the Zionist Federation of Australia and announcing a long-term medical research deal with leading Israeli hospitals and medical institutions, even though there’s so many other countries in the world that such a partnership could have been developed with.

The issue is no longer simply whether Allan remains premier. It is whether Victorian Labor can remember why it got into office in first place all the way back in 2014 – or whether the only remaining objective is keeping its people in government for another four years. The Victorian Liberal party is unfit for office, but surely there need to be better reasons for staying in government than just to keep the other side out.

Pauline Hanson has used the UK Conservative Political Action Conference – speaking in a room where there were far more empty seats than people – to announce that she was “sick of hearing about white privilege”, would “not apologise for being white” and held “fears for England”. Seemingly wanting to become Australia’s greatest cultural export since Rolf Harris, her prime evidence of the collapse of British civilisation is that London is a multicultural global city, Muslims live there and not everybody shares her brand of repulsive and divisive far-right politics. She also warned that Australia is heading towards the same supposed catastrophe, despite Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide consistently ranked as the world’s most liveable cities – third, fourth and eighth respectively – and Australia ranking second in the world for its safety, healthcare, political and economic stability, after Canada. That’s how bad things have become.

Hanson appeared on this international grievance circuit with the failed politicians Nigel Farage and Liz Truss, and convicted far-right activist Tommy Robinson (assault, fraud, stalking, and multiple contempt of court rulings), importing the familiar Trumpian formula of idiocy and incoherence: blame migrants, Muslims, transgender people, net zero and “globalists” for every economic and social failure that conservative governments and their wealthy supporters have helped to produce over many years.

We’ve always maintained that Hanson is sowing the seeds of her own demise, and going overseas to besmirch the reputation of Australia, and associating herself with political failures, known spivs and convicted criminals is a prime example of this.

And it didn’t stop there. Before lecturing ordinary Australians about our apparent national decline and cost-of-living pressures, the self-appointed champion of the battlers was photographed enjoying a Dolce & Gabbana spectacle in Sicily with billionaire Gina Rinehart – Hanson and Rinehart obviously share similar far-right political ideals – and then going off to relax in the pool at the five-star Grand Hotel San Pietro. Nothing reflects the hypocrisy of modern right-wing populism quite like railing against privileged elites from the comforting pool deck of a luxury hotel.

The Nationals join the One Nation grievance industry

In the competitive race to outdo One Nation – and to also “value-add” to Australia’s exporting of reactionary politics – the Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie has announced that conservatives are “in a war” against “leftwing globalists”, mass immigration and “woke institutions”. Forget about the war between the United States and Iran – this is the war that we really need to start paying attention to.

This is actually more consequential than Hanson’s performance at the same conference because McKenzie is from the supposedly mainstream Coalition, not an idiot populist fringe movement. McKenzie told the CPAC gathering that conservative movements across the English-speaking world must organise collectively, described Australia as the “most woke” country in the Anglosphere, before the predicable rants against migration, transgender rights and net-zero policy.

And it’s so predicably boring: the organ grinder and monkey need to find some new material, because the audience is getting bored. Many Australians would be surprised to learn that affordable housing, functioning public services that serve the community, and stagnant wages are apparently less urgent than defeating this mysterious international woke conspiracy.

The bigger problem here is an intellectual one, as much as it is a political issue. These really are stupid and insane policies, and while some in the electoral are entertaining these ideas, it will dissipate before the next election, as it did in the 2022 and 2025 elections.

But the Coalition is not learning the lessons of these defeats: rather than developing policies for Australia’s actual economic, social and environmental challenges, the Australian right wants to import a prefab Trump–Farage–CPAC culture war that has never borne any electoral fruit in the past. So why do they keep doing it? Because it’s cheaper than developing the serious policy work, it’s far more angry than decent democratic debate, and it’s a lot easier than governing competently.

Can Burnham bury Thatcherism?

Andy Burnham will become Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, in a bizarre game of political musical chairs in a country that still pretends to offer stable government. He’ll be replacing Keir Starmer and is promising a stronger focus on cost-of-living relief, social housing, regional development and devolving power away from London. The bigger question is whether this represents a genuine economic break from the disasters of neoliberalism, or just a repackaged form of language that will end up being the same economic policies from the past.

Although Britain is far away, the Burnham government will be an important test for Anthony Albanese: can a nominally progressive government recover public support by intervening directly in the economy and improving people’s lives? Australia rarely creates a unique economic direction, and mainly follows the prevailing international cycles.

