Nobody Laid a Glove on Her
Week of 19 June: Pauline untouched at the Press Club, GetUp's gift-wrapped own goal, Bullock's warning shot, and the budget already being unpicked
It might seem like we’re cosplaying in some parallel universe, but this week has given us a perfect snapshot of the absurdity of politics in Australia in 2026.
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.