Six Years to Put a Siren in Your Pocket
Week of 31 July 2026: the siren in your pocket, Victoria trades a premier for the royal commission she refused, a 20-year ballot rort finally dies, and inflation comes off the government payroll.
At 2 pm on Monday, phones right across the country screamed all at once. Ten seconds of siren, ignoring silent mode, ignoring Do Not Disturb. That was AusAlert, the new national emergency warning system, having its first full test. It took a royal commission and six years to put that sound in your pocket.
By the next morning Jacinta Allan was gone, minutes ahead of a caucus vote she swore she would win, and her successor’s first act was to announce another royal commission, the one she had spent months refusing to call.
This week runs from the siren, and the state that knocked it back within hours, to Victoria, where the price of a royal commission turned out to be a premier. Along the way a 20-year-old ballot rort cleared the lower house in an afternoon while the cameras were pointed elsewhere, and Wednesday’s inflation number looked like good news right up until you learn it had spent two years on the government payroll.
The Siren In Your Pocket
The tech behind AusAlert is genuinely clever.
The old system, Emergency Alert, has been sending individual text messages since 2009. It works off billing addresses and last known locations. It queues one message at a time, and a phone that arrives in the danger zone after the message goes out never gets to hear it. During the 2019 and 2020 Black Summer bushfires, warnings queued behind millions of other messages and reached some places too late, or not at all.
AusAlert is cell broadcast. The tower shouts once and every compatible handset in range hears it at the same moment, with no list, no sign-up and no queue when the network is congested, which is precisely when you need it. Someone driving into a fire zone gets the warning the instant they cross into it, and targeting can go as tight as 160 metres.
The technology already runs in more than 30 countries. The comparison worth keeping is against New Zealand, whose first national test reached about a third of all phones. Monday’s test reached 94% of targeted towers against a benchmark of 90%. Different standards, to be fair, but closer to a passing grade than one phone in three.
AusAlert was a recommendation of the 2020 royal commission into those Black Summer bushfires. A Morrison-era commission recommended it and the Albanese government built it, reportedly for $132m, and it goes live from October, subject to each state agreeing to use it.
Which brings the honest caveats. Within hours of the test, Queensland, arguably the most disaster-hit state in the country, said it would sit out this bushfire season and stay on the old system, because the old system reaches landlines and AusAlert doesn’t yet. The refusal came in the middle of Queensland’s open brawl with the Feds over a disaster funding shift, one its own reconstruction authority estimates cost the state $638m in the past year alone.
The system AusAlert replaces was born in grief and built at a sprint. Black Saturday killed 173 people in February 2009 and the fires outran the warnings. Within 12 weeks the states and Canberra had agreed to build a national telephone warning system, before the royal commission had reported a word, and by December it was live.
The original took ten months, yet the sequel took six years, with a federal government that wanted to build it and nobody seriously against it.
The Price of a Royal Commission
Jacinta Allan resigned on Tuesday, minutes before a caucus meeting she had vowed to contest, insisting to the bitter end that she would have won. Her tenure ran two years and ten months. Ben Carroll was sworn in as Victoria’s 50th Premier later that afternoon.
That makes three premiers for Victoria in a single parliamentary term. Antony Green counts five modern cases of it across the country. Four of those governments were then defeated, and the lone survivor was a NT government four decades ago.
The final nail in the coffin was Monday’s Newspoll, which had Allan’s dissatisfaction at 71%, the worst recorded for any premier in Newspoll’s history. That number explains the spill, but it also expired with her premiership, so read it as the cause of death rather than the state of the race.
Carroll’s first act was to announce the royal commission into the construction sector that Allan repeatedly refused. Days before she fell she was still arguing that calling for a royal commission was calling for action delayed, and Carroll himself told parliament in March, as her deputy, that a royal commission would “take twice as long and cost twice as much”.
This week it became his signature policy, with a special prosecutor announced to run alongside it. At his first press conference, and again in question time the next day, he declared himself neither Daniel Andrews nor Jacinta Allan, a line that will run in ads from all sides until 28 November.
Allan’s answer to the Big Build allegations was a referral to the anti-corruption agency, IBAC, a body that has itself warned it lacks the powers and the funding to follow public money through into private subcontractors. Carroll has now promised IBAC those follow-the-money powers this term, which tells you what the referral was worth.
The scale of what the commission walks into comes from Geoffrey Watson’s report for the CFMEU administrator, 136 pages fittingly titled “Rotting From the Top”. Watson puts the excess cost on the $100bn Big Build at $15bn. The administrator ultimately cut that from the published report, declaring the claims “weren’t properly tested”. Watson stood by it though in evidence to Queensland’s inquiry, with the Fair Work Commission’s general manager backing him publicly. If it is even half right, that is $7.5bn skimmed from one program of works.
The Liberals’ Jess Wilson demanded this royal commission for months and published the Coalition’s own draft terms back in February. Now she warns the version on offer risks being a fake royal commission unless it is established before the election with Allan compellable.
Carroll has taken the shape of her demand and kept hold of the pen, and the trap is set either way.
Handing Back the Ballot
The same week, with the state distracted, the Victorian upper house voting system finally went in for repair.
Victoria was the last parliament in the country still using group voting tickets, the device that lets parties rather than voters decide where above-the-line preferences flow.
The tickets were introduced federally for the 1984 election to cure an informal-vote problem, with nearly one Senate ballot in ten being binned over numbering errors, and the cure bred a preference-harvesting industry instead. Victoria adopted them for the November 2006 election, 20 years almost to the day before the first one that will run without them. More than 90% of its upper house votes are cast above the line, and where those votes flowed beyond the first preference was settled in back rooms by faceless men.
In 2018 that machinery elected a candidate on 0.6% of the vote while the Greens missed on 9%. The Electoral Matters Committee recommended abolition twice this term, its own Labor chair writing that the tickets had had their day. A bill to abolish them was in fact already before the upper house, introduced in February. The government adjourned debate for a fortnight, nine minutes after the second reading began, and never brought it back.
I know this machinery from the inside, because I spent the best part of a year helping design its replacement. As a faceless man.
After the 2013 federal election handed Ricky Muir a Senate seat on 0.51% of the vote, Brian Loughnane, then the Liberal Party’s federal director, and Julian Sheezel, his deputy, asked me to model three alternatives. Compulsory preferencing above the line, straight optional preferencing, and the partial version between them. Each was tested against the full results of the three previous federal elections, alongside a review of the New South Wales upper house, which had already abandoned group tickets, to see who actually gained and lost once voters did their own preferencing.
I spent much of that period shuttling to Canberra, working with Julian and the great John Burston, and presented the findings in early 2014.
Through the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, and then a study alongside the electoral commission and others, Labor among them, the partial model won out. Voters instructed to number at least six boxes above the line, and at least 12 below. After being put on ice later in 2014, the amendment to the Electoral Act passed in March 2016.
That is the system the Senate has used since 2016, and it is the model Victoria is now adopting, scaled to its own chamber. The design logic is simple, ask voters for as many preferences as there are seats at a standard election, six for the Senate, five for Victoria’s five-member regions. A ballot numbered short of the minimum is still saved, but it runs out where the voter stopped instead of being handed over as loose change for a political party to spend.
I gave one warning at the time. The model would only produce a workable chamber at a half-Senate election, where the full quota does the filtering. The 2016 double dissolution halved the quota and elected a crossbench of 20, and the electoral commission’s own statutory recount later showed that most of that crossbench would have vanished under the half-Senate quota. Now, 12 years on, Brian is president of the Liberal Party’s Victorian division that will fight the first election under the state’s version of those rules.
Back to this week. With the electoral commission’s deadline looming, Labor introduced its own version of the reform and pushed it through the lower house in an afternoon. The upper house read it in on Thursday and put debate off to its sittings of 11 August, with the Coalition’s support already on the record.
So why now? Because for four years the government needed the votes of the very crossbenchers those tickets elected, and the reform waited until it didn’t. Principle arrived the moment it became free.
The Rebate Bill Comes Due
Wednesday’s inflation numbers looked like good news, and in one narrow sense they were. Headline inflation fell to 3.8% for the year to June, down from 4%.
This all but spares mortgage holders a fourth interest rate rise next month, though Barrenjoey, Rabobank and UBS have November pencilled in, and most forecasters still have the next move as up.
Let’s look under the bonnet here, because the story inside the number is about the instrument itself.
Electricity is 22.4% higher than it was a year ago, and the Bureau of Statistics says plainly why. The government rebates that were paid straight to your energy retailer have ended, and the index simply caught up.
The mechanism is simple enough. CPI measures what households actually pay out of pocket, so when the Feds paid your electricity retailer on your behalf, the official gauge recorded the price of electricity falling even as the underlying price was rising.
Through 2024 and 2025 the measured series showed power prices dropping, at one point by more than a third in a year, while the ABS kept the legitimate books running alongside. In January, as the last rebates washed out, its commentary put the true annual rise at 4.5%.
The rebates delivered real relief while the money flowed, but they were never an energy policy. They were a loan against a future inflation number, and the 22.4% is the repayment arriving right on schedule.
Headline inflation is being suppressed by another subsidy as we speak, and this one unwinds on Monday. Petrol fell 10.9% in June alone, world oil prices doing most of the work and the rest done by the fuel excise relief introduced when the Iran conflict sent oil above $100 USD a barrel. A 32 cent a litre cut for three months, tapered to 16 cents through July, almost $3bn all up, and it expires Sunday.
From Monday the tax returns to the bowser in full, another 16 cents on every litre, about $10 on a typical tank, just as market economists warn the world has run down its reserves and has weaker buffers against the next shock.
Consequently, when headline inflation is next reported it will likely tip back upwards, scheduled by the government itself.
Trimmed mean inflation is the number that matters most though. It throws out the wildest price swings before averaging the rest, and automotive fuel has landed in the discard pile every month since March, the Middle East making it too wild to read. On that measure, underlying inflation sits at 3.6% for the second month running, above the target band.
The cash rate sits at 4.35% after three rises this year, the board meets again in ten days, and the market still prices in a rise by December as a coin toss.
The rebates were aimed at the gauge the public reads. The gauge the RBA board reads never blinked, and neither did anyone’s mortgage.
Weekly Wrap
Timing is everything, as these stories demonstrate.
A siren nobody opposed took six years, when the one built after Black Saturday took ten months. A ballot fix recommended twice by the Victorian parliament’s own committee sat on the notice paper for six months and then passed on voices in an afternoon. A royal commission that would “take twice as long and cost twice as much” took one press conference and a premier’s scalp. The full inflation number arrived once the subsidy money ran out.
Two of the fast ones are decisions rather than deliveries, their only cost being political. For years that cost kept both waiting, and the moment it hit zero each was made inside a day.
Slowness is not a property of the political machine, it is a property of who pays for the wait, and this week every instrument was in the hands of the people it measures.
Economists call this Goodhart’s law, a measure stops measuring the moment it becomes a target, and inflation spent two years as the showcase. Canberra did not lower the cost of living, it lowered the reading on the gauge.
Which is why the smallest story of the week is the biggest. With every camera pointed at the spill, the parliament quietly agreed to hand back the one instrument that points the other way. The group voting ticket is a fortnight from dead, and with it goes the last device by which a political party could spend your vote for you.
Victoria’s siren sounds on 28 November, straight through silent mode, straight through Do Not Disturb. For the first time in 20 years, the decision in its entirety is in the punters’ hands.