The strange legislative legacy of Bondi

The responses of the Liberal Party leave us wondering where exactly do they stand on reforms to racial discrimination and gun ownership laws, and how far they are willing to pander to the right.

One of the odder features of Australian politics in 2026 is watching the Liberal and National Parties twist themselves into knots over legislation they once claimed to want. The federal government’s post-Bondi omnibus bill, which tightens gun regulations and strengthens hate-speech laws, has produced political chatter about free speech, religious liberty, bureaucratic overreach, rushed drafting and what these means for “ordinary Australians”. Yet the part that has been overlooked in this debacle is that the Australian right has spent well over 25 years trying to weaken race discrimination laws and loosen restrictive gun control legislation.

The Etok v Bolt case in 2011, where the Federal Court decided that two articles written by right-wing commentator Andrew Bolt and published in The Herald Sun newspaper, contravened section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, proved to be the catalyst for a major campaign against these laws by the right. Section 18C, which prohibits public acts reasonably likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” on racial grounds, became a right-wing symbol of political correctness gone mad after Bolt lost this case.

That case inspired a whole ecosystem of free-speech warriors: the columnists, think tanks, talk radio, allowing George Brandis with his “right to be bigots” commentary to flourish, and eventually a dedicated Sky After Dark audience. From 2012 to 2017, we saw repeated attempts to change the language of Section 18C: Senate inquiries, a number of amendments suggested, moderates beginning to wobble at the knees. They never quite succeeded, but they shifted the rhetorical centre of gravity. By the time of the later Turnbull period in 2018, even moderates were muttering that “offend” and “insult” were too low a bar, that free speech needed defending, and that the Human Rights Commission had overreached.

If politics was a strategy game, that era was about shaping boards rather than winning outright. That none of them seemed to understand the power imbalance – and that they approached this type of speech as if everyone in society has the same amount of agency and power – never occurred to them. Or perhaps it was a case of the privileged classes doing what they have always done: protecting themselves from any form of loss, irrespective of how small that loss might be.

The project to loosen gun laws was slower and quieter. After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, there was a bipartisan agreement over firearms control – how could there not be after 35 people were killed by a lone gunman – but by the early 2000s, resistance started to build in the niches of a coalition of conservative interests: sporting shooters, sections of the National Party, firearms dealers, and the rural grievance machine that feeds the system of talkback radio.

The project was not to overturn the National Firearms Agreement – that would be close to impossible – but take the salami-slicer to it: change the storage rules, amend the categories, offer more professional exemptions, sporting justifications, push state–federal friction, reclassifications, and allow for a drift in bureaucratic processes. It was an erosion of the laws, not a revolution, and it made perfect sense to those living outside the cities who saw no connection between their rifles and American mass shootings. It has not gone unnoticed that the gun reform laws are one of the few very achievements of the Howard government that had broad support across the political spectrum. And it also seemed to be an inherent contradiction that it would be the Liberal Party that would want to water down what has been one of their major legislative achievement in federal politics.

When the trajectory of these pathways on racial discrimination and gun control legislation are placed together, it’s obvious that there’s a clear pattern that’s forming on the right, and has been forming for some time. The conservative instinct was to remove these regulatory encumbrances from the “in-group”. For the culture-war crowd, the in-group was conservative Anglo–Australians who felt culturally policed by the elites. For shooters, it was farmers and hobbyists who felt they were misunderstood by the people who had never seen a paddock. The task is to loosen the constraints on speech. To loosen the constraints on guns, and to let this in-group breathe. It never needed the cloak-and-dagger type meetings or funders with secret handshakes. It needed something far simpler: the interest groups, a partisan mainstream media and ideological consistency.

This is where Rupert Murdoch enters the room, not as a mastermind but as the main engine of change. Murdoch’s Australian media architecture provides three things: the platform, the networks and the mythology. First, the platforms – newspapers, tabloids, Sky News, and a digital machine that now targets YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. This is the hardware: the distribution channels that turn niche preferences into national narratives.

