This week, we examine whether AUKUS was ever really about submarines at all. As new legislation moves through the US Congress, including provisions within the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would significantly deepen military technology integration between the United States and Israel, important questions are emerging about where Australia fits into an increasingly interconnected defence architecture. AI, autonomous weapons, cyber warfare, missile defence systems and advanced military networks are no longer separate national projects – they are becoming part of a broader system designed around “interoperability” – the increasingly common and innocuous sounding defence term that describes the ability of allied military forces, intelligence agencies and weapons platforms to operate as a single integrated structure.

The implications for Australia could be profound. Through AUKUS Pillar II, Australia is already committing itself to deeper integration with American defence technologies and strategic planning. If the United States further embeds Israeli defence capabilities within its own military and industrial systems, what does that mean for Australia’s future defence outlook? Would Australia retain genuine strategic independence, or would key decisions increasingly be influenced by technological dependencies in Washington and Tel Aviv, and supply chains and military arrangements beyond its direct control?

The debate also raises broader questions about sovereignty in the 21st century. Military alliances have always required compromise, but modern defence integration operates at a level far beyond traditional treaty arrangements. Nations can become dependent not simply through formal agreements, but through shared platforms, intelligence systems, communications networks and procurement decisions. As Australia commits hundreds of billions of dollars to AUKUS, what safeguards exist to ensure that future governments retain the capacity to make independent decisions about military engagement, strategic priorities and national interests?

At its heart, this is not simply a discussion about defence procurement or foreign policy. It’s a debate about accountability, democratic oversight and Australia’s place in a rapidly changing world. As AUKUS evolves beyond submarines and into a much broader strategic project, Australians deserve to know exactly what commitments are being made in their name, what future obligations may arise from them, and whether the country is moving towards a model of defence co-operation that future generations may find difficult to reverse.

Because the real question is no longer when will the submarines arrive: it’s about what Australia becomes once this integration has been completed.

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Has AUKUS only ever been about the submarines? For many years, this is what the focus has been on: new/old submarines, will they arrive/won’t they arrive… and during this time, the political class and mainstream media has corralled the discussions in a child-like way towards the costs, delivery timetables, industrial capabilities and whether the United States will ultimately provide the nuclear-powered submarines that successive Australian governments have been promised. Yet underneath this charade – which has primarily been led by defence minister Richard Marles – is a much bigger development that has received almost no public attention at all.

And it’s something that we do need to pay more attention to and be deeply concerned about, because, if it all proceeds, it could be the end of Australia’s independence and sovereign defence capabilities, and a one-way funnel of taxpayer funds to prop up the US–Israel military industrial complex(es) that continues forever.

There’s a new provision before the US Congress at the moment – Section 224 of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act – and it proposes a significant expansion of defence technology co-operation between the United States and Israel. Known as the “United States–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative”, it will establish new frameworks for joint research, development, testing, production and integration of military technologies across a broad range of emerging defence sectors, including artificial intelligence, autonomous systems such as drones, cyber warfare, missile defence, quantum computing and networked military operations.

It means that even simple Israeli innovations such as “skunk water” – a liquid spray with an odour worse than raw sewage and excrement combined, and can linger for weeks after being sprayed from armoured water cannons – can be used equally on the streets of the West Bank or at a No Kings protest in Minnesota, as the circumstances require.

This might seem like the logical extension of a nefarious and clandestine defence relationship that has existed for decades, certainly since the Second World War, but it will make the Israeli and US defence forces almost indistinguishable. Of course, the proposed legislation has been strongly supported by pro-Israel and Zionist organisations in the US, but there’s something more disturbing about this that’s taking place.

Since the state of Israel was created in 1948, the US has transferred over $330 billion in military aid directly to its defence forces, including two additional support payments of at least $34 billion since October 2023, authorised by US President Joe Biden, and continued by Donald Trump.

While their defence forces will technically remain separate if the Act is passed, the legislation will remove that requirement that Congress needs to approve any expenditure or aid granted to Israel, military spending essentially becoming a line-item in the US defense budget that can be increased at whim – and at the behest of the US Defense (War) Secretary, as though Israel exists as a special (and expensive) military outpost of the United States. And like a spoilt and demanding nepo-baby, the state of Israel will no longer need to ask for the funds to perpetrate its endless genocides, it will just take.

This is also an outcome that will fast-track Israel’s expansion into other parts of the West Asia region as well, something we’re already seeing in Gaza and southern Lebanon – at last count, 3866 civilians have been killed by the IDF; in response, just four Israeli civilians have been killed by Lebanese forces – and it will also bind the two countries’ defence industries, research programs and technology ecosystems together for decades to come, if not permanently.

It’s a strategic partnership so deeply embedded through a de facto merger that it would be extremely difficult for any future government to unravel. And after US President Donald Trump’s statement to Israel to say that “he is the one calling the shots” – a US president who was genuinely calling the shots would never need to make such a statement – it’s clear which country would create the difficulties if the United States ever sought to bring the arrangement to an end.

That’s where the issue lies between US and Israel, but it’s not where it ends. For Australia, that distinction about who is calling the shots might not matter too much, because it might end up being a case of Australia receiving the shot calls from either the United States or Israel. And this is the bigger question for us: what happens when Australia increasingly embeds itself so deeply into the American defence ecosystem at the same time that the United States is seeking a deeper integration into Israel’s defence systems? It’s also where AUKUS becomes a key part of this narrative, although it’s clear that it’s not one the Australian government wants to speak very openly about.

Since it was announced in 2021, AUKUS has gone way beyond submarines. Pillar I covered the much-maligned nuclear-powered submarines that we are never going to receive, but Pillar II encompasses the far broader agenda involving AI, autonomous systems, cyber capabilities, sophisticated undersea warfare and advanced military networking. These are exactly the same kinds of technologies outlined in Section 224 of the Act that’s now being discussed by the US Congress, and it’s not a coincidence that Pillar II is almost a replica.

The Albanese government, like the Morrison government before it, has argued that Australia must become “more interoperable” with the United States, in response to a “deteriorating strategic environment”, which has deteriorated only because they keep saying it has, ably supported by the hawks of hack journalism at the Sydney Morning Herald and News Corporation.

“Interoperability” has become one of the key buzzwords of Australian defence policy and it’s the word that Marles and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese like to keep using in the context of AUKUS: it might seem like a fancy and innocuous piece of defence terminology, but it also means that Australian defence forces will be communicating, operating and fighting seamlessly alongside US forces and, if the Act is passed by Congress – which is becoming increasingly likely – alongside Israeli F-35 fighter jets as they bomb yet another village of innocent civilians in southern Lebanon, or decide to revisit Gaza and continue with the genocidal campaign there. Or perhaps expand into the other areas that are outlined within their Greater Israel project.

This is what “interoperability” is in reality, and it’s something that has never been clearly discussed with the Australian public. According to Pew International, 79 per cent of the Australian public has a negative view of the state of Israel, including 49 per cent who hold a “very unfavourable” view. Before the accusations of “antisemitism” start to appear, the Australian public also has a similar view of the state of Russia – 79 per cent hold a negative view – but the Australian government is not about to forge a permanent military alliance with the Russian defence forces.

How would the Australian public react if its government did ally with Russia to perform massacres in the Ukranian cities of Mariupol, Kherson or Zaporizhzhia? Or ethnically cleanse the regions of Donbas or Crimea? Swap these Ukrainian regions with the Palestinian regions of the Gaza Strip, Khan Younis – or many of the hundreds of cities that have obliterated from the map by Israel – and this is what “interoperability” will look like for the Australian Defence Forces after 2027, if this Act is passed by the US Congress.

When military systems become so deeply interconnected, decisions that are made in one country increasingly do affect smaller partners elsewhere. Australia will never have the stature or relevance within the AUKUS deal – or Pillar II – to be able to object to the involvement of its forces in any US- or Israel-led war activity anywhere in the world. It will be a case, to paraphrase former Prime Minister Robert Menzies, where if the US or Israel declare war upon any country in the world, as a result, Australia will also be at war.

If the United States proceeds with deeper defence technology integration with Israel, Australia will also be directly connected to those same systems, programs and industrial systems developed by Israeli technology and expertise. Of course, this won’t mean that Australia will instantly become responsible for the actions of the Israel Defence Forces, but it would mean that it becomes a part of a defence system that reaches far beyond the Indo–Pacific region. And this is the reality that’s likely to become increasingly controversial within Australia once the public finds out what this AUKUS – Pillar II deal is really leading us towards.

Public attitudes towards Israel – as shown by the Pew International research – have shifted dramatically across much of the Western world since the beginning of the Gaza war. Allegations of war crimes, collective punishment and breaches of international humanitarian law have generated intense criticism from governments (not many but definitely not Australia), many human rights organisations and large sections of civil society. Whether these allegations are upheld by international courts is, of course, a matter for the respective legal systems, but the political controversy surrounding Israel’s conduct is undeniable.

For Australians who oppose the policies of the Israeli government – and it seems that 79 per cent of the population does – this deeper integration between the United States and Israel raises some serious questions. If Australian military systems increasingly rely upon technologies developed through joint American–Israeli programs, what level of political scrutiny should become a part of that process?

Should Australians have a say in whether their defence infrastructure becomes connected to partnerships extending into the Middle East/West Asia region, especially for a country they view so unfavourably? Shouldn’t Parliament be the national forum where the implications of these issues are debated and fully inspected before they become so deeply embedded that we’ll never be able to get away from them?

This is the issue that needs to be explored and it’s really concerning how little attention and coverage both AUKUS – Pillar II and the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act have received in Australia. Sure, the Act is an American piece of legislation debated in faraway Washington but the consequences – unintended or otherwise – will have great long-term implications for Australia.

The future of AUKUS isn’t just about boats in the water, or even not in the water. This is about how much autonomy Australia really has in its defence capabilities, and how much its government is prepared to inform its own public on what it’s just about it embark upon. And before these foundations become permanent and are set in stone, the public deserves to know exactly what we’re in for before it’s far too late to do anything about it.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the hidden implications of AUKUS and integration into US military structures; a housing crisis that governments continue to talk about but seem unwilling to solve; and growing pressures on universities as international students and migrants become political scapegoats for policy failures.

AUKUS and Israel: The alliance Australia was never asked to join

Australians have spent the past five years arguing about the cost of AUKUS, the viability of the submarine program and whether the United States can actually or will deliver what has been promised. But those arguments are distracting from a much larger and far more divisive issue.

We now know that AUKUS was never just a program about submarines – although that’s what successive governments have kept telling the public – it’s a program for embedding Australia even more deeply into American military, intelligence and industrial systems, and it will be embedded so deeply that it will be impossible to get out of. And once we’re in there, we’ll also inherent all of America’s strategic relationships, whether we like it or not.

This is a big issue because the United States is now moving to deepen its military integration with Israel, with proposed legislation before Congress which will connect defence technologies, intelligence systems, research programs, logistics networks and weapons development between the two countries to an unprecedented level.

For Australia – already integrating itself into US military structures through AUKUS and other agreements – the implications are pretty clear. If Australia becomes a part of the American defence ecosystem, and the US defence ecosystem becomes integrated with Israel, then Australia becomes a part of Israel’s military and strategic framework too.

There’s been almost no public conversation about whether Australians are comfortable with this deeper military connection with Israel. And sure, most of this is being decided in Washington behind closed doors and will be voted on by US Congress, but it’s all wrapped in the language of the alliance, the interoperability and national security bullshit that’s espoused by the defence minister Richard Marles and, most importantly, we’ve been told nothing at all about these developments.

