https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2026/04/04/why-iran-makes-pauline-hanson-more-dangerous

by Marcia Langton:

Two events in March appear to be only tangentially related, yet their coincidence caused me great consternation. First, the United States and Israel commenced military operations against Iran, stating that their goal was to destroy its nuclear and missile capabilities, eliminate threats to Israel, and pursue regime change. In the same month, the election in South Australia resulted in several lower house seats and one upper house seat being won by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party.

The conflict in the Middle East has already destabilised fuel markets and sharpened public anxiety. In this febrile environment, both Hanson and US President Donald Trump pose a threat to social order. While millions of people in the US marched to protest against Trump’s war, in Australia the pundits continue to focus on Hanson’s poll data. They are oblivious to the threat she poses, claiming Australians are “sensible” and “centrist”. Yet when one in five voters supports One Nation and its vile mix of conspiracy theories and racism, it’s time to acknowledge that a significant part of the electorate has shifted sharply to the extremist right.

Pauline Hanson is dangerous not because she remains a grotesque nativist from 1990s Queensland but rather because her rhetoric has been absorbed into the ordinary calculations of Australian politics. That is the real story, not the tedious recitation of the polling data. For three decades, she has converted racial grievance into durable electoral power. While the major parties have condemned the ugliest episodes, they have harvested the preferences and moved the centre to accommodate the sentiment. What was once treated as aberrant is now managed as part of the landscape. That accommodation is the failure.

When Hanson stood up in federal parliament in 1996 and declared that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”, the nation recoiled. Leaders condemned her. Commentators predicted her swift irrelevance. Nearly three decades later, she is still there – still in the Senate, still finding new minorities to target, still laundering white supremacist slogans into mainstream debate. The 2017 burqa stunt, the 2018 “it’s okay to be white” motion, and her repeated pandemic-era scapegoating of Chinese and Asian communities were not random provocations. They were examples of the same method: take fear, humiliation or uncertainty and translate it into racial blame.

Hanson has understood, with consistent political instinct across three decades, that racial anxiety is electorally productive when it remains just barely within the boundaries of respectable discourse. Her skill lies in framing bigotry as common sense, in presenting the targeting of minority communities as the defence of a silent majority. Each provocation generates outrage among critics while energising her base, who interpret that outrage as proof she is speaking truths others are too cowardly to voice.

Hanson’s persistence matters. She is not merely saying offensive things on the margins of public life. She has helped to create a political environment in which racial blame is repeatedly recycled and in which other leaders lack either the courage or the seriousness to confront it. The result is a slow corrosion of civic standards. What should be unthinkable becomes debatable. What should be rejected becomes negotiable.

The normalisation of Pauline Hanson’s politics is dangerous precisely because the world is becoming less stable. There is a particular danger in normalising far-right rhetoric during periods of global instability. Crisis alters the political atmosphere. It produces fear, disorientation and a hunger for explanations equal to the scale of public distress. The far right does not explain crisis, but it racialises it. It takes diffuse insecurity and gives it a face. It tells the anxious majority the nation has been betrayed not by structural failures or political cowardice or global disorder but by those marked as outsiders within.

Far-right rhetoric does not gain power only from prejudice; it gains power from crisis. When people are frightened by war, surging fuel prices, economic shocks, unaffordable housing, precarious work and the erosion of trust in institutions, they become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and narratives that convert complexity into blame. Hanson has understood this with remarkable political instinct.

What follows is not just an uglier political vocabulary. It is a deeper distortion of public life. Legitimate grievances are detached from their real causes and fastened to racialised targets. Anger that should be directed at structural failures is redirected towards minorities with the least power to shape the conditions being denounced. The effect is emotionally satisfying and politically catastrophic. It offers explanation without truth, agency without power and belonging without solidarity. Hanson’s star appearances at the March for Australia rallies, organised surreptitiously by white extremists and neo-Nazis, boosted her support.

The attempted bombing of an Invasion Day rally in Boorloo/Perth, a year after the violent attack on Camp Sovereignty in Melbourne by neo-Nazis, demonstrates that the consequences of racialised political rhetoric are no longer confined to speech. In Perth, a homemade explosive device was thrown into a large gathering of predominantly First Nations people, an act authorities have treated as a terrorist incident. In Melbourne, neo-Nazi groups mobilised against an Aboriginal protest site, bringing organised intimidation and violence into civic space.

These are not isolated aberrations. They emerge from a political environment in which Indigenous presence, protest and claims to justice are persistently framed as threats, and in which racial grievance is normalised within public discourse. When such narratives are repeated, legitimised, or left insufficiently challenged, they do not remain abstract. They circulate, harden and, in some cases, are acted on.

