Tag: One Nation

Before we explain One Nation voters, perhaps we should listen to them

 

Yesterday I wrote about the extraordinary enthusiasm political parties have for studying unhappy voters rather than themselves. This morning the Sydney Morning Herald delivered me an article about researchers studying 1,000 One Nation voters. Sometimes the universe is unnecessarily helpful.

In my living history interviews with people in their late 80s and early 90s across my local government area, I often ask what has changed in their lifetime. I am hoping for the broad sweep, social change, physical change, how the place has changed around them.

The most common answer I get is: too many people.

They are talking about people moving into the area from somewhere else in Australia. Sydney gets mentioned a lot. Immigration does not.

So when I read Paul Sakkal’s article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning on what 1,000 One Nation voters say is driving them, I smiled.

The headline finding is immigration. Of the One Nation supporters who believe Australia is heading in the wrong direction, 39 per cent name immigration as one of the reasons. Fifty-seven per cent fear Australia’s culture and identity are changing too quickly. Forty per cent point to pressure on housing and infrastructure.

Then you read what people actually say.

One supporter says the issue is arithmetic. You cannot bring in that many people without building the houses. Another says the issue is who comes and whether they want to become part of what is already here.

Suddenly “immigration” is being asked to explain quite a lot.

We do love a complicated explanation. Apparently understanding something counts for less if it doesn’t require a consultant.

The research into One Nation voters comes with focus groups, voter segments, demographic differences, loyal supporters, newer supporters and analysis of what might persuade people to change their vote. All useful.

But perhaps people are also saying exactly what they mean.

There are more people than there used to be, and they do not like some of the consequences.

People do not experience population growth as a percentage. They experience another housing development, another traffic jam, another doctor’s books closed to new patients, another paddock covered in houses and another place that takes longer to get to.

Ask someone in their late 80s in my LGA what has changed and I may hear “too many people”.

Ask a One Nation voter what is wrong with Australia and I may hear “too much immigration”.

Before deciding those are entirely different conversations, it might be useful to ask what each person is actually describing.

The Scanlon Foundation’s long-running social cohesion research adds an important clue. In 2024, 49 per cent of Australians thought immigration was too high. Yet 85 per cent said multiculturalism had been good for Australia, 82 per cent said migrants were good for the economy and 83 per cent rejected excluding immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion.

The 2025 research is equally interesting.

Among Australians who thought immigration was too high, 58 per cent nominated the economy or housing as the country’s biggest problem. Only 9 per cent nominated immigration itself.

That does not make concerns about race, culture or identity disappear. The One Nation research itself shows a difference between newer supporters worried about migration numbers and parts of Hanson’s traditional base who are more concerned about the background of migrants.

But it does suggest that “too much immigration” can sometimes be shorthand for something much broader.

Too many people for the houses.

Too many people for the roads.

Too many people for the services.

Too much change, too quickly.

In my interviews, the people causing all this pressure can be Australians who moved down the highway. Scale the same experience up from a town to a country and suddenly the new arrivals have passports.

This takes us straight back to the leadership question I wrote about yesterday.

Political parties confronted with dissatisfied voters have an extraordinary appetite for studying the voters. Who are they? What do they want? What are they angry about? What message will bring them back?

Now we have research into 1,000 One Nation voters.

To its credit, the research reaches an important conclusion: One Nation’s rise is as much a story of Liberal failure as One Nation success.

That is more interesting than another voter profile.

Because the real question may be what happens when population grows faster than people’s confidence that governments can manage the consequences.

Housing, roads, hospitals, schools and infrastructure are experienced locally. So is change. People notice the paddock disappearing long before they read the population statistics.

Then politics arrives with an answer. Immigration.

That is a powerful word because it can turn a collection of complicated experiences into one problem with one number attached to it.

Politics loves a number. Numbers can be cut. Systems are messier.

So before politicians hear “immigration” and start competing over who can promise the lower migration target, it might be worth listening a little longer.

What are people actually describing? Because sometimes when someone in their late 80s tells me the problem is “too many people”, the people causing all the trouble came from Wollongong.