Given the direction the United States has taken under the Trump regime, it’s debateable whether Australia should maintain good relations with the United States. But diplomatic relationships should be able to survive catastrophic administrations. If AUKUS is bringing Australia closer into the expanding web of US–Israel defence integration, then the public deserves an honest debate about it. So far, we haven’t heard anything at all.

The housing crisis nobody wants to fix

House prices across the nation have fallen by around 1 per cent since the federal budget was announced last month, and for many, this is a sign that the housing market might be cooling down. But the problem is that this is only a small drop and with a national median house price of over $1 million – a drop from $1,000,000 down to $990,000 still makes that house unaffordable – it’s not clear if this will make too much of a difference at this stage. Sure, it’s better to have prices decrease than increase, but they’ll have to drop by a lot more if housing is to become affordable again.

The problem is that housing is stuck between two political realities. Governments regularly acknowledge younger people are being locked out of home ownership, while simultaneously pushing policies that are designed to ensure existing property values never fall significantly. Politicians then talk about affordability, but panic at the prospect of genuinely affordable housing.

Inflation is still high at 4.2 per cent but has moderated somewhat, although groceries, rents, mortgages, and energy costs do remain high. For many households, official economic improvements exist largely on paper while financial stress remains a daily reality.

Housing sits at the centre of this because it’s become a symbol of an economic system that has increasingly rewarded the asset class over the working class. Those who bought decades ago have often accumulated extraordinary wealth through little more than the luck of timing and the many policy changes from successive governments that have rewarded this luck, while Millennials and Gen Z face larger deposits, higher debts and increasingly insecure rental markets.

Housing affordability should remain a major political issue during the week – the majority owner of RealEstate.com.au – News Corporation – will be watching to see if property prices do drop even further, which, of course, will be reported as a calamity for the asset class, rather than a step in the right direction for housing affordability.

Falling universities standards and the migrant as the convenient scapegoat

Australia’s university sector is discovering the consequences of policies they should never been forced to introduce in the first place. For decades, governments steadily withdrew public funding while encouraging universities to behave more like corporations, forcing them to chase international student revenue to fill the gap.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having international students – it broadens the diversity of campus life, works as a two-way process of cultural exchange. Even if international students only stay for the term of their course, they engage locally and take their experiences and knowledge back to their own communities in their home countries.

If we can ignore the fact that most universities used these students as cash cows and did very little to support them through additional language skill courses and pretty much left them to their own devices, now that migration reduction is becoming a political target – including international students – universities are being punished for a dependency that successive governments have actively encouraged over the past 30 years or so, even though they were warned not to.

And just as it is with housing, the Albanese government is caught between two competing political pressures. There’s a great deal of hostility towards migrants being hurled about by One Nation, and this is being amplified by all the right-wing political opportunists who blame migrants for virtually every social and economic problem, real or imagined.

On the other hand, universities have been warning about budget shortfalls, academic job losses and declining research opportunities if international student numbers continue to fall. And with the education minister, Jason Clare, asleep at the wheel – and possibly distracted with trying to shore up his leadership credentials in a post-Albanese environment – the government is not defending the university system that has been falling apart for some time.

The housing debate is good example of government shirking its responsibilities. International students have become a convenient scapegoat for a housing crisis that has been decades in the making. The evidence points overwhelmingly towards tax concessions, speculative investment, planning failures and chronic underinvestment in public housing as the primary reasons for unaffordability. Yet blaming international students and migrants is politically easier than confronting a property market that has enriched investors while locking younger generations out of home ownership.

Meanwhile, Australia’s universities are showing signs of a broader decline. Falling global rankings, governance scandals (a big hello to Julie Bishop), controversies over executive salaries and the growing casualisation of staff all points to institutions struggling to reconcile their public responsibilities with private-sector business models that were foisted upon them in the early 1990s, where it became more important for universities to look like the business quarters of Sydney and Melbourne, than to have academic rigour and credibility, and act like centres of education, research and critical inquiry.

What we’re seeing at the moment is the culmination of years of neglect of the university sector: more international students to help pay for the high remuneration packages of poorly qualified chancellors (once again, a big shout out to Julie Bishop); and a new fancy building here and there to keep up appearances – it’s a bit like all those parents who complained to the NSW Department of Education about demountable buildings at primary schools, although in this case, it’s the vice-chancellors who are doing all the complaining. The message always has to be: it’s not the look of the building that matters, it’s all about the quality of education that occurs inside the building.

And what we’re seeing is that old familiar political pattern: a political class searching for easy targets while avoiding difficult reforms. Students become statistics, migrants are kicked into and blamed for everything, and universities become collateral damage in a debate that rarely has anything to do with education at all.

The Albanese government frequently presents Australia as a defender of international law, human rights and the so-called rules-based international order. But when allegations involve one of Australia’s closest allies, those principles appear increasingly difficult to uphold.

This week, we examine serious allegations made by Australian citizens who were detained by Israeli forces following the interception of the Sumud Flotilla. Claims of sexual violence, physical abuse and rape have now been referred to the International Criminal Court, raising profound questions about accountability, consistency and Australia’s response to alleged human rights violations involving the state of Israel.

The issue extends beyond the details of any individual allegation. At its heart is the broader question of whether Australia applies the same standards to all accusations of abuse, regardless of where they occur or who is accused. For years, Australian political leaders have argued that victims of sexual violence should be heard, supported and that their allegations deserve proper investigation. Those principles became central to national debates following the #MeToo movement, the Brittany Higgins case and broader discussions about violence against women. Yet when allegations emerge from Australians detained by Israeli authorities, the political response appears markedly different.

The government’s approach reflects a growing problem within Australian foreign policy. While ministers regularly invoke international law in relation to conflicts involving geopolitical rivals, Israel continues to receive a level of diplomatic protection that would be unimaginable for many other nations. From the killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom in Gaza to ongoing allegations of civilian harm in Gaza and Lebanon, expressions of concern have rarely translated into meaningful diplomatic consequences.

The referral of these allegations to the International Criminal Court introduces another dimension. For the complainants, the ICC may represent the only forum capable of conducting an independent investigation beyond the political interests of either Australia or Israel. The case therefore becomes not only a test of the allegations themselves, but also a test of Australia’s commitment to the international institutions it once helped establish and champion.

At the same time, the domestic political implications are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Australia’s large Lebanese and Middle Eastern communities are watching closely, while younger voters are demanding greater consistency between government rhetoric and government action. For many Australians, the debate is no longer simply about events in Gaza, southern Lebanon or Israel. It is about whether human rights principles are universal, or whether they depend on political convenience.

As public scrutiny grows and international legal processes continue, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong face an increasingly difficult challenge. The question is no longer whether Australia supports international law in principle. The question is whether it is prepared to uphold those principles when doing so carries a political cost.

AUKUS was sold to Australians as a transformational defence agreement that would deliver a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and strengthen the nation’s security for decades to come. But nearly five years after the deal was announced, the questions are mounting while all the answers remain elusive.

With Defence Minister Richard Marles confirming that Australia will receive second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the United States, we need to know how a project expected to cost up to $368 billion has shifted from promises of new submarines to used ones, which have use-by date of 33 years. At the same time, Australia continues to spend billions helping expand American and British shipbuilding capacity, despite growing uncertainty over exactly what will be delivered, when it will arrive, and whether Australia will have meaningful control over the program.

As former Labor minister Peter Garrett begins an independent review of AUKUS, the spotlight is falling on one of the most expensive public policy decisions in Australian history. Why has there never been a comprehensive parliamentary inquiry into the agreement? What does Australia actually gain from the deal? And how much sovereignty is being surrendered as Australia’s defence infrastructure becomes increasingly integrated with the United States and Britain?

We examine the escalating costs, shifting promises and strategic assumptions behind AUKUS, why Australia appears to be carrying much of the financial risk, and whether the country is becoming locked into the geopolitical priorities of others. As global politics continues to change and governments come and go, is AUKUS a visionary defence investment, or an extraordinarily expensive gamble that Australia may come to regret?

Has the National Anti-Corruption Commission ever lived up to its promise? Less than three years after it was created, the answer has to be a resounding no. The resignation of NACC Commissioner Paul Brereton has become more than just an issue about him – it’s reopened those basic questions about whether Australia’s long-awaited federal anti-corruption watchdog was ever designed to be a genuinely powerful integrity body, or whether it was paying lip service, and created just reassure a public that’s become deeply cynical about politics, following years of scandals, controversy and declining trust in institutions, especially during the era of the Morrison government.

When Brereton spoke at the launch of the NACC in July 2023, he spoke of a “historic democratic reform”, arguing that the public was no longer willing to tolerate conduct that previous generations might have accepted or ignored, and that parliament had responded by creating a body grounded in the principles of “best-practice” anti-corruption measures.

After decades of demands for a federal integrity commission, many people would have believed a new era of accountability that they could finally rely on had arrived. Instead, they received and institution that’s become laced with secrecy and total disappointment, with a belief that it’s now acting as a hinderance to combatting corruption, and it would be better if it wasn’t there at all.

Brereton suggested that personally being the focus of attention had become a distraction for the commission but, in reality, from the beginning, there had always been questions about whether he was the right person for the role. In so many hearings, Brereton had to recuse himself, because of the many actual or perceived conflicts of interest. Given his previous as a judge and military investigator, this might have been unavoidable, but surely the government would have been aware of the problems this would have caused.

The commission was created in response to the growing anger over a succession of controversies that dominated the final years of the Morrison government. The Robodebt scandal, controversies over sports grants, questions about ministerial conduct, the increasing levels of political lobbying by corporations, concerns about public sector contracting, and revelations regarding Scott Morrison’s secret self-appointments to multiple ministries – all of these issues contributed to a widespread belief that Australia’s federal integrity framework was inadequate or non-existent. Labor’s promise to establish a national anti-corruption body became one of its most popular commitments ahead of the 2022 election.

For many voters, this should have been a pretty straightforward proposition. A powerful anti-corruption commission to investigate serious allegations involving ministers, senior public servants and political figures, acting as a deterrent against misconduct and restoring confidence in public institutions. Nearly three years later, almost all those expectations haven’t been realised.

For sure, the commission has processed thousands of referrals and undertaken numerous assessments and investigations. But its public record and output has been remarkably weak compared with the scale of public concern that led to its creation, with only 11 convictions of corruption over three years. While some of these convictions have arisen from matters referred through NACC processes, these have overwhelmingly involved lower-level misconduct rather than major political corruption cases, and has not produced the kind of high-profile investigations that many Australians would have expected when it was first created.

Nothing highlights this issue more than the scandals surrounding Robodebt. The Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme delivered some devastating findings about one of the greatest failures of public administration in modern Australian history. The scheme unlawfully recovered debts from hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients and contributed to profound financial and psychological harm. The Royal Commission also found that senior public servants and ministers ignored legal concerns and continued to defend a program that was deemed to be unlawful.

Robodebt became a landmark test of whether the NACC would demonstrate independence and courage, with the belief that if an anti-corruption body could not seriously investigate one of the most egregious scandals in Australian history, what exactly was it created to do?