The escalation is visible in a broader pattern of racialised hostility that has intensified in recent months. In 2026, mosques and Islamic institutions across Australia have been subjected to threats, vandalism and intimidation, particularly during Ramadan. Lakemba Mosque received multiple threatening letters invoking mass violence and referencing the Christchurch massacre. In West Melbourne, a mosque was temporarily closed after a suspicious package prompted a bomb squad response. At Kilmore there were incidents involving fire damage, and threats have deepened anxiety within Muslim communities and prompted calls for round-the-clock security at places of worship.

These events follow a string of anti-Semitic attacks, including the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne and the torching of a kosher cafe in Sydney. Security agencies linked both fires to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. These attacks and others culminated in the Bondi massacre, where 15 people were killed during Hanukkah celebrations.

In such an environment, war and instability escalate division. The more precarious the world becomes, the more dangerous it is to license those who offer internal enemies in place of public reason. That is the lesson the political establishment still refuses to learn.

For 30 years, the default strategy of both Labor and the Coalition towards One Nation has been essentially the same: condemn the most egregious moments publicly, avoid sustained engagement and quietly calculate the preference flow. This is not moral leadership. It is political risk management and it has failed on its own terms.

Every time a major party leader issues a tepid condemnation and moves on, Hanson’s base hears confirmation that she is saying what others will not. Every time a Coalition government accepts One Nation preferences without condition, it ratifies her place in the political ecosystem. Every time a Labor leader avoids confrontation for fear of alienating regional voters drifting towards One Nation, those voters are left entirely in Hanson’s hands.

That is why the timidity of the major parties is not a secondary matter. To accommodate this rhetoric in the name of electoral management is to prepare the ground for something worse. In times of global crisis, with deep and widespread economic and social impacts, the laundering of racist grievance into respectable debate does not remain rhetorical for long. It degrades democratic judgement, legitimises exclusion and weakens the civic capacity our society needs to confront this crisis without turning on itself.

This is the contradiction at the centre of Labor’s current posture. On the one hand, it invokes cohesion, civility and national unity. On the other, it continues to drift rightwards in response to the bloc of voters rallied for years by Hanson’s racial grievance politics. When a major party adopts the frames, anxieties or exclusions cultivated by the far right, even in softened form, it ratifies the damage while pretending to manage it.

It is not fringe groups operating in the shadows that normalises racism in Australian public life. It is racism operating in plain sight, from positions of parliamentary authority, met with institutional timidity. When the Senate is the stage, the audience is the nation. Hanson’s achievement has been to make racial grievance and conspiracy theories appear ordinary, negotiable and politically useful. The parties that have accommodated her bear responsibility for that transformation.

Pauline Hanson’s nativism and populism is spreading like a wildfire and finding more fuel among the white extremist movements. This presents a highly dangerous internal risk to the nation.

Australia’s major party leaders need to stop triangulating around Pauline Hanson and start confronting her – not cautiously, not with media performances and carefully worded press releases about “social cohesion” and “progressive patriotism” but directly, consistently, and by name. The more precarious the world becomes, the more dangerous it is to license those who confect internal enemies in place of public reason.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

#AusPol #TheVoice #iVotedYes #FsckenStrayaVotedNo #Racism #VotedNoGetKarmaComebackYouRedneckRacists #Misanthropy #FirstNations #AlwaysWasAlwaysWillBe #InvasionDay

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/editorial/2026/04/04/albaneses-gamble

his article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 4, 2026 as "Albanese’s gamble":

This is how Anthony Albanese works: he takes too long to make a decision and when he finally does the decision he makes is too weak. He is like an orange tree fruiting in summer, small and pale and sparsely set.

Politically, this is a terrible characteristic. He weathers all the opprobrium of indecision and then, in eventually acting, reminds everyone of his inadequacy. Speed is not traded for thoughtfulness or thoughtfulness traded for urgency. He is simply slow and wrong. He is at once late, indecisive and insubstantial.

It is not clear what made Albanese finally act this week on the recommendations of the Murphy review into gambling advertising. Perhaps Peter V’landys told him it was time and he was allowed to. Perhaps it was a distraction from the fuel shock, or vice versa: he was waiting for a global calamity during which he could do as little as possible to address the overwhelming support for a full ban on gambling advertising.

More than a thousand days have passed since the report was handed to government. The committee’s chair has since died. An election has been and gone. An untold number of people have been tortured by problem gambling during this long interregnum.

“The government is taking decisive action to tackle the community and public health concerns associated with gambling,” Albanese said in a press release on Thursday.

“We’re getting the balance right here, letting adults have a punt if they want to but also making sure Australian children don’t see betting ads everywhere they look. What we don’t want is kids growing up thinking that footy and gambling are the same thing.”

