Over the weekend One Nation won their first state seat here in Western Australia in the Secret Harbour by-election.

Just 45 minutes south of Perth, voters made it very clear they’ve had enough, and handed a long-held Labor seat to One Nation.

One Nation ran blatant anti-migrant messaging in Secret Harbour - bankrolled by their billionaire backer Gina Rinehart - and the rise of this far right rhetoric in this country will have real consequences for people, for minorities, for our environment.

The WA Greens and our candidate Rhi Davies ran an unapologetically anti-racist campaign - and we will never shift from that. Ever.

But let’s be clear. This One Nation win lies firmly at the feet of an arrogant Labor government.

A government that is so out of touch they thought they could sneak in a candidate who works as a literal lobbyist for gas giant Woodside and who lives 60 kilometres away from the seat of Secret Harbour.

This win happened because Labor makes decisions based on the best interests of big corporations instead of working people.

A lot of people are voting for One Nation because they’re sick of Labor and the Liberals - and I think it’s pretty clear why.

Western Australia is one of the richest states in the country, with billions of dollars in surpluses, yet so many people here are working hard and finding it impossible to get ahead.

Just a short drive from Secret Harbour in Rockingham you will find a makeshift campsite of hundreds of people - including families with children - dubbed the “street of despair”.

That is what happens when governments spend years making decisions in the interests of big corporations and investors while housing, wages and public services are neglected.

Labor is so captured by the big corporations - by the gas industry, the gambling industry, by big tech - they’re not even trying to hide it.

There was some good news out of Secret Harbor, and that is that despite hundreds of thousands of dollars spent attacking us, our Greens vote held up - while Labor’s tanked.

The Greens won’t make the same mistakes as Labor, and just assume that because One Nation’s answers are wrong, people will reject them. And we won’t follow them to the right.

The only answer to a politics of fear is a politics of hope.

But to get that message of hope out there, we have to organise.

We have to fill the leadership vacuum Labor has allowed to grow, so fear doesn’t find a foothold.

We have to reach people where they are, explain why their lives are getting harder, offer solutions that materially improve them, and build the people-powered infrastructure capable of carrying that argument.

Polls around the country have shown that our Greens movement is on the up and is growing - as more and more people realise Labor’s just working for their corporate backers.

And we all know One Nation isn’t any better. They’re in the pocket of Gina Rinehart, their policies are signed off by the gas industry just as much as Labor’s. They’re not working for the people either.

The Greens are the only party actually fighting to take on the big corporations and the ultra-wealthy; who will tax gas exports and stop AUKUS, who want housing to be affordable and stop opening new coal and gas projects, and who will bring back ownership of the essential services Labor and the Liberals sold off.

So to those of you asking, if voters are sick of the major parties, why didn’t more people vote for the Greens? Consider this your call to action.

One Nation and Labor have big corporate and billionaire backers helping them reach people - but to defeat this march of the far right and the billionaires backing their racist, misogynist, Islamophobic agenda, we need you.

We need caring, compassionate people who are fed up with the politics of hate, knocking on doors, letter box dropping, having real conversations with people about how we build a better world.

Because when we have conversations with people and actually explain our policies, their positions change - but we need boots on the ground to do that.

We are not here to make Labor better - we are here to replace them.

Join the Greens movement today and help us make it happen.

- Sophie McNeill, WA Greens Member of the Legislative Council

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Who has it. Who gets heard. Who gets ignored. And what happens when ordinary people come up against institutions with far more money, access and influence than they could ever hope to have.

When big corporations want protection from regulation or fairer taxes, they have money, lobbyists and access.

When ordinary people ask for stronger public services, safer communities or a fair share from hugely profitable gas companies, they are too often told there is no alternative.

Over the past month, we’ve seen that play out again and again.

The gambling lobby has given the major parties more than $6 million over five years, while corporations, broadcasters and sporting codes fought stronger reforms. In the end, Labor and the Liberals struck a deal to pass weak gambling laws that protected many of the industry’s interests.

Disabled people, families and carers told their stories, rallied and warned what NDIS cuts would mean for their lives. Labor, the Liberals and One Nation joined forces to pass the cuts anyway.