The commission ultimately decided not to pursue corruption investigations arising from the sealed section of the Royal Commission report. Whether or not that decision was legally justified – and it’s unclear if it was – it was political catastrophe: the public expectations that the NACC would find and weed out corruption, especially in such an obvious case, were not met, and the commission seemed to be accountable to no-one for the decisions that it made.

It’s apparent that the NACC was designed with severe limitations that are so different to other integrity commissions around Australia, particularly the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. Public hearings at the NACC are rare and tightly restricted; the legal threshold for proving corrupt conduct is so narrow that it’s almost impossible to define. Many forms of behaviour that the public would associate with corruption – the high influence of lobbyists, donor access to ministers and political favouritism with certain corporations – doesn’t seem to be classified as corruption under federal law. As a result, conduct that for most people appears to be unethical, improper or damaging to public trust falls outside of the reach of the commission.

The Australian electorate was promised a powerful anti-corruption watchdog but what they’ve received is a body that is reluctant to pursue politically sensitive matters and is constrained in its ability to examine the way influence and power is exercised within federal politics. And in nearly three years since its inception, it hasn’t found one incident of political corruption, even though there are no time limits on how far back it could look.

The danger is not just that the NACC has failed to meet expectations, the fact is that it’s made a severe dent in the confidence of public accountability itself. Anti-corruption bodies don’t exist just to punish those who engage in corruption, but to deter the corruption in the first place, way before it occurs. If a watchdog is perceived to be weak and ineffective, and unwilling to pursue powerful people, that’s not much of a deterrent.

There isn’t an anti-corruption agency anywhere in the world that will completely remove corruption in public institutions. We don’t live in a perfect world, and there will always be the opportunities for corruption: it’s human nature. But the objective for an institution such as the NACC is to minimise corruption, improve transparency and reassure the public that nobody is above the law. The NACC has failed to achieve any of those goals, and it’s missed the mark by a long way.

The resignation of Paul Brereton might be removing one source of controversy, but it doesn’t resolve a far greater problem. The challenge now facing the Albanese government is not just about appointing a new and suitable commissioner, it’s about confronting a more difficult question: whether Australia’s federal anti-corruption framework was designed to expose corruption, or just exists to create the appearance of someone looking for it.

It’s clear that Israel’s war and genocide in Gaza – now rapidly expanding into southern Lebanon and beyond – has revealed the cowardice and complicity of the Albanese government, but it’s a political issue that’s becoming harder to keep hiding away from in the hope that it all just goes away.

Every atrocity and war crime that the Israel Defense Forces have inflicted in the region – whether it be the destruction of entire villages, killing civilians, medical staff or journalists – is waved away as Israel’s right to defend itself, a brief show of concern or serious concern (depending on the gravity of the situation) or, in the case of IDF’s killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom, a phone call of feigned outrage to the Israeli ambassador. And then, a few days later, it’s back to business as usual: running cover for the state of Israel and the Zionist cause, which seems to be the true purpose of political leaders, not just in Australia, but in the United States and many other Western nations around the world.

The result is the perpetual caution the Albanese government is well known for: expressions of concern, calls for restraint, carefully worded statements about humanitarian suffering, and repeated appeals for diplomacy that no-one seems to listen to, or barely do anything about it. Even when it comes to Australian citizens, the government can be depended on to avoid the issue entirely, and so it came to be when serious allegations of rape and sexual violence were made last week against military personnel from the IDF.

The allegations made by filmmaker and activist Juliet Lamont, following her detention by Israeli authorities after participating in the Global Sumud Flotilla, should change what many leaders in Canberra would prefer to forget about and regard as a distant foreign policy issue, and turn it into a serious domestic political problem. But we just know that it won’t happen: the Australian government is just too compromised by Israeli and Zionist interests to allow this.

Lamont has publicly alleged psychosexual abuse, torture and rape while in Israeli custody. And she’s not the only one – ten other Australian participants in the flotilla have reported beatings, mistreatment and sexual abuse, and have submitted their evidence to the International Criminal Court.

For the Albanese government, this creates a dilemma it has largely avoided, and will do its best to keep avoiding. Supporters will argue that the foreign minister Penny Wong has described the actions as “shocking and unacceptable” and “reinforced the government’s displeasure” to the Israeli ambassador Hillel Newman but, as we saw in case of Zomi Frankcom, there’ll be no follow up and certainly no further action. Wong will wait for the issue to blow over and continue to support Israel and the right to defend itself.

During the case of Brittany Higgins – who was sexually assaulted in Parliament in 2019 by Bruce Lehrmann – Anthony Albanese said in Parliament that “women who come forward should be believed… I encourage women to speak out”. And this always has to be the case. But here we have at least 11 Australian’s who have made the claims of sexual violence and abuse by Israeli military personnel, and the Australian government doesn’t have too much to say about it. It’s obvious that for Albanese and Wong too, wearing the keffiyeh or supporting the cause of Palestine nullifies that right for women to be believed or the right to speak out and be heard.

This issue is no longer just about Gaza. It’s about whether Australia’s leaders are prepared to apply the same standards of human rights, justice and accountability to the state of Israel as they routinely apply to their adversaries. Israel is continuing its terrorist campaign into southern Lebanon and beyond – overnight, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu issued an instruction for Israel to attack the capital Beirut as well – and the world, including Australia, is just standing by and allowing these crimes against humanity to continue.

The search for accountability

The Global Sumud Flotilla was a humanitarian mission where more than 400 activists from around the world attempted to deliver much-needed food, medicine and baby formula to Gaza by sea, and were hoping to break Israel’s naval blockade of the occupied territory. This ended on 18 May when Israeli forces violently and illegally intercepted the flotilla in international waters and detained those on board.

According to those submissions lodged with the International Criminal Court, the activists have alleged war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and other violations of international law perpetrated against them. Several of these people have publicly described physical assaults, degrading treatment and sexual abuse during their detention, and there are other statements from the flotilla organisers which claim dozens of participants suffered injuries severe enough to require hospital treatment, with some requiring further hospitalisation after their release.

Of course, Israeli officials have categorically denied these allegations, which is what they always do because Israel, apparently, has the most moral army in the world. But whether Israel disputes the evidence or not is immaterial: what matters the most is whether governments are prepared to treat such allegations seriously enough to warrant an independent investigation.

The involvement of the ICC changes this significantly, and substantial documentation to support these allegations has been provided to the Court. It’s up to the ICC to make a determination about these actions but we know that irrespective of how well and independently the Court proceeds with its work, Israel will always deny the charges – if it comes to that – and fabricate material on the background of judges involved in the case, or any other legal personnel who worked to support the allegations. Why? Because this is what Israel always does, and it abides by different rules, as adjudicated by itself and by the United States.

For the Australian government, the question is whether it intends to support those processes when they involve an ally, if, indeed, that’s what Israel is. Albanese and Wong have routinely been the grand champions of the international “rules-based order”, the authority of international courts and the importance of human rights protections and now is the time to show whether they really mean this or not.

The problem of double standards and hypocrisy

Since the onset of the #MeToo movement in the late 2010s and the sexual abuse committed against Brittany Higgins in 2019, many political leaders have rightly pointed out the importance of taking allegations of sexual violence seriously; that victims need to be heard, and that allegations need to be investigated, rather than dismissing out of hand, which, historically, institutions in Australia have tended to do. These principles have become embedded within public debate, although there has been predictable resistance from the right, most notably the free speech warriors over at News Corporation.

But the double standards have become particularly acute when it comes to Israel and Gaza. If these actions of sexual violence and rape had been committed by the militaries of Russia, China, Iran or another geopolitical adversary, the responses by the Australian government would have been swift, and the respective ambassadors would have been expelled before day’s end.

But for Israel there are no such issues: a quick phone call from Wong to the Israeli ambassador to reinforce the government’s displeasure, probably ending with a confirmation of dinner for two at the Water’s Edge on the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin, just to make sure the Australia–Israel relationship is solid and the delivery of F-35 parts and explosives to Tel Aviv will continue according to schedule.

This is what our Australian government is supporting: silence on war crimes and sexual violence committed by Israel; silence on the supply of military parts and explosives to Israel that are then used to bomb civilians in Gaza (yes, a ceasefire is in place; but no, it’s not a real ceasefire), Lebanon and Iran. And who knows where there will end: Israel has made no secret of its Greater Israel project based on the biblical claims from 3,000 years ago that most normal and mature countries have grown out of. How much of Lebanon will Israel invade and annexe? When will they invade Iraq and continue up to the Euphrates? Or invade parts of Egypt?

According to the old proverb, possession is nine points of the law and once these territories are seized and ethnically cleansed, it’s very difficult to return those lands, especially when the international community is almost inactive to stop it from happening in the first place. Who will stop the government of Israel acting this way, the most aggressive, racist and maniacal government in the world, when it has its general elections coming up over the next few months?

These issues are becoming more apparent to more voters in many countries in the Western world, even if their political leaders won’t lift a finger to stop Israel and, in the case of the Australian government, actively support Israel’s genocidal actions and war crimes with the supply of military parts and explosives. These are the concerns that are becoming increasingly widespread among younger Australians, progressive voters and many multicultural communities.

And it’s an ongoing pattern: the case of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom remains symbolic of these concerns. Frankcom was killed in a deliberate Israeli strike in Gaza in 2024, prompting the expressions of “concern” from the Australian government but no consequence. And now, we have Australians themselves alleging abuse while in Israeli custody, and the same concerns have come up.

If this government believes in accountability, when will it demand it of Israel? There’s no accountability when Israel kills over 70,000 Palestinians, or reduces 80 per cent of Gaza to rubble. There’s no accountability when Israel deliberately targets an Australian aid worker, and then claims it was an accident. And it seems, there won’t be any accountability when Australian citizens allege torture, rape, sexual violence and mistreatment perpetrated by the IDF.

The real question has to be: what would it take for the Australian government to finally speak up against the many crimes of the state of Israel? If international law is worth defending – the so-called “rules-based order” – does that commitment extend to politically inconvenient cases?

Every new allegation, every new report from humanitarian organisations and every new civilian casualty increases pressure on governments to move beyond their rote expressions of “concern” and work towards responses that are far more tangible and meaningful. The longer governments refuse to act, the more their silence reinforces their complicity.

And this issue is becoming more difficult for Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong to keep avoiding. It’s not going to go away, and they have to explain why they’re not prepared to defend Australian citizens when crimes are committed against them by Israel, as well as why they keep supplying the Israel Defense Forces with military parts and explosives that are then used to kill civilians.

They might feel that this is a distant foreign policy issue, but it’s becoming a domestic political test to find out who they really are, and if there’s any skerrick of moral consistency, political courage and credibility that still lives inside them.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the growing pressure on the Albanese government over Gaza; questions about the future of the teal independents; the AUKUS debacle continues; and the ongoing credibility crisis facing the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

The slow-burn war Albanese and Wong don’t want to talk about

The Gaza conflict is becoming a more politically difficult issue for the Albanese government, not because it’s difficult to understand – everyone else in the world can see what’s going on – but because it’s an issue that is becoming too difficult to keep ignoring.

While the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and Foreign Minister Senator Penny Wong continue to carefully word their diplomatic messaging so they don’t offend the government of Israel and their Zionist supporters here in Australia, there have been allegations from the film-maker and activist, Juliet Lamont – who was illegally detained by Israel for attempting to bring aid to Gaza as part of the Global Sumud Flotilla – of psychosexual abuse, torture and rape by members of the Israel Defense Forces.

