The inquiry’s head, acting justice Robert Hulme, this week found “a reasonable doubt” about the guilt of three of the six — Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Hulme referred his findings to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which will now consider whether their convictions should be quashed. But he declined to question the convictions of the other three — Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Maksimilian Bebic and Anton Zvirotic — each of whom continues to protest their innocence more than twenty years after being released from jail.

The six men, all young tradies in Sydney and Lithgow at the time, were arrested on 8 February 1979 after a seventh man calling himself Vico Virkez contacted state police. Virkez told them he had become embroiled in a Croatian nationalist bomb plot against Yugoslavia’s communist government and wanted to expose it before harm was done. Police raids followed, leading to one of the longest criminal trials in British Commonwealth history and the six men’s conviction in February 1981. Each was sentenced to fifteen years’ jail and served seven to eight years before being paroled.

Gradually, though, an alternative scenario began building up. According to this version, Virkez was actually a Serb named Vitomir Misimovic, masquerading as a Croat, who had accumulated a stash of stolen gelignite in Lithgow with his gullible housemate Bebic. Once he told police that bombs were about to be set across Sydney, the state’s police heavies, the Criminal Investigation Bureau, employed their notorious methods — bashing, verballing and “loading-up” — to frame six Croatian activists irking the Tito regime.

Two applications for judicial review of the convictions, in 1994 and 2013, failed. Then the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation declassified records of phone taps showing Virkez had been communicating with an officer of the Yugoslav intelligence service, the UDBa, at the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney during the six months before the arrests.

A third bid for review was then accepted by the NSW Supreme Court, with Hulme appointed to run it. He heard evidence and submissions for almost a year, with legal teams representing the NSW Police, individual police, the state’s prosecutors, ASIO and of course the six convicted men. More than twenty police officers were brought out of retirement and quizzed about the evidence they gave all that time ago.

Hulme has digested the massive trove of transcripts, exhibits and subpoenaed documents and now, fifteen months later, has published a cautious 543-page report and a similar-sized volume of annexures. Having followed the campaign for the men’s exoneration for nearly twenty years, I was puzzled by some of his assessments — especially on the question of ASIO’s role in a likely miscarriage of justice — and the weight he has given to certain testimony.

Hulme was not inclined to entertain the alternative narrative as a whole. He finds the main part of the evidence given by Virkez, who had turned crown witness for the trial and been given a short sentence, to be credible despite Virkez’s having told the ABC’s Chris Masters on camera in 1991 that he made most of it up — an admission he later repeated to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough. Virkez returned to Yugoslavia after giving evidence, without punishment by its authorities, and died in 2014.

The judge likewise accepts the testimony of the then federal police intelligence official Roger Cavanagh, who flits in and out of the investigation as a specialist on threats from the Croatian extremist Ustaše organisation and other anti-Yugoslavian groups. Cavanagh played down the connection between Virkez and the Yugoslav intelligence service in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, portraying  Virkez as a voluntary informant rather than an agent.

“The evidence does not support the contention that Virkez held considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations and activists and thereby had a motive to frame Croatian people, or to engineer a false flag style operation adverse to their interests,” Hulme found. The judge did not address the evidence that Virkez did indeed hold considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations, nor his animus towards one of the Croatian Six in particular, Vjekoslav Brajkovic.

The allegation that Virkez “played or held a higher role, such as an ‘agent provocateur’ either in the traditional or confined sense, cannot be sustained,” writes Hulme. “In his role with the Yugoslav consulate, Virkez is best described as an ‘informant’ or ‘source.’ If he is to be considered any sort of ‘agent,’ the qualifying term used by Cavanagh of ‘low-level’ is apt.”

Hulme grants that Virkez “remains a controversial character and there is a lot that remains unknown or is unclear about his background.” And he concedes that Virkez was not truthful in all respects of his trial evidence, for example when he denied he was in contact with the consulate for the purpose of spying on Croatians. But on the “core subject” of the bombing conspiracy, Hulme concludes that Virkez’s account was supported by the call he made to the consulate just before tipping off the NSW police. “The call was, in effect, a plea for help and advice; he said, ‘I am in some sort of trouble,’” he writes.

The judge argues that his evidence is “not in any way tarnished by the claims made by Virkez many years later in interviews with Masters and McGeough, two highly respected journalists who tracked him down in his native country. While those claims provided support at a superficial level for the petitioners’ case, they are replete with inaccuracies and inconsistencies that deny them credibility.”

This interpretation of Virkez’s behaviour is similar to that of the prosecution in the trial. It hardly accords with the more widely accepted picture of Virkez as a malign, cynical character who sprung a trap on his gullible housemate Bebic and the other Croatians while his delighted UDba handlers looked on from a safe distance.

Cavanagh, long retired, died in 2021 before the inquiry hearings began. Curiously, the Australian Federal Police were not represented at the inquiry, and no attempt seems to have been made to seek any records it (or its predecessor, the Commonwealth Police) might have on Virkez. Maybe Hulme had no power to call them. In one interview, Virkez said he had been in contact with “ASIO” and told to speak to a “Kavanagh.” Had Cavanagh been running Virkez as a source himself? It’s an intriguing thought.

Nor did Hulme take up the contention of the lawyers for the Croatian Six that the Wood royal commission’s 1994 finding that systemic “process corruption” existed in the CIB squads brought into question all the police evidence in this case, notably the alleged discovery of gelignite in Sydney homes and the “admissions” some of the accused allegedly made to the CIB after their arrest.

The only way for such a conspiracy to be proven would be if any of the surviving police admitted to have taken part in or known about it. But the legislation setting up this kind of judicial inquiry notably excludes the power of royal commissions and certain other types of inquiry to compel testimony and grant legal immunity in exchange. Hulme said he asked the NSW government during the inquiry for a legislative patch to fix this gap, but without success. “It cannot be known whether the exclusion of the power of compulsion did in fact work to conceal such evidence,” he said.

Hulme did find several police officers involved in Brajkovic’s arrest had severely bashed him, one using a twisted towel to throttle him, and had then conspired to mislead an Internal Affairs Branch inquiry into Brajkovic’s complaint. (The branch accepted the officers’ concocted explanation for his injuries: that he, with help from other accused, had inflicted injuries on himself to discredit police.)

Nor did the police take proper precautions for the potential discovery of massive amounts of explosives in their raids. “Indeed, by today’s standards, the nonchalant way police acted on intelligence that there might be ‘30–50kg of explosives at an undisclosed location’ was rather extraordinary,” Hulme said. “However, the inquiry does not find the inadequate or complete lack of precautions to mean that police had formulated a conspiracy to falsely accuse the Croatian Six before any raids were carried out, knowing that there was no real bomb plot. Instead, more probable is the explanation that the lack of precautions ‘was in all likelihood a product of a cavalier attitude that prevailed at the time and nothing more sinister.’”

Hulme was highly critical of Special Branch officer Victor Jefferies for withholding his knowledge of Virkez’s Serb background and Virkez’s anti-Croatian views, and for endeavouring to keep his Yugoslav consulate link hidden from the committal hearings of the charges against the Croatian Six.

He dismisses for lack of evidence the conjecture that the two half-sticks of gelignite (and associated wiring and detonators) found in each of three Sydney homes raided by separate police groups came from a “stash” of incriminating items kept by the CIB squads to “load up” suspects.

But when he discusses the convictions of the Kokotovic brothers and Nekic — arrested at the same house with sticks of gelignite on a desk at which they were preparing leaflets, according to police — he finds it unclear who possessed the incriminating items. He considers their alleged admissions of joint possession in the CIB “interviews” to be concerning. Together with the sketchy references to them by Virkez and Bebic in Lithgow, he concludes that reasonable doubt exists about their convictions.

It is when he turns to the main new evidence that led to the inquiry — the evidence of ASIO involvement — that Hulme leaves a huge gap in accountability.

ASIO records declassified in 2018 reveal that the security service was tapping telephones at the Yugoslav consulate and monitoring Virkez’s contacts with UDba. Soon after the arrests in February 1979, a secret report was circulated by its head office in Canberra. Virkez, it said, had “for a period of at least six months prior to the arrests acted as an informer on Croatian nationalist activities to a person suspected by ASIO of being an intelligence official attached to the Yugoslav Consulate-General.” The plot revealed “the depth of the penetration of Croatian extremist groups by the YIS in Australia.”

This report went to top NSW police and the Special Branch. In follow-up exchanges with ASIO, then assistant police commissioner Roy Whitelaw said “if the opposition [ie the six men’s defence team] became aware of this information it could blow a hole right through the police case.” Later Whitelaw was advised he could tell his prosecutors about it as long as the source was not made public. Through the trial and appeal, defence subpoenas for relevant intelligence information about Virkez were rejected on national security and other grounds.

As a result, the crown prosecutor, the late David Shillington QC, was able to assert, unchallenged, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that [Virkez] was some sort of undercover agent, an UDBa or Yugoslav representative.”

Hulme’s inquiry tried to find out whether ASIO’s information had got to Shillington. Various surviving police witness said he was fully informed about everything he should know. Hulme declines to accuse him of knowingly withholding evidence important to the defence: “[I]t would be neither fair to the late Mr Shillington QC, nor reasonably supported by the evidence before the inquiry, to conclude that he abdicated his responsibilities and acted in a manner inconsistent with his overarching duty.”

The judge noted that when the Croatian Six sought leave to appeal in the High Court in 1986, the then NSW crown counsel, Reg Blanch QC (later chief judge of the NSW District Court), admitted that if the prosecution had withheld vital evidence for the defence “it would be almost automatic that there would be a miscarriage of justice.”

Hulme’s own counsel assisting submitted that the defect in the trial process by reason of non-disclosure was significant. In his finding, Hulme conceded that the nondisclosure “could meet the current day test for a miscarriage of justice in that it could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict,” helpfully citing a recent case.

“However,” Hume went on, “the ultimate question for the inquiry is whether there is reasonable doubt as to guilt of the Croatian Six. A flaw in the trial processes is an appropriate matter to report upon and might inform this question, but it is not in itself determinative… The unavailability to the defence of information and evidence concerning Virkez’s allegiance to Yugoslavian interests and his association with personnel at the Yugoslav consulate has no impact upon the question of whether there is a reasonable doubt about the guilt of any of the members of the Croatian Six.”

Hulme circled the subject again in his conclusion, where he referred to “failings” in the disclosure of information about Virkez’s association with the Yugoslav consulate and loyalty to Yugoslavia. “The extent of what was known and should have been passed on is not entirely clear,” he wrote, “but there is no doubt that there was a denial of some probative ‘ammunition’ that could have been effectively deployed in cross-examination of Virkez.”

This non-disclosure, he went on, “arguably was significant and could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict and thereby constitute a miscarriage of justice.” He repeated his reference to a recent High Court ruling to this effect.

It is puzzling that Justice Hulme didn’t consider the question of a miscarriage of justice to be within the ambit of his inquiry. After all these years, exactly whose task is it? That question must surely be considered by the two authorities to whom he has given his report: NSW chief justice Andrew Bell and NSW governor Margaret Beazley (herself a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal).

The procedures drag on. Of the three exonerated, Mile Nekic has died and the Kokotovic brothers didn’t seek this inquiry. A ruling that a miscarriage of justice did indeed occur would bring a sort of exoneration for the other three, and for the broader Croatian-Australian community, which has had to live with the stain of terrorism this case has spread over them for nearly five decades. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post The Croatian Six inquiry raises more reasonable doubts appeared first on Inside Story.

Until 2011, any mention of a “carbon tax” invariably meant a consumption tax on specific goods. John Howard swore off a “carbon tax” before he lost government in 2007 but promised an “emissions trading scheme,” as did Labor. Like “carbon pollution reduction scheme,” it sounded like a cure for insomnia. But shorten it and add the “t” word, and you’ve got a potentially powerful stress inducer. Ferociously attacked by Tony Abbott’s opposition, Gillard’s scheme was indeed widely loathed and feared — until it came into operation in mid-2012 and not much changed for most people.

In 2014 the Labor opposition attempted to return the favour by labelling the Abbott government’s proposed-but-never-legislated general practitioner co-payment a “GP tax.” It didn’t catch on. The trick to getting the media to adopt these terms is to make them shorter and snappier than the official name. Abbott’s 2010 “great big new tax on everything!” (Rudd’s CPRS) didn’t become media shorthand; and four years later, “GP co-payment” was already short enough.

Bill Shorten learnt to appreciate the power of tax slogans: most powerfully when his 2019 franking credits policy was labelled the “retiree tax.” (There was also his “death tax,” which was as fictional as Labor’s “the Turnbull government will privatise Medicare!” messaging in 2016.) The “retiree tax” phrasing was parroted not just by the usual suspects at News Corp and 2GB radio but also, with little apparent thought, by the ABC and other straight news outlets.

These short, sharp labels just “work” for the news practitioners, and then can be devastatingly effective because many, perhaps most, Australians really don’t understand the policy but retain the shorthand — especially when it contains the “t” word. What sort of party wants to levy a tax on people simply because they are old and no longer able to work!

So it’s no surprise the Coalition has rolled out a couple of “taxes” since the May budget. First the “death tax” was resurrected, but this time rooted somewhat in reality: the planned changes to trusts would indeed affect some inheritances. The government wisely dropped the idea last month, and while most commentators correctly noted the potential toxicity of the opposition’s framing, they missed another crucial element: the timing of the plan’s introduction.

The headline changes — to the capital gains tax and negative gearing — come into effect this time next year. But the ones affecting trusts begin on 1 July 2028 — that is, after the next federal election. So the government would effectively have been taking the “death tax” to the election.

Labor’s capital gains and negative gearing changes, by contrast, will be in operation by the time we vote and (at least on their current stated intentions) the Coalition (and perhaps One Nation) will be one under scrutiny for their promises to reverse them and to index income-tax thresholds. All of which would cost the budget a lot of money.

It’s one thing for an opposition to promise to kill a government proposal before it’s enacted; it’s another to promise to unscramble a policy already in operation.

The other, more recent post-budget label is the “widows tax!” — in reality, the plan to end the “grandfathering” of joint ownership of property in cases of death or divorce, which would deprive people who co-owned investment properties before 12 May this year of the right to continue negative gearing after 1 July 2027. A splendid bit of creative communication, “widow’s tax” rapidly did the rounds of the media.

The government backflipped pretty quickly on this one as well, either to avoid being seen as picking on widows or because they decided it was undesirable, or a bit of both. They’ve acknowledged quite a few errors and unintended consequences in their bill and hopefully will change some more.

Reports suggest that Anthony Albanese believes the government’s vulnerability to fear and loathing will die down now the main budget bill has been passed (with more amending legislation to come later in the year). I don’t agree. The crucial date will be 1 July 2027, when the changes become reality and the sky doesn’t fall.

Still, there’s a remote chance of animal spirits raining on the parade. While experts say the capital gains and negative gearing changes, in themselves, should have only a modest impact on house prices, the reaction of would-be buyers so far has been to sit on their hands in case prices drop, which has naturally caused just that to happen. It’s a kind of “nothing to fear but fear itself” spiral the government must at least be a tiny bit worried about. A housing crash would be terrible in many ways, including for the government’s standing.

But the most substantial criticism of the budget measures, as opposed to point-scoring, goes to what they will mean for non-housing investments. Applying the capital gains changes to all investments does go against the government’s purported aim of making housing less attractive than other investments. The negative gearing changes at least do that.

What will all this mean when the next election is held in a little under two years? All our crystal balls are too foggy to anticipate the pleasures Australian politics will be inflicting on us (or perhaps voters will be inflicting on Australian politics). This time last year no one dreamed One Nation would be riding so high.

But one thing is close to certain: Angus Taylor won’t be Liberal leader. Andrew Hastie, whose policy preferences and even rhetoric very much resemble One Nation’s, would trigger a leap in the Coalition’s polled numbers, mostly the expense of the far-right party. But eventually, as the date with the ballot box approaches, his intentions could induce stress in the more progressive end of the Liberal Party, its (remaining) supporters and even the politically uninterested middle. Opposition leaders who set themselves up as “conviction politicians” tend to worry voters.

Still, if most of the electorate reviles an incumbent enough they’ll kick them out regardless.

Times are hard across the developed world, at least by past standards, with Australia among the lagging countries in per-capita performance.

The opposition parties will blame bad economic times on the 2026 budget — along with reliable old Labor economic incompetence — while trying not to explain how they will pay for their promises to undo it all and index income tax thresholds (if those promises are still Coalition policy). They’ll warn of the future, that deep down Labor still wants to levy a tax on death — and perhaps even “widows.”

But the government’s capital gains tax and negative gearing changes as big issues as the next election? Nah, they’ll be in place and part of the furniture. •

The post Great big tax scares appeared first on Inside Story.

If you missed the news cycle, here’s a quick recap.

When the latest episode of The Karl Stefanovic Show appeared last Tuesday it featured the infamous Robinson “interview” (actually an extended monologue interspersed with softball questions and approving chuckles from Stefanovic). It immediately drew widespread criticism for its derogation of journalistic responsibility.

A day later, the episode was taken offline — apparently by Stefanovic’s team — and republished by Pauline Hanson on her YouTube channel, where it has since been viewed more than 500,000 times.

By the end of the week, Nine had declared it was parting ways with Stefanovic, prompting its former star to release an unapologetic YouTube video declaring himself “free” and “truly independent” from mainstream media.

These highly publicised events generated commentary in all corners of the Australian media. Much of the discussion has focused on the terms of Stefanovic’s exit from Nine, the viability of his podcast venture, and the strategy behind the Robinson interview. (Was it a misstep on Stefanovic’s part or a deliberate move to stoke controversy and hasten his exit from Nine?)

These are important issues, but for those interested in media and politics they aren’t the only questions worth considering.

Why is it that one of Australia’s most highly paid media personalities would abandon national breakfast television — a platform that attracts a wide audience and helps to set the daily political agenda — for a highly uncertain future as a fringe podcaster catering to conspiracy theorists and neo-fascists? And what does all this tell us about the status of television within a rapidly changing global media ecosystem?

Stefanovic’s podcasting experiment may seem a counter-intuitive move for a figure who clearly relishes national celebrity. But performers like Stefanovic are not in the habit of choosing smaller audiences, less prestige and less income. They make strategic decisions based on where they think media markets and audiences are going.

Stefanovic is gambling that a prominent position within the global far-right mediasphere may be more impactful — and potentially more lucrative — than his current position at the apex of an established but fast-declining mass medium.

This is not an unreasonable assumption. Commercial television audiences and advertising revenues have been in freefall for years. While shows like Today still attract hundreds of thousands of viewers daily, those audiences are old (the average age of linear free-to-air viewers is fifty) and steadily decreasing in number. There are simply not enough young viewers tuning in to replace them.

As Stefanovic knows, the power and prestige of commercial broadcast television is in terminal decline — along with the advertising revenues that sustain that sector. Twenty years ago, when Stefanovic took the reins at Today, television was an industry of long lunches and lavish compensation packages, with the biggest stars endlessly indulged by management. No longer. Television is now a business of shrinking markets; aggressive cost reduction is the only route to profitability.

These dire economics may explain why Nine moved swiftly to sack Stefanovic. Scrubbing his $2-million-plus annual pay package off the budget sheet while simultaneously reassuring risk-averse advertisers that broadcast television remains a safe space for their brands was clearly the smart choice — and perhaps Nine’s only viable option.

One of the most interesting commentaries about the Stefanovic affair came from a Nine stablemate, the business columnist Elizabeth Knight. In her column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Knight took a stab at interpreting the business logic behind Stefanovic’s lurch to the right.

Stefanovic “astutely picked the direction of media monetisation – the fragmentation of audiences and the rise of the podcast,” she wrote, noting that the most popular podcasts are those populist titles that “push… back on the status quo and [promote] the politics of grievance.”

For Knight, though, Stefanovic’s move represents a misunderstanding of the Australian media market. “In larger markets such as the UK or the US, there is a good living to be made by the likes of Joe Rogan,” she wrote, “but the same can’t necessarily be said for a market the size of Australia.”

Has Stefanovic fundamentally misunderstood the economics of national media? Is Australia not big enough to sustain the kind of fringe media that he is trying to cultivate? This may well be the case. But perhaps Stefanovic and his team have their eyes set on a different prize: a shot at stardom within the global far-right media sphere, which extends well beyond our national borders.

You can see, then, why Stefanovic may be willing to trade a declining national television audience for a dispersed, transnational and highly engaged audience of far-right YouTubers.

One thing is clear: old assumptions about mass and niche media are being tested by these strange events. When Australia’s best-known commercial TV news personality can suddenly reinvent himself as a far-right media celebrity and then try to take a chunk of the national audience with him on a journey into the fringes of the manosphere, something important has shifted in Australian media.

The distance between television — a nationally regulated, “old” broadcast medium — and the echo chambers of social media now seems smaller than ever.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this. After all, the commercial free-to-air networks have long stoked the fires of anti-immigrant sentiment with their racialised coverage of crime, boat arrivals and housing affordability. Stefanovic’s politics may represent only an intensification of, rather than a radical departure from, this ignoble tradition. •

The post Exit, far right appeared first on Inside Story.

And the second half of this year promises more of the same, maybe even worse, with a “supercharged” El Nino (characterised by warming of the ocean surface in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean) expected to reach history-making strength. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there’s a 63 per cent chance this El Niño will grow so intense it will rank among the largest El Niño events on record.

UN secretary-general António Guterres has described El Niño as an “urgent climate warning.” El Niño conditions will “pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” he has forecast, triggering billions of dollars in damage from heatwaves, floods, droughts, tornadoes and wildfires.

Even in the absence of an extreme El Niño, billions of people around the world are experiencing increasingly frequent, intense and long-lasting heatwaves. Studies show 489,000 heat-related deaths globally each year, with 45 per cent in Asia and 36 per cent in Europe. But the true toll remains unclear, especially for low- and middle-income countries, because most countries lack consistent systems to track heat-related casualties. Vulnerability to heat is shaped by age, health status and other physiological factors, by occupation and other exposure factors, and by socioeconomic factors including housing.

Real hardship has already fallen on the less-developed areas of Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific. India and the Middle East are experiencing severe and sustained extreme heatwaves, with summer temperatures consistently exceeding 50°C.

In its December 2025 State of the Climate in the Arab Region report, the World Meteorological Organization highlights how the regions and people of the Middle East and North Africa, where water is always in short supply, are under constant pressure from rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather. WMO secretary-general Celeste Saulo says intense and longer-lasting heatwaves are “pushing society to its limits… Human health, ecosystems and economies can’t cope with extended spells of more than 50°C — it is simply too hot to handle.”

On a single day in late April this year, all of the top-fifty hottest cities in the world were in India. In such temperatures farmers are unable to work outside, livestock are under heat stress, crops fail and food supplies are severely curtailed. The heat reinforces longstanding inequalities of caste, class and gender in poor and marginalised communities. It is causing heart attacks and kidney injury among outdoor workers and homeless people and exacerbating diabetes, respiratory illnesses, mental ill-health and other chronic conditions.

Refugees, internally displaced and stateless people are on the frontlines of this crisis. Refugee settlements are disproportionately located in climate-stress zones — including the Horn of Africa and the Middle East — where makeshift shelters, little access to water, and no means to manage heat make tens of millions highly vulnerable to record-breaking temperatures.

In the developed world, meanwhile, reports of heat waves too often focus on the impact on sporting events, energy bills and strained electricity grids, ignoring the costs to productivity, medical services and the health of vulnerable people and livestock. As the Financial Times reports:

Once indoor temperatures rise above the low-twenties centigrade, or around 75 Fahrenheit, humans start to suffer. Sleep duration and quality fall rapidly when temperatures rise above 23°C. Cognitive performance fares similarly… The same is true of office workers’ productivity, which peaks at around 21°C and rapidly deteriorates as the mercury rises. And that’s all before we get on to mortality, where death rates climb steeply once temperatures hit 30°C.

The effects of heat may be exacerbated in cities where, despite better access to cooling, dense populations generate urban heat islands, amplifying risks for the elderly, pregnant women, outdoor workers and anyone who can’t afford airconditioning. Around 200 million city-dwellers in more than 350 cities live with summer temperature highs of above 35°C. Without dramatic change, around 970 cities will be at least this hot by 2050, with much higher exposures in Asia, Africa and North America.

In Australia, the national climate risk assessment, released in September 2025, suggests annual heat-related deaths at 2°C of warming would go up by 190 per cent in Sydney and 126 per cent in Melbourne compared with today’s levels.

Extreme heat is one of Australia’s most dangerous natural hazards and it’s getting worse. It has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard and has a major impact on ecosystems and infrastructure. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates that in the ten-year period from 2012 to 2022 extreme heat accounted for 7104 hospitalisations (with 2143 of these occurring in the last three years of the decade) and 293 deaths. Other research suggests higher numbers: one study estimates heatwaves caused more than 1000 deaths in Australia in the four years between 2016 and 2019, with the highest mortality rates in communities with older populations and lower incomes or education.

Indigenous Australians are disproportionately vulnerable to extreme heat due to compounding factors that include substandard and poorly insulated housing, energy insecurity and higher rates of chronic, climate-sensitive health conditions

Humidity makes the heat much more lethal. Heat stress limits for human survivability were previously defined using a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C . Combined with 100 per cent humidity, more than six hours’ exposure to this temperature will cause heatstroke and organ failure, even among young, healthy adults. But recent research suggests extreme dry heat can be just as deadly as humid conditions. A 2023 study warns that, if the world warms by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels (it had warmed by 1.37°C in 2025), as many as four billion people, particularly those in communities across Pakistan, India, China, and several African countries, would be at risk.

The impact of increased average temperatures extends to animals and the broader environment. They alter the distribution and intensity of pests and diseases, affecting flora, insects, livestock and humans. The spread of many infectious diseases is accelerating, as are the mosquitos and other vectors spreading them. (The Japanese encephalitis virus, for example, spread by the common banded mosquito, is now endemic in northern Australia and was last summer was found as far south as Victoria.) Some existing pathogens are becoming more virulent or widespread. (High temperatures increase the survival and biting rates of mosquitos carrying West Nile virus, for example.)

Despite the mortality, morbidity and economic costs, heatwaves rarely receive adequate attention because the death tolls and destruction are not always immediately obvious. But the impact of high temperatures on sport, obvious even to the politicians who pay more attention to sporting heroes than to scientists, might offer help prompt action.

The FIFA World Cup host cities are among those currently experiencing unusually ferocious heat and humidity. It’s tough for players, for those lucky enough to be in the stands, for the crowds gathering at outside venues, and for security and transport services staff.

Soon the focus will shift to the US Open in New York, where the weather is often hot and humid. After many players had problems with the heat at the French Open, they are calling for stronger responses from tournament organisers to a problem increasingly affecting their ability to play and earn. Could their voices finally drive greater climate action? •

The post The heat is on appeared first on Inside Story.

For full disclosure, I should say that I am among those who doubt One Nation will be able to sustain its momentum. It is therefore possible I found what I was expecting or even hoping to find in her address. Still, it is striking that once she no longer had a script written by someone else in front of her — once question time began at the Press Club — her discipline slipped and we got to see the old One Nation, and the old Pauline Hanson. In substance she sounded much like the right-wing Liberal she was before she lost preselection in February 1996 — even while her message was delivered in the familiar populist style that, through word, tone, facial expression and body language, constantly announces Hanson has “had a gutful.”

In her seemingly interminable speech — at one stage, the chair Tom Connell asked her to begin winding up — she was making a pitch to keep a hold on that 30 per cent of voters who are already saying they will vote One Nation and to add perhaps 5 per cent more. After refusing to give a “divisive Welcome to Country” (she presumably meant “Acknowledgement,” but never mind), Hanson spent most of the next three-quarters of an hour continuing to tell us who and what she hates.

Hanson remains, in that sense, what she has always been: a bundle of resentments and a harvester of grievance. But her present efforts meet with the most favourable of seasons for such a politician and movement: an energy crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a housing crisis, high immigration coming out of Covid, and the Bondi terrorist attack. On the political front, the Coalition is a mess, its leadership ineffectual. Labor stumbles on — paradoxically, given its enormous majority would normally be considered unassailable in a single election.

Predictably, Hanson treated immigration as the cause of the housing crisis. She then went on to link the problem to “the utterly flawed policy of multiculturalism.” Australia is “multiracial,” she said, but should be “monocultural.” Future Liberal leader Billy Snedden said much the same thing in 1969: “I am quite determined we should have a monoculture, with everyone living in the same way, understanding each other, and sharing the same aspirations. We don’t want pluralism.” But back then, to call for “monoculture” still meant something: Australia had barely passed out of the era of Britishness, and the White Australia Policy, while on the way out, was still in place. Even the politicians contributing to the dismantling of that old order still assumed the place would remain a white nation even when they politely refrained from saying so. But what could “monocultural” mean today, unless it is a nostalgic appeal to an Australia outside the living memory even of ageing Gen Xers like me?

As a populist, Hanson naturally claims the privilege of defining what that culture is: she represents real Australians, not the kinds of people who read Inside Story. More than half the population was either born overseas or had a parent born overseas: “Is that what Australia wants?,” she complains. It is a startling pitch, vaguely reminiscent of the old-time bragging that Australia was 98 per cent British and that it needed to stay that way notwithstanding the covetous Asian hordes to our north.

Populist politics is obsessed with drawing boundaries between those who truly belong and those who do not. But it is surely risky in an immigrant nation that has had an official policy of multiculturalism for about half a century to draw the line where she and her advisers seem to have decided to draw it. Who does Hanson think is living in all those suburbs she wants to win back from the Labor Party if not migrants and their children?

All the same, Hanson more or less held it together during her haltingly read text. Australia is “predominantly a Judeo-Christian society” and “Western civilisation and its values are under siege.” “Radical Islam” and the “transgender insurgency” menace the country. Net zero is a “hoax.” Anthony Albanese is a “liar.”

And a few specific policies. Nuclear energy for Australia. More control of artificial intelligence. Abolish SBS. Turn the ABC into a subscription service for city people. End government financial subsidies to renewable energy: after all, “the bloke in the corner store” doesn’t get this kind of help. (To which the obvious retort is that “the bloke in the corner store” no longer exists. There’s that nostalgia again.)

I don’t doubt the popular resonance of this kind of appeal in our present moment, even while I am sceptical whether most Australians support having broadcasts of the World Cup football taken from them because Hanson objects to the existence of a multicultural broadcaster. That said, it is in keeping with the basic joylessness of her politics. Hanson began her political career, in local government, with a campaign to prevent the building of a library in Ipswich because she thought it was a waste of ratepayers’ money. It is hard to discern much change in her outlook thirty years later. She is one of life’s straiteners.

Alongside her selective nostalgia, Hanson combines a vision of homeliness, an articulation of resentment, and a performance of authenticity, however contrived. Even while One Nation takes Rinehart’s money and Hanson drops in on Donald Trump at Florida’s Versailles, Mar-a-Lago, she continues to play the outsider challenging the political establishment, the real taking on the fake. All of this is well calculated to appeal to people who believe the world is hurtling outside their control, nothing is what it seems, and that politicians — insiders all — won’t listen to them.

And to be fair, it is hard to have much sympathy with the mainstream politicians who looked on complacently for decades while house prices went through the roof and now find themselves berated for it by a gifted, tested political opportunist. Hanson spent a lot of time in her address talking about poverty, hunger and homelessness, too — perhaps part of an effort to give her cause some moral ballast and confound the accusation she is the puppet of filthy rich “Mrs Rinehart,” as she likes to call Australia’s wealthiest woman and One Nation’s most generous financial sponsor. Still, Hanson had no policy to offer the poor and the battler apart from suggesting less government spending and more coal would reduce their cost of living.

In this connection, One Nation has a problem — and that materialised once the question and answer session started. It was then that we got our reminder that Hanson, for all her longevity, is not a particularly creative politician. Successful populisms elsewhere have mixed and matched, assembling bits and pieces from the left and right to create a broad constituency and thereby take the wind out of more centrist opponents’ sails.

If she were one of these types, Hanson would have said that she intends doubling the parental leave allowance and spending even more on childcare by taking funding away from Indigenous people or universities or the ABC — or from other of the many “rorts” she believes are being perpetrated under our collective noses. Instead, she said businesses should not be expected to pay women who were not at work and that government funding of childcare is “out of control” and requires “investigation.” Come election time, all of this is likely to go down in Australia’s suburbs about as well as Peter Dutton’s working from home policy.

In short, as she entered full, unscripted flight, all of the familiar instincts came into play. She sounded like a reactionary who, even now, could find a home on the right of the Liberal Party — the place where she began three decades ago. When asked by Mark Riley from Seven about her consistent parliamentary record of doing over workers, she sturdily defended business in its efforts to deal with lazy employees. They should be easier to sack. She complained about abortions. She harped on about government spending like a hardened 1980s economic rationalist. But some areas of expenditure were especially unwarranted: money would be taken out of Aboriginal affairs and placed in “consolidated revenue.”

On One Nation itself, she said some remarkable things that have barely featured in media coverage. She recounted how she had refrained from creating branches when One Nation Mark II emerged in 2015 because there were 350 the first time round and “I had nothing but trouble.” That’s a pretty remarkable confession even by the standards of Australia’s somewhat reduced political parties: the rank and file can’t be trusted, so let’s not have one. But One Nation does now have branches, although they seem to operate under bizarre controls and restrictions. Hanson’s support for constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech doesn’t apparent extend to them. Why? Because “I have to be in total control of it.”

There is also the not inconsiderable issue of how a party whose current lower-house presence amounts to two seats — one of them the result of Barnaby Joyce’s defection from the Nationals — will be translated into a credible competition for executive power. Interestingly, much of the media has been so entranced by Hanson’s verbal abuse of Sarah Martin that nobody picked up that while she was in full flight she indicated she intends to run for the Senate again.

No journalist asked the obvious question of whether she — or her new colleague Joyce, for that matter — would be standing for the House of Representatives now One Nation is supposedly vying for government. Indeed, there is a surprising indifference in the commentariat about this hardly trivial matter: it is as if it is imagined the sheer force of populist passion will sweep away all institutional barriers in the name of the people’s will. Those who recall the Joh for PM fiasco of 1987 will understand how magical that kind of thinking is in a parliamentary democracy.

It is often being said that One Nation is a more professional outfit than it used to be. Probably so. It certainly has plenty of money and is working social media with apparent success. Nonetheless, it is also still Hanson’s show. Her deepest instincts appear to remain those of an ageing minor-party leader more interested in saying what the 5 or 10 per cent of voters who form her traditional base still want to hear. The parallel with Peter Dutton’s retreat into culture wars and Sky appearances during the last election campaign is striking.

Coalition strategists seem no less sure about how to respond to the One Nation threat following Hanson’s Press Club address as they were before it. Labor strategists, on the other hand, have been given a generous allocation of material to work with. •

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So many big targets, so many uncosted “policies.” A lot of Hanson’s sentiments could appeal to many or most voters, but others, particularly when she was answering questions (workers are “lazy,” childcare workers don’t need qualifications, her slippery views about abortion), not so much. Left unmentioned were her strong anti-vaccination views, her adoration of Donald Trump, her fellow One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts’s conspiracy theories, her backing from posh squillionaire Gina Rinehart, her attitudes to guns.

She and her team would be happy with her performance: she was confident, strong, not for turning and avoided those tricky topics. The grievance theatre — everyone’s picking on her but she keeps soldiering on — was on full show.

Hanson is the leader of an insurgent party, so the rules that apply to the Libs and the Nats don’t apply to her. But this insurgent party is suddenly leading the pollsters’ primary vote figures in a three-way contest with Labor and the Coalition.

That doesn’t mean One Nation is “ahead in the polls” any more than when, in the old days, the Coalition led in primary votes but lagged after preferences. If recent survey results were replicated at the ballot box, Labor would likely have the most seats — maybe a majority — followed by One Nation, daylight, and then the Coalition.

If One Nation’s primary support gets into the high thirties, though, a majority of seats might (depending on other parties’ support) be on the cards. Somewhere between its current thirty-ish and that scenario, a One Nation–led alliance with the Coalition becomes likely.

Comparisons with Trump are limited: he took control of the major centre-right party, and hence its place in the country, its infrastructure, its finance and its rusted-on supporters. The United States has not seen the electoral splintering that’s happened in other advanced democracies (if America still sits in that category).

In Western Europe, where most countries use proportional representation to elect their lower houses, some far-right parties have topped the vote with very low numbers. Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy got 26 per cent in 2022, but along with her party’s junior centre-right partners won a majority of the Chamber of Deputies seats. (That’s the short version; the longer one includes first-past-the-post single-member districts, which members of her coalition divided between them so as not to split the vote — similar to Liberal frontbencher Tony Pasin’s recent thought bubble.)

At the other end of the range of outcomes, Austria’s Freedom Party won the most votes, 28.8 per cent, and the most seats in 2024 but remained totally out of government. In between, a few far-right parties won similarly modest vote pluralities and then entered government in some form, although not supplying the head of government.

France’s lower house’s electoral system is similar to ours: single-member districts, with its second round of voting rendering it all somewhat “preferential.” Two years ago, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally group topped the first round (like our primary vote) with 33 per cent, winning pluralities in a majority of districts. Other parties then selectively sat out the second round out to deny it victory.

In our compulsory preferential voting system, strategic non-contesting of seats (as advocated by Pasin) makes little sense, but recommending preferences to or away from other parties does. Labor always puts One Nation last on its how-to-vote cards, but at recent elections the Coalition has “preferenced” One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere, largely because most of the very conservative Liberal and Nationals memberships would strongly object, and possibly defect, if they preferenced Labor.

Hanson’s Wednesday speech devoted many words to lambasting Anthony “the Liar” Albanese and Jim Chalmers, but no Coalition members were mentioned. While One Nation casts itself as an alternative to the two-party seesaw, its strongest criticism is always directed at Labor (often with a swipe at the Greens). And yet it inflicts a lot more damage to the Coalition parties.

How much more damage?

There’s a question most pollsters ask without publishing the results. When a respondent says they’d put “1” next to a small party or an independent, the pollster asks which of the major parties they’d give their preference to on the ballot paper.

The question usually starts something like: “As you may know, you must rank either Labor ahead of the Coalition or the Coalition ahead of Labor on the ballot paper…” These words provide information people don’t get when voting, and this artificiality is one reason why these respondent-derived preferences don’t tend to stand up well against the eventual flows at elections.

But the question is brilliant for getting some idea of the (major) partisan leanings of these voters. One outfit that publishes these numbers is Redbridge/Accent, and in their last three (non-MRP) reports the results for One Nation voters averaged to 77 per cent for the Coalition and 23 for Labor. That’s a good proxy for the relative proportions the insurgent party takes from the majors.

Of course, the major parties began shedding primary votes years and decades before One Nation staged its recent revival; indeed, the revival itself is a symptom of the ongoing collapse of the two-party system. The support has to go somewhere, and at the moment it’s coalescing around this person.

As the election approaches, the prospect of a government comprising One Nation and the Coalition has the potential to push more voters, however reluctantly, to support Labor.

It’s barely a year since Peter Dutton led the Coalition to disaster, largely because he was seen as too Trumpy. But he was the epitome of sensible centrism compared with Hanson. That’s the big question about the 2028 election: will the old rules — that voters crave stability and reassurance and are risk averse — still apply? A lot will depend on how the economy is going, and whether the cost of living still feels alarming. People can take desperate measures in desperate times. •

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The push is to eradicate any kind of teaching and learning other than that which is officially mandated, namely “explicit” or “direct” instruction, once known as stand-and-deliver, or the fill ’em up theory of learning. Claiming to be backed by the hot new findings of “learning science,” the reality is long-familiar, with a twist: the teacher at the front facing twenty or twenty-five students delivering a centrally developed and mandated lesson plan in the approved manner as specified in the departmental “teaching and learning model.”

Sold as an educational measure — Victoria’s minister declares “we’ve got to make the precious use of every minute we have of students with us” — the push is better understood as a reassertion of top-down power, of ministers over bureaucracies, of bureaucracies over schools, of teachers over kids, of big states over small and of states over the Commonwealth and its “national approach.” It comes with the unmistakable frisson of a crackdown. 

The official crackdown is backed by a broad-front mobilisation of interests. Hence Michael Stutchbury, the former editor-in-chief of the Financial Review who now heads the conservative Centre for Independent Studies, lauding a standout school in which “Teachers do the teaching and are the authority in the classroom. Desks face the front. Lessons are fast-paced and structured. There are clear rules and expectations…” Hence the Australian attributing Ireland’s recently lifted performance (“making the world green with envy”) to a concentration on the basics. Hence The Australian Curriculum: In Search of a Knowledge-Rich Education, commissioned by another conservative outfit, the Menzies Centre. And hence a high-end conference pitching “knowledge-rich curriculum” as the key to system-wide reform.

Among those on the receiving end of the crackdown, reactions vary.

Few hard-pressed teachers can resist a free lesson plan. Equally few like being told that’s the only approved lesson plan. Even fewer like being told they’ll teach it in the head office way. Some of the more active teachers take a fundamentally different view of teaching and learning: they see teaching as a calling, and the school not as a franchise outlet but as a site for the production of learning and growth, crucially assisted by various forms of teaching. The crackdown breeds resentment and disaffection, hastening the exit of the most capable teachers.

Principals, those unfortunate sergeants of the force, increasingly hold heretical views; many are angry that a curriculum dominated by the university-oriented Australian Tertiary Admission Rank makes it impossible to give the kids what they need. Many bite their tongues; life is hard enough without putting their jobs on the line.

Among the intelligentsia, the teacher educators and others in the universities, on the other hand, the heretical view is close to being an orthodoxy. Some call for “transformation.” The learning scientists generally regard the narrowly cognitive “science” on which the crackdown depends as old hat, wrong about most kinds of learning, and counterproductive. But the academics are more inclined to “critique” than resist; few entertain the idea of getting organised to do something. And they are hierarchs too, in their way; most believe that their “research” finds the way, “practice” follows. Besides, they’ve got their own branch of the crackdown (the 2023 Scott report on teacher education) to contend with.

Then there’s a swarm of retailers of everything from software to school camps to coaching, as well as the “thought leaders” and consultants offering morale-boosting workshops and revamp services to schools, a few targeting the big end of town. (Their number includes Learning First, impresarios of the conference mentioned a moment ago and, not coincidentally, authors of the highly selective account of Ireland’s education reform puffed by the Australian). The general rule for those who depend upon schools and systems for a living must be, of course: follow the money.

And, last of all, the kids. There is much hand-wringing about the lack of “engagement,” “agency” and “wellbeing” among students, about the rising incidence of “school refusal,” “absenteeism,” bullying, “classroom disruption,” straight-out defiance and even violence by students on teachers. Many organisations confessing to such widespread workforce discontent would look to a comprehensive makeover of the whole setup; the leaders of schooling, by contrast, are blaming the victims, and pasting “programs” onto a dysfunctional way of organising daily work and of students’ learning careers.

Here the question of class intrudes, along with a widely unnoticed ageism: the people being cracked down upon are kids, and overwhelmingly they are working-class kids. Almost all of them are in government schools, and government schools are the only schools directly under the bureaucratic and ministerial thumb.

The crackdown is in practice a crackdown on the “hard” government schools, not the selectives (dozens of them in NSW) or the leafy suburb government schools or most of the non-governments, dominated by students and families focused on the big prize at the end. It’s the schools battling high staff turnover, insufficient everything and the humiliation of poor “performance” as divined by NAPLAN and publicised on My School.

It is emblematic of the class politics of the crackdown that the knowledge-rich conference will be held at the five-star Intercontinental Hotel in the Sydney CBD, a long way east of Parramatta — and even Parramatta is a long way east of the geographical centre of greater Sydney, where the westies are.

The crackdown gets the whole problem wrong right from the start. There can be no doubt that the received way of organising teaching and learning can be got to tick over like a Swiss clock — schools like the one lauded by Michael Stutchbury, those very few schools where the many stars of schooling align. The standard model can even be improved a bit across the board — it’s possible that the crackdown will be rewarded by barely visible lifts in this or that indicator.

The “knowledge rich” idea — the latest in a long line of slogans including “effectiveness,” “evidence-based” everything, “quality teaching” — has been around for decades, but always falls at the first hurdle: you can’t get knowledge-rich if you can’t or won’t understand the knowledge, no matter how hard or well the teacher teaches. “Curriculum” is a relationship before it is a menu. The received model cannot engage the many disengaged. Nor can it give the compliant/engaged students in the “good” schools the safe, happy, broad and richly rewarding experience of schooling that it is now possible to provide for just about every kid.

What the crackdown doesn’t recognise or chooses to ignore is that it’s the kids who bring the energy required for learning and growth — or refuse to. It’s the school’s job to find that energy, encourage it, and shape it. The same could be said of the relationship between government schools and systems. The realities of the present moment in Australian schooling should be manna from heaven for a well-organised alliance of the industrial orgs and the professional/curriculum associations. But no such alliance exists. Myriad professional associations stick to their myriad patches while the teacher unions confuse “public” and “system” with the domineering bureaucracies. The divided (and intimidated) are easily conquered.

There are ironies in all this, several of them. One is that the only outright condemnation of (and alternative to) the crackdown’s Gradgrind thinking I’m aware of has come from the grandees of the independent school system. Another: the crackdown is betting the farm on the OECD’s “effective” teaching/schools line just as, rumour has it, that same organisation is about to ditch “effectiveness” in favour of “flourishing.” A third: the knowledge-rich line and its many antecedents focus on the things AI can do instead of the relationships between human beings that only human beings can do.

Fourth, and last: if Michael Young’s classic The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) is even half right — and a growing band of contemporary readers think it is much more than that — then Labor governments, state and federal are driving a form of schooling that is fuelling the voter base for One Nation. •

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An exchange on Sky News last week summed up the mood, and the government’s response. Journalist Andrew Clennell asked Albanese whether Labor’s broken election promises on negative gearing and capital gains tax had contributed to One Nation’s rise. “There’s never been less trust in the major political parties,” said Clennell, “and One Nation support is rising. Is it really ideal to be breaking promises like this? Because that looks like something that could fuel the rise of —”

Albanese broke in. “I’ll tell you what’s not ideal,” he said. “It’s to see the rise of populism… [I]f people think the economy isn’t working for them and they’re working their guts out and they’re not getting opportunity, I tell you what, they will turn to more simplistic grievance-based politics. And that is the context in which my government is saying, ‘No, no, we’re going to deliver real change for the better. This is what we’re doing. This is why we’re doing it.’ Because it is real, the frustration that people have out there.”

The government argues its budget tax changes will  help young first-home buyers and stop the tax system from favouring those with investment income over those whose earnings come from wage labour. But that doesn’t answer the question of whether such measures will be effective in countering populism or whether a broken election promise has backfired at a time of rising distrust in government and the major parties. One Nation obviously thinks the latter, and has launched a major funding campaign using the slogan “Fire the Liar.”

It was not just One Nation’s rising poll numbers that should concern the federal government. Labor had a major wake-up call at the South Australian election back in March. As political scientist Luke Mansillo pointed out, SA Labor’s massive victory came with warning signs. He detected “enough places that Labor has suffered losses to One Nation for the federal government to worry about. Peter Dutton’s strategy of outer urban and regional seat targeting is coming off for One Nation, who can peel off voters the Liberal Party could not.”

Mansillo was referring to the Coalition’s populist strategy at the 2025 election, when Liberal leader Peter Dutton depicted himself as more in touch with ordinary working-class voters than Labor, which he accused of pandering to racial and ethnic minorities and woke elites.

Albanese depicted his government’s 2025 victory as a decisive vote against Dutton’s politics of division: as a vote for a socially inclusive national unity based on “fairness, aspiration and opportunity for all.” The implication was that right-wing populism doesn’t work in twenty-first century Australia.

But various commentators, including me, questioned Albanese’s analysis. He was telling part of the story, but many additional factors contributed to the Liberals’ massive election loss, from an unpopular leader to campaign own-goals and even the impact of Donald Trump.

Far from rejecting Dutton’s strategies, the Coalition is doubling down on issues like immigration, while leaving open the possibility of preference deals and a closer relationship with One Nation. It’s true that Angus Taylor has (for the moment at least) ruled out the suggestion of his “close confidant and numbers man,” South Australian MP Tony Pasin, that the Liberals should make a deal with One Nation to carve out the seats each party will contest so as not to compete with each other. Pauline Hanson has made clear One Nation will be targeting outer-suburban seats currently held by Labor.

Meanwhile, the more equal, diverse and socially inclusive society Albanese espouses can still be depicted as a woke-elite project by his opponents. It is an old Labor problem.

This is not the first time Albanese appears to have underestimated the influence and political effectiveness of right-wing populism. He also did so during the (failed) Voice referendum campaign in 2023.

Albanese’s attitude seems to go back to a view of Australian politics he held early in his term as prime minister. He apparently believed he would be managing a socially inclusive, idealistic, collaborative and progressive new politics that would favour Labor and groups such as the teal independents. He returned to that vision of Australian politics in his 2025 election victory speech.

One Nation’s rise since then should have made it clear that, while politics is changing and the old two-party system is under threat, the old politics of culture wars and right-wing populism is alive and well. Albanese is now more aware of the danger — how could he not be given recent opinion poll results? — but he seems to see the difference between his earlier depiction of the state of Australian politics and the unexpected rise of One Nation as primarily a reflection of changed economic circumstances.

In a time of global economic uncertainty with rising inflation, a major cost of living crisis and a housing crisis, a significant number of voters will feel disenchanted with traditional political parties and turn to populist alternatives. Many One Nation voters may also genuinely believe that reducing immigration numbers will help fix Australia’s housing and infrastructure crisis yet have no desire to see the reduction take racially or religiously discriminatory forms. The breadth of One Nation’s appeal is reflected by the newly elected South Australian MP who spoke lovingly of his Indonesian Muslim same-sex partner

But One Nation’s rhetoric can also appeal to those who do support discriminatory policies, to the “dark angels in our nation” famously referred to by former Labor leader Kim Beazley when he lost the 2001 “Tampa election” to John Howard. Right-wing populism can fuel the resentment of various social groups who feel their previous racial, religious, gender or sexuality privilege is under threat.

Some Labor figures emphasise the economic roots of discriminatory attitudes, and former treasurer and party president Wayne Swan has blamed rising economic inequality for the rise of populism internationally. But we should remember that Kim Beazley tried to counter Howard’s populist culture wars and mobilisation of national security issues  by focusing on the largely economic “kitchen table” concerns of ordinary Australians. Furthermore, the White Australia policy and blatant discrimination against Indigenous Australians flourished during the economically privileged postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Admittedly, Labor has had limited success in selling all it has done to tackle cost-of-living issues, including tax breaks, wage increases, increased government subsidies for healthcare and childcare. Although its efforts have also been undermined by rising inflation, fuel costs and a housing crisis, this failure doesn’t adequately explain Hanson’s resonance with substantial sections of the Australian population.

How else do we explain the electoral success of  a women who flies around the country in a plane given to her by Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, and who also accompanied Rinehart to party at Mar-A-Lago with the US president, whose war in the Middle East has contributed to Australians’ economic hardship?

Surely it is time for Albanese to reconsider his positive take on the new politics In Australia. We live in a time when the old politics of culture wars and division are very much still with us. As social democratic parties around the world have found, there are no easy ways of countering right-wing populism. But a first step is to correctly analyse populism’s nature and causes, and economic distress is only part of the explanation.

If it is to succeed in winning back mainstream voters, Labor also needs a better strategy for countering culture wars, including One Nation’s clever use of social media platforms. It also needs to be better at countering the populist framing of issues, and not just immigration. For example, it needs to make a stronger case that its broad equality agenda on issues from race to gender  is not “woke,” “elite” or anti-worker but actively supports disadvantaged sections of Australia’s  diverse working class. Above all, Labor needs to become better at anticipating the populist reaction to its actions and planning accordingly. •

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What Malcolm Turnbull calls a political vacuum applies to both policy and demographics. The Liberals have deserted the field on issues such as climate change and a sensible migration policy while losing the votes of women and young people. Many Australians might well be attracted to a new party with similar values to the teals — integrity, stronger action on climate change, gender equity, reducing the influence of lobby groups, even, dare we say, policy grounded in solid evidence.

Added impetus comes from new election funding laws, a blatant Labor–Liberal fix to tilt the field against independents.

Apart from contesting teal-type seats in the lower house, the best prospects for a new party in the immediate future could be in the Senate, which is elected by proportional voting on a state- or territory-wide basis. In fact, running for the Senate effectively requires registration as a party because it is the only way candidates can be placed above the line on the ballot paper, which is how most people vote.

The challenge lies in the execution. Persuading prominent people to join, for a start. Two teals, Monique Ryan and Kate Chaney, have already made clear that joining a party would compromise the basis on which they were elected as community independents. So have regional independents Helen Haines and Rebekha Sharkie.

Still, this might not be an insuperable obstacle: consulting with supporters about a loose party structure without the rigid discipline imposed by the Labor and Liberal parties could be an acceptable compromise.

Enticing Liberal MPs to defect is another matter entirely. It means not only risking failure at the next election but also weathering accusations of treacherous sabotaging of a Liberal Party already down on its knees. Neither moderate sitting Liberals nor former MPs like Keith Wolahan have so far shown any appetite for such a move.

Building name recognition in a crowded field would require massive publicity and major funding. A party organisation and campaigning machinery would need to be established or at least build on existing structures such as Climate 200.

Who should lead such a party? Malcolm Turnbull has the public profile but in the minds of many carries too much political baggage. Allegra Spender, who holds Turnbull’s former blue-ribbon Liberal seat of Wentworth, figures prominently in recent discussions. David Pocock, the ACT senator whose comments triggered the latest debate, is widely admired but is not advancing his leadership credentials.

In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, Spender shied away from a question about becoming leader as “hypothetical, hypothetical, hypothetical.” While she is “at least open to conversations” about ways to work more closely, including as a new centre right party, “if a few people got together, why would you need a leader? If you have a few people to start off with, I think that may be how you get things going.” More dipping a toe into the water, then, than leaping off the deep end.

Before his death in 2015, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser was the last person to put serious effort into forming a new centre party. John Howard, who boasted in the era of Reagan and Thatcher that “the times will suit me,” had increasingly alienated Liberals who adhered to the liberalism espoused (if not always practised) by Robert Menzies — “progressive…, in no sense reactionary.” Fraser was one of them, at least after he shed his former persona as a hard-right cold war warrior.

Fraser was patron of the new movement, together with former Labor minister Barry Jones and businesswoman Janet Holmes à Court. The equally stellar cast of founding members included former Fraser minister Ian Macphee, barrister Julian Burnside and Simon Holmes à Court, son of Janet and founder of Climate 200.

A constitution was drawn up and policies commissioned in areas such as health and the economy. By 2015 there was a “Founding Members’ Statement of Values and Purpose” for a party under the working title of Renew Australia, which was later changed to Reform Australia. It is striking how many of the issues identified align with the current debate.

“Our corroded national politics has led many Australians, particularly young people, to increasing disillusionment, disengagement and despair,” said the statement. It went on:

[W]e will be a party free of organisational affiliations to either the union movement or associations representing business or special interests… We will advocate strongly to limit the influence of money on party policymaking and government decision-making by requiring that donations to political parties be capped and fully disclosed — publicly and immediately. We see advancing the status and position of women in society as one of our most important objectives… We particularly recognise the importance of intergenerational equity and hence we reject policies that would impose unfair and unreasonable burdens on succeeding generations… [W]e recognise that nothing short of a profoundly different way of structuring the global economy will avert the catastrophic effects of a warming planet.… [W]e should not cede to any foreign country the capacity to decide whether Australia is at peace or goes to war, nor will we participate in war just because our traditional allies go to war.

Work on a new party continued for several years after the Fraser’s death but, as one of those involved put it, “it didn’t survive the loss of his remorseless energy.” The reality is that many ideas for new parties have started with high hopes but few have risen to prominence and fewer still have endured.

The Labor split of the 1950s saw the creation of the stridently anti-Communist and socially conservative Democratic Labor Party. It won Senate seats and directed its lower house preferences to help keep Labor out of power in successive elections. It faded into obscurity following the Whitlam government’s election in 1972.

Don Chipp, a minister in pre-1972 Coalition governments, formed the Australian Democrats as a centre party after Malcolm Fraser left him out of the ministry in 1975. A man of passion and conviction, he coined a slogan with real impact — “keep the bastards honest.”  The Democrats held Senate seats from 1977 to 2008, reaching a peak of nine senators in 1998.

The Greens, one exception to the rise-and-fall pattern, have endured since Bob Brown first won a Senate seat in 1996. The other existing long-term party is One Nation, with Pauline Hanson first elected as a disendorsed Liberal in 1996, though the party subsequently shrunk to seeming irrelevance before a recent revival that threatens to wipe out the Nationals and seriously wound the Liberals.

Built on grievance and nostalgia, One Nation’s support is strong but also shallow. If its standing in the polls is sustained, its moment of truth federally will come at the next election, when voters take a closer look at Hanson’s leadership credentials, her lack of policies that aren’t unrealistic, incoherent or harmful, her enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, wars and all, and her patronage by Gina Rinehart. Unless, like Trump supporters, none of that bothers them at all. •

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The bit about the budget is old news and entirely true. But it’s important to note that One Nation’s poll lead was in primary votes only, and we all know that’s not the full story under our electoral system. The concept of national two-party-preferred support might be outliving its usefulness, but that doesn’t mean primary votes now rule. Preferences are no less important than they ever were. And in fact the pollster, Redbridge/Accent, estimated Labor’s two-party-preferred support was 51 per cent regardless of whether its main opponent was One Nation or the Coalition.

The poll has 31 per cent for One Nation, 28 for Labor, 20 for the Coalition and the Greens on 12 (with 9 per cent for the rest). Since then another outfit, YouGov, has replicated the order if not the exact numbers, and Roy Morgan Research has Labor and One Nation tied. (An earlier Morgan poll put One Nation ahead, but as psephologist Kevin Bonham pointed out it was one of its less reliable SMS polls.)

How would these numbers, replicated at the ballot box, translate into House of Representatives seats? That’s awfully difficult to say, but it’s very likely no party would enjoy a majority. Labor would probably have a plurality (more than anyone else), with One Nation second and the Coalition third. Perhaps the ALP would retain government with support from the Greens and independents. Or One Nation plus the Coalition might be in a majority.

Could One Nation, during this parliamentary term, be in a polled position that translates into a likely majority all by itself? It’s possible; another five points at Labor’s expense, with all the others kept constant, would probably do it, assuming the Coalition continues to treat Pauline Hanson’s party favourably on their how-to-vote cards.

Late last century, prime minister John Howard was dragged kicking and screaming to “preferencing” Labor ahead of One Nation across the country, but that was a different time, a different electorate landscape — and a different Liberal Party. Preferencing Labor today would cause serious anger in the party membership and push more of them into the arms of the insurgent.

South Australia’s vote in March, the country’s first general election since the One Nation surge, showed us a few things. One was the durability of the party’s polled support all the way through to — and then on — election day. It happened in a particular context: a popular Labor premier and government widely viewed as certain to win (which it did very handsomely). This might have freed some people up to use their vote to send a message to the established parties, particularly the Liberals.

And it was a state — not federal — election, which probably means less at stake than a federal vote. Running a country is about the big items, particularly pulling and pushing those economic levers. Yes, many, perhaps most, people believe business as usual is no longer working, but when push comes to shove we know voters can be scared of changes that might affect their economic security. And Hanson has now discussed moving to the House of Representatives with a view to taking those levers. The other information South Australia provided was how seat-by-seat distributions of preferences play out with a large One Nation vote.

At the 2025 federal contest, when it received just 6.4 per cent nationally, One Nation picked up a quite strong flow of preferences from the Coalition. The Coalition dropped out of the three-candidate-preferred count against the ALP and One Nation in just one federal electorate, Hunter in New South Wales. When its primary vote (plus the preferences it had picked up from minor parties and independents) was distributed according to voters’ instructions between Labor and One Nation, it flowed a whoppingly one-sided 80.1 per cent to One Nation.

A year later in South Australia, the flows were noticeably weaker. Across the eleven electoral divisions in which the contest came down to Labor versus One Nation, the Coalition’s distributed preferences in the final round of counting favoured the latter by a much more modest 66.6 per cent.