And when we call for multinational gas corporations making billions from resources that belong to all of us to pay a minimum 25% tax on exports, Labor refuses to act and instead rushes to reassure the gas industry.

Together, these fights ask critical questions about power - and those questions matter even more as our political landscape changes.

People are rightly frustrated. Housing is unaffordable. Groceries cost too much. Climate and nature are in crisis. Healthcare is harder to access. Huge corporations keep making extraordinary profits, the major parties keep taking millions in donations, and Gina Rinehart is flying Pauline Hanson around Europe.

No wonder people are angry with the political establishment.

But anger at the establishment, on its own, does not make a party an alternative to it.

The real test comes when power is contested.

When a corporation is asked to pay more. When an industry faces meaningful regulation. When someone without money or influence needs Parliament to stand beside them.

Whose side are you on then?

For the Greens, that question goes to the heart of who we are.

Our movement is powered by people. Members, volunteers, supporters and people who give what they can because they believe politics can be better.

That independence matters. It means we can take on powerful interests without wondering what a billionaire donor or corporate lobbyist might think.

But independence alone is not enough.

We have to keep building a movement that can change what is politically possible. That means reaching people who haven’t heard enough from us, listening with curiosity, trying new ideas and offering something better than the division of the far right.

It means asking new questions about how we campaign and organise, reviewing how we work, and making sure everyone in our movement has a meaningful way to contribute.

It means doing the patient work of building trust and community, not just asking people for their vote when an election comes around.

And when we face tough votes in parliament or at elections, we keep going. We learn, we organise, and we think about the people depending on us to succeed.

The forces we are up against have enormous money and influence.

But what we are building is a better kind of power: people working together, for each other- and over the last twenty years I have learned never to underestimate what that can achieve.

- Larissa Waters, Senator for Queensland and Leader of the Australian Greens

The passing of Labor’s NDIS cuts is a blow to disabled people across Australia.

Labor, the Liberals and One Nation joined forces to pass legislation that will slash $38 billion from the NDIS and remove at least 240,000 people from the scheme.

Labor could have asked wealthy corporations and billionaires to pay their fair share of tax. They could have taxed gas. But instead they cut the NDIS.

They should be ashamed of that decision.

But everyone who supported the campaign to stop these cuts should also be incredibly proud of what we achieved.

The disability community and our allies mobilised on an extraordinary scale. Together we held them accountable at every opportunity, exposing the consequences of its legislation and using every parliamentary tool available to delay, scrutinise and improve the Bill.

There are lessons here about what grassroots community action can achieve, even when we don’t have the numbers to win the final vote.

From the beginning, the Greens were clear: we would not support cuts to essential disability supports.

We also understood that parliamentary opposition alone wasn’t enough.

One of the most important parts of this campaign was making sure disabled people had the information they needed to understand what the Bill would actually mean for them and the opportunity to make their objections impossible to ignore.

Disabled people, families, carers, workers and advocates wrote submissions, contacted MPs, attended rallies, shared their experiences and organised in their communities.

The Government might have had the numbers in Parliament, but it could not simply pass this legislation without scrutiny.

The Greens used our position in the Senate to delay the Bill for eight weeks, securing an additional Senate Inquiry and creating the time and political pressure needed for the community campaign to cut through.

Those eight weeks mattered.

They gave the community more time to organise. They gave disabled people more time to understand the proposed changes and tell decision-makers what they would mean in practice. And they kept almost $1 billion in people’s NDIS plans for longer than would otherwise have been the case.

That is a significant achievement. And it demonstrates something important about the role of the Greens in Parliament.

We may not always have the numbers to stop bad legislation outright. But we can use our position to create space for communities to organise, to expose the consequences of government decisions and to force governments to negotiate.

That is exactly what happened with this Bill.

The Government was forced to make serious concessions.

The final legislation now contains a number of safeguards that were not there at the beginning, including an appeals pathway for large-scale cuts imposed by the Minister, stronger protections around debts raised against participants, expanded rights to request reassessment, whistleblower protections for people reporting fraud, and a clearer definition of parental responsibility that recognises disability support is different from ordinary parenting responsibilities.

These changes do not make the cuts acceptable. They do not change our opposition to the legislation.