As if it wasn’t bad enough for the Australian government to constantly ignore all the war crimes, collective punishment and the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted by Israel upon the people in Gaza, it’s obvious that even when the punishment is inflicted upon Australian citizens, the government will continue with the self-imposed blind spot when it comes to Israel.

In the case of Zomi Frankcom, the Australia aid worker who was killed in the targeted attack by the IDF in 2024, Senator Wong expressed some outrage but then went on to say that it’s “hard to judge from afar”, which surely will the included on the Senator’s political epitaph, whenever that’s written up. Thoughts and prayers were also offered at the time by the Senator, that mealy-mouthed response that’s so meaningless that it’s almost offensive – up there with sympathy trolling of I’m sorry you feel that way – that’s offered at those times when there are no witnesses to explain what really happened.

But thoughts and prayers won’t be enough this time around. Lamont’s evidence is a bit more problematic for the government. She’s alive and well – as well as can be after such an ordeal – and well enough to give her accounts of the torture, sexual abuse and rape perpetrated by the IDF. There’s also 10 other Australian citizens who were on the flotilla, who have provided their documentation of the abuse and their allegations to the International Criminal Court, a far more reliable arbiter of these types of crimes than the Australian government will ever be.

The message for many years within the Australian community has been that women have to be believed when it comes to sexual violence but, obviously, there are many asterisks, exclusions, subclauses and other assorted fine print: women are not believed when the actions of sexual violence and rape are committed by the Israel Defense Forces; the likes of Albanese and Wong will make sure of that.

Are the teals independent or a party in disguise?

The discussion about the teal independents forming a political party has been floating around ever since so many of them were elected at the 2022 federal election – and many of them still remain – but it’s becoming more pertinent with the increasingly fragmented political landscape, especially on the centre-right side of politics. In reality, it brings up a question that critics have been asking since the teals first emerged: how independent are the independents? And if they form a party, does it really matter anyway?

The teals – like all other independents – benefit from being able to campaign as the representative of the local community, free from the talking-point discipline and the factions that dominate the major parties. But in the case of the teals, they’ve been able to benefit from a party-like structure, by receiving support primarily from Climate 200, and shared fundraising networks, similar policy ideals, especially on climate, and a similar political brand, although there have been several independents regarded as “teal” who haven’t used the colour teal at all.

The suggestion that they may now formalise those arrangements into a party structure raises the possibility that the distinction was never quite as clear as it was once claimed. But, then again, how much will the voters in these electorates be concerned about whether the successful member for Warringah, Zali Steggall, arrives at the next federal election campaign as the teal independent candidate, or as a member of the Teal Party? Will the idea of the “small-t Teal” become a part of the political vernacular, to replace the “small-l Liberal”?

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull – who we can easily imagine either handing out leaflets for a prospective Teal Party or, indeed, as a candidate – sees the formation of a party as an opportunity for the teals. With the major parties suffering declining primary votes and public trust continuing to erode – as it has been for many years – there is room for a new force to occupy the political centre ground, to counter the actions of One Nation on the centre-right. Yet creating a party could also destroy much of the teal movement’s unique selling point. Voters who backed local independents in elections past, may not sign up again if they see the teals as just another national political machine. And maybe they just won’t care.

The irony in this case is that the teals emerged as a reaction against the many failures of party politics and the two-party duopoly. If they now become a party themselves, they risk inheriting exactly the problems they once condemned: centralised decision-making, strict “talking points” messaging and discipline, factional disputes and the inevitable gap between grassroots rhetoric and political reality. And wouldn’t that be as boring as the proverbial batshit.

AUKUS: Pay more, get less

The latest adjustment to the AUKUS submarine program has been presented Defence Minister Richard Marles as a “sensible simplification” of an “extraordinarily complex defence project”. But we just have to have a good laugh here: whenever Marles crosses paths with the US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth – as he did last week at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore – he always returns with ridiculous gifts that we have to pay for. Last year, Hegseth demanded a lift of defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP; this year, Australia quietly lifted defence spending from 2.3 per cent to 3.0 per cent of GDP, with more promised spending coming soon.

This year, Marles has announced that Australia will now purchase three second-hand Virginia-class submarines from the United States rather than the promised newly built vessels. The argument put forward by Marles seems straightforward: fewer submarine classes mean less costs, less complexity and a more manageable transition.

But beneath the bureaucratic language and talking points is the reality that we’re not being told about. After years of announcements, reviews, summits and promises of a “sovereign submarine capability”, Australia appears to be moving closer to becoming a long-term customer of American military hardware – and from the used car junk-yard section in front of the scrap metal division – rather than an independent defence power in its own right.

Take your pick: A Bug’s Life, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, or the even the Three Amigos!. In our version of the story, Australia is the endless servant of the United States, sending off Australian taxpayers money to Washington, and getting scraps in return. But no-one comes to the rescue: we’re stuck in this endless subservience until at least 2070. And by that stage, we’ll be so embedded in the military architecture of a diminishing American power, that it will be too late to change anything.

Thank you Scott Morrison for signing Australia up to this calamity. And thank you Anthony Albanese, for continuing with this debacle. Future generations will look back and be ashamed of your actions.

The corruption of the anti-corruption commission

The resignation of Commissioner Paul Brereton is a reminder of how quickly one of Australia’s most anticipated integrity bodies has fallen by the wayside and moved so far away from public expectations.

When the National Anti-Corruption Commission was established in 2023 – just three years ago – it was sold by the Albanese government as a powerful watchdog that would restore trust in government after the many years of scandals, questionable procurement decisions and controversies, especially those committed by the Morrison government. Instead, many Australians now see it as an organisation that’s more comfortable managing expectations than investigating actual corruption.

The decision not to pursue any referrals that came out of the Robodebt Royal Commission was perhaps a turning point for NACC. The most egregious cases of deliberate departmental mismanagement and overriding the law in the history of Australia politics was detected within this Commission, but no-one was held accountable for a scheme which ultimately killed over 2,000 people, and cost the Australian taxpayers $2.4 billion. Not one person.

It’s a complete failure, and if an anti-corruption commission can’t pick such low-hanging fruit – and fail to determine such obvious corruption, that was evident to everyone else except for the Commission itself – then there’s not much reason for that commission to exist. Best to start again.

The resignation of National Anti-Corruption Commission commissioner Paul Brereton is a significant moment for one of the Albanese government’s flagship integrity reforms, but it also raises a far deeper issue: Australia’s federal anti-corruption watchdog has failed to meet the expectations placed upon it. Established in 2023 amid widespread public anger over Robodebt, sports rorts, overspending on consultants, ministerial scandals and declining trust in politics, the NACC was presented as a transformative institution that would restore accountability and transparency to government. Nearly three years later, however, many Australians are still waiting for evidence that the commission is willing – or able – to confront the most powerful figures in public life.

In this episode, we examine why the NACC has become a source of frustration for supporters of stronger integrity measures and critics of government alike. Brereton’s tenure was overshadowed by repeated conflict-of-interest concerns, frequent recusals and growing criticism that the commission had become secretive, overly cautious and disconnected from public expectations. While the NACC has secured a small number of convictions – 11 in three years – its focus on lower-level public sector misconduct has left many questioning why major political controversies, including matters arising from the Robodebt Royal Commission, have not resulted in high-profile investigations.

Unlike powerful state-based bodies such as the NSW ICAC, it seems that the federal commission was deliberately designed with significant limitations. Restrictions on public hearings, narrow legal definitions of corruption, limited resources and a highly risk-averse culture have created a watchdog that often appears more concerned with managing legal processes than exposing misconduct. The result is a growing perception that Australia has created an anti-corruption body that looks tough on paper but remains reluctant to challenge entrenched political power.

As Labor begins the search for a new commissioner, the debate is no longer simply about who should lead the NACC – it’s about whether Australia’s anti-corruption framework is capable of delivering the accountability it promised. If public confidence in democratic institutions is to be restored, reforming the watchdog itself may become just as important as the reform that created it.

The teal independents emerged as a political rebellion against the Liberal Party’s shift over into culture-war politics under figures like Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, offering the more affluent urban voters a politically safer alternative that combined economic conservatism with climate action, integrity in politics and socially progressive values. But as discussion grows about whether the teals should formally become a political party, a major contradiction has emerged: the teal movement succeeded precisely because it was not a party.

In this episode, we examine whether formalising the teal independents into a national political force would strengthen their influence or destroy the independent appeal that made them successful in the first place. With figures like David Pocock linked to discussions about a broader alliance, the debate highlights the growing fragmentation of Australian politics and the collapse of traditional party loyalties.

The Liberal Party’s neglect of moderate urban voters created the conditions for the rise of the teals, beginning with the election of Zali Steggall in 2019. Six years later, the Liberals have been virtually wiped out of many inner-city electorates. But similar warning signs may now be emerging for the Labor government, as rising housing costs, stagnant wages and economic insecurity leave many working and lower-middle-income Australians feeling increasingly politically homeless.

That vacuum is now being exploited by outsider movements like One Nation, which continues to attract protest support while also embracing surprisingly interventionist economic policies including a gas export tax, a sovereign wealth fund and limits on negative gearing. Major parties have increasingly ceded political ground by refusing to pursue ambitious structural reform, particularly when confronted by powerful corporate and mining interests.

As Australian politics becomes more unstable and fragmented, we ask if new political alliances – whether teal, populist or community-based – could eventually reshape the country’s political landscape. The parties and movements that organise themselves most effectively over the next decade may ultimately inherit an electorate that no longer feels represented by the traditional political system.

The political fallout from the treatment of Gaza flotilla activists by Israeli authorities is becoming a much bigger issue than the actions of one extremist minister posting humiliating videos on social media. What occurred on the Global Sumud flotilla – where civilians were illegally detained in international waters, kneeling with zip ties around their wrists, while Israel’s extremist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir mocked them publicly – has exposed more openly what Western governments have spent nearly two years defending, or carefully avoiding confrontation with Israel over the destruction of Gaza and the broader collapse of international law.

For leaders such as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, the problem isn’t just about Ben-Gvir, it’s what he represents. Ben-Gvir is no longer the maverick outlier who can conveniently be dismissed as an embarrassing extremist operating on the fringes of Israeli politics. Whenever Albanese and Wong claim Israel does have a right to defend itself, this is the Israel that they’re also expecting us to defend as well.

What is frequently ignored is that he is a part of the Israeli government and holds enormous influence over Prime Minister Netanyahu’s splintered coalition and represents a growing concern within Israeli politics that’s becoming harder for Western leaders to explain away while still pretending Israel remains a beacon of democracy – the only one in the region, apparently – and supposedly operates within the boundaries of international laws and protocols.

Ben-Gvir’s behaviour is grotesque, but it’s not new: this is who this guy is. Public humiliation, dehumanisation and his theatrical display of dominance have long formed the main part of his political identity, and he humiliates Palestinians in the same way each and every day. Recently, he celebrated his birthday with a cake decorated with a golden noose, after he mandated the death penalty by hanging for Palestinians deemed to be engaged in “acts of terrorism”. And we know that in Israel, “terrorism” could mean anything, even a Palestinian child throwing a stick at a police officer after being arrested for an unknown and concocted criminal charge.