Thatcherism forced through the neoliberal revolution that created gross privatisation, weakened unions, concentrated wealth in the hands of fewer people and eventually hollowed out public institutions across the Western world, including Australia. It would be fitting if what started in Britain, could also end in Britain.

Burnham’s positions on Donald Trump, Gaza, China and defence spending will also be carefully scrutinised, and a more independent British foreign policy could give Australia greater room to move diplomatically. But, first of all, he needs to show that he’s willing to stand up to the interests that have benefited from the massive changes that have occurred over the past five decades.

Labor’s conference of carefully managed disagreement

More than 2,000 delegates will gather in Adelaide for Labor’s 50th National Conference, where rank-and-file members and union delegates will demand stronger action over Gaza, restrictions on gambling advertising and policies that challenge corporate power. The federal government, meanwhile, will create the right language that sounds principled when repeated in news soundbites, satisfies the competing factions and binds nobody to anything.

Labor conferences have become highly professional exercises in manufacturing consent: some debate is permitted, some shouty passion is displayed and potentially troublesome motions are rewritten until they no longer threaten government policy, are then rubber-stamped, and sent off to the National Secretariat and filed under “not to be re-opened”.

The bigger issue is: what does Labor membership mean now? If delegates can debate Palestine, gambling, AUKUS and gas export policy but cannot materially change the direction of the federal government, what’s the point?

The conference risks becoming the standard political theatre – a place where the party remembers its principles for three days before the leadership returns to governing as though they were never discussed in the first place or even exist.

Are we the AI nation or a corporate data colony?

The Labor government is presenting its national artificial-intelligence framework as a plan to create economic opportunities, while also including controls on government decision-making, stronger privacy protections, safeguards for artists and publishers, and bureaucratic oversight of the massive amounts of electricity and water demands that are created by these data centres. These are worthwhile promises, but the government remains very vague about who will own this infrastructure, who will profit from it and who will carry the costs.

Why the sudden rush to build these data centres, and whom will they ultimately serve? Their civilian uses are extensive, from cloud computing to generative AI, but data infrastructure also has obvious strategic, intelligence and military applications. There is no public evidence at this stage that the government’s plan is designed to synchronise Australian, American and Israeli military systems, although our dependence on US technology companies and its expanding defence integration makes the demands for transparency entirely reasonable.

This not a battle between technological progress and irrational fear: it’s about finding the balance between multinational companies that want access to copyrighted work, public resources and favourable regulation, and citizens wanting consent, compensation, secure employment and democratic control. So far, it’s been working against the public interest.

AI policy cannot be reduced to yet another industry-development announcement embellished with the word “innovation”. Before Australians give up their creative work, personal information, energy and water, the government needs to explain what is being created here, who it’s for, under whose control – and why the public should trust it.

The social cohesion™ circus continues

The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion will go through its fifth block of hearings by examining security for Jewish institutions, events and community leaders, including policing, government funding and community security organisations. Jewish Australians should have protection from violence, intimidation and discrimination – as should every Australian citizen – but security cannot become a blank cheque for surveillance, secrecy or the classification of lawful pro-Palestinian activism as a constant threat.

These hearings coincide with Labor’s long-delayed response to Islamophobia envoy Aftab Malik’s report. The government has accepted 35 of its 54 recommendations – which sounds great – however, it rejected all of the more important proposals, including to hold an inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism and changes to counterterrorism laws that disproportionately target Islamic communities.

There’s an obvious discrepancy here: Labor has committed to acting on every single recommendation from the antisemitism envoy’s ambit claims, while Muslim Australians have had to wait for ten months for a half-hearted and almost invisible response to Malik’s report. Evidently, some forms of racism will result in royal commissions, sweeping institutional reforms and immediate political urgency; others receive scant regard and an inane promise to just keep talking.

If “social cohesion” is to mean anything, protection must be consistent and provided to all communities equally. A government cannot credibly oppose antisemitism while treating Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism as a side issue – particularly while the likes of Hanson and mainstream conservatives openly show their hostility towards Muslim Australians.

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

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

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

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

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

The price of speaking out

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

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

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

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

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

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

When politics of protest runs out of road to drive on

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

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

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

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

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

When the joke becomes more serious than the politicians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The party of protest removes the protestors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The house always wins, especially in politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 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.