Pauline Hanson did not invent that feeling.

She may simply have become very good at telling people what to call it.

The science of how the watch dog ends up working for the dog.

Here is the trick nobody runs an ad campaign about. The watchdog ends up working for the dog. And once you see how, you cannot unsee it.

Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.

This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.

I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.

It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.

The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.

Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.

The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.

None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.

Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.

What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.

A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.

That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.

The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.

A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.

Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.

It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.

If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.

There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.

And here is the bitter twist.

The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.

So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.

I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.

Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?

Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.

Sources

  • Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
  • James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
  • Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
  • George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
  • E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
  • Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
  • Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
  • The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
  • Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings

About this post

These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.

 

Daily News Roundup – 4 June 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a council meeting where nothing happening was the good news, to the women flocking to Pauline Hanson, to a Congress telling Trump to stop his war, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 4 June 2026.

Betty from Blacktown and her brother Kevin from Kiama, making sense of the world’s chaos the only sensible way: over toast, a strong cuppa, and a good long natter on the phone. That’s what this Catch Up is for.

Very Local: the extraordinary meeting where nothing happening was the good news

Here are the bits that caught my attention.

Council held an Extraordinary Meeting on Wednesday 27 May, and the headline is that nothing much happened, which in this case is the good news. Councillors voted unanimously to accept the variation to the Performance Improvement Order that Local Government Minister Ron Hoenig had offered. The State has given Council an extra twelve months to balance its budget, pushing the deadline out to the end of the 2027 to 28 financial year. CEO Jane Stroud was to write to the Minister confirming Council will work towards the new requirements.

Mayor Cameron McDonald welcomed it, and his framing was that it means Council will not have to cut community services or staff, at least not on the timetable that the original draft budget had been threatening. That is a real reprieve for the people whose jobs were on the line a few weeks ago.

The extra time does not make the underlying problem go away. The Minister was careful to say the order remains necessary because Council still faces serious financial sustainability challenges, and that the order does not make Council’s decisions for it. Council still has to do the hard work itself, just with more breathing room. So the unanimous vote was less a moment of drama and more everyone agreeing to accept a longer rope.

The detail I am keeping an eye on sits underneath all the calm. The revised timeline gives Council more flexibility to look at the long term future of its five tourist parks, and there are reportedly three unsolicited partnership offers from large operators already on the table. That is the holiday parks question we have been circling for a while, and it is the kind of thing that gets decided quietly while everyone is relieved about the budget extension. The strategic business case for Blue Haven Terralong is also written into the varied order, so that thread is still very much live.

The next one to watch is the Extraordinary Meeting on 30 June, where the actual budget and the planning documents get adopted. That is the one where the real numbers land.

Across the State (NSW)

The PIO variation is the local face of a wider NSW story, which is what happens to small councils that cannot make the sums work. Hoenig has chosen the patient path with Kiama rather than the heavy hand, more time and a Strategic Finance and Governance Improvement Plan rather than administrators. It is worth watching whether other councils in similar trouble get the same latitude, because that tells you whether Kiama is being treated as a special case or as a template.

Across the Country (Federal): the Hanson surge, and the women driving it

A Redbridge Group and Accent Research poll published by the Australian Financial Review put One Nation’s primary vote at 31 per cent, ahead of Labor on 28 and the Coalition on 20. Two years ago One Nation was sitting around 7 per cent. That is not a wobble, that is a genuine shift, and it follows real electoral results in South Australia and in the federal seat of Farrer rather than poll noise alone.

According to an April study by the same pollsters, Hanson is the most popular party leader among women voters, ahead of the Prime Minister, and One Nation is women’s leading first preference party. On net favourability, her approval minus her disapproval, Hanson came in at zero, which sounds unremarkable until you see that every other leader was in negative territory. Anthony Albanese was on minus 19. So Hanson is the least disliked leader in the country, and she is doing it partly on the strength of women.

That cuts against decades of assumption. Far right parties have traditionally been thought of as men’s parties, both in who votes for them and in the very masculine image they project. The Conversation ran a good piece making the case that what we are seeing here is not a local quirk but part of a global pattern. Across Europe, parties of the hard right are pulling in more women than they used to, and a striking number are now led by women. Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Alice Weidel in Germany. Hanson belongs in that company now, not as an oddity but as part of the trend.