But they will make the impacts of this Bill less brutal than they would have otherwise been for some disabled people and families.

These safeguards were secured because of the ongoing community pressure the campaign against the cuts created, and because the Greens took that campaign into Parliament and refused to let the Government pass its legislation without a fight.

That is something our movement should be proud of.

There will be challenging times ahead, but we are not going to stop defending what remains of the NDIS, and fighting to reverse the cuts.

But importantly, disability justice is about more than the NDIS.

We also need to fight for something bigger than restoring what has been taken away.

We need a country where disabled people have the right to live independently, participate fully in their communities, celebrate disability with pride and shape the political decisions that impact their lives.

The Labor Government has spoken a lot about “foundational supports” in its defence of these reforms. So let’s talk about what foundational supports should actually look like.

They should look like genuinely accessible housing and healthcare. Physically, financially and culturally accessible.

They should look like being able to marry or live with the person you love without losing essential DSP support.

They should look like properly funded disability advocacy organisations, rather than expecting chronically under-resourced organisations to pick up the pieces whenever governments make decisions that hurt disabled people.

And they should look like more disabled people in Parliament, so decisions about us cannot be made without us.

That’s just a start.

The NDIS fight has shown us what is possible when community campaigning and political action work alongside one other.

We delayed the Bill.
We forced concessions.
We helped expose the real consequences of these cuts.
And we created space for disabled people to be heard in a debate that too often happens without them.

Now we need to build on that.

The Government may have won the vote. But this movement is bigger than one Bill.

Nothing about us without us isn’t just a slogan. It’s a political project.

And we’re only getting started. Join the campaign for disability justice.

- Jordon Steele-John, Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Disability Inclusion and the NDIS

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In the last two weeks in Australia, we have been overwhelmed by devastating headline after devastating headline, each one leaving women feeling less safe in their communities.

In Brisbane a woman was killed by a former partner, and a young woman was raped while going for a morning walk.

In Melbourne, a 13-year-old boy was arrested over an alleged attempted sexual assault of two women.

In Perth, two men, 30 and 25, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and were jailed.

In Sydney, three 14 year old boys are charged with the rape of a 14 year old girl, and three 17 year old boys have been changed with raping a 17 year old girl.

Members of the Sydney Swans AFL team are being investigated over an alleged sexual assault, while Richmond players appear to mock the victims.

This is just the latest chapter in an epidemic of violence against women in this country.

We cannot keep ignoring it.

And governments cannot keep underfunding their response.

Two weeks ago, the women’s safety ministers met, but you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, which was basically zero.

At the time, I put a call out to the government to urgently commit an additional $4.6B to address the shortfall in public housing so that women escaping violence had somewhere to go.

The housing crisis and domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV) are inextricably linked; each week an average 225 women and children are turned away from crisis accommodation.

Nearly 12,000 women and children seeking short term accommodation are missing out each year.

A few days after the meeting, Labor quietly re-announced an existing funding commitment for crisis accommodation that won’t even touch the sides of the demand.

Two years ago, prompted by public outrage over a rise in women being murdered and assaulted - sound familiar? - the federal government commissioned a Rapid Review and convened an urgent National Cabinet meeting to address gendered violence.

Ministers emerged from the meeting with strong public statements about implementing the Rapid Review’s recommendations and doing what was needed to address this crisis.

Yet two years later, we find ourselves here again.

Many of the commitments made at that National Cabinet meeting remain unfinished at best, and ignored at worst. The Women’s Safety Ministers recently agreed to report further progress in 12 months on actions deemed urgent two years ago.

In 2024, National Cabinet committed to establish a 5 year Prevention Innovation Fund to support primary prevention initiatives to stop violence before it escalates. It’s unclear what progress has been made there.

All States and Territories committed to reviewing alcohol and gambling rules, recognising that these industries exacerbate the risk of violence. There has been welcome progress on alcohol delivery restrictions in South Australia and the ACT, but other governments have not done the work.

And we all saw the Federal government’s recent capitulation over gambling ads.

Ministers said they’d work towards consistent death review processes and sharing information about DFSV-related deaths. Yet even the Federal government rarely uses its own dashboard figures.