Ben-Gvir is heavily influenced by the banned fascist movement, the Kahanists, who openly advocate Jewish fascism and supremacy, violent nationalism and the expulsion of Palestinians. In 1994, one such Kahanist – Baruch Goldstein – murdered 29 Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Ben-Gvir also displays Goldstein’s portrait in a prominent position in his home – an illegal settlement near Hebron – and has constantly lauded and admired him throughout his political career, claiming that “he is my hero”. These are the values Albanese and Wong want Australians to defend when they say Israel does have a right to defend itself.

What makes this difficult for Western governments to continue to ignore is that Ben-Gvir is not irrelevant within Israel, or some kind of fringe activist. Polling over recent years has shown significant levels of support for his rhetoric and actions among the Israeli public – according to Pew Research, 36 per cent of Israelis support his actions – and his party, Otzma Yehudit – Jewish Power (of course) – remains influential because Netanyahu’s government depends upon figures like him to survive. This destroys that convenient fiction frequently used by Western governments that Israel’s maniacal behaviour can simply be blamed on a handful of rogue extremists detached from broader Israeli political culture, when they are actually a central part of it.

Of course, Ben-Gvir has behaved in this way for many years, but the recent incident on the Sumud flotilla has placed a greater focus on his outrageous and unhinged behaviour. The Australians who were a part of the flotilla were stripped naked, assaulted, denied legal access and subjected to psychological humiliation. They were also held at gunpoint, hidden and beaten inside shipping containers, and terrorised after Israeli forces illegally intercepted the flotilla in international waters, just outside of Cyprus.

Israel – as it always does – has denied all allegations and insisted detainees were treated lawfully, while Israel’s ambassador to Australia – Israel’s propagandist-in-chief Hillel Newman, has dismissed all accusations of violence and abuse. Yet these denials are increasingly at odds with the reality of what people can now see directly through videos, the testimonies and the vast volume of independent reporting emerging from the region itself.

Why is it that we are expected to believe every single unsubstantiated word that’s uttered at the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion – yet dismiss all the documented evidence and statements from over 400 people on the flotilla who were simply trying to bring much-needed aid to the people of Gaza?

We’re not expecting things to change that much – after all, the Australian government, like many others around the world, seems to have an infinite level of tolerance for the many crimes and misdeeds of Israel – but this could develop into a deeper crisis that all governments will need to face up to.

For decades, almost every Western leader has managed the domestic perceptions of conflicts within Israel–Palestine through lugubrious and slippery diplomatic language, massaging the media messaging and deliberately making it all seem too ambiguous for anyone to understand. And haven’t Albanese and Wong – along with so many others in Australia – been the masters of this, with different messages flying out from each side of the mouth on every occasion, with the key words filtering through to the leaders of Zionist lobby groups, because they are the ones who all of this language is directed towards.

Public outrage is softened through carefully crafted talking points about “both sides”, “security concerns”, “complex regional dynamics”, “difficult to judge”, and the classic go-to talking point: “Israel does have a right to defend itself”, a concept that isn’t afforded to many other countries in the region, and certainly not for the state of Palestine.

But as much as they will continue to show their weaknesses with these tactics, Israel’s actions Gaza and now in southern Lebanon have shattered that strategy and makes it more difficult to sustain. Social media, independent journalism and the unprecedented scale of destruction in the region have made that method of influencing public perception far more difficult, particularly among younger audiences who increasingly distrust mainstream political institutions and corporate media narratives. And because of this, the Albanese government now finds itself trapped inside this political balancing act that is becoming more unstable with each and every week.

Australia’s strategic alliance with the United States and longstanding diplomatic support for Israel sits on one side, but that’s becoming increasingly unpopular. On the other is the mounting public anger over the actions of the United States and Israel, a public that increasingly sees Western responses to the conflict, including Australia’s, as morally bankrupt and hypocritical.

This is why the situation in Gaza, southern Lebanon and now Iran has evolved into something far larger than a foreign policy issue, even if most people can’t fully comprehend these conflicts. It’s now cutting directly through to Australia’s domestic politics: universities, the media, arts organisations, sporting bodies, councils and workplaces are increasingly being drawn into a battleground over Palestine, protest rights, censorship, with the usual accusations of antisemitism and political intimidation.

That erosion of Australia’s legitimacy on these matters also carries enormous long-term consequences for the body politic, which seems to be so easily discarded by many countries around the world, in their quest to support the rouge and out-of-control state of Israel which, essentially is being governed by the likes of Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are the modern day versions of Himmler, Rosenberg and the brownshirts from the Nazi era.

Once domestic populations begin to realise that governments are applying human rights, democracy and international law selectively rather than universally – bearing in mind that all politics involves a certain level of duplicity and double-speak – the damage to the body politic doesn’t end up being restricted just to the field of foreign affairs. That collapse of trust then begins to permeate through to other areas – if this hasn’t already been breached – the media, political parties, universities, courts and democracy itself.

That’s what makes the flotilla incident so significant in Australia. It wasn’t just about a few hundred activists who were illegally intercepted at sea, it’s a symbolic representation of the clash between two versions of events, and only one of those is being believed. In one version, Albanese and Wong – and others – will continue speaking the concocted language of diplomacy, alliances and restraint (i.e. the outrageous lies) primarily because they’re close to hopeless and know nothing better.

In the other version, millions of ordinary people are watching graphic evidence of war, occupation, starvation and humiliation – not just of Palestinians and Lebanese people, but of their own citizens – in real time while political leaders insist the situation remains too “complex” and “far away” for them to offer any kind of meaningful and moral position.

The danger for Western governments is that the old language of diplomacy that’s been in use since the 1800s no longer works. It’s all high-level bullshit and people can see this for themselves. Every new image from the region, every viral video of humiliation by extremists such as Ben-Gvir, every allegation of abuse followed up with even more evasive statements and denials just keeps chipping away at the credibility of the political establishment, if there’s any left at all.

The issue is no longer about whether governments support Israel: they obviously do, and will continue do so, despite everyone’s protestations. There must be some serious-level kompromat being held on all these political leaders – or threats being made to their family members or other types of blackmail – because no leader in their right mind would support the actions and activities of the state of Israel, especially taking into account the actions of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, unless these types of threats against them are being made.

And it’s also obvious that large sections of the public no longer support the state of Israel, and its behaviours in the region. For the Australian government, that’s the real political crisis that it’s facing – not just the collapse of faith in Israel, but the slow collapse of faith in the entire Western political and moral framework that protected it for so long. The real question is why it has come to this.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the growing housing and inequality crisis, the continuing collapse of the Liberal Party and rise of populist politics, the emergence of independents and teals as a new political force, and the widening political fallout from Israel’s actions in Gaza and the debate surrounding Australians serving in the IDF.

The Parliament of property owners

Federal Parliament returns this week facing the political reality that neither the government nor the opposition particularly wants to address: the old economic “compact” between the current and former major parties is falling apart, and younger people now understand that the system no longer works in their favour and, perhaps, it never has.

After decades of the bipartisan worship and genuflection at the altar of property speculation, privatisation and “market efficiency”, the Albanese government now finds itself managing the consequences of a housing system that has transformed that basic human value – shelter – into a money-making machine and an extortion racket for the banks.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers uses the words of “intergenerational inequality”, but the deeper problem is that Australia’s political class spent well over 30 years creating an economy designed to protect asset holders at almost any social cost. Now that millions of younger Australians are locked out of housing altogether – even renting is becoming difficult – the same political and media establishment suddenly wants to sound concerned – really concerned – even though, in reality, they’re only pandering to vested interests – while mainly avoiding the serious reforms that will genuinely threaten entrenched wealth.

Predictably – as we’ve seen over the past two weeks – even the modest discussions about tax concessions, negative gearing, capital gains or housing investment will continue to trigger all of these hysterical warnings from lobby groups, property investors and conservative commentators claiming Labor is launching an “attack on aspiration”. But in reality, their panic is based on something that’s far easier to see: the Australian economy has become dangerously dependent on permanently rising property prices.

It won’t happen this week, but the real question facing Parliament in the long term is whether the government is actually prepared to challenge any of this in a meaningful way – or whether it just wants to give the appearance of being “reformist”, while actually protecting the structures that created all the problems in the first place.

The continuing collapse of the Liberal Party

Something which is a lot more serious than a temporary protest vote is now developing in Australian politics. The rise of One Nation is no longer just about culture wars, anti-immigration rhetoric or discontent on the fringes – although that’s a big part of it – it’s reflecting a much deeper malaise within mainstream politics across large parts of the country – particularly the voters who feel like they’ve been left behind economically, and are socially insecure and culturally ignored by both major-ish parties.

For years, Australia’s political and media establishment comforted itself with the belief that unbridled populism was something that happened elsewhere: Brexit in the UK, Trumpism in America, Europe’s nationalist right, and assorted “convenient idiots” in South America, who pave the way for vested corporate interests to take up the role that’s usually provided by government.

But after decades of wage stagnation, collapsing housing affordability, privatised public services and widening inequality, the social conditions that produced those movements now exist here too. As much as we might detest the prevailing attitudes of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the real surprise isn’t so much that it’s a fringe party on the rise – at least in the opinion polls – it’s that the major parties still seem shocked and confused by it.

The Liberal Party’s crisis is especially profound because it no longer appears to know what it actually stands for. It spent years fluctuating between corporate neoliberalism for donors and culture-war populism for voters, eventually satisfying neither of these groups. One Nation is now starting to grab the same territory the Liberal Party once occupied: railing against the elite and “woke”, fearful nationalism, distrust and resentment toward institutions.

Meanwhile, the Labor government risks making the same mistake many centre-left parties overseas have been making for some time: making that assumption that voters experiencing economic anxiety will automatically reject right-wing populism because it seems to be too unhinged. And wearing the clothing of conservatives – the same Tories Anthony Albanese claimed to fight against, because “that’s what I do” – means that the Labor Party will also one day suffer the same fate the Liberal Party is currently experiencing, and then wonder how it got to that point.

The Teal machine and the hole in the centre

Australian politics might be entering a strange phase where the structures that supported the traditional major parties are falling apart, but not sure what’s to replace them. We can see how One Nation is currently filling that gap on the centre-right side of politics, but what about the centre-left?

There’ a growing discussion about independents forming a stronger parliamentary force – either as a party or a far stronger alliance – as a counter to the rise of One Nation. Representatives such as Senator David Pocock represent a broader shift among affluent, highly educated urban voters who have become politically homeless inside a Liberal Party consumed by culture wars and increasingly disconnected from metropolitan Australia.

The “teal” movement started off as a revolt against the dysfunction, climate denialism and political corruption of the Liberal Party, but it also reflected a mood within the electorate that they wanted to see politics built around competence, moderation and stability – those same areas that the Liberal Party were ignoring.

Of course, there are going to be inherent problems – independents often present themselves as “post-political” figures who stand above party-based ideology, yet they also operate within the same economic framework that produced many of the frustrations now fuelling populist anger in the first place. Already, several teal independents have ruled out forming a party, but what will happen if the rise of One Nation becomes unstoppable?

The Labor Party might be in the ascendency at the moment – and there’s no space for a new progressive party to occupy right now – but that can always change. In the middle of 2021, with the Liberal Party already in government for eight years, the Labor government was told to just forget about the 2022 election, and prepare for campaign after that, with a new leader in either Jim Chalmers or Tanya Plibersek: that’s how confident the establishment was about the continuing dominance of the Liberal Party. That was 2021: have a good look at the current stocks of the Liberal Party, less than five years later. They are totally dysfunctional.

The independents should have a good look and assess that history, before it becomes too late to take up the opportunity when it presents itself.