Second, all the networks – the columnists, the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies, the Coalition’s media–politician interface, the talent pipeline that shuttles people between the Young Liberals, think tanks, the newsrooms and, finally, Parliament. Nobody clearly co-ordinates it because these kinds of ecosystems don’t need a conductor; they need compatible species to make it all work.

Third, the mythology – a constantly refreshed set of cultural frames that make sense of political realities for a certain audience: the “ordinary” Australians, inner-city elites, PC-tyrants, free speech, real jobs, rural common sense, bureaucratic overreach, national security. These particular frames are also flexible. The same toolkit that attacks Section 18C can then go on to defend shooters, oppose climate policy, lambast universities, elevate the military, and defend religious exemptions. Once you internalise those few myths, vast swaths of Australian right-wing politics become legible.

So when the federal government introduces a bill that tightens gun laws and strengthens hate-speech offences simultaneously, the right’s long-term deregulatory projects become apparent. Security logic wants stronger state power; identity logic wants weaker state power. The Murdoch ecosystem can manage culture war and it can manage gun rights, but it struggles to manage both when the underlying flashpoints move in opposite regulatory directions.

The Liberal Party reacts with confusion: free speech maximalism from one faction, security hawkishness from another, rural carve-outs for the National Party, and procedural nitpicking from the leadership. It’s a paradox and it makes the Coalition looks confused and inconsistent. And mainly because it is. You can’t oppose, let alone govern, without at least a level of philosophical consistency. Mixed messages give definite electoral results, as can be seen in Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia.

Federal Labor, however, responds like a technocratic manager worried about tomorrow’s headlines. It drafts bills in the same what Treasury writes reports; it communicates to the public like a consulting firm does, and behaves as if the culture wars are an optional side quest. For Labor, the omnibus bill is a regulatory instrument, not so much a moral statement, which is why they can’t explain it with any clarity, and why the Coalition can’t decide how to condemn it or if they should half-embrace it.

It is not inconceivable that Labor set this up to fail, but this has risks too. The Australian Greens, meanwhile, can articulate the clean moral position – expand protections, include disability, include LGBTQIA+ communities, take racism seriously – and then watch the ecosystem ignore them. Being correct in these circumstances is not a guarantee of political success and, in fact, is often a political disadvantage. As a result, the Greens remain structurally unheard in the Murdoch universe, which perversely strengthens their identity at the cost of power. Murdoch presents them as “shrill”, “unhinged”, “impractical”, “hysterical” and “out of touch”, or any other words that they can pull out from their lexicon of hate. Again, whether this is true or not is beside the point: it’s an exercise in negative image management.

All of this is still Rupert’s world, but the future belongs to Lachlan. The future Murdoch machine will probably care less about Canberra, and more about YouTube. Supporting and promoting influencers who align with Lachlan’s narrow world view will become more important than promoting fringe politicians like Pauline Hanson and demonising any politician who deviates one iota from their narrow and constricting ideology.

The algorithm will be the focus to manipulate the public, and feeding directly in government policy. This matters a great deal because attention, rather than policy, is now the true currency of politics. The last 25 years were about Section 18C and gun laws, because politics was mediated through newspapers, parliament and talkback. The next 25 years will be about identity, algorithms and weaponised grievance.

The Coalition may find itself pulled into a US-style populist machine. Labor will struggle to govern a country whose political consciousness is shaped outside the Australian experience. The Greens will continue to be seen but not heard. And this omnibus bill will be remembered not for its content but for the brief moment it revealed the underlying systems at play here. Lachlan lacks the talent and intelligence of his father though – so it’s quite possible the system may collapse. The historian in me reminds that the younger Rupert himself was seen as unfit and that he would see the empire that was built up by his father collapse. Against that though, Rupert was much more of an unknown quantity than Lachlan. We will see.

There was never a conspiracy in the way these things are commonly observed. There was a long game: a slow, quiet, distributed project to remove state restraints from the in-group, nurtured in an ecosystem tailored for that purpose. The Australian right didn’t stumble into this moment; it walked here, step by step, and for some decades. And that, ironically, is why it now looks so lost. I’m not sure that the best legacy for the victims of Bondi is the watering down of hate speech laws or the loosening of gun laws. But that is exactly what is happening.