So why women, and why now? The pollsters point at mood rather than ideology. Around 63 per cent of respondents said the country is heading in the wrong direction, and Redbridge’s read is that this pervasive sourness is what is feeding anti establishment support. When people stop believing the major parties understand their lives, especially on cost of living and housing, the protest vote has to go somewhere, and One Nation has positioned itself as the somewhere. The voters switching are not all lifelong believers. The coverage is full of former Liberal and former Labor voters, including women in their thirties working in sectors like aged care, who say the old parties no longer speak for them.

It is tempting to read a 31 per cent poll as the country falling into the sea, but keep some perspective. On a two party preferred basis Labor still leads One Nation 51 to 49, our preferential voting system makes it very hard for a minor party to convert a big primary vote into actual power, and Hanson sits in the Senate, which means she cannot be Prime Minister from where she is. Some commentators argue, fairly, that the surge is being over read and that One Nation remains more brand than government in waiting. I think that is partly right and partly wishful.

A party does not need to win government to reshape what the major parties say and do. The Coalition’s troubles and Labor’s negative numbers are exactly the soil this grows in, and the women’s vote is the signal that it has broken out of its old, narrow base. That is the bit I would not wave away.

The deeper point, and one we have talked about before, is that the conventional remedy of voting people out does not seem to be producing the policy change voters actually want. The cost of living and housing pressures that are driving this have not been fixed by changes of government, so the frustration keeps looking for a new outlet. Hanson is the current outlet. If the conditions do not change, the outlet will keep finding voltage. I have had more to say about this on Substack here

Around the World (International): Congress tells Trump to stop the war

The Sydney Morning Herald has been fairly thin on Trump and tariffs lately, while the American press is consumed by something our papers are barely touching, which is the war with Iran and the political revolt it is now causing inside Trump’s own party.

The United States, alongside Israel, struck Iran in late February. More than three months on, the war is still going, six American servicemembers have been killed, and it was launched without Congress authorising it. That last point matters constitutionally, because under the American system only Congress can declare war, and there is a War Powers Act designed to force a president to either get authorisation or withdraw.

On Wednesday 3 June, the House of Representatives, which the Republicans control, passed a war powers resolution directing Trump to end hostilities with Iran. The vote was 215 to 208, and four Republicans crossed the floor to vote with the Democrats. That is the clearest rebuke yet of how Trump has handled the war, and it came from his own chamber. The four who broke ranks were Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, Brian Fitzpatrick and Thomas Massie.

The vote is largely symbolic. The Senate has tried and failed several times to pass its own version, an earlier attempt was blocked 52 to 47, and even if both chambers passed it, Trump would almost certainly veto it, and his administration disputes whether the War Powers Act is even constitutional. So Congress has sent a message rather than pulled a lever. House Speaker Mike Johnson defended Trump and reached for the line that Iran declared war on America decades ago.

It still matters. The reason Republicans are nervous is the economy. American producer prices posted their biggest jump in four years in April, petrol has gone up, and Democrats have made affordability their central midterm message ahead of the November elections that decide control of Congress. Privately, Republicans in tight races are reportedly worried the war could become a political liability if it drags on. Trump’s own answer to that pressure has been to say he is in no hurry to do a deal. So the war, the tariffs and the cost of living are not three separate stories. They are one story about prices and patience, and the politicians who are closest to the voters are the ones blinking first.

This is why it pays to read across. The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters and CBS have all been on the war powers vote and the economic fallout. Al Jazeera has the detail on the earlier Senate blockages. Our own papers, by contrast, have given Trump’s domestic troubles a light touch. If you only read the Herald you would think tariffs were a minor item. If you read the American press you would think the Trump presidency was being tested by its own party. Both are looking at the same man.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. People are unhappy about prices and housing and the feeling that nobody in charge is listening, and that unhappiness is showing up everywhere. In Kiama it looks like a council buying time on a budget it cannot yet balance. In Canberra it looks like a third of voters, women now very much included, parking their vote with Pauline Hanson. In Washington it looks like members of the President’s own party voting to stop his war because they are frightened of what petrol prices will do to them in November. Different countries, different scales, same engine.

 hopeful note, and I do look for one, is that the American vote is a reminder that institutions can still push back.