Albanese says these are the most significant reforms ever implemented. This is the lie of comparison. It is true and also meaningless. They are the first such reforms and they are manifestly inadequate.

The Murphy review called for “a comprehensive ban on all forms of advertising for online gambling, to be introduced in four phases, over three years, commencing immediately”.

Those three years have now passed and Albanese has instead announced “restricting gambling advertising on broadcast television to no more than three ads each hour between 6am and 8.30pm, with a complete ban during live sport broadcasts within those hours”.

There will be a radio ban during school pick-up. Online ads will continue where a platform believes a person is 18, but players will no longer have “Sportsbet” written on their guernseys. Match fixing will become a criminal offence.

When Albanese talks about balance, he is usually talking about doing less than what is necessary. It is one of his tells, like a poker player coughing, or going online to empty his savings into a digital casino.

The argument is apparently about personal freedoms, about “adults having a punt”. This is almost as honest as the companies involved. Stopping gambling ads does not stop betting. It does not take away choice. It simply caps exploitation.

The reality is that Albanese does not want to upset the profitable nexus between sport, gambling and television. He has been convinced that without gambling revenue, television would not survive, and without television licensing deals sporting codes would not be able to support children’s football.

It’s a sorry world if an under-7s side is dependent on gambling addicts for its existence. Somehow, this is the world in which Albanese lives. It’s very unlikely this is true, but it sounds convincing in the box at State of Origin. If it were true, of course, the government could always step in and fund children’s sport. That would require strength and decisiveness and several other attributes that on this issue elude Albanese.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/04/04/the-angus-taylor-powerpoint-political-acumen-not-his-skill

By Jason Koutsoukis:

The first worry is the PowerPoint presentation. Angus Taylor has begun showing it to colleagues, using complex econometric modelling to explain how he intends to confront Labor. According to senior Liberals, the slideshow is proof Taylor is still more a management consultant than a politician.

The graphs are supposed to represent Taylor’s preparation for his first budget reply speech, although to colleagues they represent confusion and a man without a capacity to communicate a clear political narrative.

“Political acumen is not something Angus is overly endowed with,” one Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper.

“What he’s very good at is pulling apart businesses and rebuilding them, and I worry that he’s leaning too hard into that and basically overcomplicating things … He has little instinct for what lights up voters and how to get their attention.”

With opinion polls showing support for the Liberals going further backwards, the pressure on Taylor to find a coherent political message is becoming more pressing. If the party is to have any hope, he needs to re-establish the economic credentials lost during the previous parliament.

The latest Australian Financial Review/RedBridge Group/Accent Research poll shows the Coalition’s primary vote has fallen to a record low of 17 per cent, down two percentage points since February, when Taylor toppled Sussan Ley to become Liberal leader. One Nation has climbed to 29 per cent, just three points behind Labor’s 32 per cent primary vote.

On Taylor’s left flank, Liberal moderates are grumbling that he is not making use of his shadow treasurer, Tim Wilson. The Victorian MP’s lack of presence in Question Time over the past four parliamentary sitting weeks has not gone unnoticed.

“We haven’t bothered to have a question from the shadow treasurer in the last Question Time before the budget,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told parliament on Wednesday. “It shows that their focus is not on talking Australia up, just talking things down.”

Wilson’s colleagues expressed concern this week that Taylor’s experience in economic portfolios – he was shadow treasurer for three years under Peter Dutton in the last term – has made him reluctant to let go.

“Tim knows how to talk to people,” one Liberal moderate tells The Saturday Paper.

“He gets retail politics in a way that few people on our side understand. The problem is he is being kept in the background when he should be out front.

“It’s not obvious that Tim has a big say in our Question Time tactics. Taylor doesn’t seem to consult him much either. And that’s not a good sign when [the government is] giving us so much to aim at,” the MP adds.

“The economic case against the government writes itself, but we’re not prosecuting it, not on inflation, not on interest rates, not on the flatlining economy, and whenever we do stray into those areas, they’re ready for us. Worse, they’re not just ready for us, they’re laughing at us.”

By way of contrast, Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers appear to have a clearer sense of how dangerous Wilson can be. The government has methodically catalogued the policy positions Wilson has taken over the past decade – which may in part explain why Taylor is not keen to lean on him.

Topping the list of things that Labor won’t let Wilson forget is a withering attack on the tax system he delivered to parliament in 2018, which the government is using to buttress its own arguments for tax reform policy proposals being floated ahead of the budget.

“Today it’s time to be honest: the tax system is screwing over young Australians. Instead, it favours well-off, established interests against those trying to get ahead,” Wilson told parliament at the time. “In short: if you work hard to get ahead, you get hit hard; if you live off assets, you don’t.”