Instead, the public relies on data from two volunteer organisations - Counting Dead Women and Sherele Moody’s Australian Femicide Watch - to report the scale of the problem.

Significantly, the Federal government committed to expedite data collection on unmet need and everyone agreed to “resourcing the DFSV sector for long term case management”. Two years later, even the pilot stage of the unmet need data project is not yet completed.

Meanwhile, frontline DFSV services continue to report that they are turning away women and children seeking help every day because they do not have the funds to keep up with demand.

National Cabinet committed to build workforce capability. Yet DV NSW reports that the frontline DFSV workforce in NSW has been reduced by 12% - citing underfunding, lack of certainty, and burnout - at a time when referrals to frontline services has increased by at least 22%. For many First Nations women, access to culturally appropriate services is even harder.

It’s an unsustainable situation and women and children at risk are paying the price.

Despite recognising the huge impact family violence has on children, and the need to resource and reform the role of Independent Children’s Lawyers to support affected young people, progress is slow and consultation on family report writer reforms is still ongoing.

Governments supported calls for dedicated sexual violence services and implementation of recommendations to improve justice system responses to sexual assault. Yet many of those recommendations - including access to independent lawyers and protections against the release of counselling records - have yet to be progressed. And advocates were once again dismayed by the lack of attention to sexual violence in early versions of the second action plan.

All of this begs the question - what is National Cabinet for if not to coordinate collective action on matters of national importance? If urgent commitments remain unimplemented two years later, how can the public have faith that governments are prioritising the safety of women and children?

Too many women and children are being killed by violence, primarily by men and most often by someone known to them, to wait any longer. We don’t need more ideas, we need the funding and the political will to turn them into action.

Frontline services are doing the hard work everyday. Their calls for support cannot continue to be ignored.

A recent report by Safe and Equal estimates that a 62% funding increase is needed to fully meet demand in Victoria. DV NSW has consistently called for a 50% uplift in funding. Yet in Queensland, the government has recently cut funding to prevention services, and threatened services who complained.

Establishing a consistent national measure of unmet need is important, but we do not need to wait for perfect data to know that frontline services need funding now.

Funding so women and children are not turned away, left on hold, put on waiting lists, or forced to return to violent homes. Funding so sexual assault survivors are not waiting months for trauma-informed counselling or cannot afford legal representation.

This week’s National Cabinet is a chance to show that the government genuinely understands the scale of this crisis before it is too late.

We need to face up to this horrendous culture if we are going to keep women safe.

We need to challenge gender inequality and disrespect wherever it occurs, whether that’s at a school, within an AFL club or at home.

And we need to fully fund the frontline services that do the hard work to prevent violence and support the women and children who experience it.

- Larissa Waters, Senator for Queensland and Leader of the Australian Greens

It feels inescapable. And that’s by the design of some very wealthy people.

Here in Australia, we have one of the most concentrated media markets in the world - second only to Brazil.

Which means the news you see is quite literally controlled by billionaires.

Billionaires like Rupert Murdoch who owns News Corp.

He controls two-thirds of the newspapers, two-thirds of the online news, and 100% of Sky News TV.

And he’s mates with Trump. They are so close that Rupert paid $800 million to avoid a trial where News Corp would have had to admit to telling lies about a so-called ‘stolen election’ to help Trump.

He was behind a phone hacking scandal that made international headlines, but claims he knew nothing about it, despite paying out $1.9 billion in costs and damages in the UK.

He uses his media empire to bully opponents, to stoke racial division and manufacture the anger and fear campaigns that are fueling the far right across the world.

He’s systemically denied climate change and of course, like most of the world’s ultra wealthy, he religiously avoids paying tax.

Here in Australia, News Corp is part of an exclusive club of 79 companies that haven’t paid a cent in tax over the 11 years that corporate tax data has been publicly released.

$0 tax despite $25 billion in revenue over those same 11 years.

And then there’s Seven West Media, owned in part by mining billionaires Kerry Stokes and Gina Rinehart.

They control Channel 7, radio stations across the country, and a few newspapers.

Then there’s Nine, also billionaire-backed, that control Channel 9, the SMH and The Age, and radio stations across the country, like 3AW and 2GB.

Together, these billionaire-backed corporations control 80 to 90 percent of our media.