It was mostly symbolic, but a legislature telling an executive to stop, with members crossing party lines to do it, is the system doing what it is meant to do. That is worth holding onto when the news makes you want to switch it all off. Plenty to chew over with Kevin on the next call.

Sources: The Bugle, Wave FM, Kiama Council, Mirage News, Australian Financial Review, The Conversation, The New Daily, NPR, Washington Post, Reuters, CBS News, Al Jazeera, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

Daily News Round Up – 23 May 2026

Very local, state, national and the wider world, in everyday language, for people who haven’t got all day.

From a Council meeting that could decide who runs Kiama, to a budget fight reshaping Canberra and the Iran war still at the petrol pump, here’s the local-to-global wrap for 23 May 2026.

Betty from Blacktown and her brother Kevin from Kiama, making sense of the world’s chaos the only sensible way: over toast, a strong cuppa, and a good long natter on the phone. That’s what this Catch Up is for.

Very Local: a special Council meeting you’ll want to know about

Council has called an Extraordinary Meeting for 5pm this Wednesday 27 May, and there’s only one item on the list. That alone tells you it’s BIG. It’s Council’s formal response to the Minister’s proposed changes to the Performance Improvement Order, the “lift your game” notice that’s been hanging over Kiama. Here are the bits that caught my attention.

The big stick is now named out loud. The order spells out what happens if Council doesn’t lift. First a Financial Controller could be parachuted in to take the wheel on the money. And if that’s not enough, the Minister can suspend the Council entirely and install an administrator. In plain terms, our elected councillors could be sent home and an appointee put in charge. That’s the shadow behind every budget decision being made right now.

The good news, said out loud by the Minister. It’s not all stick. The Minister has handed Council an extra year to balance the books, now out to 2027-28, and openly acknowledged Council has made real progress. Better still, he’s pushed back on Council’s own deeper cuts, saying he’s worried about what slashing services would do to the community. So the bloke holding the order is actually arguing for gentler cuts, not harder ones. Worth remembering next time someone says Sydney is out to gut us.

Your bins are safe. The order flatly bans Council from outsourcing domestic waste services. The Minister reckons the small saving wouldn’t be worth the long-term loss to the community. Council half-agrees but is quibbling over the wording, asking that “waste management” be narrowed to “waste collection,” because it doesn’t run its own tip and needs to keep using outside contractors to cart rubbish away.

Jobs versus services, the $7 million question. This is the guts of it. Council has to close a $7 million gap between what it earns and what it spends. The order says do the gentler stuff first, the efficiency savings, before reaching for the big staff cuts. Here’s the eye-opener from Council’s own response. There were two options on the table. The bigger-saving option, $2.7 million, would mean axing community services, winding back tourism, and cutting library and Leisure Centre hours. The other saves less, $1.8 million, but hits staff numbers harder. Council is effectively saying it would rather restructure its own back office than gut the services residents actually use. That’s the choice to watch.

The accounting fight that sounds dull but isn’t. Council has lobbed back a sharp point. It says the Office of Local Government measures its performance in a way that even the NSW Auditor-General disagrees with. Council reckons that if you measured every council in the state the Auditor-General’s way, around 90 of them, roughly seven in ten across NSW, would be running at a loss. The unspoken message: don’t single Kiama out as uniquely hopeless when most of the state is in the same boat.

And yes, the parks again. Remember our holiday parks question? It’s here in black and white. The order tells Council to review its “strategic assets and revenue opportunities,” and Blue Haven Terralong gets its own special mention, with Council ordered to prepare a business case on whether to keep it, lease it, partner it out, or sell it, partly because of unresolved fire safety problems. So the asset shake-up isn’t a rumour. It’s a written instruction from the Minister.