With Albanese and Chalmers both flagging possible changes to the capital gains tax discount in the budget, a move aimed at giving younger Australians a better chance of getting into the housing market, Wilson’s 2018 words will make it harder for the new shadow treasurer to oppose a budget measure designed to address that same imbalance.

Chalmers has also made hay with Wilson’s record on other issues, such as superannuation.

In a 2019 appearance on The Bolt Report, Wilson suggested that compulsory superannuation may not be serving the interests of low- and middle-income earners, arguing some workers might be better off taking the money as income in order to make it easier to pay down debt such as a mortgage.

“We’re pouring more and more money into superannuation each year. Analysis by the Grattan Institute, of all people, has highlighted that most of the benefit is going to the rich,” Wilson told Andrew Bolt. “Some of us are saying for low-income earners or even for medium-income earners in particular it might make more sense that they have at least the choice to be able to take that money instead of taking it as more super – putting it towards their wages just to be able to do things like pay down debt, particularly on a house.”

Whether or not Wilson’s argument has merit, it blunts his ability to argue against Labor’s recent changes to the way superannuation is taxed, which introduced a higher concessional rate of tax for about 90,000 people with the biggest superannuation balances.

Then there is Medicare, Labor’s policy talisman, which has been a central pillar of its election strategy for decades.

In 2011, five years before he entered parliament, Wilson wrote a piece for online news and opinion website The Punch, arguing that instead of continuing to provide universal health financing the government should “restructure our health system toward a bottom-up individual health account system”.

“Put simply every Australian would have an individual health account that they contribute to on a periodic basis from their income, like superannuation. That savings account would then be used to pay for healthcare services as required throughout their lifetime.”

Despite the fact Wilson has never repeated the proposal, it hasn’t stopped Chalmers and other Labor ministers from arguing that Wilson’s real agenda is to privatise Medicare.

Wilson’s supporters reject the suggestion he is being sidelined. Those close to him argue that the fuel crisis has simply consumed the political oxygen and asking questions in parliament about the budget or the government’s handling of the economy would have been a waste of good ammunition.

Wilson’s view, which he has shared with those close to him, is that the intensity of Labor’s focus on him is a confirmation of his effectiveness.

One anecdote Wilson regards as a compliment, and which he has repeated to colleagues, is of a recent conversation with a Labor MP who told him: “We’ll do Taylor slowly – you have to be stopped early or you’ll be unstoppable.”

Those who know Wilson argue that his critics have tended to underestimate his style.

In 2018, in the lead-up to the 2019 election, Wilson identified Labor’s plan to tax franking credits – tax credits attached to share dividends that allow shareholders to avoid being taxed twice – as a key issue. Labor initially dismissed and mocked it but ultimately lost the 2019 election, in part because of an equity measure he had reframed as a “retirement tax”.

Wilson also takes credit for identifying housing affordability as the defining issue of the coming decade in his 2020 book, The New Social Contract: Renewing the liberal vision for Australia, helping to frame the policy response of both his Liberal colleagues and Labor.

Wilson is untroubled by Labor’s current cataloguing of his past positions. His response to the government’s attack lines is not to retreat but to redirect.

On the topic of the budget and the issue of whether he is getting enough time at the dispatch box during Question Time, Wilson’s view is that he needs to be less focused on the current news cycle than on where things will land when voters go to the polls.

“In ice hockey, if you run for the puck, by the time you get there it’s already moved,” he has told colleagues. “You have to race to where the puck will be. I’m focused on where the puck will be in two years’ time, not today.”

If there are Liberal MPs on Angus Taylor’s left worried about his perceived treatment of Wilson, there are problems on his right flank, too, largely in the form of Andrew Hastie. The former SASR officer used an appearance on the ABC’s Insiders last Sunday to deliver what amounted to a public challenge to the policy direction of the party under Taylor’s leadership.

Arguing that the Coalition’s policy approach was not working, and its primary vote was being cannibalised from both the left and the right, Hastie urged the party to adopt a posture of humility and open-mindedness.

He backed that up by expressing an openness to policy changes strongly opposed by the Liberal leadership, such as a windfall profits tax on gas exports. He refused to rule out changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount and declared that in a “new era”, where the world order had collapsed, nothing should be off the table.

“No one’s going to reward us for a final last stand for neoliberal politics,” Hastie said. “I actually want to win and deliver a centre-right government for this country. And the best way to beat Labor is to start listening to people and meeting their concerns head-on rather than reactively slapping them down.”

Among Hastie’s coterie of rusted-on supporters, the response to his Insiders interview was barely concealed delight, deepening their conviction that he is better placed than Taylor to lead the party to the next election.

