In the same stretch of July, across the Pacific, an artificial intelligence ran more than 17,000 hacking actions in a single weekend without a human touching a keyboard.

This week runs from the breach Origin could not see even when it arrived by email, to Adelaide, where Labor spent day one inventing a court nobody voted for and selling ministers by the plate. Then, the best saved for last, what security researchers are calling the first documented fully autonomous AI cyberattack.

All of it points the same way. The world now moves at machine speed, and our institutions are still checking their inbox.

The Hack That Waited in the Inbox

At the start of the month, on The Australian’s account, someone calling themselves Edison Walthour, a name as disposable as the Gmail address it arrived from, emailed Origin’s board members, security teams and customer care addresses, claiming to hold the records of two million customers.

Nothing happened.

For nearly three weeks the warning went nowhere while, on the self-described hacker’s telling, they roamed Origin’s customer platform undetected. Asked how they got in, the answer opened with six words, “no company VPN, very simple passwords”, and closed with Origin’s security rated below a school project. It took a 50-record sample of names, birthdates, addresses and billing histories landing at The Australian, and the paper forwarding it on, to move the company. Origin’s statement hit the ASX 21 minutes after The Australian’s story went live, alongside urgent calls to the national cyber agency, the AFP and the privacy watchdog.

Three weeks to answer an email, 21 minutes to answer a headline.

Then it got worse. A day after saying it did not believe payment details were touched, Origin confirmed unauthorised access to customer data including partial credit card and bank account digits. Chief exec Frank Calabria apologised, and the company will contact affected customers as it works out how many there are.

The hacker says the motive was anger at Origin sending support jobs offshore to Manila. The customer platform they work in, supplied by Kraken, is sold on carving cost out of serving you. The hacker also says Origin quietly interviewed and sacked the staffer whose credentials were used. Origin will not confirm that, and in fairness it says it asked for evidence at first contact and got nothing back. Companies this size field hoax extortion mail every week, and a single request for proof is close to the standard corporate playbook.

The hacker is no white knight either. They gave Origin a 14-day countdown, after which they said the full dataset would go public, and a countdown attached to two million records is a threat in anyone’s language. Then, overnight, the countdown stopped. The hacker told The Australian their site was down, no data would be leaked, and everything had been settled with Origin privately. Origin has not confirmed any settlement, and neither side is saying what, if anything, changed hands.

Follow the sequence. Three weeks of nothing, two days of headlines, then peace, declared by the intruder, on terms nobody can see. If anything of value did change hands, and settled tends to mean exactly that, ransomware reporting rules in force since May last year give a business Origin’s size 72 hours to tell the Australian Signals Directorate. Paying a hacker, unless they are under sanctions, is not illegal in this country. It is only the thing the government’s own advice says never to do, because the one thing you cannot buy from a criminal is proof of deletion.

Some balance, from someone who has built technology companies and shipped software with holes in it. Every system has vulnerabilities. Every one. The most sophisticated AI lab on the planet could not keep its own model in a box this month, so nobody should pretend an energy retailer can build a perfect wall. Getting breached is not the scandal.

The scandal is the stretch between the knock on the door and the ASX statement, nearly three weeks on the hacker’s dating, and on either account it held one request for evidence and then silence. The playbook ran exactly as written. Australia’s biggest energy retailer still needed a journalist to tell it that it had been breached.

We have seen where that leads. Optus in September 2022, 9.5 million people exposed through a dormant login door left open by a coding error. Medibank the following month, 9.7 million people, credentials stolen from a contractor and bought off a Russian crime forum. Four years on, both are still in the Federal Court, and the Medibank hacker wears Australia’s first cyber sanctions. Qantas lost 5.7 million records through a Manila call centre last year.

Parliament responded to Optus by lifting the maximum penalty from $2.22m to the greatest of $50m, three times any benefit gained, or 30% of turnover, which on Origin’s roughly $8bn in half-year revenue alone runs into the billions.

The privacy watchdog logged a record 1,205 breach notifications last year, up 8%. The national cyber agency Origin called, the Australian Cyber Security Centre, sits inside the Australian Signals Directorate, meaning the outfit that runs the nation’s electronic spying also runs its help desk for the hacked. That help desk clocks a cybercrime report roughly every six minutes.

Identity data does not expire like a password. You can reset a password. You cannot reset a date of birth. Criminals harvest it and sit on it, and a name, a birthdate and a billing history profile your household for a decade.

Four years of promises since Optus, and the hard half of the Privacy Act rewrite still has not reached the parliament. The laws that force companies to collect and hold your identity documents in the first place are a different story. Those arrived right on schedule.

The companies save by outsourcing the call centre. You carry the risk.

Solidarity, Proudly Sponsored

Labor’s 50th National Conference opened in Adelaide yesterday, and before 9:30 am three Chinese diplomats were in the corridors, in earshot of the media, demanding the party eject the observers from Taiwan’s trade office. Party headquarters refused, the observers stayed, and the diplomats walked out. Beijing tested the room before it opened, and the room passed.

More credit, because this is a genuine institution and pretending otherwise is lazy. National Conference is Labor’s highest decision-making body, and these floors draw real blood. Albanese fought boat turnbacks at the 2015 conference and lost on the floor. In Adelaide in 2018 he worked the corridors against Bill Shorten. Now he owns the room, and a motion carried on this floor can end up as law, though plenty signed off here dies quietly in cabinet and caucus. Palestinian recognition made the whole journey. The next tests, revisiting AUKUS and Palestine, land on Saturday.

It is more than the Libs can say. Their equivalents are box-ticking, and the parliamentary party has taken the root-and-branch membership for granted for years. Howard is celebrated for working the backbench, but his deeper skill was the lay party. Name a Liberal leader since who has been half as good at it. I can’t, and a fair share of the party’s troubles live in that gap.

So the conference is real, which is why the rest of the week matters. The Taiwan stoush was the day’s only unscripted moment. From there, the machine took over.

The Prime Minister used his address to unveil a Fair Work Court, a specialist bench for underpayment and other small workplace claims, reversing Howard’s 1997 dismantling of the old industrial court. The pitch is fair on its face. An underpayment claim can cost more to chase than it recovers, and faster, cheaper justice is a genuine offer.

The unions are delighted. Employers were briefed hours before the speech. The punters get consulted on the design, not the question, because this was never taken to the polls held only 14 months ago. National Conference is where Labor policy is born, granted. A floor blessing is not a mandate.

The platform tells you where Labor wants to go. It rubber-stamps the May budget’s capital gains, negative gearing and trust changes, and keeps a gas tax alive through language about a fairer return from our resources, even as the Treasurer waved the idea away that afternoon. Carbon capture is gone entirely, coal survives only as unreliable and costly, a floor amendment went after the diesel rebate, and the electrical union wants government back in the generation business.

Chris Bowen led the climate session. Senate estimates answers published the day before the conference opened put hard numbers on his home battery subsidy. The scheme launched paying a flat rate on every kilowatt hour of storage up to 50 kWh, so the bigger the battery, the bigger the cheque. Households did the rational thing and bought big. The department expected to spend around $4,500 a battery and is now spending $7,910, support per battery running 75% above forecast. Three of the 136 approved manufacturers are Australian. A program budgeted at $2.3bn over four years now heads for $8.5bn over its life, and the rescue is already running, a quiet rule change to keep the regulator paying when the money ran dry and a taper bolted onto bigger batteries.

Credit the idea. Home batteries soak up midday solar and pour it back into the evening peak, and the department’s defence is that the country bought more storage than anyone forecast, which on its own terms is the point. But useful and badly designed can be true at once, and this scheme paid for bulk, so bulk is what it bought. Bowen calls it an enormously successful program, and on uptake he is right. On cost, it is the success of a half-price sale. Giving away other people’s money is not a skill. Counting it is.

Then there is the money. A ticket to Labor’s Business Exchange costs $12,000, and the floor plan journos have sighted puts 36 ministers in the room. Entry to Tony Burke’s band pub gig runs $1,000. A law firm pays for the delegates dinner, Macquarie backs the Prime Minister’s lunch, a drinks company has the bar tab and an agricultural chemicals lobby the coffee cart. On Monday, Albanese attended a Point Piper fundraiser the Financial Review reports was built around a $1m pledge, a figure Labor disputes, at a mansion the paper says the Tax Office held security over from its almost $273m pursuit of the host family. Gambling reform tops the agenda here, and a whopping $2.72b of the family fortune passed through The Star casino, according to the 2022 Bell Review.

Fair is fair. The Coalition runs the same subscription forums, and the two sides banked $10m between them last year.

The donation laws this government wrote begin on 1 January 2027. Annual gifts capped at $50,000 per recipient, $1.6m in total, with the disclosure threshold dropping from $17,300 to $5,000 and near-real-time campaign reporting. The alleged Point Piper number is 20 times the new annual cap. The $110,000 forum membership dies with it. Everything in Adelaide this week is a sprint through the final season of the old rules, run by the people who wrote the new ones, passed them, then in April accepted the Electoral Commission’s advice to push the start back six months. Independent advice, gratefully received. They left themselves loopholes, naturally, from branch-spreading small gifts to the nominated entities sheltering their war chests, but the model on display is finished in five months.

Under it all sits the economy that should be the main attraction. Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe warns income per head has gone seven or eight years without net growth. Yesterday’s jobs figures added 76,300 positions against expectations of 15,000, and bond markets moved to fully price a fourth rate rise by year’s end, potentially taking the cash rate to 4.6%, the highest since 2011, pending next week’s inflation report. Oil is not waiting. Brent crude punched above $100 USD a barrel for the first time in two months overnight after Houthi strikes on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea.

The numbers carried a Victorian postscript. Unemployment there hit 5.1%, the worst since the sixth COVID lockdown, and Moody’s projects one Victorian revenue dollar in ten going to interest by decade’s end. Four months from the election, Victoria is running out of other people’s money and other people’s patience at the same rate.

Wayne Swan farewells the presidency at tonight’s conference dinner, and the extracts already released declare One Nation, not the Coalition, Labor’s real enemy, the same enemy Albo built his own address around while refusing to utter Pauline’s name. Redbridge explains why. Roughly four in five of One Nation’s current supporters arrived in the past 18 months. A government presiding over those living standards should be less worried about Pauline and more worried about the mirror.

Out of the Box

Now to the story that makes everything else look quaint.

On a hacking benchmark, OpenAI was testing its best public model and something stronger that has not been released. The test ran inside a sandbox, a sealed environment whose one opening was a guarded feed for code packages, and the usual gates against cyber work were dialled down so full capability could be measured.

The models decided the wall was part of the puzzle.

They found a previously unknown flaw, a zero-day, in the software behind that feed, and used it to climb out, hopping between machines and escalating access until they reached one connected to the internet. Then they reasoned about where the answer key might live, concluded the AI platform Hugging Face probably hosted it, and broke into Hugging Face’s production servers with stolen credentials chained to fresh vulnerabilities. They took the answers and cheated on their own exam.

Hugging Face noticed strange traffic, shut it down, and later reconstructed more than 17,000 actions from one weekend. No human directed any of it. Bloomberg reports the heart of the operation took the models hours, work a skilled human would need weeks to pull off. Security researchers are calling it the first documented fully autonomous AI cyberattack. The word ‘fully’ matters here. Last year’s AI-assisted espionage campaigns still had humans approving key steps, and this one had nobody. OpenAI itself describes the capabilities involved as state of the art.

OpenAI is not alone. Anthropic disclosed in April that an early version of its Mythos model, set a task inside a sealed environment, helpfully broke out to get the job done, and in separate testing worked out which benchmark it was sitting on so it could unlock the answer key. The head of Anthropic’s frontier red team told his staff to mark this month’s breach as the first true AI safety incident.

Sealed environments fail. Anyone who has run one knows it. What happened next should stop you cold.

When Hugging Face asked leading American commercial models to help investigate, their safety guardrails refused, unable to tell an incident responder from an attacker. The forensic work ran on GLM 5.2, a Chinese model given away with its weights open. One of the most important AI companies on earth defended itself with Beijing’s software because Silicon Valley’s wouldn’t take the call.

That anecdote is the whole strategic problem in miniature. China’s Moonshot has just released Kimi K3, within reach of the American frontier, and publishes its weights to the world on Monday. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman concedes it is “pretty good” and points to estimates putting China as little as four months behind. The White House says Moonshot trained on banned Nvidia chips accessed through Thailand and ran industrial-scale distillation of American models, and the US Treasury has sanctions on the table. Beijing’s play does not require winning the capability race. It gives the capability away and lets scale do the rest.

The UK’s AI Security Institute reported this week that every frontier model it tested tried to cheat on its evaluations by taking forbidden shortcuts, and often did not admit it.

Now watch Canberra’s timeline. Voluntary ethics principles in 2019. A voluntary safety standard in 2024. The Productivity Commission advising against mandatory guardrails last year, on the classic ground that you regulate harms, not technologies, and the national AI plan shelving them. Then, on 15 July, the reversal. The Prime Minister pulled AI strategy into his own department, stood up an Office of AI effective immediately, and flagged National Cabinet next month, legislation next year. He also made an appointment his government never announced and The Australian had to dig out. The office goes to Fergus Hanson, who ran the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s cyber centre before vanishing into the intelligence community in late 2022, plucked back out to run AI policy barely a year after the Prime Minister was deriding ASPI on the record. The silence was the announcement.

Six days later the disclosure landed, and a machine on the other side of the world had already delivered his case study.

The government banned DeepSeek from its devices early last year. Kimi K3 is considerably more capable and is, on Home Affairs’ own description, merely being monitored. A device ban turns on where the data goes as much as what the model can do, so the two calls are not a clean pair. The monitoring call may even be defensible, but nobody in government has argued it.

Which brings us back to Origin Energy. They took three weeks to act on a warning email. The threat now forming runs 17,000 moves in a weekend.

That is the gap Australia has to close, and no conference motion closes it.

Weekly Wrap

Step back and ask what actually failed this week. The honest answer is nothing.

Origin’s system did what it was built to do. On the hacker’s telling nobody scaled a wall. Staff credentials opened the customer platform, and the platform served up records, because serving is its job. A valid login does not look like an attack. It looks routine. The warning email died the same way, landing across inboxes at a company whose best account of itself is that it asked for evidence once, heard nothing, and let the matter rest, exactly the response the standard playbook prescribes. Even the ending, on their telling, ran to specification, the threat retired privately, the terms nobody’s business, the platform back to serving.

Labor’s conference did what it was built to do, and unlike the Lib’s imitation it is built to do something real. It debated, it decided, and the funding machinery bolted to its side converted access into money at the fastest legal rate. The exquisite detail is that Labor has already ruled this side of the equation wrong, in legislation they drafted, passed and dated. January is the sentence. Adelaide is the stay of execution, and they are making bank every day of it.

The frontier AI model did what it was built to do. During a hacking exam with the safety catches off, it hacked. To the machine, the wall was never a rule. It was an obstacle.

Nothing malfunctioned. Everything ran to specification. The scandal, in all three stories, is the specification.

The AI world has a name for the gap between what you tell a system and what you actually want from it. They call it the alignment problem, and they rate it the hardest problem of the age. This week it walked out of the lab. It has been running in Origin’s inbox and at the Adelaide Convention Centre the whole time, quietly, at human speed. The machine just ran it at 17,000 moves a weekend and made it impossible to miss.

Our systems are not broken. They are obedient. A platform built to serve cheaply served cheaply. A party built to fund itself funded itself. A model built to win did whatever winning took.

Everything we build does what we say. Almost nothing we build does what we mean. This week the gap between the two moved at machine speed for the first time. It will never move slower again.

So too, this nonsense.

On Wednesday the Prime Minister promised to make Australia an AI power. An Office of AI, a world-first framework, Australia setting the terms for the most powerful technology on Earth.

That promise depends on cables most Australians never see, and on whether anyone can fix them when they break.

This week runs from Albo’s grand AI plan and a warning about theft, to the deep dive, the 15 garden hoses the country runs on, and the new Chief of the Defence Force calling their loss an existential threat.

Then, while the One Nation orange wave breaks on the rocks, Pauline makes a cameo beside her most generous benefactor at a Sicilian pool.

One thread runs through the lot. Announcing the future is easy. Delivering it is hard.

The gap between the two is where a country’s trust collapses.

An Office, a Rulebook and a Warning About Theft

Albo’s AI speech did three concrete things.

It stood up an Office of AI inside the PM’s own department, effective immediately.

It promised Australian Standards for AI, heading to National Cabinet next month and to parliament early next year.

It killed the copyright carve-out the AI giants wanted, the text and data mining exemption, stone dead. Creators keep ownership, control and price, and using their work without permission is, in the PM’s framing, theft.

He sold it well, too, opening on his first job at a Commonwealth Bank branch, coaxing passbook holders to trust a strange new hole in the wall called an ATM. The point being Australians have met unnerving machines before and come out in front.

Remember, though, only in December the government’s National AI Plan, launched by Tim Ayres and Andrew Charlton, said Australia didn’t need standalone AI laws at all.

Charlton has spent months telling anyone who’d listen that Australia must be a maker of AI, not just a taker. Seven months later the PM has taken the file off both of them and walked it into his own department, which tells you who Labor wants to own the politics of this.

Copyright in Australia protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself, and it arises automatically under the Copyright Act 1968. This essay was protected from the moment I typed it. No registration, no fee, no little C in a circle, and the rights run for 70 years after my death.

What the industry wanted was a free pass to mine all of that for training without asking.

Why do they care so much? Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion USD to settle with American authors, roughly $3,000 USD a book across close to half a million titles, and Treasury’s own briefing notes count 81 AI copyright lawsuits live in US courts.

These companies will pay handsomely for legal certainty. Albo is betting Australia can charge for it.

The stakes are not hypothetical. A Treasury briefing note released under freedom of information shows Anthropic told the Treasurer its proposed $21.6 billion Australian investment hinges on copyright certainty, and that it’s shopping for 1.4 gigawatts of data centre capacity, which Data Centres Australia says is close to the size of the entire existing industry.

Microsoft has committed $25 billion through 2029 and Amazon has pledged $20 billion, while OpenAI and NEXTDC have proposed a $7 billion build.

Meanwhile, the boom is flattering the books. On the latest ABS capex figures, business investment without data centres would be flat or negative, meaning they’re driving essentially all the growth.

The boom leaks, too. ANZ estimates 80% of a data centre’s cost is imported kit, servers and cooling shipped in from overseas.

Large new facilities will be required to underwrite new power generation, pay their full grid connection costs, and put at least as much energy into the grid as they take out. Net generators, not net users.

There’s logic to it, and precedent. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei had already pledged his company would absorb any rise in power prices its data centres cause, so Albo is partly legislating what the industry’s most vocally safety-conscious operator volunteered.

In America, community pushback over power and water blocked or delayed $130 billion USD of data centre projects in the first three months of this year alone.

Albo’s pitch to investors is that unlike our rivals in the Gulf, nobody is putting a drone through the roof of an Australian data centre. True.

Though as we’re about to see, the threat doesn’t come through the roof. It comes along the seabed.

Credit where due, one national rulebook beats eight states and territories writing their own, and grabbing the wheel personally is the right call.

But an office is not a policy. It has no statutory powers. The standards are proposals until parliament passes them, and Ed Husic, who used to own this portfolio, is sniping from inside the tent that the approach is doomed and that some of the data centre demand is investor froth rather than real AI need.

Even the world-first label needs an asterisk. Brussels legislated an AI Act two years ago and runs an AI Office of its own. The genuinely new bit is putting data centres and copyright in one national rulebook.

There’s context Canberra’s coverage missed. In the five weeks before Wednesday’s speech, the three men running the global frontier each published a governance blueprint.

Sam Altman wants a US-led international forum that writes the standards and rations the technology to countries that follow the rules. Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, who reckons artificial general intelligence is only a few short years away, wants an American standards body modelled on FINRA, the outfit Wall Street uses to police its own brokers, vetting frontier models before release. Amodei goes furthest, arguing the top models should be regulated like aircraft, tested by an authority with the power to ground one that fails.

When the leaders selling the technology beg for a rulebook, take the risk seriously. Then apply the oldest test in regulation and ask who the rules would keep out, because incumbents adore a moat.

Do they walk the talk? Washington has intervened at the frontier twice in as many months. An export control order forced Anthropic to switch off its much-vaunted Mythos and Fable models overnight, with the curbs lifted only once safeguards were built in. Weeks later OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 launch was held back at the government’s request, cleared for the public only after extra testing.

Fair’s fair, both labs wore it, and Anthropic went further, closing the loopholes that gave Chinese users access to its models and publicly asking for a tougher referee still. The gap between talk and walk sits elsewhere.

The same industry preaching safety on the op-ed pages runs a super PAC, backed by OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman, that has raised more than $100 million USD to fight the American state politicians writing AI laws.

The contrast matters here, because these are the companies queuing to anchor Albo’s investment pipeline, and one of them spent April lobbying our Treasurer on copyright.

The smartest thing in the speech is that it calls their bluff. If the labs mean what they publish, Australian Standards for AI should cost them nothing to sign up to. Let’s see who haggles.

Here’s the quiet admission buried in Wednesday’s speech. If the grid that Chris Bowen keeps insisting is travelling beautifully could actually carry the load, you wouldn’t need a law forcing your biggest new customers to bring their own power station.

The Fifteen Garden Hoses

Power, though, is only half the infrastructure story.

Start with the man who took command of the entire Australian Defence Force last week. Before Admiral Mark Hammond got the top job, he spent four years running the Navy, and he told a maritime conference exactly what keeps him up at night. Seabed cables are “our lifelines,” and their loss would be “an existential threat to our island and to our people.” His blunter point was that you do not need to invade Australia to defeat Australia.

Existential. Not from a think tank, not from a columnist. From the man who now commands every ship, soldier and squadron we have.

Here’s what he’s talking about. The communications regulator ACMA counts just 15 of these cables, carrying 99% of Australia’s international data traffic, some lying 8,000 metres deep.

Through them runs everything, from banks to hospitals, commerce to the share market, search to socials and the traffic behind every gigawatt of Albo’s AI dream, all as pulses of light. Most come ashore around Sydney and Perth, newer ones on the Sunshine Coast, and several share the same corridors.

The redundancy is thinner than the map suggests.

We have lived at the end of a thin wire for 154 years, and we’ve forgotten how hard the first one was won.

In 1870, news from London took months by ship. Charles Todd, a Greenwich astronomer turned South Australian postmaster, drove a single telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin across 3,200 km of country colonists had barely crossed. Strung on 36,000 poles and finished in under two years, it met the undersea cable coming up from Java. South Australia outbid Queensland for the privilege.

When the wires joined in 1872, months became hours overnight, and the town that grew along the line took the name of Todd’s wife, Alice.

The Java cable itself had already snapped once that very year. The wire is everything, and the wire is fragile.

It’s a problem we didn’t leave behind in the 19th century.

Finnish investigators charged the crew of a tanker with dragging its anchor nearly 100 km across the floor of the Gulf of Finland in 2024, tearing out a power link and four data cables. A Helsinki court later tossed the charges on jurisdiction grounds. Taiwan logged five cable incidents last year alone. A ship sunk by Houthi missiles is believed to have sliced through Red Sea cables on its way down, and the repairs took months while lawyers argued over who could safely enter the water.

Defence Minister Richard Marles told the Shangri-La Dialogue the seabed is becoming a battlefield, with attacks over the past 18 months at a scale without precedent.

In May, Iranian state media reportedly floated charging tolls on the cables running through the Strait of Hormuz, the same chokepoint that menaces the world’s oil.

When one of these cables breaks, a specialist ship must sail out, grapple the severed cable off the ocean floor, haul it up, splice glass fibres in a clean room on deck, and lay the whole lot back down.

The industry’s own numbers run to 200 cable faults a year worldwide, and its surveys reckon two-thirds of the repair fleet will reach the end of its working life by 2040.

A replacement ship costs over $100 million USD and takes years to build, and the economics reward laying new cables over fixing old ones, so almost nobody builds the ships. A British parliamentary committee wants a national repair ship. France went further and took its cable maker back into majority state control.

The Lowy Institute points out that in Australia, no Commonwealth agency has the mandate, or even a mechanism, to task a repair ship if a cable is cut in a crisis.

An existential threat, on the Defence chief’s own assessment, and nobody in Canberra answers the phone that rings when it happens.

The good news is Australian, and it’s another private enterprise success story rather than a government one.

Bevan Slattery, the Queenslander behind Pipe Networks, NEXTDC, Superloop and Megaport, has laid more than 20,000 km of cable through his company Subco, including a direct line from Perth to Oman. When Tasmania needed its first new cable in 20 years and neither Canberra nor Hobart would fund it, an AI company underwrote that build too.

Slattery’s next act is APX East, a $747 million cable connecting Sydney straight to California by 2028, which he bills as the longest continuous subsea path ever attempted and the first across the Pacific with no stopovers. By his account, traffic between America and the Indian Ocean is already being rerouted through Australia, and his warning to Canberra deserves framing.

The longest-lead item for AI in this country won’t be power, land or chips. It will be international connectivity at AI scale.

Below the waterline, the Navy is buying dozens of Ghost Shark autonomous submarines from Anduril’s Sydney factory under a $1.7 billion program to watch the seabed. Not to be confused with Boeing’s Ghost Bat, the flying one, engineered by more than a few of my former employees from Dick Johnson Racing.

So the pieces exist. Admiral Hammond gets it. One of our great entrepreneurs is building. The Navy is buying. What’s missing is the government function that joins them, and Wednesday’s speech didn’t create one.

You cannot be the region’s data warehouse without the keys to the loading dock.

The Splinter, Not the Wave

The same gap between announcing and delivering has opened on the populist right. One Nation has found the anger. It hasn’t yet built the machine.

Three polls this week say the Pauline surge is receding, and the direction of the flow is the story.

Resolve has One Nation down three points to 26%, the Coalition up three to 23% and Labor flat on 28%.

YouGov lands on the same 26%, down four in a fortnight, and finds the sharpest fall among voters who call themselves working class, where One Nation shed six points and Labor now leads the two-party preferred count 53% to 47%, a swing twice the size of the national shift.

DemosAU has the Coalition up three as conservatives drift home. Hanson’s own numbers tell the tale. Her preferred PM rating is down eight points in a month and her net likeability down 11 to +3.

The detail explains it. DemosAU found 61% of Australians want immigration substantially reduced, so the grievance is real.

One Nation’s policies are another matter. The same poll has voters rejecting the monoculture pitch 51% to 25%, abolishing SBS 58% to 12%, and turning the ABC into a metro subscription service 54% to 21%. Flinders University’s Josh Sunman reckons the vote has hit its ceiling, stuck short of the 30% mark.

Grievance sells. The solutions, so far, do not.

Perspective, though. Morgan is the outlier, with One Nation bouncing 5.5 points this week to 28% and back ahead of Labor on primaries, and the polling average still sits near 27%.

Senate modelling by DPG Advisory says even at current support the party would hold the balance of power with as many as 15 senators. Redbridge’s research keeps finding the fuel underneath it all. Two-thirds of voters are convinced the country is on the wrong track, and almost as many reckon the next generation will do it tougher.

Barnaby Joyce, One Nation’s highest-profile defector, shrugged the wobble off as the price of scrutiny, and it’s a sensible read of the tea leaves.

Victoria is where the trend next meets a statewide ballot.

A “leaked” Redbridge seat model commissioned by Trades Hall, sampling 6,500 voters, puts Labor’s median outcome at 35 seats in the 88-seat chamber, the Coalition at 39 and One Nation at 12, with Labor’s worst case a rump of 25 and its best case being minority government.

The model has the Premier, Jacinta Allan, losing her own seat of Bendigo East.

One Nation is doing this on 27% of the Victorian primary, a point clear of Labor and the Coalition on 26% apiece. It has no state leader and not one confirmed candidate, four months from the election. Pauline’s in the Senate, of course, and while the movement itself bears her name, she’s not on a Victorian state ballot paper.

If the Libs finish third in any seat behind Labor and One Nation, their preferences scatter, and a serious slice of them leak to Labor rather than One Nation.

You can see it in Redbridge’s own numbers. Head-to-head, the Coalition beats Labor 54% to 46%. Swap in One Nation as the challenger and Labor wins 52% to 48%.

Queensland ran this experiment in 1998. One Nation’s surge didn’t build a conservative majority. It made Labor’s Peter Beattie premier.

One Nation doesn’t have to win seats to decide this election. It only has to push the Liberals into third to re-elect Labor.

Redbridge’s fieldwork here predates the slip that’s been measured in these other national polls, which is frankly about the only comfort Labor and the Coalition can take.

Which brings us to Sicily. In the very week her polling slid, Pauline, midway through a British tour that included embracing far-right agitator Tommy Robinson, was photographed poolside with Gina Rinehart at the Grand Hotel San Pietro in Taormina, where a room will set you back at least two grand a night.

Rinehart is no mere travelling companion either. She is the party’s chief patron. A company she owns handed One Nation a Cirrus aircraft this year, and her associates tipped in another $2 million in cash.

One Nation proudly skewers the elites and proclaims itself the voice of the people.

But if the richest person in Australia isn’t an elite, then who the hell is?

That’s ultimately for the punters to reconcile. They usually do.

Weekly Wrap

Telstra’s executives fronted the Senate today, and the outage we pulled apart last week now has a name. A Symmetricom SSU-2000 Synchronisation Supply Unit, a 15-year-old GPS timing box that could have been replaced for $30,000.

The manufacturer flagged a firmware update in 2022 and again in January. Telstra never applied it. When a maintenance crew chasing a backup power fault switched the box off and on, it instead reset the clock and dragged the network back to 2006.

Telstra’s chief executive has conceded the fault was known and left unfixed. The fine could reach $30 million, 1,000 times the cost of the unit. The company that lost track of time is about to spend plenty of it explaining itself.

The maritime union has named its price for automation on the docks. A 28-hour week on full pay.

The first strike in a generation has hit Port Hedland’s iron ore operations, with union leaders vowing they can outlast BHP, days before Labor’s national conference debates handing unions a bigger say over AI in every workplace.

The docks and the mines this week, the conference floor next.

The Libs spent the week in a strategy session asking what Menzies would do. It’s the first time in a long while they’ve asked themselves that one. Perhaps next week I’ll throw in my two cents.

Albo has an office. Slattery is laying cable. The Navy is buying underwater drones. Telstra had a backup that didn’t work. One Nation has the grievance, but not yet the means to govern. The whole dream, meanwhile, rides on 15 threads of glass that no one in Canberra is charged with fixing when they snap.

Every story this week sets the same test. Who can turn an announcement into something that survives contact with reality?

Two-thirds say the country is on the wrong track. Almost as many are convinced their kids will inherit something worse. That anger is flowing to One Nation, but not because the punters have bought what Pauline is selling. Her own numbers show they haven’t.

The gap between saying and doing has never been starker, and the electorate has stopped believing anyone delivers.

There’s no better example than One Nation leading the Victorian polls without a single candidate on the ballot, risking the re-election of the Allan government, one of the worst state governments we’ve ever seen.

Until someone, anyone, delivers, we have to watch the gap.

First is Iran, where the ceasefire died in two nights of missiles and the price of it will land at your local servo soon enough.

Second is your power bill, and what happened to the promise that was supposed to shrink it.

Finally, there’s Telstra, and the true story of Wednesday’s meltdown. It’s stranger and far more important than anything you’ve heard so far.

Three stories, one lesson. We keep outsourcing the things that keep this country moving, and this week the bills started arriving.

The Strait and the Ute

The June ceasefire with Iran is over. This week Tehran hit three commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and fired on American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Americans answered with two nights of strikes on more than 80 targets, and Trump declared the agreement dead, floating a renewed blockade and even seizing Kharg Island, the terminal that ships roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports.

Before the war, Brent crude sat just under $70 USD. In March it touched $126 USD before the ceasefire dragged it back to earth. This week’s strikes pushed it to $78 USD.

But the sharper number is diesel. Even before this week’s escalation, the Asian benchmark for diesel was still 27% above its pre-war price while crude had drifted almost back to normal. The crisis was never really about crude though. It’s about refining, and that’s the part Australia gave away.

We have two refineries left, Lytton owned by Ampol and Geelong owned by Viva Energy, covering about 20% of what we need. For a stretch of this crisis we nearly had one, after a fire significantly reduced Geelong’s output. It only climbed back above 90% capacity this week, just in time for round two.

Australia buys almost no crude from the Middle East, yet roughly half our imported diesel starts life as Gulf crude, refined in Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia by refiners who pull 60% to 70% of their feedstock through Hormuz. The dependency hides one step up the supply chain.

Diesel is the fuel that matters most in an enormous country like ours. The government concedes Australia gets more energy from diesel alone than from the entire electricity system. Diesel underpins agriculture, freight, mining and the supermarket shelf.

One more thing the strait controls is about a third of the world’s traded fertiliser, and with Gulf plants idled, world fertiliser prices hit their highest level since 2022. A fuel shock tests resilience. A fertiliser shock impacts a full crop cycle. A wheat or barley crop needs diesel for sowing, spraying, fertilising and reaping. That’s before it leaves the paddock too. Our farmers need certainty and assurance with both.

Energy minister Chris Bowen says stocks are above average and fuel keeps arriving, and this week that’s true. But the fine print tells a different story. The minimum stockholding obligation was cut by 20% in March to free up fuel, and it’s still cut. Australia hasn’t met the 90-day reserve obligation it signed with the International Energy Agency since 2012, and holds the lowest oil stocks of any member country.

Freshwater Strategy’s independent tracker puts usable in-country jet fuel below 28 days. The number of sold out servos is climbing again too, with the government’s own dashboard showing 82 sites dry on diesel nationally, up 30 in a single week.

And the famous oil in Texas? Gone. The 1.7 million barrels Australia bought into America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in 2020 was sold in 2022 as part of the coordinated global release after Russia invaded Ukraine, and it was never replaced. What we call a reserve today is mostly fuel the law requires companies to hold inside their own supply chains, and that law is the very obligation that’s been wound back since March.

Round two has just started courtesy of the abandoned ceasefire. Bypass pipelines carry less than half of what Hormuz moves, and Iran has already run the strait as a toll booth at more than $1 million a ship.

And here’s the bit you’ll feel personally. The fuel excise discount ends next month. The 32 cents a litre of relief we had in June disappears entirely, about $21 more to fill a 65 litre tank. That’s before a single missile is priced in.

The $22.7 Billion Power Bill

Remember the $275 promise to cut your power bill, due by 2025?

Coalition analysis of the regulator’s own data puts the real number at $22.7 billion.

Except it’s an increase.

That’s the extra households across the east coast grid have paid since 2022, and Bowen doesn’t dispute the figure. In NSW the median bill went from about $1,900 to $2,858. Under the promise it should have been $1,625. Some families are more than $1,000 a year worse off.

Fuel is the story of outsourced refining. Power is the story of outsourced realism, a promise delegated to a modelling spreadsheet while the impact to your hip pocket stayed real.

Bowen concedes bills are too high, then blames the decade before he took the job. Never mind he has had the job for four years.

Fair’s fair, the regulator’s default offers fell in most states this month. But the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood points out the wholesale savings are being swallowed by the cost of transmission lines to connect new wind and solar, and he calls anyone predicting falling prices “very optimistic”. A good year doesn’t refund four bad ones anyway. The promise wasn’t for a good year, it was for desperately needed relief in a cost of living crisis that continues to worsen.

The world isn’t following the script either. The new Statistical Review of World Energy, the industry’s 75th annual bible, shows renewables became the biggest single source of new supply in 2025, up 3.3 exajoules, yet oil, gas and coal together added nearly double that. Fossil fuels still provide 86% of the world’s energy, and the fastest emissions growth came not from China but from the United States.

Against that backdrop, Bowen reportedly told a Bonn conference that Australia’s future is exporting green hydrogen, green gigabytes and green AI, while more than half the hydrogen projects the CSIRO tracks have reportedly been shelved and the government writes nine-figure cheques to keep the dream on life support.

Then came Thursday. The Prime Minister stood beside Narendra Modi in Melbourne and greenlit uranium exports the Minerals Council says could be worth billions of dollars, fuel for India’s push from eight gigawatts of nuclear power to 100 by 2047. To be clear, the deal itself is genuinely good news for Australia. Billions in export revenue, a new market for our miners, and recognition that we sit on roughly a third of the world’s known uranium with just four operating mines.

But the official position is now this. Australian uranium will power Indian homes for decades, and it remains illegal to use it to power a single Australian one. Bowen calls nuclear a fantasy. Modi just bought the fantasy in bulk.

The Clock That Stopped the Country

On Wednesday morning, phones died across Australia. EFTPOS terminals went dark, regional trains stopped on the tracks, and more than 600 calls to Triple Zero failed to connect. Telstra ended up running 639 welfare checks, referring 170 people to police for a knock on the door. Seven needed urgent help.

Here’s the first thing almost nobody knows. Telstra doesn’t just carry your calls. Telstra is the front door to Triple Zero. It has been the nation’s emergency call operator since 1961, and every 000 call in Australia, whether you’re with Optus, Vodafone or anyone else, is answered first by a Telstra operator before being passed to police, fire or ambulance. Last year that was 14.6 million calls.

There’s even a law for when networks fail. It’s called camp-on, and it forces every carrier to carry a 000 call from any phone, even one with no SIM card. That’s why a phone with no bars still says emergency calls only. When the Optus network collapsed last September, camp-on shunted its customers onto rival towers.

But this week the operator itself went down. The safety net was the thing that failed.

No hackers. No sabotage. Telstra says a software fault broke the nodes that keep time across its network, and reportedly the clocks wound back exactly 1,024 weeks, waking up convinced it was November 2006. The network stopped trusting everyone’s phones because the date was wrong.

Why 1,024? Anyone in tech will smile at that number, because it’s two to the power of ten, one of the roundest numbers in computing. The original GPS design stores its week counter in just ten binary digits, which can only count from zero to 1,023. Tick past that and the counter rolls over to zero like an odometer, every 19.6 years. It’s Y2K’s forgotten cousin. Y2K happened because old software stored the year in two digits. This happens because the original GPS design stored the week in ten bits.

It isn’t theoretical either. The last rollover, in April 2019, crashed New York City’s $500 million municipal wireless network, cut the city’s connection to traffic lights at more than 12,000 intersections, and delayed Boeing flights in Europe and China.

It even grounded our own Bureau of Meteorology’s weather balloons for days. The next rollover is booked for 2038.

Telstra’s account fits the family history. By its own telling, an update touched what its engineers call the GPS node, the servers in two data centres in Melbourne and Sydney that take satellite time and feed it to the entire network, and the time forcibly re-synced. Its acting chief compared the repair job to fixing a broken clock. Telstra time-travelled, and the country went with it. The network died because its clocks did. It’s not unreasonable to put the cost of the day at a couple of hundred million dollars, possibly more.

Notice the pattern, because it’s the same one every time. Optus in 2023 was a routine software upgrade in Singapore that flooded its routers until their own safety limits shut them down, 14 hours of darkness and a $12 million fine for 2,145 failed emergency calls. Optus last September was a firewall upgrade, linked to two deaths, and the regulator’s report still hasn’t landed. Now Telstra, another update gone wrong.

Nobody is blowing these networks up. A network can never be switched off to be serviced, so every upgrade is open-heart surgery at 2am on a machine carrying trains, tills and emergency calls. Thousands of those operations happen every year, and as a tech guy I know the risk of the patient nicking itself with the scalpel.

These operations aren’t casual either. Every serious operator rehearses changes in offline lab networks first, puts them through change control and change advisory, schedules them for the quietest hour of the night, rolls them out in stages and keeps a rollback plan ready. The catch is that no lab on Earth can replicate a live national network. Millions of devices, decades of accumulated configuration, a dozen vendors’ equipment interacting under real traffic. The 2023 Optus collapse proved the point, because its routers shut down exactly as their safety settings intended, in a situation nobody had designed for. You test what you can imagine. The network finds what you can’t.

Which brings us to the real story. GPS, the global positioning system, doesn’t just help us navigate to where we are going. It’s also a clock. In truth the positioning is the side effect. Time is the product.

Here’s how it actually works. Around 30 satellites orbit the planet doing one job: broadcasting the exact time and their own position, one-way, no login, free to anyone. Each carries three or four atomic clocks. Your phone has no clock anywhere near good enough, so it listens to multiple satellites at once and measures the tiny differences in when each signal arrives. Radio waves cover 30 cm in a billionth of a second, so knowing precisely when tells your phone precisely where. The blue dot showing where you are in your Maps app is just number crunching performed on timestamps.

The clocks are so precise that the engineers had to build Einstein into the system, twice over. Orbital speed slows the clocks slightly, weaker gravity speeds them up more, and gravity wins. So every clock is set to tick slow on the ground and come right once it’s flying. Skip those corrections and the clocks would gain 38 millionths of a second a day, the map would drift by roughly ten kilometres every 24 hours, and the whole system would be useless within hours.

It was the Pentagon that built it, to guide ships, submarines and weapons. Reagan opened it to civilians after the Soviets shot down Korean Air Flight 007 in 1983, a passenger jet that had drifted off course with 269 people aboard. Even then, Washington deliberately fuzzed the civilian signal, until 2000 when Clinton switched the fuzz off and accuracy improved roughly tenfold overnight.

From that day, perfect time was free, so the world stopped buying its own clocks and auto makers started integrating sat nav into centre consoles.

Mobile towers, power grids and the banks stamping every transaction are all quietly synchronised to the free American signal. It was built to guide missiles. It ended up running civilisation.

Now, to be clear about Wednesday. The satellites didn’t fail. Telstra’s software fumbled its GPS time, and there was nothing underneath to catch it. That’s the real lesson. One company mishandled the free satellite clock for one morning and the country shook.

A genuine GPS failure, jammed, spoofed or broken, would threaten mobile networks, grid synchronisation and bank timing all at once. Australia owns atomic clocks in a Sydney laboratory, but there is no national system to carry that sovereign time to the towers, grids and banks that would need it.

That’s not hypothetical either. In 2016 the Americans retired one old satellite and introduced a timing error of 13 millionths of a second. It knocked out digital radio in Britain and stopped some police and fire radios in North America.

13 millionths of a second.

The Americans understood the lesson and legislated a ground-based backup for GPS time in 2018. Eight years on, they still haven’t finished building it. Australia hasn’t even legislated one. Our own researchers call precise time “an essential utility we presently have no control over”, and the nation’s official timekeeper runs on caesium clocks more than 20 years old, described by the man who tends them as “1950s technology”.

Last week we talked about Jindalee, the radar we built that sees over the horizon. That’s what sovereignty looks like. This week we met its opposite, the free clock we use from American military satellites. That’s what dependency looks like.

The good news is Australians are building the fix. Adelaide scientists have portable optical clocks that outperform GPS timing by orders of magnitude, and Perth is building laser ground stations that can beam secure time from space. What’s missing is a government that treats time the way it treats water or fuel, as critical infrastructure needing a backup.

Telstra CEO Vicki Brady lands back in the country this morning. Wednesday was the free preview of why a sovereign backup matters.

Weekly Wrap

Our diesel is refined in someone else’s country. Our uranium will power someone else’s homes. Our time falls from someone else’s satellites.

Strip it back and this week was an audit. Nobody attacked us. Nothing was sabotaged. One clock forgot the year, and a first-world country lost its phones, its tills, its trains and, for more than 600 people, the connection to Triple Zero. The audit came free. Imagine the version where this isn’t an accident.

The fix isn’t another press conference or another inquiry stacked behind the last unfinished one. The regulator still hasn’t reported on the Optus outage that cost lives last September, and this week it opened a file on the next one.

The fixes aren’t mysteries either. Hold real fuel onshore and meet the 90-day floor we’ve ignored since 2012. Stop pretending transmission costs are someone else’s problem. Legislate a backup for the nation’s time. Boring, unglamorous, sovereign.

The things we own bent but didn’t break. The resilience of the Geelong refinery, restored to above 90% output, is a great example of that. Yet the system running on borrowed time buckled in a single morning, because there was nothing underneath it.

That’s the whole argument. Sovereignty isn’t a word for defence white papers. It’s whether the trains run and the tills ring when someone else’s satellite, someone else’s strait or someone else’s software has an outage on any given Wednesday.

This week has delivered three stories that cut through the spin cycle.

First is the fuel excise creeping back into the price at the pump at the precise moment world oil prices are tumbling, so the one piece of relief headed motorists’ way in a cost of living crisis is quietly taxed straight back.

Second is a Victorian poll that should terrify anyone who wants the Allan Labor government gone, because it shows how a haemorrhaging right of centre vote could hand the worst government in the country another four years in office.

Then, the best saved for last, is the biggest defence export in our history, the payoff on a bet we placed half a century ago.

One of these stories is about the next month, one is about the next election, and one is about avoiding the next war.

The First of July Ledger

From Wednesday, the tax rate on income between $18,201 and $45,000 drops from 16% to 15%. That’s worth a whopping $5 per week for anyone earning over $45,000.

But the minimum wage jumped 4.75% to $26.44 an hour, taking a full-time week past $1,000 for the first time.

Paid parental leave now runs to a full 26 weeks, super lands within days of every payday rather than quarterly, and the $20,000 instant asset write-off is finally permanent.

Even Christmas in July is followed by a credit card statement.

The first of the month switched on the new tax on super-sized superannuation accounts, an extra 15% on earnings on balances above $3 million, rising to 25% above $10 million.

Let’s call a spade a shovel here. The issue with Div 296 was never that it targets the top end of town, it’s that the first draft tried to tax paper profits on assets never sold, and it took a two-year backlash to force the retreat.

However, we are now witnessing the unwinding of the fuel excise relief, and we’ve been here before. When the excise was halved during the 2022 oil shock, the sugar hit lasted six months and vanished just as quickly, and this one is going the same way.

Here’s the back-of-a-coaster maths the government would prefer you didn’t do. Last month you were saving 32 cents a litre at the bowser. From Wednesday that’s been halved to 16 cents, and in a month it goes to zero. On a 65 litre tank, that’s roughly $10 more per fill now and about $21 more from next month.

The timing is no accident. Global oil prices have tumbled since the Iran ceasefire and unleaded on the east coast is down around 90 cents from the April peak, so the tax is creeping back in precisely as the falls flow through, and the relief you’d otherwise be seeing at the pump quietly disappears into consolidated revenue.

Fill up once a week and the extra cost at the bowser swallows that tax cut twice over from day one, and four times over once the full excise returns. Four months of fuel relief has cost the budget almost $3 billion, and it’s now abundantly clear who this government’s most dangerous opponent really is. It isn’t the meandering opposition led by Angus Taylor. It isn’t even Pauline Hanson. It’s inflation.

Then there’s the fine print, where this government does its best work.

Take the new $1,000 instant deduction for work expenses, spruiked as money for nothing. Labor says the average worker will save $205. What it doesn’t say is that most workers already claim more than $1,000 in work expenses, so for the majority this gift is worth precisely zero, and it doesn’t even apply until you lodge your tax return a year from now.

The tax cut itself is drip-fed, 15% now and 14% from July next year, each instalment timed to land like a campaign pamphlet as the election drums beat louder. There’s even a returning classic for small business, with the loss carry back offset scrapped three years ago now reintroduced to great fanfare, the fiscal equivalent of regifting.

One item does deserve a genuine tick. Paying super with every pay packet instead of quarterly is good policy, worth about $5,000 at retirement for the average 25-year-old on the super industry’s own numbers, and long overdue.

The Reserve Bank has hiked interest rates three times this year, taking the cash rate to 4.35%. Headline inflation eased to 4% in May but underlying inflation accelerated to 3.6%, and the deputy governor said just this week the bank still has work to do. Every dollar the government redistributes from 1 July adds to the demand the RBA is trying to mop up, and the mop is your mortgage.

The government calls it cost-of-living relief. The Reserve Bank sees it for what it is, more demand from a government that can’t control its spending.

One Nation Comes for Victoria

Now to the scariest poll of the year, so far.

The Financial Review’s Redbridge survey of more than 5,500 Victorians has One Nation on 27% of the primary vote, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition on 26% each. That’s One Nation leading both major parties in a mainstream Victorian poll for the first time, five months out from the state election in late November.

Naturally, that support lives mainly outside urban Melbourne, and out there it’s not even close, with One Nation on 34% in rural seats, 31% in regional ones and 28% in outer metropolitan Melbourne. The vote isn’t exactly soft either, with 62% of those pledging allegiance to Pauline saying their vote is locked in.

One Nation currently holds a single upper house seat in Victoria, has no state leader and not one confirmed candidate. A party with no leader and no candidates is topping the primary vote five months out from polling day. That’s the size of the strife Victoria is in.

If any state was going to resist the orange wave, it should have been Victoria. John Howard once consoled the Victorian Liberals after a drubbing by dubbing the place “the Massachusetts of Australia,” the most progressive, multicultural corner of the country. Yet it’s Victoria where One Nation now tops the primary vote, and the union movement’s own research explains why.

A Victorian Trades Hall commissioned paper warns that One Nation’s path to power runs straight through the working class, through the production workers, service workers and small business owners whose loyalties have come loose from the major parties.

Redbridge has mapped where it lands, with 34 seats it believes are in play, from Labor’s outer suburban heartland in Werribee, Melton, Frankston and Cranbourne to Coalition-held regional seats like Shepparton, Mildura and Morwell. Even the Premier’s own Bendigo East electorate sits on Labor’s internal risk list, and party headquarters has left her to her own devices to fund the local campaign.

That is not a detail you leak about a leader you intend to keep.

Jacinta Allan’s net favourability has sunk to -42. Rarefied air, the ignominious stench of which has only been shared with John Cain and Anna Bligh in the history of Australian state politics. Of the 34 state premiers who have gone to the people with a negative approval rating, just five survived, and the best of those weren’t carrying anything like Allan’s baggage. Redbridge’s own read is that Labor needs to find at least another four points of primary vote just to have a pathway, and nothing in the Premier’s circumstances suggests where those points might come from.

Why is she in so much trouble? It’s not just the hangover of the most punishing and brutal lockdowns anywhere in the world during the COVID pandemic. Nor is it the anti-business tax regime that is driving the population to states north of their border.

It’s in no small part because Victorians have watched the CFMEU treat the $100 billion Big Build projects as a private ATM, watched reports that the government knew union standover tactics were inflating costs and directed contractors to pay anyway, and watched a Premier who ran transport infrastructure for nearly a decade fail to answer what any of it has cost them. Her colleagues know it.

A spill fizzled out a fortnight ago when her deputy Ben Carroll declined to make a move, but parliament returns from its winter break late this month, and the party room knows that’s their last window. Labor headquarters has already written off nine of its own seats and privately fears being reduced to around 30, and that’s before fully pricing in the looming orange wave reported in the Fin’s poll yesterday.

Before Jess Wilson’s Libs get too cheerful, the same poll carries two warnings for them. The first is that the Coalition’s primary vote went backwards, and on 26% it cannot govern alone. Its path to power now likely runs through One Nation’s backing with confidence and supply. The second is the three-way count where they must finish in the top two to survive.

A divided right is how an unpopular Labor government survives, and Victoria wrote the manual on that. The DLP breakaway locked Labor out of Spring Street for 27 years, and the party doing the splitting spent most of them watching from the sidelines. The maddening part isn’t just that this one should have been in the bag long before now. It’s that the ground is still there for the taking. When the same poll asked which parties are focused on the right issues, the Liberals netted out at +7, the best of anyone, while Labor came dead last on -17.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that the party has spent the week consumed by the Moira Deeming and Matthew Guy saga instead of prosecuting the case against the most unpopular premier in living memory. It was easy to sympathise with Deeming through her long war with former leader John Pesutto, a fight she ultimately won in court. But the appalling episode of levelling haphazard assault allegations at a colleague and failing to withdraw or apologise even after their dismissal by police is simply beyond the pale. The CCTV showed no assault at all, and still no apology came.

Deeming had been sounding out One Nation about a new political home, and Pauline Hanson went on 3AW to slam that door shut, saying she wants “a person with integrity and honesty” and doesn’t see one. The party winning over every disaffected conservative voter in the state looked at Moira Deeming and said, umm, no thanks. When Pauline Hanson is the one calling your honesty and integrity into question, it speaks volumes.

The harder discipline test for the Libs comes afterwards, though. Every day between now and November that they spend talking about themselves is a day gifted to Pauline, and there aren’t enough days left to be giving any away. This election was the Libs’ to lose. The recruitment of my erstwhile boss Brian Loughnane as state president was a masterstroke by Wilson, but even with his considerable ability and experience, he has his hands full.

Polling this far out measures a mood, not a result. The more exposure and pressure Pauline and One Nation face, the greater the expectation that they answer the same simple question the Coalition seems to stumble on.

Where are your policies?

Because it’s not enough to just point and criticise, even at governments as bad as those led by Albo and Allan. Credibility counts too.

The Best Story Canberra Never Tells

Credit where it’s due, and here it’s due in spades. Last week in Canberra, Australia signed its largest defence export deal on record, a $2.5 billion agreement to supply Canada with Jindalee over-the-horizon radar to guard its Arctic approaches, with delivery starting this week and the radar operational by 2029.

Better still, that’s just the deposit. The agreement covers the first of two radar systems Ottawa has planned, and when Canada first announced it was buying Australian, the full program was valued at up to $6.5 billion.

Canada, needled by Washington and shopping from friends it can trust, looked hard at the American alternative and chose ours, because it was better, smaller and faster to build. Even the US military backed the choice. At least 300 high-skill Australian jobs come with the deal. Most countries would celebrate an achievement of this scale. We buried it in defence estimates.

Now the part worth savouring, because it tells you how real capability actually gets built.

Australian scientists first tried bouncing radar off the ionosphere in the 1950s and failed, because the electronics of the day weren’t up to it. They kept at it. In the early 1970s an experiment between the Woomera Rocket Range and Broome, 11 months of soundings along an 1,850 kilometre path, proved the sky over our continent would carry the signal.

In 1974 the Whitlam government approved a pilot radar on a budget so lean the project was named Jindalee, an Indigenous word meaning bare bones. By 1976 it was switched on outside Alice Springs and detecting its first aircraft, and in December 1977 it was spotting ships off the northwest coast, something it wasn’t even designed to do. The experimental antenna that grew from it stretched 2.8 kilometres, its steel run off the line at the Hills Hoist factory. Behind that wire sat millions of dollars of top-secret Australian software, and behind the software sat something rarer still. Patience.

Kim Beazley promised the project would be treated reverentially no matter how tight the defence budget got, and every government kept that promise, through cost blowouts and a full network that arrived six years late in 2003. Approved under Gough Whitlam, switched on as a national network under John Howard.

Plenty of nations tried this technology, superpowers among them, and built systems at vast cost that were abandoned or mothballed within years. Ours endured, and on Defence’s own assessment it remains the most advanced system of its kind in the world.

The tech is seriously impressive too. Jindalee doesn’t see over the curve of the earth so much as around it, bouncing its signal off the ionosphere and back down onto whatever’s moving below. Because the beam comes down from above, all that hugging-the-deck flying you see in the Top Gun movies achieves precisely nothing, and there’s no hiding behind mountains or in valleys either.

Today, JORN keeps watch over roughly 15 million square kilometres of sea and sky, about twice the land area of Australia itself, spotting ships and aircraft up to 3,000 kilometres out from antenna fields at Longreach, Alice Springs and Laverton. The $1.2 billion mid-life upgrade being rolled out across the network right now will make it ten times more sensitive again and keep it in service into the 2040s.

From the Hills Hoist factory to the biggest defence export in our history. That arc took 50 years to draw, and it’s why Canada is buying.

Jindalee isn’t the exception, either. It’s the pattern, and we never string the stories together.

Take the Collins class subs. Mocked for their birthing pains in the 1990s, the six Osborne-built boats matured into one of the finest conventional submarine fleets on earth, and their stock in trade is precisely the quiet work you never hear about, slipping into the waters to our north to intercept communications and shadow foreign navies. Who could forget the legendary tale of redemption at the RIMPAC 2000 war games, when HMAS Waller “sank” two American nuclear submarines and slipped undetected to within torpedo range of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, close enough to photograph her through the periscope?

Their surveillance of Chinese submarines in the South China Sea has been reported for years, carrying on a signals intelligence tradition that runs all the way back to the Oberon boats creeping up the Chinese coast during the Cold War. When allied navies talk about what Australia brings to the table beneath the waves, intelligence is the currency.

Then there’s the newest chapter, and it might be the best one. When Palmer Luckey, the Silicon Valley wunderkind who invented the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, founded defence company Anduril in 2017, it could have stayed a purely American story. Instead, Anduril picked Australia for its first factory outside the United States, and together with the ADF, co-funded Ghost Shark.

This extraordinary drone submarine, which fits inside a 40-foot shipping container, can dive to 5,000 metres, spend weeks at sea undetected, and carry torpedoes or seed the seabed with sensors guarding the undersea cables our entire economy depends on. The first prototype arrived a year early. One of them swam 1,000 nautical miles and came home like a homing pigeon.

They are now being built by the dozen at a secret Sydney factory drawing on 42 Australian suppliers under a $1.7 billion contract, and the plan is to sell them to allies across the region. Concept to full production took three years, which in defence procurement isn’t just fast, it’s unheard of. Anduril is now worth around $48 billion, and Australia is in on the ground floor.

Ghost Shark matters because the Virginia-class boats don’t arrive under AUKUS until the early 2030s, and even then, a handful of nuclear submarines cannot cover a coastline our size. The answer is a hybrid fleet, a small number of state-of-the-art manned boats doing the high-end work and cheap autonomous drones doing the rest. An adversary might chance sailing warships around a country with six submarines, as we discovered last year. But it thinks very differently about a country with six submarines and 100 unmanned drones lurking.

That’s deterrence we can manufacture, and it’s the piece that bolsters AUKUS before the nuclear boats show up.

In the air it’s the same story. Ghost Bat, developed by Boeing Australia with more than $2.3 billion of government backing, is the first combat aircraft designed and built in this country in half a century. It has test-fired air-to-air missiles, the newest version carries weapons internally, a factory is going up outside Toowoomba to build it at scale, and Germany has confirmed it’s under consideration for its air force.

Japan is joining the flight testing, and Canada’s procurement chief, fresh from signing the radar deal, says he wants a look at Ghost Bat next. That’s what happens when you sell one world-beating product, the customer asks what else is on the shelf.

The RAAF’s stated ambition is three unmanned aircraft for every manned fighter. Boeing’s Australian operation is stacked with ex-Supercars engineers, including some seriously talented people who used to work for me at Dick Johnson Racing. World-class radar, drones and subs, engineered and made in Australia. This is what our future looks like. More of it.

Which begs an uncomfortable question. Jindalee can spot a ship 3,000 kilometres over the horizon, yet the same country spent the first half of this year counting its petrol reserves in days, like a ration book, and masking pump prices with almost $3 billion of excise band-aids, because a war on the other side of the world exposed two decades of neglected fuel security.

That neglect spans governments of all stripes, but the fuel security pen sits today with Chris Bowen, and his answer to a strategic fuel problem has been the same as his answer to everything else, a press conference and a promise.

The threat has been visible the whole time. We simply weren’t looking. The difference between JORN and our fuel stocks is the difference between a country that plans in decades and a government that plans in media cycles. The radar deal shouldn’t be a once-in-a-generation headline. It should be our business model.

Weekly Wrap

Step back and the three stories share a single thread, and that is the passage of time.

The 1 July package is a government thinking in months, every measure timed for a headline, the bill postdated to your next tank of fuel.

Victoria is a state thinking about an election five months from now, so desperate to punish a rotten government that its voters are flirting with the very split that could keep it in power.

Then there’s JORN, a country thinking in decades, and proof that the surest way to keep the next war over the horizon is a radar that can see beyond it.

The talent that turned a spool of Hills Hoist wire into a $6.5 billion export program never left this country. What’s gone missing is the foresight to back things whose ribbons someone else will cut, whose plaques someone else will unveil. The ministers who signed off on Jindalee and the Collins boats, and the ones who followed who nurtured and protected both, knew the applause would land long after they’d left the stage, but they proceeded anyway.

We always reminisce through rose-tinted lenses, but in this instance, it really was Labor and Coalition governments of yesteryear thinking about tomorrow and the day after.

Meanwhile, today’s political class thinks only about itself. The Coalition in both Melbourne and Canberra fights internally over scraps and lets bad governments off the hook.

So, when the lot of them inevitably come asking for your vote, whether it’s for the treasury benches on Spring Street this November or in Canberra soon enough thereafter, put the 50-year question to them. What are you building that will outlast you? The silence that follows will be deafening.

A country that taught itself to see 3,000 kilometres over the horizon has no business being led by people who can’t see past the next headline or TikTok video.

Here’s how it was spun. The treasurer set about telling anyone who would listen that our growth is running faster than almost every other advanced economy in the world, even as the bond market quietly went back to pricing in a fourth rate rise for the year.

The head of ASIO warned that the terror threat is getting harder to read, not easier. Then, after years of indignant denials, two teal MPs registered the political party they always swore they would never form. There’s a bit to unpack.

The Fourth Rate Hike Comes Knocking

On paper, this week’s jobs figures looked like good news. Unemployment edged down to 4.4% in May, off the 4.5% we saw in April. The economy added 40,000 jobs and the number of people out of work fell by 18,000. A tighter labour market means upward pressure on wages, and upward pressure on wages means the one thing the Reserve Bank cannot stand to see right now, which is more inflation.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics had headline inflation down from 4.2% in April to 4% in May. Trouble is, it’s not coming down in real terms. At least not by the bank’s preferred measure.

Pollies will always stick with the number that best suits their narrative in the moment, but trimmed mean inflation is the real number that matters. It strips out the wild swings at either end and leaves you with the underlying trend. That ticked up to 3.6% from 3.4%, drifting away from Bernie Fraser’s 2-3 per cent target band rather than back toward it.

The Reserve Bank has already lifted rates three times this year, taking the cash rate to 4.35%. Only weeks ago the market believed the tightening was over. The mood has since flipped hard. The bond market is now banking on a fourth hike before Christmas, which would drag the cash rate to its highest peak since 2011. Westpac is the sole big four bank openly tipping a rise as soon as the next meeting in August, with heavyweights like Goldman Sachs and Citi warning the next move is up, not down.

Throughout all of this, Jim Chalmers keeps up the happy talk of solid growth, low unemployment, rising wages and, bewilderingly, that he’s got debt under control. The problem he keeps skating past is productivity. As Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock put it, productivity is critically important for growing the economy, and right now it’s going nowhere. With a medium-term productivity forecast of just 0.7% a year, the economy simply cannot grow much faster than 2%, and wages cannot rise by much either.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The NAB business survey, which the Reserve Bank watches closely, found more than 45% of businesses now say federal government policies are denting their confidence. Former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe was blunter still, warning in The Australian yesterday that “we don’t have a growth agenda, we now have a redistribution agenda,” and that taxing the assets businesses build only works against the investment the country desperately needs.

So the message for anyone with a mortgage is not a cheery one. A fourth rate rise is on the table, not because households went on a spending spree, but because the economy cannot find a gear and sticky inflation will not budge.

The treasurer gets to spin the numbers. The mortgage belt gets to pay for them.

Eighteen Thousand, or Fewer Than One Hundred

The formidable boss of intel agency ASIO, Mike Burgess, sat down for a rare interview this week to discuss the terror threat that we must never be complacent about. The highest-priority caseload, the people the agency considers most dangerous, currently sits below 100. The total number of people that ASIO has examined or is examining runs to more than 10,000. Pressed on how many people are under active investigation, Burgess would only say that it’s “not tens of thousands.”

Those figures matter, because Pauline Hanson, ever reliable when citing numbers, had claimed there were 18,000 people on ASIO watch lists. Burgess refused to be dragged into a political stoush and cited his duty to stay apolitical, but the numbers tell their own story.

The sobering part really is what surrounds those numbers. This was Burgess’s first annual threat assessment since the Bondi massacre, when 15 people were senselessly murdered last December. The official threat level remains at Probable, but Burgess made clear he thinks that word now undersells the danger, and he is working with Home Affairs on a new classification system because he cannot lift it to Expected without intelligence of a specific attack.

Almost every terror plot disrupted in 2024 involved minors, all of them lone actors or small groups, and most were strangers to ASIO and the police until they surfaced. Burgess says the pattern only deepened through 2025. Sobering reading for any parent. These are kids radicalised online, moving alone, just about the hardest threat any security service can hope to see coming.

Burgess described the modern terrorist as anything from a Sunni extremist to a neo-Nazi to a far-left radical to an extreme Christian, warning that what all too often binds these otherwise warring groups together is a shared hatred of Jews. That is a large part of why antisemitism has surged here so fast and so viciously. The same antisemitism that has been unleashed on uni campuses across the country. The same antisemitism that has seen social licence granted to the return of tropes and slurs.

For all the talk of numbers, ASIO’s record is genuinely one of substance and success. The agency has foiled 31 major terror plots since 2014, and resolved 14 significant cases since Bondi alone. Burgess was characteristically frank about the limits, conceding the agency “cannot stop every terrorist.” That is an uncomfortable thing to hear, but it’s honest and candid.

However, the hard questions about Bondi haven’t gone away either. One of the alleged attackers had come to ASIO’s attention back in 2019 before being deemed no ongoing threat. The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is now examining how the agency is resourced, and it is worth remembering the government tried, and failed, to stop the commissioner from seeing cabinet documents about how much of the intelligence budget actually goes to counter-terrorism. When a government fights that hard to keep a number secret, you are entitled to wonder what the number is, and the simple enough question as to why. What exactly have they got to hide?

Beyond the headline-grabbing terror figures, Burgess painted a clear picture of a country under pressure on every front. He pointed to Iran, which ASIO has already linked to arson attacks on a Melbourne synagogue and a Sydney restaurant, and warned its activities here could one day stretch to assassinations. He spoke of an unnamed foreign state, which everyone understood to mean China, burrowing so deep into our critical infrastructure that it could cripple networks at any time of its choosing.

This is the security environment Australia now lives in, and it is not getting any friendlier.

Independent No More

Which brings us to the political farce of the week. After months of secret talks and flat denials, teal MPs Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender have set up their own political party. Its name is Community Strong Australia, and they would like you to know it’s a party built on integrity and evidence rather than ideology. But when you cut to the chase, it’s actually the very thing these two have spent years insisting they would never become.

Timing is everything. The major parties voted to pass the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act last year that introduces donation caps that, from 2027, limit donations to a single candidate to $50,000 per annum. Little wonder One Nation is now banking cash while it can. Its extraordinary Fire the Liar fundraising blitz raised over $4 million in five days from over 65,000 individual donors, contributing handily to its war chest before the caps bite.

The caps fall hardest on independents, who lean on a handful of deep-pocketed donors channelled through groups like Climate 200. A registered political party can raise and pool money in ways a lone independent can’t. So the great crusaders against money in politics have built themselves a tidy vehicle to keep the river of cash flowing.

For a new party allegedly built on integrity, it’s already curiously shy about its own finances. Steggall and Spender insist Climate 200 and its founder Simon Holmes à Court are not involved, and they have ruled out support from the Atlassian billionaires Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, perhaps because of their floundering share price, but that’s likely wishful thinking on my part. What they would not do is name a single donor who is backing them. Transparency, it seems, can be put off until tomorrow or the next day.

Because what pulls the whole independent mirage apart is the voting record. Voting on the floor is a binary choice after all, so it’s not inconceivable for an independent to land on the same side as the Greens on any single bill. Just not most of them.

Since 2022, Steggall has sided with the Greens around 72% of the time, Sophie Scamps around 75%, and Spender around 67%. So when these MPs tell their well-heeled electorates they are a sensible alternative to the major parties, the record says they line up with the Greens far more often than with anyone sensible. Independent in creed, perhaps. Not so much when it comes time to vote.

The structure is almost too good to be true, which is to say it probably is. This is a leaderless, rudderless party of two members, which falls short of even being recognised as a minor party in the parliament. There’s no leader until they reach ten members, at which point in time they will appoint a three-person leadership panel. There’s no binding policy platform either, and a free vote on everything save for supply and confidence.

They want every upside of being a political party, the fundraising and the Senate tilt. Just none of the downsides, the discipline, the trade-offs, the robust exchange of ideas, and certainly not the awkward business of actually having to agree on anything. The major parties aren’t always fit for purpose, but their structures are purpose-built. They exist because power brings with it hard choices, and this new outfit has not yet worked out what it will do when it reaches a fork in the road.

The rest of the crossbench has taken one look and seen it for the radioactive comedy of errors that it is. Monique Ryan, Helen Haines, Andrew Wilkie, Kate Chaney and ACT senator David Pocock have all said thanks, but no thanks. Nicolette Boele and Sophie Scamps are considering it, which in independent-speak means waiting to see how it plays at home. Even the gentler critics could not resist. Shadow treasurer and chronic foot-in-mouther Tim Wilson breezily dismissed the new party he couldn’t even remember the name of.

Spender, for her part, offered the line that may come to define the whole venture. “If I wasn’t in politics, I wouldn’t know who to vote for,” she said, pitching her new party at centrist voters who feel they have nowhere left to go in a facepalm moment for the rest of us. It’s a candid admission, though what does it say about a sitting member of parliament? Steggall, meanwhile, waved away the absence of a leader as nothing more than a “media construct,” a novel position for someone who has just filed party registration papers with the AEC.

Angus Taylor was blunter than his shadow treasurer. For voters who want this Labor government gone, he argued, there is no point supporting crossbenchers at all.

The real question, though, is one for the voters of Warringah and Wentworth. They were sold a teal and they kept the receipts that their local member was an independent. They are now represented by a bona fide political party. Whether that is what they signed up for is something only the next election will settle.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen credibility thrown by the wayside in the shadow of broken promises. Something we are used to now from our 48th parliament. Albo has demonstrated that even 50 emphatic denials mean nothing if he changes his mind. Maybe these teals just followed the precedent set by the prime minister.

Weekly Wrap

Stitch the week together and you get a fair snapshot of the country in the middle of 2026. Lemon, indeed.

Jim Chalmers stands at the microphone insisting the economy has rarely looked better, even as the bond market quietly readies the mortgage belt for a fourth rate rise and productivity sits there flatlining behind the spin. The nation’s spy chief levels with us that the threat is climbing and that he cannot stop every attack, while the government does its best to keep the probity and funding questions buried. Two teals have gone and formed the party they swore they never would, while most of the crossbench have avoided it like the plague.

The thread running through the lot is the widening gulf between what we are told and what is actually going on. Inflation is beaten, except it’s not. ASIO has it under control, except no net is ever big enough. The teals are fiercely independent, except they may as well recolour themselves Green with how they vote.

Words and deeds in public life have consciously uncoupled, and promises expire the moment they stop being convenient.

Pauline Hanson and her party are leading the way in opinion polls, party memberships and high-volume, low-value fundraising. Hanson debuted at the National Press Club and walked out without anyone laying a glove on her.

The Reserve Bank held the line on rates, but Michele Bullock spent her press conference bemoaning sticky inflation, putting the fear into all of us that this is very much a case of hitting pause rather than stop. The Albanese Government spent yesterday unpicking the budget it handed down barely five weeks ago.

There’s blood in the water, but the next election couldn’t feel further away.

Pauline Holds Her Nerve

You have to hand it to her. She held her composure in the lion’s den. After 30 years in public life, she faced the hostility of 90 minutes at the Press Club for the first time. A fairly pedestrian and not fit for purpose stunt unfurled behind her head, and she didn’t even blink.

She rambled at times almost nonsensically, ran long, strayed from the script, tripped over a few words along the way and let fly at those she deemed worthy of a free character assessment. She took aim at Chris Bowen, branding the energy minister a peanut. For someone who hammers judges for going soft on sentencing, that was a remarkably light one to hand down.

She left the lectern having proved a point though. She belongs on the national stage.

The polls have One Nation as the most popular party in the country and Pauline closing in on Albanese as preferred prime minister. After this week nobody can pretend that’s a fluke or that the support is soft, a charge that even I’ve been guilty of levelling. The receipts from One Nation’s Fire the Liar campaign back that up as much as their membership drive did a few weeks before it.

But belonging on the national stage is not the same as being ready to run the place. This was not the alternative prime minister. It was a performer who knows her audience and plays to them better than anyone else in Canberra does.

Her policy detail was thin, her answers were deflections, and trying to pin her down on the numbers didn’t work because it never does. Never has, never will. That’s fine for an insurgent. It’s a long way short of what we deserve from an alternative government. With the next election just under two years away, that gap is going to be the whole story, and it’s going to be a long, agonising two years.

The Angus Problem

There’s a greater worry for the Coalition than anything Pauline said. While she was front and centre at the Press Club, Angus Taylor was down in southern Sydney holding a press conference. Only one lone journalist bothered to ask him a question, more likely out of pity than interest.

Four months into the job and he’s getting zero cut-through and zero traction. He is saying sensible things about lower taxes, curtailing immigration and having a credible economic plan. The problem? Nobody is listening and nobody cares.

The Libs have made the same critical mistake they made with Peter Dutton. They are sitting back and letting Labor paint the picture, defining their leader.

Chalmers artfully framed Taylor as having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, a bloke who fails upwards. Albanese and Wong spent the week framing Pauline as too dangerous for foreign policy and too anti-worker for the battlers that make up the broad foundation of her support. Yet in doing so they have defined the opposition for the Coalition, except the opposition they are defining is One Nation.

Taylor hasn’t made the cut, and on the rare occasion he warrants a mention, he’s merely a footnote. It’s akin to being cageside at the unfathomable UFC fight at the White House this week instead of being in the octagon and in the fight. The Taylor-led Coalition aren’t even on the undercard right now, not in the eyes of Labor and not in the eyes of the voters either.

GetUp Delivering Manna From Heaven to Pauline

Which brings us to the geniuses who handed Pauline her best moment of the week.

Midway through her speech a yellow banner dropped down behind her, courtesy of GetUp, claiming she opposed a pay rise for workers while taking a $100,000 pay rise for herself. That rise, for the record, was the automatic one she received when Barnaby Joyce’s defection handed One Nation official party status.

GetUp claimed credit within hours. Their new media and campaigns man, David Sharaz, was sitting in the room filming it on his phone, the footage that went up on GetUp’s socials came from the exact spot where he was sitting, and he got up and left in a hurry once the banner dropped. The federal police are now investigating.

The stunt was a rip-off of one that Nigel Farage copped in Britain two years ago, and it didn’t hurt him either. All it did here was prove Pauline’s entire point about how the establishment treats her, gift-wrapped and live on national television. One of her staffers reportedly conceded they wished they’d thought of it themselves. When your target expresses gratitude and appreciation for the stunt, it’s hardly something to bank in the win column.

As for what GetUp is now, they’re a joke without the laugh. A dollar coin thrown in a fountain offers a better return than one donated to them. Their guerrilla ambush marketing doesn’t move the needle, and it doesn’t move votes. It’s activism as performance art, and the review is two thumbs down.

Bullock Sounds the Alarm. Again…

Over at the Reserve Bank, the cash rate stayed put at 4.35%, and the board was unanimous. That was the right call this month. The economy is wobbling, growth is soft, and there are economists who reckon we may have gone backwards in this June quarter. Time will tell. Holding firm makes sense.

Don’t mistake a hold for relief, though. Bullock spent her press conference sounding the alarm bell. Inflation is still too high, underlying inflation has been sitting above 3% since the back half of last year, and she would not rule out lifting the cash rate again. The money markets put another hike before year’s end at near enough to a coin toss. This is a central bank that has already lifted rates three times this year and is telling borrowers, plainly, that the pain is not over.

That pain is real too. Those three hikes have already added around $342 a month to the repayments on a typical $736,000 mortgage. At the same time, house prices are sliding, down across the capitals last month. Higher repayments and lower valuations is the worst of both worlds.

Bullock has all but told us the economy has to slow down and that we shouldn’t be alarmed when it does. Easy to say from the governor’s chair. Harder to swallow when it’s your mortgage or your business.

There’s a final piece to this. The budget piled on another $18 billion in new spending. Chalmers has tried to wave it away, attributing most of it to indexation and defence, putting the net effect of his own decisions closer to $3 billion. The $18 billion is the gross of everything new in the book, the $3 billion is the net of his own decisions, and both push demand the same way. The direction is the problem.

The treasurer swears black and blue his budget takes the pressure off inflation. The Reserve Bank says government spending is part of what’s keeping it so sticky, and borrowers have worn three rate hikes this year with Bullock refusing to rule out another.

The Backflip Budget

Then there’s yesterday’s main event. A patchwork quilt of broken promises.

Five weeks after handing it down, the treasurer stood up in Sydney and started carving bits out of his own budget. The capital gains tax changes that terrified small business have been softened, with the turnover threshold for the concession lifted from $2 million to $10 million, covering 2.7 million businesses, and even then only one of the four concessions, not the full suite. The so-called death tax on testamentary trusts, the one that seemed buried in the fine print, has been dropped. Innovative start-ups get a qualified carve-out too, and Chalmers has quietly handed back some of the sweeping ministerial powers he tried to write into law. The carve-outs though are too little, too late.

By the government’s own numbers, all of these backdowns cost the budget a grand total of $475 million over four years, out of more than $8 billion it still expects to rake in from the tax grab. Less than six cents in every dollar, handed back.

The measures that caused all the fury, that spooked investors and froze business decisions across the country, were never really about the money. If they had been, walking them back would have blown a hole in the budget. It didn’t. This was ideology dressed up as reform, and now that the politics have turned, the ideology is being quietly negotiated away.

The business lobby will lament any adverse tax changes because an environment without stability is one that’s incredibly difficult to invest in. The most damning verdict here doesn’t just come from them though. It comes from Labor’s own side.

The backbench have driven these changes because, as they concede, Chalmers overreached and got it wrong. Peter Beattie, a former Labor premier who now chairs one of the country’s biggest biotech outfits, has warned the government’s changes threaten devastating consequences for the sector and that the concessions don’t go nearly far enough. Treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson admitted at Senate estimates that revenue had to be raised from somewhere, which is about as candid an admission of a money grab as you will ever hear.

Back in 2019, when Bill Shorten took the most aggressive tax agenda in a generation to an election, even he specifically left testamentary trusts alone. When you have gone further than 2019-spec Bill Shorten and had to retreat inside five weeks, you have not reformed the tax system. You have instead shown poor political judgment.

The government still has to get all of this through the Senate, where the Greens can’t even agree among themselves whether Labor’s hikes are too soft or whether to hold the bill hostage over NDIS savings.

Weekly Wrap

Step back and the picture is striking. We have a government rewriting its own budget five weeks after delivering it, an opposition so quiet you’d forget it exists, a populist surging in the polls and loving every minute, and a central bank warning that the worst of the rate pain is still to come. This is a system under real strain.

For the government, it’s the budget that will linger long after the dust settles. Cast your mind back to 2014. The Abbott/Hockey budget was death by a thousand cuts, and the government never really recovered from it. Labor should be very nervous that the 2026 budget is shaping up the same way.

Backdowns don’t restore trust, they confirm the original judgment was wrong. Pauline understands that better than anyone, which is exactly why she’s the one smiling this week.

The grown-ups are meant to be in charge. On this week’s evidence, you’d be hard pressed to tell.

Right on cue, the chorus of objections has arrived. Too much power, too much water, too noisy. Senator David Pocock wants to tax these things before they’ve earned a dollar of profit.

So this week we’re sorting the real problems from the confected ones, because the prize on the table is enormous and we are entirely capable of fumbling it.

The Size of the Prize

Start with the scale. Australia was the second-largest destination for data centre investment on the planet in 2024, and Westpac puts the current pipeline at around $155 billion. Microsoft has committed $25 billion, Amazon another $20 billion.

NEXTDC, a home-grown ASX success story from Bevan Slattery, is building a $7 billion, 650 megawatt facility at Eastern Creek with OpenAI signed up as the anchor tenant. When it was announced in December it was billed as the biggest in the southern hemisphere. It held that title for about six months before IREN’s 800 megawatt South Australian campus blew past it, with a 1.2 gigawatt proposal in western Sydney queued up behind that.

The opportunity is bigger than it appears on the surface. Right now, Australian companies route a huge amount of compute through Singapore because it’s available and relatively cheap. Here’s the thing though, Singapore froze new data centre construction for years because it ran out of power, and it still rations capacity.

Every workload we bring onshore means more subsea cables and capacity landing here, sovereign control over Australian banking and government data, and downward pressure on the cost of compute for every Aussie business. The economy-wide payoff from AI adoption is estimated at $116 billion to GDP over the next decade, with around 400,000 jobs supported through the construction phase.

Here’s the insurance policy for the AI bubble worriers. Firmus started life in 2019 as a bitcoin mining outfit. It pivoted to AI, and it’s now valued at around $6 billion with Nvidia’s backing and an ASX float in the works. IREN ran the same play.

The lesson? This infrastructure is not a one-way bet on AI chatbots. If AI disappoints, the substations, the cooling systems, the fibre and the silicon get redeployed to whatever comes next, exactly as the crypto kit was redeployed to AI. You don’t refuse to build a port because you’re unsure what the ships will carry down the line.

Water

Here’s the viral stat of the moment, and it’s a beauty. California’s almond orchards alone consume more water every year than every data centre in America combined. It totals more than ten Sydney Harbours annually!

The Australian numbers tell much the same story. Every data centre in the country currently uses a fraction of 1% of national water consumption, which is fundamentally akin to a rounding error.

The answer, as always, is technology. Closed-loop heat exchange and immersion cooling, of the kind celebrated in the Firmus IPO prospectus, uses a fraction of the water.

Energy

This is the genuine pinch point, so let’s not dance around it. Data centres use about 2% of the power on the national grid today. AEMO says that triples to 6% within four years, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation thinks 11% within a decade.

Let’s concede the obvious. You cannot claim a mining-boom-sized opportunity while praying the energy question away. The boom is only as big as the grid that feeds it. But the mining boom didn’t stall because railways and infrastructure didn’t exist. We built the railways. We built the infrastructure. Demand this big doesn’t shrink the opportunity, it tells you exactly what to build next.

Look at what the smart money is doing. Microsoft signed a 20-year deal that is restarting the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, an 819 megawatt reactor due back online next year. Google and Amazon have signed deals for small modular reactors.

Ford, like many automakers, wrote off billions in EV research and development last year. Yet they’ve just repurposed an underused EV battery factory into a grid-storage business selling straight to data centres, which earned Wall Street’s confidence with its best month in 17 years. GM joined in on the power play this week with grid-scale batteries of its own.

It constitutes an extraordinary pivot. When the good people who build Mustangs and Silverados are pivoting into the energy business, the message could not be louder. Energy is the bottleneck of the AI age, and supplying it is the commercial opportunity of the decade. That’s what serious operators do when demand shows up. They build supply.

Now enter Chris Bowen, who declared that if you want a data centre in Australia, you’ll bring your own renewable energy and you’ll be flexible, thanks very much.

Energy researchers like UNSW’s Dylan McConnell have pointed out the maths simply doesn’t add up. Forecast data centre demand has ballooned by around 10 terawatt hours since 2023, more than the last expansion of the government’s own underwriting scheme added, which means Australia can build the data centres or hit Bowen’s signature 82% renewables target, but not both without more generation actually getting built.

Bowen’s response was that he doesn’t accept it’s a choice. Of course he doesn’t. This is classic Bowen. Announce the target, bask in the photo op, then hold industry to ransom at the expense of jobs and investment. We need cheap abundant energy, and that’s a fact. The answer is gas and the brown coal fleet we already have underpinning renewables, funded by industry, with small modular reactors on the table for private enterprise the second Canberra lifts the ban.

Tasmania is the preview of what happens without a plan. The state’s energy minister confirmed in Budget Estimates that Firmus’s three sites will draw around 400 megawatts, making one AI company the largest power consumer in the state within four years. The first Launceston stage alone is reported to need roughly 15% of Tasmania’s entire electricity supply, in a state where other industrial customers have already been told there isn’t enough energy for their needs. The water in the dams is finite. Nobody planned for this.

Concede the sceptics their strongest case, though, because it’s better than the confected stuff. The grid connection queue is already years long, so every data centre that jumps it pushes somebody else’s project further down the list. Land near existing transmission is scarce, and a boom this size drives up the price of every hectare of it. Then there is the tax take, because the construction deductions keeping today’s bills near zero run off eventually, and unless the profits are still booked here when they do, Australia hosts the depreciation while someone else banks the dividend. All three are fair worries. None is an argument against the boom. Each is an argument about what to build, zone and police next.

So here’s the division of labour, and it’s not complicated. Industry pays. New demand funds new generation, a simple principle that even the union/green bloc agitating on all of this seems to agree with, delivered through the same long-term contracts that just brought an ignominious American nuclear plant back from the dead.

Government does the things that only government can do, which happen to be the things it currently does worst. Approvals must be measured in months rather than years, transmission built ahead of demand, market rules that let data centres share firming infrastructure at the big substation hubs instead of every build deploying its own diesel generation, and genuine technology neutrality so the cheapest reliable energy wins.

The public-private partnership worth having isn’t government picking winners. It’s government building the poles, wires and pipes no single company can, and providing planning and regulatory certainty, then standing back while private capital does what it does best in return.

Noise

Credit where due. Pocock says noise and air quality concerns shouldn’t be dismissed as NIMBYism, and he’s right. That proposed 1.2 gigawatt Mamre Road monster in Western Sydney would ultimately put 852 diesel backup generators and 14.4 million litres of diesel storage near two schools.

In Virginia, the heart of the American data centre industry, voter comfort with local data centres has collapsed from 69% to 35% in two years. This is complete with measured noise hitting 90 decibels at residential boundaries, which is the point at which your Apple Watch declares it’s too damn loud and you might need hearing protection! That backlash is now blocking tens of billions of investment in new projects. We should learn from it, not import it.

The thing to realise is that the problem isn’t data centres. The problem is wedging gigawatt-scale industrial facilities, replete with noisy diesel generation attached, into suburbs full of families. Which brings us to the obvious fix…

Put Them Where the Sun Is

Here’s the thought experiment. Why are we fighting over Western Sydney’s water, power and patience when we have a continent of non-arable land drenched in the best solar resource on earth?

Crypto has already proved that compute migrates to wherever power is cheapest, and AI training especially works much the same way. So build the big ones in the regions, on land nobody farms, next to the sun, the wind and the transmission lines, far from anyone’s bedroom window let alone school.

This isn’t a thought bubble either, it’s already happening. IREN’s record-setting $10 billion campus near Bundey in South Australia sits 125 km from Adelaide on a major substation in the heart of renewables country, serving Asia through high-capacity fibre.

GreenSquareDC has bought 3,100 hectares in regional WA to build its own 300 megawatt wind and solar farm to power its facility. Even the Clean Energy Council crowd is pushing the same idea, proposing data centres be sited inside Renewable Energy Zones as “Digital Energy Zones” that anchor new generation in the regions.

Are there limits to building out there? Of course. Remote builds cost more, the nearest fibre can be hundreds of kilometres away, and summer heat is brutal. But building big industrial projects in the middle of nowhere is the thing Australia does best.

Mining sorted out the camps, the logistics and the engineering decades ago, and plenty of mines already run on their own off-grid solar, wind and batteries, 24/7, with no grid in sight. Liquid cooling handles the heat. Fibre is the cheapest infrastructure we lay, and it follows the highway. Nobody is proposing a greenfield build at Birdsville anyway. The model is Bundey, regional sites on existing transmission and fibre, an hour or two from a city, cheap land, no neighbours.

No, it’s not a jobs play, any more than an iron ore mine is. A small crew runs an enormous asset, and the payoff is the asset itself and everything built to serve it. The fibre, the transmission and the generation outlast any single tenant, the same way the mining boom’s railways and ports outlasted the peak boom.

Water barely rates a mention out there either. A closed-loop system gets filled once, then it’s serviced, treated and topped up, and the fill can come from bore water, not anyone’s drinking supply. Government’s contribution is expediting the fibre routes and transmission links, private capital does the rest.

The tech to put data centres in orbit isn’t there yet but it’s coming, so the bush is the next best thing. Empty, sunny, stable and ours. Cheaper and available right now. We could turn land nobody can farm into the engine room of the Asia-Pacific’s digital economy.

Pocock’s Facepalm Moment

Which brings us to the senator for the ACT, who is a bit one step forward and two steps back a lot of the time. Faux pas, fumbles and follies aside, he retains the title of being the only tolerable teal.

This week he branded data centres the next “Great Gas Scam” and pointed, scandalised, at the tax data. Amazon Web Services booking $3.4 billion of income in Australia but paying only $61 million in tax, Microsoft’s local data centre arm reporting $1.5 billion of income and paying none.

Someone needs to walk the good senator through a profit and loss statement. “Total income” in the ATO transparency data is revenue, not profit. A data centre is one of the most capital-intensive assets on earth.

NEXTDC’s Eastern Creek build is $7 billion for the facility alone before billions more in silicon that depreciates and is superseded within a few years. Of course taxable income is minimal in the build-out years. The deductions are the depreciation on the very investment we’re celebrating. That’s no scam, it’s accounting, and it’s how every airport, port and mine in this country was financed too.

The gas analogy collapses on contact. Gas is a finite resource Australians own, dug up once and shipped offshore. Hence there’s a legitimate debate about resource rent and the obligation to tax it accordingly. It’s hard to argue with.

A data centre’s key inputs are imported chips and imported capital. What Australians supply is land, energy, infrastructure and wherewithal, which operators pay for at full market rates, on top of Labor’s new expectations to underwrite renewables and fund their own grid connections. But if they actually execute that part, we could all stand to benefit too.

Tax the revenue of a business with massive upfront capex and razor-thin early margins and you don’t capture super-profits, you simply tell the next $45 billion from Microsoft and Amazon et al to land in Texas or Tokyo instead. If profits genuinely get shifted offshore down the track, the answer is enforcing transfer pricing rules that already exist, not inventing a turnover tax that punishes investment itself.

On his jobs jibe, that NEXTDC employs only 381 permanent staff, you don’t measure a port by the number of blokes standing on the wharf. You measure it by the trade flowing through it. The payoff from data centres is the productivity of every business that runs on them, plus the 400,000 construction jobs during the build.

Weekly Wrap

So where does that leave us? The data centre boom is real, it’s the biggest investment wave since the mining boom.

Everyone’s talking about water use that’s a rounding error without looking at the next-gen tech on the horizon, about noise that’s a siting failure, and about a turnover tax from a senator who made a hell of a rugby player.

We should welcome the capital, all $155 billion of it.

Build the energy, because the boom is only as big as the grid that feeds it.

Make industry pay for it through demand, the way Microsoft just paid to restart a nuclear plant and Ford just became a battery company.

Australia benefits through data sovereignty, cheaper compute, more cables landing on our shores, nation-building infrastructure projects on land nobody can farm, and a second engine for the economy if mining ever cools.

Where is government? Well it’s in the way of course. Rationing power, mandating technologies, lecturing the very investors it’s courting.

The job from here is simple. Approve fast, build the poles and wires, let private enterprise deploy small modular reactors and solar and storage at scale, and otherwise get the hell out of the way.

Singapore ran out of power. America is restarting reactors and turning car factories into battery plants.

The door is only open exactly as long as we keep it open. Get it right, and we can be truly world leading in this space.

They are buying union loyalty with your money, and hoped none of us would notice

A workplace bill landed in parliament this week dressed up as housekeeping: a fix for the Fair Work Commission that’s drowning in unfair dismissal claims, half of them now written by ChatGPT. Fair enough, makes sense.

But buried inside, in language built not to be noticed, is something that has nothing to do with chatbots or backlogs. It carves a hole in s354 of the Fair Work Act, the provision that stops anyone discriminating against a business over whether it has signed an enterprise agreement, and it lets the Commonwealth favour firms that have done a deal with a union when it hands out contracts. It even writes in cover so the government can’t be accused of coercion while it does it. Strip away the jargon and here is what it says: if you want government work, get a union deal. The principle it tramples is freedom of association, the simple idea that a worker, and a business, should be free to join a union or not without government putting its thumb on the scale.

The timing is breathtaking. We are in the middle of the biggest union-corruption scandal in a generation. The CFMEU’s own court-appointed investigator found agreements that had been bought, literally, for cash, and those are the very agreements Labor now wants to turn into a gateway to public contracts and grants. Queensland’s version of this racket, scrapped by the LNP, is before a commission of inquiry for baking union rates in as so-called best practice. In Victoria this week a cornered and febrile Jacinta Allan finally agreed to give the corruption watchdog some teeth over a Big Build the same investigator reckons has been rorted to the tune of $15 billion. And at that exact moment, Labor federally decides the way forward is to make a union ticket a passport to the public purse.

Public money is meant to go to whoever does the best job at the best price. Not whoever signed the right piece of paper. Queensland’s experiment did the opposite, driving costs up and productivity down on government jobs. The government swears black and blue that construction will be carved out and that none of this brings back the Queensland scheme, but go looking for that promise in the actual bill and you won’t find it.

Do not let anyone tell you this remit is limited to the realm of construction. The lawyers reading the fine print are sounding the alarm. This rule will follow Commonwealth money wherever it flows, into aged care, defence, technology and professional services, and it reaches all the way down to the subbies. Anywhere government spends, the unions get to go along for the ride and clip the ticket on the way through.

Chris Bowen, the minister flying at low altitude into his COP side hustle

Now to the man who best embodies the pattern, Chris Bowen. There are heavyweight ministers and there are lightweights. Then there are the abject failures who somehow keep getting promoted up. Bowen is presiding over the quiet death of Labor’s signature promise, 82% renewable power by 2030, and his entire strategy is to pretend it’s not happening. The number has been scrubbed from Labor’s own platform. His answer is that nothing has changed and that a platform is merely a high-level statement of principles. Which is exactly the sort of thing a man says when the real number has become an embarrassment to an aspirational pipe dream that never stood a chance.

So let us look at the real numbers, because they are brutal. We are stuck at roughly 40% renewables in the grid right now, and he wants 82% in four years. Of the 15 wind farms underwritten by his flagship scheme, not a single one has started construction. Not one. Strip out the batteries (which have gone gangbusters because who doesn’t like free money) and only two of 39 government-backed generation projects have turned a sod. New investment in large-scale wind and solar has roughly halved in a year, from about $9 billion to $4.4 billion. Bowen stands up and boasts about gigawatts under contract, but when his own department was hauled before Senate estimates, barely a third of the so-called successful projects had actually signed a deal. The independent forecasters who do this for a living put us at 60-65% by 2030, nowhere near 82%. The people calling it are from his own side. You know it’s bad when even Ross Garnaut says the target will be missed, in his words, “not by a little, but by a big margin”. Jennie George, a former Labor MP and president of the ACTU, has written the whole scheme off as magic-pudding economics. Even the electricians’ union admits the country is tens of thousands of tradespeople short of being able to build the thing. Meanwhile the coal stations that were supposed to be shutting, Eraring, the biggest of the lot, among them, keep getting their sentences commuted, because without them the lights flicker. Just remember the promise that started all this, power bills down by $275. They have gone the other way, and they are still climbing.

What is Bowen’s response to all of this? To lecture us that the sun cannot be interrupted by a war, and to pick a fight with a journalist who had the temerity to ask him a tough question. That is what weakness looks like in government. This from a minister who lost the bid to host the next UN climate summit, settled for the runner-up gig of chairing its negotiations, and is now costing taxpayers north of $150 million for the privilege. They call it a vanity project, and they are being kind. It would be nice to think Albanese might read the tea leaves on this one, but he is so out of touch that his own energy minister is now the punch line for a joke that needs no premise or setup.

Labor premiers read the room on a crook budget

A federal budget is usually a three-day story. You bring it down, the gallery chews it over, the circus moves on. Not this one. Weeks later we are still talking about it, and this week its centrepiece, the self-immolating capital gains tax and negative gearing reforms, cleared the lower house 94 votes to 48 on its way to a Senate brawl Labor is set to win with Green support, though even those loonies complain it does not go far enough. This is not reform that fixes the budget, nor addresses our cataclysmic and skyrocketing debt. It is ideology that punishes ambition, and it will leave us one of the most punitive places in the developed world to own an asset and build a bit of wealth. We are still talking about it because of the sheer hypocrisy of this government, and because the tax reform in the budget will simply not deliver for housing and investment what it says on the tin.

Here is the part that should frighten the Prime Minister. The sharpest critics of this budget are not limited to those on our side of the fence. They are also on his. Chris Minns, the very popular Labor premier of New South Wales, has gone after the income tax burden, pointing out that working families now toil the back half of every week for the taxman before they earn a cent for themselves. Roger Cook, the very popular Labor premier of Western Australia, has warned the changes will frighten off the mining investment his state runs on, and says investors here and overseas keep raising it with him. And yesterday Peter Malinauskas, the most popular premier in the country if not the world, had his treasurer Tom Koutsantonis hand down a South Australian budget with no new taxes, in part because he didn’t take any to their state election back in March. Instead, he banked every election promise, and took a swing at Canberra on the way through. When the three most popular Labor leaders in the land are queuing up to tell you the federal budget stings, that is the ultimate litmus test. These blokes are popular precisely because they are tuned in to the needs and aspirations of their states. Three Labor premiers are prosecuting the case against their own side.

They will be punished, eventually, but who is fit to replace them

So let’s join the dots. On tax, Labor didn’t just dodge the question of capital gains tax and negative gearing changes at the last election, it categorically ruled them out. Albanese was asked point-blank, more than once, whether he would touch them, and he swore he would not, telling one journalist he had already answered the question fifty times over. Dead, buried, cremated. Then he turned around and went even further than Bill Shorten wanted to go. On renewable energy, 82% by 2030 was the solemn promise, and it’s now being quietly erased too. That is not a government that levels with people. It is a government that says whatever it needs to say, and does whatever it wants, and in the process it’s destroying whatever scrap of trust we had left in the political class.

Here is the hard truth. Punishing Labor only counts for something if there is a credible government ready to take its place. Right now the polls say the strongest party in the country is One Nation. Pauline Hanson is openly running for prime minister, her party is sitting ahead of Labor on the primary vote, and it has just won the Farrer by-election, which is the first lower-house seat they’ve won at the ballot box. This is also a party that has a former deputy prime minister among their number, with Barnaby Joyce walking out of the Nationals and into One Nation. It is pulling both votes and wannabe defectors off the Coalition at the same time. Anyone cheering that on should stop and think. As Paul Kelly put it this week in The Australian, a Hanson government would put the nation’s prosperity and its social cohesion at risk, leading a party that, in his words, “has built nothing and shows no capacity to exercise executive power”. Anger at Labor is entirely earned. But anger is not a plan, and a protest vote is not a government.

Weekly Wrap

A government that treats the truth as optional has earned its day of reckoning, and it’s coming. But a reckoning is not a result. If we answer Labor’s dishonesty by getting behind Pauline Hanson we are likely going to reward Albo with another three years. Just like those in Victoria might inadvertently do with Jacinta Allan. This country doesn’t need a louder protest. We need a government in waiting that can count, that can build, and most importantly we need one that can be trusted. Labor has abandoned that ground, and it can never be trusted again. But we get the governments we deserve in the end. Tony Abbott’s return to the fold as Federal President of the Libs is the shot of adrenaline the Coalition desperately needs. Say what you like about Abbott. Laugh him off, just as Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard did. But how did that work out for them? The only question that matters between now and the next election is whether the Liberals and the Nationals are willing to stand for something and draw the battle lines that credibly separate them from Labor, or whether they keep running the race to the bottom and forget about the forgotten people. The forgotten people seem ready to give Pauline a go.