The bottom line: this one meeting is the whole story in miniature. A small council under real pressure, an extra year of breathing room, a Minister who actually wants the cuts softened, and a quiet but crucial choice brewing between trimming the back office and trimming the services we use. It’s livestreamed on the Council website if you want to watch.

Across NSW (State)

A grim run on the roads this week, worth a mention if only because it’s the sort of thing that makes you drive a bit more carefully. Three people died in a two-car crash at Sans Souci in Sydney’s south early this morning, and there’ve been separate fatal crashes out near Warialda and Mudgee in the past few days. A sobering stretch.

On the brighter side, Vivid Sydney is now in full swing, lighting up the city every night until 13 June. If you or the family fancy a night out, the light walk and the drone shows are free, which counts for a lot just now. Rug up. It’s proper winter.

Across the Country (Federal)

The politics is getting willing. The big national story is the scrap over Jim Chalmers’ budget and its tax changes, and it’s reshaping the whole landscape. One Nation has surged in the first poll since the budget, and the Coalition, now split after the Nationals walked out earlier in the year, is promising to hand money back to workers by tying tax rates to inflation. The Opposition under Angus Taylor is also floating cutting welfare for non-citizens, which has stirred plenty of anger. The short version for the kitchen table: tax and cost of living are the whole ballgame now, and the minor parties are the ones cashing in.

The same money squeeze, everywhere. Notice the thread. The fight in Canberra over budgets and tax is the exact same fight playing out at our Council, just with more zeros. Everyone from the Treasurer to our Mayor is wrestling the same problem: not enough coming in, too much going out.

Around the World (International)

The Iran war grinds on, and it’s still about your petrol. The ceasefire in the US and Israel’s war with Iran is holding, just, but more than 400 people have been killed since it came into effect in mid-April. The latest twist: Iran’s Supreme Leader has reportedly ordered that the country’s enriched uranium not be sent abroad, which is the sort of thing that keeps everyone nervous. The Strait of Hormuz disruption is still rippling through global fuel prices, which is why petrol stays dear here at home.

Russia and China cosy up further. Vladimir Putin has been in Beijing meeting Xi Jinping, the two of them talking up closer ties, just a day after Donald Trump left the same city. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine drags on, with reports Russia’s economy is starting to wobble under the strain.

The bottom line

It all joins up, Betty. A war on the other side of the planet keeps petrol dear, which feeds the cost-of-living squeeze that’s shaking up politics in Canberra, which is the very same money fight our little Council is having on Wednesday night, just closer to home and with our library hours and bins on the line. Everyone’s wrestling the same beast. Not a bad lot to talk over with Kevin and a cuppa.

Sources: Kiama Municipal Council agenda, NSW Police, SBS, Yahoo News Australia, Al Jazeera, Sydney Morning Herald, and others.

A note on Betty and Kevin: Betty grew up in Kiama before life took her to Blacktown. Her brother Kevin still lives in their old home town. Keeping up with what’s happening down the coast is partly nostalgia for the place she came from, but mostly it’s how she and Kevin fill those long phone calls she looks forward to all week. That’s what this Catch Up is really for. Not just the news, but the conversations it keeps alive.

The $1 Million Plane, the $500K Donations, and the Three Words That Admit Everything

“Everybody Does It” is an admission, not an argument. And it tells you everything you need to know about whose interests our political system is actually serving.

When supporters of any political party reach for “everybody does it,” they have already made the most important admission in the argument. The system is working for powerful interests, and ordinary Australians are footing the bill in ways most people simply do not realise.

Consider the Fuel Tax Credits Scheme, which refunds mining companies for the diesel excise paid on their operations. In the 2024-25 financial year the scheme is projected to cost Australian taxpayers $10.2 billion, with $4.8 billion of that going directly to the mining industry. At roughly $10 billion per year, the scheme costs more than Australia spends on foreign aid and more than several major defence programs. Rinehart is also thought to be a major backer of the Institute of Public Affairs, the influential think tank that has called for the abolition of the minimum wage

This is what “footing the bill” actually looks like. Public money flowing to the most profitable industry in the country, workers denied the wages they have earned, and the political donations that help keep those arrangements in place. The connection between who donates and who benefits is a straight line.