Inside the broader party room, however, the reaction was less enthusiastic. Many colleagues privately questioned what Hastie was trying to achieve. The appearance reinforced the perception that Hastie is not a team player, with one MP telling The Australian nobody else in the party agreed with him.

“The left want higher taxes,” they said. “That’s not our position.”

Taylor himself moved quickly to shut down the speculation. “If you whack a tax on something, you get less of it,” he said on Monday. “Right now, I want to see more crude oil ... more gas ... more houses. And that has to be an imperative for this budget.”

The Australian subsequently reported that Hastie was set to receive a “gentle reminder” of shadow cabinet processes after freelancing on policy. When contacted, Hastie said he had not heard from the opposition leader’s office.

Albanese needed no invitation to exploit the division.

1/2

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

ah. i'm quite worried now that elbow will dig his heels in & outright reject this essential change. he seems to have almost as big a visceral loathing for #ACOSS as he does for the Greens, the deranged bastard.

https://thepoint.com.au/news/260327-acoss-backs-gas-export-tax-as-momentum-builds-across-parliament

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2026/03/27/the-world-turned-upside-down

BY:
Paul Bongiorno is a columnist for The Saturday Paper and a 35-year veteran of the Canberra Press Gallery:

The entire planet is paying a very high price for the abandonment of a world order that once constrained the powerful from actions that weaker nations would struggle to survive.

The fuel crisis foisted on us by the Iran war is a dramatic case in point. The visiting head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, says the scale of the economic carnage caused by the war is worse than the combined impacts of the three biggest energy shocks in modern history.

Birol had in mind the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, which led to rationing and petrol queues. He also cited the 2022 gas crunch, which came in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Birol said he was worried households around the world were not better informed about the magnitude of the challenge we are facing. The federal opposition lays that very charge at the feet of the Albanese government. Hindsight is a wonderful gift for parties not in government.

In the first instance, Anthony Albanese’s job as prime minister is to avoid panicking the populace, especially as the facts, as Energy Minister Chris Bowen correctly outlined, did not warrant immediate draconian action.

That was particularly so when United States President Donald Trump was assuring the world that his military intervention would be swift and short-lived.

One cabinet minister observed Australians simply do not trust Trump and this “hugely” contributed to the undermining of Bowen’s message that there was no need to panic buy.

Trump’s inability to keep open the critical Strait of Hormuz, the gateway for about 20 per cent of the globe’s oil and gas, and Iran’s retaliation against its neighbouring energy-rich Gulf states, sent the price of petrol, diesel and gas soaring.

Australia’s abundance of natural gas spared it this trifecta, but the disruption of our energy market was complete, with Bowen having the embarrassing task of informing parliament every day about the growing number of service stations that had run out of fuel. This is a problem more of distribution than supply, but a problem all the same.

The opposition kept up its pursuit of the government’s handling of the mounting crisis. They say it is inadequate if not complacent. This drew charges from Bowen and other ministers that the Liberal leadership had chosen “partisanship over patriotism, and they should hang their heads in shame”.

Bowen, however, began taking measures that ordinarily would be considered to border on the extreme. He lowered the fuel standards for diesel and petrol so that “dirtier” petrol from the Brisbane Ampol refinery normally destined for export can now legally be sold in Australia. The purpose was to boost supply in an attempt to restrain price rises.

This did not stop petrol prices reaching a record average high of $2.38 a litre on Monday. According to the Australian Institute of Petroleum (AIP), this tops the previous record average of $2.19 set the previous week.

Albanese sought assurances from his counterpart in Singapore that this major supplier of refined product to Australia will not leave us in the lurch. Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong is full of good intentions in this regard, particularly in light of Australia’s reliability as a supplier of liquefied natural gas.

AIP chief executive Malcolm Roberts says if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for the next couple of weeks, however, refineries in Asia that supply about 80 per cent of Australia’s refined product will struggle to meet orders. Roberts fears our imported supplies could fall off a cliff by the end of April.

Bowen was more upbeat, telling parliament that the six cancelled ships he spoke of earlier had now been “filled with new alternative orders” from different locations, following interactions with foreign counterparts. Besides replacing those, the industry has informed him it has secured at least three more cargoes for April and May.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, notes the world we live in feels “upside down”. She says it is brutal, harsh and unforgiving, with old economic models of stability and safety facing a new reality.

In a speech to the Australian parliament, made as Australia finalised a free trade deal with the European Union, von der Leyen echoed sentiments Prime Minister Albanese expressed in a keynote address to the Minerals Council on Monday night.

Albanese pointed to the physical destruction of oil and gas infrastructure across the Middle East. He said that even if the conflict ended tomorrow, “there would still be a long economic tail to reckon with”.