The flotilla and a small crack in the Western consensus

The political fallout from Itamar Ben-Gvir’s treatment of the Gaza flotilla activists is becoming far more than just about the actions of a demonic and provocative Israeli minister going viral on social media. For many years, governments all around the world – including the first-class denialists, the Australian Labor government (a special mention to Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong) – have spent more than two years defending, rationalising or carefully avoiding confronting Israel over its war crimes in Gaza and southern Lebanon, and kidding themselves that the international “rules-based order” still means something, when it obviously doesn’t.

It’s not a new style of imagery: detained civilians kneeling with zip ties aboard a seized aid flotilla in international waters, while one of Israel’s most violent, vile and extreme ministers publicly mocked them online. This is Ben-Gvir’s modus operandi – he’s been doing this for years and, along with Bezalel Smotrich, is among Israel’s most despicable parliamentarians, in a field of many.

That creates an increasingly dangerous political problem for governments all around the world. Official statements continue to express “concern” or “shock”, but it’s not really new material from Israel that we’re seeing, and the broader diplomatic and strategic relationship with Israel remains fundamentally intact. The contradiction is becoming harder to sustain though, particularly among younger Australians who consume international news outside traditional media frameworks and increasingly distrust establishment narratives surrounding the conflict.

The Foreign Minister Penny Wong infamously said that it’s hard to “judge from afar” when Israel cut food and water to starving Palestinians. Although Senator Wong did condemn Ben-Gvir – not the government of Israel, but only Ben-Gvir – she needs to start making more judgements about Israel’s war crimes, genocide, illegal actions and occupations in Palestine and southern Lebanon, and stop treating the public as fools. We can all see what’s happening and what Israel is doing and, yes, we are also afar and standing at the same distance from Gaza as Senator Wong is.

The IDF fighters amongst us

More people are now asking the question: if Australians who have travelled to fight in conflicts linked to Islamist groups, separatist militias or hostile foreign causes are subjected to intense national security scrutiny – as they should be – why is the involvement of people who have served in the Israeli Defense Forces never subjected to the same scrutiny?

The growing debate surrounding Australians serving in the IDF is exposing that glaring inconsistency at the heart of Western foreign policy and counterterrorism rhetoric. Federal governments have spent years expanding foreign fighter laws, surveillance powers and national security frameworks in the name of upholding international law – the so-called “rules-based order” – and preventing Australians from participating in overseas conflicts. Yet now, amid mounting allegations of war crimes and ongoing investigations by the International Criminal Court into Gaza, the question is being totally ignored by the government.

One of these people – IDF volunteer Russell Campbell – was freely roaming the streets of Sydney, violently disrupting and attacking people who showed any evidence at all of supporting Palestine. Even though his actions were well-documented through social media, police officers were “unable to identify any offences”, doing nothing about it until he was arrested six months later. Would an Australian citizen with a Palestinian background returning from the region be afforded the same leniency?

Officially, the Albanese government insists serving in a recognised foreign military is not automatically illegal, and legally, that is correct. Politically, however, the issue is becoming harder to ignore as evidence and imagery from Palestine and southern Lebanon continue to shock international audiences.

Once the criticism transcends the scope of activists and legal groups and moves into the mainstream electorate – and especially the younger members of the electorate, the cowardice that has always been there, just becomes more obvious and more difficult to sustain.

In this episode of the New Politics podcast, we examine how the debate surrounding the 2026 Budget has quickly moved into a battle over class, aspiration, political power and the future direction of Australian capitalism itself. The Liberal Party has framed Labor’s housing reforms as an “assault on aspiration”, warning of attacks on small investors, family wealth and entrepreneurship, while conservative commentators are recycling familiar rhetoric from the Howard era about rewards for hard work and property ownership. Yet much of this language increasingly feels disconnected from the reality facing millennials and Gen Z Australians, many of whom now see home ownership as permanently out of reach under the current system.

We explore how the media narrative surrounding the Budget has become heavily shaped by vested interests with enormous financial exposure to property speculation and tax concessions. From sensational claims that Australia is abandoning investment and venture capital, to aggressive polling designed to frame the Budget as “bad for Australia”, the reaction has been unusually intense even by Australian political standards. But who exactly is driving these narratives, and whose interests are actually being protected? As property prices, rents and inequality continue to rise, the debate increasingly reflects a deeper divide between older wealth holders who benefited from decades of deregulation and younger Australians demanding structural economic reform.

We also look at whether this Budget really represents the massive political gamble the media claims it to be. Despite the commentary, Albanese remains one of the most cautious and focus-grouped prime ministers in modern Australian history, and Labor clearly understands that housing affordability has become one of the defining political issues of the decade. Rather than a reckless gamble, the reforms may instead reflect a broader shift in electoral reality: governments can no longer endlessly prioritise property speculation, tax concessions and wealth accumulation when an entire generation feels economically excluded from the system itself.

Ultimately, the concocted backlash may say less about the Albanese government and more about a political and media establishment struggling to defend an economic model that many Australians increasingly believe no longer works for them.

The Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is revealing something much larger than the question of how Australia responds to discrimination. Increasingly, the inquiry is becoming a test of where political dissent begins and ends – particularly when it comes to Israel and Palestine. As governments, media organisations and major institutions attempt to navigate growing public anger over the war in Gaza, the Commission is emerging as part of a broader political struggle over free speech, civil liberties and the role of protest in democratic society.

We examine how accusations of antisemitism are becoming deeply entangled with debates surrounding Zionism, Palestinian solidarity and criticism of the Israeli state, and ask whether Australia is moving towards a political environment where certain international conflicts are treated differently to others, and where criticism of some forms of state violence becomes increasingly difficult to express without political consequences.

There’s a contradiction within the language of “social cohesion” itself. While political leaders regularly call for unity and tolerance, genuine social cohesion cannot exist if some communities and perspectives are excluded from public debate. The absence of Palestinian voices from institutions, the controversy surrounding the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and the broader attempts to regulate political language all raise larger questions about who gets heard in Australia – and who doesn’t.

Antisemitism is real and must be opposed, alongside all forms of racism and discrimination. But democratic societies also depend on the ability to distinguish between hatred directed at people and criticism directed at governments, ideologies and states. Australia is increasingly confronting difficult questions about free speech, political identity, historical memory and the future of democratic debate itself.

#AustralianPolitics #RoyalCommission #Antisemitism #Palestine #Israel #FreeSpeech #PoliticalSpeech #SocialCohesion #CivilLiberties #IHRA #Democracy #Media #NewPoliticsPodcast

What was meant to be a Royal Commission to examine antisemitism and social cohesion in Australia has quickly become much broader and far more politically dangerous: the attempt to recreate the boundaries of acceptable political debate and dissent surrounding Israel, Zionism and the destruction of Palestine.

While it was established to address allegations of rising antisemitic abuse following the October 7 attacks in Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza, the inquiry was initially framed as an effort to protect vulnerable communities after the Bondi terror attacks in December 2025. However, it’s now morphed into an attempt to blur that distinction between antisemitism, and criticism of Israel and Zionism.

Much of the testimony presented at the Commission is basically suggesting that any form of solidarity with Palestine is inherently antisemitic. The presence of Palestinian flags, watermelon symbols, university encampments, fundraising drives for children injured by the barbaric actions of the state of Israel, artistic exhibitions and slogans such as “from the river to the sea” are all now being claimed as acts of antisemitism. In this kind of environment, even describing the actions of the Israeli state as “barbaric” risks being interpreted as antisemitism, and the overall effect of this is to create a climate where legitimate critique of a specific nation–state will result in the criminalisation of those making the criticisms.

Much of this is arising from the application of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which too easily combines opposition to Israeli government policy or Zionism, with antisemitism. This Royal Commission has adopted the IHRA definition rather than more sensible alternatives such as the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which clearly distinguishes between antisemitism and criticism of Israel as a political entity. This is an enormous distinction in a democratic society such as Australia, if that’s what we claim to be. If opposition to nationalism, occupation, military and state violence or extremist ideology can be twisted and re-presented as racial hatred just because Israel is involved, then we may as well give up on that claim and just let legitimate political debate disappear for good.

The inconsistencies are more obvious once we compare the acceptance of the actions of Israel with the treatment of other communities during similar international actions. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Australians of Russian background experienced hostility and social stigma, yet few political leaders or media outlets warned against conflating ordinary Russian people with the actions of the Vladimir Putin; in fact, the social stigma seemed to be encouraged. Yet criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza and now in southern Lebanon – despite the massive amount of civilian casualties, widespread destruction and mounting international condemnation – is increasingly treated as a unique political situation or brushed off as “Israel’s right to defend itself”, and protected from the scrutiny that’s directed at every other country in similar circumstances.

The bigger danger here is that the Commission risks transforming legitimate concerns about the actions of the state of Israel – which includes war crimes and genocide – and the extremist ideology of Zionism, into a state-sanctioned process for regulating speech, and delegitimising protest and political activism. Democracies ultimately become unstable when institutions decide to protect one group from legitimate criticism of a state they support – or even criticism of their own actions, such as fundraising for the Israel Defense Forces, or supporting Shevet Onnot, a scout’s group in Melbourne that actively recruits and prepares young people to serve in the IDF.

This is something that has already shaped the media commentary surrounding the Commission. Former editor of The Age Michael Gawenda argued in his testimony that many journalists within the mainstream media have become activists who are hostile to Israel and Zionism, and that the incidents of antisemitism have been too easily dismissed by them.

There’s very little evidence to support this. Yes, over 600 journalists signed a letter of solidarity in November 2023 for the many Palestinians journalists who had been killed by the IDF and to condemn Israel for the killing of so many civilians, but almost none of these sentiments – which were registered in their capacity as journalists outraged by so many of their peers being killed – have filtered through to the coverage provided by the mainstream media.

Major outlets such as the ABC, SBS, Seven West, Nine Media and News Corporation have, with very few exceptions, generally framed events that are broadly sympathetic to Israel’s political narratives, almost to the point of regurgitating Israeli propaganda verbatim. In comparison, coverage of Palestinian suffering has often been neutered by more cautious editorial language and suspicion, while pro-Palestinian activists have routinely been portrayed as being socially disruptive or politically suspect – and on occasions, beaten by police or arrested for holding up a “river to the sea” sign at a protest rally.

Yes, there are any many Jewish Australians who have experienced fear and trauma since October 7, and those emotions – whatever they might be – need to be heard and recognised. But what are we actually hearing at this Royal Commission? Complaints about watermelons; feelings of being unsafe after seeing the flag of Palestine – as if seeing the Israeli flag doesn’t cause any discomfort at all for Palestinian communities – complaints of bullying over a Minecraft exchange online; concerns about seeing fundraising activities for victims (which are usually accompanied with the aforementioned offending Palestinian flag); objections to children’s drawings in public spaces (with flag, again).

Many of the testimonies provided at the Royal Commission, such as Gawenda’s, rely heavily on personal commentary and subjective interpretation rather than verifiable evidence, or blanket statements that appear to be at odds with reality. Also, there’s been almost no reference at all to the existence of Palestine, or reference to the brutal actions of Israel, including the occupation of West Bank, genocide in Gaza, the illegal expansion of settlements, or the practice of apartheid.

Of course, these issues will never be mentioned because it undermines the narrative that Israel wants to present of itself at the perfect and “most moral” state, and cover over the extreme ethno-nationalism that is subjugating and attempting to remove an entire group of people from their homes. Best to limit the conversations to Minecraft, or offensive comments that might have been made at a netball game in the eastern suburbs of Sydney.

