The New Politics Monday Brief – 16 March

Your weekly guide to the issues shaping Australian politics this week.

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

Fuel prices and energy security

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

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

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

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

The continuing rise of minor parties

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

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

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

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

Social cohesion and Islamophobia

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

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

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

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

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

South Australian state election

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

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

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

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

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