Hopes of an early end to the conflict were buffeted when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the war’s end would depend not on the US but on when Israel says it’s done. Trump would not be the first American president challenged by Netanyahu.

Albanese said the “stable, predictable world of ever-expanding free trade is gone and it will not be returning any time soon”.

From both von der Leyen’s and Albanese’s perspectives, Trump is a central driving force in this global disruption.

There is no doubt this week’s free trade deal, signed after eight years of stalling negotiations, was spurred by the US president’s willingness to risk trade wars by imposing tariffs in defiance of pacts Washington had made with many countries, including Australia.

Australia and the EU also part company with Trump on the science of climate change and the imperative of decarbonising economies. Von der Leyen said she was proud they had made decarbonisation “a defining pillar of our free trade agreement”.

The European Commission president said, with geopolitics at boiling point, building homegrown energy supply would be necessary to deal with price shocks. She said we are “in a race to electrify our economies” and future generations will judge us on our progress.

Albanese noted Australia’s key role in decarbonising the global economy, which will need from us “more copper, more rare earths and more iron ore”. He said that’s why the biggest economies in the world are knocking on Australia’s door. The EU is the latest partner, joining the US and Canada in bolstering critical minerals cooperation and development.

No one could be more out of sympathy with this agenda than One Nation, which is consolidating its position as a serious second or third political force, as clearly demonstrated at last weekend’s South Australian election.

The new world political order in Australia sees an end to the dominance of the old Labor–Coalition duopoly. This week the YouGov poll, in line with a number of recent polls, shows the major parties are now commanding just half of voters’ primary support. It is a long way from their accustomed 70 per cent support in years gone by.

Labor’s national secretary, Paul Erickson, had some encouraging analysis of the South Australian result when he briefed Labor members in Canberra. The popularity and ascendancy of Premier Peter Malinauskas was a factor in the size of the victory. So, too, the unity and discipline of the Labor Party in contrast to the disarray of the Liberals, with their leadership churn and public conflict between moderates and conservatives.

The Liberals’ No. 1 Senate candidate for South Australia, factional powerbroker Alex Antic, does nothing to hide his admiration for Pauline Hanson and her divisive social policy attitudes.

Anthony Albanese is no Malinauskas – indeed, the premier is a rarely talented politician – but federal Labor has manifested the sort of unity and cohesion that stands it in good stead to present as a safe option in troubled times.

Albanese is completely ascendant in the parliamentary party, although he has internal critics who worry that his instincts are poor when it comes to handling criticism. They point to his reaction to the Lakemba Mosque protest and the immediate aftermath of the Bondi massacre.

The federal Liberals are on to their second leader since the last election and so far Angus Taylor hasn’t worried Albanese. He has made a good fist of adding to the government’s discomfort on the current oil shock, but this is not exactly a hard thing to do. Incumbents always cop the blame in a cost-of-living crisis.

The latest ANZ–Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence rating is an amber light for the government. Confidence fell 7.9 per cent last week at the same time as inflation expectations reached a record high.

The survey’s finding has confidence at its lowest level since records began in 1973. Soaring fuel prices and interest rate increases are putting enormous pressure on Treasurer Jim Chalmers to come up with something in the upcoming budget.

Labor is avoiding any sort of electoral test at the upcoming Farrer byelection but is keenly watching how the Angus Taylor-led Liberals and the Nationals fare in the early May poll.

Independent Michelle Milthorpe is running again after an impressive showing against Sussan Ley at the 2025 election. Milthorpe has Climate 200 backing but says that because of her family farming background she has voted for the Nationals in the past, and for the Liberals before challenging Ley last year. Locals say Milthorpe is more in the mould of the successful Indi independent Helen Haines.

Not everyone who sees the imperative of addressing climate change is a teal or a Green. In fact, Haines’s success is as sure an indicator as any that the Nationals underestimate support in regional Australia for renewables and mitigating climate change.

In that regard, the world is not completely upside down.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9207152/ian-warden-too-much-brain-power-is-wasted-analysing-donald-trump/

BY:
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist:

"Can IQ tests settle whether Trump is a moron or not?"

This unkind heading appeared above a recent article concluding that, no, Trump's moronity is too elusive for IQ tests alone to capture.

This Trump era is a time of Trump-triggered crimes and evils. But as well as all the obvious, daily life and death and human misery evils, this Trump era has also brought us an accompanying, related, galaxy of absurdities and weirdnesses.

One recurring absurdity is the way in which commentators with minds 100 times more healthy and knowledge-wealthy and wise than Trump's sick and impoverished and ignorant one are, now, so demeaningly reduced to endlessly analysing Trump's thoughts and actions. Fine minds really should have finer work than this to do. It is a kind of cruel shame, as if our Mozarts and Shakespeares squandered their talents on writing jingles for gambling ads and speeches for shifty politicians.