The musician Deborah Conway also complained to the Commission about being excluded and “cancelled” from performances and venues, but failed to mention that it’s the result of extreme Zionist views and callously suggesting in an ABC interview in 2024 that the Palestinian children killed by the state of Israel were not even children, and “depends on what you call kids”.

The Commission has become – at this stage at least – a one-sided receptacle for every perceived slight against Zionists and supporters of Israel in Australia, with the ultimate intention of making these slights – real or perceived – punishable in the court of law. The Royal Commission was created as a result of the Bondi terror attacks – and to explore the issues of antisemitism – but the victims of these attacks seem to have been forgotten about, and the social cohesion that it was meant create, is as far away as it has ever been.

While the Royal Commission continues to hear the one-sided evidence and perspectives, others who have been left out are using other ways to have their voices heard. At Sydney Town Hall last Friday night, pro-Palestine supporters gathered to mark 78 years after the Nakba – the other holocaust that never gets mentioned and Israel doesn’t like to talk about, where over 700,000 Palestinians were violently removed and displaced by the infamous and brutal Zionist paramilitary group, the Stern Gang – an event that is a key cause of the generational trauma that exists until today.

One of speakers was 87-year-old Fouad Shriedy, displaced from northern Palestine as a child during the 1948 Nakba, and he provided a lived historical memory that rarely fits within Australia’s discussions about “social cohesion”. “The Palestinian dream will never die… my heart is still in Palestine,” he said. “The Nakba did not end in 1948, it is still happening today, and the genocide is still going on in Gaza. We will never forget Palestine and one day, Palestine will be free.” Palestine will be free. Is that now deemed to be antisemitic as well?

Voices such as Shriedy’s are entirely absent from mainstream discussions surrounding the Royal Commission. The Australia Palestine Advocacy Network requested leave to appear, but was refused on the grounds that it didn’t have a “direct and substantial” interest in the public hearings, even though the Commission is ostensibly about social cohesion.

Why can’t we recognise the perspectives of Fouad Shriedy or from the representatives of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network? If the goal is to achieve “social cohesion”, we should be hearing from as many people as possible, even if it is to give the Commission a veneer of credibility – and to avoid the accusations of just being another avenue to entrench the viewpoints of a privileged group of people who already have strong connections to the existing power structures in society.

So, what will become of this Royal Commission? Perhaps it has already done its work through the release of its interim report, and its activities from this point onwards are to allow people to vent their frustrations, experiences and perceptions about how they feel the rest of the world is against them, while the incidents of real antisemitism will slip by.

None of this is to deny the existence of antisemitism in Australia. As a child growing up in a working class migrant family in a dysfunctional, predominantly white-Anglo lower socio-economic and angry outer suburb in Perth, I’m not going to deny whatever people might be feeling, because I’ve felt it myself, and so many times.

It’s not just the fuck off and go back to where you came from – so much of racism and discrimination doesn’t always reveal itself in obvious ways, and even when it is overt and obvious, if there’s no one there to record it or report it, it’s as though it never occurred in the first place.

These testimonies should be heard, even if we’re not quite sure what we’re listening to. Jewish Australians, like all all other minority communities, deserve safety, dignity and protection from abuse, harassment and violence. And when an event such as the Bondi terror attack occurs, we need to work out ways of reducing the chances of this ever happening again, and improve protections for all peoples.

Australia does face challenges in addressing these concerns at a time when the nationalistic far right is gaining a foothold in many parts of the community. But if the solutions end up suppressing hard-fought political rights and are used to protect the state of Israel from criticisms of its war crimes and genocidal actions, then Australia will be trashing the same democratic freedoms that it claims to be defending.

This week’s briefing outlines the big issues to look out for: the political panic over Labor’s property tax reforms… the concocted backlash to the federal Budget… the fragmentation of conservative politics… and how rising fuel and cost-of-living pressures are exposing deeper problems in Australia’s economy.

The great Australian property panic

Australian politics has tried to set foot in that sacred temple of property speculation, and the reaction from the conservatives has entirely predictable. Labor’s modest attempt to wind back negative gearing concessions – and that’s what it is: modest – and reduce the capital gains tax discount has triggered a full-scale panic from the establishment, as though the government had announced the socialist takeover of Toorak, Dalkeith and Mosman all at once, rather than a small recalibration of tax policy that overwhelmingly favours wealthy asset holders.

For decades, Australia’s political and media class has built an economy around inflated house prices, tax minimisation and intergenerational wealth transfer, while younger Australians were told to stop buying coffee and smashed avocadoes if they wanted to live in their own home. Now that even a very limited reform is being discussed, the same vested interests that have benefited from the system are suddenly warning of “economic collapse”, “housing shortages” and “investor flight” – without any evidence to back their claims – despite investors already treating housing less as shelter and more as a wealth creation mechanism.

What makes the politics even stranger in this case is the collapse of traditional party loyalties beneath the surface. Despite their political dominance, the Labor primary vote remains soft. The Liberals are still imploding, although Angus Taylor has appeared as the preferred prime minister in the latest Resolve opinion poll, commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald, a rag that’s been consistently pushing the “broken promise” narrative.

And One Nation – a permanent protest vehicle powered up by resentment, grievance and media stunts – is harvesting disillusionment from the conservative base at an extraordinary level. The recent defections of figures like former Liberal Party figures Teena McQueen and Hollie Hughes confirm what has become increasingly obvious: much of the Australian right is no longer interested in debating and implementing policy that’s to the benefit of the country, but seeking a more destructive form of oppositional politics, as if what they’ve provided over the past 30 years or so hasn’t been destructive enough.

The bigger question – as always – is whether any of these parties are genuinely prepared to confront the structural failures of Australia’s housing sector – or whether this is just another reshuffling of the bipartisan factions inside a political system that’s still terrified of upsetting the propertied class and vested interests. The Australian Greens seem to be the only ones prepared to take on these issues, but the mainstream media is far too interested in pushing the case of vested interests and getting on with attacking the Labor government: who’s got time for fairness and equity?…

The Budget and the collapse of the old consensus

The Budget narrative that’s being pushed by the mainstream is increasingly becoming negative, as they try to find a way creating that inane commentary of “winners and losers”, and “what’s in it for you”, rather than focusing on what’s best for our society.

What was presented by Treasurer Jim Chalmers as a small attempt to rebalance an overheated housing market is now in conflict with the decades of political mythology about property, wealth and economic management. The reaction has been ferocious because the reforms – albeit small – expose the harsh truth of Australian politics: the economy has been structured for years around protecting asset inflation while wages for workers have stagnated, inequality has widened and younger Australians were increasingly locked out of economic security. Governments do have choices, and there are the choices they have made.

This government finds itself trapped between these competing issues – on the one hand, voters are angry about housing affordability and economic inequality, and are demanding a change to this. On the other, older investors, financial commentators and property interests – the ones with the loudest voices – are treating even this level of reform and tinkering at the edges as a political heresy. The result is this strange environment where the Labor government is being accused simultaneously of reckless and overly cautious. It can be one or the other, but surely it can’t be both.

At the same time, the government’s push to “slow growth” in the NDIS – or massive cutbacks in anyone else’s language – has deepened that cynicism that “budget responsibility” still means asking ordinary people to absorb the burden while defence contractors and corporate interests remain unscathed.

Meanwhile, the political system continues on the path of fragmentation – it’s affecting the conservative side of politics at the moment, but it will affect Labor and progressive politics, it’s just not clear at this stage how that will occur. The danger for Labor is that while it attempts to cautiously retreat from parts of neoliberalist thinking – ever so slightly – the public may already have already worked out that the entire political class remains incapable of delivering meaningful economic security for as many people as possible, or the social change required to do this.

Petrol politics and the crisis economy

Australian politics is once again discovering how fragile the country’s economic model really is. The continuing instability in Western Asia/Middle East has immediately reignited the fears about fuel prices, inflation and supply chains, exposing the uncomfortable reality that one of the world’s largest energy exporters remains deeply vulnerable to global oil shocks.

After decades of privatisation, refinery closures and “market efficiency”, Australia now imports most of the fuel that it needs to keep the economy functioning, while governments quietly scramble to secure emergency diesel shipments every time geopolitical tensions escalate, as they have done on this occasion, with agreements made with Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysis, Brunei and Japan.

And, of course, the political opportunities that this crisis presents to leverage against are already being exploited. Conservatives are attacking the government’s energy transition plans, insisting that Australia should double down on fossil fuel dependence in the name of “energy security”, despite the fact that decades of deregulation and corporate consolidation helped to create this vulnerability in the first place. Meanwhile, the government is attempting to present itself as economically responsible while carefully avoiding any serious confrontation with the market structures driving price instability across housing, energy and transport.

Underneath all of this is a far greater problem: the electorate is exhausted by this permanent economic anxiety and continuing crisis. Mortgage stress, soaring rents, grocery prices and electricity bills have created a political mood far more volatile than our political leaders would be willing to admit. The government talks about “productivity”, “supply constraints” and “fiscal discipline” – the old language of neoliberalism that pleases the markets – but voters increasingly see a system where massive defence spending, corporate profits and speculative wealth remains protected while ordinary households are told to accept sacrifice.

Even the housing debate now reveals a larger crisis in the delivery of essential services. Politicians endlessly announce housing targets and infrastructure plans, yet governments struggle to physically deliver projects on time or at scale, as has been the case with the Housing Australia Future Fund – 839 dwelling created after 18 months.

Labour shortages, planning chaos, developer speculation and collapsing construction firms have turned the idea of “nation building” into a kind of permanent Powerpoint presentation that’s dragged out on Budget night and then put back into the archive. Real change needs to be activated right now, not tomorrow, next month, next year. Right now.

The Farrer byelection may have shocked the political establishment, but the real story is not just that One Nation won its first ever federal lower-house seat – it’s that the Liberal Party’s political base has collapsed. One Nation candidate David Farley secured a decisive victory, while the Liberal Party’s primary vote crashed from 43 per cent at the 2025 federal election to just 12 per cent barely a year later. That scale of decline is almost unheard of in modern Australian politics and points to a much deeper structural crisis inside Australian conservatism.

For years, support for the Liberal and National parties has been eroding across regional and outer-suburban Australia as voters face housing stress, stagnant wages, declining public services and growing distrust in political institutions. The Farrer result exposed how much anger is now directed towards the conservative parties themselves. While byelections are often protest votes, this result reflected something larger: a growing sense that the Liberal Party no longer stands for anything beyond opposition and internal conflict. Leadership changes alone are unlikely to fix that problem.

At the same time, One Nation’s rise has been carefully cultivated over decades. Pauline Hanson has maintained an enormous public profile through sustained exposure across commercial television and right-wing media, helping transform One Nation from a fringe protest movement into a permanent force in Australian politics. Backed by wealthy conservative interests and sections of the media, the party has become a vehicle for pushing culture wars, anti-immigration politics, climate scepticism and neoliberal economics further into the mainstream.

But One Nation’s growth is also creating a dangerous fracture on the political right. Much of its support is coming directly from former Liberal and National voters, particularly in regional areas, and there are now open discussions among some conservative MPs about defecting to the party altogether. The result in Farrer suggests the biggest threat facing the Liberal Party may no longer come from Labor – but from the political forces emerging from inside its own collapsing coalition.