And that’s before you even consider digital media, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter.

They’re all owned and run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

And like Murdoch, Musk is actively using his platform to inflame political division and stoke right wing violence.

These billionaires control what you read, what you watch, what you scroll through.

There’s things that could be done, like bringing in laws to stop billionaires buying up and owning all the media.

Or laws supporting more independent media so that people can access a diversity of ideas and opinions.

So next time you think, why is every headline about Pauline Hanson, or why haven’t I heard anything from the Greens?

Think about who is controlling our media. It’s not people who want to see the Greens win.

The billionaires may not like us, but that’s ok, because we’re not fighting for them, we’re fighting for you.

Unlike Labor, the Liberals, One Nation, we don’t take money from billionaires or big corporations trying to buy influence.

We want them to pay their fair share of tax. So we can afford essential services.

So we can invest in independent media.

Media that will lay down the facts, not twist the truth to suit some billionaire’s agenda.

Media that isn’t bought and run by billionaires.

And make sure everyone has what they need to live a good life.

— David Shoebridge, Greens Senator for NSW

We are being completely inundated by an onslaught of foreign-backed AI slop, deepfakes, and automated bots.

It’s a digital tsunami of trash intentionally designed to do two things: artificially boost One Nation and flood our comment threads with racism, hate and division.

Let’s be clear, this stuff is not from real people with genuine concerns about their and their children’s future, and who are deeply frustrated with the status quo.

It’s a highly orchestrated, billionaire-funded campaign designed to crowd out our voices: Green voices. Progressive voices. Your voices.

It is a mass propaganda campaign to stop people from looking at the real crisis: extreme wealth inequality caused by the billionaires and big corporations who make up the 1% and who continue to get richer and richer from it.

You don’t need me to tell you exactly how dangerous this global playbook is. 

Pauline Hanson recently jetted off to Europe, seen holidaying in Italy with Gina Rinehart, attending Dolce & Gabbana fashion show and travelling on to the UK on a “fact-finding” mission.

The experts she chose to meet with? 

A billionaire ex-pop star, a multimillionaire MP whose party welcomes fascists and white supremacists as members, and a far-right activist even Nigel Farage won’t speak to. 

This is more of the same for Pauline Hanson. She wants a monoculture, mass deportations, and thinks everything started to go wrong in Australia when the White Australia Policy ended; we know, she’s been telling us for 30 years.

All that’s changed is that she’s found some billionaires to help her spread her hate.  

One Nation is running a coordinated campaign to turn people’s legitimate economic pain into cultural warfare.

But we know the truth: blaming immigration, attacking workers' rights and fueling racism and Islamophobia will not make big corporations pay their fair share of tax, it will not lift people out of poverty, and it will not make housing more affordable.

Labor and the Liberals are compromised, doing the bidding of the exact same billionaires and big corporations who fund their political parties. One Nation is exactly the same, completely bought off by the wealthiest donors who profit from keeping us divided.

At best, they tinker around the edges. At their worst, they tip the scales even further away from everyday people. They will not change this broken system because they are entirely dependent on it - and yet wonder why voters abandon them or look elsewhere.

This is where we must face the reality of the job ahead.

We are not here to change the minds of failing politicians.

As Bob Brown once said, our job is not to keep the bastards honest, it’s to replace them. Only then will we be able to break the corporate grip on Canberra once and for all.

I know that saying this out loud opens us up to ridicule from the media and attacks from fringe groups and trolls. Well, you know what? Bring it on.

If we’re being attacked, it’s for a reason: they know the impact a strong progressive movement can have.

By ourselves, it can feel like there is little we can do, but we are not by ourselves. We have each other.

This grassroots solidarity - our grassroots solidarity - is exactly how we challenge the racist and divisive politics of the far right and the corporate greed of the 1%.

If you’re not already a member of the Greens, that’s the most powerful step you can take on this journey.

We have the power to replace the establishment, bring the essentials back into public hands, and build a movement that welcomes everyone. Better is possible, friends, and it is a future we can absolutely shape together.

— Larissa Waters, Senator for Queensland and Leader of the Australian Greens

Politics should work for people. It’s a simple idea in theory. The people you elect to represent your interests, should in fact do that.