This particular absurdity loomed especially large for me last Sunday morning. First I spent an intellectually engaging 50 minutes with an Iran war session of Private Eye magazine's Page 94 podcast panel discussion program.

This session (wittily-titled "War On Iran: Aya-Tollad You So") featured four fiendishly witty but also fiendishly bright and well-informed commentators. They wrestled with the question "Why did Trump declare his latest perfect, 'very complete', already-won war?"

Then when these worthies were done I tuned to ABC Radio National's The Minefield. There, the healthy, knowledge-wealthy and wise minds of public intellectuals Scott Stephens, Waleed Aly and scholarly international law guru Dr Tamer Morris addressed the theme "Can illegal wars [like Trump's war against Iran) still be legitimate wars?"

Their discussion became, really, a sometimes pained, despairing, baffled attempt to understand what on Earth goes through Trump-like American presidential minds when those minds turn to might-makes-right ideas of invasion and of regime-changing.

Following the seven participants in the two programs (let us call them the Intelligent Seven) one wondered if they were even to be of the same species as the creature, Trump, they were wasting their good hearts and fine minds on trying to fathom.

They were examples of Homo sapiens (sapiens means wise) but were painstakingly analysing a creature, Trump, at best only a human subspecies. Perhaps he is of Homo stupidus, or Homo narcissus-cosmeticus or, thinking of his total inability to feel any empathy for others (for example the 170 Iranian schoolgirls killed by US bombing of their school) Homo sociopathus.

The sheer futility of what the Intelligent Seven were trying to do reminded one of the wisdom of the sardonic US commentator/public speaker Fran Lebowitz.

"Echoing the opinion of former US secretary of state Rex Tillerson, Lebowitz thinks the biggest danger of Trump is that he is a moron," The Guardian has noted, going on to reported her diagnosis that "Everyone says he is crazy - which maybe he is - but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."

Yes, it seemed to me that the Intelligent Seven discussants of Trump were, in trying to understand him, up against the problem that, living and moving among people like themselves, they have no experience of pure, deep, human stupidity.

All seven will have read but have probably temporarily forgotten the message of American philosopher Thomas Nagel's immortally brilliant 1974 paper and ensuing book What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

Nagel explains, at scholarly length, why no human can ever truly know what it is like to be a bat, or any other non-human species.

Nagel's methodologies and his analyses apply, too, to all my attempts to imagine what it is like to be any of the humans who are radically unlike me.

I struggle to imagine what it is like to be the kind of Australian who votes "no" to the Voice referendum, or who votes for One Nation, or who thrills to every episode of Married At First Sight.

These people are mysteries to me. I have more in common with bats, and with platypuses, than I have with them.

Don't think that I am scoffing at the Intelligent Seven. I am caught up in the very same Trump-era absurdity syndrome that they are.

Here I am, fiendishly intelligent and poetically sensitive, writing a column about fiendishly stupid Trump. This Saturday's column was going to be an arts-focused poetic meditation on the beauty and the wonder of clouds, predicated on the news that celebrations are under way to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of John Constable, the famed painter of the beauty and the wonder of clouds. A genius.

That intended column would have been an uplifting and sincere read for you all. I am an enthusiastic member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and care deeply about clouds (Australia's are unique and the best in the world and have been beautifully painted by Australia's Constable-influenced artists) and would have written about them with feeling.

But instead of writing about meteorological and painterly loveliness here I am instead, depraved and debauched by this Trump era, down in journalism's gutters, scribbling about human ugliness.

#USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch
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https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9208955/what-are-australian-values-angus-taylor-pauline-hanson-on-immigration/

BY:
John Minns is emeritus professor of politics and international relations at the ANU and a member of the Refugee Action Campaign in Canberra:

Expect to hear a lot about "Australian values" between now and the next federal election.

Liberal leader Angus Taylor has made it clear that immigration policy will be a central part of his push to win back voters from One Nation. His first speech as leader called for immigration based on "Australian values", claiming that "standards have been too low".

Taylor argued that some people have come to Australia who should not have been allowed in.

"Our borders have been opened to people who hate our way of life. People who don't want to embrace Australia, and who want Australia to change for them", he said.

This is clearly not simply an argument about the size of the immigration program. It is about the people who come, some of whom, he suggests, do not subscribe to our "core beliefs".

His likely future challenger, Andrew Hastie, made it clear that it is the culture of some of those new immigrants that is not acceptable - saying that Australians are being made to feel like "strangers in our own home" - not simply that our home is overcrowded.

The phrase echoed a line from the UK Prime Minister last year which suggested that immigration was making Britain an "island of strangers". Both comments are reminiscent of an infamous 1968 speech by the anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell in which he warned that non-white immigration would lead to "rivers of blood" and that the British would be made "strangers in their own country".