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The 2026 Australian federal Budget has triggered outrage from conservative commentators, who are branding it everything from a “Whitlam budget” to outright “Marxism”. But the reaction says more about the collapse of the bipartisan consensus on neoliberalism than it does about the Budget itself. After four decades of governments protecting property speculation, corporate power and market-driven economics, even modest reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax are now being treated as radical political acts.

We examine Labor’s cautious attempt to rebalance Australia’s housing market, and why the government’s reforms reflect a growing public recognition that housing should be treated as a social necessity rather than a speculative asset. We also look at the political legacy of the 2019 negative gearing scare campaign, the worsening housing affordability crisis, and why Labor appears trapped between responding to public anger over inequality while still protecting the broader neoliberal framework that created it.

There’s a lot of contradictions inside the Budget itself: limited cost-of-living relief, no meaningful increase to JobSeeker, cuts to the NDIS disguised as “slowing growth”, continued underfunding of education, and massive support for defence, mining and corporate interests. While Treasurer Jim Chalmers has taken tentative steps towards reform, Australia’s political economy still overwhelmingly favours wealth, property and corporate power over public need.

Plus, we analyse Angus Taylor’s predictable budget reply, the Liberal Party’s continued obsession with “tax cuts”, and why Pauline Hanson accusing Labor of “communism” may be the clearest sign yet that Australia’s political debate is shifting in ways the conservative establishment no longer fully understands.

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#AustralianPolitics #FederalBudget #Budget2026 #HousingCrisis #NegativeGearing #CapitalGainsTax #Neoliberalism #LaborParty #JimChalmers #CostOfLiving #NDIS #HousingAffordability #AustralianEconomy #NewPoliticsPodcast

Treasurer Jim Chalmers had delivered his fifth budget – but the first for this term which commenced over a year ago – and it’s a mixed but ideologically revealing budget: it contains some redistributive reforms, especially on housing tax concessions, but it also preserves the deeper neoliberal framework that has afflicted most economies in the Western world for far too long – there’s the typical material about budget repair, productivity, business incentives, expanding the defence, means-testing and restraint on social spending, especially within the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

The most prominent changes relate to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. New investors won’t be able to use negative gearing on existing homes – applying to new builds only – while the 50 per cent CGT discount will be replaced by inflation indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax rate from July 2027. This change directly targets those tax concessions that have helped turn housing into an investment portfolio and a tax minimisation scheme, rather than a social necessity, and it’s a change that’s well overdue.

We’ve long argued that housing should be about providing homes and shelter and building up communities, not as a tradable commodities linked to wealth creation, and it would have better to have a staged reduction of negative gearing benefits on existing properties, rather than grandfathering them completely, but for a cautious government that’s been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after their 2019 election loss, this might the best that it can deliver and will go some way in exorcising those demons.

There are some modest benefits for workers: a $250 Working Australians Tax Offset, a simplified deduction process for $1,000 in work-expenses, and an increase in Medicare/public hospital funding, including an extra $25 billion for public hospitals and $1.8 billion in urgent care clinics.

The huge issue is the cutbacks to the NDIS, which is harsh and immediate. This budget aims reduce the growth in the scheme from around 10 per cent per year to 5 per cent, with massive reductions in funding over the next four years. The NDIS has been used as a punching bag by the right-wing media and conservative interests, running lengthy and exaggerated stories on waste and provider profiteering and, once again, people with disabilities are treated as a budget problem to be cut, rather that citizens who are entitled to public support. Yet another win for the neoliberalists in our midst.

The budget also provides the usual largesse to business – absolutely no budgetary problems there or a need to look at waste – there’s regulatory “productivity” measures, expanded venture capital tax incentives, permanent loss carry-back for companies with a turnover of up to $1 billion, and a permanent $20,000 instant asset write-off for small business.

Some of these measures might help genuine small operators, but the ideological language of the Labor government still favours the business class and worships the gods of capitalism. For sure, we can have an existential argument about who came first – the capitalist or the worker – as well as the argument that without capitalism there would be no modern economy, but without workers there would be no capitalism in the first place.

Defence is another big concern. Just like the business sector, there seems to be an endless supply of funding available for defence, and there’s never any question of finding waste or “provider profiteering”. It might be a case of needing to be careful with those that control the guns and tanks, lest they be used against a government, but an extra $53 billion over a decade is going into defence, while social programs such as the NDIS are facing severe cutbacks – it’s robbing carers to pay for the colonels and it’s totally unacceptable.

Does this Budget reverse the neoliberal ideology that was fast-tracked by the Howard government in the mid-1990s? Not by a long shot, but at least it’s a tiny start, without knowing what the next steps might be. The housing tax reforms challenge the idea that investor wealth-building should dominate housing policy, and that is a significant change. But this is a Labor government that we’re talking about; it’s the least they could do.

But it doesn’t break that connection with those policies of the Howard government, and still accepts the core features of Howardism: fiscal discipline, productivity through business incentives, private markets as the main provider of social services, targeted rather than universal welfare, and “sustainability” as the rationale for cutting social programs such as the NDIS. Not much has been announced to change the massive imbalance between public and private education. The higher education sector has been a mess for some time, and there’s little in there that suggests anything will change.

A more progressive budget would have included stronger welfare support – there are still no changes to JobSeeker or youth allowance – there should be more funding for large-scale public housing construction, serious reforms to mining and gas taxation, public ownership or public investment in energy, stronger national renters’ rights, and less funding for defence and business concessions.

And the support that is being provided for working people, much of it is delayed or modest. The $250 tax offset won’t arrive immediately, and the $1,000 deduction will save workers an average of about $205. For sure, that is useful and better than receiving nothing at all, but these are not transformative changes during a cost-of-living crisis, and feels more like the leftovers scraps after the mining, business and defence sectors have already had their banquet and left the scene.

For underprivileged people within the community, the result is weak. Medicare and hospitals help, but the NDIS changes, lack of major welfare spend, and no obvious large-scale public housing build mean the poorest – as usual – will be the hardest hit.

For big business and mining, the budget is not aggressive enough. Gas companies face a domestic reservation requirement, but the PRRT take is only revised up by $400 million despite windfall conditions caused by the Israel/United States war on Iran, and there is no major super-profits tax or serious mining rent reform.

The New Politics verdict

The 2026 budget is:

• A good start on housing tax fairness, but it’s still nowhere what’s needed to truly transform the idea of housing in the future.

• Weak on poverty issues, social services, public housing, mining taxation and disability support.

• Still far too generous to the business, mining and defence sectors.

• Gives working people something, but not enough and not now.

• Removes one picket from that long white fence of Howard government neoliberal orthodoxy, but mainly keeps it intact, and is tinkering at the edges.

Generally, it moves away from the cautious Labor budgets that we’ve seen since 2022, but it’s still too timid on the scale of inequality, housing stress, and standing up to corporate power and vested interests in Australia.

On Tuesday night, Treasurer Jim Chalmers will deliver what is being regarded as one of the most important federal Budgets in many years, promising action on housing affordability, productivity, cost-of-living pressures and long-awaited tax reform.

Of course, we’ll have to wait to see whether this will be the case or not, but behind all of this talk about “structural repair” and “reprioritisation” lays a deeper political issue: after four years of caution, hesitation and carefully managed expectations, is the Albanese government finally prepared to confront the vested interests that have distorted the Australian economy and worked against too many people for far too long, or is this another round of choreography designed to look “transformative” without actually changing very much at all?

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has spent most his time in office acquiescing to many powerful groups in Australia. For example, there was great debate about the introduction of a 25 per cent gas exports tax, only for Albanese to rule it out after pressure from the resources sector.

To support Albanese’s position, Chalmers has indicated that the petroleum resources rent tax has raised additional revenue in this financial year, so there’s no need to worry about taxing gas exports at an appropriate rate. But Chalmers is trying to be too clever, and not even by half: yes, the revenue PRRT has increased from $1.41 billion, to $1.5 billion, but a gas exports tax – even if it fully replaced the PRRT – would raise around $17 billion per year, a sum that’s 188 times greater than the additional revenue Chalmers has claimed. This is the price the public pays – $17 billion in this case – when governments pander to the vested interests in Australia.

For well over a decade, the major parties – if we can still call the Liberal Party a “major party” – have avoided the serious reform of negative gearing, capital gains concessions and the massive wealth accumulations gained through property, despite the mounting economic and social evidence that shows how the existing system overwhelmingly benefits older asset holders while locking younger Australians out of home ownership.

Everyone seems to know about this: Labor, Liberal, Treasury, most economists. Yet governments continue treating even the mildest reforms as political kryptonite, terrified of stirring up yet another scare campaign from the property industry, the mainstream media and the opposition parties who defend a system of intergenerational protectionism that makes millennials and Gen Z pay for the largesse of the older and already wealthy propertied class. This is not to pit different generations against each other but the reality is that is unsustainable economically and socially – and politically.

The government’s language in the lead up to the Budget suggests that something will change, but many governments over the past 30 years or so have perfected the art of leading the “bold conversations” before the Budget that somehow end up in mouse talk, modest adjustments, a raft of review panels and carefully diluted compromises, once the final decisions are made.

The Housing Australia Future Fund is an excellent example of this – after much parliamentary debate, political grandstanding and delay, it was introduced in late 2023, 18 months after the Albanese government was first elected in May 2022. As of May 2026, just 889 dwellings have been completed: only 889, in four years of office; or an average of one dwelling per 17 suburbs across Australia. Whichever way it’s calculated or viewed, this is a pathetic number.

Sure, there are a further 9,500 currently under construction and 55,000 social and affordable homes are due to be completed by mid-2029 – but it’s around 500,000 dwellings short of where it needs to be, and that’s according to the government’s National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. There was a “bold conversation” in the lead-up to the 2022 federal election but, on housing at least, the strong words have been matched up with very weak action.

The bigger contradiction here is that governments talk endlessly about productivity and fairness – or in the case of the Prime Minister, “no one left behind” – while preserving the tax structures that overwhelmingly reward the wealth class and speculators more than work itself. A salary is for mugs: the real support from government goes to the people whose real work is deciding the best time to sell a property to maximise the profit, or at which point rents should be raised on a working and struggling family.

Will any of these areas be addressed in Tuesday night’s Budget? Will the Labor Party remember the people who brought it into office in 2022, and returned it again in 2025 with the greatest majority a government has ever held in the lower house? The Labor Platform can’t just be a document that Albanese uses for his bedtime reading at The Lodge, as a reminder of yesteryear and the possibilities that can exist for a progressive government; it’s something that has to be lived and breathed by the entire Labor Caucus.

If Albanese still holds these core Labor beliefs of “no one left behind” and has simply been waiting for the “right time” to fully introduce them, then this is the time. Otherwise, no one left behind will just become a football-type slogan and that’s used ironically against the Labor Party, in the same way the “honest John” moniker was used against former Prime Minister John Howard, when he was anything but.

The point is that there probably never ever will be a greater time for the introduction of a true Labor agenda within federal Parliament. The early signs, however, are not good – Chalmers promising “spending restraint” on the eve of the Budget, including a $37 billion cutback for the NDIS over four years – but if Labor genuinely wants to claim a mandate for reform after its substantial 2025 election victory, then this Budget will determine whether it intends to start governing differently – and that would be about time – or just continue with the business as usual approach and manage the continuing divides within the Australian community slightly more softly and less savagely than its conservative opponents.