But right now it doesn’t work that way.

96% of Australian rentals aren’t affordable for essential workers.

Just last week I was listening to a story about a couple on the Sunny Coast, a nurse and an electrician, who’ve had so much trouble finding a rental that they’ve started their own community organisation to help other young people find housing.

We need to be better than this.

In fact we need to demand better than this, or we’ll end up like the US

where inequality is rife, services are underfunded or nonexistent, and billionaires run politics.

We’re not there yet, but as long as the 1% are allowed to keep accumulating wealth and buying political power in Australia, we’re on the same path.

Since I became parliamentary leader of the Greens, it’s been a real journey to navigate just how much we can and should work with Labor.

At the time I said I wanted to get shit done, unfortunately, Labor simply isn’t interested.

They will never take the bold action that would actually fix the housing crisis, the cost of living crisis, the climate crisis.

And it is this unwillingness by Labor to act for people that has created the conditions for One Nation to rise.

Two years is a long time in politics.

With Labor in structural decline. The Greens have to be ready to replace them.

When I focus on all the good things we will be able to do if we achieve that, the overwhelming emotion that I feel is HOPE.

That is what gets me out of bed everyday and makes me want to fight for a better, fairer world.

In the short term, yes, we have power to build pressure on the Labor party to drag them to get outcomes in the Senate, and we’re using that power to make change.

But we’re not a pressure group, we’re a political party. And the aim of a political party is to win government.

The Greens don’t accept that tinkering around the edges is the best we can hope for, and neither should any of us.

Better is possible, but change isn’t something we can just wait for, to land in our laps.

It’s something we have to make together.

As a people-powered movement, that doesn’t take the big corporate donations the other parties do, we know that better than anyone.

Because even though the system is stacked in the favour of the 1% now, we are not powerless.

The billionaires and big corporations out-lobby and out-donate, buying out politicians like yet another asset in their portfolio.

They fund fake grassroots campaigns, to make it look like their support is bigger than it is, and set up industry groups that use their megaphone to argue their interests should come first.

By ourselves, it feels like there’s little we can do; but we are not by ourselves.

We have each other.

And that solidarity is how we challenge the divisive politics of the 1%.

It’s how we build a movement that welcomes everyone, and a community that is safe for everyone.

The 1% want us to blame one another, so that we don’t come together and realise it’s the big corporations and billionaires making life harder for everyone to boost their own profits.

But around the world we are seeing people powered, progressive movements for change are growing and winning.

We can make sure that happens here too, because the majority of Australians agree on the basics.

They agree that a nurse’s wage shouldn’t be taxed more heavily than a big gas corporation’s exports.

That democracy should mean that billionaires and big corporations can’t buy off politicians.

That our climate and environment are worth more than corporate profits.

That the top 1% should pay their fair share so the 99% can live a better life.

And the Greens do too.

With the major party system on the decline, we have an opportunity for real change.

People are angry, and they are looking to blame the establishment.

They are looking to One Nation because the major parties have failed.

Labor and the Liberals have stopped representing people and just represent the vested interests of the corporations and their ultra wealthy donors.

While Pauline Hanson wants us angry, divided and scared of our neighbours, the Greens are fighting for the things that make Australia such a great place to live.

Because blaming our neighbours, workmates and friends won’t bring down rents, it won’t make housing more affordable. It won’t make life any easier for anyone.

But it does stop people pointing the finger at the big corporations and billionaires who are actually causing these problems.

We can fight back against Pauline’s incoherent hatred and her efforts to destroy the things we love; public education, public hospitals, decent wages and working conditions, our incredible environment and climate.

And the things we deserve; affordable housing, dental and mental in Medicare, making Tafe and uni free like it used to be.

All those things Labor could do, but won’t.

If you’re feeling fired up, if you’re angry, if you’re nervous about the direction of Australian politics, the solution is to come together and fight for the change you want to see.

Join the Greens.

Sign up to volunteer.

Get out on a campaign and talk to people.

Because better things are possible, if we’re willing to fight for it.

We can make Australia a better place to live for all of us, and we need that if we’re going to take on the 1% and win.

- Larissa Waters, Senator for Queensland and Leader of the Australian Greens