The question voters should be asking it: do you want to be part of fixing it, or part of entrenching it?

This is a question about the kind of democracy we want, and whether we are willing to hold it to the same standards we apply everywhere else in life. We expect better from our children. We expect better in our workplaces. We expect better in a court of law. The moment “everybody does it” becomes acceptable in politics, we have handed the keys of public life to whoever has the deepest pockets and the least shame.

Nobody gives very large sums of money to a political party out of the goodness of their heart. That is common sense about how human relationships work.

Consider the difference between donating to a sporting group and donating to a political party. A donation to a netball association or a swimming club buys goodwill, perhaps a naming right on a scoreboard. A donation to a political party buys access to people who hold direct power over the donor’s business interests. Regulations. Approvals. Environmental protections. Workplace laws. The recipient of a political donation holds power that a sporting body simply does not.

AEC disclosures show that Hancock Prospecting channelled $500,000 in donations to the Coalition, with the then Opposition Leader also hosted at fundraisers where guests paid $14,000 a head, an amount kept deliberately just below the threshold requiring public disclosure. The relationship with One Nation runs just as deep. A company within the Rinehart empire gifted a $1 million plane to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, and two executives from within the same Hancock empire separately donated $500,000 each to the party. This is a systemic pattern across multiple parties, and the people saying “everybody does it” are proving exactly that point.

When multiple parties are funded by the same powerful interests, the policy direction is already decided before you get to vote. Your ballot should mean something. It does not, when the people on both sides of the ballot paper answer to the same donors.

Australia passed electoral reform legislation, and new donation caps come into effect in January 2027. HOWEVER donors can still spread contributions across multiple state and federal branches of a party to reduce disclosure obligations, and peak industry bodies, including those representing the mining sector, can donate up to four times the standard gift cap. Reform and resolution are two very different things.

So how do we normalise doing the right thing?

This is the question at the heart of everything, and the one that gets pushed aside whenever politicians would rather argue with each other than answer to you.

Every norm we take for granted today was once considered idealistic. Equal voting rights. The end of child labour. Transparency in public life. Each became normal because enough people decided it should be, and then voted accordingly.

Morality in public life is a choice. It does not arrive on its own. Political integrity is what a functioning democracy looks like, and it is precisely what Climate 200 supported independents have built their platform around. The proposition is straightforward: your elected representative should answer to you, the voter, rather than to whoever funded their campaign.

That is the standard we should expect from everybody in public life. Voting for independents committed to that standard is the most direct way to say so.

“Everybody does it” is an admission that the system is broken. So let’s fix it. Read this article, share it with everybody you know, and when you get to the ballot box remember who answered to you and who answered to their donors.

Australian values belong to the people who live them not to politicians who weaponise them

 

Source https://tinyurl.com/ycxnp6rk

When Pauline Hanson claims “Australian values”, I cringe.

When Angus Taylor mirrors it, I cringe again.

These are leaders who trade in suspicion. Who elevate culture as a test. Who talk about countries that supposedly fail us. Who tighten the definition of belonging and call it strength.

Then they reach for “Australian values”.

The Australia I know runs on a fair go. Equal treatment under the law. Decent schools. Decent healthcare. Work hard and get ahead. Once you are here, you stand in the same queue.

Researchers writing in The Conversation asked Australians what a fair go means. Strong support for equal opportunity. Strong support for access to education and healthcare. More than half gave the highest possible agreement to recent migrants having the same opportunity as everyone else to get ahead.

That feels familiar.

When I shared the article, my Facebook tribe responded in minutes. Fairness. Decency. Treat people properly. Play by the rules. Give newcomers a chance. It read like the country I recognise.

So when “Australian values” is used to narrow the circle, I recoil. The phrase belongs to all of us. It does not belong to the loudest voice in the room.

Read the article in The Conversation here 

Thank you one of my Facebook tribe for this wonderful sentiment image

Ht to Bill Piggott who shared this with me on Facebook

“Australian values are visible when kindness, care, collaboration, compassion and reciprocity are recognised, encouraged, embraced and rewarded.”