More evidence came from electorates where Labor’s accumulated vote was distributed to the Coalition and One Nation. In the one 2025 federal where that happened, those votes went 58.9 per cent to the Coalition and 41.1 to One Nation. In South Australia in March, the percentages in the two such contests were favoured the Coalition much more, 71.5 to 21.5 per cent. This makes intuitive sense: if most “right-wing” supporters have shifted their first preference to One Nation, the rest will generally be relatively unenthused by the party.

These numbers matter when we’re trying to make sense of national polls — and even more so when we look at seat-by-seat ones such as Redbridge/Accent’s most recent MRP, a much larger, slightly earlier survey that still has Labor leading the primary vote. Pollsters and others must make assumptions when they simulate full seat-by-seat counts, eliminating parties one by one and distributing their preferences.

Redbridge/Accent’s estimates from that poll put Labor on 76, One Nation on 53 and the Coalition on 12. My estimates, mostly relying on South Australia’s flows, are quite different: 86, 43 and 12 seats respectively. For what they’re worth, that is. With lots of caveats. And with two years to go until the election. (Estimating preference flows to and from independents is the hardest part of the exercise.)

Victoria’s election in November will provide another big information dump, and will probably be more relevant to the federal sphere, given the absence of a popular Labor incumbent.

For the government in Canberra, two years is a long time, particularly from a budget as detested as this. The key date is 1 July 2027, when most changes come into operation and the fear of them starts to subside. But even before the budget, One Nation didn’t look like it was going away. •

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Treasury data shows how radically disproportionately the capital gains tax discount, negative gearing and trust arrangements have benefited the top 1 per cent of income earners compared to the median income earner since 2000: about 123 times more. Perhaps nothing better explains the force of the campaign to thwart the government’s objective to claw back this scandalous gift to the wealthiest.

Ever since Albanese won the prime ministership a drumbeat has sounded: “What do we want? Reform. When do we want it? Now!” Yet when Labor does reach for the higher-hanging reform fruit and its opponents ferociously bare their ideological teeth, at least some of those who had been advocates of change have responded fickly or tepidly to the budget measures.

While Labor’s tax plan monopolises attention, another frontier of change conscientiously advanced under Albanese’s leadership risks being overlooked. With ramifications that may prove highly significant, it shows there is more than one way to bring about a new order of things.

This is the Labor government’s deliberate and concerted strategy of appointing women to leadership positions in the public service and other key institutions and agencies. The championing of women under Albanese was something I first wrote about in the days after Labor’s resounding May 2025 election win — a result that underlined the trend of women’s votes skewing to the left-of-centre that had been evident since at least 2010, when the support of women effectively saved Julia Gillard’s prime ministership.

Suggesting that the “feminisation of Labor” was one reason for the Albanese government’s handsome return to office, I pointed to not just the record number of women in cabinet and caucus but also how the government was prioritising the interests of women in key policy areas: by moving towards universal childcare support, extending paid parental leave and supporting wage increases in care industries dominated by women workers.

I am conscious of the risks of characterising childcare as an issue of primary concern to women. But the reality is that mothers continue to shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility for rearing the young and expanded childcare provision thus chiefly enhances their choice.

I also alluded to the operating style of the Albanese government, suggesting that its premium on collaboration and internal solidarity was consistent with a “feminalist” approach. A recent article by the Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent Karen Barlow about how the prime minister manages the government’s record-sized caucus was striking in that context. The tight discipline of Labor’s party room can be attributed to several things. On the less flattering side, it is consistent with a longer-term marginalisation of caucus and centralisation of authority in the hands of the prime minister and senior ministers. On the positive side, it reflects a lesson learnt: a determination not to repeat the destructive and indulgent disunity of the Rudd–Gillard years.

In Barlow’s piece, an unnamed Labor MP — the absurd braggadocio of the quote all but gives away that it is a male speaking — ascribes the Albanese government’s internal discipline to the dictatorial control exercised by the Prime Minister’s Office. “PMO is like North Korea, right? They’re like Pyongyang.” No one can doubt that Albanese’s PMO, like the offices of all prime ministers at least since John Howard’s time, maintains strict oversight of the government. But Pyongyang, really?

More instructive was a reflection by an unidentified female Labor MP who contended that the government’s solidarity could also be explained by a caucus that comprises 56 per cent women: “There’s a lot of women and there is a much greater sense of working in a collaborative way… outcomes-focused, not ego-driven.”

Julia Gillard’s leadership illustrates the point. Unlike many of her male predecessors and successors, Gillard did not preen or chest-beat as prime minister. Her method was to put her head down and concentrate on managing her team and the nitty-gritty of the government’s legislative program. She let her deeds speak for her without much in the way of fanfare or flamboyance. A behaviour characteristic of women, Gillard’s disdain for the performative side of the job was ironically debilitating for her prime ministership.

The Albanese government’s feminine bearing is also undoubtedly a reflection of its prime minister. As with all holders of the office, Albanese, the son of a single mother, exhibits a belief system and leadership style powerfully stamped by his early life. His was an upbringing in which women — his adored and adoring mother and to lesser extent his grandmother — were the dominant adult influences. This has manifest in what the political psychologist Graham Little categorised as a “group” leadership style: one orientated towards collaboration and cooperation. It is also revealed in the prime minister daring to speak of kindness and compassion as positive leadership traits — at a time when the norm worldwide is uber-aggressive — and by his frequent displays of emotion. Only a little over a week ago, at the Victorian state Labor conference, he barely suppressed tears while defending his government’s budget measures.

Let’s not be doe-eyed about Albanese. He is also the product of the bare-knuckled school of NSW Labor politics. While there is ample testimony to his close and nurturing relationships with female Labor colleagues — Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher in the current government, Linda Burney and Jenny Macklin in the past — his never fully explained lack of generosity towards his neighbouring inner-Sydney Labor MP and one-time potential leadership rival, Tanya Plibersek, has been less becoming. And on occasions his empathy has gone conspicuously missing. His gratuitously callous declaration earlier this year that he had “nothing but contempt” for the “ISIS brides” is an example.

Even so, the advancement of women on Albanese’s watch is unmistakeable. Another dimension of that agenda, perhaps at least equally significant, is the appointment of women to posts that have previously been exclusively male domains. This trend began in the government’s first term with, among things, the appointment of Michelle Bullock as governor of the Reserve Bank and Danielle Wood as chair of the Productivity Commission, followed by Albanese’s handpicking of Sam Mostyn as governor-general.

Australia’s twenty-eighth governor-general, Mostyn is the second woman to occupy the office — the first having been Quentin Bryce, who filled the post between 2008 and 2014. When she was invited by Albanese to become governor-general, a surprised Mostyn asked him, “Why me?” to which he responded: “I want to modernise the office.” That modernising process, as the Australian’s Troy Bramston revealed in his record of an interview with Mostyn in January this year, is based on the guiding principles of “care, kindness and respect.” It suggests a close alignment of (feminine-style) values between prime minister and governor-general.

The announcement of Mostyn’s appointment provoked a sour response from the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen. Under the headline “Cushy Job for the Wokest of Women,” Albrechtsen bemoaned the “utter predictability” of Albanese’s selection and sneered that if Mostyn’s “chromosomes were XY she wouldn’t have been considered for the role.” That seems a peculiar complaint given the XY chromosomal profile has been a foremost consideration in the choice of the vast majority of governors general since 1901.

Still more bizarre was Albrechtsen’s assertion that Mostyn’s appointment was symptomatic of a “new group of oppressors putting the squeeze on a new group of oppressed.” Presumably men made up that rising class of downtrodden.

The Albanese government’s strategy of placing women in high offices has proceeded apace in its second term, many of them pioneering gender appointments. Among the key examples are:

• Jenny Wilkinson as secretary of treasury
• Sarah Court as chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission
• Meghan Quinn as secretary of defence
• Krissy Barrett as commissioner of the Australian Federal Police
• Susan Coyle as chief of army.

Announcing Court’s appointment in February 2026, treasurer Jim Chalmers observed that the Albanese government had “ushered in a wave of female leadership across Australia’s top economic institutions”: the Reserve Bank, the Productivity Commission, Treasury and now ASIC.

The storming of the upper echelons of the public service by women — who now head eight of the sixteen Commonwealth departments — and their appointment to other institutions and agencies partly reflects a longer-term evolution. But the Albanese government’s role has been to accelerate that trend purposely and assiduously.

Does this campaign to promote women matter? We ought, of course, be careful about surrendering to essentialist assumptions about the kind of leadership women provide and the cultures they nurture around them. Each woman will steer in her own distinctive way — and not all will lead well. Nevertheless, research indicates that women, generally speaking, tend to be collaborative, team-orientated leaders who privilege “soft” values. Measuring the impact on the fabric of the nation of the rush of appointments of females to senior positions will be difficult, if not impossible. Its effects will take time to mature and mainly materialise osmosis-like.

Make no mistake, though. We are witnessing a quiet revolution. It suggests there is more than one way to skin the cat of societal change. •

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What went unmentioned was the question of how different, in practice, this would be from existing policy. Nor did opposition leader mention which groups are most likely to be affected, how much the government would save by restricting the payments, or whether the change in policy would actually be fair.

Eligibility for social security payments has never been restricted to Australians citizens, but various restrictions have always applied. Especially tight were the racial provisions in the earliest social security programs, which excluded people born in Africa, Asia and the Pacific — assuming they had somehow gained residence despite the White Australia policy.

From the time they were introduced in 1908, age pensions were subject to residential waiting periods. Initially, claimants needed to demonstrate twenty-five years of continuous residence in Australia, but this was reduced to twenty years in 1909 and then, many years later in 1962, to ten years. The invalid pension (now the disability support pension), introduced in 1909, required only five years’ residence, although the claimant had to have become permanently incapacitated in Australia. The widow’s pension, introduced in 1942, also had a five-year residence requirement.

Child endowment (now known as the family tax benefit), legislated in 1941, required mother and child to either have been born in Australia or resident for the twelve months before the claim. The unemployment benefit, legislated in 1944, only required twelve or more months of continuous residence immediately before application, and even that was waived if the director-general of social services was satisfied a claimant intended to reside permanently in Australia.

But requirements started to become more restrictive in the 1990s. In 1993 the Keating government introduced a “newly arrived resident’s waiting period” for all new permanent residents, which delays eligibility for certain social security payments. Initially twenty-six weeks for unemployment and sickness payments, the waiting time for those benefits was extended by the Howard government to 104 weeks in 1997, with shorter waits for other working-age support.

Further modifications came in 1999 and 2000, with the next major change in 2019, when the Morrison government extended the waiting period for unemployment payments to 208 weeks and extended waiting periods for supplementary payments. For the first time, a waiting period was applied to the family tax benefit.

The Morrison government also attempted to extend to four years the waiting time for a variety of other payments and concession cards, including paid parental leave, carer payment, carer allowance and family tax benefit, but its legislation failed to pass. During the 2025 election campaign it again proposed longer waiting periods, this time a uniform five years.

The decades of change have left a patchwork of waiting times:

• The four-year waiting period, the most common, applies to income support payments, among them JobSeeker, the parenting payment(single and partnered), youth allowance, Austudy and the special benefit, as well as to supplementary payments including the Commonwealth seniors health card, the ex-carer allowance (child) health care card, the farm household allowance, the low income health care card, the mobility allowance, the pensioner education supplement and the tertiary access payment.

• A two-year wait applies for the carer payment and parental leave pay. Partner provisional visa-holders only qualify for parental leave pay. An Australian citizen who has only just started living in Australia for the first time faces a two-year waiting period for parenting payment (single or partnered).

• A one-year wait applies for the carer allowance and family tax benefit part A (with no wait for part B).

Some groups are exempted from these waiting periods, the most important being refugees, former refugees and family members of a refugee or humanitarian migrant.

People can also qualify for the special benefit if they are in severe financial hardship, have become homeless or are at risk of becoming homeless, are experiencing family violence or a decline in health, or their visa sponsor is no longer able to support them. But while most people receiving special benefit were born overseas, fewer than 6000 people receive the payment.

Vital to considering the impact of Angus Taylor’s plan is an accurate tally of the overseas-born people who actually receive income support. Department of Social Services, or DSS, figures for the top twenty-five birth countries of social security recipients reveal that the largest number receive the age pension and the third-largest receive the disability support pension; as of June 2025 those two payments accounted for 71 per cent of all benefits claimed by overseas-born people. Both payments already have longer residence requirements and aren’t among the seventeen payments covered by the opposition’s proposed citizenship requirement.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the DSS allows us to calculate the share of the population receiving income support according to country of birth. As the chart below shows, about 10.5 per cent of the working-age population receive these payments, comprising 12 per cent of people born in Australia and around 7 per cent of people born overseas. The share receiving payments ranges from 1.8 per cent of the Indian-born population and 4.4 per cent of the Chinese-born to around a third of Afghan-born residents, 39 per cent of Iraqi-born and 46 per cent of Syrian-born.

To assess the impact of the Coalition’s citizenship plan, we also need to know how rates of citizenship vary between different birthplace groups. Of the permanent migrants who arrived in Australia between 2000 and 2021, 1.8 million or 59 per cent are now Australian citizens. Broken down by visa, 64 per cent of those on skilled visas had taken out citizenship, as had 47 per cent of those on family visas and 61 per cent on humanitarian visas.

The chart below shows the top ten countries of birth for permanent migrants who took out Australian citizenship between 2000 and 2021. The proportion with Australian citizenship ranged from a little over a third of Chinese-born to more than 60 per cent of those born in Vietnam, India, England, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, and nearly three-quarters of those born in South Africa.

This second chart also shows whether migrants’ countries of origin allow dual citizenship. If they don’t, migrants will have to renounce their original citizenship in order to take out Australian citizenship. In general, migrants from countries that allow dual citizenship have higher rates of Australian citizenship.

India is an exception. Although it doesn’t allow dual citizenship, a relatively high proportion of Indian-born people take out Australian citizenship anyway. Along with China, it is the largest birthplace of migrant arrivals over this period, but both groups are much less likely to seek income support than other overseas-born Australians or Australian-born citizens.

No breakdown of NDIS participants by country of birth appears to be available, but data is available on the number of participants from culturally and linguistically diverse, or CALD, backgrounds.

In 2025–26, there were 66,600 from CALD backgrounds in the NDIS, or 8.7 per cent of all participants. Payments made to these groups were higher than the overall average, adding up to 10.5 per cent of total NDIS expenditure. With an estimated 23 per cent of the Australian population speaking a language other than English at home, CALD people appear to be underrepresented in the scheme.

Access to the NDIS requires either citizenship, permanent residence or a humanitarian visa. No data on the breakdown by citizenship status appears to have been published. It also needs to be borne in mind that all visa applicants need to meet health requirements, including passing the “significant cost threshold” for estimated healthcare of $86,000. For permanent visa applicants, these costs are generally projected over five years, though applicants with “a permanent or ongoing condition with a reasonably predictable course” can be assessed over a ten-year period. This seems likely to preclude entry to Australia for people with existing disabilities.

What does this patchwork of payments, conditions and waiting times mean for Angus Taylor’s proposed changes?

To apply for citizenship, a person must have lived in Australia for four years on a valid visa (including at least twelve months as a permanent resident). The process then takes a median time of eighteen months up until the citizenship ceremony. On the basis of these figures, the citizenship requirement would be similar to increasing the waiting period for social security payments to about five years and six months, with the number of people affected and the budgetary savings dependent on the number of new citizens and their subsequent need, if any, for income support.

When the Liberal Party proposed increasing seventeen waiting periods to five years during the 2025 election, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated it would improve the federal government’s fiscal balance by $2.6 billion over the five years 2025–29. But it also noted that “the financial implications of this proposal are uncertain and sensitive to the assumed eligible population, which in turn is sensitive to the assumptions around the population of eligible visa holders and their interaction with the social security system.”

Crucially, the PBO assumed the eligible population “would access social security payments at the same rate as the overall population of Australia.” But — as the first chart above shows very clearly — different birthplace groups don’t access social security at the same rate as the overall population.

Given that the largest groups of recent immigrants — those from India and China — have much lower rates of social security support than people born in Australia, the PBO’s costings probably overestimate the savings from the measure. If more people were prompted to apply for citizenship then projected savings would also fall.

Importantly, the birthplaces with the highest level of income support are people born in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria, who are highly likely to have arrived in Australia on humanitarian visas. The Coalition’s 2018–19 budget specified that humanitarian migrants “will remain exempt from all waiting periods, and hardship provisions will remain in place.” If the same policy applies in the event of a Coalition government, these birthplace groups would not be affected.

Replying to the federal budget, Angus Taylor declared, “We’ll remove Labor’s handouts for noncitizens.” Given what we know of existing waiting periods and patterns of payment, the impact of his proposal (which is already attracting controversy within his own party) would be nowhere near as simple as that.

On the one hand, the humanitarian and refugee groups most likely to receive social security payments because of their deep disadvantage are exempted from the proposal. On the other, the largest birthplace groups among the most recent permanent residents are unlikely to need payments. Combined, these two facts suggest the budgetary savings won’t even be as high as the Parliamentary Budget Office’s estimates.

But perhaps the savings are secondary to the desire to appeal to people who might otherwise vote for One Nation, which has a policy of increasing the waiting period for both citizenship and welfare payments to eight years, as well as withdrawing from the UN Refugee Convention.

Here, it’s worth noting that the share of the working-age population receiving social security payments fell to record lows in 2023 and 2024, partly because of very high employment rates among skilled migrants. Those rates translate into a very strong net contribution to the federal budget. •

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Many of the criticisms, of course, are beat-ups and bad faith speculation. The polls embolden the critics, whose overblown predictions in turn affect public attitudes. Welcome to policy-reform debates Australian-style. And now there’s the extra, ever-changing input from social media.

But to this not-very-finance-literate observer many of the criticisms are valid, an obvious one being the incongruity of applying the capital gains changes to forms of investment other than (established) housing when the government’s chief stated purpose is to steer investment away from property. Both Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have offered nonsensical explanations for this contradiction.

Still, it’s facile and self-serving to assume, as many of the anti-government combatants seem to, that the public reaction shows how right they are and how truly dreadful the package is. Many of today’s complainers quite liked the Abbott government’s first budget, with its smorgasbord of spending cuts and broken promises. (Or they would have liked it if they’d been old enough to follow such things twelve years ago.) Voters loathed that one too.

Similarly, squeals about overturned election pledges tend to be selective. Governments pressing ahead with unpopular decisions can be cast as hopeless and out of touch with the common sense of the electorate or, alternatively, as possessing political courage, leadership and even, yes, “conviction!”

Voters’ attitudes to a budget will be influenced by many things, including general feelings about whoever’s in power. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey no doubt believed they were replicating the Howard government’s politically successful first effort in 1996, which was similarly littered with reversed assurances (people of a certain age will remember core and non-core promises) and bitter medicine.

The spiel in 2014 was the same: our profligate predecessors left us no choice, we don’t like this any more than you do. (Bob Hawke and Paul Keating read the same script in 1983.) But it didn’t work that time, perhaps because they were inferior politicians, or perhaps because voters were getting more cynical. Those faux-Churchillian cigar-smoking snapshots didn’t help.

Or maybe Hockey’s budget was so reviled because the Abbott government and its prime minister were never well-regarded; in fact, barely two months after being elected they were consistently behind in the two-party-preferred polls, which is almost certainly unprecedented. John Howard, by contrast, was still in his election honeymoon when his government’s first budget came out in August 1996, on top of which sat the Port Arthur massacre gun buyback boost.

A chief reason we remember 2014 is that Hockey’s budget all (or mostly) came to nought, with the big, unpopular bits never getting through the Senate. Instead they were debated for months, even years, becoming more and more reviled, until they were quietly abandoned (or maybe until Abbott was deposed the following year). And Senate crossbenchers’ refusal to let the changes through must have been influenced by the public reaction.

Anthony Albanese did enjoy very high standing in his first year, but as with the uncourageous Kevin Rudd in 2008 he declined to perform the tough first-budget ritual. Now, in Labor’s second term, it’s difficult to blame painful decisions on predecessors. And these days Albanese and his government are very unloved. Their consistent (but declining) two-party-preferred leads in the polls bely their low primary-vote support, very poor approval ratings and high dissatisfaction. It’s just that the other side, or sides, seems even worse.

(It needs to be acknowledged that One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s approval rating is higher than either Albanese’s or Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s. But the majority of voters would probably still view the prospect of her party in government with horror.)

Note that Newspoll’s most-well-regarded budget, in 1987, was another in the “this will hurt, but there’s no other option” category. In that case the Hawke government successfully laid the blame on all previous administrations, right back to 1949. And the Howard government’s second-best-received instalment came just months before it lost office.

Perhaps the closest template will turn out to not be a budget but the Gillard government’s “carbon tax broken promise.” Unveiled in February 2011, six months after the hung parliament re-election, it was immediately an object of fears that would not only hit the hip pocket ($100 roasts!) but also clobber the economy. Then, after it was introduced and no extra tax deductions appeared on payslips and nothing much else seemed to change, it subsided as an issue.

With former Jacquie Lambie Network/independent senator Tammy Tyrrell joining Labor’s caucus this month, the government plus the Greens easily have the numbers to get the budget through the upper house. Many Labor and Greens supporters celebrate this “progressive majority” and it’s certainly easier for the government than, say, the chamber the Rudd faced. But it’s still terribly stifling for them all the same. Oh, for last century’s self-consciously centrist Democrats.

Greens in formal alliance with centre-left parties in, say, New Zealand and Germany, have their policy discussions with their big-party allies mostly behind closed doors, and it’s in their interests not to make life unnecessarily difficult for the government. In Australia, by contrast, the smaller party has its own distinct political imperatives that mostly involve wresting support from Labor.

Yet the government will need to make concessions to various stakeholders, and indeed for the national economic interest, and most of that is not likely to be to the minor party’s liking. Albanese has said he wants the legislation passed in July this year and pushed off the government’s plate. But if he thinks that will end the hullabaloo, he’s mistaken.

The truly important date is 1 July 2027, when the capital gains and negative gearing changes are slated to take effect. After that, when the sky hasn’t fallen, they will be part of the furniture. By the next election the onus will be on politicians campaigning to undo them to explain where the money will come from. The Coalition and/or One Nation will find themselves taking tax policy to an election.

Those adjustments to discretionary trusts, on the other hand, aren’t planned to start until 1 July 2028. In effect, that means that even if they’re legislated this year they will be treated as a Labor campaign promise during the 2028 campaign.

It’s understandable if Labor’s brains trust expected the vast majority of Australians’ to eyes glaze over at mention of trusts, which are seen mostly as a tax minimisation tool of the wealthy. But thanks largely to lazy mainstream media picking up the Coalition’s catchy slogan (similar to the 2019 “retiree tax”) it’s already become the “death tax”: a dastardly attack (again!) on old people (or, less politely, their offspring) and possibly the thin edge of the wedge of a universal inheritance tax.

There must be reasons for its delayed implementation, but politically it would make sense to bring it forward to 2027. If that’s not possible, it would be in Labor’s interests to drop it altogether. •

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Comparing statistics across countries with differing mental health systems is risky, but WHO figures have Australia leading the Anglosphere on this metric. Only Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland and the Netherlands are more generously equipped. Even so, there is a widespread view that we need not just more psychologists, but many more. Finding a psychologist who doesn’t have a lengthy waiting list has been especially difficult since the pandemic hit.

The mental health crisis narrative has been successful in shaping public opinion and governments are taking note. A report on the psychology workforce released in April by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing recognises the profession plays a key role in the mental health system, providing roughly half of Medicare-billed mental health services. It finds that Australia’s demand for psychologists vastly exceeds the current supply, and that the situation is going to get much worse.

Based on its estimate of unmet demand for services, the report finds that in 2025 the nation’s mental health system needed 58 per cent more psychologists than it had. Despite projected growth in the profession, workforce modelling predicts that by 2038 the shortfall will swell to 97 per cent: we will only have half the psychologists we need.

The report is clearly a call to action: more on that later. But it also makes some puzzling claims. On the demand side, its estimate of the size of the current shortfall is astonishing. The report also predicts that the required quantum of psychologists will rise by 92 per cent between 2025 and 2038. This represents a compounding annual increase of 5.2 per cent, almost five times the expected rate of increase in Australia’s population.

Why this steep projected growth in need for psychological services should occur is opaque. It sits uneasily with epidemiological evidence that rates of common mental disorders have not risen significantly in recent years, except among young people, and that they have stabilised since the pandemic. Why need for treatment should race ahead of population growth is a mystery.

The supply side is equally mysterious. The number of registered psychologists has been growing at steady clip — around 4.8 per cent annually this decade after roughly doubling in the previous one — but the report anticipates that from 2025 to 2038 growth in the number of psychologists in the health workforce will be a sluggish 2 per cent annually. Why the slowdown, when psychology remains stubbornly popular among students and universities continue to roll out new training programs?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that these forecasts inflate the psychologist shortfall by overestimating the rising need for services and underestimating the robust growth of the psychology profession. Moderate the unrealistic demand increases and extrapolate existing growth and the shortfall dwindles.

Whatever the merits of the government forecasting, it is worth asking whether many more psychologists will indeed improve the nation’s mental health. Psychologists can do a lot of good, but it doesn’t follow that proliferating them will turn things around. Studies on the “treatment-prevalence paradox,” some of them carried out by leading Australian researcher Anthony Jorm, suggest it won’t.

Research around the world shows that the large increases over recent decades in the proportion of unwell people who receive treatment have not been accompanied by reductions in rates of mental ill health. Successful treatment would be expected to help people recover from episodes of illness and prevent relapse, thereby reducing rates of diagnosis, but these reductions have not eventuated. Opinions differ on why that might be — some think it reflects the limited efficacy of treatment, especially for chronic cases — but the disconnect between rates of treatment and of ill health is real.

Studies of the efficacy of psychological treatment in Australia are equally sobering. Recent evaluations of the Medicare’s Better Access scheme, which subsidises psychotherapy delivered primarily by psychologists, have found that although 50–60 per cent of clients improve with treatment, 20–30 per cent experience no meaningful change and 10–20 per cent deteriorate. Importantly, people who enter treatment with milder problems obtain substantially less benefit. A 2024 review of the Ten to Men program also found that receiving more Better Access sessions had no effect on depression or anxiety symptoms in men.

These findings suggest that funnelling more psychologists (or other psychotherapists) into Australia’s existing system of care is unlikely to move the dial on our population’s mental health. It also raises awkward questions about whether well-meaning efforts to boost access to treatment by tapping into a supposedly deep reservoir of unmet need may backfire.

These efforts may simply direct people experiencing less severe difficulties into treatments unlikely to help them and may even do harm. They may also increase what is sometimes called “met un-need”: the delivery of services to people who don’t require them. It is surely wiser to focus resources on the more severe end of the mental health spectrum and find more effective and less psychologist-intensive means of dealing with the milder end, scaled up by technological developments or other social initiatives.

This argument implies that tackling the nation’s mental health predicament requires systemic change, not just a larger workforce. Part of the problem is not how well resourced the system is, but how well those resources are distributed. Beyond our major cities psychologists are thin on the ground, as they are outside Buenos Aires. Per capita, psychologists are four times as prevalent in metropolitan areas as in small rural towns. Simply producing more of them will not fill the geographical gaps.

Psychologists are also maldistributed across the private and public sectors. New graduates are flocking to private practice settings and the share of psychologists in the public sector is in decline. Between 2019 and 2023, the increase in full-time equivalent psychologists working in the private sector exceeded the increase in the public sector by a ratio of forty-two to one. Training more psychologists (and other professionals) to dispense private therapy in our cities is the current trend, but it is unlikely to boost mental health meaningfully.

Universities have a large stake in these questions. Australia’s alleged need for a radically increased psychology workforce is the primary rationale for a proposed overhaul of training programs. The plan put forward by the Psychology Board of Australia, responding to a directive from the federal minister, is to replace the existing model, which requires completion of undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications, with one in which a five-year undergraduate degree is the sole pathway to professional registration.

The many critics of the new model argue that it relegates professional training to a lower level in Australia’s qualifications framework, erodes the commitment to a broad-based and science-led education, and makes the psychology profession less accessible to equity groups, among many other concerns. Most of these critics accept the premise that there is an urgent need to produce more psychologists, disagreeing only on the means to that end.

That premise needs more careful scrutiny. We are indeed facing significant mental health challenges, there is unmet demand for services, and psychologists do have a large role to play in dealing with these problems. We could do with more of them, and there is strong momentum within the field to boost their numbers incrementally. But the case for a massive expansion of the psychology workforce is weak, especially via an imposed revolution in professional training. •

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The Australian government announced it would allow public universities to enrol fee-paying international students back in 1986. This decision, enacted from 1990, built on strong foundations. Australia’s participation in the Colombo Plan had earned goodwill and a reputation for offering high-quality English-language education. Thousands of students from developing countries had studied in Australia from the 1950s, with many of them later enrolling their children in Australian schools so they, too, could study on an Australian campus.

The decision to open courses to fee-paying international students was a small component of a policy package that ended free university education for Australian students and introduced HECS, all with the professed aim of expanding access. Numbers from abroad were expected to be modest, and the minister’s staff debated whether international income should stay with the institutions or be returned to Canberra.

Yet something important had stirred. Australia’s public universities quietly but effectively built a new industry. The pieces were assembled at speed — expanded courses and facilities to cater for student demand, international agents to recruit students, new student housing to provide accommodation and, in some cases, offshore campuses for students not able to move to Australia.

The timing was fortuitous. Suddenly Australian universities — close to Asia and in proximate time zones — could offer degrees to a huge, rapidly developing region, particularly China with its profound need for tertiary level skills but as-yet insufficient domestic supply. The circumstances were right for a happy accident — an opening up at just the right historic moment. Like like Australian mining companies, universities were soon growing at the pace of the Chinese economy.

From a handful of international students in the early 1990s more than 550,000 enrolled in January this year. Estimates of the return to the Australian economy vary, but hover around $50 billion annually, roughly the national cost of the NDIS. In many towns and cities universities are among the largest employers, attracting industry, private accommodation and precinct investment. Tourists visit to see children, siblings or friends studying in Australia. Some graduates stay on for a year or two after study concludes, and around 25 per cent apply for permanent residency to become citizens.

International education has always attracted — and retains — many critics. International students have been blamed for housing shortages, despite the boom in specialist student accommodation. Coded messages hint at too many foreign faces on campus or, recently, demand an end to group assignments that require working across cultural boundaries.

Much disquiet plays into general community concern about migration, but some is specific to universities. The view that the educational experience has deteriorated is not necessarily shared by students, though: despite larger classes and higher costs, overall satisfaction rates with the university experience remain around 78 per cent across the nation, the long-run average.

Undoubtedly international students have changed the campus experience. As the late Emma Johnston commented when launching the University of Melbourne’s international strategy:

[A]ll our staff and students bring diverse perspectives to university life and society. Our international students are individuals and valued members of our university community. They are learners, researchers, friends, colleagues and our future alumni. We will continue to promote and celebrate staff and student diversity precisely because it enhances our education, research, engagement, and contributions to the public good.

International education has proved a major contributor to new teaching facilities across the nation. Through internal cross-subsidies international income supports expensive research infrastructure. It has made possible Australia’s stellar international standing, with multiple universities ranked in the global top 100, a per capita performance matched by few other nations.

Yet a happy choice can have unhappy effects. As income from international students rose, governments slowed increases in public funding. Under the Coalition’s Dan Tehan the portion of student funding nominally allocated for research stopped and investment in courses such as arts and business fell sharply. Universities were expected to make up the difference from international revenue.

Which brings us to a nervous present. Australia’s public universities depend on international students; the parents of Shanghai subsidise not only their own children but those of Australian families. Federal governments too have grown to depend on the income; alongside higher domestic fees for many degrees, international student income has allowed Canberra to fund an expanded national system without the public investment otherwise required.

What happens if international students stop showing up in their accustomed numbers?  Location and first-mover advantage helped Australia in the short term, but the flow is slowing.

Since 1990 China has created its own impressive university system. Chinese investment in scientific and technical research now tops the United States, and Chinese researchers have reached parity with their American counterparts as authors of the top 1 per cent cited academic papers. As that nation reaches out, globally mobile students who might have chosen Australia now opt for a Chinese university. And China isn’t the only country in the region to have invested heavily in their tertiary sector.

For Asian students still looking for an overseas English-language education, numerous options now exist closer to home, from international campuses in South Korea to highly ranked universities in Singapore and elsewhere, all of them actively recruiting.

European universities have joined in with enthusiasm. As SciencesPo proudly advertises, a student can now study at undergraduate or masters level in Paris in English with “no need to speak French.”

In this global market, Australia has lost some of its shine. Applications from China fell around 25 per cent this year alone, following smaller but steady declines in previous years. Overall, the number of Chinese students seeking a place at an Australian public university has nearly halved since 2019.

Those changing opportunities within China, the strong Australian exchange rate, higher living costs and an abundance of choice are not the only factors. Influential too is the decision by the Australian government to cap the number of international students and discourage applications by charging the highest (and non-refundable) visa application charges in the world.

Responding to public disquiet about migration, both government and opposition risk treating international education as a problem to be managed rather than a remarkable Australian success story.

Universities meanwhile have long recognised the hazard of relying too heavily on one source of students. Some 17 per cent of the international student cohort, or around 92,000 students, are now drawn from India, not far behind the 23 per cent recruited from China. Universities have paid close attention to other markets, including Indonesia, Nepal and Vietnam, but these have expanded more slowly, and none has the unique scale and circumstances of China in recent decades. One leading indicator — enrolments in ELICOS English-language courses ahead of applying for study in Australia — fell 32 per cent last year.

Australia has probably passed peak international education. If the recent fall in applications continues, a sector that has enjoyed decades of significant growth must contract. The impact will be felt across the sector and, fairly swiftly, in the national economy.

The effects may be more far-reaching, touching on Australia’s place in the world. Sir Steve Smith, the UK’s International Education Champion, recently noted that international education is the primary vehicle for building enduring trust and comity between countries. Australia has reaped diplomatic and strategic benefits from educating Asia’s best and brightest for more than seventy years. These graduates have been pivotal in creating stable, prosperous societies in our region well-disposed towards Australia. Though such goodwill won’t end with falling international numbers, Australia could surrender a powerful avenue for soft power.

The biggest question is how governments will react should domestic higher education be required to pay significantly more of its own way. The federal government is already reluctant to repeal the Coalition’s Jobs Ready Graduates legislation because of the cost — around $1.9 billion annually according to work by the Innovative Research Universities group. With around 1.08 million domestic students enrolled in Australian universities, the cost of maintaining current class sizes, student facilities, research teams and capital expenditure without the contribution of international students would be formidable.

At a minimum governments may require more domestic students to pay up to 90 per cent of their own degree costs, a regime already applied to some graduates by Jobs Ready Graduates. Contraction means less capacity to tackle disadvantage, and fewer of the professionals urgently needed in health and other key sectors.

Are political parties, students and parents ready for the cost of a tertiary system more dependent on our own resources? Will the promises to make further education available to an even wider cohort survive an ugly encounter with fiscal reality? Now, before we hit a crisis, is the time for a candid discussion about how this nation supports its public universities. •

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Chalmers’s centrepiece tax reforms are of course nowhere near as comprehensive as those introduced by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the mid-1980s or by John Howard and Peter Costello in 2000, and they don’t involve as many dollars as Scott Morrison’s three-stage tax reforms of the late 2010s and early 2020s. But they represent the most adventurous set of tax reforms seen so far this century.

For all that, there were almost no surprises in the treasurer’s speech last night. To a greater extent than in any recent budget, almost all of the “announceables” had been leaked — intentionally or otherwise — in the preceding weeks. That’s given both supporters and opponents plenty of time to construct and hone their arguments for or against the major measures.

Needless to say, the most attention-grabbing elements — and rightly so — were the changes to income tax. As widely foreshadowed, the government will prevent purchasers of established residential properties from offsetting net losses on their investment against other income after 1 July next year. This “negative gearing” will be retained, however, for purchases of new dwellings (and for shares and other assets), and existing property investments will be grandfathered.

Capital gains accruing after 1 July next year will no longer be taxed at half the applicable marginal rate (as has been the case since 1999) but instead subjected to the full marginal rate less an allowance for the impact of CPI-measured inflation on the cost base of the asset (the system that applied between 1985 and 1999). This change will apply to existing investments, including those acquired before the capital gains tax was first introduced in 1985, though only to capital gains accruing from July 2027. But investors in new residential properties will still be able to access the 50 per cent discount on nominal gains if they prefer.

Capital gains will also be subject to a minimum tax rate of 30 per cent to prevent investors from reducing their tax by crystallising gains in years when their marginal rate would otherwise be less than that figure.

The government says these measures will improve the prospects of younger Australians seeking to own their own home — a goal that has become significantly more difficult over the past thirty years as prices have increased at multiples of the growth rate of incomes.

Treasury modelling suggests these measures will slow the rate of house price increases by around two percentage points a year and enable around 75,000 more Australians to buy their own home over the next decade. But it also suggests the slower rate of increase in house prices will result in 35,000 fewer homes being built than would otherwise be the case — although it asserts that this will be more than offset by the budget’s additional funding for infrastructure in new housing estates.

The opposition will no doubt seize on this latter element of Treasury’s modelling to support its assertion that “if you tax something more you will get less of it.” In one sense they’re right — the budget measures do represent an increase in the tax on (prospective) investors in existing residential property. But getting less of that would actually be a good thing. That’s because investments in established properties (which account for over 80 per cent of the money lent to property investors) do nothing to increase the supply of housing. All they do is add to upward pressure on housing prices and on the demand for rental housing (by out-bidding would-be home buyers).

Although it’s not guaranteed, there’s a reasonable chance that restricting tax breaks for investors in established housing while retaining them for investors in new housing will encourage new builds, which would also be a good thing. And I’m not persuaded that the prospect of slower price rises will dampen the demand from owner-occupiers — who account for almost 60 per cent of lending for new builds — in the way Treasury seems to assume.

So although the budget’s tax changes won’t solve Australia’s housing crisis on their own, over time they will make a meaningful contribution towards solving it.

Combined with the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax to be imposed on distributions from discretionary trusts, the tax changes also have an inter-generational dimension. According to the latest available statistics from the Australian Taxation Office, only 4.4 per cent of taxpayers under thirty-five report capital gains, compared with 8.6 per cent of fifty-five to sixty-fives and 14.3 per cent of those aged sixty-five or over. That latter group — the sixty-fives and over — accounts for 62 per cent of all capital gains, compared with only 4.2 per cent for the under thirty-fives.

In fact, just 3 per cent of taxpayers aged under thirty-five are negatively geared property investors, compared with 10 per cent of those aged between forty-five and sixty-four, who account for almost half of all reported net rental losses. And almost 19 per cent of taxpayers in the top tax bracket are negatively geared property investors, compared with just over 6 per cent of those who are not in the top tax bracket.

The budget also introduces two small tax breaks directed at people earning wages and salaries: the working Australians tax offset and the $1000 instant tax deduction (in lieu of documented claims for work-related expenses). In no way do these represent a substitute for the indexation of the tax thresholds, which many observers have called for, although the first of these measures is likely to be the primary vehicle for delivering future income tax cuts. But they do represent an attempt to narrow the differences between the way income from labour and capital are taxed.

The government may well pay a political price for breaking its promise not to make changes to negative gearing or the capital gains tax. But if it can convincingly articulate the strong arguments for these changes — as they did when they re-jigged the Morrison government’s “stage three” tax cuts despite having promised to “deliver them in full” — then that price may turn out to be both small and ephemeral.

If this turns out to be the case, then I’d like to think the government will feel emboldened to break another promise it should never have made — to keep giving Western Australia up to $7 billion a year of GST revenue more than its government needs to provide its population with the national average level of public services while levying the average level of state taxes. That’s something a government professing a commitment to equity and responsible fiscal management shouldn’t be doing. •

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For this reason, candidates tend to matter more in by-elections, although in this case an objectively poor one romped home anyway. The party name, synonymous with its leader Pauline Hanson, was more than enough. David Farley’s roughly 39 per cent primary vote (on latest counting) doesn’t reflect much of anything outside Farrer in May 2026 — certainly not the party’s likely national support at the next election, or even “if an election were held today.” The national opinion polls, which have One Nation averaging around 25 per cent, are the tools for that. But a general election that saw One Nation get 25 per cent overall would certainly include electorates where the minor party received 39 per cent or more. And they’d mostly be rural, as Riverina is.

Labor didn’t contest Farrer. The big parties tend not to run these days in by-elections they have no chance of winning (although the Albanese government made an exception in Fadden in its first term). Would it have made a difference if they had? Actually, it might have. We’ll come back to that.

This will not be the first time One Nation has sat in the House of Reps. After winning the Queensland seat of Oxley as a Liberal in 1996 (despite having been deselected just weeks earlier), Pauline Hanson formed the first iteration of the far-right party in 1997–98 and unsuccessfully contested the 1998 federal election in Queensland’s Blair. Although she topped the primary vote with 36 per cent, she lost after buckets of preferences flowed to the Liberal candidate, thanks mainly to Labor how-to-vote cards.

In Farrer, a whole lot of preferences sat ready and willing ready to flow to the Liberal candidate Raissa Butkowski against Farley, but they didn’t matter because Butkowski didn’t get to the two-candidate-preferred count. Instead it was Farley who was deluged by preferences in the final count. His roughly eleven-point primary lead over independent Michelle Milthorpe increased after preferences to fourteen or fifteen points. That was the work of Liberal and National how-to-vote cards, which favoured One Nation over the independent, and of course the natural resistance of many Coalition supporters to any independent candidate with a highly publicised Climate 200 connection.

It’ll be several weeks before the Australian Electoral Commission publishes individual candidate’s preference flows, but the back of my napkin suggests that Liberal and Nationals voters’ preferences, combined, went very approximately 65 per cent to Farley and 35 to Milthorpe. Could the Coalition, via its how-to-vote cards, have delivered victory to Milthorpe? It’s unlikely. She would have needed to receive more than 70 per cent of total Liberal and Nationals flows (perhaps more than 75 per cent), and it stretches credulity to believe the two parties exercise such influence over their supporters.

Anyway, it’s now a given: the Coalition preferences One Nation over virtually everyone else — certainly Labor, the Greens, and Climate 300–funded independents — and that’s not going to change before the next federal election, if for no other reason than the Coalition parties’ memberships would go ballistic, sending even more of them to the far-right alternative. (On the other side, imagine the outrage from Labor’s true believers if the party preferenced the Coalition over the Greens.)

Given Saturday’s results, the only way Farley could have conceivably lost would have been if, like Hanson in 1998, he had faced-off with the Liberals’ Butkowski in the two-candidate-preferred count. The current tally of first-preference votes suggests the Liberal didn’t come close to reaching the top two. (The AEC had correctly picked the identity of the final two candidates who all other preferences needed to distributed to, and is currently concerning itself mostly with that count.)

But what if Labor had contested Farrer? It would have done embarrassingly poorly, struggling to hit double digits. But most of its votes would have come at Milthorpe’s expense, pulling her down closer to Butkowski. To meaningfully assist the Liberal (and admittedly the thought of party strategists doing this is a stretch) Labor could have preferenced her ahead of Milthorpe (while still putting One Nation last of course).

On the current counting, that probably still wouldn’t have been enough to elevate the Liberal to the final count. It’s not certain, though, and we’ll know more when final figures are available. But if Labor wants to minimise One Nation’s House of Representatives wins in 2028, this is the sort of preference action it would take, selectively, in seats where One Nation has a good chance. It might also mean installing the odd Coalition MP at the expense of a teal one, disadvantaging Labor in parliament. Look, they probably won’t do it. But they could.

In the meantime, the Liberals and Nationals can take some consolation from the fact that Farrer was unusual in having such a strong Climate 200–backed candidate, strong enough to have come second at last year’s general election. She came second this time too, which tolled the end for the Liberal candidate.

In a two-candidate-preferred count Butkowski would have easily defeated Milthorpe, while Butkowski versus Farley could’ve gone either way. But the Liberal and National parties’ combined primary support was just too low to reach that contest — thanks partly to Climate 200.•

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Inspired by a US military study, the project’s central idea was that a market can be understood and visualised like an ecology inhabited by predators and prey — service providers of different sizes and appetites on the one hand, customers with different service needs on the other.

After the application was successful I began working my way through the Productivity Commission’s two-volume blueprint for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. I very quickly realised the scheme was deficient in one vital respect: nobody had made any attempt — anywhere in the design or implementation of the scheme — to specify what an individual episode of each service type needed to include, and nor had they attempted to benchmark the price providers could charge.

This could have been done if the scheme designers — the Productivity Commission and then the National Disability Insurance Agency, or NDIA — had possessed the required time, personnel and expertise. Initial pricing could have been based on the prices the states and territories were already paying. But it would have been a big job, and the scheme’s planners seem to have decided to let the market sort it out instead.

I call this the original sin of the NDIS scheme design.

The Productivity Commission’s report refers at different points to the emergence of dynamic forces that would self-organise the different markets for services and generate pressures that would, in its vision, control prices. But when I went looking for the market theory that underpinned the design of the scheme, I found only a single reference. In a subsequent journal article I drew on my analysis to criticise what I called the “magical thinking about markets” that underpins the design of the scheme.

According to conventional market theory, efficiencies usually emerge because price rises are constrained — preferably by limits on what consumers are willing to pay — in a dynamic interplay of supply and demand. But in a scheme like the NDIS, the consumer and the payer are separate entities, so the consumer has no incentive to economise. This poses a theoretical challenge that different thinkers have resolved in different ways.

The neoclassical theory of markets proposes that we impose budgets on consumers of public goods to school them in economic rationality. This thinking underpins an obsession among politically conservative economists — Milton Friedman being the best known — with voucher schemes and lower welfare payments. It assumes that economies arise directly out of market participants’ urge to economise.

By contrast, the neoliberal theory of markets proposes that efficiencies emerge from superior use of local knowledge by market participants best left to their own devices. Unconstrained by regulation, they will use price signals to efficiently transmit knowledge about changing conditions of supply and demand.

Schemes like the NDIS are called “quasi-markets” because they require ongoing government regulation to generate the constraints and information flows that these two quite different theories predict are necessary in order for dynamic pricing and allocation to emerge.

Although the Productivity Commission reports are effectively silent on which theory of markets underpins the design of the NDIS, the design itself gives it away. Scheme participants are allocated personal budgets they use themselves to purchase different supports. This is Friedman’s approach on steroids. No attempt is made to constrain prices; instead, consumers are left to pressure service providers to deliver more for less.

This is where the market structure of the NDIS turns out to be crucial. The only way for participants to exert pressure on providers is the threat of changing providers. But many local markets only have two or three providers (if that!) to choose from, and if those providers offer similar services and pricing, consumers are powerless to exert any pressure on the service mix, the approach to service provision or the pricing of services. The situation that market forces are supposed to remedy is the situation that immobilises them.

When markets “fail” — when dynamic market forces don’t emerge to self-organise the pricing and allocation of services — there is said to be a case for market intervention by government. Three main options exist for intervening in failed markets.

First, governments can step in and deliver programs themselves to ensure scheme participants are not left without services. The NDIA has shown little appetite for this approach, and it would constitute a public acknowledgement that the market-based design of the scheme is flawed. (At a bare minimum, many of the supports received by people with autism and low needs could be delivered more cost effectively by direct service provision through funded community services.)

Second, if we adopt the neoliberal theory of markets as self-organising networks whose dynamic function is enabled via flows of knowledge and consumer empowerment, then we might advocate evaluation and information sharing to enable participants to make better-informed choices based on differences in approaches to service delivery. But the NDIA took forever to scale up its capacity for service evaluation and complaints handling, and it primarily uses this information to evaluate the performance of the scheme rather than packaging it up to help inform participants’ choices.

Finally, there is the blunt instrument of market theory: constrain budgets to force the consumer of public goods to make “hard choices” and economise on their service use. This, predictably, is the strategy the Labor government has chosen to pursue.

We can speculate on its reasons for doing so. First, it is consistent with the neoclassical market theory that implicitly but obviously underpins the Productivity Commission’s design of the scheme. Far from being the only option in an emergency, my sense is that something like this moment was always anticipated as part of the implementation of the scheme.

Second, this approach is politically convenient. It doesn’t require any admission that an earlier Labor government made a grave error when it commissioned the economists of the Productivity Commission to design a market-based scheme for human service provision. It is also consistent with Labor’s desire to present itself as a responsible economic player willing to take the hard decisions.

What this approach fails to consider is the brutal reality of living with disability: no matter how much it costs, you still need help to shower. Without effective constraints on pricing, there is no guarantee participants can afford to pay for the supports they need. •

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We must hope Amodei’s carefully cultivated image as the conscience of the industry is accurate, because earlier this month his company — best known for its Claude AI models — revealed a new AI product, Mythos Preview, that’s widely seen as a step change in AI capabilities. Challenged by its designers to break out of a “cyber cage,” this model not only made its escape but also demonstrated a remarkable capacity to identify exploitable flaws in widely used software. “Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities,” said Anthropic, “including some in every major operating system and web browser.”

The model can identify tiny flaws in the systems that operate digital communications, electricity infrastructure, online banking and other vital services, and link them together to create major vulnerabilities open to exploitation. “Given the rate of AI progress,” the company added, “it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely.” In the wrong hands, Mythos could be used to bring essential infrastructure and services to a grinding halt.

“The ability to defend against cyberattacks is integral to the basic functioning of society,” observes Atlantic technology writer Matteo Wong. Mythos’s near-inevitable abuse would make that task much, much harder.

To underline Mythos’s alarming potential, Anthropic has withheld the model from general release and contacted forty big companies whose digital infrastructure could be threatened by its talent for spotting vulnerabilities. These companies — Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Google, JPMorganChase and NVIDIA among them — have been given access to Mythos to scan and secure their own software as part of Project Glasswing, the company’s attempt to moderate the risks posed by its own product.

The significance of the model’s release didn’t elude governments and regulators around the world. The European Central Bank, for instance, began questioning banks about their digital safeguards. Canadian finance minister François-Philippe Champagne, who compared the news to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz blockade, revealed that Mythos was discussed extensively at last week’s International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington. “The difference is that the Strait of Hormuz — we know where it is and we know how large it is,” Champagne told the BBC. “The issue that we’re facing with Anthropic is that it’s the unknown, unknown.” Even the Trump administration is unnerved, reports the Economist.

A week or so after Mythos hit the headlines, Dario Amodei sat down for lunch at Catogna, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco’s Jackson Square, with Financial Times innovation editor John Thornhill. Over two courses accompanied by sparkling water, Thornhill tried valiantly to get a grip on a figure accused by one critic of purveying “disaster-porn-as-marketing-tool” and by a “veteran Silicon Valley investor” as “an extraordinary man, the real genuine article.”

Amodei professed to having been inspired to work in AI by futurist Ray Kurzweil’s influential 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, though he acknowledges it contains some “crazy,” “sci-fi” things. (Physicist Paul Davies described the book as a “breathless romp across the outer reaches of technological possibility” when it was published.) He was especially struck by Kurzweil’s observation that exponential increases in computing power would eventually result in human-level AI.

That vision still grips him. “There’s no end to the rainbow,” Amodei tells Thornhill. “We don’t see anything slowing down. I’m the first to say that it’s going to completely transform the world and we’re underestimating its significance.”

How you react to Kurzweil’s subtitle, “When Humans Transcend Biology,” no doubt mirrors your attitude to this period of seemingly unbridled technological experimentation. Amodei is overwhelmingly optimistic, telling Thornhill that he and his sister, fellow Anthropic founder Daniela Amodei, had long dreamt of doing good together, and “admits to being surprised” that Anthropic has given him what he sees as the chance to do that. Despite his warnings about the need for regulation, he clearly regards the structure and values of Anthropic as a reflection of that early pledge.

“We have an obligation to give back selflessly,” Amodei tells Thornhill at the end of their lunch. “And society does not have to venerate us for doing it.” For Thornhill, those words “make clear that Amodei wants to position himself as one of the good guys in the AI debate. But Amodei’s tone grates with many Silicon Valley critics, who note how his principles align with Anthropic’s commercial interests.”

Perhaps, given that Anthropic on its own can’t (and certainly won’t) significantly slow the rate of AI progress, Amodei’s combination of boosterism and scruples is the best we can expect from him. And the question of whether or not he is the good guy might not matter much if, as he suspects, “open-source models and Chinese developers will be able to replicate Mythos’s capabilities within six to twelve months” — or sooner, given reports this week of unauthorised users having already accessed the model.

Australia’s former e-safety commissioner Alastair MacGibbon was shocked by what he heard at a meeting with Anthropic representatives in Sydney earlier this month. “They are smart people and alarmed by what they have built,” he says. “They are right about the problem, but wrong about the solution.” Leaving Anthropic to choose who it shares information with will leave systems everywhere fatally exposed.

MacGibbon says federal home affairs and cybersecurity minister Tony Burke must act now to “convene critical infrastructure operators, private sector defenders and AI developers.” We must insist local organisations get early access to the Project Glasswing tools, he adds. “Australia cannot defend itself with yesterday’s capability while the frontier moves on without us.”

Australia’s official AI plan, released last November, looks entirely out of step with the challenge. By declaring Australia’s existing legal frameworks — updated “case by case” — are strong enough, it signalled the government had abandoned its earlier plan for mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI systems. Other countries have made a different assessment, wrote lawyers Jake Goldenfein, Christine Parker and Kimberlee Weatherall in the Conversation, citing rules introduced in the European Union, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Brazil and China.

Since then, the Australian Financial Review reported last month, the government has “put tech giants and data centre operators on notice about complying with Australian values and interests when deploying artificial intelligence or face a decade of reactionary regulation.” A decade of after-the-fact regulation doesn’t seem quite what this moment demands. The broad-brush memorandum of understanding that came out of Amodei’s meeting with Anthony Albanese late last month aren’t much more reassuring.

As two New York Times reporters put it, “Major AI breakthroughs are beginning to function less like product launches and more like weapons tests.” Will the threat dramatised by Mythos Preview prompt a rethink in Canberra? •

The post Right problem, wrong solution appeared first on Inside Story.

The Liberal Party’s problems are clear enough, and have registered in opinion polls over recent months. The Newspoll quarterly analysis for 12 January to 26 March has Coalition support at a fifth of the primary vote. In South Australian, the Liberals managed about 19 per cent to One Nation’s 23 per cent, with most of the Liberals’ lost vote going to One Nation.

But One Nation also picked up votes in Labor’s northern Adelaide heartland. In Elizabeth, an area that has experienced the full blast of economic disadvantage over decades, the swing on primaries against Labor was 15.7 percentage points and One Nation won a third of vote. In neighbouring Ramsay, centred on Salisbury, the Labor primary vote was down eleven points and One Nation polled 28 per cent. The seat of Light, which incorporates Gawler, also in the outer north, saw a swing of more than twenty points against Labor and a One Nation share of 34.5 per cent.

Labor retained these seats, but they are now marginal. In each case the two candidates left standing after preferences were Labor and One Nation rather than the traditional major-party standoff. Is this a vision of the Australian political future? Labor political strategists — especially in Victoria, with its unpopular Labor government and election later this year — will be looking nervously at these results. Liberals will be apprehending them in horror.

But both sides can perhaps take a little heart. The Liberals can tell themselves the National Party didn’t run in South Australia, which may well have sent the state’s more conservative voters One Nation’s way. The SA Liberal Party has also had a torrid time, with its frequent changes of leadership — indeed, a former leader, David Speirs, who stood as an independent, was convicted of supplying drugs. The notably popular Labor premier Peter Malinauskas is scooping up support that might otherwise, and elsewhere, go to the Coalition.

Labor, meanwhile, will take heart that its own vote is holding up pretty well in seats where its main competition is the Liberal Party. It is losing support to One Nation in some traditional heartlands, but not where middle-class voters are more prominent. The SA election confirmed Labor’s strength in metropolitan Australia — a feature of the 2022 and 2025 federal elections — while pointing to a vulnerability in the outer suburbs that the Liberals have so far been unable to exploit. And when pollsters calculate a two-party preferred vote for Labor and the Coalition, they are showing Labor well ahead — a recent Morgan poll reported Labor at 56 per cent to the Coalition’s 44 per cent.

The drivers of these patterns are well known. Cost-of-living pressures and housing shortages are undermining support for the major parties, which are each seen to share responsibility for them. As the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 federal election pointed out, voters appear to have accepted the Albanese government’s case that “responsibility for the country’s economic travails were [sic] jointly shared with the former Coalition government.” After almost four years of Labor government, that attitude might be contributing to a conviction among disaffected voters that neither party has a solution to the nation’s economic woes — a conviction that could feed the idea, pushed in One Nation propaganda, of a Lib–Lab “uniparty.”

One Nation, which doesn’t yet run the risk of being in government and therefore needing a policy to deal with inflation or housing, can simply catch the wave of discontent. The Iran war’s effect in drastically increasing petrol and diesel prices is a further boon to a party strongest in the fuel-thirsty rural, regional and outer-suburban areas.

The growing salience of immigration as an issue has also greatly assisted Pauline Hanson and her candidates, who also ride on the back of anti-Islam sentiment without the kinds of hesitations, qualifications and even occasional pushback you get from your average Coalition politician. But above all, One Nation gathers the support of those who believe the system is not working for them: things used to be better than they are now. One Nation’s is a performative politics on behalf of those who, like Hanson herself, have had a “gutful” and resent that “they” have stolen from us… what? Perhaps it is a feeling of control over the conditions of their own lives, as Guy Rundle has argued.

Can One Nation’s momentum be sustained? Critics point to the party’s poor record of solidarity in the past, the dubious quality of many of its candidates, and its silence when asked about policy — failings that would normally devastate a party that aspires to a predominant role on the political right. One Nation might flame out as it did in the late 1990s after its stellar performance in the 1998 Queensland state election, with eleven seats and 23 per cent of the vote. As it gathers greater electoral support, the profile of its electoral support and the hopes of those voters are likely to diverge from what might be expected of a party gathering a mere 6.4 per cent of the vote — as it did at the 2025 federal election.

The party also remains Pauline’s baby: it is not entirely clear what it would look like without her. One Nation has a ripe history of bitter internal division and most of Hanson’s key political relationships end up foundering on one rock or another. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether cordial relations with Barnaby Joyce will last longer than they did with Mark Latham — to name two former leaders of mainstream parties who made the jump to One Nation. It is not a party that has managed to harbour more than one big personality at a time — and only one big personality, Hanson herself, can really claim the right to be considered a permanent fixture.

Much will also depend on the response of the parties of the right competing with One Nation for support. The Liberals have so far shown little capacity to rise to the moment. Their post-2025 federal election review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, judged that many Liberals smarting from their humiliation in May 2025 were rather better at recognising specks in the eyes of others than logs in their own, to borrow from Matthew’s Gospel. One of those logs is the collapse of Liberal support in metropolitan areas. Another is that it can muster majorities only among the over fifty-fives. It is being shunned by women — Crosby Textor’s estimate of the gender gap was 4.7 percentage points. It has deep problems in the migrant communities. (Strangely, Australians of Chinese heritage resent being smeared as spies during an election campaign — and probably at any time.)

The Liberal Party’s post-election response to these various ailments can be briefly summarised. First, it failed to release Goward and Minchin’s report. (Anthony Albanese eventually tabled a leaked copy in the House of Representatives.) It is ramping up a campaign to oppose changes to tax breaks for property investors despite investors’ advantages being a major grievance among younger voters trying to buy a home. It chose a woman, Sussan Ley, as party leader only for her colleagues to tear her down in the space of a few months. (Its National Party colleagues initially refused even to serve with her in a coalition and then broke with her a second time earlier this year.) It continues to oppose quotas for the selection of female candidates for winnable seats — a measure adopted by Labor more than thirty years ago.

On the multicultural front, meanwhile, the Liberals have adopted a hardline immigration policy that, in a nutshell, signals to migrants they are here under sufferance. Adopt Australian values or else: and we — the Liberal Party — get to say what those values are. Yet the very same migrants are a conspicuous presence in many of the outer suburbs the Liberals have been fantasising about claiming from Labor since Peter Dutton gave his first media conference as leader in May 2022.

Armchair criticism is easy: the Liberals’ dilemma is an admittedly difficult one. In the big cities, they are being squeezed on the left not only by their traditional rival, the Labor Party, but by teal independents and even the Greens. The Liberal election review makes clear there is more than one opinion in the party about how much of its energy needs to go into winning back teal seats and how much into dealing with Labor. That is already a bad place from which to start.