As Hastie put it while speaking to Peta Credlin on Sky News, "numbers are one thing but who we bring to our country is fundamentally important. They have to sign-up to our values - which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values".

Both Taylor and Hastie targeted "radical Islam" in the wake of the Bondi massacre. Neither was as blunt as Pauline Hanson who said that there was no such thing as a "good Muslim", but they are all seeking to profit politically from the same constituency.

While Muslims in Australia are bearing the brunt of these attacks, the insistence on a Judeo-Christian ethic also points an accusatory finger at Hinduism - the third largest religion in Australia with probably about 3 per cent of the population - and Buddhism - which is the fourth largest.

There is a utopianism about these demands from the Liberals and One Nation that people should sign-up to Australian values or the door will be shut to them. How exactly, will it be possible for an immigration official to determine whether a prospective migrant has them? Will there be a questionnaire? In which case, how will it be certain that people have answered it truthfully? In the worst-case scenario, would a potential terrorist tick a box saying that they intend to perpetrate violence once they get here? The idea is absurd.

The call for an immigration program based on Australian values might win some votes and perhaps even claw back Liberal voters from One Nation. But it is political posturing which cannot be practically implemented.

Another possibility for excluding those who might make Andrew Hastie feel like a stranger in his own home is to adopt a system which excludes migrants from certain countries and regions - for example from countries with a large Muslim population. It is something which US President Donald Trump has already announced - and he included other countries he doesn't rate highly as well.

The largest Muslim population in the world is in Indonesia. India has more Muslims than Pakistan. Of the alleged Bondi terrorists, one was born in Australia, the other came originally from India. And there are significant Muslim populations in most countries. For those with a fixation about keeping Muslims out of Australia, this must be a truly perplexing problem. Again, it is a utopian demand. It might win some seats, and it will certainly cause harm to many immigrant communities, but it cannot be implemented.

Above all, what are the "values" that we are supposed to hold and to which prospective migrants are to sign-up? Hastie mentioned equality as one. The facts show that Australia has become more unequal over a long period. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was the equivalent of 8.4 per cent of GDP in 2004. Twenty years later it was 23.7 per cent of GDP. Meanwhile, the poorest 20 per cent of the population owned only 0.4 per cent of total wealth. The level of equality that we should have is a value that has been fought over since European settlement - between trade unions and business owners, social reformers and conservatives, and many others.

What about tolerance as a quintessential Australian value? Academic Stephen McInerney made a widely reported and, in some circles, admired speech in Sydney at a March for Australia protest in August last year. In it he argued that the founding prime ministers, war-time leaders and Australian soldiers were: "fighting for a people - a people bound together by the crimson thread of blood, a distinct people, a unique people, an irreplaceable people, derived from the British Isles and Europe and forged on this continent through ethnogenesis into a new ethnic group, Australians".

The sentiment that we should be fighting for the same thing today - a racially-discriminatory immigration program - is repugnant to me. But he does express clearly what has been behind this "debate" - he wants to reduce the number of non-white people in the country. And he is right in one sense - our history since 1788 is one of racism. The White Australia policy was the first measure passed by the Australian parliament in 1901. It was only phased out from 1966 and not really removed until the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. Australian Indigenous people were not even counted as Australians officially until 1966. Is this long history of open, biologically-based racism an Australian value? If so, hopefully, most of us don't still hold it.

Is a Judeo-Christian ethic something which has a great record historically? European colonial empires, the destruction of Indigenous societies and many other brutal and inhumane periods were, at least, part of that record.

Australian history is not a simple story of unanimously agreed values - they have always been a contested space. People fought for women's rights, for gay rights, for Indigenous rights, for labour rights over many decades. They had different values from those they fought against - those who were in power and who also had majority popular support at the time. Which side embodied real Australian values?

What values we should have is being contested still. While clearly support for an immigration program based on race or religion is growing, there are many others determined to prevent that happening. This Palm Sunday - tomorrow - a broad range of organisations, including the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, the Uniting Church, St Vincent de Paul Canberra/Goulburn, many other churches, UnionsACT and other unions are supporting a rally under the banner "Refugees and Migrants Welcome Here" - a direct challenge to those who have marched recently under the banner of "Australia for Australians".

The values we as a country and people will hold in the future - perhaps those which we will call "Australian values" - are still being contested today.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

yeah but think about the whales, n dolphins, n fish, n plankton, n seagulls, n albatross, albatross, get 'em while they're hot, albatross!

oh yeah, n the fossilfools' balance sheets...

https://social.chinwag.org/@abc_bot/116297658754617652

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance