The writer is in Australia
IT HAS been quite a week in Australian politics.
First, the abhorrent, ‘set-to-be-scuttled’ hate speech legislation, crafted in the aftermath of Bondi, actually passed both Houses of Parliament, with the support of the unconscionable, now all-but-defunct Liberal Party.
It wasn’t ‘scuttled’, after all. Way too much optimism, right there.
Second, and related, we have probably seen the beginning of the end for the Liberal Party leader, Sussan Ley. She was only ever a stop-gap. Terry Barnes of the Spectator Australia sums it up:
‘The Albanese hate speech and hate groups bill has passed in federal parliament, as has the now-separate gun control and buyback bill. All done in just one day. The Nationals supported neither bill, making Sussan Ley look an isolated and feeble an Opposition and Coalition leader – which she is. She effectively gave Anthony Albanese a get out of gaol free card, while angering half her MPS and getting two fingers from the Nats. If the knives aren’t being sharpened for Ley now, they soon will be. The only performance more shambolic than hers this week was Albanese’s.’ (Source: The Spectator’s Morning Double Shot newsletter, January 21, 2026.)
Third, and most arresting, the latest Newspoll, published by the Australian newspaper, found that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has overtaken the combined Coalition (Liberal National) primary vote. One Nation has done a Reform UK, at last.
This has never happened before here. We have always been two-party Dictatorship Central.
The last would have sent shockwaves through the polity and its guardians, the legacy parties. Or should have. The poll showed Labor at a pathetic 32 per cent, One Nation at 22 per cent, and the miserable Coalition at 21 per cent. Immediately apparent is the fact that, on this poll at least, the two legacy parties now pull barely half the nation’s primary vote. Starker evidence could not be found of the rupture of the democratic social contract between the governors and the governed and thus the demise of the current system.
The passage of the hate speech legislation, which, among other things, gives the Minister for Home Affairs the power to identify and punish designated ‘hate groups’, shows that the major parties, which combined in the Senate to pass the Bills, have simply no interest in changing their ways. The public had mere days to make submissions to the parliamentary committee ‘scrutinising’ the proposals. The two Houses of Parliament had a day to ‘debate’ it. This legislation is no mere trifle.
The new laws are an attack on free speech that even the Greens baulked at. They voted against worst parts of the legislation in the Senate, along with the Nationals (the country-based ‘conservatives’), One Nation and one Liberal, the heroic Alex Antic.
It was the day free speech, long on life support, finally died in Australia. At the hands of the utterly disdainful, unapologetic political class.
The Liberals remain leaderless and hopelessly divided. They are totally controlled by (in some cases, unelected), leftist factional warriors who get the MPs to side with Labor on the things that matter, and maintain all-but-impossible internal barriers against genuinely conservative (and sensible) leadership.
Should the political class be worried by the latest polls? Yes and no.
The polls show that just about half of the electorate hates them. Do they even care about that? Recent arrogant misuses of ministerial perks by several ministers, none of them punished, shows that accountability is gone from government.
Dozens of policy decisions by both major parties in government, decisions (and non-decisions) that ignore or oppose the popular will, confirm it. As does the now routine outsourcing of governance to the non-elected.
Further back, in 2016, the major parties combined to scupper the prospects of emerging micro parties by making it much harder to form new parties, and by stopping minor parties from having joint group voting tickets in Senate elections, as explained here.
They don’t like uppity, populist challenges to their shared hegemony. Despite these actions, the minor parties did very well, at least in terms of votes, at the 2022 Senate election.
It shows the depth of despair and disillusionment across the electorate.
I said that perhaps the major parties should not be overly concerned. In Britain, Farage’s Reform is yet to demonstrate in a real general election whether it can convert popular support to the actual seats needed (326) to form a government. Running second to Labour in seat after seat doesn’t change much.
Similarly, in Australia, the electoral system (for the Lower House) massively advantages Labor and the Coalition. We have a measure of party standing called the ‘two-party preferred vote’, over which the pundits obsess, due to the compulsory preferential system of voting. In the Senate, with its proportional representation system, One Nation holds a mere four seats out of 76. It needs around 14 per cent of the vote in any state or territory at a Senate election to gain the needed ‘quota’. The Greens hold considerably more Senate seats (11). In the House of Representatives, where governments are formed, One Nation’s chances of winning seats, even on the latest poll numbers, are slim.
So, the latest polls are still pessimistic for those of us who want radical change in the form of a basic policy reset.
One Nation, a party approaching 30 years of age and rarely commanding more than 10 per cent of the primary vote – until now – has an ageing leader who has doggedly pursued sensible policies and who has been unafraid of being unpopular with the chattering classes. She lacks Farage’s much broader acceptance among voters – despite the misgivings of some prominent Brits – and his undoubted retail political skills.
Our two nations find themselves with similar electoral dilemmas, angry and resentful at many things, with mass immigration and Islam right at the top of a long list. We each have voting systems that are designed to prevent systemic change. We each suffer fractures on the alt-right. We each are pessimistic about what a change in government would achieve in the medium to long term, by way of a radical turning back of the deep state and its many perversions.
I have long argued that the best, perhaps the only, way out is to get enough micro party members elected to the Lower House to help form and support a minority Coalition-led government with a half-decent Liberal leader. Then for the micro parties to blackmail the Coalition into reversing course on the issues that matter.
The Liberals, of course, need a new leader. Perhaps one way out is to persuade the former Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, who lost his own seat in 2022, to come back in. Frydenberg is a ‘moderate’, but he is also Jewish, and has led the charge since Bondi against Jew-hating Labor and its repulsive Hamas-adjacent PM, Albo.
Frydenberg has covid form, like all the others, but has several things going for him. He is courageous and clear-headed about the matters that now should concern us most, and he might just be acceptable to both of the Liberal factions, the Nationals and the micro parties. But he, like any leader of the Liberals, would first have to say a genuine sorry for many, past, mortal political sins – as the retired Tony Abbott has done – and set out a clear forward path that involved the end of net zero, climate realism, a migration reset, a winding back of Labor’s (and the Coalition’s) attacks on free speech, the promotion of real leaders like Alex Antic, and a willingness to accept alt-parties in a broad, national coalition of the willing, dedicated to the rights and interests of the outsider class.
None of this is likely to happen, alas.