On the right, the Liberal Party competes with One Nation and, in some respects, with the Nationals as well; the Coalition partners are rivals, for instance, in the forthcoming Farrer by-election. Policy designed to win back younger, female and migrant voters in the metropolitan areas will push other voters to One Nation — not that the Coalition has actually done anything much to gain the support of the groups that have turned decisively against it. Meanwhile, policies designed to stem the flow of support to One Nation, like the recent one on immigration, might make the Coalition unelectable in the metropolitan seats that need to be reclaimed from Labor, independents and the remaining Green.

All the while, party members are typically old and conservative. There is a sense that the Liberals don’t like modern Australia much more than One Nation. As an unsuccessful metropolitan Liberal candidate at the last election told Goward and Minchin: “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”

“Not how we would like it to be.” What do those few words mean? They surely imply that “we” — presumably, your average Liberal — instinctively dislikes what this country has become but out of a sense of pragmatism “we” need to get over it in the interests of winning an election some time. As well-meaning as the comment might be in trying to steer the party towards a more moderate and pragmatic course, it seems to me a bad place for a mainstream political party to try doing its business — really a recipe for another Abbott-like government, in the unlikely event that it yielded an election victory in the first place.

Meanwhile, One Nation is likely to be most competitive in rural and regional seats where it will encounter Nationals as well as Liberals. The Nationals have rather smugly treated the Liberals’ poor performance as if they had no share in it. This positioning was bogus from the start and does a party with a proud history of intelligent pragmatism no credit at all.

The Coalition’s loss of support among key demographics is hardly disconnected from those same voters’ grim view of the role of the Nationals in the Coalition, especially on matters such as climate change. At the time of the 2022 election, Barnaby Joyce, then Nationals leader, was about as popular among city voters as a bowl of lentils at the Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival.

Those days of smug aloofness are almost certainly over. It is not just that Nationals seats are in danger from One Nation. If, as the polls suggest, One Nation is getting 25 per cent per cent of the national vote and 30 per cent in Queensland (as reported by Newspoll), its share in some rural and regional seats — especially in its Queensland heartland — is probably north of 40 per cent. That is a big problem for the Liberal National Party in that state.

The Nationals are hardly in rude health. They have broken the Coalition twice since the last election. They recently changed leaders for the fifth time in a decade. They have endured three federal parliamentary defections since 2023, resulting in a loss of each of those seats to the party: Andrew Gee, who left over the party’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice and retained his seat of Calare as an independent at the 2025 election; Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who defected shortly after that election from the Nationals party room to the Liberals; and Barnaby Joyce, twice party leader, who has joined Hanson in One Nation. Speculation continues over other Nationals politicians making the jump, and some ordinary members have followed suit: as in Tamworth, the ABC reported, the National Party branch “moved en masse to One Nation” last October.

That’s the picture on the Liberal Party’s right. On its left (broadly defined), it has Labor and independents — and occasionally even the Greens — swallowing its metropolitan seats, and the occasional regional one. It is unlikely to be able to win an election again without reclaiming parts of its old heartland in the cities, since that is where most Australians live and vote. Yet to do so will lead only to further alienation among conservative voters, and accusations the party is “Labor-lite,” a charge foreshadowed by Malcolm Turnbull’s fate.

The closest historical parallel I can think of is Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists, which formed governments for much of the first decade of the Australian Commonwealth. But Deakin’s party was also squeezed between parties to its right and left at elections in 1903 and 1906. On the right it was George Reid’s Free Trade Party; on the left, it was Labor. Reid increasingly appealed to anti-socialist sentiment — indeed, his party was also known as the Anti-Socialists — and it grew in numbers. Labor was growing in numbers and confidence too, and its industrial wing in the unions was flexing its muscles as Australia emerged from depression and drought.

The result: Deakin chose to join with the Free Traders in 1909 to form a single Liberal Party, giving birth to the two-party system. But Reid’s forcing of the issue over the preceding years was probably the crucial factor. At the 1910 election a Liberal government faced a Labor opposition — and Labor won.

That was really the last great realignment in Australian politics, and we have been living in its shadow ever since. When a Country Party emerged nationally at the end of the first world war, it threatened to reinstate a three-party system (and briefly did so) but by early 1923 it had joined with the other major non-Labor party, by then called the Nationalists, in a coalition government. A two-party system, or at least a system in which two sides competed for government, had re-emerged. It endures still but seems more fragile now than at any time in the past century.

The Coalition parties might eventually have to confront Deakin’s dilemma, or something like the predicament faced by the Nationalists and the Country Party in the early 1920s. Should they join with One Nation, as a “fusion” (like in 1909) or a coalition (1923), to counter the electoral predominance of the Labor Party and the further rise of the independents and Greens?

We are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there. The most significant electoral effect of the current fragmentation on the right is to entrench Labor’s power federally and in a majority of states and territories. We can be certain federal Labor strategists are already eyeing off further seats they might win at a future federal election.

If Jacinta Allan’s Labor government should survive the next Victorian election, we will surely have arrived at the moment when it will be impossible for the Liberals to continue as before unless they are comfortable with permanent opposition or even minority party status. •

The post Stuck in the middle appeared first on Inside Story.

The Resolve poll reported a three-point drop in support for Labor since February. But it didn’t show that One Nation had benefited. The Greens were up by one, independents by one, One Nation by one, and the Coalition down by one. One Nation’s gain might just as well have been at the Coalition’s expense. (Tracking the change is difficult: the figures in this poll added to 100; those in February added to 101.)

Even if One Nation was “stealing” votes from Labor, that wasn’t news. True, there was no evidence of Labor losing support to One Nation back in September, when Resolve’s polling showed support for One Nation reaching “double figures for the first time,” as Massola wrote. Support for One Nation had risen by five percentage points since the May election but Labor’s share hadn’t moved. Nor was there any evidence of it in October, when support for One Nation was a little higher; or in November, when the party’s support had risen by more than ten points since May but support for Labor still hadn’t moved.

From mid-December, however, there is evidence of Labor voters shifting to One Nation. Perhaps not between Barnaby Joyce’s defection to One Nation (8 December) and the Bondi Beach massacre (14 December), when Morgan was the only poll to show a slide in Labor’s support. But after the massacre, when the nine polls conducted between 17 December and 21 January (before the Coalition fell apart) showed a three-point shift, on average, away from Labor and a three-point gain by One Nation.

Whether that shift among Labor voters reflected concerns about Labor’s security measures, or Labor’s response to the massacre, or broader sentiments about Muslims or immigration triggered by the massacre — or even a combination of factors, including the impact of Joyce — we cannot tell. But during those weeks support for the Coalition, the Greens, or those lumped together by the pollsters as “others” barely moved.

The shift of Labor voters to One Nation showed up not just in the polls overall; it also showed up in Resolve’s own polling, which reported support for Labor dropping from 35 per cent (2–7 December) to 32 per cent (17–20 December) and then 30 per cent (12–16 January). One Nation’s support rose from 14 to 18 per cent. Labor lost five points and the Greens one, with One Nation gaining four and the Coalition two. It was back then that One Nation started “stealing votes from Labor.”

This swing from left (Labor) to right (One Nation) was exceptional. For the most part, One Nation’s gains have come not from the left but from the right — the Coalition — and “others.” The shifts have been within the combined right plus “others” rather than from left to right.

Between the 2025 election and the end of February (the start of the war on Iran), polled support for One Nation increased by eighteen percentage points. Over the same period, support for the Coalition fell by 9.5, support for “others” fell by 4.3, and support for Labor fell by 3.8. Support for Labor and the Greens, combined, fell by four points.

If we assume support lost by the Coalition and “others” shifted to One Nation, this would account for about 80 per cent of One Nation’s gains; shifts from Labor would then account for the other 20 per cent. While the shifts are unlikely to have been as clearcut as this — some of the Coalition’s support would have shifted to Labor, no doubt, and some of Labor’s support to the Coalition — a four-to-one ratio of non-Labor to Labor voters moving to One Nation may not be far off the mark.

Since the election, support for Labor has moved down as well as up; likewise, for the Coalition. Compared to its performance in 2025, One Nation has benefited least from Labor when the Coalition’s vote has gone down and Labor’s vote has gone up: after the Coalition split, One Nation appeared to have gained six votes from non-Labor for every vote it had gained from Labor since the election. When Labor’s support has dropped, the ratio has narrowed: after the Bondi massacre, One Nation looked to have gained about two votes from the non-Labor side for every vote it had gained from Labor, and since the war on Iran the ratio has looked very similar.

While some of Labor’s first-preferences have shifted to One Nation, at no stage has this had more than a marginal effect on its share of the two-party-preferred. Given a choice between Labor and the Coalition, Labor has maintained a lead somewhere between 54–46 and 55–45, its winning margin in May. Labor voters who have shifted to One Nation appear not to have thrown in their lot with the opposition.

Whether we have witnessed anything quite like this before — certainly on this scale — is doubtful. After Labor’s split in the mid-1950s, the voters lost to the newly formed Democratic Labor Party mostly directed their preferences to the Coalition. This helped keep Labor out of power. The One Nation phenomenon looks quite different: Coalition voters who have shifted to One Nation prefer the Coalition to Labor; but voters who have shifted from Labor to One Nation continue to prefer Labor over the Coalition. If this remains the case, those preferences will help keep Labor in power.

By mid-March, the view that One Nation’s support was not “a blip” was widely accepted. That One Nation had been “stealing” Labor votes, not just those from the Coalition, was equally well established. Whether the rise was “real” was no longer a question of whether the rise in One Nation’s polled support was a flash in the pan — a consequence, some had thought privately, of the sort of sampling problems that might arise around Christmas and the New Year.

Rather, it was a question of whether One Nation would do as well as the polls suggested at the state election in South Australia, at the by-election in Farrer, at the state elections in Victoria and New South Wales, and ultimately at the next federal election — and of how its flow of preferences would affect the results. •

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America, fuck yeah
Comin’ again to save the motherfuckin’ day, yeah
America, fuck yeah
Freedom is the only way, yeah
Terrorists, your game is through
’Cause now you have to answer to…
America, fuck yeah…

“For the habitual critics of US foreign policy in general and Donald Trump’s in particular,” Ferguson wrote, “the analogy between today’s air raids against Iran and the invasion of Iraq nearly twenty-three years ago is too obvious to be resisted.” He even conceded that the South Park team (which made the film) “understood before many commentators that the United States has a track record of coming to save the day and leaving a trail of devastation.”

Yet, he went on, there’s “one thing I can confidently promise about the US–Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long.” Unlike Bush in 2003, Ferguson said, Trump’s aim is “not to march into Iran and confer, much less impose, freedom on the Iranians. It is to decapitate the Islamic Republic’s political structure and leave the Iranians to take their freedom from the mullahs and their murderous henchmen.”

Defence and intelligence agency denizens headquartered at Russell Hill in Canberra, wary of instant punditry like Ferguson’s, will also have been looking for the logic in Trump’s Operation Epic Fury. Defence department secretary Greg Moriarty, heading to Washington to replace Kevin Rudd as ambassador, will be particularly focused. The message he is likely to take with him from Australia is: wrap it up quickly, don’t expect an immediate transformation of the Middle East (as some of Bush’s advisers did in 2003), and get your eyes back on the main game: the challenge of China.

The Middle East has long consumed American strategic attention, along with its military resources and political capital, notes Jennifer Parker, an analyst close to Canberra’s defence thinking. “That sustained focus constrained Washington’s ability to compete as effectively as it might have with China,” she wrote in the Nine papers. “The Indo-Pacific was emerging as the central theatre of strategic competition while the US and its allies remained absorbed elsewhere.”

In 2025 and 2026, Parker reminds us, “aircraft carriers were diverted from the Indo-Pacific, where they were intended to deter China, to respond to crises in the Middle East. For a country that identifies China as its primary strategic competitor, that reallocation sits uneasily with its stated priorities.”

In Canberra and elsewhere, defence ministries will also be wondering about the capacity of American forces to sustain operations while keeping stockpiles of munitions for contingencies in Eastern Europe and around Taiwan. The Financial Times reported the Pentagon has ordered fewer than 650 high-altitude interceptors since 2010 and could burn through large quantities quickly in a sustained exchange. As many as 150 are thought to have been used during last year’s twelve-day war with Iran. Officials said “magazine depth” might constrain the scope or duration of operations and force trade-offs affecting US commitments in Ukraine and the Indo-Pacific.

China has so far given no sign of taking advantage of the Abraham Lincoln aircraft-carrier group’s move to the Gulf region from its normal East Asia station. Ahead of the annual National People’s Congress session this month, Xi Jinping seems preoccupied with his purge of the People’s Liberation Army top ranks, his latest victim the general in charge of the military region facing Taiwan. Trump’s planned visit to Beijing next month is going ahead, with disruption of China’s oil supplies from Iran a reminder of his unpredictable power.

Trump’s justifications for the war are getting knocked down as soon as they are put up, as much as both his allies and his critics agree the Iranian paramount leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will not be missed.

Iran was resuming work on nuclear weapons, and getting close to producing them, Trump claimed. But after the US–Israel air strikes on its enrichment plants last June, he had already declared that capacity obliterated. The Iranian stockpile of enriched uranium seemed to be entombed under rubble, and a day before the 28 February attack, the Omani chair of Vienna talks between US and Iranian delegations had declared good progress towards agreement on meeting US concerns about nuclear enrichment and weapons development. The talks were due to reconvene on Monday, when an agreement would just meet Trump’s deadline.

Then there was Iran’s ballistic missile program. US officials told reporters they had information that Iran was planning a pre-emptive strike using ballistic missiles, creating an “intolerable” threat to US interests in the region and soon the American homeland. But sources in the Pentagon soon said that was nonsense: though it had missiles able to reach parts of Europe as well as the Middle East, Iran was many years away from achieving intercontinental missile capability.

And finally there was regime change: the aim of removing the theocratic tyranny that repressed its own people and pursued a regional agenda of violence and threats directly and through its network of allies in Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Yemen against Israel and America. But the Iranian regime was already reeling from sanctions, currency collapse, drought and a recent wave of protests quelled only by massacres. For more than two years since the violent Hamas breakout on 7 October 2023, Israel had blitzed and decapitated Iran’s regional allies.

And then, two days after the attack, US war secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation was not a “democracy-building exercise” and nor was it an “endless” commitment like the Iraq war. “It turns out the regime who chanted ‘death to America’ and ‘death to Israel’ was gifted death from America and death from Israel,” said Hegseth. “This is not a so-called ‘regime change war’, but the regime sure did change.”

Assassinating a leader is not the same as regime change. If anyone is going to change the regime, it has to be the Iranian public, the people Trump is urging to rise up without giving a commitment to further help.

Adding to the discomfort in Canberra is the fact that the Trump administration has made crystal-clear that it sees Israel as its pre-eminent ally — and, what is more, an ally it is willing to be led by.

The administration was negotiating nuclear limits with Iran last June when Benjamin Netanyahu launched an air strike that Trump felt obliged to join. B-2 bombers carrying deep-penetration weapons were duly mobilised. This is what happened last Saturday too: Netanyahu acted to prevent any possibility of Trump reaching a nuclear deal with Tehran. If anything about the US attacks was pre-emptive, that was it.

As US secretary of state Marco Rubio admitted on Monday, the US attacked not because Tehran was preparing a missile strike but because the US feared Iran’s retaliation after Israel assassinated Khamenei. “There was absolutely an imminent threat and it was that we knew that if Iran was attacked and we believe that they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow,” Rubio said. He tried to walk back this telling remark on Tuesday, with a new narrative taking Israel out of the decision chain.

The administration has drawn an unfavourable comparison between Israel and other old allies, notably Britain whose prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, refused permission for any of the initial attacks against Iran to be launched from the Diego Garcia base on the British-controlled Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. Trump told London’s Daily Telegraph he was “very disappointed in Keir” over this refusal. “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said later at a White House meeting with the German chancellor, adding that the closure of British bases had added hours to transit times for the Iran attacks.

Hegseth also criticised “traditional allies,” accusing them of being hesitant and indecisive about using military force. Israel was a “capable partner” with a clear mission, Hegseth said, while other allies would “wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.” He went on: “America, regardless of what so-called international institutions say, is unleashing the most lethal and precise air power campaign in history… No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically correct wars. We fight to win, and we don’t waste time or lives.”

So it really is: Fuck, yeah!

Starmer later changed British policy to allow its bases to be used for operations against Iranian missiles and drones, and for British forces to join such operations. This followed advice from his attorney-general, Richard Hermer, that any British military involvement in the conflict would have to be purely defensive to be legal.

“President Trump has expressed his disagreement with our decision not to get involved with the initial strikes,” Starmer said in parliament. “But it is my duty to judge what is in Britain’s national interest. That is what I have done. And I stand by it.” He declared his decision “in accordance with international law,” adding: “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq… we will not join offensive action now.”

Australia was too far away for its bases to be used directly for the attacks, though the joint satellite ground station at Pine Gap might have relayed operational signals to US forces. The only Australian forces in the Gulf region currently are about a hundred air force and army ground crew operating a transport base inside a vast US–Emirati military airfield near Dubai, which came under drone attack without damage.

Still, it has been an awkward time for Anthony Albanese, Richard Marles and Penny Wong. Although the US build-up was blatant and Trump’s threats explicit, they seem to have had no advance notice of the Israel-led attack. Now they are bystanders to a chill between their two partners in the AUKUS nuclear submarine and high-tech alliance. Moriarty will no doubt work hard to convince the US administration that Australia is not a “pearl-clutching” ally, but one to be trusted to do the right thing by America with scarce submarines.

But they supported the US action: Iran was a destabiliser, its nuclear and missile programs a risk, and Khamenei’s regime a cruel one. They have quickly dodged questions about its legality, saying this was a matter for the US and Israel to judge — as if international law is what protagonist nations say it is.

Like other allies relegated to the second rank, Canberra will be wondering how much more of the rule book will be jettisoned by Trump’s team. The dispute with the artificial intelligence developer Anthropic is hardly reassuring. The company wanted assurances written into its contracts with the Pentagon that its AI systems would not be used to direct fully autonomous lethal weapons or for mass surveillance of US citizens. Hegseth thought this an outrageous restriction and got Trump to bar Anthropic from any and all government contracts, though its AI application, “Claude,” was still being used by US forces to prepare the Iran attack.

Meanwhile, Albanese and other allied leaders will be dealing with the fallout: tens of thousands of travellers stranded in the Gulf; oil and gas prices possibly spiralling with the Hormuz Strait closed and Qatar shutting down its massive LNG plants; waves of Shia Muslim protests and mourning for Khamenei in far-flung Islamic communities including in Australia; and perhaps, when Iran’s rockets run out, a fanning out of terrorists seeking martyrdom.

Meanwhile, have the analysts all been looking at the wrong set of possible goals motivating Trump? In a perhaps prescient article, an anonymous writer in Asia Sentinel looks at Trump’s record and finds “neither a neocon warmonger nor a liberal interventionist” but “a distressed assets hunter.”

The article continued:

In the White House’s current calculus, Venezuela and Iran are not sovereign nations defined by borders and flags. They are underperforming energy super-majors holding a combined 511 billion barrels of reserves, run by boards of directors viewed as incompetent, hostile, and ripe for removal… If Venezuela was the pilot project, Iran is the Grand Prize. With 208 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and the world’s second-largest gas deposits, its strategic weight dwarfs that of Caracas. Control over Iran is not just about resources. It is about controlling the thermostat of the global energy market. Yet Trump views Iran through the same prism: a massive asset suffering from a severe liquidity crisis and a breakdown in internal order. The catalyst for Trump’s escalation was not a specific terrorist threat but the wave of protests beginning last December. The collapse of the rial [Iran’s currency] to historic lows and hyperinflation signalled that management in Tehran had lost its social capital and solvency.

The cynicism spreads even into the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. “If you were in a bunker in Tehran or Karaj,” asked columnist Matthew Syed in London’s Sunday Times, “would you rise up against the Iranian regime on the basis of Trump’s call to arms when he might, even now, be negotiating with a Revolutionary Guard general to cement the regime in place, as he did in Venezuela, on the proviso oil flows west rather than east?”

So far, the Islamic Republic’s institutions are moving ahead with deciding on a successor to Khamenei, who was eighty-six. Three senior Islamic scholars appear to be contenders, including a son of Kamenei and a grandson of the regime’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The new ayatollah will be chosen by a panel of eighty-eight clerics, whom Israel is trying to assassinate as well through further air strikes. The officer corps of the defence and security services are already starting reshuffles to replace the generals also killed in US and Israeli air strikes.

A forty-day mourning period declared for Khamenei will be marked by orchestrated displays of anger and grief. The humiliated Iran Revolutionary Guard Force, with 190,000 personnel and controlling somewhere between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of Iran’s economy, along with the 450,000-member Basij security volunteers and the 420,000-strong regular military will be vigilant against any rejoicing at Khamenei’s death coalescing into protest.

Persuading a new ayatollah to retreat from Khamenei’s failed promotion of an “axis of resistance” against Israel and the West might be a more tangible goal for Western statecraft than an explicit revision of theology. Progress on Palestinian statehood and the promise of a lifting of sanctions linked to good behaviour would help.

So Australian defence planners will probably have to put up with American military efforts being drawn off to the Middle East for a long time yet. At least this time, there seems to have been no pressure, or willingness, to join in. •

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But what pollsters have going for them should make them an object of envy to their counterparts elsewhere in the world. Among Australians eligible to vote, enrolments are rising: between 2013 and 2025, the figure rose from 92.4 to 98.2 per cent. Compulsory voting largely eliminates the need to work out which respondents are enrolled to vote and will turn out, and which aren’t enrolled or won’t vote. And while pollsters need to report first preferences for a relatively large list of entities — Labor, the Liberals and Nationals (preferably combined), the Greens, One Nation, and others — they are ultimately judged by their ability to estimate just one figure, the two-party-preferred vote, a figure that has proved easier to get right than the first preferences.

Now, some things are changing, and not in ways that make the pollsters’ work any easier. In 2025, turnout (90.7 per cent) was slightly lower than in 2010 (93.2 per cent); of those eligible to vote, less than 90 per cent did so. And 5.6 per cent of the votes cast were deemed informal (something few polls, if any, attempt to measure), slightly higher than in 2022. All up, a formal vote was cast by just 84.1 per cent of eligible adults. Without the Australian Electoral Commission’s efforts to boost enrolment, this figure might have dipped below 80 per cent.

Surveying the pieces or assuming nothing has changed?

Worse was the challenge posed by the Coalition’s disintegration — first, for eight days in May 2025 and then from 22 January to 8 February this year — before coming together again, however shakily initially and desperately now. Should pollsters have carried on estimating the vote for the Liberals, Nationals and the Queensland Liberal Nationals jointly — or should they have begun estimating support for the various members of the (former) Coalition separately?

Perhaps assuming the Coalition would sooner or later be back together — or perhaps because it was much easier — some pollsters continued to report the “Coalition” vote. (Almost no polling was done during the first split.) They either reported a single figure for the Coalition (Essential) or separate figures for the Liberals, the Nationals and the Queensland Liberal Nationals (RedBridge, YouGov).

Two pollsters did reject the business-as-usual model and reduced the Coalition to two parties, Liberal and National. One was Pyxis, which is responsible for Newspoll, the most watched of all the polls. Between 5–8 February it measured what it said was support for the Liberals and support for the Nationals and reported a historic low: just 18 per cent combined, down from 31.8 per cent at the 2025 election. The other was Morgan, which reported support for the Liberals plus support for the Nationals dropping first to 22.5 per cent (19–25 January), then to 20.5 per cent (26 January–1 February).

But measuring support for the parties that had made up the Coalition (even leaving aside the Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party, or CLP) is less straightforward than this implies.

The biggest problem is that none of Queensland’s seats is contested by the Liberal Party or the National Party: they are contested by the Liberal National Party, a separate entity that styles itself as a “branch” of the Liberals and an “affiliate” of the Nationals. When the Coalition split, the LNP (Qld) stayed together. Of Queensland’s thirty seats, the LNP holds sixteen — ten occupied by MPs who sit in the Liberal party room, six by those who sit in the National party room. Were the LNP to win Kennedy, now held by Katter’s Australian Party but originally won by Bob Katter on behalf of the National Party, the new member would join the Nationals party room. Were the LNP to win any of the seats held by Labor (twelve) or the Greens (one), the new member(s) would join the Liberal party room.

Asking Queenslanders how they would vote, Newspoll divided seats into two categories. In the ten “Liberal” seats and all the other “non-National” electorates the party contested in 2025, respondents were given the option of the Liberal Party (alongside Labor, the Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Other parties or independent candidate, and Don’t know); in seats the “Nationals” held and in Kennedy, it offered the option of the Nationals (plus Labor, the Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Other parties or independent candidate, and Don’t know). Morgan did something similar, except it offered both alternatives — Liberal and National — in every Queensland seat.

What respondents made of being offered a Liberal and/or National option but not the LNP, the Queensland party that has contested every election since 2010, can only be wondered. Even in seats held by the LNP (Qld), how many voters would know that their member was “really” a Liberal or “really” a National?

Who’s most at risk from One Nation?

The Nationals are widely regarded as the party most likely to lose votes — and seats — to One Nation; and that means the level of support for the Nationals matters. At the 2025 election, contesting twenty seats outside Queensland, Nationals candidates won 3.8 per cent of the vote; contesting seven seats within Queensland, including the seat held by Katter, those who sat (or aspired to sit) in the Nationals party room won another 1.8 per cent. Adding these two figures, the Nationals might claim to have won 5.6 per cent of the 2025 vote.

To what extent has the rise of One Nation been at the Nationals’ expense? Between 22 January and 8 February, the polls estimated support for the Nationals (outside Queensland) to be just 1 per cent (YouGov) or no higher than 2 per cent (RedBridge). On these figures, support for the Nationals had (at best) almost halved since the election. If we include the Queensland figure for “the Nationals,” support rises to 2.5 per cent (Morgan) or 3 per cent (Newspoll). On these figures, too, support had (at best) almost halved.

How reliable are these figures? Traditionally, the National Party has been underreported by the polls. Not since 2019 have any polls reported a separate National Party figure in their final pre-election forecasts; and in 2019 they all underestimated how well the Nationals would do.

Analysing a post-1966 election survey, he had conducted in 1967, the political scientist Don Aitkin discovered that nearly half the respondents who had voted for a Country Party candidate claimed to have voted Liberal despite there being no Liberal candidate in their electorates. How much of the apparent change since 2025 reflects the same phenomenon — respondents saying they intend to vote Liberal when they will actually vote for a National (the Country Party’s successor) — and how much is due to One Nation eating the Nationals’ lunch, we cannot say.

The National Party might be the party most at risk of losing the greatest proportion of its seats to One Nation, but even if One Nation has already devoured half (or more) of the Nationals’ vote, this would still only account for a small part of One Nation’s support. If One Nation’s vote share has jumped from 6.4 per cent in 2025 to 26.5 per cent (the average of the most recent Morgan, Newspoll, RedBridge and YouGov polls, out of the field by 14 February) and the National’s vote has slumped from 5.6 per cent, for argument’s sake, to 2.5 per cent — a fall of about three points — its losses cannot account for more than about 15 per cent of One Nation’s twenty-point gain.

By far the largest slice of One Nation’s lunch is coming not from the Nationals but from the Liberals. Proportionally, the Liberal losses since the 2025 vote might not be as great as the Nationals’, but in terms of absolute numbers they have been much greater.

In 2025, the Liberal Party secured 20.7 per cent of the vote. During the most recent Coalition split, this dropped by about a third to 14 per cent (YouGov) or 13 per cent (RedBridge) — a fall of seven or eight points. If we add the “Liberal” vote in Queensland, the Liberals’ national vote appears to have dropped by at least a third, from 26.1 per cent in 2025 to 18 per cent (Morgan) or 15 per cent (Newspoll) — losses of between eight and eleven points. In other words, the Liberals alone have contributed 35 to 40 per cent (excluding Queensland) or 40 to 55 per cent (including Queensland) of One Nation’s rise.

Some of those voters who previously supported independents and a variety of very small parties are likely also to have switched to One Nation. In 2025, these voters accounted for 15.2 per cent of the vote. But now, in the most recent polls, independents and others account for no more than 10 to 11.5 per cent of the vote. Those who voted for independents and others in 2025 (though probably not the ones who voted for the teals) could account for 15 to 25 per cent of the rise in the One Nation vote.

Some on the political left have also swung to One Nation. Since we are dealing with net shifts — not the panel data required for us to see all the movement across the parties — the numbers that have shifted from left to right or from right to left can’t be calculated; to the extent that movements in opposite directions have been of equal size, they will have cancelled out. The Australian’s Simon Benson insists that after the Bondi massacre, Labor voters “disgusted” with Albanese or struggling with the cost of living jumped straight over to One Nation. But those losses, he says, were offset by moderate Liberals “appalled by the prospect of the Coalition chasing rabbits down the One Nation burrow.” This may be true, but he provides no evidence for it.

In net terms, the evidence is clear: the boost Labor voters have given One Nation has been relatively small. In 2025, Labor won 34.6 per cent of the vote; averaging the figures in the most recent polls by Morgan, Newspoll, RedBridge, Resolve and YouGov, Labor’s share stands at 32.2 per cent. That drop of just over two percentage points would have contributed about 12 per cent of the surge in One Nation’s support.

If any Greens have moved to One Nation, their numbers would have been much smaller. In 2025, the Greens won 12.2 per cent of the vote; in the latest polls, the Green’s average share (11.7 per cent) remains almost the same.

In short, the lion’s share — as much as 85 per cent— of One Nation’s support appears to have come from the Liberal, National, and Liberal National parties and from smaller parties and independents.

2PP or not 2PP?

More challenging for the pollsters than deciding whether Liberal and National support should be reported separately during the most recent split was deciding what to do with the two-party-preferred, or 2PP, the centrepiece of election reporting since all the polls adopted it in 1993.

To calculate the 2PP, pollsters take all the first preferences for Labor (or for the Coalition parties) and add all the other ballots that rank Labor ahead of the Coalition (or the Coalition ahead of Labor). Labor’s 2PP is then the percentage of all ballots where Labor is ranked ahead of the Coalition (and the Coalition’s 2PP is the percentage of the ballots where it is ranked ahead of Labor).

The concept of the 2PP dates from the early 1970s when: (a) Australia had a system of compulsory and exhaustive preferential voting (as it still does); (b) to win, candidates had to secure more than half the votes, either before or after the distribution of preferences (still the case); and (c) the winner in each seat, almost invariably, was either a Labor, Liberal or Country Party candidate. The third of these factors hasn’t held since around 2013: so much so that in 2025 no fewer than thirty-five seats (known as non-classic seats) out of 150 featured some other party or an independent in the final two-candidate count.

The significance of the 2PP, nationwide, is threefold. First, it shows whether Labor or the Coalition is the more likely to form government. Second, it suggests how many seats Labor would lose to the Coalition, or the Coalition to Labor, given a national 2PP swing of a given size — regardless of how many seats other parties and independents might win. Third, it propagates a new yardstick by which to judge which side deserves to form government — the side with more than half of the 2PP.

In each of these senses the 2PP has succeeded, largely. Its record of picking the winner, though not perfect, has been pretty good: two misses (1998, 2010) in the last 21 elections. Its anticipation of the net shift in seats between the two sides — despite the rise of the Greens and the teals — has been very good; even in 2022 and 2025 it was out by only two seats. Equally successful has been its elevation of the 2PP as the pre-eminent measure of electoral fairness in relation to the distribution of seats.

This last helps explain why calls for proportional representation to replace single-member electorates are largely a thing of a distant past. When Labor, with 54 per cent of the 2PP in 2025, won 63 per cent of the seats with less than 35 per cent of the first preferences, it provoked barely a whisper in favour of switching to PR. It helps, of course, that having succeeded in single-member electorates, the Greens and independents have no great interest in PR; their concerns about electoral reform are focused on electoral funding.

But what to do with the 2PP when the Coalition collapses? On this, pollsters were divided. For some, the collapse was either a temporary separation or, if a divorce, something to be recognised in polling methods sometime in the future. And even before the splits, not all pollsters had been calculating — or had ever calculated — the 2PP figures in the same way.

Morgan continued to provide two figures — a 2PP based on the actual distribution of preferences at the 2025 election, and a 2PP based on how respondents said they would allocate their preferences. (Come the election, this would allow Morgan to highlight whichever measure had come closest to anticipating the result — usually, the distribution at the last election, thanks to voters following their how-to-vote card).

During the parties’ separation, Morgan conducted three polls. Based on the 2025 vote, Labor’s 2PP started at 54.5 before falling to 53 per cent; based on respondent allocation, Labor’s 2PP started at 56.5 before falling to 53.5 per cent. Rather than showing the Coalition losing ground following the separation, as one might expect, these figures showed it gaining ground. A week after the Coalition had reformed, Morgan’s 2PP had it losing ground, with Labor’s 2PP jumping to 58.5 per cent (based on the 2025 allocation) or 55 per cent (respondent allocation) before falling back to 55 per cent (whether based on both the 2025 allocation and respondents allocation was not disclosed).

RedBridge, polling for the Australian Financial Review in association with Accent Research, also continued to calculate a 2PP while the parties were apart, in its case based on preference flows from the 2025 election. It warned, however, that with the new spread of primary votes, “the traditional two-party preferred measure” made the 2PP likely to be “less useful than it has been historically.” Its poll put Labor on a 2PP of 56 per cent. YouGov’s 2PP, also based on the 2025 distribution, was 55–45.

Resolve, polling for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, would report the same figures, 55–45, the week after the Coalition had got back together. Its 2PP was based on how respondents said they would allocate their preferences. But, as the mastheads’ chief political commentator James Massola was at pains to emphasise, Resolve held back from “highlighting” these figures: “those numbers are potentially inaccurate because in some seats where One Nation is polling well, a two-candidate preferred count that pitched Labor against One Nation, or the Coalition against One Nation, would be more accurate.”

In seats of that kind, this was no doubt true. But Massola appeared to misunderstand what a 2PP measures nationally, and Resolve’s pollster appeared to share a similar misunderstanding. A 2PP, Jim Reed was reported as saying, “only works at a national level when you have a binary contest.” At a national level, despite the large loss of Coalition and Labor votes in recent elections, the 2PP has continued to work well. How well it works with a resurgent One Nation remains to be seen, but no commentator expects Labor to lose the next election or for its 2PP lead (as the Resolve poll indicates), if it wins the election, to be anything other than substantial.

Newspoll, the poll most closely watched by politicians, had previously used “preference flows at previous elections”— not just the flow at the last federal election, apparently — to calculate a 2PP. After the Coalition’s separation, Pyxis thought a 2PP no longer applicable and didn’t calculate one. Regarding its absence as self-explanatory, the Australian offered no justification. Essential, whose polls are reported in the Guardian, also appears to have dropped the 2PP (which it usually bases on respondent allocation) — also, without saying why.

A new 2PP and a 3PP

As well as a standard 2PP, YouGov (in a relatively new partnership with Sky News) produced another quite different two-party vote — one that forced respondents to choose not between Labor and the Coalition but between Labor and One Nation. This had Labor ahead, 57–43. According to the announcement of the poll, the new two-party vote meant that One Nation would become the opposition party… if an election were held today.”

It meant no such thing. In a two-horse race, the horse that doesn’t finish first is indeed likely to finish second. But what YouGov missed is that a party needs to have the second-largest share of seats to form the official opposition, not the second-largest share of an arbitrary two-party vote. Even if One Nation outpolled the combined Liberal and National vote, it wouldn’t necessarily out-seat them.

For Benson, pollsters who had started polling a Labor versus One Nation two-party vote were “premature at best and simply whacky at worst.” Imagining that most seats would come down to this sort of contest would indeed be “whacky,” but wondering which way voters would jump given a choice like this was neither premature nor whacky.

The bigger story, entirely missed, was just how close the YouGov’s new two-party figure was to the traditional Labor–Coalition result — and what that said about how close nearly half the voters polled (especially Liberal and National voters) felt they were to One Nation. An analysis based on the 1998 Australian Election Study showed that what was distinctive about those who gave One Nation their first preference was their alienation from politics, their attitudes to Aborigines and their hostility to immigration. Yet large numbers of Coalition voters, if forced, said they would choose a party that  Benson described as  “extreme right-wing” over Labor, a party in the mainstream.

Newspoll also wondered about what voters would do if they had to choose between Labor and One Nation. But instead of posing a simple choice of second preference, Newspoll gave respondents three options: “Pauline Hanson’s One Nation,” “Labor,” and “Will just follow how to vote cards/don’t know.” Half (50 per cent) chose Labor, 29 per cent chose One Nation, and 21 per cent said they would either follow the how-to-vote card or didn’t know. For its headline (on the front page), the Australian chose “One Nation a No-Go on Preferences.” This was misleading. In addition to the 29 per cent who said they would preference One Nation, 21 per cent were open to the possibility of doing so — if instructed to do so by the how-to-vote card; that’s 50 per cent. Of the Nationals, 70 per cent said they would preference One Nation with another 24 per cent open to doing that if instructed to do so. Most Liberals, too, said they would either preference One Nation (43 per cent) or might if instructed to do so (24 per cent). Of those who intended to vote for “others”, half (53 per cent) said they would preference One Nation or were open to it. Only among the Greens was a One Nation preference off the table: 91 per cent said they would preference Labor.

Three weeks before the split, when support for One Nation had climbed into the low twenties, Fox & Hedgehog computed a 2PP “match-up” between Labor and One Nation and another between the Coalition and One Nation. Asked to choose between Labor and One Nation, 56 per cent chose Labor and 44 per cent One Nation — figures almost the same as YouGov’s. Fox & Hedgehog had the standard two-party vote at 55–45, identical to YouGov’s.

Freshwater, a few days before the split, produced a standard 2PP as well as a Labor versus One Nation two-party vote. These, too, were very similar: 57–43, Labor versus the Coalition; 53–47, Labor versus One Nation. Of those, in 2025, who had given Labor their first preference, 90 per cent preferred Labor to One Nation; so, did two-thirds of those who had given their first preference to the Greens. All the One Nation voters, three-quarters of LNP voters and most of the Others from 2025 preferred One Nation to Labor. These figures point to a clear left–right divide, voters preferring to switch between parties on the same side, where possible, rather than switch to parties on the other side.

Fox & Hedgehog also calculated a “three-party preferred” taking in Labor, the Coalition and One Nation. Its figures were intriguing: Labor, 46 per cent (building on a first preference of 29 per cent); the Coalition, 29 per cent (25 per cent); One Nation, 25 per cent (21 per cent). So, when asked to choose, most of the Greens (14 per cent of the sample) and Independent or other voters (11 per cent) chose Labor (up seventeen points) with the remainder dividing evenly between the Coalition (up four) and One Nation (up four).

When asked in the same poll to choose between the Coalition and One Nation, respondents chose the Coalition, 63–37. Here, switching between parties on the same side was possible for voters on the right — the two alternatives were drawn from the right — but not for voters on the left. Evidently, Labor voters overwhelmingly chose the Coalition.

How likely is it that Labor voters will be forced to choose between the Coalition and One Nation? Except for some seats in which Labor might come third, and the first and second places are filled by one of the Coalition parties and One Nation, it won’t happen.

If One Nation secured 25 per cent of the vote, it is conceivable that it would pick up something like a quarter of the seats, given that in many seats its vote would be much greater than this. A large One Nation vote that yielded only a small number of seats could well fuel a debate about the fairness of the electoral system — a debate that hitherto has been muted.

What is important about a Coalition–One Nation or a Labor–One Nation two-party vote is what it tell us about the attraction of One Nation to Coalition voters but not to Labor voters. While Coalition voters seem willing to preference One Nation over Labor (unless, perhaps, they are handed how-to-vote cards offering advice to the contrary), Labor voters (and Greens) overwhelmingly prefer the Coalition to One Nation; unless instructed otherwise, Labor voters might assist Coalition candidates threatened by One Nation to hold on.

None of the polls have tested a two-party vote between the Coalition and the Greens. Such a choice would test the willingness of voters, especially Labor voters, to choose the Greens over the Coalition. The result, very likely, would prove to be at least as one-sided as the equally unlikely match-up in the Fox & Hedgehog poll between the Coalition and One Nation.

The party spectrum and voter realignment

While the reuniting of the Liberal and National parties has solved, at least for the time being, some of the problems that have confronted pollsters recently, it hasn’t solved all of them; in particular, it has left them with a series of questions about how to treat the One Nation vote and whether the two-party preferred will continue to work in the way that it has worked for more than fifty years.

With the decline in support for the parties of government since 2019, Australian politics — until the rise of One Nation — had come to be discussed in terms of three more or less equal sized groups: Labor, the Coalition, and an inchoate melange of others. Descriptions of the electoral landscape of this kind have limited analytical value.

Commentators who thought the large group of “others” — those who didn’t intend to vote for either Labor or the Coalition — were just “protest” voters never explained why the same label couldn’t be applied, just as easily,  to some of those voting for the parties of government. After the 1993 election — an election in which Labor and the Coalition toegther secured over 89 per cent of the vote — when Newspoll asked respondents which was the “stronger influence” on the way they had voted — “your liking of the party you voted for” or “your disliking of the other parties” — the majority of those who had voted for Labor and the majority of those who had voted for the Coalition chose their “disliking of the other parties.” Known to political scientists as negative partisanship, it’s not something Newspoll has sought to document after recent elections.

Again, commentators who said those in the polls who intended to vote for “others” were simply “parking” their vote — a term Sol Lebovic, who used to run Newspoll, would use regularly — while making up their minds about which way to jump, never stopped to explain why some were “parking” their vote with the Greens while others were  “parking” their vote with One Nation. These choices are quite different and not random.

The rise of One Nation has made the idea of three groups of roughly equal size — Labor, the Coalition, and an undifferentiated group of others — even less tenable. The parties that are now attracting about 90 per cent of the vote are the Greens and Labor on the left, and the Coalition and One Nation on the right. The teals, often characterised as fitting somewhere in the middle — to the right of the Labor Party but to the left of the Coalition — hold a much greater proportion of the seats than they hold of the votes.

The surge in support for One Nation, whether temporary or not, and the willingness of Coalition voters to preference it over Labor, challenges what Benson sees as “the great equaliser” of the Australian electoral system — “compulsory preferential  voting.” Neither compulsory voting nor exhaustive preferential voting protects the duopoly (Labor and the Coalition) or guarantees that politics stays in the “middle.”

The movement of voters within blocs — left and right — rather than between blocs is not unique to Australia: recent research in Britain points to much the same thing. A world in which most of those who swung between elections moved from Labor to the Coalition or from the Coalition to Labor may have passed. A new world in which voters move between the Coalition and One Nation, or between Labor and the Greens, helps explain why the turmoil of the last few weeks — not least in the polls — has left the 2PP, with Labor well ahead, largely undisturbed. •

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He also hatched a plan to retrain as a carpenter. Australia needs more tradies to meet its ambitious home-building targets, so carpenters are eligible for a “core skill in demand” visa. Labor’s promise to fast-track construction trades would enable him, he hoped, to qualify as a chippie in fifteen months. Having laboured for an arborist during his studies, he had no fear of physical work. His concern was cost.

To secure his traineeship, he expected to pay a potential boss, another Punjabi, a $25,000 “thank you.” He then anticipated doing countless hours of unpaid overtime on an entry-level wage. “That’s the way it works,” he shrugged. But it would be worth it to get permanent residence. Not only for the eventual pay-off in decent wages, but because he loves living in Australia.

Hari’s story illustrates what LSE economist Alan Manning calls “the infernal circle of immigration policy.” The cycle can be summarised very simply:

• Wealthy nations put controls on immigration to manage the number and mix of people coming.
• The number of wannabe migrants to wealthy nations far exceeds places available.
• Would-be migrants do all they can to breach or sidestep the barriers in their path.
• Residents of wealthy nations fear being overwhelmed and call for even tougher controls on immigration.

As Manning tells us in his new book, Why Immigration Policy is Hard, he became involved in this policy field “by mistake” after surrendering to a colleague’s entreaties to join the British government’s Migration Advisory Committee. He ended up as committee chair for four years until 2020, when his contract was not renewed. (“Was I sacked?” he wonders.)

His schema is instructive, if necessarily simplified. One missing step, of which Manning is aware, is governments’ tendency to open new migration pathways, often as an ad-hoc fix to other problems, with unforeseen, though predictable, consequences.

My Uber driver’s post-study work visa is a case in point. Work rights for international student graduates were expanded in 2013 to stop a sharp decline in overseas enrolments and revenues at Australian universities. Enrolments had slumped from 320,000 in 2008–09 to 250,000 in 2010–11. Work rights were offered to help Australian degrees compete against rival offerings in Canada, Britain and the United States. Hari was an eventual beneficiary.

The upgraded 2013 post-study work visa was itself a fix of a fix of a fix. Back in the early 2000s, Australia’s resources boom had been creating labour shortages. The Howard government responded with a near-automatic pathway from study to permanent residence. Private colleges sprang up to meet demand, churning out cooks and hairdressers who often had little training. The Rudd government cracked down, narrowing the study–migration nexus just as a surging Australian dollar made Australia very expensive for overseas students. Enrolments fell, which in turn made the incentive of post-study work rights seem a good idea.

Manning has seen the same dynamic play out in Britain:

Migrants use student visas (normally legally but sometimes not) in ways that are different from what was intended. A scandal results and more restrictive policies are put in place that reduce student migration. This in turn harms the universities, which then lobby (aggressively in my experience…) for more liberal policies and, with time, the previous scandals are often forgotten. Policy is eventually liberalised, leading a few years later to another scandal — and we go round the infernal circle again.

Another local example of unintended consequences is the transformation of the working holiday scheme into a temporary labour program. In 2005, to fill rural job vacancies, the Howard government offered young travellers from eighteen countries a second twelve-month visa if they spent at least eighty-eight days fruit-picking or doing other “designated work” in a regional area. Since then, Australia has signed working holiday agreements with another thirty-two countries, lifted the age limit from thirty to thirty-five for selected nations, broadened the definition of designated work, and created a third twelve-month visa. Unsurprisingly, the number of working holiday makers is at record levels.

Thanks to Scott Morrison, the largest cohort are young Brits. When he wasn’t swapping Tim Tams and Penguin biscuits with Boris Johnson under the 2020 UK–Australia free trade deal, he agreed that British backpackers could live and work in Australia for up to three years without doing any designated work. Home Affairs data shows the number of British citizens in Australia on working holidays rose by 134 per cent between December 2019 and December 2025, triple the rate of increase for other nationalities.

There are now a combined total of 452,000 working holiday and graduate visa holders like Hari in Australia, almost double the number before Covid. They have contributed to record rates of net overseas migration, prompting alarmist if often misleading headlines, public unease and government anxiety. Yet there is virtually no dispassionate analysis of past decisions by administrations of both stripes that brought us to this pass.

As Alan Manning writes, debate about immigration policy is plagued by three problems: it is “too binary, too polarized, and tries to find someone to blame when it all looks a mess.”

The dominant immigration-good/immigration-bad rhetoric is “profoundly unhelpful” for policy development, says Manning. So, too, argument by anecdote, whether it’s a tale of a refugee-turned-millionaire or a refugee-turned-murderer. We should expect nothing different from migrants than from anyone else, he writes, since we are all a mixture of characteristics, “saintly, sinful and just plain ordinary.”

Contrary to strident claims about the benefits and drawbacks of immigration, Manning says much of the evidence is unclear or shows the impacts are not very significant one way or the other. “Immigration often causes change that cannot be put in boxes simply labelled good or bad,” he writes. “And different types of immigration have different effects on different people.”

This doesn’t stop protagonists from cherry-picking evidence to suit their positions. As examples, Manning cites a German report from 2022 celebrating the entrepreneurial benefits of migration on the basis that 22 per cent of all start-up founders came from a migrant background. Given that 24 per cent of the German population had a migrant background, it really showed nothing at all. On the other side of the debate, a 2012 Daily Mail headline proclaimed that “foreign nationals were accused of a QUARTER of all crimes in London.” Again, no surprise, given that 26 per cent of London’s population are foreign nationals.

Even when the evidence is unambiguous, migration policy can be as much about ethics as data. It’s beyond question, for example, that elderly parents are not economically desirable immigrants since they have few years of productive work ahead of them, won’t pay much income tax and are entering a stage of life in which they are likely to draw heavily on government services, especially medical treatment. Yet such facts are no response to questions of love and filial duty and the widely accepted obligation to care for our parents as they age, which is hard to do long distance.

Until the 1980s, parents could migrate to Australia to join their adult children as “close family members.” Over time, a series of administrative changes have redefined “close family” to include only dependent children and rendered parent migration nigh on impossible. This may be an evidence-based decision, but it is also a moral choice.

As a fraction of the global population, the share of migrants around the world has barely increased since the 1960s, leading some analysts to ask what all the fuss is about. But Manning’s focus is on migration to high-income countries, and here the numbers have changed markedly. In 1990 only about half of the world’s migrants lived in wealthy countries. Now, the share is two-thirds. On average, the proportion of migrants in the population of high-income countries doubled from 7.5 per cent in 1990 to 15 per cent in 2024. In Australia, it rose from 23 per cent to 31 per cent.

Such statistics provide context to the resurgence in public concern about immigration and the tendency to claim governments have lost control of borders. They also remind us that migration patterns are shaped by powerful demographic and economic forces.

“If all countries offered much the same quality of life, migration flows would be smaller and more symmetric,” Manning writes. But as long as inequality between nations persists, so will the desire to migrate. And since population growth is concentrated in countries where incomes are lower, the drivers of migration to wealthy nations will only intensify.

The flip side of these external pressures are demands for labour in affluent countries arising from longer lifespans. We’re told we need young migrants to counter a shrinking workforce, restore the balance between wage earners and retirees, and keep income tax revenues healthy. But as Manning points out, this is another temporary fix, because migrants age too.

“Immigration makes the population younger in the short term yet older in the long term,” he writes, and so it’s “not a very effective tool for dealing with the long-term challenges posed by ageing.”

An alternative is temporary migration, a trend long evident in Australia. Bring in young workers to do dirty, dangerous, difficult and demeaning jobs and send them away before they become a burden on the state. Temporary migration enables wealthy governments to avoid the costs both of raising and educating children, and of caring for elderly migrants. Of course, it has the opposite effect in the countries from which migrants come.

Temporary visa holders already make up about 10 per cent of the Australian population. But can we claim to be a democracy if our economy relies on the labour of workers who are denied the vote? What kind of “fair go” is it when migrants pay taxes but lack access to essential services like Medicare?

Some temporary migration programs, such as the Pacific labour scheme known as PALM, tie workers to their employers. But if workers can’t change jobs easily, warns Manning, they end up as captive labour, vulnerable to exploitation: “The low wages and exploitation of these workers is a feature, not a bug; it is the only way the sectors can survive.”

Segments of the labour market that depend on temporary migrant workers on tied visas tend to detach themselves from the rest of the economy. This may already be true of horticulture and meat processing in Australia. Governments shouldn’t bail these sectors out with special migration arrangements, says Manning. “The only solution to these shortages is to improve pay and conditions; if the sector cannot do this, it probably should be a smaller part of our economy.”

This hard economic reasoning is not politically palatable. In theory, Australia’s horticultural and meat industries could attract local workers with better pay and conditions and recoup profits though higher prices. But it would mean blocking cheaper imports, and Australian exports would struggle even more against products from lower-wage countries.

Manning’s view is different. He believes industries forced to offer better pay and conditions would find ways of boosting productivity — or fold — and he argues persuasively that low-skilled immigration can hold back innovation. Indeed, a lack of rural workers was historically credited with driving the efficiency of Australian agriculture relative to other nations.

After setting the global scene in his opening section, Manning works his way systematically through the issues. He first considers migrant perspectives: the impact on their lives, their children’s lives and the countries they leave behind. His crisp summary comes as no surprise: “quality of life improves for the average migrant to a high-income country, with bigger gains for those coming from poorer countries.”

Next, he tackles issues of importance to receiving countries — including population, ageing, economic growth, productivity, innovation, employment, public finances and community relations — busting myths along the way. His final section spells out policy options for different types of migration: labour migration, student migration, family migration, asylum seeking and unauthorised migration.

When it comes to numbers, Manning concludes that “the absolute outer limit for a sustained net migration rate might be 1 per cent per annum.” In Australia, population roughly 28 million, this equates to a maximum of 280,000 migrants per year. On the most recent figures, annual net overseas migration to June 2025 was 305,600 people, a little above Manning’s outer limit. But the trend is downward as Covid-era disruptions recede, and the long-term average is within Manning’s acceptable range.

Manning also cautions against pursuing explicit targets for net migration because there are just too many variables. In what could be a reference to Australia’s experience before and after the pandemic, he warns that “too much emphasis on meeting a certain level of net migration every year can lead to a boom–bust cycle that it is important to avoid.”

Angus Taylor has promised to release the opposition’s new immigration policy within weeks. A draft plan leaked under his predecessor proposed restricting migration from regions where listed terrorist organisations are in control — bad luck if you are a refugee fleeing persecution. While Taylor has distanced himself from the document, he says immigration standards have been too low and numbers too high, and he’s vowed to “shut the door on people who don’t adopt our core values and beliefs.”

Beyond performative rhetoric, it’s hard to say what this might look like. Under Section 501 of the Migration Act, the home affairs minister already has sweeping powers to refuse or cancel a visa on character grounds, and all visa applicants must pledge to adhere to Australian Values before entering the country. As former deputy immigration secretary Abul Rizvi argues, testing for these values would either be a box-ticking exercise or else “clog up an already heavily backlogged visa system” at great expense.

If ensuring all migrants adhere to our core values and beliefs is tricky, so too is cutting migrant numbers, even from their historically high levels. While opinion polls show One Nation surging in regional areas, for example, you can bet Taylor won’t propose cancelling working holiday visas or shutting down the PALM scheme, two sources of labour vaued by many conservative voters in rural areas.

Nor, given the workforce shortages in the residential construction industry, is he likely to wind back skilled migration in the building trades. Or starve regional areas of health workers by restricting migration by health professionals. New Zealanders are moving across the Tasman in record numbers, thanks to higher wages, higher growth and better job opportunities, but it would be a bold step to renege on the 1973 Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that allows Australians and New Zealanders to live and work in each other’s countries.

There is barely any room to cut family migration since the vast bulk of visas are partner visas. It would be draconian indeed to tell Australians not to marry people from overseas, and processing times for partner visas have already blown out to unconscionable levels.

The Liberals could promise to scrap parent migration, which would be a more honest than the current do-nothing policy that has allowed waiting times to balloon to thirty-plus years. But the category is too small to significantly reduce overall numbers. Likewise, the humanitarian program: before the 2025 election the Coalition flagged cutting the intake from 20,000 to 13,500. This is small beer.

What is left? A stricter immigration policy could target international students (and graduates like Hari), overstayers and people on bridging visas. But even here — as Manning puts it in his book title — the options are “difficult.”

In October 2025, the number of new students studying in Australia was down 15 per cent on the previous year, partly thanks to Labor’s massive hike in visa application fees, tougher English-language requirements and restrictions on moving between different visas. Pushing student enrolments down further would invite a massive fight with the higher education sector.

Under Sussan Ley, the Coalition was talking tough about deporting more than 100,000 asylum seekers who’ve had their claims for refugee protection rejected. But the figure is misleading: about two-thirds of them are here lawfully appealing departmental decisions. Based on past statistics from the Administrative Review Tribunal, about one in ten are likely to be successful.

As we see today in the United States and know from our own not-so-distant past  (think Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez Solon), mass round-ups and heavy-handed enforcement actions are likely to lead to mistaken arrests and harassing of law-abiding residents. Finding, detaining and removing overstayers would require a massive injection of funds into Home Affairs to boost Border Force staffing and intelligence gathering. This is difficult to reconcile with Angus Taylor’s promise to make government smaller.

Efforts to reduce the number of people on bridging visas, which has blown out from 216,000 to 388,000 over the past six years, present similar problems. Bridging visas are held by would-be-migrants and asylum seekers who have been denied a visa and are challenging that decision. The Administrative Review Tribunal has 129,000 active cases on its books, including 75,000 migration cases and 40,000 involving asylum seekers, but is only funded to finalise 60,000 applications annually.

As Manning writes, “immigration justice is rough justice,” often under-resourced and — because the burden of inadequate processes and bad decisions falls mostly on legal residents from minority communities — effectively discriminatory.

When the Albanese government was first elected in 2022 it set about tackling Australia’s “fundamentally broken” immigration system. In response to an impressive, evidence-based expert review, energetic home affairs minister Claire O’Neill and policy-oriented immigration minister Andrew Giles promised a new migration strategy for Australia.

Their plan was to overhaul skilled migration and then tackle family migration. While much was achieved, reformist zeal evaporated when the High Court ruled indefinite immigration detention unlawful and forced the government to release 148 people, some of whom had served jail time for serious crimes. The media frenzy prompted a cabinet reshuffle, and O’Neill was replaced by Tony Burke, who seems more intent on keeping immigration out of the news than on significant reform.

The politics of immigration is never easy, and Manning’s book helps to explain why crafting coherent policy is so hard. As he writes, “it’s much easier to criticise, to say what you wouldn’t do, than to say what you would do.”

It’ll be interesting to see what Angus Taylor comes up with. The new opposition leader, his shadow ministers and their advisers should make reading Manning’s book their top priority. •

Why Immigration Policy is Hard: And How to Make It Better
By Alan Manning | Polity | $51.95 | 416 pages

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But his policies and rhetoric on immigration, climate change and government intervention in the economy would also have created problems on the party’s moderate flank. And, in the end, with the electorate: namely because, as the 2025 federal election suggested, most Australians really don’t like anything that reeks of Donald Trump and chaos. The fire-breathing Hastie, with his ostentatious religiosity, would have made Peter Dutton look like a mild-mannered accountant. So the party has gone for Angus Taylor — Rhodes scholar, scion of landed gentry, but also very right wing — to replace Sussan Ley.

Ley’s tenure began ten days after the 3 May 2025 landslide loss, and from the beginning she was under pressure. The defeated right-wing forces supporting Taylor didn’t even bother mouthing standard niceties about how, oh certainly, she would be leading them in 2028. Rather, they told journalists off the record that she’d get a fair run for a few months, and they probably wouldn’t bring her down until, well, the following year (which is where we are).

From the outset she faced a balancing act, trying to appeal to metropolitan Australians who had run so far and hard from Dutton while not upsetting the Liberal partyroom, which on average is much more conservative than the general electorate. And there’s also the Coalition partner, more right-wing again.

The pressure on Ley has been exacerbated over the past six to eight months by a gradual but dramatic surge in One Nation support, which by the time of the spill hadn’t peaked, and was almost certainly mostly at the expense of the centre-right parties. One Nation now routinely comes second in polled primary-voting intentions, and in the recent YouGov survey was just two points behind Labor.

All this means Taylor is a better fit than Ley for federal Coalition MPs, which means he’s a worse one for Australian voters. Still, elections are not simply about occupying the middle ground. History (Tony Abbott in 2013 is a fine example, Anthony Albanese in 2022 a less dramatic one) shows voters will tolerate many flaws if they’re determined to boot out a government they’ve come to revile.

Ever since entering parliament in 2013 Taylor has cut a slightly comical figure prone to fumbles. Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s description of him on ABC TV on Friday as “the best-credentialled idiot you’ll ever meet” might be unfair, but it’s hard to see him lasting until the 2028 election.

Senator Jane Hume, who after a dreadful election campaign was dropped by Ley from the frontbench, is now deputy, the first senator of either major party to occupy that position since Western Australia’s Fred Chaney in 1989–90. Hume has an opportunity to shine as the cheerfully stoic understudy who cleans up after the boss’s mess.

What has driven One Nation’s rise? The easy answer is immigration, but is it that simple, given the government’s huge win less than a year ago?

The unravelling of centre-right support is this and last year’s story, but the longer-standing context is the decline of the two-party system, and while the two-party-preferred seesaw currently favours Labor, that will change at some point. One day people will tire of the Albanese government, it will lose its majority, and something else will take its place. In the meantime, the prospect of a Coalition–One Nation government must mean an extra point or two for Labor from the electoral middle.

At his first press conference Taylor prioritised immigration and the cost of living. Compared to Hastie he is the cautious choice, but as an establishment figure is not likely to satisfy voters who crave drastic rightward change.

Ley has announced she’s leaving parliament. The by-election in her electorate of Farrer, and particularly One Nation’s performance, will fun to watch, but it won’t really tell us much about an actual election. By-elections rarely do that, because the fates of governments are not at stake.

Much more useful will be the South Australian election next month. It won’t be a pointer to the next federal outcome (state contests never are) but it will give some clues about how well pollsters are measuring One Nation support, both in terms of the minor party’s polled trajectory between now and then, and the final pre-election polls versus actual results.

But first, there are federal polls to come. Will Angus as leader stop the One Nation rot? He just might, somewhat. But not as much as Captain Hastie would have. •

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One Nation’s support has not only jumped to a level hardly imaginable at the May 2025 election, where it secured just 6.4 per cent of the vote; in three of the polls, it drew level with — or even eclipsed — the combined support recorded by the parties that until recently made up the Coalition. Having failed to pick up a single seat at the last election, One Nation could pick up quite a number from the Liberal Party and the National Party especially, plus a few from Labor as well.

All of this raises two sets of questions. One is about the polls: are their readings of the electorate entirely independent of each other? Assuming they are, are they all exaggerating One Nation’s support? And even if they are not, would support for One Nation be anything like as great if an election had been held in January not just a series of opinion polls?

The second set of questions is about Australia’s electoral system, which combines compulsory voting with the exhaustive allocation of preferences. Is it conceivable, as many who celebrate Australia’s electoral system seem to assume, that compulsory voting means support for One Nation is lower than it would otherwise be? Even if voting were not compulsory, might exhaustive preferential voting ensure that a party such as One Nation has much less impact on the allocation of seats than it otherwise would?

First, the polls. Pollsters are unlikely to be indifferent to what other pollsters have reported. Newspoll, the poll with the best track record, was the first to report support for One Nation (at 22 per cent) had notionally eclipsed support for the Coalition (21 per cent). Resolve, published on the same day (19 January) and in the field at the same time (12–16 January) had quite different figures, 18 per cent (One Nation) to 28 per cent (Coalition). But Newspoll, with the best track record, is the most-watched poll. Subsequent polling, showing One Nation either not far behind the Coalition or ahead if it, was closer to Newspoll’s than to Resolve’s.

Newspoll’s founder, Sol Lebovic, was fond of saying that voters who appear to favour small parties in opinion polls are simply “parking” their vote while deciding between “the majors.” Whether he was right or not, this far from an election — the next is not due until May 2028 — the polls aren’t much of a guide to the likely outcome; lots of Labor, Liberal and National voters may also be “parking” their vote.

Close to an election, polls haven’t always overestimated One Nation’s support. True, One Nation did perform slightly less well than the pre-election polls predicted in 2025 and 2019. But in 1998, 2001 and 2022, it did as well or slightly better than they predicted. In 1998, in the Queensland state election, One Nation, newly formed, secured 22.6 per cent of the vote and did better than the published polls (Newspoll) predicted. In 2001, in Western Australia, it secured 9.6 per cent of the vote from another standing start, again doing better than Newspoll’s surveys predicted.

The impact of compulsory voting — and of exhaustive preferential voting — is more complicated. Compulsory voting has been a feature of national elections in Australia since 1924. It has long been part of the electoral architecture in the states as well, with South Australia being the last jurisdiction to introduce it in 1942. Once introduced, it has never been repealed. Not so with exhaustive preferential, which requires voters to put a number, in order of preference, next to the name of every candidate. It has been repealed from time to time. In Queensland, for example, the 1998 election required voters to number only as many squares as they wished: optional preferential.

Does compulsory voting encourage turnout among voters in the “centre” with little interest in politics who would otherwise stay at home — or does it perhaps encourage political entrepreneurs such as Hanson to get rebellious voters to turn out for parties on the extremes?

One way of thinking about the question is to look at countries where parties on the extreme right have fared well but where voting is not compulsory. For example, in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland lifted its vote from 10.4 per cent in 2021 to 20.8 per cent in 2025; in France, Rassemblement National lifted its vote from 13.2 per cent in 2017 to 18.7 per cent in 2022; and in Britain the latest polls have Reform UK lifting its vote from 14.3 per cent at the 2024 election to somewhere between 24 and 33 per cent.

Comparing these figures with One Nation’s, now and in some of the earlier contests, you might be excused for concluding that compulsory voting doesn’t make a lot of difference.

In Australia, however, the idea that compulsory voting provides a bulwark against parties on the extreme right (or extreme left) has become the received wisdom. When Judith Brett, for instance, in her engaging history of Australia’s electoral system, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, concluded that “compulsory voting tempers the impact of the passionate and committed voters of the base with the votes of the moderate and indifferent,” ensuring “Australian elections are won and lost in the centre,” her declaration appeared to go unchallenged. Few would have been able to cite any real evidence for it, but no one seemed to doubt it. In celebrations of Australian democracy, with its lessons for the rest of the world, compulsory voting now occupies pride of place.

But Brett was also at pains to point to a countervailing consequence of compulsory voting. Without compulsion, she argued, “many disillusioned voters would turn away from politics altogether and stop voting.” Forced to turn out, “disillusioned voters… have to find someone to vote for,” and so “new contestants, many from outside the established political class, enter the fray to pick up their protest and offer an alternative.”

One Nation was one of the parties Brett had in mind. “[T]he great bulk of [Hanson’s] voters” were not “extreme” or “racist,” she wrote, but “had been left behind and were ‘outsiders’ in a generally prosperous nation.” Forcing these voters to the polls “encourages the major parties to modify their policies to try to win back some of their erstwhile supporters, as Labor is doing with the Greens and John Howard [from 1998] did when One Nation began to take votes from the Coalition.”

Writing in 2019, Brett thought the entry of One Nation, other parties such as the Greens, and independents, “a very good thing.” What might she have said had she been confronted by evidence, derived from the Australian Election Study, or AES, showing the key issues distinguishing those who voted for One Nation were their attitudes to Aboriginal Australians and immigration? In economic terms, they were not insecure; they had not been “left behind.”

Responding to the rise of One Nation, Howard might have “shifted too far… especially with his harsh treatment of asylum seekers,” Brett concedes. But unless we assume Howard did think these voters “extreme” or “racist,” his shift is difficult to explain. Publicly, Howard chose his words carefully. Too savvy to describe these voters openly as “deplorables” — Hillary Clinton’s mistake — he simply said he wasn’t (openly) “branding [Hanson] and her supporters as extreme and racist.” That’s not the same as saying he didn’t think of them as “extreme” or “racist” and seek to pander to their priorities.

How many of those proselytising for the Australian electoral model would want to carry the message that compulsory voting was good because, in encouraging parties such as One Nation, it challenged parties of the “centre”? While compulsory voting might encourage parties of the “centre” to moderate their positions, as Howard did, it might also — and for the same reason — encourage small parties to take extreme positions.

For compulsory voting to act as a firewall against parties or individuals on the political extremes, one of two things Brett notes would need to be true. Either those in the “centre” would be more inclined than those on the political extremes to abstain from voting if it were voluntary because they are more likely to hold fairly tepid views about their party or have less interest in electoral politics. Or those in the “centre” would be less inclined than those on the political extremes to abstain from voting because those on the extremes have less trust in the system as it presently operates and are not particularly hopeful their vote will change anything.

What does the evidence say? One of the opinion polls conducted in January asked respondents whether they would vote at the next federal election if voting were “voluntary, rather than compulsory”? Three-quarters of respondents said they would either “definitely” vote (58 per cent) or “probably” vote (20 per cent). The poll (with an effective sample size of 1038) was conducted online by a new polling firm, Fox & Hedgehog.

Those who said they would “definitely” vote included 62 per cent of intending Labor voters and 62 per cent of intending Coalition voters. But it also included 59 per cent of those planning to vote for the Greens and 65 per cent of those planning to vote for One Nation — parties sitting either well to the left of Labor (the Greens, which secured 12.2 per cent of the vote in 2025 and 14 per cent in this poll) or well to the right of the Coalition (One Nation, which secured 21 per cent of the vote in this poll). The difference between a low of 59 per cent and a high of 65 per cent is not significant in either a statistical sense (given the size of the sample) or in a substantive sense (given the size of each party’s vote).

If we take their answers at face value, the only respondents for whom a switch to voluntary voting would have had a disproportionately large impact were those who fell into either of two groups: those who said they intended to vote for an independent or much smaller party than One Nation or the Greens (only 44 per cent of whom said they would “definitely” vote if it were not compulsory) or those who professed to be “undecided” about how they would vote (just 29 per cent of whom said they would “definitely” vote).

If we add to the “definite” voters those who said they would “probably” vote, the pattern of response is much the same. Among both Labor and Coalition voters, 84 per cent said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote; so too did 77 per cent of the Greens, 80 per cent of One Nation voters, and 67 per cent of Others, though only 37 per cent of the “undecided.”

The poll also asked whether “the Australian political system is fundamentally broken.” Half the respondents either agreed (28 per cent) or “strongly” agreed (23 per cent) it was. Among Labor voters, 8 per cent “strongly” agreed, as did 17 per cent of Coalition voters, 18 per cent of those intending to vote for the Greens, and 18 per cent (though not reported) of the “undecided.” For those intending to vote for One Nation, the figure (51 per cent) was much higher. At 37 per cent, it was also higher for those voting for some other party or an independent (again, these categories weren’t separated).

If we add in those who agreed but not “strongly,” the pattern doesn’t change much. Among Labor voters, 35 per cent said the system was “fundamentally broken”; so, too, did 52 per cent of Coalition voters (a difference that no doubt owes something to the fact that the Coalition is not in office), 46 per cent of the Greens, and 47 per cent (though not reported) of the “undecided.” For One Nation the figure jumps to 75 per cent and for “Other” voters to 63 per cent.

On these figures, rates of abstaining (if compulsory voting were to be abolished) appear unrelated to levels of political alienation. Those who said they would currently vote for One Nation were the most likely to be alienated from a “political system… fundamentally broken,” but they were just as likely as the least alienated to say they would “definitely” or “probably” vote even if they didn’t have to.

While media attention has focused on shifts in voting intention reported by the best-known polls — the more dramatic, the better — other polling worthy of consideration has gone underreported or not been reported at all. Since Fox & Hedgehog is not commissioned by anyone — let alone by the Australian (Newspoll) or the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (Resolve) — its report has been ignored. This is a pity — not because its figures on voting intention are especially interesting (they are not) but because some of the other questions it asked should be of interest, especially those on voluntary voting and on views of the political system.

If Australia’s system of compulsory voting guarantees the political battle is decided in the middle — with those who vote for parties on the extreme having to allocate a preference to one of the parties of government — this is not because everyone must vote. Rather, it is because all those who do vote, whether forced to or not, must ultimately cast a preference for one or other of the parties of government.

If we dumped compulsory voting but retained exhaustive preferential voting, we could still have a system that favoured the middle. But in thinking about this, we need to be cautious, for preferential voting — with or without compulsory voting — doesn’t favour the middle as a matter of course; everything depends on how many votes insurgents can muster and, short of enjoying a majority in any seat, how the established parties (or their supporters) choose to direct or allocate their preferences.

In Queensland in 1998, when One Nation picked up eleven seats (out of eighty-nine), voting was compulsory but the marking of preferences was not. All the One Nation candidates who won seats either topped the first preference vote (in five seats) and would have won in a first-past-the post system or came second (in the other six). With vote shares ranging from 29.9 to 43.5 per cent, none of them won an absolute majority; all depended on preferences from other parties or independents.

The preferences that got One Nation candidates over the line came mostly from National Party voters who preferred One Nation to Labor, and in one or two cases from Labor voters who (perhaps for tactical reasons) preferred One Nation to the Nationals. In almost all the seats where National Party preferences were decisive, the runner-up — the other party to which voters might have directed their preferences — was Labor. The key point: given a chance to safeguard the “centre” by voting Labor, Nationals voters — ostensibly from the centre — preferred One Nation to Labor. They preferred the party on the extreme over the party in the “centre.”

One opinion poll, of course, is just that. But there have been others. Since 1996, after each election, the AES has asked respondents whether they would vote if voting weren’t compulsory. It has asked how much interest respondents have in politics, and how they feel about each of the parties, including One Nation (though only between 1998 and 2004) and the Greens. Since 2019, it has also included a series of questions about party images — though only about Labor and the Coalition (treated as if the Coalition was a single party): is it “united or divided” and is it “capable of strong government”; is it a party that “keeps its promises”; is it a party respondents “like” or “dislike”?

This quarry of data has been mined to see whether ending compulsory voting would favour Labor or the Coalition. But it has yet to be mined to see whether it adds to our understanding of the impact of compulsory voting on the grip of the “centre.”

In mining it, consideration would need to be given to how representative the AES samples are and what it is that the AES questions are really measuring. After Malcolm Mackerras and Ian McAllister attempted to use the 1996 AES to measure whether ending compulsory voting would favour the Coalition, their colleague, political scientist Simon Jackman, pointed to three problems: those who choose to participate in such surveys are more interested in politics than those who don’t; respondents may be inclined to exaggerate the likelihood they would vote if voting weren’t compulsory; and, if they do dissemble, respondents may be more likely to be affected by the social norm that valorises voting — hence, perhaps, more likely to vote Liberal.

Australia is not the only country with compulsory voting, though it is the only country where national elections combine compulsion with exhaustive preferential voting. (Nine other countries also use compulsory voting and enforce it.) It might pay to examine the rise of extremist parties in some of these countries too.

The Fox & Hedgehog poll suggests compulsory voting may not be the bulwark many think it is. The turnout of voters in the “centre” might not be dependent on it; but nor, it seems, might the turnout of voters at the political extremes — those who intend voting for the Greens or the much larger number who intend voting for One Nation. On the face of it, this suggests, though it certainly doesn’t prove, that the conclusion one might draw about the impact of compulsory voting on the rise of the far right being minimal, here and abroad, is correct. •

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When Victoria’s new opposition leader Jess Wilson set about meeting business types, she says she heard the phrase anywhere but Melbourne three times in three days. One of Wilson’s first pledges was to make housing more affordable by addressing “all the taxes that sit on property.”

It’s true: Victoria’s taxing of property investments does stand apart from other states. In the 2023 budget the state government not only increased the rate of land tax but also dropped the threshold at which it kicks in. The Parliamentary Budget Office calculated that 380,000 Victorian property investors and holiday home owners would pay land tax for the first time, at an average of almost $900 each, and 480,000 existing tax payers would see their annual land tax bill rise by more than $2000.

Since the start of 2025, Victoria has also levied a tax on vacant residential land in swathes of inner and middle Melbourne. It’s payable on homes vacant for more than six months in the previous year, and on land where homes have been under construction, in the process of renovation or uninhabitable for more than two years. If homes remain empty for a second year, the tax rate goes up. From this month the levy also applies to residential land in the rest of metropolitan Melbourne that has remained undeveloped for more than five years.

Victoria also applies a windfall gains tax of 62.5 per cent if government rezoning results in land increasing in value by between $100,000 and $499,999, with larger gains taxed at 50 per cent. Foreign property owners pay surcharges and extra duties, and a levy applies to short-stay rentals.

The Property Council says this all makes Victoria incredibly difficult for domestic and global investors. Its research, commissioned from Mandala Partners, shows that Victoria attracted 40 per cent less global institutional property investment per capita than New South Wales between 2023 and 2025.

But are state taxes and charges really to blame here? The data also shows that per capita foreign investment in property was much lower than Victoria in smaller states with more generous tax regimes — 46 per cent lower in South Australia and 70 per cent lower in Western Australia. Mandala’s snapshot of institutional investment may tell us more about market size and market conditions than tax settings as drivers of boardroom decisions.

The Mandala report also showed that apartment projects accounted for only 6 per cent of all global institutional investment in Australian property between 2011 and 2025. The vast bulk of foreign investment flowed to commercial projects, particularly office buildings in New South Wales. Given that apartments are a subset of all housing, the impact of new taxes on international investment in Victoria’s overall residential property market is likely to be modest.

Another reason big players may be reluctant to commit to major residential projects Melbourne is the thousands of brand new apartments already on the market. In March last year the property advisory firm Charter Keck Cramer reported 8000 unsold apartments — or about one in every six units completed between 2020 and 2024. In November the firm cautioned that “it will be challenging to deliver new supply” as long as the current stock remains unsold. Apartment prices, it said, would need to rise by about 30 per cent before new projects stack up. In other words, apartments need to get pricier before developers will build more of them.

Of course, if the Victorian government cut  its taxes and charges that could make apartment projects more viable, but a more significant factor undermining commercial profitability is the rising cost of construction, up 40 per cent since the pandemic.

Victoria is also ahead of other states in regulating the private rental market and protecting tenants. It led the way in important ways: ending no-fault evictions; allowing tenants to have pets and make minor modifications; banning rent bidding; and introducing minimum standards for heating, cooling, ventilation and locks. Recent amendments have made it harder for landlords to withhold a tenant’s bond without good reason when leases end.

The latest Homes Victoria rental report shows the number of active bonds fell by 1.5 per cent last financial year, which suggests that more investors are leaving the rental market than entering it. The Real Estate Institute of Victoria says excessive burdens on landlords and property managers are shrinking the pool of rental properties, with claims that there are now 10,000 fewer homes available for rent.

Given all this doomsaying, and the usual linking of supply and demand, you would expect Melbourne’s property market would be particularly tight. If fewer homes are available to let, then surely rents must be going up and vacancy rates going down? If higher taxes have stalled home building, then presumably a shortage of supply should be driving up prices. Yet property industry data suggests that Melbourne is the best state capital to be a tenant and one of the best to buy a home.

While the recent statistics from property analysts SQM and Domain differ, both find that Melbourne has the largest share of properties available for rent of any capital city in Australia. SQM puts Melbourne’s vacancy rate at 2 per cent and Domain has it at 1.6 per cent.

That doesn’t make it easy to find an affordable place to live in Melbourne — far from it. In a market with a reasonable balance between supply and demand the vacancy rate would be 3 per cent. (In other words, at any time, three in every 100 rental properties would be empty and listed for rent.) Yet dire as the situation in Melbourne may be, it is significantly better than in other state capitals, where vacancy rates are much lower.

The weekly asking rent for a house in Melbourne is lower than in all state capitals too (at least on Domain’s data), while rents for units are significantly cheaper than in Sydney, Brisbane or Perth.

Every year, SGS Economics and Planning, Melbourne develops a rental affordability index based on comparing household incomes and median rents. In 2025, Greater Melbourne’s rating was 118, which put it in the category of “moderately unaffordable” (which would translate to very unaffordable for people on low incomes). This is bad, but the scores for other state capitals were even worse. The next best was Greater Hobart with an RAI of 106. Greater Sydney came in at 100 and Greater Perth at 94

When it comes to buying a house, Melbourne is cheaper than Sydney and Brisbane but a bit pricier than Perth and Adelaide, while for apartments, Melbourne is cheaper than any city except Hobart.

How do we square these two things: property industry claims that Victorian government taxes and tenancy regulations are wreaking havoc on the housing market, and data that suggests Melbourne performs relatively well as a place to rent or buy?

The first thing to note is that a review of basic census data shows Victoria has consistently out-performed other states in building homes. In the two decades from 2001 to 2021, the number of residents per dwelling in greater Melbourne fell significantly, down from 2.48 to 2.39 people per dwelling. The ratio fell marginally in Sydney and Brisbane, stagnated in Perth and rose slightly in Adelaide and Hobart.  This suggests that Victoria outperformed other states in housing a growing population over those two decades.

More recent data confirms this trend. Between September 2021 and March 2025, Victoria completed around 220,000 new dwellings, one for every 2.3 additional residents. NSW completed only 173,000 dwellings, or one for every 2.8 extra residents, while Queensland and WA built even fewer homes per capita.

Only Tasmania did better than Victoria, which means, according to the standard supply-and-demand theory, property prices and rents should have risen less. The fact that they rose more suggests demand for housing is not driven just by Tasmanians looking for a place to live. Other factors could include locals and mainlanders building holiday homes or properties to let to tourists as short-term rentals.

The second thing to note is that while higher land taxes and better protections for tenants may make the business of being a landlord more challenging in Victoria, when property investors quit the market, the homes they sell don’t disappear. They are either sold to other investors, who will rent them out, or to owner-occupiers who will live in them. And when people sell holiday houses or other underused dwellings to avoid higher land taxes or vacancy levies, it’s likely that the purchasers will use those homes more intensively, resulting in a more efficient allocation of the scarce resource that is housing.

Lending data suggests that first home buyers are the winners from Victoria’s higher taxes and stricter tenancy rules. In every mainland state except Victoria, the ratio of new loans going to investors and new loans going to first home buyers is about 70–30. In Victoria it is 60–40. (This applies whether assessing loans by number or by value.) This ratio held steady in Victoria over the past three years as new tax settings and tenancy laws took effect, whereas in other mainland states it shifted markedly in favour of investors.

If the primary aim of housing policy is to help more people realise the great Australian dream of home ownership, then it looks like Victoria is leading the pack.

Melbourne remains an extraordinarily expensive city in which to buy or rent a home, especially for people on modest incomes. The fact that it outperforms other Australian capitals, though, suggests that alongside greater housing supply, higher property taxes and more stringent tenancy regulations can help to constrain house price inflation and rent increases. And surely that’s a good thing, even if investors aren’t happy. •

The post Anywhere but Melbourne? appeared first on Inside Story.

From just 6.4 per cent support at last year’s election, One Nation hit double digits in September and has since kept climbing. In December its measured primary vote was in the late teens, and so far in January it’s hovered around 20 per cent, with Newspoll even showing it, at 22, one point ahead of the Coalition. Liberal and National MPs would be all have been watching their slide and One Nation’s rise with horror, but Nationals in particular are most at threat.

And that’s just in the House of Representatives. Senate numbers would also suffer.

We don’t know when it will peak, but if the published data in any of January’s surveys were replicated at an election, One Nation would certainly take House seats. How many depends on which poll you use and what assumptions you make about seat-by-seat swings and preference flows.

Newspoll’s 22 per cent would appear as single digits for One Nation in some (urban) seats, but exceed 40 per cent in parts of the bush and particularly in Queensland. And the bigger the variance the better for the party’s chances.

Why? Labor always “preferences” the Coalition ahead of One Nation. Only a minority of voters follow these suggestions, but they can still make a difference. In David Littleproud’s Queensland electorate of Maranoa last year (the only head-to-head Coalition–One Nation count) it washed through to 59 per cent for him and 41 for One Nation.

The Coalition preferenced One Nation over Labor everywhere. In Hunter (NSW), the one electorate where we can observe the flows, One Nation received 83 per cent of the preferences of people who put a “1” next to the Nationals candidate, with just 17 per cent going to Labor’s Dan Repacholi.

But that’s not a representative sample, and the national numbers were probably around 72 to 28 per cent in One Nation’s favour.

Newspoll’s figures, with a big 55–45 two-party-preferred lead for the government, are the most dire for the opposition(s) vis-à-vis Labor, and also against One Nation. The twin contests are related: the higher Labor’s overall two-party-preferred vote the bigger One Nation’s likely seat haul. The reason is simple: One Nation would meet Labor (rather than the Coalition, if I can use that word) in a greater number of seats in the two-candidate-preferred count and benefit from Coalition preferences.

The Newspoll numbers would see One Nation’s seat haul in the twenties, at least. It would take some seats Labor would otherwise have won, but that damage would be nothing like what it would inflict on the Nationals and the odd Liberal.

In the Mother Country, a Labo(u)r government is also facing a grotesquely shrivelled centre-right opposition. Over there, One Nation’s counterpart, Reform, has been polling ahead of all other parties for quite a while, with most recent MRP polls projecting a parliamentary majority for the far-right party. Several Tory MPs have already defected. Give or take a Barnaby or two, we’re not at that stage yet in Australia, although late last year One Nation was hyping up dramatic announcements in the new year.

For a Nationals MP prioritising personal survival in the House in 2028, there’s a potential matter of timing. It makes sense to wait and see what future polls produce before jumping, but defectors will have to make the leap well before One Nation’s candidates are preselected. They’ve still got a year or so.

But help might be on the way from their erstwhile partner. Even before this week’s disintegration, Liberal leader Sussan Ley looked all but certain to be toppled in 2026. Of the two chief aspirants, Angus Taylor would promise a snoozefest punctuated by the odd bungle and Andrew Hastie is the red-pilled, high-octane-ideology option, promising a bit more excitement.

Despite being on the right of the party, Taylor would be the conventional choice; Hastie would be a throw of the dice. The raw materials he possesses — SAS backstory and visual attributes — as well as a likely big shift in rhetoric and policy, particularly on immigration, would be manna for the media and almost guarantee a honeymoon. He’s young, a breath of fresh air, he tells it like it is.

Then the contradictions would see it all unravel. Even more than Peter Dutton, Hastie is Trumpian, and Donald Trump scares the bejeezus out of most Australian voters. He’s likely to go on about God a lot, which Australians find a bit weird. And while high immigration has doubtless helped fuel the One Nation revival, none of it is as uncontrolled as in America and much of Europe.

Across the aisle, there used to be a pattern of mid-term Labor leadership changes (specifically in 2003, 2006 and 2010) producing an immediate rise in the party’s polled primary support mostly at the expense of the Greens. If Hastie became opposition leader then a big jump in Liberal and perhaps Nationals support would likely follow, with a corresponding drop for One Nation. In his early months at least, the opposition would probably also take votes from Labor.

The Nationals could return to the Coalition (freedom of speech disagreements, a symptom of the current opinion polls, would be forgotten) and the fall in One Nation support might even prove enduring. But the rightward shift would guarantee devastation for the Liberals in the capital cities.

As Liberal leader, Hastie can make the Coalition whole again. But if he takes it to the election, the cost would be a big loss. •

The post Labor’s splintering opponents appeared first on Inside Story.

What should have been a peaceful communal gathering became a scene of terror, reminding us how quickly belonging can unravel when hatred is allowed to grow unchecked. In moments like this, Australians rightly demand action. The question is not whether racism and antisemitism must be confronted — they must — but how we do so without eroding the democratic and social foundations we are trying to defend.

The government’s response to the antisemitism envoy’s report gets important things right. Strong hate-crime laws, clear consequences for incitement to violence, better data, education and protection for vulnerable communities are all essential. Antisemitism, like Islamophobia, corrodes our democracy and must be named and challenged early. But enforcement alone will never be enough.

History shows that lasting peace and social cohesion are not built through punishment and surveillance alone, but through sustained investment in civil society — in the institutions that allow people to meet one another, work together and rebuild trust over time. Northern Ireland offers a lesson worth remembering. Peace there did not emerge simply from political agreements or tougher policing. It was made possible by decades of patient investment in grassroots organisations, cross-community initiatives and shared civic spaces — the quiet, difficult work of helping former adversaries encounter one another as human beings rather than abstractions.

That belief has shaped our shared work. More than a decade ago, alongside Palestinian and Israeli partners, we helped build Project Rozana, which aims to connect Palestinians with appropriate medical training and healthcare, on a simple conviction: that caring for another human being can open doors that politics alone cannot. Over years of often unseen effort, this work has brought Israeli and Palestinian doctors, nurses and health leaders together — not to argue, but to heal.

We have witnessed it in small, human moments: an Israeli nurse training alongside a Palestinian colleague after an exhausting shift; a child from the West Bank receiving specialist care that would otherwise be out of reach; professionals crossing checkpoints most of us will never see, not in denial of the conflict, but in defiance of its most dehumanising logic.

In the years since, those same principles have guided our work here at home. We have applied the lessons of that experience to Australia’s own social fabric — building relationships across communities, absorbing criticism and backlash, and insisting that social cohesion is something that must be constructed deliberately, not assumed to endure on its own. This work is slow, relational and often uncomfortable. But it is precisely this kind of sustained engagement that makes it possible for people to encounter one another not as symbols or threats, but as neighbours with a shared stake in the future.

This work is not symbolic. It is civil-society infrastructure — practical, relational and fragile — and it requires protection and growth. That is why the Australian government’s decision to invest in Rozana’s health diplomacy matters so deeply. It recognises that social cohesion, here at home and abroad, is built not only by condemning hatred, but by funding cooperation. At a time of deep polarisation, this kind of investment is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

We are speaking out now because moments like this demand more than condemnation. They demand courage, restraint and a willingness to invest — patiently and deliberately — in the conditions that make hatred harder to sustain. Our shared future depends on whether we choose to keep building the bridges that allow us to meet one another not as enemies, but as neighbours — and, most importantly, as Australians. •

This article is republished from the Jewish Independent under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.

The post Building, not retreating appeared first on Inside Story.

Many in attendance accused Lammy and his Labour colleagues of culpability: by allowing antisemitism to flourish since 7 October 2023; for their criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza; and, most importantly, for recognising Palestine less than two weeks earlier. (Lammy was foreign secretary when the intention to recognise was announced.) A lot of media punditry agreed.

The toll in our Bondi mass murder on Sunday is many times higher, the evil more profound, but the dynamic of the relationship between our Labor government and the Jewish community is similar. The majority of Australian Jews seem to have viewed the government’s statements and actions on Israel over the last two and a bit years as betrayals.

Much of the criticism over that time, most of it inevitably via News Corp, has at least mentioned the foreign policy decisions, with some seeming to share the Israeli prime minister’s belief that any criticism of the country is antisemitic, or at least “rewards Hamas” and encourages antisemitism at home. This, at core, seems to be the government’s major crime in the eyes of most accusers.

Glibly talking about “eradicating antisemitism,” as many including Anthony Albanese have done this week, doesn’t make it an easier goal. But governments can always do something, and that includes setting an example.

As many have pointed out, when Albanese and his ministers have been asked about antisemitism over the past two years they have trotted out a rote reply: yes, it must be condemned — as should other forms of discrimination including Islamophobia. This coupling has diluted the nature and importance of antisemitism and the Holocaust’s sheer number of victims.

The context is complicated by the fact that the federal opposition, particularly under Peter Dutton, has seen political advantage in the issue, as the number of exchanges in question time shows.

The government would claim it’s just been trying to lower the temperature, especially as some of its electorates include large Muslim majorities. The extent to which this concern morphed into crude electoral considerations before May’s expected close election — specifically the fear of losing seats to single issue pro-Palestinian candidates, as its British counterpart did last year — might be in the eye of the beholder.

Still, even this week, Albanese’s sloganeering seems a bit off. “Terrorists want to divide us, we must not let them” is a clunky response appropriate to urging people not to take out their anger on the Muslim community after an act of Islamist terror. Sunday was certainly in that broad category, but the specificity of the targets — one of the killers was shooing bystanders away — makes it different. The fiercest anger Albanese is trying to contain is directed at himself.

Some political leaders appear able to draw on a deep moral well, at least in public. Kim Beazley, who never became prime minister, was one. Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull as well. Not so Anthony Albanese: displaying sincerity, real or faked, is not his forte. It’s not clear where this deficit comes from — decades of internal party skulduggery, perhaps — but when he’s being interviewed he’s always just managing the situation, resorting to talking points, staying out of trouble.

That habit of extending sentences with an unnecessary phrase — “at this time,” “in this place,” “going forward” — presumably to give himself space to prepare for the next line, doesn’t make for great oratory. By keeping attention on the other side, the small-target persona obviously worked at both elections he has contested as leader. But it makes for a poor ethicist-in-chief and, after Sunday, mourner-in-chief.

(There was a time when our head of state’s representative might have taken up some slack. Should governor-general Sam Mostyn be more active, or is she tainted by association with the Labor government?)

So Sunday’s mass murders have been followed by a lot of criticism of Albanese, what he’s failed to do and is still failing to do. Much commentary is light-on in pinpointing exactly what he’s done wrong, apart from his handling of Israel, or what he should do now. One on Thursday, headlined “Albanese Has a Moment in History to Do Something Big. He’s Wasting It,” ends up barking just two orders: “confront antisemitism wherever it ferments” (yes, this week apparently) and accept all the recommendations in special antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s contentious “Plan to Combat Antisemitism” right now.

Among the assorted litter elsewhere are some meaningful contributions. ASIO should be funded to upgrade its technology: it beggars belief that no automated red light went on when the older shooter’s gun licence was approved, given his son had come to ASIO’s attention. Call out Labor people like Bob Carr, who seems to take mischievous delight in deliberately using “Jewish” rather than “Israel” when describing its “lobbies.” Get serious about preachers of hate in mosques: an old chestnut that’s obviously easier said than done without draconian laws but still worth pursuing. Screen immigrants more thoroughly. Action on most of these fronts was announced last Thursday.

The government can also talk about antisemitism with less equivocation. But any outreach to the Jewish community will be difficult, of course, given the animosity.

Why, in the last four days, is NSW premier Chris Minns spared the sort of opprobrium poured on Albanese when the atrocity, and the constant threat for Sydney’s Jews over two years, took place on his watch and in spite of his government’s law enforcement apparatus? Partly because he has been more forceful in condemning antisemitism without caveats. He also possesses a larger dollop of those public-speaking attributes mentioned above.

And generally he’s been relatively pro-Israel. Most importantly, of course, state governments don’t have foreign affairs responsibilities.

Israel’s prime minister has meanwhile been doing what he can to keep Australian divisions rife. This being Benjamin Netanyahu, we can assume he believes it is in his personal, as opposed to his country’s, interest. •

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From a disappointing election result of 6.4 per cent (disappointing thanks to the pollsters who routinely overstate the party’s numbers by a point or two in their final campaign polls) its support has more than doubled, and almost tripled.

The popular explanation is a perceived move to the left in the Liberal leadership — if not in actual policy, then in the presentation — since Sussan Ley took the charge. For one thing, she’s a woman, and in the past has taken some rather moderate policy positions. Instability sure doesn’t help, either, with Barnaby Joyce’s One Nation flirtation, finally consummated this week, surely beneficial for the minor party, in the short term at least.

The defection delivers leader Pauline Hanson a huge pay rise and perhaps more staff. It might even open a floodgate. (One Nation is spinning it that way, but we should believe that only when we see it.) Being rid of Barnaby will disappoint many Nationals supporters, but its impact at elite level is yet to play out. Most Liberal MPs, on the other hand, will be happy to see the back of him — particularly aspiring candidates in former blue-ribbon city electorates, where Joyce’s unpopularity peaks.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The track record of One Nation’s MPs is not one of picking and sticking. The supposed plan is for Barnaby to get elected to the Senate in 2028 and take over as leader, but that’s almost three years away. There’s plenty of time for a party implosion before then.

The decision to contest the Senate rather than New England presumably reflects an assessment of likelihoods. Voting evidence suggests Joyce is extremely popular in his electorate, and even if the odds of re-election under the One Nation banner in New England are better than even, the chances of succeeding in election to the Senate are even better — and might boost the vote to bring another senator with him.

Is Barnaby the articulate leader that can take the far-right party to the next level? There’s no doubting his communication skills, his word-picture creating, even if it’s getting a bit old and was never everyone’s cup of tea. His former Nationals colleague Bridget McKenzie said recently that “he’s not a racist,” and it’s true his repertoire over two decades in parliament hasn’t included “dog-whistling” of the kind favoured by John Howard in his time and enthusiastically embraced by Peter Dutton.

Watchers of an ABC 7.30 interview on Monday were treated to quite a lot of squirming and dissembling when Joyce was quizzed about some of Hanson’s utterances, including recent ones. He just couldn’t bring himself to agree with some of her nastier comments. Yet the leaders of successful far-right parties around the democratic world — the parties he claims are, like One Nation, the future of politics — aren’t so bashful. Immigrant bashing is a crucial part of the formula; it’s not enough simply to say immigration is too high. Will a hardening be forced on Barnaby’s rhetoric in the new year?

Australia also lacks the plentiful uncontrolled immigration that causes friction in the US and Europe. By comparison with other countries, though, we have long had a very high level of controlled immigration. And there’s also the abundant rorting of bridging visas.

Recent polls have the far-right party on between 14 and 18 per cent. Such support would see its numbers mushroom in the Senate, but what about the House, where government is formed? How would those figures translate into seats? That would depend on two factors.

Pollster Demos recently released a national voting intentions survey of a little under 7000 respondents. It used “multilevel regression with post stratification,” or MRP, which tightens the seat-by-seat margin of error. Demos’s national primary votes gave One Nation 17 per cent with Labor on 33, the Coalition on 24 and Greens 13. Its estimated national two-party-preferred vote is 56 for Labor and 44 for the Coalition. Seat by seat One Nation swings were somewhat proportional to 2025 support: the bigger the One Nation vote in May, the larger the swing its way in this poll.

That’s splendid for the minor party. And, as might be expected, most of the support is coming directly from the Coalition. Demos has the 18 per cent translating into twelve seats. That would make One Nation happy. But this is where the caveats come in.

Demos uses 2025 election preference flows to arrive at each electorate’s two-candidate-preferred results. That’s fine — so they should — but it assumes the Coalition’s how-to-vote cards will again recommend One Nation ahead of Labor everywhere. Is that a certainty in 2028? It seems likely, but it will largely depend on who the Liberal leader is, how much authority they enjoy and whatever in-vogue ideas decree to be the best way forward.

Under Dutton, the pro–One Nation preference strategy was justified by his prioritisation of the outer suburbs and regions. But a Liberal Party that wished to regain territory from the teals and protect itself from  further losses in the inner city might put as much distance as possible between itself and One Nation.

Andrew Hastie and very likely Angus Taylor would happily do deals with the minor party. But Sussan Ley or some other “moderate,” trying to reclaim capital city support, might not.

I’m not suggesting Ley will last until the next election — she won’t — but her right-wing replacement next year might not either; and if that person crashes it would likely be interpreted as showing the hard-right experiment was a dud. Then, in typical Liberal leadership fashion, the pendulum would swing back to a “moderate” or at least “compromise” individual. That could even be Ley.

The second condition for maximum One Nation seat success is not just a rock-bottom Coalition primary vote but also a reasonably healthy Labor one. Of Demos’s twelve projected One Nation wins, the strongest seven come from two-candidate-preferred counts against the ALP. This is where its best chances are, because Labor “preferences” the Coalition over One Nation everywhere, which makes the former difficult to beat in a final count.

If we hold Demos’s One Nation, Greens and “Others” primary votes constant and move three percentage points from Labor to the Coalition in all electorates, four or five seats shift from One Nation to the Coalition. Make it a six-point movement (which would mean a 50–50 national two-party-preferred result) and One Nation is left with just one electorate.

So Labor doing well is also good for One Nation. The 2028 election might see a repeat of 2025, but to assume it will is to succumb to the tyranny of the present. In fact, across federal election history, big wins are nearly always followed by notable corrections.

The other, most important variable, of course, is the One Nation vote itself. Who knows, this time next year it might even, à la Reform UK, be leading the pack with support of around 30 per cent.

There is no reason to believe One Nation’s surge has peaked. •

The post Exit, stage right appeared first on Inside Story.

I bet many readers thought I had the Australian Democrats in mind. Which would just go to show how successfully Don Chipp, the party’s first leader, promoted his party as the epitome of participatory democracy. By which he meant that policies and even parliamentary leadership positions were decided by a vote of the entire party membership.

Chipp, a former Liberal, was central to the founding of the Democrats in 1977 when he was still on the rebound from being cast out from the ministry by Malcolm Fraser following the December 1975 election. And, yes, we are now at the half-century mark of the advent of Fraser’s prime ministership, the unfashionable flipside of the Dismissal anniversary.

That Chipp and his new party proceeded to win two Senate seats at the 1977 election was a shock to the Liberals. Fraser’s ditching of the popular minister was a political misjudgement second only to his terminal mistake of calling an early election in 1983 before discovering he was facing Bob Hawke as opposition leader. The rise of Chipp’s gentle juggernaut tells us much about Australian political culture and just might provide a lesson or two for today’s struggling Liberals.

Chipp under each of Liberal prime ministers Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon received far more publicity than the more typical junior minister. As customs minister overseeing the importation of some hitherto banned books he became the shining epitome of trendy liberalism, while Fraser was wrongly seen as firmly lodged in the party’s far right.

Even decades later, Fraser didn’t make clear why he expelled Chipp from his ministry. The antipathy looks to have been more personal than policy-based, not helped by Chipp having supported two Fraser enemies, Gorton and Billy Snedden. Patrick Weller noted in Malcolm Fraser PM that Fraser invariably stuck to his opinions of individuals.

It must be said that Chipp was widely admired outside his former party, and seems to have been an entirely sincere individual. Labor senator John Button thought him “a very likable larrikin.” Snedden detected a more complex mixture of “altruism, egoism and anger” motivated by “an enormous conscience.”

Chipp’s eponymous memoir Don Chipp: The Third Man (co-authored with John Larkin) is a rich source of anecdotes about other parliamentarians. He once nearly punched young Fraser for amusing himself by depositing pickled onions and ice cubes in colleagues’ jacket pockets. His book is studded with proclamations about the Democrats representing “the politics of hope” and suchlike, along with all-purpose denunciations of “greed and selfishness,” not to mention “apathy and indifference.”

Chipp’s writings also abound with references to popular seers of the ilk of Alvin Toffler, Margaret Mead, Hermann Kahn and Paul Ehrlich, to an extent that Michael Oakeshott, that great philosophic critic of rationalism in politics, would have found amusing. (Or perhaps just tiresome?) At least Chipp was even-handed, smiting both “the blue-singleted ocker” and “his more genteel counterpart.” His promise to “keep the bastards honest” — he was referring to the major parties, especially the Liberals under Fraser — became one of our most enduring political aphorisms.

Chipp’s departure didn’t amount to a split in the Liberal Party. His Democrats were instead based on dissatisfied and uncommitted voters, with an infusion of former members of other middle-of-the-road parties. He was not the sole creator of the Democrats but his exceptional public profile made him its catalyst.

Fraser’s worry was that the new party would channel votes to Labor via preferences. In the event, he won the 1977 election with ease. But there was now a viable alternative for those voters convinced he was a heartless ideologue. At the December 1980 election the Democrats won three more Senate seats, giving them the balance of power in the upper house as of the following July.

The Democrats happily followed their leader in seeing themselves as both pure and unique. They were, in fact, neither. The first was an impossible standard for any political entity to maintain, as shown by the Democrats’ very mixed history in the years following Chipp’s retirement in 1986. By 2008 they held no Senate seats at all. New parties invariably arrive on the political scene bearing an exaggerated moral vanity that is destined to slowly fizzle. Many might be puzzled to hear that the nascent Country Party was quite convinced of its own purity.

The early Democrats also showed little awareness that they were at heart the latest manifestation of Australia’s long, undistinguished and by no means unique history of producing minor parties that proudly reject major-party politics. (All roads lead to history, I say.) The Great Depression in particular generated what political historian Peter Loveday described as “anti-political political thought.” Its more extreme manifestations included the paramilitary New Guard in 1930s New South Wales and the extraordinary little gang of parliamentarians and others plotting the unilateral separation of New England from Jack Lang’s New South Wales.

The more moderate All for Australia League tasked itself merely with creating a unity of purpose among the entire citizenry that would supersede all sectoral interests. Meanwhile, the delightfully named Sane Democracy League had sufficient cred to persuade mainstream right-of-centre figures Richard Casey and Joe Lyons to address its meetings.

More seriously, when Robert Menzies and his confreres sought in 1944 to create a new anti-socialist party from the ruins of the United Australia Party they had a fine array of dissenting entities to draw on. In Victoria alone there was a Services and Citizens Party, an Australian Constitutional League, a Young Nationalist Organisation and, conveniently closer to home for Menzies, the Kooyong Citizens’ Association.

This legacy of anti-political dreaming helps explain why the Democrats did so remarkably well for a minor party that lacked a solid social or regional base. They successfully appealed to what Paul Kelly described as “a synthesis of radicals, lefties, greens, the disenchanted and the caring nice people.” They also owed much to their very mixed post-Chipp leadership having included the capable Janine Haines and Meg Lees. They peaked at a remarkable nine senators following the election of 1998 before going into a slow, painful decline. I am surprised to have discovered they still linger as an entity registered with the Australian Electoral Commission.

The Democrats’ other big achievement was unintended. They convincingly demonstrated that participatory democracy, the antithesis of Edmund Burke’s representative democracy, simply does not work. Their initial party model had ordinary members being invited to vote on policy and the leadership using mind-bogglingly complex ballot papers. The efficacy of this process was predicated on a high level of engagement that proved unforthcoming.

More positively, the Democrats helped sustain popular faith in the virtues of seeking alternatives to the major parties. Neil Brown, another former Liberal colleague of Chipp’s, spotted as early as 1993 how the Democrats “gave a new respectability to minority parties and consequently to independent members of parliament.” They encouraged the idea held by today’s Greens, One Nation and teals that they have a special moral authority to impose on majority elected governments, despite their not being responsible for the consequences of what might ensue. The teals have the convenient added advantage of not being impeded by a formal party structure.

The Chipp affair was a bit of a one-off for the Liberals. Chipp was blessed with such an unusually strong personal following that he provides only the broadest of lessons about the desirability, where possible, of corralling dissenters safely within the party tent and perhaps benefitting from their honest feedback and popular appeal. Anyone thinking of splitting off to establish a new political entity should ponder the short history of most minor parties. Such departures don’t magically banish intractable policy challenges.

Big established parties might seem decidedly unfashionable nowadays but they offer some unique advantages. These include providing the most demanding of training grounds for potential national leaders, giving voters a clear choice between comprehensive, ideologically differing programs, and, being aware they may have to bear the consequences, having every incentive to think carefully about the practicalities of what they preach.

So, please, don’t ask who I happened to vote for so wantonly the first couple of times I went to the polls. By now you should be able to tell. •

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But the Board’s post-meeting statement was less “hawkish” than many other economists had anticipated. In particular, it doesn’t give any indication it is contemplating a possible lift in rates next year (to which the financial markets are now assigning a 100 per cent probability).

No indication, that is, beyond the usual concluding sentence declaring it “will do what it considers necessary” to achieve “price stability and full employment,” although governor Michele Bullock did reveal at her post-meeting press conference that the board “discussed the possibility” it might need to increase interest rates. Presumably the minutes of this week’s meeting, to be released on 23 December, will shed more light on that discussion.

While acknowledging inflation has “picked up more recently,” the board judged that “some of the recent increase” in inflation “was due to temporary factors” and, moreover, that “there is uncertainty about how much signal to take from the monthly CPI [consumer price index] data given it is a new data series” (although it is not as if the preceding data for the September quarter was a whole lot more comforting).

Against that, the board’s post-meeting statement also acknowledged “some signs of a more broadly-based pick-up in inflation, part of which may be persistent and will bear close monitoring.”

It also referenced three factors: the strengthening in private demand (evidenced in last week’s September quarter national accounts), which it said had been “stronger than anticipated”; the continued tightness in the labour market (evidenced, it said, by the “significant share of firms… experiencing difficulty sourcing labour”; and the continued strong growth in “broader measures of wages” (such as the national accounts measure of average hourly earnings) and unit labour costs. In her press conference, Governor Bullock cited the strength of the recovery in private sector spending as potentially signalling that further reductions in interest rates are “not needed.”

The board’s statement concluded by recognising that “the risks to inflation have tilted to the upside” but also asserting that “it will take a little longer to assess the persistence of inflationary pressures.” That doesn’t sound like it is laying the groundwork for an increase in interest rates any time soon.

As I said after the release of the higher-than-expected October inflation data, for the Reserve Bank to contemplate lifting rates any time soon (having recently lowered them three times) it would need to be persuaded that the recent upturn in inflation represents the beginning of a new upward trend — as opposed to it being evidence that the “last mile” of getting inflation down from its 2022–23 peak is proving more difficult than previously anticipated.

It will take time to draw a conclusion, one way or the other, on that point. There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that a new upward trend in inflation has begun in any other comparable country, in the way there was in the early stages of the inflation cycle following the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, except in the United States — where progress in reducing inflation has been hampered by the effects of the Trump regime’s tariffs (and where there is no official data beyond September) — “underlying” inflation is either close to central bank targets or (as in Britain and New Zealand) heading in that direction.

So, for now at least, I remain of the view that the Reserve Bank isn’t going to raise rates next year and there is still a reasonable probability it will cut again, although in all likelihood only once, and not until May at the earliest. •

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The Pacific Island affairs minister (also in charge of defence industry) should know. He shared a big chunk of responsibility for the largest diplomatic debacle so far experienced by prime minister Anthony Albanese, albeit involving one of Australia’s smaller neighbours.

Conroy went to Vanuatu in August this year with defence minister Richard Marles and foreign minister Penny Wong convinced that its government was ready to sign an agreement giving Canberra approval rights over its security and infrastructure deals with third countries. In return, the island nation would receive A$500 million in aid over ten years.

Most of the Vanuatu government was out of the capital, Port Vila, when the Australians arrived, so Conroy and his colleagues followed them to the island of Tanna, where they were attending a cultural festival. The ni-Vanuatu hosts obliged them by signing a treaty draft at a table perched on the rim of Mount Yasur, an active volcano.

The location might have given a clue to the shakiness of the political ground. When Albanese arrived in Port Vila in September expecting to sign the final agreement, Vanuatu’s prime minister Jotham Napat informed him that signature was impossible due to continuing wrangles about the “wording” of the so-called Nakamal Agreement, named for the communal big houses in the island nation’s villages. As sources in Port Vila explain, the problem was the apparently sweeping veto powers Canberra expected.

In the section on security, one of Canberra’s “red lines” was any form of police cooperation between Vanuatu and countries outside the Pacific Island Forum — which would leave only Australia, New Zealand and island nations in the field. Vanuatu insisted on keeping its freedom to accept help from China and elsewhere.

Nor was Vanuatu happy about having to knock back infrastructure projects that could threaten Australia’s security, one local source told me. “We are worried about what Australia will consider a threat to their security: a wharf? A road? An airport? A threat according to who?”

More than two months later, the differences remain unresolved.

That setback was followed by another when Albanese went to Port Moresby later in September for the fiftieth anniversary of Papua New Guinea’s independence. There, PNG prime minister James Marape wasn’t ready to sign another document worked on by Marles and Conroy — a defence pact known as the Puk-Puk (Crocodile) Treaty — which would pledge each country to come to the other’s defence and allow Papua New Guineans to enlist in the Australian Defence Force.

As the government’s critics in the opposition and News Corp geared up to attack Labor for misreading the region, it emerged that the problem was simply that Marape’s cabinet members had dispersed to their electorates for independence celebrations before the treaty had been put before them. It was duly endorsed after they returned to Port Moresby and signed by Marape when he travelled south to watch a State of Origin rugby league game with Albanese.

The finer details — like how the ADF’s officers and sergeants are being readied to cope with up to 10,000 Melanesian recruits from PNG towns and villages when they are struggling to attract and retain enough personnel from Australia itself — aren’t yet being shared publicly by Marles and Conroy.

The Puk-Puk Treaty is definitely an achievement. But in the absence of any foreseeable external attack, the major security challenges in the South Pacific are domestic ones, particular from crime and violence.

Wong and former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus forged an earlier security agreement to help the PNG police force increase its numbers and deepen its crime solving and prosecution expertise. The government is pursuing similar initiatives elsewhere in the region, but with mixed success.

Two weeks ago, the Vanuatu government announced it would exclude all foreign advisers from its offices, including police and defence officers from Australia and New Zealand, to prevent “outside influence.” At around the same time it also accepted grants of some A$116 million from China to repair and rebuild buildings and roads in Port Vila damaged by last December’s big earthquake. As the government buildings among the worst hit had been built with previous Chinese aid by Chinese firms, though, this seemed more about restoring Beijing’s reputation than expanding influence.

In the Solomon Islands, coming up to a year since Albanese and prime minister Jeremiah Manele announced a A$190 million four-year plan to expand the police force and create a new police academy, agreement on the details still seems far off. Manele told the ABC the delay is due to “language in the agreement” being negotiated. While both countries could still “revisit” the pact, he said, there was no timeline for reaching an agreement.

Across the Melanesian boundary in Polynesia, the Albanese government is also pursuing further defence and police ties with Fiji and Tonga, their conservative governments both being willing partners. On the military side, the two island nations are already working on joint natural disaster responses with Australia and PNG. But they also face a new wave of criminality, deepened by factors in Australia and to some extent New Zealand.

The huge Australian demand for cocaine, methamphetamine and latterly fentanyl, pushing prices to among the highest in the world, has encouraged smuggling through Pacific nations, including on semi-submersible speed boats or narco-subs. Local intermediaries include convicted non-citizen criminals deported from Australia on “character grounds”under the Section 501 provision of the Migration Act — a provision ramped up by Peter Dutton as home affairs minister in Scott Morrison’s government.

Pasifika and New Zealanders, including Māori, form a disproportionately large segment of Australia’s prison population, so the bulk of deportees have gone to New Zealand and island nations. Many get dumped with no local connections or job prospects and turn to crime, their skills enhanced by jail associations. “If a country like New Zealand, with the resources it has in law enforcement, is struggling to deal with the 501 deportees from Australia, one can only imagine the impact deportees from New Zealand and Australia are having in small island states,” points out Canterbury University security specialist José Sousa-Santos.

The chair of New Zealand’s ministerial advisory group on transnational and serious organised crime, Steve Symon, warned in October that Pacific Island nations were at risk of becoming “narco-states,” their police, customs and other border agencies corrupted by crime syndicates. In the meantime, hard drug use is rising in the islands, with associated spread of HIV, leading Wong to announce a new A$48 million program to combat “increasing rates” of infections.

But these are just the start of the troubles the Albanese government faces in the region over the rest of its current term.

In New Caledonia, the government appointed by French president Emmanuel Macron is attempting to placate the indigenous Kanaks with the constitutional device of a new “state” within France. To further this plan, it has won parliamentary endorsement for expanding the territory’s electoral franchise, which could weaken the position of Kanak representatives in local institutions.

The territory of 290,000 people is consequently in an explosive state, with twenty of France’s 120 Gendarmerie (para-military) squadrons, amounting to 2500 troopers, stationed there. In 2024, when Macron’s government attempted a similar electoral rejig, the territory erupted in widespread rioting and arson, causing some €2 billion (A$3.5 billion) in damage, a 13.5 point economic contraction, and an exodus of expatriate residents.

Further afield, the pro-independence president of the autonomous government of Bougainville, Ismael Toroama, was re-elected with 70 per cent of the island’s vote in September. Bougainville’s people voted 98 per cent for independence from PNG in 2019, but under a peace agreement designed to settle a civil war the referendum result needs to be endorsed by the PNG parliament to take effect. Current estimates are that only around one in ten MPs would approve separation. Toroama, a former rebel commander who fought the PNG military, has vowed to declare independence unilaterally by September 2027 if it is not conceded by then.

These will be excruciating diplomatic challenges for Canberra: New Caledonia testing the “First Nations” priority that Conroy lauded in his speech; Bougainville destabilising the security pact with PNG.

But a bigger one, reaching deep into Australian politics, is the widening gap between the Albanese government’s posture as a good climate citizen — by virtue of its efforts to reach net-zero at home by mid-century, its support for the Paris accords, and its help for Pacific island states to cope with the effects of climate change — with its refusal to acknowledge responsibility for emissions from the fossil fuels Australia exports.

In July, the International Court of Justice in The Hague rejected Australian, Saudi, American, British and Chinese assertions that their climate responsibility was entirely covered by global agreements such as the Paris accords. The fifteen sitting justices unanimously found not only that all countries have an obligation to work together to hold global warming to 1.5C but also that obligations don’t simply rest with the end users of fossil fuels.

“Failure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that state,” the judges ruled.

The ICJ action was launched by Vanuatu. While the judgement is advisory, it may be the foundation for specific litigation. With some ninety-four new coal and gas projects lining up in Australia, according to the Australia Institute, Vanuatu or others would seem to have ample cases to raise. They include the forty-five-year extension to Woodside Energy’s North-West Shelf gas project, approved by Albanese’s environment minister Murray Watt in September after objections met a ferocious campaign by Western Australia’s state government, trade unions, and media outlets in support of Woodside. The institute says that project alone adds the equivalent of twelve coal-fired power stations to emissions.

In his Newcastle address, Conroy made reference to the Coalition’s backing away from net-zero. “You can’t engage effectively with the Pacific unless you’re serious about climate,” he said. “They just won’t take you seriously — and with good reason.”

He went on: “Unlike them — I applaud the students of Vanuatu, and the Vanuatu government for galvanising the world to achieve the landmark International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate change. In seeking this opinion, the Pacific has spoken with the moral authority and weight of lived experience.”

On the face of it, then, Albanese’s minister for Pacific Island affairs is supporting the case his own government opposed at The Hague and lending his weight to the notion his prime minister and the environment minister continue to reject.

How much longer can the Albanese government get away with trying to walk both sides of the street?

It suggests the government is under-powered in dealing with the region’s challenges and a broader political dialogue is needed. Perhaps some of the under-utilised talent in Labor ranks — economics PhDs Andrew Leigh and Andrew Charlton, and the technology-astute former industry minister Ed Husic come to mind — could be brought into the engagement. •

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First came a new security treaty Australian foreign minister Penny Wong framed as “a significant extension of existing security and defence cooperation between Australia and Indonesia.” Then came the announcement that five Australian more companies have committed to investing in Indonesia — “one in the hospital sector and two in downstream industries,” according to Indonesian investment minister Rosan Roeslani, with two others “already invested in Indonesia” and “looking to expand.”

When Australian companies invest in Indonesian hospitals, agriculture and battery plants, Australia’s government doesn’t see it as just a matter of commercial returns. Building supply chains, establishing manufacturing capacity and creating economic interdependence are all strategic matters.

Trade and investment ties have been the missing link between Australia and Southeast Asia for decades. As long ago as Julia Gillard’s Australia in the Asian Century white paper, businesses were being enjoined to do more to connect with the “economic powerhouse of the world.” But even the kindest would concede these appeals have had only a limited effect. Australian companies still invest less in the whole of Southeast Asia than they do in New Zealand.

Indonesia presents an interesting case. Australian businesses have been trading with our big northern neighbour for decades, but it is still only Australia’s ninth-largest two-way trading partner. As of 2024, Australian companies had invested just A$1.36 billion there.

Yet Indonesia is hardly a marginal economy. The World Bank ranks it the tenth-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and the IMF expects it to grow by around 4.9 per cent in 2025. It’s been projected to be among the top five world economies by 2050.

How excruciating for the government to watch the rise of an economic superpower on our doorstep while Australian businesses stubbornly refuse to engage.

Enter the Moore report. Or, less colloquially, Australia’s Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040. Developed by former Macquarie Group chief executive Nicholas Moore, this September 2023 report provided the blueprint for a long-term effort to build trade and investment with Southeast Asia, including an expanded role for government as a facilitator.

Moore’s message was a familiar one: “Australia’s prosperity and security is intimately linked to the prosperity and security of its neighbours” and “we can do more to boost trade and investment.” He identified ten priority sectors for Australian efforts, including agriculture, healthcare and infrastructure.

Where Moore departed from previous efforts is by recognising that exhortations won’t translate into outcomes without government taking an active role. His report made seventy-five practical recommendations, most of which focus on how the government can support, de-risk and encourage business to engage more in Southeast Asia.

In the two years since the report, the Australian government has put many of these place. Investment Deal Teams work directly with Australian companies and Southeast Asian partners to spot opportunities and get them moving. The Southeast Asia Business Exchange helps Australian exporters figure out how to enter and compete in these fast-growing markets. A $2 billion Southeast Asia Investment Financing Facility helps reduce risks for investors willing to back projects that align with the Moore Report’s priorities.

What is interesting about these various initiatives is the proactive role for government. Having identified, for example, that a lack of people-to-people connections among business across the region was hampering trade and investment, the government didn’t just exhort business to do better. It built a placements program.

Small, focused and practical, the Placements and Internships Pilot Program for Young Professionals has involved young professionals from Indonesia and Laos rotating through jobs at Australian companies in renewable energy, finance and creative industries. One participant landed at a Sydney renewable energy startup to learn first-hand about the energy transition. Another trained in Wollongong’s creative sector. Meanwhile, six Australian professionals spent four weeks in Jakarta working across six different industries from hospitality to renewables.

What matters is the impact. One Indonesian participant now runs joint ventures between his home company and Australian partners in sustainable agriculture. An Australian participant joined a regional working group on digital skills training, bringing Australian expertise into ASEAN initiatives. They built relationships and professional networks that are translating into business outcomes.

By removing friction in sectors where companies genuinely want to operate, such as finance, energy and digital economy, the program creates a natural entry point for businesses hesitant to venture into unfamiliar markets.

Officials are already eyeing how to scale this up. If funding continues, the model could evolve into a permanent Southeast Asia Business Fellowship. It would remain a modest program, but it would signal something important: Australia is thinking about regional engagement not just as deals and transactions, but in terms of people, relationships and trust.

Another example of government playing an innovative role is Investing in Women, a program that supports female entrepreneurs across Southeast Asia. An old initiative given new purpose by the Moore report, it shows how government investment can unlock both social impact and commercial returns.

The program works with ten impact investment funds spread across Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Vietnam. Together, they have mobilised more than $500 million in private capital flowing into businesses that might otherwise struggle to find funding. Australian aid money and private investment are blended to show that development outcomes and commercial returns are not mutually exclusive.

The results are concrete, including agritech startups using precision farming, community health providers expanding their reach and clean energy companies scaling up operations. In Indonesia, Angel Investment Network Indonesia has backed women entrepreneurs building fintech platforms and sustainable agriculture ventures.

The scheme shows investors that the “missing middle” in Southeast Asia — companies too big for microfinance but too small or unconventional for traditional banks — actually work as investments. Sometimes the best business opportunities come in the places nobody’s looking.

If you can convince investors there is genuine money to be made supporting Southeast Asian businesses, government funds become a lever rather than a cost. Government is not replacing the private sector; it is activating it.

This is the context for the significant commitments to real projects made during Prabowo’s recent visit.

Aspen Medical is putting US$1 billion into a hospital redevelopment project in Samarinda, reshaping healthcare infrastructure in eastern Indonesia. Pure Battery Technologies is investing US$350 million to build cathode materials facility at Batang Industrial Park, targeting the global clean energy transition. These are both in priority sectors the Moore report identified as critical for Australia.

Moore spelled out the logic when he launched the strategy. Australian companies have funds, Indonesia has opportunity: “We have the potential to be a substantial investor due to our well-capitalised corporate sector. What happens next will show whether his report reshapes Australia’s regional engagement or is just another well-meaning strategy.

In the short term, the new investment commitments need to move from press releases to actual operations. This sounds obvious, but it is where most grand strategy dies. Investment announcements often come with asterisks. Financing needs finalising, approvals must clear regulatory hurdles, local partners need vetting and legal frameworks shift. When Roeslani said that one investment project would happen “possibly through Danantara, which we will explore further,” that word “possibly” is the key.

In the longer term, scale will be vital. Five Australian companies announcing investments looks impressive. Step back, though, and it is actually a modest move. Australia’s total investment stock in Indonesia is small relative to Indonesia’s economic size and growth trajectory. If Moore’s strategy is to work, Australia and Indonesia should be building dozens of multibillion-dollar projects.

This will depend on how Australian companies and investors respond. Moore acknowledged that Australian investment in Southeast Asia is “underweight” because companies lack familiarity, fear risk and lack established networks. Government programs can help, but they can’t eliminate unfamiliarity overnight.

On some of these issues, Australia also needs Indonesia to step up. Regulatory systems need to be clearer and more predictable, local partners need stronger capacity and value chains need to be built with depth, not just surface integration.

Finally, institutional coordination will be vital. Australia has created committees, deal teams and an investment fund, and state governments have also launched initiatives. But getting them all to pull in the same direction is no easy task. Moore called for a “whole-of-nation” approach, but this remains a work in progress as governments, superannuation funds and major corporations learn to operate in a more coordinated way.

The recently announced investments, meanwhile, are not just about commerce; they are playing out against a strategic backdrop. Australia is saying that Indonesia is too important to leave to others.

This moment will reveal whether the Moore report marked a genuine shift in how Australia engages in Southeast Asia, or whether it will be remembered as another well-intentioned effort that failed to shift Australian companies from their comfort zone. •

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Prime minister John Howard’s metooism on an emissions-trading scheme at the end of the previous term hadn’t triggered a party-room rebellion. He possessed the authority that comes from being prime minister, and more: he was a successful one who (it seemed) knew how to win elections. Perhaps some suspected or hoped the scheme would turn out to be “non-core.”

Yet by 2010 it was the Labor government, sinking in the surveys, that was playing Twister over global warming. With a new Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, going in hard, Labor “hard heads,” armed with opinion polls, pressured Rudd to dump his policy. When Rudd’s public esteem suddenly and dramatically collapsed, those same machine men pressured caucus to dump him as leader. They didn’t know much about actual voters but they did know their polling numbers, and the numbers told them Julia Gillard would cruise to victory as leader.

And so, from mid-2010 all the way until the May 2022 election, climate change was seen as a terrible problem for Labor, ripping off the plaster that held together their twin constituencies: blue-collar workers (including miners) and inner-city trendies. It was, yes, an existential problem.

Then, when Labor surmounted the seemingly insurmountable and took office again, it once again became the Coalition’s albatross. The very right-wing Peter Dutton managed to hold the outfit together by sticking with the Morrison government’s net-zero-by-2050 pledge but proposing to achieve it via nuclear energy. The beauty of this scheme was that it meant Australia would be let off the hook for the decade or so until the nuclear plants were up and running.

Labor is now in office with a majority that dwarfs its 2007–10 term, and the Coalition is again squabbling over climate. Liberal MPs have now struck a compromise whereby they dump all targets while not denying the science. Affordable energy for Australians is the priority, not international agreements. Our tiny contribution doesn’t make much difference anyway.

Leader Sussan Ley obviously wasn’t staking her leadership on net zero, but she is likely to lose it anyway — because, again, of the opinion polls. Angus Taylor or Andrew Hastie will be leading the opposition, perhaps this year, perhaps next, and prosecuting the cost-of-living case, which is the government’s biggest political problem, with global warming policies front and centre via energy prices. If it’s Hastie, it’ll be accompanied protectionism, slashed immigration and fortress Australia.

How much difference will dropping the pledge make? It’ll mean the Coalition won’t have to come up with a climate policy, leaving it free to propose more coal-fired power and bang on about Labor’s responsibility for Australians’ financial difficulties. Every cent increase in energy costs in living memory will be sheeted home to Labor’s climate obsessions.

But Dutton’s nuclear plan more or less facilitated all that.

Is the world moving away from net zero? Some of the claims it is are dodgy. But it’s possible the Coalition will eventually be vindicated by international developments and the Labor government, with all its tub-thumping about the irresponsibility, will look a bit silly. That won’t mean global warming isn’t real or that that the gradual shift to renewable energy was a bad idea all along. And it’s hardly the stuff that destroys governments.

One other thing: unlike Rudd’s 2010 capitulation, there is zero chance of Albanese throwing up his hands and declaring the renewable transition too hard.

What brings down governments? Perceptions of incompetence, particularly on economic management. Economic problems in general. Perhaps most importantly, longevity. But an opposition that obliges with a big target can extend that longevity.

Opposition leaders come and go, sometimes enjoying honeymoons (Hastie in particular would probably get one). The prospect of not having to worry about doing our bit to combat climate change might entice many voters. But the Coalition will still be left with the hurdle of an election where they are promising to unscramble the government’s renewable energy egg. A change of policy isn’t going to undo past cost of living pressures. And there will be so many questions, so many unknowns. We’ve seen that episode before – and not too long ago.

Unloading the net zero promise, and reopening the climate wars, presents opportunities for the Coalition. But it also offers substantial downsides. •

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He’d been asked to address Crawford School alumni on the campus where he wrote his PhD on Paul Keating and the use of prime ministerial power. The thesis of his eleven-minute address on Thursday evening was at least as interesting as the one for which he received his doctorate. Just how interesting depends on how you choose to interpret it.

Chalmers made an appeal to the bright minds there gathered. He urged them to join him in a mission to grab the opportunities now presenting themselves for Australia. He spoke of ambition and courage and leadership — of being here to “run the joint, not just occupy the space.”

He noted that big economic shifts in this country come around roughly every forty years. After the agricultural and colonial economy of the 1900s, the postwar economy of the late forties and the fifties — tariff-dependent and increasingly industrialised — and the 1980s’ opening to the world and growth in financial services, he argued we’re due for another one.

Pointedly, Chalmers observed that each shift “took leadership to land it.” What he called Australia’s “fourth economy” would not “build itself,” he added.

“It will take ambition and courage and it will take leadership to build a new economy powered by cleaner and cheaper energy and turbocharged by AI,” Chalmers told his audience in Canberra’s distinctive Shine Dome. “That’s why I want you all to understand that this a big moment for us as a country and we can’t talk ourselves out of it.”

What he said next bore flashes of familiarity, like the muted echo of another speech by another treasurer, given just a few kilometres away and thirty-five years ago. Not the same, mind, but approaching some similar territory.

“We can’t spend our time ambling slowly along the path of least resistance — not when the pace of change in the world is accelerating,” Chalmers said. “That path of least resistance leads to mediocrity and malaise. Instead we can make this a defining decade, filled with opportunity in a world of uncertainty. But only with your help. Only with your ideas. And only with your ambition.”

The vision of a continually modernising Australia, the warning of stagnation, the call to join the quest to avoid it. Now, where have we heard that before?

Way back in December 1990 another treasurer made an evening speech that dreamed of bold reform, spoke of the need for leadership and urged his audience to “come with” him. I remember that speech very well because I was there. I also remember the after-effects, which were seismic.

To be clear, Jim Chalmers’ Crawford School address is not Paul Keating’s Placido Domingo speech, not by a long shot. The circumstances, the audience and the tone are completely different and the impact will not be the same. The real leadership dramas, right now, are on the other side.

Keating was emotional and reflective that December night at the National Press Club when he addressed journalists from the federal parliamentary press gallery as guest speaker at their — our — annual dinner, having just attended the funeral of his Treasury secretary Chris Higgins. He had spent seven years as treasurer to prime minister Bob Hawke, who had won yet another term earlier that year. Keating was increasingly frustrated at being leader-in-waiting but Hawke was showing no sign of going anywhere.

What we didn’t know that night, and didn’t become public until the following year, was that Hawke had made a secret pledge two years earlier that if he won again in 1990, he would step down in Keating’s favour soon after. Nine months on from the election, he’d made Keating deputy prime minister but remained in the Lodge.

Keating’s speech was unmissably aimed at Hawke. He said Australia had “never had a great leader,” derided the kind of campaigning that involved “tripping over” television cords in shopping malls, and described himself as the “Placido Domingo” of Australian politics, from whence the speech would gain its forever label.

Supposedly off the record, the Friday night speech was in a newspaper by Sunday. The events that followed have been canvassed ad nauseum — an enraged Hawke declared the speech treacherous and told Keating the still-secret leadership deal was off. Then, in June 1991, the existence of the verbal undertaking, which had been struck during a private 1988 meeting at the prime minister’s Sydney residence and became known as the “Kirribilli agreement,” was leaked to the Nine Network’s political editor Laurie Oakes. As intended, the leak precipitated a leadership challenge. Keating lost but challenged again in December that year and prevailed, going on to win the 1993 election against expectations.

In this week’s speech, by contrast, Jim Chalmers made no criticisms of the government or his prime minister, who is riding high after a second and extraordinarily decisive election victory. There’s no secret handover deal and Chalmers isn’t the heir apparent, just the most prominent in a queue of aspirants whose hopeful timelines have all now been extended to the horizon.

And Chalmers’ Crawford School address was broader in scope and looking to the positive — to the opportunity that lies in ambitious policy, which he called the “protein” of government, as opposed to the “carbohydrates,” politics.

But in the warning about paths of least resistance delivering “mediocrity and malaise” there seemed just a hint of the kind of frustration you might see in someone who wants to go big when others around — or above — them are more wary.

Chalmers can argue he’s not talking about his own side and point legitimately to an opposition in flames and reheating old climate scepticism — a Coalition he believes would drag Australia backwards and let the opportunities the world is presenting pass the nation by.

He did mention Keating, though, via an old story he’s told before, including in another motivational speech he gave in 2022, that one to Treasury officials as they worked on his first budget. The story is about Keating as a young MP in the Old Parliament House during the Whitlam government, bumping into then treasurer Jim Cairns in the men’s room. Cairns was wearing a Vietnam moratorium badge and asked Keating why he wasn’t doing the same.

“And Paul says to Jim Cairns something like: ‘The difference between me and you, mate, is you came here to protest. I came here to run the joint,’” Chalmers recounted. Context is everything, and the story rang differently somehow in this week’s speech, maybe because of Chalmers’ recent tensions with Anthony Albanese over superannuation policy and recent consultations with Keating himself. Chalmers went on to borrow the key phrase as he reflected on having spoken the other day to a group of young graduate students now working in his Treasury.

“Their questions that afternoon reflected a level of ambition that we don’t always see in our politics, and I think to our detriment,” Chalmers said. “They’re here, and we’re here, to run the joint. And what a time to run it.”

And in encouraging his Crawford School alumni audience to use their knowledge and passion to help reshape the economy and build the future, he reflected on the Albanese government’s achievements thus far, declaring it had “made the right calls and the big calls for the right reasons, well-intentioned and well-informed.”

“I think that’s the test for all of you and it’s the test for all of us in your line of work and in mine — to actually run the joint, not just occupy the space,” he said, in conclusion. “To do justice to the opportunity that the world is dangling in front of us, and the opportunity that this country and this university has given us.”

Like I said, an interesting speech. •

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The New York-based institute, an initiative of the prestigious Asia Society founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller III, was a welcome sinecure for the irrepressible intellect of the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia. By 2021 he would add the titles president and CEO of the Society itself to his tirelessly burnished CV.

Dr Rudd described himself as an “independent think tanker” during his time at the policy institute before he landed the job of Australian ambassador to Washington in 2023. “As an independent think tanker, people expect you to exercise a wide latitude of engagement in the public policy debate,” he later explained.

As we are all now painfully aware, wide latitude includes offering frank assessments of former presidents of the United States, which is all very fine unless the president in question makes a Lazarus-like comeback for a second term and you become Australia’s supplicant-in-chief in America.

In social media posts back in 2020–21, Rudd wrote that Trump was the “most destructive president in history” and “a traitor to the West,” among other unflattering appraisals. But in November last year, after Trump was re-elected, he promptly deleted all the posts “out of respect” for the office of president.

As some in the media have pointed out in recent days (with notable exceptions in the Murdoch camp) Rudd’s social media history was positively tame compared with the two most senior members of Trump’s cabinet. In 2016 Vice President J.D. Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler” and compared him to O.J. Simpson as a “hated, villainous, douche celeb.” Around the same time, secretary of state Marco Rubio called him ”a con artist” who had “spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy.”

The revisiting of this awkward history during Anthony Albanese’s visit to Washington has brought back troubling memories of reporting from Southeast Asia in another millennium.

Back in the 1990s, former foreign minister Gareth Evans would rail in exasperation that there were only two types of stories that interested Australian journalists covering the region — “the row and the kowtow.” In essence, the stories that guaranteed media coverage were ones where Australian leaders and officials were in heated disagreement or, better still, open conflict with their regional counterparts (the row) or were deemed to be compromising or, better still, grovelling to defuse or end such conflicts (the kowtow).

In my experience, one of the richest veins tapped in this unedifying journalistic genre was the unhappy relationship between prime minister Paul Keating and his Malaysian counterpart Mahathir Mohamad.

In 1993, when Mahathir declined an invitation to attend the leaders’ meeting in Seattle of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum — a project pioneered and driven by Australia — Keating dismissed him as “recalcitrant.” While many observers needed to dust off their dictionaries to clarify the gravity of this rebuke, a row erupted in Kuala Lumpur that strained relations between the two countries… and Keating refused to kowtow.

For years thereafter, Australian journalists in need of a quick headline from Mahathir press conferences would throw baiting questions about the shortcomings of Keating in particular, and Australia in general. Mahathir was rarely recalcitrant in replying, and indeed seemed to relish the sport. This nonsense of course did nothing to advance the sum of human wisdom or the health of the relationship between Australia and Malaysia.

I was overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu reading the headlines after last week’s White House meeting and press conference between Trump and Albanese. “Trump Takes Swipe at Rudd”; “White House Spray”; “Australian Ambassador Humiliated”; “Trump Scolds Rudd”; “Trump Puts Kevin Rudd in his Place” etc. etc. Even the earnest Conversation joined the pile on: “Clip Over the Ear for Kevin Rudd.”

I rushed to find video footage to witness the enormity of what clearly had been a disastrous confrontation between the Kevin we thought was there to help and the pugilist president. How could what, by all accounts, was an astonishingly cordial and constructive meeting between Albanese and Trump have been derailed so dramatically?

Moments after Sky News Australia political editor Andrew Clennell caught Trump’s attention, I saw the good old “row” button flashing green. Clennell then charged in, helpfully offering Trump a multiple-choice opportunity to stick the boot into Albanese, Rudd or both.

“There is concern in Australia that it has taken nine months to get this meeting,” Clennell intoned, neglecting to acknowledge that the only people genuinely exercised about the delay were a flailing faction of the Coalition and their Sky After Dark and Murdoch tabloid spruikers. “Have you had any concerns with this administration with its stance on Palestine, climate change or even things that the ambassador said about you in the past in Australia, the Australian ambassador?”

The question triggered a bombshell. But it was not the one Andrew Clennell so ardently anticipated and the subsequent coverage “buried the lead,” as they say in the craft. The real revelation was that Donald Trump had no idea who Kevin Rudd was and no idea what he had said that so clearly deserved his umbrage.

“I don’t know anything about him,” said a bewildered Trump. “If he said bad then maybe he’d like to apologise.” Then, turning to Albanese, he asked: “Did an ambassador say something bad about me?” As Albanese was about to speak, Trump continued: “No, don’t tell me. Where is he? Is he still working for you?”

On the opposite side of the table, Kevin Rudd seemed momentarily and uncharacteristically lost for words, obviously fearful of what might be coming next — and presumably mortified that after two and a half years as Australia’s top envoy in Washington and nearly a year at the court of King Donald, Trump apparently did not recognise him.

As the press pack standing behind Rudd howled with laughter, Clennell gleefully pointed the president in the direction of Rudd. “Did you say something bad?” asked Trump. “Before I took this position, Mr President,” replied Rudd. “I don’t like you either and probably never will,” said Trump.

It was, the Guardian later observed, “the testiest and most uncomfortable remark at a typically freewheeling” presidential press conference: “But it was quickly followed by laughter across the packed room: the guffaws coming as if a pressure value had been released in government and diplomatic circles.”

After an immediate apology delivered by Rudd at the end of the presser (Kowtow: “Rudd Issues Grovelling Apology”), Trump was reported to have told Albanese that he “seems like a nice guy” before declaring: “All is forgiven.” That ought to have been the end of it — especially after Albanese later batted back opposition calls for Rudd’s sacking and heaped praised on Rudd as “an outstanding representative” of Australia in Washington who was “working his guts out.” But this ignores one of the foundation principles of row/kowtow journalism: when you’re on a roll, stick with it.

At the weekend, as Trump was leaving Washington to attend the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur, Australian journalists were back in the hunt. Asked by Nine newspapers’ Michael Koziol whether he had forgiven Ambassador Rudd (kowtow plus row), Trump unhelpfully replied: “No, I don’t know anything about him.” Then, having just forgotten, he declared that he was a man who never forgets: “I think he said a long time ago something bad. You know, when they say bad about me, I don’t forget.”

Perhaps this could have been the basis of fresh news stories about Donald Trump’s apparently accelerating mental decline, but Murdoch’s news.com.au was in no doubt that they had yet another “row” in the bag. “Smiling Assassin: Donald Trump Takes Another Swing at Kevin Rudd,” shouted the headline, then: “Donald Trump has warned Kevin Rudd he never forgets people who badmouth him despite telling Australia’s Ambassador that ‘all is forgiven’.”

Maybe we should never forget that Kevin Rudd along with Malcolm Turnbull led the campaign for a royal commission into the Murdoch media empire, describing it as a “cancer on our democracy.” •

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The Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters is to “inquire into and report on all aspects of the conduct of the 2025 federal election and related matters, including consideration of the following,” with the last being:

the composition of the Parliament as a whole, including: the length of the parliamentary term; the potential for fixed terms; and the number of elected representatives relative to the growth in population and the electorate.

Parliament was last expanded in 1984, and since then we’ve had seventy-six senators and (it varies) between 147 and 151 House of Representatives members. In 1984 the Australian population was around sixteen million; by the time of the next election, as Farrell notes, “the population will almost have doubled [to] about twenty-nine million people.”

Much further back, at the first federal election in 1901, some 111 MPs (seventy-five in the House and thirty-six senators) served around 3.8 million inhabitants. That’s one federal politician for roughly every 34,000 people. Now, with 226 parliamentarians, the ratio is one per 122,000.

How does that figure stack up internationally? India comes top of the charts, with each national politician representing an average of around 1.8 million people. But Australia tends to rank reasonably high; in this Wikipedia table, for example, we have the forty-fifth highest number of voters per politicians in a field of 238. (The Australian calculation in the right-hand column is actually wrong; inserting the correct one lifts us to about thirty-third.) With 238 entries, the list obviously includes a lot of non-democracies.

Given Australia’s ranking, and given that our seats are sometimes georgraphically huge (you can fit several European countries into some of them) the argument for more MPs seems persuasive. The political class seems to think it’s a good idea, but also something that voters can easily be encouraged to rail against. So it’s no surprise the federal opposition is waiting and seeing.

And yet…

Australia, as a federation, has another 465 lower house and 116 upper house MPs across the country; including them would move us down the international rankings. Communication and travel in the 2020s is vastly easier than in the 1980s, let the early 1900s.

True, federal electorate offices are doing a lot of work for constituents, particularly those in low-income areas. But if those staff are overburdened, a more obvious answer is to increase their numbers, and perhaps deal with the problems in government departments driving people to seek help in MPs’ offices.

The Constitution and the early Commonwealth electoral legislation were composed in the absence of political parties as we know them. In those days MPs represented their geographical areas. Since about 1911, though, they’ve represented their parties — in parliament at least. In this way, single-member-districts can be seen as an anachronism from a pre-party era. Why lump us with more of them?

And then there’s the Senate. The Constitution stipulates that House numbers must, “as nearly as practicable,” be twice the Senate ones. In 1967 the Holt government, with Labor support, attempted to eradicate this “nexus” but the referendum was lost badly. (Its lower-profile companion, an amendment to strike out all references to “aboriginal natives” in the constitution, succeeded with 91 per cent support.) The nexus, and the enormous malapportionment that sees each state send the same number of senators (currently twelve) to Canberra, were part and parcel of the federal system, designed to prevent the more populous states from throwing their weight around. But for more than a century senators too have voted along party lines.

Each senator has a single electorate office in their state, far away from the vast majority of their constituents. What do major-party backbench senators do with their time when parliament isn’t sitting? Engage in intra-party skulduggery, write opinion pieces, surf the internet trolling their opponents? It’s the chamber of party defections, occasional drunkenness and often just weird behaviour. And with more and more senators retiring mid-term, an increasingly appointed one. The idea of making the Senate even bigger is, frankly, a bit depressing.

Former Liberal cabinet minister George Brandis recently penned a rather disastrous opinion piece in the Nine papers about the alleged benefits for Labor of a bigger parliament. (Election analyst Ben Raue has picked it apart here.) In truth, it’s impossible to predict who would benefit from an increase in numbers. But Brandis’s point that the government wouldn’t be attempting this if they didn’t perceive advantages is obviously correct. It’s not zero-sum: a few dozen extra spots with salaries and perks for deserving party hacks would be a plus for all sides.

In addition, reports have floated around for years that some in Labor wish to add a Senate seat to each of the ACT and the Northern Territory (each currently has two). A larger Senate would facilitate that (or even, perhaps, an extra two). Extra seats for Canberra would make political sense for Labor, as it always votes much more left than the rest of the country. So has the Northern Territory this century, but not by nearly as much (and it could revert to its old conservative ways).

Proponents claim the territories are underrepresented in the upper house, but that’s totally untrue. The ACT is actually now better represented, per head of population, than New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia. And the Northern Territory, with its tiny population, has the second-smallest number of people per senator after Tasmania.

Of the other elements of Farrell’s final term of reference, four-year terms is one of those proposals that pops up every few years and usually dies a quick death, if for no other reason than it would require a referendum. This time the death throes will last longer. But it won’t go to a national vote under a Labor government.

Like the size of parliament, fixed terms can be achieved by legislation. They’re a better idea anyway because they would mean one less advantage for incumbents, which means that over the long term they would facilitate more changes of government. Parties in office for too long can start to believe they own the place and become vulnerable to opportunities for corruption; see for example the tail ends of NSW Labor, 1995 to 2011, and before that the Queensland Country Party’s thirty-one and a half years to 1989.

And an end to frantic election-date speculation would be an added blessing for all of us. •

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Not quite. Tiny amounts of these seventeen minerals are vital in the production of a broad range of high-tech products, many of them critical for defence industries. Some commentators have likened them to a spice which, added to the recipe even in small amounts, greatly enhances the dish.

For more than a decade, vulnerability to a Chinese rare-earths embargo has been apparent. In 2010 China embargoed rare-earth mineral exports to Japan as part of a territorial spat. Japan backed down but put in place a longer-term response — a $500 million joint venture with Australian company Lynas to produce an alternative supply. Within a couple of years, Lynas was producing rare earths with ore mined in Australia and processed in Malaysia to overcome Australian environmental regulations. It remains the largest alternative source to China, but supplies only a tiny part of the market.

Australia is a major supplier of rare-earth ores but the West has largely left to China the dirty and unprofitable task of processing this ore. China has used the past decade to become very expert. It has scale, cheaper labour and low-cost risk financing provided by the state. It is prepared to put up with the environmental impact of the processing. Its monopoly supply position is a result. We have had the benefit of cheap supply, and turned a blind eye to the vulnerability this created.

Overcoming this vulnerability requires three elements: stringent environmental safeguards, very substantial government subsidies, and time.

Lynas illustrates the environmental challenge. The company initially exported its ore to Malaysia, producing more than a million tons of low-radioactive waste that understandably caused criticism and threatens the future of processing in Malaysia. The proposal to send the waste back to Australia foundered on local environmental opposition. Only after long negotiations and stringent emission controls did the newly constructed processing plant at Kalgoorlie begin production in 2024.

Processing is a risky and expensive business. Iluka, Australia’s other prospective processor, illustrates the challenge. It has a unique advantage — a large stockpile of suitable ore — but still needs a $1.25 billion government loan to make the project commercially viable.

How will the Trump–Albanese deal tackle these issues? Details are not yet public (and probably remain to be worked out). But $US3 billion of government money contributed jointly by the two governments, with further support from the US Ex-Im bank, would be a good start. A government-guaranteed floor price for ore would compensate for the profitless prices China’s oversupply has caused. We have the technical knowledge for processing, enhanced by CSIRO research.

Is the national-security risk worth the considerable commitment of taxpayers’ funds implicit in this deal? The answer may well be that it is, as China’s monopoly in rare-earth minerals gives it such a powerful leverage with serious security implications.

Even this application of substantial government funding still leaves China with embargo power for the immediate future. The critical choke-point is not so much the rare-earth ores (which are, in fact, fairly common in the world) but the processing capacity. Even with expedited regulatory approval, getting processing facilities on-stream will take some years. In the short term, there seems no alternative to working with China to obtain supply continuity.

For Australia, a longer-term issue is at stake. As a medium-sized economy heavily dependent on global trade in general and trade with China in particular, it is not in our interests to foster the fragmentation of international trade and investment into rival blocks with exclusive trading arrangements. Our security partner is America, but our economic partner is China. China is a principal investor in Australia’s existing rare-earth ore mining, with this ore shipped to China for processing. Our comparative advantage is in ore extraction, while China holds comparative advantage in processing.

It is in our interests to maintain multilateral trade and remain open to investment from all countries, including China. We don’t want this deal to send the wrong message to China.

China will understand the response to its embargo. It responded in the same way when America embargoed the export of high-end chips: it set out to manufacture its own. It will also understand that certain national-security goods are so sensitive that some productive capacity will be built and maintained outside China.

When Deng Xiaoping made his oft-quoted comment that “OPEC has oil, we have rare earths,” he wasn’t implying that export embargoes should be seen as a foreign policy tool. This has not, after all, been the basic OPEC strategy. OPEC may exercise some control over price, but its income depends on selling oil to the world. China’s interests are the same. •

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Ten months into the president’s second coming and there’s still no US ambassador announced for Canberra, mirroring the eleven-month wait in his first term. In Trump-world, though, not having a noticeable ambassador can be an asset.

When meeting King Donald, always carry gifts. Albanese couldn’t match the British PM’s trick of handing over an elaborate invitation for the US monarch to ride in a carriage with the British monarch. More practically, Australia offered up rare minerals.

Rare minerals can have lustre and sheen, so that speaks to Trump’s glittery tastes. And a deal worth $8.5 billion was worth one of the signing ceremonies The Donald so loves. Trump and Albanese put pen to the “United States–Australia Framework for Security of Supply in the Mining and Processing of Critical Minerals and Rare Earths.”

Note a telling detail in the naming of what Albanese calls “a significant new chapter in the over seventy years of our formal Alliance.” The detail is that the seventy-year-old treaty is called ANZUS and there, as in most alliance documents, it’s Australia that comes first in the title. Thus, the annual meeting of foreign and defence ministers follows history and alphabetic order in being called AUSMIN.

In the critical minerals agreement, the US gets top billing. This is the gift brought along for the king’s pleasure, and the wrapping suits the king’s tastes. The gift offers Trump important help in his latest bout with China: his new 100 per cent tariffs on China as punishment for Beijing’s strict new controls on rare-earth exports.

A glittery gift. Billions of dollars. A signing ceremony. And help against China. Great scripting and an almost flawless show.

Widen the lens a moment to see why that was almost all Albanese had to achieve. A calm meeting in the White House glides gently by the raucous cavalcade that is Washington’s daily agenda. Consider what was making news as Albanese arrived.

At the weekend, more than five million Americans took part in “No Kings” protests against Trump. His characteristic response was to post a video showing him donning a gold crown and manning a “King Trump” plane to dump poop on the protestors. Only in Trump-world is this a normal response by a leader to his people. In the realms of flabbergast, the US is becoming used to amazing flabber from its king and hardly bothers to gasp at the gast.

The shutdown of the federal government is about to enter its third week because of the budget deadlock in Congress. The White House “government shutdown clock” says it’s all the fault of the Democrats, while Trump uses the moment to slash even harder at bits of the federal government he wants to destroy, sacking thousands of public servants.

As Trump grapples with Gaza and Ukraine, he also seems to want a quick war to overthrow Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro. He has authorised the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela while the US military assembles ships and troops in the Caribbean.

Poor Venezuelans. First, Hugh Chavez, then Maduro, and now Trump shapes as another strongman come to “save” them. Venezuela shares Mexico’s lament (which sounds even better in Spanish): “So far from God, so close to the United States.”

Despite such fevered headlines, I suspect many in Washington are more taken with the last burst of warm weather before the arrival of the fall frost that proclaims autumn. The trees are turning and the leaf colours are already vivid.

Across America, there’s as much interest in how the football season is going as in the strange tackles and scrimmages at the White House. At least gridiron still follows the traditional rules and rhythms.

Tough tackles and frosty weather hit with full force Australia’s ambassador to Washington Kevin Rudd as he sat at the long table in the White House with the rest of Albanese’s delegation. A pesky journalist brought up Citizen Rudd’s old comments about Trump as “village idiot” and “the most destructive president in history.”

Cue Trump to be relatively cute and only mildly cutting about Rudd: “I don’t know anything about him. If he said bad, then maybe he’ll like to apologise. I really don’t know. Did an ambassador say something bad about me? Don’t tell me. Where is he? Is he still working for you?”

Albanese: “Yeah, yeah.” Pointing to his former leader and now ambassador.

Trump: “You said bad?”

Rudd: “Before I took this position, Mr President.”

Trump: “I don’t like you either, and I probably never will.”

After the meeting, Rudd offered a fresh apology to Trump and the president responded that “all is forgiven.”

Mark this as gentle joshing compared to the abuse Trump and team heaped on Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky at the notorious White House meeting back in February. The Australian delegation is putting far more weight on Trump’s repeated pledges to the cameras of his “love” for Australia and Albanese.

Back home, opposition leader Sussan Ley frothed that Rudd should quit or be fired: “When the ambassador is the punchline of the joke and the prime minister is actually laughing at him, I think it tells you all we need to know about the fact it’s probably not reasonable he continue in the role. I don’t believe he should stay in that role and to see the PM actually laughing at his own ambassador in the room when the president made a joke, I think it’s untenable.”

The realist read is that Albanese has both the first and last laugh. He gets lots of love from a meeting with Trump, signs a big deal, and gets a warm endorsement of the alliance. And the only blip is a mild wack at K. Rudd. Albo and Australia win!

Stir in a further Machiavellian interpretation. Albanese gets everything he wants from the Washington visit yet shows his independence (and enrages the federal opposition) by leaving in place Australia’s ambassador.

Now there’s a way of signalling that Australia is a firm ally that still manages to make its own foreign policy decisions. •

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Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has long been a favourite. Tony Abbott, who one senses has been dreaming of a comeback for the past decade, is enjoying a revival. And for several months Andrew Hastie has been trailing his long coat.

Ever since he entered parliament in September 2015, Hastie has been spoken of as a future Liberal leader. His employment history and from-central-casting appearance — I mean that literally, he looks like an actor in an action movie — combine powerfully.

He has overtly inserted himself into the leadership stakes while denying to journalists he is doing any such thing. Journos love a leadership stoush, and quite a few, reporting with a soft brush, have cited the at-first-glance-impressive statistic that at this year’s election, which saw a national 3.1 per cent swing to Labor, Hastie picked up 5.4 percentage points in Canning. Which is true: but in fact all sitting Liberals in Western Australia (a small group to be sure, just four of them) achieved positive swings, and Hastie’s was the smallest.

Western Australia was easily the Coalition’s best state swing-wise — shifting to the government by a mere 0.8 per cent — and if you exclude the four Labor MPs freshly elected in 2022 (beneficiaries of the sophomore surge) the state swung a bit to the Coalition.

But Hastie does seem to have a decent personal vote in Canning — candidates and MPs who once wore uniforms tend to attract that — although nothing like the following built up by his voluble predecessor, the late Don Randall. And anyway, performance in an electorate has little to do with leadership prowess.

Explicitly or not, Price, Abbott and Hastie all advocate dramatically lower immigration, but Hastie promises another, complementary defence against an unpredictable world: economic protectionism, so we can make things again. And the three of them would abandon net zero.

It’s all very Donald Trump, of course, but in our case, unlike America and Europe, the evidence of immigration that voters observe on the street is 100 per cent “legal,” although very high relative to other countries. Protectionism, on the other hand, is even more Australian than American, having been with us until quite recently, in the early 1990s. And Anthony Albanese has himself attempted to tap into such yearnings, most obviously when he named the government’s net zero policy the Future Made in Australia.

Slashing immigration and protecting Australian industry would instinctively appeal to many Australians. But if politics was just about mouthing things most people reflexively agree with, well, Dutton would now be prime minister. The very act of energetically promoting such plans can have unintended consequences.

A standalone plebiscite to dramatically lower immigration would possibly or even probably pass, but in the polling booths at election time the issue slides down the list of voters’ priorities. It’s not that important, so why is that politician going on about it so much? Protectionism, which is more about putting food on the table, would probably be attractive to more electors at gut level, but it would constitute a big economic target. We know many Australians are easily frightened at elections.

Abandoning net zero would obviously damage the Coalition in current or potential “teal” electorates, but elsewhere is probably in itself not a great game-changer either way. Except for one thing: right now, investors and businesses are making decisions based on current government policy and a widespread assumption that the Labor Party will be in office for at least six more years. Taking a platform to the 2028 election that proposes to unscramble all that would conjure up disruption and stress, and perhaps see business donations dry up. This is not 2010–13, when most expected the Coalition to take office and made plans accordingly.

These right-wing aspirants for the Liberal leadership would all take inspiration from Trump’s reputation for having tapped into his country’s mood, even if they’re now wise enough to not advertise it. But Trump lost the 2016 national vote by 2.1 per cent and won in 2024 by 1.5 per cent. Neither election could be called a landslide. He has a particular persona and, in his way, eloquence and communication skills. He’s a very American phenomenon, and Australians are not like Americans. Apart from anything else, we lack the evangelical base that was vital to both his wins.

I am one of the minority who doesn’t assume the 2028 election is a lay-down misère for Labor. I mean, they’ll probably win it, but it’s reasonably open within the parameters of those declining primary votes for both major parties. A lot depends on what the world throws at us.

Meanwhile, Sussan Ley is trying to refashion her diminished parliamentary party. She got the booby prize of post-election opposition leadership, and not even six months out the sharks are already circling. The best thing that could happen to her would be to lose the leadership this year, hang around the backbench watching the debacle of her right-wing replacement, and then allow herself to be enlisted again for 2028.

Six months out from the next poll would be perfect. She is much more electable than those other pretenders to the throne. •

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Still, it’s easy to forget that Australian governments tend to change not because the opposition has set voters’ pulses racing but because the incumbent has worn out its welcome and the alternative seems at least endurable. We’re talking about voters who elected Tony Abbott as prime minister in 2013 with a seriously big majority. Yes, Abbott enjoyed a united team, but they were united because he had delivered huge voting-intention leads in the polls throughout the preceding term.

What is on life support is the two-party system. If we include the support for that 1930s breakaway, Lang Labor, in the national figure, Labor’s primary vote of 34.6 per cent in May this year was its fourth-lowest since 1910 — and the three lower ones all came in the last twelve years.

So, one day the electorate will turf this government out, and something will have to take its place.

What does our best-known calculator, the Mackerras electoral pendulum, tell us about the likely prospects? A 5.2 point swing to the Coalition, taking the national vote to a two-party-preferred 50–50, would reduce Labor’s haul by a net fourteen seats. The government would end up with eighty seats and the Coalition fifty-seven. (The redistributions taking place in three states will probably change these numbers a little.)

But the pendulum’s design means it keeps the thirteen-strong crossbench constant. How realistic is that? Not very. Apart from anything else, changes in major-party votes will have flow-on effects in those “other” electorates.

Let’s stay with that uniform 5.2 point swing but assume it all comes from a uniform first-preference swing from Labor to the Coalition in all 150 electorates. All the other candidates’ primary votes stay the same. Would that mean the crossbench doesn’t change? No, the Labor-to-Coalition shift alone would have repercussions for non-major-party candidates.

First of all, the Greens would regain Griffith in Queensland. The 5.2 point Labor drop would mean that, as in 2022, the two-candidate count comes down to the Coalition versus Greens and the latter, thanks to piles of Labor preferences, easily prevails.

In the same way, Labor would lose Richmond in New South Wales, probably to the Greens, but maybe to the National Party. It would depend on how those preferences from Labor voters flowed. But the party would certainly lose.

The Coalition would take Ryan in Queensland from the Greens purely because of its improved primary vote. And the Liberals would snatch Curtin in Western Australia, Kooying in Victoria and Bradfield in New South Wales for the same reason: increased Liberal support.

Labor’s lower vote would see it lose two seats to independents, Bean in the ACT and Fremantle, Western Australia.

We’re getting to something closer to a contest. The tally now is Labor on seventy-six, the Coalition on sixty-one, nine independents, two Greens, and Rebekha Sharkie and Bob Katter (who are both, strictly speaking, minor-party members). But Labor still comfortably forms government with a 50 per cent national two-party-preferred vote.

What if we bump the swing up to 6.2? Four more seats would shift directly, on the pendulum, from Labor to the Coalition. And the Greens would take Victoria’s Wills and Queensland’s Brisbane from Labor. Now Labor is on seventy, the Coalition on sixty-five and Greens on four, with nine independents plus Sharkie and Katter.

The resulting minority government could be of either persuasion. It would depend on the teal independents, and the identity of the Liberal leader would play a big part. (I’m not assuming the teals would behave as a bloc.)

Add another percentage point, and a 7.2 point swing would give the Coalition seventy-one and Labor sixty-four, with the crossbench as described above. That’s a likely Coalition government, with 52 per cent of the two-party-preferred.

Of course, it won’t be the case that only the major party votes swing. Swings are never uniform, and we’re forgetting our old friend, the sophomore surge, among the twenty-five new Labor MPs, which will assist the government on the pendulum. But the main point here is that when a party does well against the other major party it can also expect to improve its performance in some contests against minor parties and independents.

Is a swing of around seven points attainable? Of course it is. Elections are discrete events, each in different circumstances, and electoral gravity tends towards 50–50. Big wins are usually followed by corrections.

If the size of Labor’s win this year was heavily influenced by the craziness in the United States, with opposition leader Peter Dutton realising too late that his Trumpiness was a serious negative, then the 2028 Australian contest will be played out in utterly unknown parameters. Yes, either Donald Trump or J.D. Vance will be American president and their country will be further along its march to authoritarianism. The repercussions for international events, and especially involving China, are unpredictable.

By then Australia might have blotted our copybook with America over matters such as Israel and Palestine.

But either way the Liberal leader, to be competitive, will need quite clearly not be a Trump or a Vance. In short, the circumstances of the 2028 election, domestic and international, are Rumsfeldian unknowns.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on a pendulum-plus computer routine that spits out seat numbers for a given set of polled primary votes, along the lines of those hypotheticals above, but inputting numbers for all parties. The Mackerras pendulum is still useful, but it needs an additional dimension. •

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Worst fears were realised. Mayhem arrived only weeks after the Australian flag was lowered in Port Moresby.

The eruption, though, was in Canberra. On 11 November, PNG’s new prime minister, Michael Somare, sat in Port Moresby listening to radio accounts of “Kerr’s coup” — the governor-general’s dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government. Marvelling at the most extraordinary day ever in Australian politics, Somare jested to aides: “We’ve only just cut them free and already they’ve stuffed it up!”

The “stuff-up” potential always lurks between Australia and PNG. These two vastly different societies have deep links of history and geography, yet the long intimacy is defined by contrasts. Related, yes, but never a marriage of minds. The distinction between Australia’s influence and its power in PNG is more than diplomatic nicety.

Port Moresby can deal with Canberra using the same tribal war techniques of the PNG Highlands. That observation was given to me by the Australian diplomat David Irvine when he was serving as ambassador in Port Moresby, 1996–99: “They stand on the other side of the valley and scream abuse for several hours to soften you up before coming down to start the real battle or negotiations.” Two robust nations play their politics as hard as their football. That’s why the cautious dance towards a full Australian defence alliance with PNG took five decades.

The alliance moment was supposed to happen in Port Moresby last month during the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Prime minister Anthony Albanese was there to sign the Pukpuk treaty with PNG, Australia’s first formal alliance since the creation of ANZUS with the United States in 1951. Instead, it became another stuff-up moment. PNG’s cabinet failed to reach a quorum; no signature was possible. It wasn’t so much robust politics as lots of PNG politicians out and about across the country for the fiftieth birthday.

Now prime minister James Marape has got his cabinet together and gained approval for the treaty to elevate the “foundational” relationship to “its highest level in history.” He is due in Australia at the weekend for the rugby grand final, so the treaty can go from missed goal in Port Moresby to converted try in Sydney. (This allows me to run one of my old jokes: only two states in the world are strange enough to make rugby league their state religion: PNG because league is slightly less brutal than tribal warfare, and Queensland just because it’s Queensland.)

As Marape and Albanese said in their communiqué in Port Moresby after the signature stuff-up: “The signing of the Papua New Guinea–Australia Mutual Defence Treaty — the Pukpuk Treaty — will elevate the defence relationship between Papua New Guinea and Australia to an Alliance.”

With PNG so vital to Australia’s strategic understanding, it’s surprising, perhaps, that it was up to Port Moresby to suggest the treaty. As the communique noted: “Papua New Guinea proposed this Alliance in its 50th year of independence. Australia was honoured to agree.”

Its core principles will include:

• A mutual defence alliance which recognises that “an armed attack on Australia or Papua New Guinea would be a danger to the peace and security of both countries.”
• A recruitment pathway for Papua New Guinea citizens into the Australian Defence Force. Marape says as many as 10,000 Papua New Guineans could serve with the ADF under “dual arrangements.”
• Efforts to ensure that “any activities, agreements or arrangements with third parties would not compromise the ability of either of the Parties to implement the Treaty.”

The “third party” element in the alliance is the China veto clause. Canberra has replicated recent security agreements with Nauru and Tuvalu that give Australia veto rights over security partnerships with other countries. (Read: China!) The response to claims of paternalism or colonialism is that Australia holds up island states by holding them close.

Next, Canberra wants to get the China veto into a security deal with Vanuatu. Port Vila won’t give the mutual-alliance assurances promised by PNG, but if it signs it will get many alliance-level benefits from Australia.

In what foreign minister Penny Wong calls the “permanent contest” with China in the Pacific, Australia has the huge advantage of being in and of the region. China reminds Australia of what we should be doing anyway. When Australia speaks of being the region’s partner of choice — economically, politically and strategically — it defines a lesser role for China.

The China contest changes the way Canberra thinks about its trilateral dynamic with PNG and Indonesia. In the cautious fifty-year defence dance with PNG, Australia hedged its military pledge for decades because of our fear of “moral hazard” — that giving PNG a guarantee would embolden it to wage a border war with Indonesia. Australia feared having to fight Indonesia because of PNG’s actions.

With the focus now on China, there’s no such fear.

It’s hard to believe these days, but Australia used to be shy about giving a defence or security guarantee to PNG. In the 1970s and 1980s, a gap opened between our secret defence guidance about Australia’s resolve to fight for the island arc to the north and what Canberra actually said to the new nations of the South Pacific. Well into the 1990s, Canberra promised to do its bit so South Pacific states could “look after their own strategic interests.” In a crisis, the focus of Australia’s military would be “evacuation of Australian citizens.”

No longer the colonial master, Australia was discovering how to deal with an independent neighbour, just as it had to build understandings with other newly independent island states. Slowly, the secretive habits of Australia’s defence department shifted: some core interests are so important they need to be publicly stated.

To see how this once operated, come to a meeting in 1985 between Indonesia’s defence minister, General Benny Murdani, and his Australian counterpart, Kim Beazley. Murdani asked the extent of Australia’s military commitment to PNG. Beazley replied: “First, you need to understand that we would fight for PNG to the last Australian soldier. We have done it before. Second, we would never be as emphatic in our expression of that to the PNG government in case they decided to test it.”

Beazley was making clear to Murdani that Australia would go to war to defend PNG’s border against Indonesian incursion. That danger was real because the rebel Free Papua Movement was using bases in PNG to operate in Irian Jaya.

Angered at Port Moresby’s “connivance,” Jakarta made military plans to cross the PNG border in force to destroy rebel camps. The secret version of Canberra’s 1986 Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities feared Indonesian troops would stay in PNG permanently to “occupy the border region to some depth.”

Beazley later said the Indonesia border issue was one reason Australia needed to formalise the PNG defence relationship within a broader 1987 agreement: “The purpose in part was to discourage Indonesia from doing anything in PNG and in part for us to get a handle on what the PNG government was doing.”

Beazley had a fight in cabinet with foreign minister Bill Hayden, who argued against any increase in the security promise beyond a statement that the two countries would consult about matters of common security. Hayden’s “moral hazard” argument was that PNG could blunder into a serious military confrontation with Indonesia and Australia would be forced to do the fighting.

Beazley gained a partial win over Hayden, getting wording that fell short of an ANZUS-style pledge but gave PNG a promise equal to what Australia offered Singapore and Malaysia under the Five Power Defence Arrangements.

The 1987 joint declaration of principles on Australia–PNG relations gave no automatic commitment to PNG. Australia could decide on diplomatic rather than military measures if PNG got into a fight with Indonesia. And the declaration specified external armed attack threatening national security, so it could not be invoked for internal conflict in what became the Bougainville war.

Australia’s 1987 promise to PNG didn’t have any ANZUS-style reservations (“acting in accordance with its constitutional principles”). Yet the guarantee had to be part of a general declaration of principles because Canberra and Port Moresby couldn’t agree on the terms of a separate defence treaty. A certain vagueness was retained.

A decade later, in 1997, the Howard government’s strategic policy described Australia’s “compelling” interests in PNG and readiness “to commit forces to resist external aggression.” For the first time, the unclassified document expanded the PNG guarantee to make it a Melanesian pledge, with the “same considerations that apply to PNG” also covering Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Having given a PNG-level promise to Melanesia, the 1997 statement then embraced the whole of the Pacific Islands Forum, recognising that “any attack on them — or penetration by a potentially hostile power — would be serious for our security and that, as with PNG, we would very likely provide substantial support in the unlikely event that any of them faced aggression from outside the region.”

What Australia could hardly say officially to PNG in the 1980s it was now affirming to the whole of the South Pacific a decade later. Timor-Leste was soon added.

Canberra’s mindset changed. No more moral hazard. The focus in PNG became China, not Indonesia. Now the fear was that PNG and the South Pacific would take the security guarantee for granted — as a mere statement of Australian interests — and that it wouldn’t carry enough weight in their choices.

Over the past decade, the military element of the permanent contest has been the dread of China getting a naval base in PNG, Vanuatu or Solomon Islands. Australia’s first new alliance in seventy-four years is a decisive step in facing the China challenge. PNG’s pledge is to join the scrum and do its share of tackling. •

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This month’s numbers, averaging around 11 or 12 per cent, are also nothing like some far-right parties in Europe, the highest-profile from this distance being Reform in Britain and France’s National Rally bloc, both on around 30 per cent and comfortably in the lead, and Germany’s AfD, in the mid-to-high 20s, sometimes leading the pack, sometimes behind the governing CDU.

In Italy, meanwhile, the far-right Georgia Meloni is actually prime minister, and in other countries similar parties sit in governing coalitions.

One Nation is not remotely within distance of those parties. But a couple of recent polls have them slightly ahead of the Greens (Resolve has 12 per cent, Essential 13) and hence in third place. (Essential stubbornly persists with its slightly insane post-2019 policy of not publishing data net of undecideds; there’s a better than even chance that the 13 is really a 14.)

Pollsters are probably overstating the party’s support. When taking their mid-term voting-intention surveys they must decide whether to include a minor party in the same breath as the major ones, or leave it to a secondary list along with the ones you might not have heard of. The first strategy tends to overstate support for the small party, the second tends to understate it. These days the Greens and One Nation always feature in the first list, which is why both go on to underperform at the ballot box. (The Greens less in recent years.)

At this year’s federal election, for example, One Nation received 6.4 per cent in the lower house, a couple of points below what most of the final surveys had suggested.

One reason for the party’s apparent doubling in support since the election might be that the Liberal Party is now led by a “centrist,” even if she’s obliged not to behave like one. Perhaps Peter Dutton, with his regular forays into immigration, racially tinged rhetoric and fierce opposition to the Voice, kept a few potential Hansonites in his tent. Last month’s March for Australia might also have galvanised some people to prioritise immigration when participating in surveys.

But why hasn’t One Nation reached the heights of similar parties in Europe? And more generally, why doesn’t Australia exhibit similar levels of “populism” to Europe and America? Total support for far-right minor parties at this year’s election barely cracked 10 per cent.

I reckon uncontrolled immigration is a major factor in our outlier status: we have virtually zero. Even when “the boats” peaked under the Rudd and Gillard governments, the numbers as a proportion of our population were minuscule compared with what other advanced democracies experience today. In Europe and the United States the huge numbers of “illegals” can be evidenced in many camps, streets and, infamously, hotels, while over here they only appeared on television news.

Electoral systems are a factor, too. With some exceptions, chief among them France and Britain, European countries tend to elect their lower (or sole) chambers via a form of proportional representation. Under such a system down under, Hanson’s party would probably have got a foothold in the House of Representatives in both 1998 and 2016 — as they did in the PR-elected Senate at those elections — and might have played a role in deciding who formed government. From little things big things have been known to grow, although One Nation’s record of losing senators needs to be taken account of. On the other hand, both Britain’s Reform and France’s National Rally managed to overcome the single-member-district hurdle.

There’s the persona of Hanson herself. It’s very likely that in the late 1990s and early noughties her unpolished inarticulateness played a big role in her rise, contrasting with the slickness of those “elites” and the “establishment” who — in her supporters’ view — ridiculed and looked down on her, and hence on them. But perhaps that shtick can only get you so far.

The successful European far-right leaders, according to reports, tend to have the gift of the gab. (I’m monolingual so can only judge Farage, who certainly does.) Many have university degrees and some were born into privilege. In America of course, where the far right has hijacked the major centre-right party, Donald Trump’s undoubted communication skills and outsized personality have been key.

Also in the United States the highly decentralised, partisan-infused, ramshackle election apparatus provided fertile soil for Trump to succeed in persuading some people of his false claims about the 2020 election. In Europe, trust in elections seems to vary. Norway, where it seems to remain high (I couldn’t find any surveys) has nonetheless taken preemptive measures to increase transparency and guard against potential future disinformation campaigns. Australia should do the same.

Our Australian Electoral Commission and its state and territory counterparts deservedly enjoy wide support. Not only do they have legislated statutory independence, but the AEC is most unusual in conducting all aspects of elections. (In most countries, local government plays a major role.)

But our Achilles heel is our voting system, which is widely misunderstood. The intricacies of electing senators are unfathomable for nearly all Australians, though the identity of the government is not decided in that chamber, and the roughly proportional votes-to-seats results do make sense.

It’s the “alternative vote” in the lower house — the thing we call preferential voting — that provides scope for mischief now that major party support is so low. Most Australians probably don’t understand how it works. No data exists for this, but anecdotally many people believe parties “give” each other preferences (as actually was the case for the Senate from 1984 to 2014); journalists’ jargon, which often implies this, is largely to blame. Others assume a second preference has less value than a first, or don’t understand why it doesn’t. Many questioned how Labor could form government in 2022 despite easily losing the primary vote.

France actually has a very similar system to ours, but it’s conducted on two separate occasions. When, between the first and second rounds of last year’s legislative election, some parties made agreements to selectively withdraw from some electorates so as to not split the anti-National Rally vote — which meant that Le Pen’s party won just a quarter of seats despite topping the first-round vote — most French would have understood what had transpired, not least because they (or at least the two-thirds of registered voters) participated in that second round. Not so with preferential voting.

The fate of National Rally in 2024 is analogous to Hanson’s in the Queensland federal electorate of Blair in 1998. She topped the primary vote but failed to win because Labor voters overwhelming preferenced the Liberal candidate thanks to Labor’s how-to-vote cards and general advocacy. Not surprisingly, the result fuelled conspiracy theories among her supporters that can still be heard today; Hanson herself, in her 2016 comeback speech, falsely claimed that “the introduction of full preferential voting… cost me the seat.” Full preferential voting has been with us federally since 1918.

One day a wilier, more articulate far-right politician might emerge who is also a dab hand at spreading dangerous porkies. They might even, as in the United States, come through a major party; Dutton showed he was at least willing to try to spread untruths about electoral shenanigans during the Voice referendum campaign. Our much-misunderstood method of electing members to the House of Representatives (and its counterpart lower houses across the mainland) is a big juicy target.

Some will say the answer is education, but that’s been tried forever. Journalists can’t change their spots. The answer instead is to change the electoral system, preferably to proportional representation (for other reasons as well, and despite any uncomfortable European experiences) or, failing that, to an actual two-round vote.

We do not know what delights America and the rest of the world will throw at us in coming years. But like Norway’s, our legislators and electoral commissions should try to anticipate possible future enablers of widely believed disinformation about how MPs are elected, and build appropriate safeguards. •

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What’s more, the agency I had landed in still harboured fond memories of having been the fiefdom of the former Country Party leader John “Black Jack” McEwen. As trade minister, this much-feared figure was postwar Australia’s high priest of protectionism as bulwark of the nation’s manufacturing base. “Under McEwen you either shared the minister’s opinion or had none at all,” a departmental veteran told me.

The department was dedicated to opening up markets for Australian exports, but my decrying of Australia’s own trade barriers was considered a mere youthful indiscretion. In the early 1980s, after the nation had been governed for most of the past thirty years by a Coalition headed by a Liberal Party supposedly committed to economic liberalism, these barriers seemed as unassailable as ever. How did the Liberals and the Country Party keep the proverbial lid on what could have been as great a cause of mutual strain as net zero today?

In the late nineteenth century the trade issue defined the discordant political cultures of the two main Australian colonies, Victoria being the home of arch protectionists David Syme and his acolyte Alfred Deakin while footloose New South Wales was committed to free trade. It constituted the greatest policy choice facing a still formative Australia as the twentieth century approached. As an obstacle to Federation, it had potential to be a nation breaker.

Even after Federation was finally achieved in 1901 there remained a fundamental question of whether the new nation would try to compete boldly on international markets or withdraw into cosseting domestically oriented infant industries. Unsurprisingly, the young Commonwealth trended towards the easy option of protection against imports, only partly made up for by the abolition of trade barriers between the states. Their borders are still dotted by now quaint colonial-era customs houses. Any lingering doubt as to where Australia was headed was ended by the Massy–Greene tariff of 1921, which embedded tariff policy by — among other things — creating the Tariff Board to assess industry requests for protection.

But surely the formation of an earlier coalition in 1923 between the urban based Nationalist Party of Stanley Bruce and Earle Page’s Country Party would have changed things? One of the Country Party’s foundational gripes — long before Black Jack took the leadership — was that tariffs and other trade barriers imposed unfair costs on primary producers, and Page and his rural confreres now had nearly half the spots in cabinet, with Page himself as treasurer.

Well, no, the Bruce–Page government didn’t make much difference. One fundamental reason is that the costs of protection are spread so thinly as to be less than obvious, while its benefits are highly concentrated on the fortunate few. Continuing to rip off great numbers of consumers has always been far easier than exposing inefficient manufacturers to international competition.

Also, the Country Party in government discovered the joys of what became known as protection all round: if you can’t get rid of tariffs then you compensate for the costs they impose by building up a smorgasbord of schemes to subsidise primary producers. This nice little earner of a strategy became a staple of Country Party policy. Page and co also found that remaining in government was necessary to keep directing funds to (mostly much-needed) rural services and infrastructure.

Hence the Bruce–Page government resisted the not infrequent tariff tantrums of rural radicals from the Country Party’s outer fringes. Bruce persuaded himself that tariffs actually built up the home market for primary goods but, as one of our few prime ministers with a commercial background, harboured a disconcerting soft spot for business efficiency. Just before losing office in 1929 his government moved to inquire more closely into its own tariff regime. Its hapless Labor successor, headed by James Scullin, raised tariffs to unprecedented levels in a vain effort to cope with the Great Depression.

Postwar, the Liberals’ lack of economic nous let McEwen dominate trade and industry policy. So much so that he became one of the very few Australian political leaders to give his name to an economic strategy. “McEwenism” was more than just a cynical exercise in expanding the Country Party’s rural support base by encompassing manufacturers. McEwen held that a prosperous Australia needed to build its ability to defend itself by expanding its population, and that only a manufacturing sector protected by tariffs, quotas and suchlike could provide the mass employment required to sustain this. Subsidies, meanwhile, would keep primary producers happy.

The end result was that “the whole of the Australian economy is protected,” McEwen proudly proclaimed. His conviction that Australian manufacturing would grow overlooked the limitations of internationally uncompetitive industries limited to a small domestic market while encased in a business culture cosily attuned to government assistance.

McEwen’s considerable personal standing didn’t help. Menzies considered him to be the Coalition’s most capable minister, and even the acerbic Paul Hasluck respected his commitment to the national interest — even if he otherwise treated politics as “a contest for advantage, not a matter of doctrines or principles.” There were occasional suggestions — and not just from within the Country Party — that McEwen would make an excellent prime minister. It took until the early 1960s for his economic doctrine to finally attract serious criticism from within his party’s coalition partner.

Many early public attacks on the excesses of McEwenism emanated from a self-styled “modest member” from South Australia, one Bert Kelly. This Liberal backbencher correctly argued that the tariff wall constricted the national economy by propping up industries for which we had no natural advantage, just as “you can, with the expenditure of immense effort, grow bananas at the South Pole.” Yet the Country Party remained under McEwen’s domination, while both the Liberals and Labor bathed in a “pleasant pool of apathy.” Kelly did, at least, give his fellow Liberals due credit for tolerating his seemingly quixotic fixation.

More serious for McEwen was criticism starting to emanate from the Tariff Board under its chair Leslie Melville and his successor Alf Rattigan. By the mid-1960s a graziers’ organisation called the Basic Industries Group and a particularly rambunctious economics journalist, Max Newton, were campaigning with a vigour that Black Jack found decidedly irksome. They were almost as annoying as one of his fellow ministers — an ambitious little guy from Sydney with big ears and a sing-song voice.

Billy McMahon is not normally cast as a political hero. Whatever personality flaws he bore, he was a serious student of economic policy. Zachary Gorman, historian of Australian liberalism, called him a “deeply philosophical classical liberal” for his efforts to uphold individualism and oppose the concentration of power. This, and his emergence under prime minister Harold Holt as a capable treasurer, helps explain the seeming mystery of why he eventually became Liberal leader.

McMahon was McEwen’s most serious Liberal challenger. They clashed not just over industry protection but also over creation of an Industry Development Corporation to lend to and invest in industry, and McMahon’s refusal to devalue the dollar to match Britain’s own devaluation in 1967. McEwen accused him of encouraging the Basic Industries Group, and of leaking information to Newton.

So it was not a total surprise that when McMahon moved to contest the party leadership in the wake of Holt’s untimely death, Black Jack decreed that a McMahon prime ministership would end the Coalition. In doing so he produced one of the best-known Australian political remarks: “Bill, I will not serve under you because I don’t trust you.” Whether McMahon would have otherwise won the party-room ballot remains doubtful: there was no groundswell of support for him before or after McEwen’s veto. Nor was there any need to attribute McEwen’s hard line to the quite false rumour that McMahon was gay, to use the parlance of a later era. I lost count of the number of times I had been assured of the contrary.

The remarkable thing here is that the McEwen–McMahon clash was the only time in the twenty-three years from 1949 to 1972 that protectionism became a major public issue between the Country Party and a senior Liberal. McEwen eventually lifted his veto shortly after John Gorton nearly lost the 1969 election.

Whitlam’s sudden twenty-five per cent across the board tariff cut of 1973 was soon written off as a political blunder. It took until the early 1980s for things to really begin to change. Bafflement over the stagflation that followed the two oil shocks and a growing fear that the Australian economy was facing irreversible decline encouraged the emergence of the Dries in the Liberal party room, not to mention such robustly economically rational Labor figures as Bill Hayden and Peter Walsh.

In the end it was those great (no sarcasm intended) economic reformers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating who belatedly led the way towards modernising and internationalising a moribund Australian economy, crucially supported by opposition leaders Hewson, Downer, and Howard.

Now, I am no climate change expert: nor am I confident that net zero is a great goal for Australia to aspire to. But I will make a few admittedly broad-brush observations on how the Liberals might relate to their Coalition partner on such a tough issue, drawing on the sorry saga of their predecessors’ acquiescence with McEwenism.

Lesson one is to develop a strong internal capacity for developing robust policy. If you don’t have a well thought out position in which you have intellectual faith, how can you even begin to stand up to the McEwens of this world? Nurture ideas, tolerate debate, read worthwhile books, and conduct research. Too many Liberal MPs of the 1950s simply didn’t do enough in this department.

Second, value the Coalition as a ready-made basis for hammering out a balanced policy package. It’s far better to negotiate as joined at the hip partners than to resort to public spatting that leaves both sides fearful of being seen as having backed down. The Coalition has been more or less functional for most of the past century, so it must have something to offer. It worked for Bruce and Page, so why can’t it for their political descendants? And remember also how the Nationals largely went along with economic reform under Howard.

It’s up to the Liberals here as the senior Coalition partner (well, those of them who favour net zero) to balance National demands with a wider view of what is good for Australia. Don’t condemn the Nats for protecting their regional constituency — it’s what they do, and might even generate a few good ideas for a balanced policy package that addresses net zero’s manifest costs.

Third, be patient about policy change. Plant an idea and encourage it to grow as changing circumstances make its merits more obvious. Good ideas are the ultimate vehicles of power, they just take time to achieve majority favour. Bert Kelly was seen as an obsessive, and McMahon as a boat rocker, but ultimately their ideas won out.

Fourth, one slightly “out there” thought. Don’t always dismiss the seeming crank: stay alert to the near inevitability that in today’s ever-growing oceans of dottiness there swim a few Kellys who have done their policy homework and are truly brave, not merely obsessive. Stanley Bruce said wisely of his rather manic deputy that “if you had the patience to listen to Page, he’d come up with a helluva good idea now and then.”

Finally, remember that no major issue is ever permanently resolved, so never rest on your laurels. Those trade department sages were oh-so wrong to assure me that protectionism would last forever. And now even such a manifestly bad idea as protectionism is coming back. Who would have thought that a prominent Liberal would be calling for the revival of the Australian car industry? History doesn’t go in circles, but nor does it ever cease.

Incidentally, I didn’t last long in the trade department. I’ve no idea why. •

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Under Labor’s policy, around $7.7 billion a year had been collected via a price on carbon emissions and returned to Australians through various channels but mostly direct tax cuts. The Abbott government, by contrast, paid companies to reduce their emissions. It was budgeted to cost around $2.5 billion over four years.

Wielding a nifty pea and thimble, Hunt used the emissions cut under the carbon price, the total money churned, the emissions cuts promised by businesses and the dollars paid to them to pronounce that “Labor’s $15.4 billion carbon tax reduced emissions at over $1300 per tonne” while his government’s scheme “averages $13.95 per tonne.” Labor’s “failed carbon tax was more than ninety-three times more expensive.”

This was a false comparison in many ways, the main one being the dollars: one figure (the ERF’s) was a cost to the budget and the other (Gillard’s) wasn’t.

That’s political spin for you — nice work if you can get away with it — and if you’re very lucky journalists will pick it up and run. In this case no journo obliged with more vigour than the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan who, in a celebratory column, wrote that Hunt (yes, Hunt personally) was “going to cut Australia’s carbon emissions four times more than Labor did with its carbon tax at 1 per cent price per tonne of emissions…”

Sheridan evidently liked the cut of Hunt’s jib, for his columns in those years were littered with glowing mentions of the frontbencher — too many to list, in fact, but here’s a sample and a final farewell.

Hunt is long gone, and these days the object of Sheridan’s besottedness seems to be Matt Canavan, the coal-revering Queensland LNP senator. Canavan was a minister in the Turnbull and Morrison governments, and Sheridan is very much of the opinion he should be back on the frontbench. In particular, Greg shares his conviction that the Coalition should abandon the net-zero-by-2050 target.

In May this year, Canavan shared on social media a screenshot of a London Daily Telegraph headline “New Zealand Abandons Jacinta Arden’s Net Zero Push” and added his own words: “New Zealand just dropped net zero. Why do we remain committed to this madness?”

The Tele’s headline, repeated in the article’s introduction, was fake news: New Zealand hasn’t dropped net zero. (But if you google the words you’ll find them gleefully repeated many times.) The piece instead referred to that country’s National government’s plans to “invest NZ$200m (£90m) in new offshore gas fields,” overturning Labour’s fossil fuel policy. If expanding gas exploitation is abandoning net zero, then the Albanese government has also dropped the target.

Within days, Sheridan was writing that the “Nationals in New Zealand… are abandoning the inherently fraudulent concept of net zero” and Australia’s federal opposition should do the same. And, of course, “By far the most policy-competent and intellectually substantial National is Queensland senator Matt Canavan.”

Sheridan articles railing against net zero — both in itself and as Coalition policy — and advocating Canavan’s return to the frontbench have been many. One, in early August, began by asserting that “there’s not a centre-right party in the English-speaking world, Nationals senator Matt Canavan points out, that remains committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” though he equivocated further down that “New Zealand’s government has kept the notional commitment but reversed Labour’s main policy actions.”

There was more. The Economist magazine, that “high-gloss rendition of every globalist piety,” has “crossed a Rubicon by declaring the world should abandon net zero by 2050 as a hard target and conceive of it as a “more of a guideline strategy.’” Sheridan has repeated this interpretation of the Economist’s view several times since, including last Sunday on ABC’s Insiders.

Is it true? Well, it’s nuanced. The magazine’s editorial stated that the “scientific rationale for net zero is strong” and an “end to warming requires the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to stop increasing… The logic is inescapable.” But the politics being fraught, and politics being the art of the possible, leaders need to make sure the perfect doesn’t get in the way of the good.

The magazine distinguished between wealthy countries (like Australia) and the majority that aren’t but are trying to be. The latter’s carbon ambitions, starting off such low bases, are “[in] many cases… barely physically imaginable, let alone politically feasible.” But wealthy countries, rather than “abandon stringent net-zero targets outright” should “find ways to ease [such targets] into the ‘more of a guideline’ category,” even if it means sacrificing economic purity.

So the Economist lauded, for example, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s decision to “rescind the aspects of Canada’s carbon-pricing scheme that affect [voters] directly.” That was the largest component of that country’s scheme, a tax on fuel, applied at the level of consumption. (Australia has never had such a tax. And Canada’s federal government still has a carbon price rather like our 2012–14 one but involving much smaller dollar amounts, as well various state abatement schemes.)

It’s a huge exaggeration, at best, to say the Economist takes the view that we should “forget about net zero as a guiding principle because it’s just not going to happen,” as Sheridan did on Insiders on Sunday. Greg’s most recent net zero piece, on Wednesday this week, had something for everyone: advice for Ley, more Matt, another dubious reference to the Economist, even Greg Hunt.

As far as I can tell (cheat sheet: AI) no country has followed Sheridan’s advice and dropped net zero, not even Argentina (yet) under Javier Milei. But some parliamentary oppositions have, including the British Tories — and Nigel Farage’s Reform party, which is leading that country’s voting-intentions opinion polls.

Australia might or might not get to net zero, but it’s hard to be optimistic about the planet’s ability to hit the goal by 2050. If global warming was restricted to the geographic area in which the carbon was let loose into the atmosphere, the incentives would be different. As it is, every country is encouraged to freeload.

But is the Economist’s realpolitik actually realistic? Can a government proclaim a goal that’s only an aspiration? Maybe the Albanese government is conforming to that prescription by having a net zero target, albeit one that many experts believe won’t be met, while not moving ahead of the international pack. And another actual carbon price for this country — forget about it.

And what of the domestic politics down under? I’m never one to project the most recent election result and/or current surveys into the future and forecast government victories as far as the eye can see. Parties in opposition tend to flaunt their flaws, and these are particularly discernible through the prism of disastrous polling numbers. The same defects are also present during their stints in office, though, and they are a driver of the ever-falling major-party support. But the total major-party election share after preferences still has to add to 100 per cent.

The electoral cycle goes on, voters will one day well and truly tire of this Labor government, as they tired of the Coalition three years ago, and a change of government will be in the offing, albeit in the context of that expanding crossbench.

With the evidently red-pilled Andrew Hastie promising to quit the frontbench if net zero is not discarded, other Liberals rumoured to intend the same, and the Nationals deeply anti-zero, Sussan Ley’s five-month-old leadership appears fragile.

Mr Sheridan will probably get his wish on Coalition climate policy, if not necessarily the full Canavan-as-shadow-minister quinella. Abandoning net zero in opposition probably doesn’t make much difference to how voters see them. The median Coalition MP has never seemed to believe global warming is real, let alone that Australia should do anything about it. It didn’t stop them winning three elections on the trot.

The danger for the opposition lies in the prospect of people like Canavan having an influence on energy policy in general. He is, for example, very keen on building new coal power stations — a fringe position. If undoing moves towards renewable energy actually became opposition policy it wouldn’t only be a “signal” to the electorate that they’re a bunch of out-of-touch blokey troglodytes. It would also mean taking big policy targets to future elections.

Back when the “carbon tax” was legislated in 2011 and implemented the following year, it was against the backdrop that most people expected the next election would result in the policy being undone. Today, by contrast, virtually everyone assumes that 2028 will be a shoo-in for Labor and the earliest the Coalition can conceivably take office is 2031.

So, twelve to fourteen years ago, big business made plans for the demise of the carbon price and then agitated like hell and poured cash into the Liberal coffers to make sure that happened. That won’t be the case in 2028 if the opposition is promising to upend a more deeply embedded climate policy.

Through my prism, one election result never tells us much about the next one. But that general expectation about the 2028 election is probably correct, and the chief reason is that America’s White House will contain either Donald Trump or J.D. Vance and will hence still be a madhouse.

If the Coalition campaigns then, or in 2031, to unscramble the renewables egg, regardless of how on the nose the government is, and even if voters are blaming it for high power prices… well we know from experience that even an electorate ready to toss out an incumbent can be driven back into its arms if the alternative is too stress-inducing.

The big danger for Coalition MPs is that they put their climate change policy money where most of their mouths are. •

The post Toxic emissions appeared first on Inside Story.

That remaining group of respondents would then be asked an “open” or “free-answer” question, allowing them to voice viewpoints that might otherwise have been overlooked. Only then, he suggested, should they be asked a question that required them to answer “yes,” “no” — or “no opinion.” Their answers to the earlier questions would allow pollsters to see whether a “no opinion” response was based on ignorance, indifference, confusion, or the respondent’s wrestling with conflicting considerations. A “yes” or “no” would be followed by questions designed to discover why a respondent held this view.

Finally, respondents would be asked about the intensity with which they hold their views. In Gallup’s original polling manifesto, intensity hadn’t mattered: if a poll was a “sampling referendum” designed to guide legislators, as Gallup argued, then every “vote” should count equally, regardless of how strongly or weakly held. But if voters were indifferent to an issue, they would be unlikely to turn out for a referendum. And in the absence of a referendum, legislators would be less likely to be guided by opinions that were wishy-washy than by opinions that were firm — opinions that might induce a change of vote.

In a preface, Gallup also emphasised the importance of the “split ballot” technique as a way of monitoring the impact of different ways of writing the survey questions (though not different kinds of response alternatives). The American Institute of Public Opinion had deployed the split-ballot, he said, since 1938.

Against Gallup’s five-point plan, how does Australian issues polling — as opposed to voting-intention polling — measure up? Pollsters are asking issues questions all the time, but the comparison is more revealing when they all pose questions about the same issue at roughly the same time. The question of Palestinian recognition is the most recent — and, as it turns out, quite revealing — Australian example.

Depending on which poll you look at, the federal government’s decision last month to recognise Palestine at the September meeting of the United Nations was supported by almost half of the Australian public, or by no more than a third, or by just a quarter.

A nationwide poll taken by DemosAU on 31 July suggested that Australia’s recognition of “a Palestinian state in the present circumstances” would be supported by 45 per cent of respondents. But a Resolve poll, conducted on behalf of Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, that went into the field on the day of the government’s announcement (11–16 August), found the move to recognise Palestine was supported by just 24 per cent. Then came an Essential poll, conducted a week or two after the announcement (20–26 August), which reported that the decision was supported by a third of its respondents — fewer than the DemosAU poll but more than Resolve’s.

None of the polls — all of them conducted online — were based on a sample drawn from a list of all voters. Instead, they drew from panels into which potential respondents had mostly opted in. So, the quality of the sampling offers no obvious reason for preferring one set of results over either of the others.

At the May election, Resolve’s estimate of the parties’ vote shares was more accurate than the estimates ventured by Essential or DemosAU by around a percentage point. But on the Palestine question we are not talking about a difference of one or two percentage points, as we usually are with election forecasts; we are talking about differences of as much as twenty-one points.

Resolve’s sample for the Palestinian poll (1800 people) was bigger than either DemosAu’s (1079) or Essential’s (1034), but that’s unlikely to explain much of the difference either. The DemosAU poll, conducted in a single day, was what the British call a “quickie”; the Resolve and Essential polls were conducted over six or seven days, which is one way to boost very low (though undisclosed) response rates.

What, then, explains the differences in the levels of support and opposition across the polls? Most likely, the pollsters’ introductions or preambles (when these were used) to their question, the wording of the question, and the range and nature of the response options.

DemosAU: Conducted late July, the poll that produced the biggest proportion in favour of recognition introduced its question thus: “The recognition of a Palestinian state is a topic of international debate. Some countries have formally recognised a Palestinian state as a step towards supporting a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestinian conflict. Others believe such recognition should only occur as part of a negotiated peace agreement between the parties.” Then came the question: “Would you support or oppose Australia formally recognising a Palestinian state in the present circumstances?” The response options, as published, were “support,” “oppose,” “don’t know.” As presented to survey respondent, they appear to have been ordered differently: “support,” “don’t know,” “oppose.”

Formally, the introduction was “balanced”: reasons were given — one for recognition, one against. Whether the respondents themselves considered the two reasons to be balanced — and how one might establish whether they did — is another matter.

While each of the reasons was drawn from the current debate, they were not necessarily the most powerful each side had to offer, nor were they necessarily of comparable importance. In September 2022, the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network listed at least ten reasons for recognising a Palestinian state “now.” And following the government’s announcement, Peter Jennings, formerly of the defence department, listed nine reasons not to do so. As it happens, recognising “a Palestinian state as a step towards supporting a two-state solution” was not on APAN’s 2022 list, and recognition “only occur[ing] as part of a negotiated peace agreement” doesn’t appear to be on Jennings’s list.

Since the argument in favour of recognition was the first consideration mentioned, and online polling can generate a “primacy effect” — the tendency for respondents to choose the first option they are offered — the introduction might (unwittingly) have encouraged support for recognition. Moreover, if we assume that most respondents preferred peace to war, the reason for supporting recognition may have seemed more constructive, hence more attractive, than the reason for opposing it — the appeal of the immediate (“a step”) especially attractive to those who placed some distant future (“should only occur”) at a discount.

Note, too, that by the standard Flesch–Kincaid measure of intelligibility, the introduction was “very difficult to read.” The difficulty of comprehending the introduction may have encouraged “satisficing”: respondents struggling with the cognitive load, ticking the first box (“support”), and moving on. The cognitive challenge (and the placement of the “don’t know” option) may also help to account for the fact that nearly a third of the sample (32 per cent) responded by saying “don’t know.”

Having answered the question, those who had expressed a view one way or the other were “engaged in a chat-style discussion with a research AI specially programmed by the DemosAU team to probe their opinions and attitudes in more detail.” From these discussions “key themes” emerged.

For those who supported recognition these were: “Historical Land Claims and Right To Self-Determination” (to which 39 per cent of respondents were said to have referred); “Humanitarian Concerns” (34 per cent); “Path to Conflict Resolution” (26 per cent); and “Response To Israel’s Recent Military Actions” (15 per cent). What proportion expressed other views, or no view, is not disclosed.

For those opposed to recognition, the themes that emerged were: “Concern Over Legitimising Hamas” (40 per cent); “Not Australia’s Business” (20 per cent); “Preconditions for Peace as Conflict Resolution” (18 per cent); and “Belief that Israel Holds Exclusive Sovereignty for Historical/Biblical Reasons” (15 per cent). Again, the proportion offering other reasons or no reason at all was not stated.

Both sets of reasons suggest that while the considerations mentioned in the introduction to the question may have primed some — bringing considerations to the fore that might not otherwise have entered their thinking — they certainly didn’t prime all. “Path to Conflict Resolution,” the only consideration that approximated the reason referred to in the preamble, was mentioned by no more than a quarter of those in favour of recognition; “Preconditions for Peace as Conflict Resolution,” the only consideration against recognition that approximated the consideration to which the preamble had referred, was mentioned by less than a quarter.

What of those respondents who registered as “don’t know” when asked about recognition? Were they unable to decide between conflicting considerations or did they know nothing and had never considered the question?

Resolve: The question asked by Resolve and response options it offered were much more problematic; so problematic that it shouldn’t have been asked — or, if asked, not published. It’s an example of poor polling and woeful oversight by newspapers that commission polls and find themselves ill-equipped to distinguish good polling from bad.

“The prime minister has recently said Australia, along with several other countries, will recognise Palestine at the UN assembly in September,” Resolve told respondents. This introduction lacked formal balance; by referring only to the prime minister and countries that supported him, it was weighted (however inadvertently) in favour of his position. At the same time, it ran together things about which respondents might have had separate views — the position of the prime minister, and the position (as DemosAU had done) of “several other countries.”

Following this introduction, respondents were asked, “Which is your preference on this question of recognition: Australia should recognise Palestine in September’s UN meeting regardless of who is in power” (24 per cent ticked this box); “Australia should wait until Hamas is replaced and/or when Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist first” (32 per cent); or “No change” (44 per cent)?

While there was one box respondents could tick to indicate their support for the government’s move, they were offered two to indicate their opposition. To what, in the first box, was the phrase “regardless of who is in power” supposed to refer? To Labor and the Coalition in Australia? To Likud or some other party in Israel? Or to Hamas or some other entity in Palestine? On the Flesch–Kincaid scale, this option was “difficult to read.”

The second box — “wait until Hamas is replaced and/or when Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist” — rolled two considerations into one, separated by “and/or.” Even if we assume that “Hamas” was an entity with which respondents were familiar, that they also understood that an entity called “Palestine” had yet to recognise “Israel’s right to exist,” and that they understood these things in roughly the same way, the use of “and/or” made this a daunting choice. On the Flesch–Kincaid scale, this statement, too, was “difficult to read.”

What about the third box, “no change” — referencing the fact (nowhere spelled out) that Australia didn’t recognise Palestine at the time? Though the second and third alternatives should have been mutually exclusive — respondents, after all, could only choose one of the two — those who ticked the second box might just as easily have ticked the third since the belief that “Australia should wait until Hamas is replaced” and the belief that “Australia should wait until Palestine considers recognising Israel’s right to exist” (the second option) were not alternatives to supporting the status quo but reasons for supporting the status quo (the third option) — unless, of course, we assume that “no change” meant “no change, whatever happens.”

“Don’t know” was not a response the question allowed. Preventing a “don’t know” may encourage those with an opinion to express it, but only at the cost of forcing those without an opinion either to skip the question (creating a potential non-response problem) or to select an option they don’t necessarily support — here, most likely, in large numbers, “no change.” That “no change” was the most popular of the three alternatives also may be explained by the fact that it was the only alternative “easy to read.”

If DemosAU exaggerated the level of support for the government’s move to recognise a Palestinian state, the Resolve poll surely underestimated it.

Essential: “To what extent do you support or oppose the Australian government’s move to recognise the state of Palestine?,” Essential asked. There was no introduction. This was the question that produced an answer in favour of recognition mid-way between the result obtained by DemosAu and the result obtained by Resolve. If the other two questions were “very difficult to read,” this one was simply “difficult to read.”

Respondents were offered five-point scale: “strongly oppose” (20 per cent); “somewhat oppose” (10 per cent); “neither support nor oppose” (37 per cent); “somewhat support” (16 per cent); “strongly support” (18 per cent). Responses were evenly spread — some might say randomly spread: 34 per cent in favour, 30 per cent opposed — a difference of just four points — with 37 per cent saying “neither support nor oppose.”

The way the results were published might have suggested that “strongly support” was the first option, but “strongly oppose” came first. So, any “primacy effect” would have boosted opposition to the proposal, not support. Essential, the only one of the three polling organisations to be a member of the Australian Polling Council, was the only one of the three to publish its questionnaire.

How do these polls measure up against Gallup’s “quintamensional plan”? None sought to establish whether respondents had “given any attention or thought to the issue,” much less what interest in or information about the issue they brought to the interview. The closest we can get to estimating how many had given little or no “attention or thought to the issue” is the proportion registered by the polls as “don’t know” or as “neither support nor oppose.” These numbers are high.

Had the polls drilled down into the numbers to discover how many had “given any attention or thought to the issue,” the findings might have been sobering. Asked in January 2021, in a probability-based poll, “how interested are you in the Middle East and the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” two-thirds of the respondents said they were either “not at all interested” (35 per cent) or only “a little bit interested”; only a quarter (24 per cent) said they were “somewhat interested” and hardly any (8 per cent) said they were “very interested.” Asked “How much do you know about Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine,” most (57 per cent) said they knew “virtually nothing”; while 27 per cent said they knew “a little” and 14 per cent said they knew “something,” almost no one (2 per cent) said they knew “a great deal.”

Polls like this are almost certain to reflect the times in which they are taken. Given the events of 2023 — October 7 — and their consequences, both the level of interest in “the Israel–Palestinian conflict” and the level of knowledge about “Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine” are very likely to have increased. How much they might have increased, we cannot say.

Given the likely low level of engagement, the questions and introductions — and/or, we should add, the response alternatives — invited the use of split-ballots, even if this meant enlarging the number of respondents. This never happened. Pollsters (and academic survey researchers) have always been keen to maintain that public (polled) opinion largely exists independently of how it is measured. So, experimental techniques — with the risk that different techniques will yield quite different results — are rarely used, no matter the insistence of the experts in questionnaire design that they should.

In the era in which he proposed it, Gallup’s suggestion that pollsters include an open-ended question “to bring to light general attitudes,” was largely impractical. Until the 1970s, interviews were conducted almost entirely face-to-face; the idea of interviewers faithfully recording open-ended responses, of market research organisations putting the time into coding these responses, and of media outlets footing the bill for effort involved, was mostly fanciful.

AI might change all that. DemosAU’s poll included no open-ended question before respondents were asked whether they would “support” or “oppose.” But in asking for their reasons for supporting or opposing “Australia formally recognising a Palestinian state in the present circumstances,” DemosAU was able to harness the power of AI to both record respondents’ “verbatims” and to code them.

Gallup’s final suggestion, that the polls measure the intensity of opinion, has always been something pollsters could do. On the Palestine question, however, only Essential tried to do it. As we have seen, it presented respondents with a five-point “Likert” scale with “strongly oppose” at one end and “strongly support” at the other. On this measure, 38 per cent had strong opinions — 18 per cent in “favour,” 20 per cent “against.” In 2021, slightly fewer (32 per cent) said they were either “somewhat interested” or “very interested” in “the Middle East and the Palestinian conflict,” even if many fewer (16 per cent) said they knew either “something” or “a great deal” about “Australia’s foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine.” Even allowing for an increase in the levels of interest and knowledge since then, the polls suggest (though they certainly don’t prove) that intensity of opinion on the recognition of Palestine may be closely related to interest in the conflict but not closely related to (self-assessed) knowledge about Australia’s position on it.

Of the three polls, the Essential poll is the one most likely to represent the state of public opinion on the recognition issue. This is not because it is the most recent, taken after the public had had more time to digest the news and think about it. Nor is it because it represents a reading that is midway between the other two — though, as rule of thumb, the idea that the truth is likely to in the middle offers some reassurance. Rather, it’s because the Essential poll is the least problematic of the three.

Essential’s is the only poll to have respected the injunction to “Beware of asking respondents about solutions to complex problems.” It avoided the use of an introduction that might bias as well as inform a response. It avoided the use of alternatives that might have been loaded or incomprehensible. And it allowed respondents to say they had no opinion even if this also allowed respondents to conceal views they held.

Does that mean that support for recognition split 34–30, as the Essential poll showed? Not necessarily. A poll, after all, is no more (if also no less) than the product of a sample survey; even if the sampling is probability-based, there are other kinds of possible error: coverage error (a sampling frame, such as the internet, that doesn’t cover everyone), measurement error (from asking the wrong question to asking a question that solicits meaningless answers), non-response error (those asked to participate not responding, now very common, with those who do respond having different views from those who don’t). Each of these may be more important than sampling error — though sampling error is the only source of error most pollsters are prepared to acknowledge.

More striking than the difference between the level of support for a Palestinian state and the level of opposition is the level of non-commitment — the number of respondents who chose “don’t know” or “neither support nor oppose.” In American polls that offer a “don’t know” as an option, the uptake across all manner of topics normally ranges from “about an eighth to a third.” In these Australian polls, the level of non-commitment ranges from about a third (32 per cent) to about a half (46 per cent) — both “don’t know” and  “neither support nor oppose.” How many who responded with a “yes” or a “no” should really have registered as uncommitted?

For an issue that appears not to have generated widespread engagement — with low interest in it, and little knowledge about it, if only one of the polls had had the wit to measure it — might the intensity of opinion be a better measure of public opinion than its overall distribution? If intensity is our best guide, then support for recognition (as measured by Essential, the only poll that measured it) appears to be evenly split: 18 per cent in favour, 20 per cent against.

Has there been a shift in the polls over the last eighteen months or so? If there has been — either in the distribution of opinion or in its intensity — then the findings of Essential and DemosAU in April and May last year respectively suggest it was small. (DemosAU’s head of research declared that the July 2025 figures represented a “jump” in support of ten percentage points since last May, with the gap between support and opposition increasing from thirteen points to twenty-two. But changes in the questions and/or response options mean the polls don’t allow us to infer anything much.)

Are polls the only measure of public opinion? They are not. The rise of polled opinion, the American political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg argued nearly forty years ago, transformed earlier understandings of public opinion: from being understood as views citizens volunteered to views survey researchers solicited; from views inferred from particular kinds of behaviour to the expression of particular kinds of attitudes; from the expression of groups, their leaders and so on, to the expression of random individuals; and from assertions of an agenda for public debate to responses to a pollster’s agenda of public concerns.

While the rise of polled opinion may have marginalised earlier understandings of public opinion, it hasn’t eliminated them — especially when it comes to public policy — as the recent pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests show. Political leaders are usually less concerned with whether a proposal has widespread public support than with whether falling into line with — or defying — calls of certain kinds is likely to shift votes. •

The post Gallup’s errant offspring appeared first on Inside Story.

Samaras: “85 per cent of the Indian diaspora voted for the Labor Party at the last election. Thereabouts, it varies across the country.”

Pavlou: “What was the number sorry Kos?”

Samaras: “85 per cent. Whenever we poll, in our polling, they’re about that, two-party-preferred.”

The first I saw of this number was in an article by the Institute of Public Affairs’s Adam Creighton in the Australian on Friday, a typically tendentious cherry-data-picking effort that I used as brain exercise here.

But the 85 per cent figure had apparently been making the rounds of the internet, or certain corners thereof, for a couple of week before that. According to Nine papers, it has been “quoted by far-right social media accounts and in posts by March for Australia, the group that organised last month’s anti-immigration rallies and targeted Indian Australians in their promotion flyers.”

It slots in very nicely with a far-right meme that has the Labor government carefully selecting the type of migrant who will vote for them. Hence all the Indians! It collapses immediately when faced with the fact that immigrants can’t become citizens and vote for at a minimum of four years after arrival, which would mean the Morrison government was in on the act. But no matter, it’s out there.

It was Wednesday last week when one obviously very-online federal MP, Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, made her now infamous assertions about Indian migrants on the ABC. The following day, in a partial backtrack, she explained that “a recent Redbridge poll told us that 85 per cent of those who have Indian ancestry… voted for Labor… So, these were the facts that I was pointing out.”

Now, facts shouldn’t be suppressed simply because bad faith actors might misuse them. None of this would be Samaras’s problem if that 85 per cent number accurately reflected what his research had found. (It might cause us to question his methodology, although Redbridge has a good record for voting intentions at elections.)

But it’s not accurate. To anyone who has thought about these things, it’s obviously way too high. Kos at first doubled down, but was reported yesterday in Nine Papers as downgrading the figure to “mid-60s” two-party-preferred, which is believable, given the overall 55 per cent vote for Labor in May.

(When Samaras also described Indian people voting Labor “for sectarian reasons,” Pavlou responded that he’s “really concerned for the future of the country if we get these sectarian voting blocs.” This sent me to Google search in case there was some variation of that word’s meaning that I wasn’t aware of. I found none. It’s a bizarre, more inflammatory assertion.)

There’s a question hiding in all this about how people of Indian ancestry really did vote in May, or at any election. No one knows. They probably comprise around 3 per cent of the electoral roll, and any polled numbers are just too small to come to a robust conclusion. As far as I know, Accent’s Shaun Ratcliffe has the best data on federal election 2025, within which, as he says, voters born in India are a tiny subsample. The primary vote support from Australians of South Asian ancestry (about 70 per cent of them are from India) implies a Labor two-party-preferred vote in the low 60s. So maybe it’s that, give or take 5–10 per cent.

This might invite another question: how then would I or anyone else know that 85 is too high? The answer is that it’s way too high for any ethnic group in this country, apart perhaps from Indigenous Australians. In the United States (for which large datasets exist) African Americans regularly register that figure or more for Democrats; Indian Americans voted about 60 per cent Democrat last year, around the same advantage as Labor’s here.

If Price really was motivated by the 85 per cent misinformation, it has now led to her departure from the opposition frontbench after she publicly declined to affirm support for leader Sussan Ley.

We’ve seen all this before, an MP adored by the Coalition’s self-proclaimed base and far-right media outlet Sky After Dark destabilising the Coalition. It ended Malcolm Turnbull’s premiership in 2018. With such a right-wing Liberal party room it just makes life more difficult for Ley. As one wag on X put it, “Some people are trying very hard to make it 85pc next time.”

Indeed. By all accounts another big name among the “base,” Tony Abbott, was a key holder of the shoehorn that brought Price into the Liberal party room this year. This weekend it’ll be ten years since Liberal MPs unceremoniously voted him out the highest office. This is one very cold dish. •

The post What was that number? appeared first on Inside Story.

“Comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were prostituted by the Japanese army during the war. Across Asia, hundreds of thousands of them were taken from their homes or workplaces and press-ganged into service in “comfort stations” attached to Japanese garrisons or military supply stations. Dutch-Australian Jan Ruff-O’Herne was among the victims and in later life was prominent among activists pressing the Japanese government to accept legal responsibility for the system.

The plaits on this statue differentiate it from its Korean counterpart, which has bobbed hair. There are two Korean comfort women statues in Australia, one in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, the other in the grounds of the Korean Society of Victoria building in Oakleigh. Worldwide, more than seventy such statues provide evidence of an unresolved trauma in Korean history and — despite some significant bilateral agreements — an enduring problem in Korean–Japanese relations. The first of them was erected in Seoul, opposite the Japanese embassy.

A girl with plaits or a bob offers a very different image from a soldier with a gun. She doesn’t say “Look what we can do to you” but rather “Look what you did to us.” For Australians, it is as if a statue depicting the skeletal figure of a survivor of a Japanese POW camp were to be erected somewhere — perhaps in front of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. But Korean- and Chinese-Australians are of course Australians themselves. The comfort woman statues are a reminder that new generations of migrants bring to this country different legacies of war.

This is especially true of migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Unknown but certainly large numbers of Chinese women were pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The survivors carried a significant legacy of trauma into the postwar years, their health and often their lives altogether ruined. Yet after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the war years came close to being obliterated by the sound and fury of mass campaigns targeting domestic “enemies of the revolution.” “Remembering the bitter past” was a collective activity focused on Chinese landlords or capitalists. It was only in the 1980s that this sort of memory work began to be reoriented towards Japan.

Once given their heads, historians in China had plenty of material to work with. The Anti-Japanese War was much longer than the Pacific War and entailed Japan’s occupation of a vast swathe of Chinese territory. The Nanjing massacre of 1937 was the largest single atrocity committed by Japanese forces anywhere. Oral histories, the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the publication in translation of The Rape of Nanjing by Chinese-American Iris Chang, movies, television series, and now an annual day of mourning — all these have together generated a collective memory of wartime atrocities that feeds into anti-Japanese nationalism in China.

Like the war itself, the comfort women system was deemed a proper subject for historical research in China only decades after the communist takeover in 1949. Ironically, it was exposure to Japanese research on the topic, along with direct action by South Korean victims, that inspired China’s leading historian of the comfort women system, Su Zhiliang. China now has two museums dedicated to the comfort women, one in Nanjing and one at Su Zhiliang’s home institution, Shanghai Normal University.

In South Korea, democratisation meant space for freewheeling social movements, including feminist movements, capable of pursuing human rights issues independently of positions taken by the government. China has no such space. Entry to the museums is restricted, and in recent years the Chinese government has withdrawn support from an international movement to have the Voices of Comfort Women placed on the UNESCO “Memory of the World Register.”

Outside China, this is a free-floating issue that can easily find fertile soil in diasporic communities. But it has been taken up by other interest groups, too. In Berlin, the installation of a Korean comfort woman statue was supported by a coalition of civic groups of mixed ethnic and national origins with shared interests in crimes of sexual violence, particularly but not only in the context of war. As Japanese demands for the statue’s removal show, however, commemorations invariably have a geopolitical context. The transnational, universalist meanings attached to the peace statues do not exclude their particular, nationalist meanings.

Why such a statue in Melbourne? And why now? The formation of the Chinese-Australians for Peace Association, apparently for the purpose of sponsoring the “peace statue” (heping tongxiang), implies the existence or threat of war, possibly the remembered war that ended in 1945 but also, again possibly, the war that may yet happen if China decides to take Taiwan. The threat is not imminent, but since Russia’s assault on Ukraine it has become a constant in Australian discussions about security in the Pacific.

The founder of the Peace Association is Jimmy Li (Li Jianmin). Li is a good citizen: president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia (Victorian chapter) and a member of the Monash Multicultural Advisory Committee. He supported recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He promotes Chinese ethnic engagement in local society and politics. His organisation is not like the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification, which has been listed by the Australian government as a body exercising foreign influence. It looks more like a community expression of hope that history will not repeat itself and that a war in Europe will not again have a parallel in Asia.

Yet, corresponding as it does with this week’s huge military parade in Beijing marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, the unveiling of the Oakleigh statue can also read as aligning Chinese-Australian interests with China’s. Koreans in Victoria understand the optics. Their representative society, the Korean Society of Victoria, has given permission for the use of their premises for the ceremony on Saturday so that the Chinese and the Korean statues can sit side by side for the day. But they have refused permission for the Chinese statue to be installed there permanently. In this, says KSV president Chang Suk Lee, they are “influenced in part by the prevailing political landscape.”

To the extent that he means the geopolitical landscape, this statement reflects awareness of the difficult relations between South Korea and China in recent years and also of the realities of a regional order in which South Korea is aligned not only with Australia but also with Japan. In anti-Japanese sentiment, South Korea has long outranked China, but in his Liberation Day speech this year South Korean president Lee Jae Myung made reference to Japan as “our neighbour” and our “partner in our economic development.”

Is it possible to disentangle awareness of this difficult history from nationalist sentiments? Searching for a space separate from the spheres controlled by the state in China, ANU researcher Yujie Zhu has emphasised the relative independence of the research and historical memory work undertaken by Su Zhiliang. But the fact that Su’s research wasn’t conducted at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t rule out nationalist readings.

Among Su’s findings are that Chinese victims of the comfort women system numbered no less than 200,000, accounting for half of all comfort women across Asia. These huge numbers, varying greatly from all other scholarly estimates, are characteristic of patriotic history in China. Comparably, in a statement redacted in the English-language version of the ABC report, Chinese-American documentary film-maker Leo Shi Young states: “Comfort women were not just Koreans; there were even more Chinese.

Unsurprisingly, comments by local visitors to the comfort women museum in Shanghai show that the exhibits reinforce the Chinese nationalist narrative and anti-Japanese feeling. There is a risk that the Chinese Australian for Peace Association’s statue will stir up tensions within Australian communities with links to the region.

There is one other noteworthy thing about Chinese comfort women: the consistency with which men figure in reports about documentation, exhibitions and commemorations.

This is not the case elsewhere. In South Korea, the first name to come to mind (apart from any of the many victim activists) is probably Yun Chung-ok, an English literature professor at Ewha Women’s University, who in 1990 did much to educate the public about the comfort women system through a series of newspaper articles on the subject. In Japan, it is Yayori Matsui, daughter of a Christian pacifist, inspiration for the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, and an early adviser to Yun Chung-ok.

In China, however, the obvious name is that of male historian Su Zhiliang. Close on his heels is the filmmaker redacted from the ABC report, Leo Shi Young, who is in the forefront of efforts to create Chinese statues to accompany Korean ones. In Australia, Jimmy Li is following in Young’s footsteps.

A movement for recognition of war crimes perpetrated against women, driven by women, necessarily changes character when it’s led by men. With the best will in the world, male activists cannot avoid lending a different aura to the movement. After Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish national of Kurdish origin, died at the hands of her father in a so-called “honour killing” in 2002, she was carried to her grave by women. As Swedish MP Nalin Pekgul, herself of Kurih origin, remarked, “The most important thing was that it was not her male relatives who laid her to rest.”

Pekgul’s point was that the male relatives unavoidably personified the system that resulted in Şahindal’s death. It would overstate the case to claim that the men who have taken the lead in propagating knowledge of China’s comfort women in themselves embody the state-based system of national rivalry that underpins war and war crimes. Nonetheless, once it was felt necessary — by Young — to create a Chinese statue as well as a Korean one, the Korean statue lost something of its universal symbolism as a monument to the sufferings of women through rape in war. Once Young emphatically stated that there were more Chinese victims than Korean, the comfort women issue seemed in danger of being hijacked by competitive narratives of victimhood. It might now be difficult for the Chinese Australians for Peace Association to avoid their no doubt heartfelt gesture of commemoration becoming hostage to these narratives.

The tensions over the installation of peace statues are sometimes represented as a case of right-wing Japanese nationalists versus transnational feminist and human rights activists. But Japan has a strong tradition of activism around the comfort women system, which had its Japanese victims too. The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo is a fine example of commemorative activity, asking visitors to reflect on the past and on Japan’s responsibility for the system. It’s the sort of internal critique that is hardly possible in today’s China. •

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The data I sought covered the number of applications on hand in each category at the end of April. I asked the media team to get back to me by 9 May, the Friday after the election. A reply acknowledged my request and noted my deadline, but by 12 May I’d heard nothing. I emailed again and was reassured a response was being worked on and I’d be hearing back soon.

The next day, in fact, when an email from the department fobbed me off with links to the general migration statistics on the Home Affairs website and the federal government’s data portal. I diligently trawled the sites, with which I was familiar, and confirmed they didn’t answer my questions.

A few days later I wrote again, renewing my request. This time, a Home Affairs media officer rang to tell me the data was not available. I politely pointed out that this was bunkum because the latest statistics on the number of visa applications awaiting processing are sent to ministerial offices on a weekly or monthly basis. It would be a waste of my time and Home Affairs resources to compel me to submit an FOI application.

The officer undertook to refer the matter up the chain. A few more days elapsed, I sent another reminder email, and on 20 May I was told the links I’d previously been sent had the most recent publicly available data.

I immediately submitted an FOI request. The response was swift. An authorised FOI officer told me the following day that my request had been “de-registered.” I was no longer entitled to seek data under the FOI Act because it was available for purchase by the public via the department’s new dedicated channel for data.

This was news to me (and something Home Affairs media had failed to mention). I followed the provided link to the requesting statistics webpage to find that I would need to pay $30 per question. I filled in the form and got a response the next day, advising that if I paid the necessary fees, the data team would try to finalise my request within thirty business days. I considered seeking an exemption from the charges on the basis that this was a matter of public interest (an exemption available under FOI laws) but figured this would only delay matters further.

I transferred the necessary funds to Home Affairs and — a month later, on 24 June — I finally received the information I’d requested eight weeks earlier.

By now, of course, it was out of date. Still, I was able to write my article, even if the election was now long behind us. And I was pleased to know that next time I want to revise those visa statistics I could bypass reluctant media officers and go straight to the data team with my requests — albeit at $30 a pop.

I’d been given a similar runaround seeking data on parent visas in 2024, just after Tony Burke took over the Home Affairs portfolio. The previous year, by contrast, I’d received a relatively prompt response to the same request.

Having spent decades writing about migration and periodically requesting information from the department, I’ve seen departmental openness wax and wane according to the political climate and changes in personnel. Sometimes my questions are swiftly answered. Sometimes they are delayed or denied. In Australia, freedom of information is more arbitrary than systematic.

But matters could get worse. Attorney-general Michelle Rowland this week introduced a bill to “modernise” the FOI system. It would mandate fees for certain types of request and restrict access to “deliberative processes.” As ABC political reporter Tom Crowley wrote on Wednesday, this potentially extends the FOI exemption covering cabinet documents to include “anything that has been brought to cabinet’s attention or might inform something that is shown to cabinet in future” or any document “in which ministers, public servants or other officials record their thoughts about policy.”

It’s a far cry from the robodebt royal commission’s call to repeal Section 34 of the FOI Act so cabinet documents are only kept confidential when there is an identifiable public interest reason for doing so.

The attorney-general argues FOI reform is needed because digital automation means “large volumes of vague, anonymous, vexatious or frivolous requests” are tying up time and resources. But as Maria O’Sullivan from Deakin University argues, this could also be tackled by greater use of “proactive disclosure.” Personal information, for example, would be released directly to the people to which the it pertains without requiring them to use FOI.

The same applies to many journalistic requests. Statistical information, like the number of partner visa applications on hand at Home Affairs, could be published online in timely updates, just as it is regularly supplied to ministerial offices.

Charging for statistical information on a case-by-case basis is more cumbersome, time-consuming and inefficient — especially when, according to government policies, the data should be public anyway.

In its May 2023 data and digital strategy, the Albanese government offered the vision of delivering “simple, secure and connected public services” by 2030. One sign of success would be “greater usability and availability of government-held data”  As a journalist and researcher, I was excited by the commitment that “all government entities” would “make non-sensitive data open by default, in compliance with relevant laws and appropriate privacy, security and ethical controls for sharing sensitive data.”

Statistics on growing backlogs in visa processing might be embarrassing and uncomfortable for government ministers, but they are of public interest. And they are in no way “sensitive”: they raise no privacy, national security, confidentiality or ethical concerns. The same applies to reams of other government data in other policy areas.

If the government is serious about modernising freedom of information, then it should live up to its data and digital ambitions and routinely publish statistics online in a timely manner. •

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Since 2014 (but not every year) the Lowy Institute has posed a similar survey question with an almost identical trio of available responses. Its first instalment painted a reasonably rosy picture, with just 37 per cent saying immigration is too high. But since then attitudes seem to have soured, with 2018 the recording the lowest support, and the latest, 2025, the second-lowest, noticeably less favourable than in 1951.

But what is meant, and understood, by “immigration”? “Coming to Australia” (in the 1951 framing), of course, but from where?

The first post–second world war “populate or perish” boatload arrived in 1947 from, according to the National Museum, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. “They were all young and single and quickly became known as the ‘beautiful Balts.’ As [Labor immigration minister Arthur] Calwell later admitted, ‘It was not hard to sell immigration to the Australian people once the press published photographs of that group.’  ”

Most interesting about that 1951 survey is that APOP asked respondents whether they supported immigration from each of seven European countries. Approval ranged from 77 per cent for the Netherlands to 26 for Italy. The latter’s wooden spoon was no doubt influenced by its membership of the Axis only several years earlier, though Germans managed 51 per cent against Allied Greeks’ 41.

The fairer the better, it seemed. Or, put more politely, we prefer those who look and behave more like us.

Britain was not listed, presumably because their welcome mat was simply assumed. Over the following decades, the United Kingdom and Ireland accounted for easily the biggest numbers, followed by Italy and Greece. There were quite a few Dutch, but not many of those beautiful Balts.

These days, of course, the intake makeup is very different. After an influx in the 1970s and 1980s, Australia currently has the largest cohort of Vietnamese (as a percentage of population) outside Indochina. This century, people from India have been the largest component, followed by China.

After Sunday’s rallies against immigration, former immigration minister Philip Ruddock penned a piece for the Australian Financial Review that blamed it all on the Morrison and Albanese governments’ failure to communicate population policy to the electorate. He assures us that he himself was exemplary in this respect. Ruddock might have a point, but we need to note that his “communicating” in the lead-up to the 2001 election included spreading misinformation about children thrown overboard and mugging and chewing the scenery about how despicable it was.

Most risible was Ruddock’s assertion in the AFR that Australians “remain strongly supportive of a skilled program that drives prosperity, of a multicultural society that reflects our modern identity, of a humanitarian program that offers safety to the persecuted and close family reunions.”

“Australians” are familiar with these details of immigration policy? They’re “strongly supportive”?

As George Megalogenis wrote in the Australian fifteen years ago, “The impulse to close the door cuts across party and cultural lines, and draws on a gut call voters make that Australia can’t carry too many more people without breaking. Local born and established immigrants think alike, as do Labor, Liberal and Green voters.”

Yet, as George also noted, “no government since World War II has allowed the political cycle to dictate policy.” Which is a nice way of saying majority opinion was largely ignored.

That is a critical point. Large-scale immigration, particularly from other than northern Europe, has for eighty years been one of several technocratic projects that, thanks to bipartisan agreement, voters haven’t had a say in. Ending White Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s in particular sits in that category, as do most of the you-beaut economic reforms — privatisation, deregulation, tariff elimination, etc — the political class celebrates today from the Hawke–Keating and Howard–Costello years. The fruits of this political model can, in part, be seen today in the slow collapse of the two-party system, and not just in Australia.

Australians tend to adjust, move on, even concede that the difficult change was for the best after all. In any case, younger generations usually prefer the present to old fuddy duddies’ reminiscences of a glorious past. Earlier waves of migrants become largely accepted; newer ones thought by some to be problematic.

This time last year I wrote on these pages that “if Kamala Harris fails against the easybeat Donald Trump in November it will be largely due to [immigration across] the southern border.” If that sounds too reductionist, perhaps we can agree with a more modest formulation: that illegal immigration was a necessary ingredient in Trump’s narrow (1.5 per cent in the national vote, 2.5 per cent in the electoral college) victory.

A crucial component is missing in a lot of commentary of Sunday’s demos, particularly those that link it with movements overseas. It’s a factor that matters for our general politics, and particularly Peter Dutton’s failure to capitalise on fear of foreigners in May’s election. It is the virtual absence of uncontrolled border-crossing into this country. Again quoting myself from August last year, “per-capita ‘illegal immigration’ numbers in America (in 2023) are roughly ten times what ours were at their peak (in 2013); and ours are close to zero today. Comparisons with Europe are similarly one-sided.”

Australia has long had a large immigration program relative to comparable countries. The Albanese government’s actions — limiting overseas students, for example — suggest an acknowledgment that earlier settings were too lax. Importantly, immigration, for all the benefits in the medium term, cannot help but negatively impact housing. And there are and always have been racist attitudes towards people of colour.

But in the United States and much of (the former Western) Europe, evidence of years of accumulated unauthorised arrivals is glaringly apparent in many citizens’ everyday lives, in towns and cities, in for example buildings and hotels used for housing them. Over here, people who arrived by boat are as rare as hen’s teeth, and of course impossible to pick out on the street. There is quite a bit of dodgy visa manipulation and overstaying, which adds to numbers and is evident in our capital cities. And, yes, conflating “legal” and “illegal” is almost de rigueur in anti-immigration rhetoric. The internet and Covid have fuelled radicalisation.

But we have nothing like the challenges that face the United States and Europe — and that, in many ways, including at the political level, is a good thing. •

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It might sound like adolescent bravado but my son’s remark captures a broader truth: young people are increasingly questioning the value of formal education. They compare the immediacy and variety of on-demand knowledge (including quick AI-generated answers) with the rigidity of school curricula. For many, these sources feel faster, clearer and more relevant than the slow pace and fixed structure of the classroom.

Many critics interpret this attitude as evidence of a broader educational crisis, with AI at least partly to blame for student disengagement. For example, when the NSW education department banned ChatGPT and similar tools in public schools in early 2023, it warned that AI could allow “fluent but lazy” thinking to go unchallenged and devalue authentic student learning.

Reinforcing this concern, the Paul Ramsay Foundation–sponsored report Shaping AI and EdTech to Tackle Australia’s Learning Divide argues that introducing AI tools without the right frameworks risks alienating students. If new digital tools widen the gap between how students learn and how school teaches, those students may feel increasingly disconnected from, and question the relevance of, school itself. The report’s author, Leslie Loble, stresses that without strong governance and thoughtful design, the tools will push students further away from learning rather than bringing them closer.

It’s important to remember, though, that students were questioning the relevance of their schooling long before AI came onto the scene. Research across Australia consistently shows that student engagement and sense of belonging have been in steady decline. Between 2003 and 2015, data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, revealed that the share of Australian fifteen-year-olds who agreed they “feel like they belong at school” fell from 88 to 72 per cent, almost double the average decline across OECD countries.

Over the same period, the proportion who reported feeling disconnected from school also rose sharply, particularly in the middle years of high school (around Year 9, when disengagement peaks). Those least likely to feel a sense of belonging included Indigenous students, girls, students from less well-off backgrounds, Australian-born students and those in provincial and remote areas.

International data backs this up. The PISA studies have identified key predictors of student disengagement, including a low perceived value of school, poor classroom climate and weak teacher–student relationships. When school feels unsafe or irrelevant, or when students don’t have positive relationships with teachers, they inevitably tune out. Lessons are too often framed as preparation for the next exam rather than opportunities to explore and apply knowledge in authentic ways.

Many students also feel they have little voice in what or how they learn; their role is to receive and reproduce information, not to shape the learning process. It’s no wonder so many struggles to see a meaningful connection between what they do in class and the realities of their future lives.

We can’t simply blame individual teachers for these outcomes. Staff in Australian schools report some of the highest workloads in the OECD. Many work well beyond their contracted hours just to keep up with administrative demands, constant curriculum changes and pastoral care responsibilities. A 2022 Grattan Institute survey found that teachers work about fifty-five hours a week on average — far above a standard working week — yet less than half of that time is spent teaching or interacting with students. The rest is devoured by paperwork, meetings, data entry and other tasks. Disengagement is the product of a system that prioritises compliance, standardisation and measurable targets over curiosity, relationships and real-world relevance.

In this light, my son’s comment starts to make sense. When students feel disconnected from what happens in the classroom and see little link between schoolwork and their own goals, it’s hardly surprising they turn to AI. By the time they finish school, many have learned to see education as something to endure rather than a space to explore and grow. My son was voicing what many students feel: that the education system is struggling to keep pace with the way they learn and live.

The first step to reducing students’ overreliance on AI is to make learning more relevant and engaging. Too often, lessons are framed as preparation for the next test or assignment rather than opportunities to grapple with real-world challenges. When students are asked to solve problems that connect with their lives, from environmental issues to ethical dilemmas to practical applications of maths and science, their learning feels purposeful.

This could mean project-based work, with students collaborating to design ways of reducing waste in their school, designing a more inclusive public space, or creating campaigns around health and wellbeing. In classrooms, it could mean shifting discussions beyond textbook answers into debates that evaluate competing perspectives, with students weighing evidence, challenging assumptions, and justifying their reasoning.

Students would be given more opportunities for inquiry and more choice in how they demonstrate their learning, whether that’s through a presentation, a group project, or a community partnership. Lessons would become spaces of exploration, helping students see that what they are learning has a direct bearing on the futures they are preparing for.

Australian research supports this approach. A UniSA study earlier this year asked disengaged senior students to design and build a playground for a low-income school, combining inquiry, service and skills-based learning with teachers acting as facilitators. Students set achievable goals, conducted market research to identify community needs, and explored multiple design options before selecting the most viable. The researchers found that disengaged students are more likely to participate when learning connects to the real world, benefits their communities, and gives them opportunities to make authentic decisions.

A South Australian trial of project-based mathematics reached a similar conclusion. It found that students in project-based classes reported greater enjoyment, stronger academic confidence, and higher achievement than those in traditional classrooms. The approach was open-ended and inquiry-driven, with teachers facilitating group projects rather than delivering content. Unlike textbook-driven lessons, the projects began with a problem and introduced the maths needed to solve it.

If students see how their studies link directly to real-world issues and their futures, they are less likely to view AI as a shortcut and more likely to use it constructively, not to replace their learning, but to extend and deepen it.

The pressure is not only on students. Increasingly, educators themselves turn to AI to prepare course content, streamline administration or even generate assessment tasks. While this reliance is understandable in a system where staff are expected to do more with less, it risks hollowing out the very heart of education: the transfer of expertise, judgement and experience from educator to learner. Students notice this too, and they rightly ask, if their lecturers are leaning on AI, why shouldn’t they? When both sides are outsourcing parts of the learning process, the human connection at the core of education is put at risk.

Until we make those changes, AI will remain less an opportunistic shortcut than a necessary crutch. We need to be talking not about how AI is ruining education but about why our educational infrastructure is so brittle that a chatbot could exploit its weaknesses overnight. Only by tackling those underlying faultlines, the relevance of our curriculum, the way we measure success, the support we give both learners and teachers, can we ensure that the next technological disruption becomes a tool for empowerment rather than an escape hatch from a broken status quo.

AI didn’t create the cracks in our education system. It’s just accelerating and illuminating them. The responsibility is now on educators, policymakers, parents and communities to build an education system that reflects our highest aspirations for learning, one where technology complements genuine engagement rather than substituting for it. Only then will students choose substance over shortcuts — because the learning experience will finally be worth their while. •

The post Don’t blame AI for schooling’s decline appeared first on Inside Story.

“Sovereign citizens” — a term that emerged in the United States in the early 1990s — exist at the intersection of several overlapping far-right political and religious movements that percolated across America and then spread to other democracies. Today, the descriptor is an umbrella term for a broad and diverse group of people, hostile towards government and authority, who believe laws don’t apply to them without their consent.

At the core of their beliefs is what those who study this phenomenon call “pseudolaw,” a radical reinterpretation of law based on adherents’ strange and bewildering legal theories. They may maintain that Common Law overrides legislation (in reality it is the other way around), that the Magna Carta is directly enforceable, that traffic regulations only apply to “commercial drivers” and that one’s “legal person” is distinct from the “living man.”

No sovereign citizen argument has ever been accepted by a court in Australia or elsewhere. Indeed, adopting these arguments often leaves the adherent in a worse position than if they had just paid the initial fine, a fact that is mysteriously omitted from the material promoters hawk on websites and through social media. But most adherents aren’t focused on winning in court; after all, they believe the courts are illegitimate. Rather, pseudolaw is the means for them to reject legal authority and attempt to assert their own power.

Many readers would have first encountered sovereign citizens during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the evidence suggests that pseudolaw had reached Australia long before 2020. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, for instance, several prominent American pseudolaw “gurus” toured Australia hosting seminars on how to opt of legal obligations. As far back as 2011, the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that one American pseudolawer, David Wynn Miller, made “hundreds of thousands of dollars” from a visit to Australia.

Scholars examining the rise of pseudolaw in Australia have largely focused their attention on its impact on the administration of justice. While much of this commentary is anecdotal, a recent study from South Australia (which we were involved in) confirmed that Covid-19 inspired significant pseudolaw litigation.

Judges, magistrates and staff described how pseudolaw claims increased workloads by generating hours of work dealing with issues that should take minutes and creating large volumes of paperwork with little relevance to the issues at hand. They also reported intimidating behaviour: adherents bringing supporters to the court, threatening to sue the magistrate or judge, videotaping court staff and even following staff out of the building. Pseudolaw clearly wastes time and slows down systems, and can intimidate and destabilise. The cost in resources and pressure on staff are significant. One judicial officer told us that he was seriously considering retirement.

While police and judges stand on the front line of the pseudolaw challenge, sovereign citizens cause problems for all official bodies that intersect or engage with the public. Local governments and councils are particularly vulnerable: they are the most easily accessible level of government and don’t enjoy the same level of protection as prominent public figures and state and federal officials. Some pseudolaw adherents have taken advantage of this by disrupting council events.

In 2023, fifteen councils across Victoria reported that members of the pseudolegal organisation My Place disrupted their meetings and activities. According to the Municipal Association of Victoria, anti-government groups like My Place targeted councils because “you can turn up to a council meeting. You can’t turn up to state parliament [and ask a question].”

Similar incidents have occurred in South Australia. In January 2023, the ABC reported, a City of Onkaparinga council meeting was adjourned and police called after several protestors wearing “body cameras and GoPros” to film their interactions “charg[ed] towards the council chambers.” Later that month, around seventy No Smart Cities Action Group members protested at the City of Salisbury council chambers, forcing police to expend significant resources to protect the safety of councillors. Some councils in Australia and New Zealand have been forced by death threats to institute new lockdown procedures. Others have moved public meetings online.

The week’s shootings in Victoria demonstrate the threat of pseudolaw at its most extreme. More common, however, are prosaic efforts to frustrate the effective administration of governance. This can be as simple as refusing to pay council rates. Just as adherents inundate courts with mountains of inappropriate documentation, local government authorities are pestered with groundless correspondence.

As one South Australian law firm noted in 2023, these actions place local government staff in difficult positions. Eventually, they are forced to commence debt recovery proceedings, but given that process generally begins in the small claims divisions of magistrates’ or local courts, where legal representation is permitted only in special cases, council officers must appear and engage directly with pseudolegal adherents.

Some pseudolaw adherents refuse to seek approvals for work on their homes and property. While councils have successfully acted in some cases, each instance requires authorities to waste scarce resources investigating whether an infraction should be prosecuted.

In what is perhaps the most disturbing development, some pseudolaw adherents establish their own courts and judicial systems. These courts regularly indict and try public officials (in absentia) and hound ordinary people through spurious court procedures.

In the small town of Warkworth, just north of Auckland, sits the New Zealand Common Law Court of Justice, a court run (as the name suggests) by pseudolaw adherents. Over the past few years, this fake court has tried prominent New Zealanders including then prime minister Jacinda Arden, her cabinet and advisers. Their offences? Committing crimes “against the Living Man” by requiring New Zealand residents to “receive an experimental medical procedure known as the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination.”

Similarly, the Sovereign Peoples Assembly of Western Australia has issued verdicts against numerous public figures, including the then prime minister Scott Morrison, Commonwealth chief health officer Paul Kelly and premiers Daniel Andrews, Mark McGowan, Gladys Berejiklian and Annastacia Palaszczuk. These politicians and public health officials were sentenced to 120 years’ imprisonment for fraud, violating the Nuremberg Code (via medical experimentation), human trafficking and genocide.

These courts can’t enforce their verdicts, but they are not harmless. Their orders constitute threats against public officials. At least one individual in New Zealand has been jailed for such threats.

Ordinary people will feel the consequences more directly, however. Despite the references to “tribal” law on its website, the Australian group Nmdaka Dalai Australis appears to have been formed for the sole purpose of justifying child kidnapping. It created its own court and issued warrants for the arrest of a member’s ex-partner, demanding that he surrender his two sons to “court sheriffs.” As an ABC Investigations probe found, NDA sheriffs “deployed the threat of NDA’s bogus court as a weapon in family law disputes around Australia, harassing and intimidating judges, lawyers, officials and parents and children involved in custody battles.”

Pseudolaw is not simply eccentric nonsense. It is based on a worldview set on challenging and undermining democratic governance and delegitimising institutions. In rare circumstances, it is also used to justify violence, but most of its effects are rather mundane. It’s a slower, prosaic form of tedious disruption that clogs courts, interrupts proceedings, burdens councils and, in rare circumstances, intimidates staff.

Pseudolegal adherents are a classic example of the free-rider problem. Acting as though they are not subject to the law, they benefit from council services without contributing. Instead of collecting rates, local governments are forced to spend money enforcing compliance, draining and diverting resources from ordinary governance functions and increasing costs on others.

We originally expected pseudolegal activity to decrease with the diminution of Covid-era lockdowns and mandates, but it has shown incredible resilience. The question we face today is how public institutions can respond with systemic and coherent strategies that recognise both the everyday and the extraordinary threats pseudolaw poses without also forming the overbearing, tyrannical state that exist in the minds of its adherents. •

The post The everyday threat of sovereign citizen pseudolaw appeared first on Inside Story.

First, it put the issue of productivity front and centre of the Albanese government’s second term. The government’s first-term priority was dealing with cost-of-living pressures. They haven’t gone away: prices, on average, are almost 20 per cent higher than they were four years ago — five percentage points more than wages have risen over the same period — and real per capita household disposable income is still some 6 per cent below its peak. But at least inflation is back within the Reserve Bank’s target band, wages are rising faster than prices, and interest rates are coming down.

Now that the economy is starting to rely less on public spending, it’s appropriate that policy-makers turn their attention to reversing the dramatic slide in Australia’s productivity performance over the past two decades — after having ignored it for most of that period, as perhaps best exemplified by how the twenty-eight recommendations in the Productivity Commission’s first five-yearly productivity review and the seventy-one in its second review have been gathering dust since 2017 and 2023 respectively.

As Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood observed in her address to the National Press Club the day before the roundtable, “growth has simply fallen down the list of priorities in policy-making.” So it was encouraging to read Jim Chalmers saying, at the end of those talks, that higher living standards are “the holy grail, and a more productive economy is how we deliver it.”

Second, the roundtable appears to have created the momentum for quickly implementing a number of productivity-enhancing proposals that have been around for some time but have failed to gain traction.

These include reducing some of the red tape that adds to the cost of new homes and the time taken to build them; reducing delays in environmental approvals; eliminating “nuisance tariffs” that cost more to comply with than the revenue they raise; reducing impediments to investment in housing by superannuation funds; improving labour mobility by enhancing the recognition of professional and trade qualifications earned in different states; and developing a more sustainable system for charging road users.

None of them are new ideas: but until last week there hasn’t been a sufficiently broad-based commitment to advance any of them, and now there is. And progress in these areas could produce tangible results in relatively quickly.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the roundtable appears to have laid the basis for what might be called adult conversations about broad-ranging reform of Australia’s taxation system. Again, the ideas canvassed in Canberra were not new. And some people will have been disappointed that the prime minister and, subsequently, the treasurer appear to have ruled out significant tax reforms before the next election.

But the political reality is that the Albanese government doesn’t have a mandate for ambitious tax reform in this parliament — because it didn’t seek one at the election that delivered it such an historically large majority in the House of Representatives. Unlike John Howard, who sought a second-term mandate for introducing the GST while defending a first-term majority of forty seats (of which he lost fourteen), Anthony Albanese was defending a first-term majority of just two seats. He was also a senior minister in the Gillard government which, having pledged at the 2010 election not to introduce a carbon tax, did precisely that almost immediately after winning the election by the narrowest of margins, giving its opponents the ammunition to mount one of the most effective political campaigns ever waged.

Having defied the postwar tradition of first-term governments losing seats in pursuit of a second term, Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers now have the political capital required to pursue an ambitious reform agenda — but also a history that will make them determined to avoid squandering it, as other governments in similar positions (in particular, Tony Abbott’s and Campbell Newman’s) did by attempting to implement policies they previously pledged they wouldn’t.

At the conclusion of the roundtable, Jim Chalmers laid the basis for those “adult conversations” by outlining three principles that will underpin the government’s thinking about tax reform options.

The first of these is an “intergenerational lens.” That’s something I’ve previously advocated in these pages; and the case for doing so was also powerfully articulated by Grattan Institute chief executive Aruna Sathanapally in her presentation to the roundtable, and by another participant, Bob Breunig, director of ANU’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, in a paper he co-authored in May. Each demonstrated that Australia’s tax system imposes a disproportionately high burden on younger working Australians, and a correspondingly lower burden on older, asset-rich Australians.

The second principle is to consider how the tax system can provide better incentives for productivity-enhancing business investment, the dearth of which over the past decade or more has been one of the reasons for Australia’s deteriorating productivity performance (as demonstrated by, among others, the head of the Reserve Bank’s economic analysis department, Michael Plumb). But a large cut in the company tax rate, as advocated by the major business organisations (among others) is a very expensive, and not necessarily the most effective, way of encouraging business investment, as other Reserve Bank research has shown).

And the third principle is about making the taxation system simpler and more sustainable — one important dimension of which is generating the revenue needed to pay for the services the Australian public expects governments to provide.

Given current projections showing budget deficits as far as the eye can see, both federally and in the state, this almost inevitably means raising more revenue than the taxation system as currently structured seems capable of doing. And that in turn means taxation reform in the 2020s must mean making some people worse off. We can’t delude ourselves that everyone can be better off, as was possible in the early 2000s when the Howard government was able to draw down continuing budget surpluses in order to ensure that everyone was better off.

In making that case, two other announcements made outside the roundtable suggest the government is also serious about reining in the rapid growth in spending. The first was Mark Butler’s proposal to shift children with mild to moderate development delay or autism from the NDIS to another program, and the second was Tanya Plibersek’s decision to gradually return the “deeming rates” that form part of the means test for the age pension to their pre-pandemic levels. Together, these represent an important quid pro quo for any moves to raise additional revenues through tax reform.

But the point remains that governments shouldn’t proceed with decisions that make a significant number of people worse off without having secured an electoral mandate for doing so. The encouraging thing is that the government — with the backing of most of those interest groups represented, however imperfectly, around the economic roundtable — now seems emboldened to contemplate seeking such a mandate at the next election.

So, while the roundtable was, inevitably, “talk” rather than “action,” it does seem to have laid the ground work for some near-term action on a series of small but sensible, pragmatic measures that have been stalled for too long, and to have opened the door to a pathway to more ambitious reforms that has been closed for too long. In both those senses, it was a worthwhile exercise. •

The post Simpler, fairer and more effective appeared first on Inside Story.

Years later, as a reporter at a press conference held by a 1980s entrepreneur, I noted that his company’s finance division had recorded a huge increase in assets but only a tiny improvement in profit. Surely, I asked, the two figures should move roughly in sync? “No,” the entrepreneur said. “You simply don’t understand modern corporate finance.”

In both instances, fashions in finance did nothing to avoid disaster. The bank’s consumer lending division blew up, taking the bank down with it. The entrepreneur’s glorious career collapsed under a mountain of debt, dragging some of Australia’s largest businesses into a deep hole.

On another occasion I asked Nobby Clark, chief executive of NAB — and a reassuringly plain-talking human — why his bank had loaned money in the 1980s to the same people whose reckless antics in the 1970s had given him the opportunity to take over my employer on very favourable terms. Nobby made two remarks. One: almost two decades later, NAB still owned some of the property associated with the dud loans of my 1970s bosses. Two: the key to banking is “active forgetting.” Then he laughed, acknowledging the absurdity of it all.

Finance is not what it once was. After the 1930s Depression and through the postwar boom, tight regulation in most of the world made the industry “boring” (to again quote Nobby Clark). In those days, Australia’s economy was parochial and closely managed. Bank lending was heavily influenced by central government agencies that could loosen or tighten the flow of money. Big businesses — breweries, banks, media, energy suppliers — tended to hold state-based franchises with limited interstate competition. Tariffs protected a wide range of industry from imports, with high rates of union membership and centralised wage-fixing being the other side of the coin.

When the postwar economic consensus unravelled in the 1980s, finance was the big winner. As Nobby Clark lamented, banking became exciting. Merchant bankers, those lobotomised sharks of finance, became Medici-like, their new social status built on their cunning extraction of profits from other people’s assets. Along the way, princes of finance profited from mergers of competitive businesses. So much so that, just this month, the Productivity Commission described its recent tax proposal as a response to an economy in which “a small number of big firms exercise market power to the detriment of consumers.”

From the fundamental banking reforms of the early 1980s to the introduction of compulsory superannuation in the early 1990s, a one-way trend has driven an ever-larger share of the Australian economy towards finance. Australia’s GDP growth — fivefold since 1990 — has been outpaced by an explosion in finance-sector assets, which grew from 170 per cent of annual GDP in 1990 to about 450 per cent today. Over the period, finance’s share of GDP has grown from roughly 5.8 per cent to around 7.5 per cent (a similar trajectory to that of the United States).

Compulsory superannuation has certainly contributed, but the most obvious driver has been the growth in bank assets. The banks’ outstanding housing loans have grown twenty-five-fold from around $156 billion (in current prices) in 1990 to $1.6 trillion today. And house prices have risen in tandem, driving up debt’s share of household incomes. As we know, the burden of mortgage payments on incomes has become heavy.

Naturally enough, concern about the financial sector’s role in Australia has tended to focus on the growth of debt, and especially household debt. Regulators have remained relatively sanguine because the national aggregates show a high overall level of household assets. In other words, people can afford to borrow because they have — on average — a savings buffer.

Another reason to be cheerful is that a lot of smaller, inexperienced and sometimes incompetent financiers were driven out of the system in the wave of growth that followed deregulation. During the sharp upturn in financial assets in Australia after 1981, the large banks’ share grew slightly. But from 1990, in the wake of a sharemarket crash and a burst property bubble, the large banks took an increasingly large share of total assets as the smaller and less capable financiers were driven out. Lessons were learned when large banks like Westpac were forced through a very public humiliation; meanwhile, smaller players like Pyramid and virtually all of new banks — local and foreign — were proven to be lightweights (or worse).

Like much of the Australian corporate scene, finance is now dominated by a small number of players. Size is certainly a factor in their profitability, but the evidence suggests that this level of concentration has been fundamentally unhealthy and, in serious respects, a hazard to customers and the community.

Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission produced an admirably principles-driven report in 2019 challenging the notion that banks, super funds and others took seriously their duty of care to customers and the wider community. He made four observations, each of which was alarming. First: sales were the overriding objective and sales incentives were the driver of behaviour — regardless of whether that behaviour was illegal or contrary to client interests. His second and third observations highlighted the complexity of financial transactions, the disadvantages consumers face in understanding their choices, and the fact that agents and advisers were often conflicted. Fourth: big financial institutions must be penalised for law-breaking.

Hayne’s report attracted appropriate attention, and some legislation, but very little follow-up of the punitive kind. Anyone dealing with a bank or large financial institution would be well aware of bureaucratic tweaks designed to avoid liability but won’t have seen much evidence of a culture balanced, at least a little, by the need to deliver value and a duty of care to the client. Lately, a couple of newly appointed bank CEOs have announced themselves with “culture” shakeups that seem at once trite and somewhat mindlessly focused on profitability. (One spruiked the advantages of working over Christmas while the other demanded shorter PowerPoint presentations.)

In other words, it seems entirely possible that bankers (and others who sell financial services) remain entirely focused on personal incentives and corporate profit. Is that a problem?

Australia has experienced a remarkably stable, positive economic environment for a very long time. Putting aside Covid’s impact in 2020, the country hasn’t fallen into recession since 1991. Having moved away from protectionism and intrusive regulation in the 1980s, the economy benefited enormously from a global trend towards open markets and trade, and the remarkable rise of China, South Korea and India.

But the leading proponent of open trade, the United States, now seems intent on undoing all the progress and imposing its own conditions on trade and security partners. China, our largest trading partner, is a prime target of US trade restrictions but must also manage a complex and potentially disruptive transition in its own economy. All this means that a comfortable, prosperous experience that has lasted more than thirty-five years may well be disrupted, though you wouldn’t know it from the behaviour of the financial markets.

The Commonwealth Bank is undoubtedly well managed. As Australia’s highest-valued company, its almost matches Elon Musk’s on-paper fortune. Yet the average market analyst shaves a third, or $100 billion, from its sharemarket value, and the least confident would halve the figure. CBA’s earnings are valued at almost three times those of BHP, perhaps implying that BHP will face stormy international weather while CBA’s domestic earnings remain firmly on a growth path. But is unusual for sharemarket analysts to discount the market price of a prominent company, especially the largest in Australia, and the implication that CBA’s listed value is much higher than it should be is itself a red flag for the industry.

CBA’s hot valuation isn’t an outlier. On the contrary, global markets today are dominated by a country, the United States, whose sharemarket is effectively driven by a handful of hugely overpriced stocks. Confidence has grown year by year since the end of the cold war, and with that has come an increasing tendency to invest an expanded pool of savings in higher-yielding — and riskier — investments. Bets on currency, commodities, shares, private debt and a very wide range of “hedge” options have become a large part of global finance.

It’s more than thirty years since Hyman Minsky, a US economist, published his observation that long periods of prosperity breed financial instability. Minsky is cited when things go wrong at the end of a long period of asset inflation and credit growth, the abrupt version of which is known as a “Minsky moment.” The sudden withdrawal of credit from core global financial institutions in New York in 2008 was one such moment, and its context was examined in John Kay’s Other People’s Money, published in 2015.

Kay, a distinguished British economist, explains the evolution of finance from the “boring” environment that Nobby Clark preferred to a sector massively larger in every sense and layered with esoteric transactions largely conducted among the players themselves. A memorable contributor to the 2008 crisis was the trade in “collateralised debt obligations,” a form of security traded originally entirely within the market for corporate bonds.

In the 2000s, CDO trading funded a rapid expansion of American home mortgages, notably in the riskier “sub-prime” category. CDOs bundled mortgages in investment securities that provided investors with the interest and principal repayment of mortgage borrowers. Slices of a mortgage pool were sold in “tranches” according to varying risks of potential default, with those risks determined by S&P Global Ratings and other rating agencies. And then, to close the loop, insurance companies provided default insurance in the form of credit default swaps and “synthetic CDOs,” which were even more artificial than the name implies.

Sales-driven mortgage lenders turned out to be careless about maintaining high credit standards. When the bubble burst between 2007 and 2009, about US$1 trillion was lost by financiers, roughly half of which evaporated in the CDO trade. Major banks failed, requiring massive interventions by governments. And not much has really changed since then.

Kay’s theme is simplicity. Financiers who take public deposits should be limited to conservative, low-risk lending on solid home mortgages and government debt. The whole sector should be regulated by function, so that the obscure and often opaque market for derivatives and things like CDOs is confined to those who knowingly choose to take the associated risks. The finance sector has grown too big, says Kay. It is largely self-serving and presents too many points of conflicted interest.

We know that some astute investors take a dim view of today’s financial markets. Warren Buffet, famously, has been accumulating huge piles of cash for some years in the face of what he sees as unrealistic asset prices. In Australia, the difference between the price of those Commonwealth Bank shares (thirty times the company’s earnings) and BHP shares (twelve times) seems like a sign of trouble. BHP is effectively a proxy for Australia’s primary exports. CBA is our largest domestic bank. One of the numbers is seriously wrong, and informed observers think it is the bank’s. But it might be both.

Among the points made in the Productivity Commission’s tax reform proposal is that Australia’s economy is dominated by companies that have neutralised competition by buying their competitors. One possibility, boosted by the flow of money into superannuation, is that our savings have promoted reduced competition and inflated the share prices of the dominant companies. Index funds are popular with superannuation investors because they are often low cost and allow non-expert investors access to fairly dispersed risk across stocks in, say, the top 20 or 50 or 100 companies. Companies valued highly enough to get into those categories get an immediate share price boost from the index weighting, so there is a significant incentive for managements to try to achieve that result. Buying another company is the short route. The Productivity Commission’s proposal to change the tax rules to encourage smaller companies suggests that informed people see the need to reverse the concentrations of financial power that have grown up over recent decades.

In Australia’s case, overvalued assets — notably houses — are entering a more risky environment. The global trading system is being dismantled and China’s economy is undergoing a difficult transition of its own. Inflation could easily spread out from the United States if its proposed tariff strategy remains in place. It seems wise to follow Commissioner Hayne and John Kay in asking whether our financial settings and structures are robust enough to deal with the risks ahead. •

The post High finance appeared first on Inside Story.

It has been evident since Josh Frydenberg’s last budget, in March 2022, that federal government spending is likely to be higher by between 1.5 and 2 percentage points of GDP over the next decade than the average during the forty-five years leading up to the pandemic.

There are three reasons for that:

• Voting patterns and widespread support for increasing government expenditure on a variety of programs suggest the public wants more spending on health, the aged, disability and childcare.

• There is a bipartisan consensus that, whether the public wants it or not, they are going to get more spending on defence.

• The $600 billion increase in net debt since the onset of the global financial crisis and the projected $391 billion further increase in net debt over the next decade mean there is unavoidably going to be more spending on interest.

Some combination of expenditure restraint and additional revenue will be required. It’s far from obvious that this additional spending can be sufficiently offset by cuts to spending in other areas of the budget (although scrapping the obscene Western Australian GST deal — which was most recently estimated to cost $60 billion over the eleven years to 2029–30 — would be a very good step in that direction).

So what could the treasurer contemplate, if he is serious about raising additional revenue, of between 1 and 2 percentage points of GDP, in order to pay for this additional spending and put the budget on a sustainable trajectory, in the fairest and least economically damaging way?

In principle, one of the first cabs off the rank should be an increase in the rate and a broadening of the base of the GST. Australia’s GST contributes only 12.5 per cent of total taxation revenue, less than every other OECD country except the United States, which doesn’t have a GST, and well below the OECD average of 20.75 per cent.

Australia’s GST rate of 10 per cent is (along with Japan’s) lower than all but two (Canada and Switzerland) of the OECD countries with a GST-type tax, and well below the OECD average rate of 19.2 per cent: twenty-three out the thirty-seven OECD countries have standard GST rates of 20 per cent or higher (although many of those countries apply lower rates to “essential” items like food and, more recently, energy). Australia’s GST only applies to 50 per cent of total final consumption expenditure, less than in twenty-six of the thirty-seven OECD countries with a GST, below the OECD average of 58 per cent, and well below New Zealand’s 96 per cent.

As a practical matter, however, no federal government is ever going to wear the political odium of raising the rate or broadening the base of the GST, and the financial burden of compensating up to one-third of all households for the impact of doing so on them, while state and territory governments get to spend the resulting additional revenue, as would occur under our present system, which allocates all the revenue from the GST to them.

So the “nexus” between GST revenues and federal “untied” grants to the states and territories would need to be broken before this, otherwise highly desirable, reform, could be implemented.

In that context, it’s worth remembering that among the reasons why the Howard government decided to allocate the revenue from the GST to the states — apart from as an incentive for them to abolish a number of inefficient state taxes — were, first, to absolve the federal government of having to make an annual decision as to how much to give the states and territories by way of financial assistance grants (a decision which would inevitably be greeted with howls of protest by premiers and chief ministers); and second, to allow the Howard government subsequently to pretend the revenue from the GST wasn’t a federal revenue, and payments of that revenue to the states and territories weren’t a federal expenditure. This meant both could then be excluded from the federal budget, thereby allowing his government to claim it was the lowest-taxing and spending government since the 1970s. That fiction wasn’t corrected until the 2008–09 budget.

There is one major objection to collecting more revenue from the GST — namely, that it’s potentially regressive because lower-income households spend a larger proportion of their income, and hence would be proportionately more affected by an increase in the rate of GST than higher-income households.

That’s a legitimate concern. One way of addressing it, which is quite common in European countries where the standard rate of VAT is much higher than Australia’s GST, is to have lower rates on “essential” items. It’s also worth noting that many of the items currently exempt from GST in Australia, such as private health insurance premiums and private school fees, constitute a larger proportion of the spending of higher-income households than of lower-income ones — so broadening the base of the GST would not necessarily be regressive.

But in order to sell an increase in the rate and/or broadening of the base of the GST, it would seem sensible — as well as being justified on other grounds — to include some progressive tax reforms in any comprehensive reform package: that is, measures that have a larger impact on higher-income households than on lower- income ones.

It’s worth noting that, according to the latest available (2022–23) taxation statistics from the ATO, 45 per cent of the income reported by taxpayers in the top tax bracket was in forms other than wages and salaries or interest, compared with 18 per cent of the taxable income reported by taxpayers who weren’t in the top tax bracket. Equally notable is that income in forms other than wages and salaries made up just over 72 per cent of the income reported by people aged sixty-five or over, as against less than 21 per cent of the income reported by people aged between eighteen and sixty-five.

That’s significant, because income in forms other than wages and salaries can often be channelled through other structures (such as businesses or trusts) to achieve a lower tax rate. Owner-occupied housing and superannuation are very lightly taxed relative to other forms of savings and income paid out of superannuation funds in the “retirement phase” isn’t taxed at all.

So the concessional treatment of income in forms other than wages and salaries or interest disproportionately benefits higher-income and older households, at the expense of lower- and middle-income, and younger households.

And that in turn suggests a “progressive” reform of the income tax system, justifiable in its own right, but especially as a counter-balance to an arguably “regressive” increase in the GST, would be to reduce the generosity of the tax treatment of these other forms of income, compared with that of wages and salaries or interest. That could be done, for example, by reducing the 50 per cent tax discount on capital gains, curbing negative gearing, taxing trusts as companies, or taxing payouts from superannuation funds.

Alternatively, it could be achieved by adopting the schedular system used in Nordic countries, under which income from capital is taxed at a flat rate with no tax-free threshold.

In order to make those changes more politically saleable, an appropriate quid pro quo could be a significant increase in the threshold at which the top rate of income tax becomes payable. Australia’s top personal income tax rate (of 47 per cent, including the Medicare levy) is in the middle of the range for OECD countries. But the threshold at which it becomes payable — just 1.7 times average annual earnings — is very low by OECD standards.

Depending on how much additional revenue was produced by reducing the concessional tax treatment of non-labour income and by raising the rate or broadening the base of the GST, it could be possible to reduce the marginal income tax rates paid by lower- and middle-income earners.

And the tax scales should be indexed for inflation, as is done automatically in seventeen OECD countries. Particularly sensible is Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis’s proposal that income tax thresholds should be increased annually by 2.5 per cent (the mid-point of the Reserve Bank’s inflation target range), so that when inflation is above (below) the target band, fiscal policy is automatically tightened (loosened), which would take some of the burden of responding to fluctuations in inflation off monetary policy and dampen swings in interest rates.

In addition to making a meaningful contribution to “budget repair” and improving the equity of Australia’s tax system, tax reforms that seek to increase incentives to work (through reductions in tax on labour income) and to invest in income-generating assets rather than assets whose primary purpose is to produce capital gains (that is, speculation) could also contribute to the goal of improving Australia’s productivity performance. •

This is an extract from Saul Eslake’s new paper for the Australian National University’s Tax And Transfer Policy Institute. The full paper, with graphs, also looks at company taxation; taxes on “economic rents” (including revenue from fossil fuel exports) and inheritances; and state and territory taxes.

The post Towards a sustainable budget appeared first on Inside Story.

Articles and talk programs pondering whether the youth vote “might decide the outcome this time” have been staple pre-election fillers for decades. Along with other demographic ruminations, they usually disappear on election night as their meaninglessness becomes evident: once again, the election is decided by all voters.

A related meme followed the demise of the Howard government in 2007 and Scott Morrison’s in 2022: support for the centre-right among young Australians was now so diabolically low that it was hard to see how the Coalition could win office ever again. In both cases the yarn worked a treat while the Rudd and Albanese governments were soaring in the polls but dissolved as voting intentions narrowed. From late 2023 until May 2025 not a peep was heard from anyone about this existential threat to the Libs and the Nats.

A particular version of the “youth vote” narrative did, however, step up. The “era of Baby Boomers as the dominant voting force in Australian politics is at an end,” it said. “Power and numbers have shifted to younger people” because “for the first time in Australian history, Generation Z and Millennials will outnumber Baby Boomers at the ballot box in the upcoming federal election.”

“Disillusioned” and “resentful,” these two groups’ impact on the election was impossible to predict, but “their grievances could deliver unexpected results in marginal seats” and they “may well,” yes, “decide the election.”

Today, three months after the Albanese government’s massive return, the “Coalition may never govern again” narrative is well and truly revived, with those Millennials and GenZs enjoying a central position, having morphed from unpredictable to reliably left-of-centre, not just now, but forever. Just in the last fortnight you could read about “younger voters whose electoral heft now rivals the traditionally powerful baby boomer bloc” and how “Gen Z and Millennial voters, spanning the age range from thirteen to forty-four, [have been] gradually overtaking the electorate as Baby Boomers fade away.”

Now, your takeout from all this hullabaloo might be that this is the first time voters under forty-five have outnumbered the sixty-pluses. This is not the case. That younger group has always outstripped the sixty-plus cohort, and in fact the extent to which it does shrinks with every election (perhaps excluding 1974 when the voting age dropped from twenty-one to eighteen). In June 2008 (the earliest AEC age data I could find) eighteen- to forty-four-year-olds comprised 45.8 per cent of the roll and sixty-pluses 26.6 per cent, a gap of 19.8. At the close of rolls in 2025 the numbers were 43.1 and 32.7, a difference of 10.4.

It almost halved in seventeen years: our population is ageing, after all.

No, the claim here is specific to those particular demographics, Gen Zs and Millennials, and its alleged significance rests on an assumption about their future voting behaviour: they will remain left-wing. Nearly all these yarns are sourced to polling outfit Redbridge, and usually include quotes from director Kos Samaras. Redbridge has a very fine quantitative polling record, topping Kevin Bonham’s 2025 election pollsters analysis. Along with his colleague Tony Barry, Samaras has been a staple of the ABC TV’s election night coverage in recent years.

To understand what they’re on about, we need definitions of these rather arbitrary “generations.” By most accounts, Boomers are people born from 1946 to 1964, Millennials from 1981 to 1996 and Generation Z from 1997 to 2012.

For enrolment we go to the Australian Electoral Commission’s electoral roll, provided on their splendid website, where ages are grouped mostly in five-year bunches. Mil-Gen Zs fit neatly into the forty to forty-four category plus all the younger ones. Boomers at first glance look trickier, but luckily it turns out that when Samaras et al talk about them, they actually mean Boomers and older, so the AEC’s sixty to sixty-four group is also convenient: just add it to the more aged. (Poor old Gen Xers, alone, are left out of this equation.)

Now, the reason, stated or implied, that the new outnumbering is tectonic is that Mil–GenZs are not like earlier eighteen to forty-four years olds: their political inclinations will not change much over time. Yes, they were seen as up for grabs before 3 May, but the result, or maybe the size of it, changed that. (In truth we have no data on who voted how age-wise this year, apart from pre-election polling which, remember, apparently showed volatility among young voters.) The crux of it, why this constitutes an earthquake, is that they will not follow earlier generations in becoming more politically conservative as they age.

That last bit requires a bit of fleshing out.

It’s obviously not the case that historically all Australians’ voting habits adhered to the socialist–capitalist, heart-and-head formulation. But, in net terms, a substantial minority have. Our meagre exit polling data means that any guesstimate can only be rough, and the picture is complicated by the erosion of major-party support over the decades, particularly among the young. The meaning of left and right, and the positions of the major parties, are not fixed in time. The parties evolve over the years in response to changes in popular attitudes, or for other reasons. But preferential voting does allow us to observe two-party-preferred trends, while acknowledging the decreasing applicability of that construct.

It’s also important to view any observed shift in a particular demographic’s vote in the context of the electorate as a whole. At the 2025 election, for example, the overall swing to Labor was 3.1 per cent. If you identified a cohort that had swung to Labor by 3 per cent, it would not be of great interest. But a 6 per cent swing, or no swing at all, might well be.

I have to report with some sadness that many breathless accounts of changes in voting habits over time among particular groups don’t take account of those overall shifts. Not adjusting in this way produces more drama just makes better copy.

So, with plenty of provisos, how has the ageing process affected the net shift from left to right in the wider electorate?

The best available evidence, with decent sample sizes, comes in Newspoll’s quarterly numbers, which stretch back to 1996. Twenty-nine years ago, the eighteen to thirty-four age group — not quite a perfect match for today’s fifty to sixty-four group, but not-too-bad — supported Labor at about 3 per cent above the national figure. (These are my two-party-preferred estimates from Newspoll’s primary support.)

Across last year and early this, though, Newspoll’s fifty to sixty-four group registered two-party-preferred support for Labor at around 4–5 per cent below the corresponding national number.

So, with plenty of caveats — midterm surveys are not as meaningful as exit polls because people can change their minds as election day approaches; immigration, emigration and death have changed the roll over the last thirty years; support shifts in both directions; and polls, of course, can be wrong — we seem to be talking about perhaps 7 (rounding down to account for the current group being slightly older than a perfect match would be) per cent of those voters have shifted right, or around double that, 14 per cent, of Labor ones, in two-party-preferred terms. That’s across a period of less than thirty years; today’s fifty-year-olds still have a lot of ageing to do.

So, is there really a reason to believe Mill–GenZs will buck the long-term trend and go to their graves the left-of-centre voters they are today? This is, after all, the basis on which all the drama rests.

The answer is no.

For one thing (as Zou Enlai didn’t really opine about the impact of the French Revolution) it’s just too early to tell. Even if current data suggested they haven’t shifted allegiance so far, they’re still young. But the evidence, despite some claims, doesn’t show that anyway.

The source for the assertion that their politics won’t change is usually the Australian Election Study’s 2022 report. I gave the AES a going-over a couple of years ago for various sins, including ignoring aggregate voter shifts, which is relevant here. The AES claimed that Millennials had shifted left over the decades, that they “entered the electorate in the early 2000s with about 35 per cent of this generation supporting the Coalition [in primary votes], a level which has now fallen to 25 per cent in 2022].”

The two big flaws in this finding were that the electorate as a whole recorded a 2022 Coalition primary vote 7.2 per cent lower than in 2001, and that Millennials were still turning eighteen, adding presumably relatively left-wing voters to the roll, right up until 2014. So it wasn’t a fixed group.

The AES made no similar assertions about the newly-arrived Gen Z electors, in fact had them swinging to the Coalition in 2022, albeit from an unusably tiny sample. But Redbridge has lumped them with Millennials, presumably to facilitate the “now outnumber Boomers” tagline. It makes for a very large group indeed, containing many parents and their offspring. Note that young Gen Zs will continue joining the electoral roll until around 2030.

As far as I know there has been no attempt by the AES to track the votes of subsets of Millennials, say those who are forty to forty-four in 2025 and were nineteen to twenty-three at the 2004 election (adjusting for overall electorate votes, of course). The samples would be tiny, but the results could still be of interest. In theory we outsiders should be able to do that with the public AES data, but in practice their older datasets are rather messy. I had a go a couple of years ago but hit a dead end. It was the case though, using minuscule samples, that older Mil-GenZs voted more right-wing than younger ones in 2022.

What is undoubtedly true, however, is the increased divergence between young and old voters. That roughly three-point 1996 Labor advantage among eighteen to thirty-four year olds has exploded to at least ten per cent among today’s eighteen to thirty-four year olds. This is in line with worldwide trends, though complicated by recent accounts of many young men turning to the centre-right and far-right parties.

Now, you could argue that even if today’s overwhelmingly left-of-centre young people move to the right by the same amount as their predecessors, it will still result in a very leftwing overall electorate. But it’s easy to imagine them shifting by more as they become more well-off than younger Australians. Because all the bounty held by oldies today has got to go somewhere.

Explanations for this predicted electoral seachange routinely link it to the housing crisis and increasing intergenerational wealth disparity. These are real issues: real estate ownership is increasingly skewed to older people, and skyrocketing prices, particularly over the last two decades, continue locking younger people out. It is no doubt part of the reason for the big divergence in votes by age.

But what happens to all that property and wealth when old people die? It doesn’t accompany them off this mortal coil, but is inherited by others, eventually nearly all younger Australians.

According to one 2025 account, the median age at which people get an inheritance is fifty-five and the average amount $707,000. Many, of course, will receive a lot more than that, and many a lot less. If the current age–wealth disparity is historically large, then so will be the sudden (average) increase in wealth they experience. And, of course, many young people will also, as they age, achieve the Great Australian Dream before their parents die.

So would we really expect all or nearly all Mill–Gen Zs to remain loyal to the parties that claim to promise a more egalitarian spread of home ownership and/or cheaper rents when it’s no longer in their material interests?

Or might they become more like today’s selfish, property-hogging Boomers?

When it comes to age and the electoral roll, the most important fact to remember is that the median is always increasing (it’s currently around forty-nine). And regarding electoral behaviour more generally, one of the worst things an observer can do is project the present — the last election result, the current opinion polls, today’s impression — onto the future. That usually ends in tears. •

The post The trouble with Coalition’s young-voter problem appeared first on Inside Story.

Along with flat productivity, stagnant income per head and slow output growth, the fall in business investment surely suggests the Australian economy is in big trouble. And from that failure much follows. If business investment is low, little wonder productivity growth is slow, and output growth is below trend.

The obvious remedy is to increase the returns on investment. One way to do that is to cut the rate of company tax. Another might be to change the calculation of company tax so that investment can be deducted from taxable profits. As the Financial Review reported recently, the Productivity Commission would recommend more generous immediate tax deductions for new investment “as a way of boosting non-mining business spending that has declined over the past fifteen years.”

If company tax is cut when the federal budget is already in deficit, a prudent government would balance the revenue loss by a spending cut or a tax increase somewhere else. This is a reason to increase the GST, for example. The Productivity Commission is all for lower company taxes, as is the Financial Review.

But there is a puzzle here, because the volume of non-mining business investment measured by the ABS capital expenditure survey has never been higher than it is now. It is one-fifth higher than it was in 2009, and 6 per cent higher than the previous peak reached before Covid hit in 2020. It’s true that the total volume of business investment (including mining) is less than it was during the mining investment boom of 2010–15, but it is well up from the subsequent trough in 2020. Overall, the volume of business investment measured in the national accounts has increased by more than a third since the 2020 slump.

Nor is business investment low as a share of GDP. The volume of business investment shown in the national accounts is less than it was during the mining boom as a share of real GDP but markedly higher than the average share of the last forty years. Comparing the volume of business investment to GDP, business investment is about double what it was coming out of the recession of the early nineties. (Comparing nominal business investment to nominal GDP just picks up the huge gain in iron ore prices, which boosted nominal GDP but had little impact on the price of investment goods.)

If there is a problem with business investment in Australia we would expect to see it also reflected in foreign direct investment in Australia. This should be especially so if the problem is high company tax. Australia’s dividend imputation system means that changes in company tax primarily affect overseas-owned businesses. For Australian-owned businesses, an increase or decrease is mostly offset by a more or less equal but opposite change in imputation credits for shareholders’ personal income tax, leaving the total return for shareholders unaffected.

Far from falling, though, foreign direct investment in Australia is very strong indeed. It was $82 billion last year, exceeded in the last thirty-five years only by $99 billion in 2022.

So why has GDP growth been so slow? No puzzle here. Growth was supposed to be slow. It was exactly the result the government, Treasury and the Reserve Bank wanted, and rightly so. Three years ago consumer price inflation reached 7.8 per cent, more than three times the midpoint of the 2.5 per cent target. The Reserve Bank sharply increased interest rates from just above zero in March 2022 to 4.35 per cent two years later. At the same time, fiscal policy was tightened from a deficit of 6.4 per cent in 2021–22 to a surplus of 0.6 per cent of GDP last financial year.

The intention was to slow growth and increase unemployment, and it worked. Output growth did indeed slow, and inflation returned to within the target band. Happily, jobs growth remained much stronger than expected.

But if GDP growth does slow while jobs growth remains strong, the arithmetical result must be a downturn in output per hour worked, or labour productivity. It is not the whole explanation for the decline in labour productivity, but if the number of hours worked is increasing faster than output then labour productivity will go down.

(Another part of the explanation is that productivity soared during the pandemic. This was because many low-productivity service industries — restaurants, concerts, theatres, cinemas, clubs and bars, hotels and retail — had to close, while mining, manufacturing and other high-productivity industries remained open. When everyone went back to work, productivity of course fell.)

It is true that Australian real GDP per head has declined over the last two years of data. But much of the decline is due to that (intended) slow growth in real output combined with the very big increase in population after Covid restrictions were lifted. Once they were gone, Australia experienced what the ABS described as an “unprecedented” population increase of 7.2 per cent in 2022–23.

When Bob Hawke convened the first economic summit in April 1983 unemployment was heading towards 10.3 per cent and the country was still struggling out of the deep recession of 1981–82. In most respects, by contrast, the Australian economy has never been more prosperous than it is today.

The rate of participation in the labour force is at record highs and the unemployment rate, at 4.3 per cent, is still quite low (though increasing). Apart from the deliberate interruption to economic activity during Covid, more than thirty years have passed since the last recession.

Australia is emerging from an extremely successful disinflation, one achieved without a recession, without a big increase in unemployment — and with a big increase in business investment. That, and not a looming investment catastrophe, is the foreground to next week’s summit.

Australia has done well, but it can certainly do better. It is well worth commissioning another review of the impact on business of unnecessary regulation and red tape, for example. Regulation is becoming a sort of economic wokeism that could be better disciplined.

It is also worth looking at sensible means to increase productivity. Many studies have concluded that the health sector has plenty of room for improvement. But most productivity gains arise from businesses redesigning work flows, especially around new technologies, or new businesses creating new products that use less labour than the products they replace. Governments can subsidise research and development in industry‚ but in Australia the government already does that, and generously. Governments don’t otherwise have much influence over the availability of new technologies or the speed of their adoption.

Productivity upswings and downswings are usually mysterious. The huge mining investment boom coincided with a prolonged downturn in mining productivity. Mining productivity then rose for a while and is now again falling. Tax changes of themselves rarely affect productivity. The introduction of the GST in Australia, for example, coincided with the end of the productivity boom of the 1990s. As Westpac chief economist and former RBA assistant governor Luci Ellis recently commented, “If tax reform is the answer, it is hard to see how boosting productivity growth was the question.” •

The post Productivity puzzles appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the dominant view of Australia’s housing challenge — homes are too expensive to rent and buy because we don’t build enough of them, and we don’t build enough of them because there’s too much regulation. The proposed solution is to reform zoning, planning and building rules to unlock more supply.

While it’s beyond argument that Australia needs more housing to meet the needs of a growing population, the proposition that we can build our way to affordability is open to challenge — at least if affordability means the price of housing relative to incomes.

Our housing sector relies almost entirely on private sector residential development, which is characterised by upswings and downturns, and experience suggests that we are unlikely to build significantly more housing over a sustained period.

Bursts of rapid construction are followed by dips, with the average number of new dwellings rising relatively slowly over the longer term. In the two decades to 2004, about 36,000 dwellings were completed every quarter in Australia. In the ten years to 2014 the average rose to 38,000, and in the most recent decade it jumped to 48,000 thanks to a spike in apartment building between 2015 and 2019. Over the past two years, though, the average has fallen back to 44,000. (The increase in overall housing supply is less since many homes are demolished to make way for new builds.)

But even if we could sustain housing production at a level significantly above the long-term trend, property prices are likely to keep rising. This seems to defy logic — surely if we build homes faster than the population grows then prices should stabilise or fall? That would certainly be true if the number of extra people — or more correctly, the number of extra households — was the sole driver of housing demand. But there are other drivers too, including interest rates, lending rules, tax incentives and incomes.

The laws of supply and demand operate with housing, as with most other goods, to the extent that prices go up when demand exceeds supply. People respond to rising prices in a variety of ways, depending on their situation. Some pay more for their housing, some use their housing more intensively (with adult children remaining in the parental home, for example) and some end up with no housing at all. Higher prices also give developers an incentive to build more, but the relationship between rising prices and increased housing construction is weak in Australia. And, as we’ve seen recently, even when property prices go up, new building can be constrained by shortages of labour and materials, rising construction and finance costs and other factors. Rather than building more, developers can also respond to increased demand by increasing their profit margins.

While higher property prices don’t necessarily drive more construction, increases in income do swiftly lift housing demand: when we get extra money, we generally spend it on more and better housing. This is also the case with increased productivity, the holy grail of economic policy. My research shows that when low-income households benefit from greater productivity, they tend to spend the financial gains almost entirely on housing.

Even in higher-income households, some 40 to 50 per cent of extra productivity-related income will be spent on housing. Some of this will stimulate additional housing supply as people purchase new dwellings, but much of that extra spending helps purchase, extend or renovate existing homes, or buy holiday houses. Higher incomes can drive up prices and worsen affordability even if the population is falling or stagnant (as happened during Covid).

The upshot is that if we bank everything on a strategy of fixing housing affordability by adding to supply, we could end up chasing our own tails, at least if incomes keep rising too.

In a recent working paper, I showed that if real per capita disposable income rises by 1.5 per cent annually, then the number of new dwellings must exceed the number of new households by 0.55 per cent for affordability to remain constant (that is, to maintain the current ratio of houses prices to incomes.) So, even if we build enough new dwellings to accommodate every new household, prices will still go up if incomes rise too. Adding an additional 0.55 per cent to dwelling supply might not sound much, but Australia’s record of residential construction shows it would be difficult to achieve.

Under the National Housing Accord, governments have set an aspirational target of building 1.2 million new dwellings by 2029. In its 2025 report on the State of the Housing System, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, or NHSAC, forecast that only 938,000 will be completed.

For illustrative purposes, though, let’s see what would happen if the aspirational target were met. If income growth mirrored the five years leading up to Covid in 2020, when real disposable incomes rose by only about 0.5 per cent per annum, then housing affordability — the ratio of house prices to incomes — would decline by 0.7 per cent per annum.

But if government were to achieve its aim of boosting productivity and incomes grew 1.2 per cent per year (in line with historic averages), then the effect on affordability of building 1.2 million new homes by 2029 would be considerably less — only 0.3 per cent per annum — and even less if the number of households grew at the higher end of expectations. The lower the rate of household growth, the greater the affordability gains. But also, the lower the income growth, the greater the affordability gains.

This assumes not only that we succeed in building 1.2 million dwellings but also that the other factors that influence demand — like interest rates, lending rules and tax settings — don’t change. Lower interest rates, for example, would increase buyers’ capacity to borrow, which would increase demand and prices. Tighter lending rules would have the opposite effect.

What is more, to substantially improve the ratio of house prices to incomes, the aspirational target of 1.2 million new homes over five years would need to be met not just once but sustained into the future.

Here we confront another problem. Again, for the purposes of illustration, let’s assume that a building boom is sustained long enough to substantially bring down house prices. That would require developers to keep building at record rates even in the face of falling prices. A more realistic response would be for them to slow development until prices recovered. After all, experience shows that when dwelling prices decline, the rate of construction falls too.

If boosting supply alone is not enough to make housing more affordable, what else could governments do?

One option would be to reduce demand by slowing population growth, which means, in effect, cutting immigration. Again, the matter is not so straightforward: with fewer new households looking for a place to live, new construction will slow accordingly.

Governments could reduce demand by restricting income growth, leaving people with less money to spend on housing, but that is hardly a winning economic or political strategy.

Any serious effort to improve housing affordability means thinking differently about how the housing system works and addressing drivers of demand beyond population growth. It means seeing the housing challenge as a question not just of supply but also of distribution.

For now, most policy effort is focused on pulling the single lever of increased residential construction. In a market economy, though, where the bulk of building is done by private industry, the impact of government action is indirect at best. Planning and zoning reform can make it easier to get projects approved, or to build at higher densities, but these are only two factors influencing investment decisions and profitability. Planning and zoning reform change what can get built but are not enough to determine what does get built.

To be fair, the Albanese government is trying to boost housing supply in other ways too, such as training more skilled workers and encouraging greater productivity through innovative construction techniques. These are worthwhile measures, but they are still indirect and will take time to have an impact.

Since taking office in 2022, the government has also joined the states in investing billions in social and affordable housing. Social housing has declined steadily as a proportion of total housing over four decades and by the last Census, in 2021, it was below 4 per cent. The total of 55,000 new social and affordable homes anticipated by 2029 under the National Housing Accord is a massive turnaround, but still not enough to reverse the long-term decline, let alone restore it to previous levels. The NHSAC has called for government investment to increase the share to 6 per cent in the medium term, and 10 per cent in the long term. This is bold and welcome advice, but there is, as yet, no indication of the government acting.

If 10 per cent of all dwellings were social and affordable housing, this would constitute a substantial non-market sector alongside the two private markets that currently dominate housing provision in Australia — the owner-occupier market and the private rental market.

Boosting the role of non-market housing would ensure that more dwellings went to the individuals and families who need them most: not only those at imminent risk of homelessness but also households pushed into poverty because they shell out so much of their income on rent.  Many rental properties that would be affordable to households with modest means are currently occupied by people who could, in principle, pay more for housing without falling into financial stress. If the non-market sector was large enough to give low- and moderate-income earners real choice, this could put downward pressure on property prices and private rents.

But there is no vision at state and federal level to dramatically expand the size of the non-market housing sector. Instead, governments seem to assume that an unshackled private sector can generate affordability on its own. Non-market housing is consigned to the role of a safety net rather than a competitor on quality and price.

The public investment required to build a large non-market sector would be huge, but the payoff would be enormous too. Adequate housing would generate a range of other benefits, including better health, higher economic growth fuelled by higher consumer spending, greater labour market flexibility and, for some, increased productivity.

With its narrow focus on supply, the government has all but ruled out changes to tax policy. The primary residence is completely exempt from capital gains tax, property investments benefit from a 50 per cent discount on that tax, and negative gearing enables investors to claim rental losses as a tax deduction against their other income. This generous tax treatment of housing encourages over-investment as a store of wealth, inflating property prices. As NHSAC chair Susan Lloyd Hurwitz said recently, tax settings incentivise us to maximise the amount we invest in housing. The logic of the system, she said, is that you should put every dollar you can into housing, which contributes to the situation we’re in.

In tandem with a focus on increasing supply, government could dampen demand by reducing the returns to housing investment through the tax system. It would make sense to target speculative investments — those fuelled by expectations of capital gains, which drive up the price of existing dwellings — while providing tax incentives to construct new homes.

In its 2025 report on the state of the housing system, the NHSAC set out five priorities for action.

1. Increasing investment in social and affordable housing

2. Improving construction sector capacity and productivity

3. Applying best practice principles to planning systems and making more land available

4. Supporting better outcomes for renters

5. Ensuring the tax system supports housing supply and affordability.

The Albanese government has gone further than any government in recent decades on the first of these aims, but the promised funding will all be committed within a few years, when what is needed is sustained funding across decades.

To a greater or less degree, the government is also tackling the next three priorities. But housing tax reform is only on the agenda when it is being ruled out.

Without more far-reaching change, Australia can only hope to make housing more affordable by generating unprecedented levels of dwelling construction. Experience and analysis tell us that such targets are unrealistic. Broadscale planning and zoning reform and greater productivity in the construction sector may get us part of the way there, but to focus on supply as the only cure is to misdiagnose the disease.

Without housing tax reform and sustained investment in non-market housing to complement increased housing supply, it’s likely we’ll keep chasing our tails. •

The post We can’t just build our way out of Australia’s housing problems appeared first on Inside Story.

To encourage new approaches the travellers linked with two very different organisations, Ellen Koshland’s Australian Learning Lecture, a refreshingly different social-reform think tank, and Leading Educators Around the Planet, which has long helped school leaders see best practice up close and bring it back to our schools. Both organisations and the travellers share a concern about the direction being taken by Australian school education.

They have good reason to worry. The differences between schools above and below the “average” index of socio-educational advantage, or ICSEA, are becoming very noticeable. The “above schools” (with an index of 1000 or more) are getting bigger and monopolising the headlines about school achievement. The “below” schools (1000 or less) are far less sought after and publicised. Public schools are enrolling more of the most disadvantaged. The drift of families who have choice has become a scramble from low- to high-ICSEA schools in all sectors, government, Catholic and independent.

Overall, NAPLAN scores have changed little over time, but they have markedly fallen in the “below” schools. A study of the link between student/school ICSEA and NAPLAN achievement shows that family background, ahead of what schools and teachers do, has an increasing grip on student achievement. On equity grounds alone it is a dismal picture for a country that prides itself on a fair go for all.

In searching for solutions it helps to know some of the background: how the problems evolved, how they feed off each other, and why intervention is needed.

Until recently school funding has been the highest-profile issue. The Gonski recommendations about school resourcing didn’t fare well under changing governments and endless fiddling, including by the states and territories. Federal Labor has restored a pathway to full funding of public schools, but the rollout is delayed, and we’ll have to hope that history won’t repeat itself.

But even if the funding does arrive, decisions made in the past will still act as a drag on both equity and achievement. Dean Ashenden told the whole sorry story recently in Inside Story. Researcher Barbara Preston has shown how the very unlevel school playing field, still firmly in place, has affected schools. In Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for All Australian Schools, Australian Learning Lecture confirms the problems, but also points to a solution.

What is really wrong with Australia’s schools, and why do we need to search high and low, at home and abroad, for solutions? The most noticeable indicator is enrolment segregation and its impacts far and wide. The diagram below helps explain how, at the level of schools and families, Australia’s segregating school framework is seemingly locked into a vicious cycle.

Screenshot

This regressive sequence plays out in just about every Australian community and pervades conversations about schools, teachers and — in the better-resourced families —school choice. Even casual observers can see the links between the stages in the cycle and how schools fare in what has become a very lopsided competition. It looks like a system designed to create winners and losers.

Many of these problems, along with half-hearted solutions, have found their way into official reports. These include a 2023 Productivity Commission report on the National School Reform Agreement and a review, commissioned the same year by Jason Clare, to inform a better and fairer education system. The latter’s report is essential reading: it argues that the growing segregation of school enrolments needs to be tackled not least because the extent of segregation is making it less likely that other reforms will achieve Australia’s longstanding ambition of equity and excellence.

The other feature of the regressive cycle is that it is fuelled by assumptions about school quality. Dean Ashenden’s book, Unbeaching the Whale, points the finger at Labor’s “education revolution” and how successive governments have insisted that schools serve a narrowing range of priorities, reinforced by measurable student outcomes. It’s hardly surprising that families at stages four and five of the cycle become very fussy about their preferred school.

The persistence of the cycle not only undermines both equity and excellence but also raises questions about efficiency and effectiveness. There have been no gains in the “winning” schools to balance the losses elsewhere. It advantages some families in relative terms, albeit at a dollar cost to them, and imposes an opportunity cost on others. And all this is taking place alongside the ever-present human cost of lost livelihoods and disconnected young people, families and communities.

School reform is a “busy” response to all this but doesn’t deal with the fundamentals of the cycle. The most common interventions have tried to improve inputs (funding, for example) near the top of the cycle or close the gaps between schools at stage two by reforming classroom and school practice. But it hasn’t worked, and we are still left with a wicked problem wrapped in a vicious circle. Few reformers want to touch an unlevel playing field that requires only public schools to be free and inclusive.

The dimensions of the problem are harder to avoid. Browbeaten by growing concern, the 2023 review even commissioned research on how make schools more socio-educationally diverse and ensure affluent and non-affluent students don’t grow up strangers to each other. More recently, a former education system head, Michele Bruniges, gathered, assessed and reported on new ideas to reduce concentrated disadvantage in our schools, and ways to improve equity across them.

It is certainly possible to intervene at different stages to diversify enrolments within schools. Bruniges suggested adjusting school zoning to challenge the way postcodes concentrate both wealth and disadvantage. Michael Sciffer, one of the Australian team in Canada, shows how this can be done. Stage two in the cycle would start to look different if public funding substantially rewarded schools for enrolling more students from targeted disadvantaged groups.

The problem is that solutions grafted onto a largely dysfunctional framework might not be resilient enough to fend off efforts to unwind even the most thoughtful interventions. In Canada, the Australian team found evidence of creeping compromises that worsened the prospects of equity and achievement. One Canadian province allowed many community schools to become selective. Another loosened the regulations around school choice of public schools.

This suggests the need for a more wholistic approach. Bruniges certainly stressed that we must rethink how we resource and structure our education system. The Australian Secondary Principals Association has a new focus on transforming systems, declaring that inconsistency and inequity in the way schools are regulated must be tackled. It is effectively calling for a new schooling accord with a common funding and regulatory framework to enable all schools to tackle entrenched inequities.

The Australian excursion to Canada and its newly released report has the potential to inform these conversations by clarifying what might be gold-standard policy options while gently dismissing ideas that won’t make enough difference in the Australian context.

Lessons from Canada: An Equal School System is Possible asks if there is a better way to design our school system. After all, Canada and Australia are similar societies with different educational outcomes. The report makes eight significant findings derived from a close look at three quite different provinces. It concludes that solutions are possible, and outlines the steps towards a more equal school system.

One province started diversifying its provision of schools in the 1970s, the same decade in which Australia unwittingly launched what became our regressive cycle. This particular Canadian province put in place regulations and conditions that have generally stood the test of time — to the point where the province has achieved a reasonable public/private balance in the provision and operation of schools.

The reader might ask why we don’t do the same. Some of the regulations and conditions, if implemented in Australia, would improve our framework of schools. But they would fall short of an optimum solution. We can do better.

We could identify strongly with another province, but for all the wrong reasons. Just like Australia, this province has stumbled into serious equity problems. Quite uniquely in Canada, it substantially funds private schools — but as equity problems grew it then allowed many public schools to become selective. It could be argued that Australia and this province are competing in a race to the bottom. There is, however, one important difference: a parent-driven organisation in that province has come up with a plan for a common school network that has shifted public opinion and been drafted into possible legislation. Watch this space.

In common with a number of countries, a third province already has a fully funded framework of schools, with both secular and Catholic schools operating under almost identical obligations and responsibilities. All schools are resourced according to need and are regulated on a consistent basis, but they are diverse in character, curriculum, ethos and governance. No school, including Catholic schools, is allowed to charge fees, and fee-charging schools are only found in the small private sector. Variations of this approach are found in other Canadian provinces.

Smart educators know that it isn’t easy or even necessary to transplant school system reforms from one place to another. But Australia has done worse than that. Our response has been to shut our minds to the world beyond the level of each school. It’s not working. It is time to swallow our pride, take the blinkers off and learn from those who just might be doing better. •

The post Lessons for Australian schooling appeared first on Inside Story.

The premier called an early election for March 2024 won only fourteen seats in a House of Assembly that had expanded from twenty-five to thirty-five. Labor won ten, the Greens five, the Jacqui Lambie Network three and left-leaning independents three. To hang on as head of a minority government, Rockcliff struck confidence-and-supply agreements with the Lambie Network members and two of the independents.

Tasmanians were back at the polling booths a fortnight ago after Labor moved a successful motion of no confidence in the premier. Again, Jeremy Rockliff had been unable to keep the crossbench onside, but rather than resign he took Tasmanians back to the polls. Throughout the campaign, his policy demeanour remained “my way or the highway” as he pushed along the Liberal Party’s 2030 Strong Plan.

Post-election, the makeup of parliament has changed remarkably little. Neither major party has a majority, but the Liberals have slightly more support than before and Labor slightly less. The Greens and the independents are back, but not the Jacqui Lambie Network members, and the counting continues for the remaining few seats. The premier has begun talking to the crossbench but has telegraphed that he wants to get on with the job of implementing his party’s plan. And Labor will attempt to form government if he can’t.

The problem is clear. The major parties don’t share the concerns the leftist Greens and independents will bring to minority-government negotiations and to parliament. They are not minor concerns: they are why the crossbenchers are in politics. Invariably they touch on Tasmania’s environment, government transparency and accountability, the need for powerful political backers to be kept at arm’s length, and the integrity and intrinsic value of public spaces.

Tasmania’s conundrum resonates around the country. It raises the key question: is it possible to govern when the major parties no longer attract majority support?

Across Australia, twenty-five state- and territory-level minority governments have held power since 1989. Given that more than two-thirds of them ran full term, minority government can be made to work. And it’s important to remember that Labor was widely expected to be returned in minority at the May federal election. Even though the government won by a landslide, independents and minor parties surpassed the Coalition vote and were within a whisker of Labor’s share of first preferences.

Although a two-party-dominant system took hold federally a decade or so after federation, the picture was different in the states. Between 1910 and 1977 state governments spent around a third of the time in minority — except in Queensland, which experienced no minority governments. In South Australia and Western Australia, about 20 per cent of government years were spent in minority; in Victoria the figure was more than 50 per cent, and in Tasmania it was even higher.

Political scientist Jeremy Moon draws on these cases to define several types of minority government. Under ersatz majoritarianism the crossbench is compliant with the minority government. In an ersatz coalition the minority government largely accommodates the interests of the crossbench. Under ad hoc minoritarianism the crossbench unsystematically challenges the minority government. And minoritarianism prevails when crossbenchers, for example left-leaning independents and Greens, systematically pursue change.

These categories only matter because of the dramatic nationwide fall in major-party support. Federally, for instance, the combined Coalition–Labor vote fell from 91.8 per cent in 1987 to 66.4 per cent in 2025. During this period Labor prime minister Julia Gillard struck deals with the crossbench to support her minority government for the full 2010–13 term. Later, following the loss of three Coalition MPs, prime minister Scott Morrison’s government fell into minority, surviving as an ersatz majoritarian government until the 2019 election.

Analysing the twenty-five power-sharing governments at the state and territory level since 1989, the Australia Institute finds that they vary markedly, take time to negotiate, and typically result in the crossbench pursuing resources, reforms and occasionally ministries. They are usually based on formal agreements, involve the crossbench sponsoring legislation, and run full term. Such governments may follow elections, or form after a government loses its majority. Just as we see in Europe, it may not be the party with the highest vote that is able to form government.

In Tasmania, an ersatz Labor–Green coalition existed in 2010–14, but the Greens certainly didn’t have all their interests accommodated. The last two Liberal minority governments have been subject to substantive ad hoc minoritarian challenges, which were resented by the government and used as justification for early elections. Tasmania’s more recent parliaments, though, have very clearly been minoritarian rather than majoritarian.

Now, the Tasmanian Liberals are pursuing ersatz majoritarianism — in other words, behaving as if they are still in majority government — but the crossbench is in no way compliant.

Independents and defectors to the crossbench have always existed in Tasmania, and even the domineering Labor premiers Albert Ogilvie, Robert Cosgrove and Eric Reece relied on them at times to form minority governments. The rise of the Greens, however, was a major disruption to Tasmania’s conservative politics. It brought ideological contention into a politics that was largely concerned with brokering local interests. And it rejected the trashing of the natural environment as the key tool of state development.

Labor has never recovered electorally from the rise of the Greens. And it has been unable to reinvent itself as a party that embraces environmental concerns. Since 1989, three minority governments have been supported by the Greens, two by Labor and one by the Liberals. The Labor–Green Accord government in 1989 was a shortlived, acrimonious affair, but won significant upfront environmental concessions for the Greens. Much had changed by 2010, however, and a Labor–Green quasi-coalition ran full term, relatively harmoniously, with the Greens holding ministries.

The Liberals, meanwhile, had lost their majority in 1996. When Labor campaigned on “no deals with the Greens” after the rancorous Labor–Green Accord, the Liberals found themselves in minority government supported informally by the Greens. Ultimately the major parties voted in 1998 to rid themselves of the Greens and reclaim majority government by reducing the size of parliament and raising the lower house electoral quota. After this move diminished the efficacy of the major parties and parliament and failed to see off the Greens, it was reversed in 2024.

The difficulties the Liberals and Labor are facing today in forming government are compounded by the sharp rise in voting for independents. Following a recent national trend, a strong Voices of Tasmania movement has been backing community candidates. In 1989 the “other” vote was 1.2 per cent; by 2025 it was 19.9 per cent. Three key left-leaning independents have been returned this month. Meanwhile the Green vote has been marginally trending up at each of the last three elections. At 34.3 per cent of the 2025 vote, the Green/independent vote has eclipsed Labor’s 25.9 per cent and is nudging the Liberals 39.8 per cent.

Eighteen seats are needed to govern. The Liberals have fourteen, Labor ten, the Greens five and independents five, with several still being counted. The Liberals are relatively close to government. But even when they were only two members short in 2023, they were unable to govern. Labor, for its part, has been humbled by its lowest-ever vote.

Together, though, Labor, the independents and the Greens comprise a significant left-leaning bloc that may emerge as a quasi-coalition government or form an ad hoc bloc alliance to prosecute a reformist agenda in opposition to a Liberal minority government.

Governing Tasmania is further complicated by several other factors. The state’s Hare Clark electoral system translates the trend away from the major parties into a more dramatic loss of seats than on the mainland. Despite this, the Liberals mindset remains determinedly majoritarian. Labor is hoping to attempt to form government but is hampered by its worst ever electoral result. And the major parties are ever wary of the electoral punishment that has previously followed power-sharing deals with the Greens. •

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In the largest multi-country case it’s ever heard, the ICJ has significantly increased the prospect of nations and individuals whose lives are being ruined by climate change being able to hold other countries legally responsible. And in an extra indignity, the only Australian on the fifteen-member bench, Hilary Charlesworth, has added extra remarks to the court’s ruling specifically rejecting her nation’s key arguments against exactly that.

Australia was among dozens of countries that backed a bid by law students from Vanuatu to persuade the UN General Assembly to take their case on climate action to the ICJ. But once two years of lobbying saw the students succeed in 2023, Australia was among a small group urging the court to limit the extent of nations’ legal obligations to protect the globe from harmful greenhouse gases. Australia insisted that complying with international law only involved upholding obligations under climate treaties — and exporting fossil fuels didn’t constitute a breach. The court disagreed.

On behalf of the students, the UN sought an advisory opinion from the ICJ, posing two questions about countries’ responsibility to prevent climate change in the context not just of international climate treaties but also of human rights law. The judges were asked whether countries have legal obligations to protect the global environment from human-induced climate change and what the legal consequences might be for those that, through their “acts or omissions” related to emissions, harm other countries’ geography or development — especially small-island states — or adversely affect “peoples and individuals, whether in current or future generations.”

Among others, Australia argued that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, and the Paris agreement it spawned, are the only relevant and applicable pieces of international law. Both emphasise the importance of collective action and collective responsibility. But the court decided that a raft of other treaties and agreements that impose obligations on countries individually are also relevant, including the Treaty on the Law of the Sea and various human rights covenants.

The judges determined that the obligations in all these agreements are legally binding and nations must uphold them to protect the globe from human-induced greenhouse gas emissions at levels that would precipitate climate change.

Of specific relevance to Australia as an exporter of coal and gas, the court found that “fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies” amount to a failure to take “appropriate action” to protect the climate and “may constitute an internationally wrongful act.” The emission of the gases themselves wasn’t the bad act, it was the failure to protect the climate system from them.

Those countries that committed wrongful acts should be required to stop and not repeat them, the judges found, and might also be obliged to make reparations “in the form of restitution, compensation and satisfaction.” Such “satisfaction” might include making formal apologies or public statements or establishing climate education programs.

In its written submission — one of ninety-one made to the court — the Australian government addressed whether the right to “a clean, healthy and sustainable environment” was legally enforceable under international law. While the submission acknowledged the “importance” of the issue, it concluded that, “consistently with a number of other participants, Australia does not consider that such a right has crystallised as a matter of customary international law at this time.”

In her remarks appended to the court’s opinion, Hilary Charlesworth concurred with her judicial colleagues, who rejected the position Australia and other like-minded countries took on the right to a healthy environment but didn’t spell out precisely what that meant. Charlesworth did, at length.

“It is important to emphasise that the right has both substantive and procedural features as well as special obligations towards those in vulnerable situations,” she wrote. “… It includes the right to a safe climate, clean air, a safe and sufficient supply of water, adequate sanitation, healthy and sustainably produced food, non-toxic environments in which to live, and healthy biodiversity and thriving ecosystems.”

She described the procedural rights as “access to environmental information, participation in environmental decision-making, and access to effective remedies, including protection from intimidation, reprisals and criminalisation.”

The judges also disagreed with Australia’s position on whether there was a legal obligation to uphold human rights by protecting the climate system and other parts of the environment with measures to prevent, or mitigate, climate change. Charlesworth delved into this in more detail, too, writing that the obligations to engage in both mitigation and adaptation — by changing practices to manage the impact of the changing climate — were linked to the right to a healthy environment and to human rights more broadly.

“The application of human rights law in the context of climate change has important procedural implications, through broadening access to dispute settlement procedures and granting standing to rights holders who would otherwise not be able to enforce climate change obligations on the international level,” Charlesworth wrote.

In other words, the court’s view was that climate-action obligations are also obligations under human rights law that open the door for future legal action.

Even though the ICJ’s decision is an advisory opinion and not a judgment, it carries moral and legal weight and is likely to lead to formal cases seeking judgements and, if those succeed, to hefty compensation claims.

Hilary Charlesworth’s additional remarks also emphasise the impact of climate change on “vulnerable groups” including Indigenous people, people with disabilities, children and women, especially in societies in which they play prominent roles in agriculture. She cites Kiribati and Tonga and recounts what the court heard about how climate change is contributing to the loss of cultural practices across the Pacific. In Melanesia, she said, it had “unmoored young people from their cultural heritage.”

While Australia’s own Federal Court confirmed earlier this month that no provision exists under Australian law for citizens of the Torres Strait Islands to sue their own government for failing to protect them from climate change, the ICJ decision suggests citizens of countries around the Pacific may now have an international avenue.

With the government still to announce its updated emissions reduction target for 2035 and vying to win the right to co-host the UNFCCC’s annual global climate summit with Pacific nations next year, while also defending the ongoing export of fossil fuels, the ICJ opinion may make things a little more awkward in the neighbourhood. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Her predecessor, Michelle Rowland, declared ominously in October that broadcast TV was “entering a period of unmanaged transition.” Rowland “believe[d] in the broadcasting platform,” but a sustainable future would require “changes to the way… broadcasters operate and the way they reach their audiences.” Despite deep cost-cutting, the shift of viewers from linear to on-demand content services and the decline in advertising revenues were “putting some broadcasters in a position where they can’t keep the doors open, for certain services.”

A few months earlier, the company delivering Network 10’s channels to Mildura had announced it was turning off the transmitter and handing back its licence. Viewers who wanted those channels could watch the Sydney versions via the 10 Play app or website. The Seven, Nine, ABC and SBS over-the-air signals would still be available in the area. This was what an “unmanaged pathway” would look like. Staying on it, said Rowland, would lead to “more service closures in remote and regional markets, where the financial pressures are greatest.” This trend “may eventually manifest in the larger cities.”

The financial pressures noted by Rowland became visible again in June when Seven briefly disappeared from the airwaves of southeast South Australia during a dispute between the network and its regional licensee — further evidence of the precarity of regional television in a shrinking ad market.

Britain is further down the same path. Ofcom, which regulates TV, radio, online and postal services and allocates radiofrequency spectrum, says the system of “public service media” in Britain is “under serious threat.” By public service media, it means not just the publicly funded TV and radio broadcaster, the BBC, with its 2025–26 revenue of nearly £4.5 billion (more than A$9 billion) but all the other free-to-air broadcasters as well: ITV and STV in Scotland, Channel 4 and the Welsh language S4C, and Channel 5, which is owned, like Australia’s Ten, by Paramount Global.

Young British children spend more time watching YouTube than broadcast TV and less than half of sixteen- to twenty-four- year-olds watch any broadcast TV at all in an average week. “[I]n a world dominated by global streaming platforms, public service media risks becoming an endangered species, and time is running out to intervene to protect it,” says Ofcom’s director of broadcasting and media. This matters because public service media is “stitched into the cultural fabric of UK society. It starts conversations, educates and informs, and brings us together in moments of national importance.” It also “supports the UK’s production sector — a global leader which contributes meaningfully to the creative economy and attracts significant investment into the UK.”

Ofcom has proposed a “six-point plan” that includes remarkable steps to save an industry that dominated the media scene a little over two decades ago. Public service broadcasters “should work urgently with YouTube” to ensure their content is “prominent and easy to find on the platforms, and on fair commercial terms.” If YouTube doesn’t cooperate then the British government “should consider” new laws to compel the platform to increase visibility of public-service television content.

By early next year, meanwhile, “urgent clarity” is needed from the government about the future of the digital terrestrial TV transmission network: leave decisions any later and “the investment and innovation needed to put universal TV distribution on a sustainable footing [for] all audiences” is at risk. Decisions are also required about extra government money for specific program genres: Ofcom recommends priority to “socially valuable but commercially less viable genres, such as news, local news and children’s content.” These trusted, original programs “reflect British culture and bring the country together.”

These recent statements add to Ofcom’s high-profile interventions in television policy. Last year the agency released a major report that forecast several scenarios for British television, including the switch-off of broadcast television “over the 2030s” or its evolution into a slimmed-down “nightlight” service carrying only a few essential channels. Ofcom was signalling here that the economic model of broadcast television was unsustainable. Policy change was urgently required.

Ofcom’s argument about the pressing need for a “managed transition” in television preceded Minister Rowland’s more cautious statements by several months. But it is clear both countries face the same challenge: the steady, structural decline of the broadcast television model.

Broadcast television has been an “endangered species” for a long time. The dangers have come from different sources. In the mid-1990s, Australians finally got the multichannel pay TV services available years earlier in overseas markets. These provided new buyers for programs and new spots for TV advertising while accelerating the fragmentation of viewing that started when video-cassette recorders and games consoles were first connected to TV screens. Telcos Telstra and Optus entered the TV business, rushing out new cable networks and investing heavily in sports and other programming. Foxtel became a bigger business than any of the free-to-air operators, although it never attracted more than a third of Australian households, and its owners remained big but familiar locals until British-based streamer DAZN acquired it earlier this year.

The early internet promised what some envisaged as a “Celestial Jukebox.” Everything would be available to everyone, everywhere. Movies, TV programs, short films, music, books, whatever. If content had been created, it would be stored and discoverable, viewable, readable, listenable. A lot of content did become available online, but much, much more was created afresh, especially for the video-sharing site called YouTube, launched in 2004 and acquired the following year by search giant Google. The genres were both familiar and novel. Audiences watched, listened and uploaded, sometimes adding to the time they spent with broadcast media and sometimes substituting for it. Advertisers flocked to the site and to other social media platforms hosting video.

Streamers, too, attracted eyeballs and revenue. The US giant Netflix launched in Australia and New Zealand in 2015 and others followed. These were more like on-demand television services, initially offering drama, documentary, children’s shows and other well-established genres. Over time, they became even more like TV, commissioning exclusive titles, introducing advertising, acquiring rights to live sporting events, moving into genres like real crime, entertainment and reality. Ampere Analysis’s Guy Bisson, speaking at a Future of TV Advertising event in Sydney in April, called this the “broadcastification” of streaming.

The other potent new form of competition for TV broadcasters comes from the very tools that display their services: smart TVs. No longer dumb devices that simply translate digital code embedded in electrical signals into pictures and sounds, TV sets have become platforms. This enables consumer electronics manufacturers to earn revenue through ads carried on the home screen and on their own streaming channels: Samsung TV Plus now offers around 150 channels in Australia. Revenue also comes from content sales, rentals, and commissions, and from prominence fees for third-party apps. Manufacturers gather and control data about what is being watched on their screens that helps them to target their advertisements and services.

For TV broadcasters, smart TVs are a mixed blessing. They have generally loved the trend towards bigger screens, because this has helped to refocus fragmented household attention on a premium screening environment, perfect for live, “event” television. But these mighty, wall-mounted screens have ushered Samsung, LG, Hisense, TCL and Sony into the broadcasters’ revenue and customer relationships as well.

The Coalition’s most recent communications minister, Paul Fletcher, published a green paper nearly five years ago containing proposals to “modernise television regulation in Australia.” Attempting to tackle the problem of the long-term sustainability of the free-to-air industry in a world where online streaming of TV was surging, the paper proposed a kind of reverse incentive. If enough TV broadcasters were interested in squeezing their transmissions down to a smaller number of channels, thereby using less radiofrequency spectrum, the federal government might be willing to lighten their tax burden and hand them some of the proceeds from auctioning the vacated frequencies. It was complicated, the impacts were uncertain, and the proposals were not well received by broadcasters. Nothing came of the plan.

Under Labor’s Michelle Rowland change occurred in several areas. The most significant legislative initiative was a “prominence framework” that will commence in 2026. It is intended to ensure Australian audiences can easily find and access local free-to-air TV services and apps — ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 10 Play, 9Now, 7Plus — on the home screens of imported smart TVs that would otherwise prioritise the services of overseas media and technology giants. The commercial networks welcomed the outcome, as did the ABC and SBS, which regard prominence as an essential protection for public-service broadcasting. Further changes to legislation last year were designed to enable WIN and other broadcasters to seek operational efficiencies by consolidating services onto a single transmitter.

Licences for community TV services in Adelaide and Melbourne were extended beyond their 30 June 2024 expiry date, enabling those services to stay on air until another use is identified for their frequencies. An audit of TV infrastructure in remote and regional areas was undertaken and funding and administrative arrangements were extended for seven years so that the viewer access satellite television service, or VAST, continues to provide commercial and national free-to-air services to the estimated 1.5 million viewers in remote and poorly served locations who rely on it.

Rowland’s big commitment in October 2024, though, was not delivered before the election. A discussion paper was to be released for consultation in early 2025, “explor[ing] pathways for the future of television, shaped by the possibility of realising a digital dividend.” A digital dividend is what was reaped after broadcasters shifted from analogue to digital transmission between 2001 and 2013. The new technology enabled more efficient use of spectrum and a large band of frequencies was reallocated and auctioned mainly to support better mobile broadband. TV viewers got more TV; mobile users got faster broadband speeds and larger data caps; the Treasury got a lot of money.

The minister was crystal clear. She was “not [her emphasis] announcing that the Government has identified, or decided to yield, a digital dividend.” But she was “putting, front and centre, the important question of what the future of television may be.” It was “an essential platform in Australia, and we need a mature and measured discussion to plan its future.”

The technologies available to support a second digital dividend — such as higher-resolution DVB-T2 broadcasting — are not as revolutionary as those deployed for the first, and the TV industry that will need to pay for them is not as rich. Some efficiencies are possible but everything will come at a cost — to broadcasters, to viewers, and perhaps even to the government. There will not be more broadcast TV: there may even be a bit less in some places. Well down the track, there will probably be further improvements to mobile and other wireless services but alternative spectrum users are unlikely to pay as much for vacated spectrum as they did more than a decade ago.

This second Albanese administration has already seen a little more of what “unmanaged transition” looks like. The AFL decided no free-to-air footy would be shown on Saturdays this season in Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, although it has scheduled more of the Thursday night games that are shown live on 7. Only Amazon subscribers got to watch the biennial summit of men’s cricket, the World Test Championship final in June, where Australia played South Africa at Lord’s. Then, as noted earlier, some South Australian country viewers temporarily lost access to Seven’s channels, including Thursday and Friday night AFL, while the local broadcaster and Seven brawled over commercial arrangements.

Overseas, the French public service broadcaster France Television has done a deal with Amazon Prime to carry its free-to-air channels and its commercial rival TF1 has made a similar arrangement with Netflix. This follows the closure in 2022 of Salto, a streamer designed as a common platform for French broadcasters. The new deals represent a radically different kind of future for public service media, with a handful of channels embedded within a vast universe of content branded and supplied from elsewhere.

None of these threats to what is now free-to-air are directly the fault of governments, but electors in Australia and elsewhere are likely to ask what is being done about them. Ofcom’s call to arms is a further sign that the stakes for TV broadcasters everywhere, and especially for the distinctive programs they offer, are getting very high indeed.

Michele Rowland and Paul Fletcher both spent a lot of time in and around media before being allocated the communications portfolio, Rowland as a commercial lawyer acting for broadcasters and telcos, Fletcher as a senior executive with Optus. The media marketplace in Australia and overseas is serving up a crash course to their successor. •

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In truth, as at all our earlier forty-four constitutional referendums, the question of who would govern the country for the next three years was not on the ballot. And as with most of the others, the Voice question was a tenth-order issue for probably 90 per cent–plus of electors. It joined the thirty-six previous defeats, and its size was also unexceptional in the context of Labor governments’ midterm attempts at constitutional change. (As it happens, governments have nearly always won the election following a referendum loss.)

It’s not clear whether Liberal hardheads saw 14 October 2023 as an indicator, like a large opinion poll, or as a process that would shape voter behaviour, so that the campaign and act of rejecting the government’s proposal made Australians more pro-Coalition.

For whatever reason, throughout the 2025 election campaign Peter Dutton repeatedly brought up either the Voice or the broader topic of Indigenous Australians, with a particular focus on violence in Alice Springs and “Welcome to Country” ceremonies. Of the latter, the opposition leader opined repeatedly that there were too many, and under his government there would be far fewer. In one televised debate Dutton demanded that Anthony Albanese provide similar clarity; the prime minister expressed support for the ritual with his characteristic bland ineloquence. (Most “Welcome to Country” ceremonies actually have nothing to do with the federal government.)

As with the Voice (in the end), it’s likely that most voters agreed with Dutton — but so what? Election campaigns routinely showcase fluff and trivia, but deep down voters are mostly motivated by livelihoods, security, putting food on the table, particularly in a cost-of-living crisis. Still, in the campaign’s dying days the News Corp–Coalition tag team, citing words from Penny Wong, ran hard on a re-elected Albanese holding another Voice referendum. It was perhaps the feeblest “scare campaign” the nation has ever seen.

(The foreign minister’s formulation — “We’ll look back on [the Voice] in ten years’ time and it’ll be a bit like marriage equality” — made little sense anyway. Same-sex marriage was a global trend whose time most Australians finally believed had come, and the voluntary, indicative quasi-plebiscite had nothing to do with the Constitution. A Voice, by contrast, could simply have been legislated but its designers wanted it constitutionally enshrined, which all but doomed it. The chances of the Constitution ever containing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament are now approximately zero.)

The Liberals’ pollsters, Freshwater, went even further, using their respondents’ recalled Voice vote to second-guess their stated 2025 voting intentions. Or so it seems.

The day after the election, Freshwater’s boss laid out in the Australian Financial Review (for which the pollster had also provided survey outcomes for several years) three reasons why their final voting-intention numbers, whether published in the AFR (Labor ahead 51.5–48.5 per cent, way off the actual 55.2–44.8 result) or provided privately to the Libs, got it so wrong.

“Polling appears to have overestimated Labor ‘defectors’ to the Coalition,” ran his first justification. “Particularly, those who voted No at the Voice referendum. Early indications suggest that ‘Labor-No’ voters just didn’t switch over to the Coalition in the big numbers estimated.” (Italics added.)

“Estimated” is doing lots of heavy lifting here. How did they do it? Did they presuppose a proportion of those who said they’d voted No in 2023 and would be voting Labor in 2025 (or had already voted early) would actually vote for the Coalition instead? Or some variation of this? It makes no sense, and the appropriate word would have been something like “assumed” or “hoped for.”

The October 2023 vote was of course not about some arcane, dry piece of law, but about Indigenous Australians. Had it been instead about recognising local government (a chestnut attempted in referendums in 1974 and 1988 and planned for one in 2013 until bipartisanship collapsed) and had it been similarly walloped (pretty much a certainty — all midterm Labor referendums have suffered that fate) would the Coalition have invested it with so much meaning?

Probably not. Topics involving minorities hold a special place in our country’s electoral narratives. Ever since the 2001 “Tampa election,” the conviction that what are politely called “values” can rescue the Coalition at the ballot box has taken a firm grip despite all the contrary evidence. John Howard himself attempted unsuccessfully to resurrect that 2001 dynamic in his final 2007 hurrah as prime minister, first with the Northern Territory intervention and then with African immigrants.

Dutton rose to the peak of the Liberal Party by embodying this particular element of the Howard legacy. The socially conservative Liberal leader who connects with blue-collar voters by sympathising with their resentment at elites, multiculturalism and supposed special rights for racial minorities remains an alluring tale. There was no great demand from the electorate for Dutts to be leader, but he had long been a big hit in the conservative “base” and among the blathering heads at Sky After Dark. Throughout the 2022–25 term he repeatedly, often with grating gratuitousness, reached for the immigration lever, perhaps as red meat for the base, perhaps to connect with less-engaged voters, perhaps to make himself feel good, or perhaps all three.

That was presumably what drove him to fleetingly ruminate in March this year on a constitutional referendum (!) to enable the government to deport criminals who had dual citizenship.

Once again, most Australians would doubtless instinctively support the idea, but it is tangential at best to what they look for in a prospective government. That legendary 1992 Bill Clinton war room Post-it note, “It’s the economy, stupid,” could do with elaboration: “It’s economic security, and security generally, for people and families.” As we’ve seen recently in other advanced democracies, fears about out-of-control immigration, especially by people who look and act differently, can slot into the “security” framework, but Australia simply lacks anything like the required numbers. Similarly, not-so-subtle hints about special rights for Aboriginal Australians can get traction in a standalone vote on a particular topic but are barely of interest at a general election.

Dutton’s repeated forays into “values” were out of place for voters looking for solutions for Australia’s years-long per capita recession. Much worse, they provided another reason to be wary of his Trump-like tendencies.

And what possessed his party’s pollster to apparently overlay their results with “estimates” of large numbers of “Labor-No voters” switching to the Coalition? •

The post How to misread a referendum appeared first on Inside Story.

The two men had come to Canberra to declaim the injustices they had endured all their lives. The following day, 10 May, prominent citizens were paraded before the Duke and Duchess as they stood atop the steps of Parliament House. Nangar was among those who passed before them. As the Argus reported, “An ancient Aborigine, who calls himself King Billy and who claims sovereign rights to the Federal Territory, walked slowly forward alone, and saluted the Duke and Duchess.” The photograph of Nangar appeared under the headline “Demanded His Rights.”

Until recently, Nangar and Ooloogan appeared in Australian history as a brief, defiant cameo in the otherwise triumphant march of Australian democracy. But in 2024, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, or ADB, published Wiradjuri historian Laurie Bamblett’s article on “Nangar (1848–1927).” Now, for the first time, we could understand Nangar’s life in its full context — Family. Nation. Country. Bamblett, a descendant of Nangar’s aunt Nellie Hamilton, explained Nangar’s cultural responsibilities as a walamira talmai — “a distinguished holder of ancient knowledge passed on by his forebears” — and his life-long role as an esteemed ambassador for his people. In the space of little more than 1200 words, Bamblett’s ADB entry finally gave Nangar’s life the dignity it deserved.

The same could be said for more than a hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander biographies recently added to the ADB. This project, which is supported by the John T. Reid Charitable Trusts, is led by Indigenous members of the ADB board and guided by a national working party of distinguished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars who believe in the ADB and want to ensure their peoples are properly represented in the nation’s biographical dictionary.

A book of Indigenous Lives, edited by Shino Konishi, a Yawuru historian working with the ADB, will be published next year and several hundred more portraits are being commissioned. Because the subjects of these biographies are nominated by communities and many of the entries are written by Indigenous authors, there is a growing sense of Indigenous ownership of the ADB and pride in its work.

And yet the Australian National University has recently proposed drastic funding cuts that threaten this vital biographical project, and, indeed, the very survival of the ADB itself.

Since its first volume appeared in 1966, the ADB has published nearly 14,000 Australian biographies — all of them now freely available online. The ADB’s volunteers in every state and territory are constantly researching and writing new lives, with each providing a unique portal to Australia’s culture and history. As well as expanding the number of Indigenous lives represented in the dictionary, the ADB has launched projects to increase the number of women, convicts and working-class people and is advancing the urgent task of revising biographical entries written decades ago. Like Britain’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the American National Biography, the ADB is an ongoing project of profound national significance.

When Australians look for engaging, thoroughly researched and trustworthy biographies of their countrymen and women from every walk of life, there is no more reliable source than the ADB. At a time when dependable, human, evidence-based information becomes more elusive by the minute, institutions like the ADB matter more than ever before. All the more reason, then, that the ANU’s recent announcement to slash three full time positions at the ADB, and “disestablish” the Australian National Dictionary, another priceless project which has tracked the changes in Australian English from colonial times to the present, represent cultural vandalism on a breathtaking scale.

The proposed cuts threaten ANU’s unique mission laid down in its founding charter of 1946. In the “Organisational Change Proposal” released this month by the dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Bronwyn Parry, there is an extraordinary omission. No mention is made of the National Institutes Grant that ANU receives from the federal government for research “supporting the development of Australia’s national unity and identity, including by improving Australia’s understanding of itself and the history and culture of its Indigenous peoples, its Asia-Pacific neighbours, and its place in the international community.” ANU receives this specially targeted federal funding to support national projects such as the ADB and the Australian National Dictionary.

As former ANU chancellor Gareth Evans has argued, there is probably no finer or more enduring expression of ANU’s nation-building charter than the ADB. It has been celebrated by previous vice-chancellors as “the jewel in the crown of the ANU.” The ADB coordinates volunteer working parties in every state and territory of the Commonwealth, and from almost every university, and thus enacts a very unusual federal scholarly collaboration that only a national university can make possible.

With its relatively small budget, the ADB mobilises a vast army of eminent unpaid scholars who do this work for the public good. This is exactly what ANU was founded to do in the postwar period, and the celebrated historian Sir Keith Hancock recognised that opportunity in establishing in 1958 what has now become the largest collaborative research enterprise in the humanities and social sciences in Australia. To diminish such an achievement is an astonishing act of self-harm by ANU. The changes, if realised, will destroy the very thing that makes the university distinctive.

Professor Parry has defended the Change Proposals by stating that the ADB could easily have been cut altogether. She appears to regard the ADB as an academic unit within the gift of the dean rather than as a collaborative national institution established by the ANU council with an independent board and supported by extensive volunteer labour. She insists that the ADB is not financially self-sustaining. But such an assessment places no value on the generous gift of scholarship to ANU from Indigenous and other Australians. It deems as worthless the goodwill of “the state universities” in a highly competitive tertiary education sector. And it turns its back on the national mission and international reputation of the ANU.

ANU’s assault on the ADB and the Australian National Dictionary is taking place in the context of a sustained attack on the humanities in Australia. The Albanese government has so far failed to reverse the Morrison government’s decision to introduce a fee regime that punishes students who choose to study the humanities and social sciences. At the same time as the government has established a new national literature body, Writing Australia, to support the development of Australian literature, and inaugurated an Australian “poet laureate,” it continues to undermine younger generations’ capacity to learn the critical analytical skills that underpin a civil society.

What do we, as Australians, value? Who else will nurture and defend the languages, cultures and histories of this continent, who else will tell the life stories of this place, who else will cultivate our capacity to share a common reference point of understanding such as has been generated by the ADB? These are the potentially nation-defining questions the ANU administration has failed to ask. The stature, respect and authority of the ADB has been built up meticulously and lovingly by tens of thousands of minds over seven decades, yet it seems it can be dismissed with the wave of a hand.

We believe this is a moment that requires urgent action — not only to stop the proposed cuts to the ADB and the plan to abolish the Australian National Dictionary, but to reverse the assault on the humanities and recognise that our history and cultural life are vital to Australia’s civic intelligence and national identity. •

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Stone’s unflagging commitment to a cause (and to winning an argument) is perhaps best illustrated by a famous tale that became part of Canberra folklore. While he was working as a Treasury official in the 1950s, Stone would have Friday night drinks with colleagues, academics and journalists. On one occasion Stone became involved in a bet with two other men over which of them could win a running race to Lake George, twenty-six miles away. They decided to settle the bet right away, and after ducking home to change into his running gear, Stone set off towards his destination. He reached Lake George in first place around 5am, another argument won.

Born in the Western Australian wheatbelt in 1929, Stone was a high achiever from an early age. In 1941 he won a scholarship to attend Perth Modern School, where he excelled in academic and sporting pursuits. He was a member of the WA Colts under-twenty-one representative hockey teams that were national champions in 1948 and 1949. He enrolled at the University of Western Australia and graduated with a Bachelor of Science, with first-class honours in mathematical physics, in 1950. Awarded a Rhodes scholarship to undertake an arts degree at Oxford University, he graduated with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics in 1954.

The parallels here with Stone’s later political opponent, Bob Hawke, are uncanny. Hawke was also born in 1929, attended Perth Modern School and UWA, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Both also served as president of the undergraduate guild at UWA. But there was never any love lost between the two.

“I’d have to say Bob was rather unrecognised in the intellectual stakes,” recalled Stone in 1987. “I didn’t know him very well, I didn’t think he was a very nice boy. He wasn’t my type. He was a bit of a lair, loudmouthed, cocky and full of himself even then.” Hawke returned fire with his own recollections of their youthful rivalry in his 1994 memoirs. “Stone, whom I inherited decades later as Secretary of Treasury,” he wrote, “exhibited at that early stage all the arrogance and cynical contempt for his fellows which were to characterise his distinguished career as a public servant.”

Returning to Australia from Oxford, Stone took up a position in the federal Treasury, where he remained for the next thirty years, except for the period 1967–70, when he worked at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington. He became a deputy Treasury secretary in 1971 before being appointed to the top job in 1979. He soon made his hardline position on industrial relations clear when Malcolm Fraser asked him to prepare a memorandum of advice for an incoming conservative government in Britain. “Union power has become a threat not merely to economic stability,” he wrote, “but to civil liberties and the very concept of the rule of law upon which the British society has been founded and of which it has been for so long such a notable exemplar.”

Stone had initially been encouraged by Fraser’s strong electoral mandate and apparent economic liberalism, but like many on the insurgent New Right he was left bitterly disappointed by the Fraser government. “How could Fraser leave office in 1983,” he recalled in 2007, “with so little achieved in turning back the Whitlamite tide of destruction that he had promised to reverse?” In March 1983 he voted Labor for only the second time in his life, and was kept on at Treasury by Paul Keating despite the reservations of Hawke’s cabinet. But Stone was always on borrowed time, and he resigned in August 1984 following increasing disagreement about the direction of economic policy.

Stone took a big risk in abandoning a long and successful public service career, but he revelled in the intellectual freedom his resignation enabled. He moved to Melbourne to become a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs in 1985, and commenced writing regular articles on a wide variety of topics for the Sydney Morning Herald and Quadrant. Former High Court Justice Dyson Heydon summarised Stone’s outlook at this point as consisting of six propositions:

1. Governments had too much power in society.

2. The federal government had too much power in relation to other governments.

3. Within each government, a small core of ministers had too much power compared to other legislators.

4. Within each executive, the public service was becoming too politicised to give independent advice.

5. Trade unions had too much power over governments and other social forces.

6. These evils could only be exposed and combated by vigorous debate, which he saw as the lifeblood of democracy.

Shortly after resigning from Treasury, Stone delivered the Edward Shann Memorial Lecture in Economics at UWA. Titled “1929 and All That,” the lecture drew parallels between the state of the Australian economy in the 1980s and on the eve of the Great Depression, pointing to three key problems: “financial mismanagement, protectionism and ossified labour markets.”

Along with Gerard Henderson’s essay, “The Industrial Relations Club,” Stone’s speech provided the intellectual foundations for the formation of the anti-union advocacy group the H.R. Nicholls Society in 1986. Ray Evans described it as “arguably the seminal document in the campaign for liberalising the labour market.” Stone served as the H.R. Nicholls Society’s president for its first few years, and remained involved for decades. Though no longer influential, the organisation exists to this day.

It was in April 1987 that Stone accepted an offer to help develop Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s single-rate tax policy, which was to form a key part of the Queensland premier’s ill-fated “Joh for Canberra” campaign. Many were shocked to see such a respected figure as the former Treasury head associating with a man whom much of the country regarded as a joke. Stone responded in the only way he knew how: engaging in vigorous debate in defence of his position.

“In the end, it is policies — not political parties — that I care about,” he wrote. “I see in this initiative by the premier of Queensland… a real chance of turning around those policies which have brought Australia to its present pass. That is why I am working for Sir Joh.”

Before long, he had doubled down. Despite not being a member of the National Party, and never even having voted for it, Stone was offered the number two spot on the party’s Queensland Senate ticket (behind Sir Joh’s wife, Florence Bjelke-Petersen). Elected in July 1987, he immediately became the leader of the National Party in the Senate. Delivering his maiden speech in September, Stone wore his H.R. Nicholls Society tie, though he light-heartedly reassured other senators that “when I put on this tie this morning I had no intention of being provocative.”

Many — including Liberal leader John Howard — blamed the Joh for Canberra campaign for the Coalition’s 1987 election loss. Nevertheless, Stone served as Howard’s shadow minister for finance until Howard sacked him in September 1988. The sacking was ironic: Stone had supported Howard’s controversial remarks on the need to slow Asian immigration but then went further just as Howard was trying to calm things down.

“Howard,” wrote Paul Kelly, “having tolerated Stone’s transgressions on indirect taxation and immigration for fourteen months, felt compelled to act.” Stone was philosophical: “I bore Howard himself no ill will for this. As I said in a press conference the next day, he had probably done me a favour.” Though Stone would later be highly critical of Howard’s policies in government, he nevertheless concluded in 2009 that Howard was probably Australia’s greatest prime minister.

When Stone resigned from the Senate in March 1990 to contest the Queensland lower-house seat of Fairfax, many were perplexed. “It seems likely that John Stone will remain an unpredictable enigma,” wrote Gerard Henderson. “Few would doubt his ability or courage. But many will query his political judgement.” Stone’s unsuccessful attempt to switch chambers brought an end to his short career in electoral politics. After this setback he returned to his former role as a senior fellow at the IPA, and recommenced writing for Quadrant and various newspapers.

Stone’s next political project was inspired by what he perceived as a concerning and growing disregard for the federal principles of the Australian Constitution, especially by the Labor Party. Having already relied on a questionable interpretation of the Constitution’s external affairs power to prevent the Tasmanian government from constructing the Gordon-below-Franklin Dam, the Hawke government later tried to amend the Constitution with four simultaneous referendums in 1988. Though all four were soundly defeated, Stone remained alert to the prospect of further attempts.

In 1992, together with fellow constitutional conservatives, he established the Samuel Griffith Society to defend the Constitution “against all who would attempt to undermine it.” With assistance from his wife Nancy, he led the organisation until his retirement in 2009. Though its primary concern was the centralisation of power in Canberra, that issue was largely overwhelmed by two others that soon appeared on the agenda: the alarming prospect of an Australian republic, and the High Court’s Mabo decision recognising native title, which Stone described as “a fit of self-indulgent remorse, [which] overturned two centuries of settled Australian property law.”

Mabo in particular seemed to unleash something visceral in Stone. Having already been accused of racism against Asians in the 1980s (and later — following the 11 September terrorist attacks — against Muslims), Stone’s contempt for First Peoples and their culture became an ongoing feature of his writing. “The less said about the violence-racked, female-oppressive, sexually predatory cultures of the Australian Aboriginal the better,” he wrote in the Australian in 2010. Introducing a 2017 address to the Samuel Griffith Society, Stone declared, to laughter from the audience: “I’m beginning with a welcome to country — a welcome to our country. So let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land: King George III and his heirs and assigns.” His final piece of published writing, for the Australian edition of the Spectator in March 2023, was a passionate denunciation of the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

Perhaps this is what Dyson Heydon had in mind when he described Stone as “peppery and pugnacious.” Heydon recalled that “many a speaker at a Quadrant dinner or a Samuel Griffith Society conference or an H.R. Nicholls Society meeting will take to their graves the vivid recollection of the puzzled and frowning face of John, advancing towards the podium in order to extirpate the speaker’s fallacies with the intellectual equivalent of fire and sword.”

On the other hand, as one journalist found after interviewing him in 1987, he could be a model of civility: “There is a polite, old-fashioned charm about Stone: he calls everyone ‘Mr,’ he observes all the correct rituals, his cultural style is donnish, patronising, somewhat upper class.” In my own email correspondence with him he was unfailingly courteous and generous with his reminiscences. But none of this excuses the racism and white supremacy that seemed embedded in his political worldview.

Advancing age did nothing to dull Stone’s passion for political debate. In March 2016, conservative columnist Miranda Devine coined the term “del-con” to describe those “delusional conservatives” — including Stone — who remained firmly in Tony Abbott’s camp following Malcolm Turnbull’s successful coup. Though Stone preferred the term “dis-con” — disaffected, rather than delusional — he embraced the criticism. It prompted a regular “dis-con notes” column in the Spectator, where he attacked Turnbull ferociously, mocked the Liberal “bed-wetters” who installed him, and gave forthright advice to Liberal MPs about standing up for conservative values. He urged a restoration of Abbott or, failing that, a new leader with comparable right-wing bona fides, such as Peter Dutton.

Stone was never convinced by Scott Morrison, so the Coalition’s defeat in 2022 came as something of a relief. Counselling readers against despair at the prospect of a Labor government, he immediately foresaw green shoots of recovery under Dutton: “The bottom line is this: from their election wreckage, the good Lord has so arranged matters that, under Dutton’s leadership (and predictably, with a lot of help from Albanese), the Liberals now have the capacity to recover their lost conservative ground. So dry your tears, snowflakes. All is not lost; on the contrary, the Liberals’ recovery should now begin.”

What a devastating blow, then, Dutton’s catastrophic 2025 election defeat must have been for this grand old man of the Australian right. Perhaps Devine was correct to call him delusional, after all. •

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Henry has copped a lot of flak over the years for personally prioritising wildlife protection when he was one of the nation’s most powerful public servants.

In 2008, opposition leader Brendan Nelson chose to reduce the then secretary’s passion to a cheap punchline for a swing at his minister, Wayne Swan, when Henry took five weeks off during the global financial crisis to volunteer as a caretaker in Queensland’s remote Epping Forest national park, habitat of the endangered northern hairy-nosed wombat.

“Five weeks is a long time and I’m a bit concerned about who is going to look after our muddle-headed treasurer in that period,” Nelson said at the time.

Seventeen years on, Henry’s opening remarks to the National Press Club this week exposed the depth of his ongoing commitment as he singled out Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young in the audience for what she’d done for frontline wildlife defenders.

“She has become quite an advocate for the interests of those people who spend their lives looking after injured and orphaned native animals — which is dear to my heart — so, thank you,” Henry said, his voice cracking before he reached for a water glass to get himself back to business.

He was speaking as chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation and his target was the tangle of Australian laws that are supposed to protect the environment but are undermining it — and the economy — instead. He joined the dots from the acute need for climate action, the government’s quest to transform the energy system and its ambition to meet the challenges of housing, infrastructure and critical minerals development and boost productivity, to the laws that could help solve all of it but are failing.

“All these projects will be critical to enhancing economic resilience and lifting Australia’s flagging productivity growth,” he told his audience. “Boosting productivity and resilience relies upon environmental reform. But the biggest threat — the biggest threat — to future productivity growth comes from nature itself, more particularly from its destruction.”

In a brief stroll through economics 101, Henry described his chosen discipline as being “about optimising choices” by carefully specifying not only your objective but all the constraints that dictate your options for achieving it. Make a mistake in specifying those constraints, Henry said, and your decisions “become suboptimal.”

For the past century, he argued, economists have largely ignored what should be recognised as the most potent constraint of all: the “immutable laws of nature.” By failing to acknowledge and respect those laws — and to consider the impact all economic decisions have on the environment as a whole — we’ve “turned nature against us.” The natural environment has begun accelerating wild weather events instead of protecting us from them, and its destruction now poses “an existential threat to everything that we value.”

The roadmap to genuine environmental and economic reform had already been written, he said, jointly by the late Allan Hawke in his initial review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and then in Graeme Samuel’s comprehensive re-examination in 2019–20. Henry himself led a review of the whole tax system in 2010 that proposed a road user charge, among numerous other ideas also not taken up, and he recommended an emissions trading scheme to prime minister John Howard more than two decades back, in 2004.

“Despite all of that, here we are in the winter of 2025,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”

Henry is especially exercised that the carbon-trading scheme, finally introduced, was soon abolished by Tony Abbott. “Why the hell did we ever drop it? I mean, that’s the question, right? It still boggles the mind… Well, my God. Of course, we need a carbon tax.”

He blamed short-termism, political self-interest, blame-shifting and a lack of coordination between federal and state jurisdictions for the decades-long failure to progress reform of all kinds, and especially this. The mindset — and the laws — need to change, he said, and that needs to happen in this coming three-year term of parliament, the one that begins next week.

Henry’s address came a day after the Federal Court rejected a compensation claim brought by two traditional owners from islands in the Torres Strait who argued that successive Commonwealth governments had negligently failed in their duty of care to protect island communities from the impact of climate change. If Ken Henry was unapologetic in calling out the dire state of the climate and its relationship to the economy, Justice Michael Wigney was forced by the law to be almost the opposite by the end of his lengthy and eloquent judgement.

Despite finding against lead plaintiffs Uncle Pabai Pabai and Uncle Paul Kabai from the islands of Boigu and Saibai, Wigney made plain his agreement that their communities are being “ravaged” by climate change and that successive governments have failed them. In a judgement with the tone of a lament he described the “devastating” impact of rising tides, extreme weather, disappearing marine life, salinated wetlands, acidified oceans and bleached coral on daily life in the Torres Strait and on the deeply held cultural beliefs and practices of its people.

The judge emphasised that his was not a verdict on the facts of climate science, which he said were clear. He couldn’t find in the men’s favour because current Australian law, and particularly the law of negligence, made no provision for such a claim. The quality of policy was therefore a matter for parliament, not the courts, he wrote, and the only recourse against detrimental decisions was “via the ballot box.” But that didn’t prevent him from devoting many, many pages to the science and politics of climate change in this country.

Australia’s response to the threat it posed — and poses — to the Torres Strait Islands “has, at least in some respects, been wanting,” he wrote. Without naming them, he singled out the Abbott and Morrison governments for specific criticism.

“In particular,” he wrote, “I have found that, when the Commonwealth identified and set Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets in 2015, 2020 and 2021, it failed to engage with or give any real or genuine consideration to what the best available science indicated was required for Australia to play its part in the global effort to moderate or reduce climate change and its impacts.”

He noted that the best available science was behind the world’s goal: to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change it “was and is imperative” for every country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to limit the rise in the global average temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius — and no more than 2 degrees — above pre-industrial levels. Wigney wrote that the evidence before him showed the targets the government set in those three years “were plainly not consistent with those objectives” nor with the global climate agreement Australia had signed in Paris in 2015.

If these twin messages pointing to parliament’s intransigence haven’t yet struck a chord among those about to enliven its halls, they should — if only for the fact that many of the news stories on which politicians were asked to comment this week went to exactly the issues they raised.

The judge’s ruling and remarks were a story all on their own. Henry’s warnings about the damage wrought by inefficient federal–state relations, the state of toxic waterways and the rise of invasive species and depletion of those endangered were all vividly illustrated in our media — in the lack of a national database for childcare workers, the toxic algal bloom off the South Australian coast, the march of nasty fire ants beyond southern Queensland and the seed-sized tree-destroying beetle in Western Australia and, yes, the prime minister’s visit to a panda-breeding sanctuary in China.

Here it’s worth quoting Ken Henry from back in 2008, when his wombat-saving venture was making headlines. “These guys are on death row,” Henry told the Sydney Morning Herald. “There are ten times as many giant pandas in the world as there are these guys.”

All this underscores Ken Henry’s argument that environmental law reform is beyond urgent — and not just for nature’s sake. It’s holding Australia back.

Henry spent some time on the government’s issue du jour — productivity — describing environmental law reform as essential to lifting Australia’s performance because of the detrimental impact the red-tape-heavy laws were having both on business and on nature. Australia’s failure to achieve Treasury’s twenty-five-year productivity projections made in 2002 has already had real financial consequences for ordinary working Australians, he explained. The target was 2.25 per cent, the projection 1.75 per cent and the outcome just 0.98 per cent. Using the assumption that real wages grow in line with productivity, as they generally do, Henry did the maths.

“The average full-time Australian worker has been robbed of about half a million dollars over the past twenty-five years because of our failure to achieve,” Henry said, declaring it “not good enough.”

“So, you know, when I hear people say, ‘Oh, we can’t do this to enhance productivity, we can’t do that to enhance productivity, because… it’s going to hurt somebody,’ I think: ‘Give me a break.’”

Henry reckons the collective mindset needs to change and so does the law. He wants enforceable national environmental standards and to have proposed developments assessed for their cumulative effect on climate change, or efforts to curtail it, rather than considered individually. He wants a legislated climate trigger in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

Unless it is properly overhauled in this parliamentary term, he declared, Australia’s commitment to achieving net zero emissions by 2050 and adhering to the global diversity framework will not retain “a shred of credibility.”

An address that began in tearful gratitude ended somewhere closer to anger at the mismatch between lofty rhetoric and action. Like Justice Wigney, he pointed to Capital Hill. “We’ve had all the reviews we need. All of us has had our say. It’s now up to parliament. Let’s just get this done, shall we?”

Shall we? •

Funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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It’s sadly not remarkable that the inquest into the death in police custody of an Indigenous man in remote Australia should hear evidence of his profoundly disrupted upbringing, chronic health conditions acquired in utero and exacerbated by disadvantage and trauma from exposure to violence, mental impairment and recidivist criminal behaviour.

It’s far less common, though, for a coroner to devote as much attention as Justice Elisabeth Armitage did to the background of the policeman from the “loving, stable family in Canberra” who, through what she called “officer-induced jeopardy,” created the circumstances that led to Walker’s death.

Armitage’s findings about Rolfe are scathing, the facts she unearthed appalling.

She concluded that Rolfe is racist and disrespectful of women, that racism was not just tolerated but celebrated within the NT police force, and that Rolfe’s sense of superiority over Indigenous people, and his practice of using excessive force against them, rang no alarms before 9 November 2019, the day Kumanjayi Walker died.

Most dramatic, though, is her finding on exactly what happened that night when Walker lashed out as two police tried to arrest him in a darkened house in Yuendumu.

At his criminal trial for murder in 2022, Rolfe testified that in the moments before he fired three shots at Walker in less than three seconds, Walker had grabbed his gun. When he reached for his Glock pistol, Rolfe told the jury, he felt Walker’s hand already on it. He was acquitted.

The police officer gave the same evidence to the inquest, which began soon after. There, the coroner also examined evidence she said had emerged since the trial that Rolfe had given at least three versions of that crucial event.

Armitage scrutinised Rolfe’s conversation with a colleague the morning after the shooting, his own record of the incident in his police notebook, and an almost-hour-long interview conducted only a month later with a journalist from the Australian, Kristin Shorten, who had expressed private support for him and offered to write a supportive story after his trial (which she did). In none of those accounts did he mention Walker’s hand on his gun.

Armitage also watched the footage from his bodycam. It showed no sign of Walker’s hand on the pistol.

Armitage noted Rolfe had told the inquest that losing control of a service weapon is “one of the most serious things that could happen to a police officer. Had that really happened, it is likely that Mr Rolfe would have disclosed that in at least one of his early accounts,” she wrote. “… Having reviewed the available evidence, I am firmly satisfied that the account given by Mr Rolfe about Kumanjayi’s hand being on his Glock cannot be accepted.”

Armitage’s twin portraits of the men at the centre of this case are vivid.

Born in Alice Springs, Kumanjayi Walker had recurrent pneumonia and gastroenteritis and was diagnosed with “failure to thrive” before he was a year old. His parents had substance-abuse problems and split up after his birth, his father’s new girlfriend becoming his primary carer and, the coroner noted, trying to do her best for him.

Persistent ear infections, a perforation in one eardrum and a foreign body in the other led to childhood hearing problems that seemingly went untreated.

His dad died when he was five, his mum when he was twelve, but contact with them had fallen away early.

Walker struggled at school, his life disrupted by violence in the community and at home when his carer’s new partner drank. Designated as a “special needs” child, he reacted aggressively to teasing from other kids and was regularly suspended. He began offending at age thirteen — mostly property crime, not violence — setting a pattern that was only broken by periods in custody or residential programs and, ultimately, by his death in the last year of his teens.

Zachary Rolfe’s early life, Armitage observed, was “far removed” from all that. He completed high school in Canberra with no exposure to Aboriginal history or issues and limited contacted with the one student there who was Indigenous.

The coroner dwelt more on Rolfe’s early military and policing career than on his childhood. He joined the Army in 2010, aged eighteen, and hoped to progress to the Special Air Service regiment, an ambition he didn’t fulfil. A year into his service, he was charged with public nuisance and violent behaviour and fined $300 after a fight on a night out in Queensland. A year or so after that, he and some military mates got drunk and stole tobacco from an army dorm. When he went to return it in the morning, he was reported to the military police. He pleaded guilty to theft and received a two-year good behaviour bond. When he later wanted to apply for the SAS, his superiors wouldn’t support him because he was still within the two-year penalty period.

In 2015, Rolfe left the army, still hoping one day to apply for the SAS. He took a privately run tactical firearms course in the United States and then returned to Canberra, where his father ran an Audi dealership, to work as a law clerk while he applied to join the police. Rolfe tried four forces — Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the NT — but lied about the previous infringement and whether he’d ever been the subject of investigation. Queensland, which had the records, rejected him on integrity grounds and banned him from applying again for ten years. The NT — his last choice — did no due diligence on his answers to integrity questions and accepted him.

Armitage explained in her report that she canvassed these details about Rolfe’s background and his brushes with the law and authority not because the conduct they involved was directly relevant to the inquest, but because of the lies he told about it. She pointed to evidence he had regularly had problems with the truth.

On 9 November 2019, Rolfe and his colleague ignored the authorised arrest plan — already wanted by police, Walker had waved a small axe at police who tried to arrest him three days earlier — and entered House 511. He grabbed Walker, who slashed him with scissors. The second officer grabbed Walker and, without warning, Rolfe then fired his Glock pistol three times, missing the other officer, who Armitage said was lucky, and hitting Walker first in the back and then in the side. He died just over an hour later. The lack of available medical assistance — the local clinic had been evacuated — was also examined during the inquest.

“Mr Rolfe was not an entirely credible witness,” Armitage found. Of his explanation for not following the arrest plan, she said: “His evidence was not convincing and defied common sense.”

The inquest heard Rolfe’s mental health had been declining in the months leading up to the incident on 9 November 2019. He had passed selection for the police Tactical Response Group but been overlooked for a position. Armitage described a text-message exchange Rolfe had with a friend the day after the shooting as suggesting he hoped the previous night’s show of force “might assist him.”

A psychiatrist gave evidence that Rolfe had started taking a prescribed anti-depressant a month earlier, which may have affected his self-control.

But there was also evidence that Rolfe had repeatedly used excessive force while serving with the NT Police, and that the police force was aware from 2018 of complaints about his aggressive behaviour, particularly towards Indigenous people. Psychometric testing conducted as part of the application process in 2016 had flagged Rolfe as disinclined to take responsibility for his mistakes, tending to minimise his role and blame others, scoring above average for aggression, and resenting authority.

“The warnings set out in the psychometric testing report now appear prophetic,” Armitage wrote. She observed that it “should have been obvious that action was required” but instead his actions were tacitly “and sometimes expressly” approved and the two sergeants tasked with mentoring him had endorsed and joined in his use of racist language and praised his claimed superiority over community “bush cops.”

“Ultimately, I have found that Mr Rolfe was racist,” Armitage wrote. She was not saying he was motivated by racism in shooting Walker but that his racist attitudes may have influenced his failure to take adequate steps to minimise the risk of a fatal interaction. She also condemned “entrenched systemic and structural racism within the NT Police.”

As coroner, Armitage could not — and did not — make any finding that anyone was guilty of an offence, nor any finding on Zachary Rolfe’s state of mind when he fired the three shots. In response to the findings, Rolfe issued a statement accusing the coroner of “infantilising” Indigenous communities. “The severity of Armitage’s criticism inadvertently highlights how effectively the police have safeguarded her privileged position, granting her a level of security and comfort that insulates her from the harsh realities faced daily by frontline officers and, more importantly, by countless victims of crime throughout the Northern Territory,” it said.

After a criminal trial and a coronial inquest, the justice system now closes the book on the killing of Kumanjayi Walker. But Elisabeth Armitage’s findings on the depth of prejudice in an institution supposed to protect people, and her comprehensive rejection of Zachary Rolfe’s version of events, will sit like a stain on its cover. •

Funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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The committee did as it was required to do, but was less than happy about it, and said so in carefully modulated tones: “There is a point beyond which it is not possible to consider policies relating to the private sector,” it warned, “without taking into account their possible effects on the public sector whose strength and representativeness should not be diluted.”

The problem anticipated soon materialised and grew. It has been a recurring theme in schools talk ever since, without anyone actually doing anything about it.

A few moments from an instructive story:

1978: In one of its formidable reports the Schools Commission — the Karmel committee’s successor — worried about how public policy might cause government schools to become “residual.” “Many of those who favour choice as a prime policy objective assume that the choice being spoken of is only that traditionally available between government and non-government schools,” it said. “If this is so, and as public funds now sustain this choice, important questions arise about conditions of entry to non-government schools, about the cost to parents of exercising such choice, about the extent to which the governance and operation of the schools should be publicly regulated as public subsidies rise, and about how and under what conditions new non-government schools should be permitted or assisted. There are also questions about the effect on government systems arising from making the choice to move out of them easier for parents. If such choice is greatly enhanced, government schools could become residual institutions, serving only those children whose parents were unwilling or unable to meet even low fee levels in non-government schools, or who were geographically isolated from, or indifferent to, or unaware of, alternatives.”

1984: The Australian Education Union picked up the “residualisation” idea and argued that the Schools Commission — now under new management — was making recommendations to government that would turn government schools into schools of last resort.

1998: Government secondary school enrolments fell to 64 per cent, down from 78 per cent in 1975. Catholic schools: up from 15 per cent to 22; the independents doubled their share from 7 per cent to 14. The shift was so marked and so persistent that it now had a name: the “drift.”

2001: The Ministerial Council for Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs set up a school resourcing taskforce to develop “a clear and common understanding of the premises upon which funding for schools should be based.” Subsequent work commissioned by the Victorian government argued for muscling up: non-government schools in receipt of substantial public funding should be required take all comers from the local area, with extra funding as appropriate.

2004: A Labor-dominated Senate inquiry on school funding accused the Howard government of ignoring the ministerial council’s recommendations so it could continue to push funds toward non-government schools. Coalition senators, on the other hand, saw a government that supported parents’ right to choose and committed to “raising the national standard of school education” through rigorous standards and tested attainments.

2010: Federal education minister (and deputy PM) Julia Gillard announced the “first review of schools funding in forty years” — a nod to Karmel, but with no mention of Karmel’s warnings about the “strength and representativeness” of the government sector. The review would look at funding and funding only. It was in fact a review of only some aspects of funding. It took as given the existence of three sectors — government, Catholic ad independent — and funding by two levels of government.

2012: The Gonski report was released to acclaim on all sides, except the federal opposition and, inexplicably, (now-PM) Gillard, who adopted a we’ll-have-to-see-about-the-money position. A union-led grassroots campaign for Gonski’s “needs-based funding” forced opposition leader Tony Abbott to declare a “unity ticket on Gonski.” The ticket was torn up within weeks of the Coalition taking office. A decade of Coalition government in Canberra would see most funding for the non-government sectors coming from the deep pockets of the Commonwealth, leaving the government schools to depend mainly on the chronically indigent states/territories.

2015: A small Melbourne-based group (of which I was a member) attempted a rethink of the problem. Our conclusions: “funding” meant all aspects of funding, including sources and limits; the regulation of choice and selection were as important as the funding; the problem wasn’t just “policy” for the sectors, as Karmel had suggested, but the whole sector set-up — structural reform was called for. To “level the playing field” the sectors should be moved toward common funding and regulatory regimes. Contra the implications of the “residualisation” analysis, fixing the government sector meant fixing the whole system. Papers were written, workshops held, a “high-level round table” convened, and small grants from a (nervous) foundation obtained, but in a Coalition-dominated firmament the idea got no traction.

2022: Two members of the “level playing field project,” Tom Greenwell and Chris Bonnor, pressed on. Their labours produced Waiting for Gonski, to excellent timing. The book’s publication coincided with the end of the Coalition decade and the arrival in Canberra of a sympathetic Labor government. In Greenwell and Bonnor’s (definitive) account of the sorry history of the sector system, Labor governments played an equivocal role while Coalition governments going back to the Howard years were ruthless in exploiting the weaknesses of the Whitlam/Karmel settlement. The upshot wasn’t just the “residualisation” of government schools: it was a wholesale demographic shift. The disadvantaged were going to school with other disadvantaged kids, the advantaged to schools for the advantaged. Greenwell and Bonnor sketched a proposal for a level playing field that would reconcile “choice” and “equity” and suggested how it might be got. Their proposals were subsequently fleshed out and popularised in a Choice and Fairness: A Common Framework for All Australian Schools. Notice was taken; they succeeded in getting “segregation” onto the new government’s agenda.

Without diminishing these achievements we must also note omissions: on the causes side of the equation, a real estate market that allowed the “advantaged” (but not others) to buy into the zone of a “good” government school; on consequences, Greenwell and Bonnor worried mainly about segregation’s impact on outcomes. Much more important is the impact on how young people, disadvantaged and advantaged, view themselves and others and see the proper working of the world, as well as its impact on the culture and the social order as a whole. Economics writer Ross Gittins summed it up: Jewish kids go to one school, Muslim kids go to another. Then he posed a riddle: what did the rich kid say to the poor kid? Answer: nothing, they never met.

2023: Federal education minister Jason Clare pointed to exceptionally high levels of social segregation in Australian schools — but then defined it as a problem only for the disadvantaged, and for them only to the extent that it affected “outcomes.” His “expert panel,” appointed to advise on the contents of the next National School Reform Agreement, reviewed the segregation question and recommended annual tracking and reporting of “socio-economic diversity” before cutting the problem down to size in three swift strokes. First, it commissioned a consulting firm to report on policy responses used in other countries; there would be no analysis of Australia’s unique sector system or policy in respect of it. Second, and following the minister, it construed segregation not as a problem for all students or for the wider society but as a problem for “the disadvantaged.” And third, the one and only problem among disadvantaged students was unsatisfactory attainment in “the basics.” Thus advised, the school reform agreements make no mention of the problem of “segregation,” by that or any other name.

2025: The Ramsay Foundation supported work by Dr Michele Bruniges, a former head of the NSW and then the federal departments of education, on “concentrations of disadvantage.” It then commissioned Essential Research to develop a guide to “framing and communicating” that problem to the wider public. Essential’s report has not been released, but it is believed to have stayed well within the “concentrations of disadvantage” construction of the problem.

What should we make of this dismal tale? One common way of looking at it is that the system is “resistant to reform.” But perhaps it’s incompetent reform that’s the problem? The sector system, and the machinery that has failed to reform it, comprise two of the three structures that shape and drive Australian schooling (the third is the organisation of students’ work). Labor governments since Rudd and Gillard (2007–13) have recognised the need for school reform but avoided structural reform and the politics it requires, preferring instead reform-as-technique, incremental steps toward targets in this or that aspect of schooling in search of a frictionless way around vested interests. Big problems have been converted into the counterfeit currency of “outcomes.” It hasn’t worked, even in its own desiccated terms, and there is no reason to believe that it will. Unlike the Schools Commission in 1978, those who now direct “reform” can measure the waves but don’t understand that beneath the waves are currents. And, also unlike the Schools Commission in 1978, “understanding” is not what they’re after. •

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