ON MY MIND

There’s something really refreshing about hearing a mother talk about her independence and how much she loves her life outside of her kids. Last week I came across this clip of Michelle Obama talking to Jon Stewart on the podcast she does with her brother and immediately resonated with it. Both Jon and Craig talk about loving the stage of their kids being younger and how it gave them purpose, but Michelle talks about how much she loves and embraced the independence of her kids.

And you do definitely pick up a bit of a gendered approach in this conversation. In the actual podcast episode, Michelle does go on to say that part of their perception is likely down to the difference between the experience of mothers and the experience of fathers. Especially when a mother is the primary caregiver.

As an aside, I do recommend listening to the whole podcast episode because it’s a really interesting conversation about politics, comedy, and Jon’s background — they’re also all just very intelligent, thoughtful and enjoyable people to listen to!

The gendered split of parenting aside, it is also just so positive to have an example of a woman talking publicly about her identity and her personhood outside of being a mother.

Yesterday I caught up with some friends, including someone who has recently gone through a separation and is also doing the shared parenting thing like I do and we chatted extensively about the liberation of shared care arrangements. I’ve been doing this for almost ten years now, and I honestly can’t imagine doing it differently. Sometimes when someone finds out that my daughter spends half her time with me and half her time with her dad and his partner, they’ll ask, “Oh do you miss her? Isn’t it hard not having her with you all the time?” And often I’m not entirely sure how to answer. Because the honest answer is, not really.

Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely hard at first because she was young and we were also going through a separation and divorce so there is a lot of emotion and stress and tension all kind of mixed into the experience. As well as just finding the right balance of co-parenting and transitioning your relationship with someone from a partner to a co-parent. But I’ve become incredibly used to and grateful for this way of parenting. (With the necessary caveat that I do have a very good co-parent — but we did also put in the work to make it a successful co-parenting arrangement — and I know that this isn’t everyone’s experience of this kind of arrangement).

I am a single parent when she’s with me so I am 100% on all of that time. When she is with me, I don’t have another adult to share the housework or the cooking or the school drop-off or the finances with when it comes to the logistics of having a kid in the house. But at the same time when she’s at her dad’s place, I am 100% for me. My time is mine to do with what I want. My house is mine, my meals are mine, my schedule is mine. It is so incredibly freeing to be able to have an identity that is mine outside of my identity as a mother.

I think that it’s something that we don’t really talk about enough because there is this inherent level of shame or stigma that comes from admitting that you enjoy being a person outside of being a mother. Motherhood is treated as this sacred calling that overwhelms and overrides anything else and that is just not my experience.

Maybe it is part of the way that I was raised as well. My mum was never really a very maternal kind of parent and she’s told me that she had kids because that was what you did. I don’t think she regrets having kids, I know that she loves me and my brother, but also being a mother never really defined her in the way that I think it defines a lot of people.

I also don’t feel particularly compelled to define myself by my motherhood. I absolutely wanted kids and I’m so glad that I have my daughter. I absolutely love her and I love being her mum but being her mum is not all that I am. Doing shared care of her from relatively early on means I almost had to find my own identity again outside of motherhood in a way that the all-consuming nature of early parenthood doesn’t often allow time for. And I genuinely believe that her being able to see that I have an expansive life outside of her is only a good thing for her and gives her so many more options in life.

I think that that is possibly why this clip of Michelle Obama really resonated with me and really resonated with a lot of people when I shared it in my stories because it is something that we don’t talk about enough. Having someone you respect or admire give voice to something that a lot of people might think and feel but haven’t really heard someone articulate out loud in some ways gives us permission to embrace it for ourselves that is so much harder when it’s a quiet, unsaid thought in your mind. Wanting a life of your own doesn’t make you less of a mother.

WORTH READING

• A hungry woman is easier to dismiss than a well-fed woman (Aeon). The societal pressure for women to shrink themselves isn’t just about aesthetics. This essay argues hunger works as a cognitive tax on women that starts in adolescence. The underfed brain spends its bandwidth tracking food, and constantly monitoring the body. It reframes “discipline” as something closer to a handicap we’ve been taught to call virtue. An interesting perspective that goes beyond the focus on thinness in the beauty sense, and looks at what other deficits this focus costs us.

• “Labor — the middle ground is not enough!” (Pearls and Irritations) Former Canberra Times editor Jack Waterford argues that Labor cannot rely on moderate “middle ground” and that focusing on One Nation is missing the point. With such a majority in federal parliament and controlling most of the state governments, Labor should be making broad reform and strengthening institutions Labor pioneered like Medicare, superannuation and the NDIS. Instead, they seem content to be timid and risk losing their electoral advantage from sheer inaction. “The Albanese model of good government is an essentially managerial one, with a limited agenda, and a plan of seeming competent in responding to events as they came up. The figure for imitation is the calm of John Howard, one of the few giants of the Australian political landscape with a personality and charisma matching Albanese, and, like Albanese, reluctant to deal in visions, long term plans or discussions with voters.”

WORTH WATCHING

Silenced is a new documentary out in cinemas this week (3 September) that I recommend everyone goes to see. The documentary is built around the incredible Jennifer Robinson and is based on her book How Many More Women? that she co-wrote with fellow human-rights barrister Keio Yoshida.

The book covers a lot of cases where the legal system has been used as a tool and a weapon to silence women and to stop them speaking about their own experiences, particularly of sexual violence. This documentary primarily centres around three women and their stories — Amber Heard, Brittany Higgins and Catalina Ruiz-Navarro — but also includes a range of different legal cases that show the depth and breadth of the ways in which the legal system is leveraged to silence women’s voices.

I went to the preview screening of this in Canberra on Friday night and the producer of the film, Blayke Hoffmann, was there. She talked about how this is part of a broader impact and advocacy campaign that they are working on, focused on Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) — essentially legal actions or threats designed to silence people. This is a beginning step in this broader campaign to pursue anti-SLAPP laws in Australia and better protect our freedom of speech.

It’s an incredibly important film that I really, really recommend you all see. You can check where it’s screening on the website, as well as learn more about the broader impact campaign and how you can get involved and support this work.

ICYMI

Last week’s Four Corners episode Access All Areas (ABC) focused on lobbyists and it was a really good deep-dive into something that is fairly opaque (and opaque by design). The insight into the gambling lobby in particular — given the recent passing of “reform” in this space — makes it well worth the watch. Two-thirds of Australia’s registered lobbyists are former government staffers, according to Deepcut — and that’s only the ones the register can see. Research suggests up to 80% operate as in-house “government relations” and never make the list at all because of the way the rules are set up. The rules need a serious overhaul.

One thing I’d note though is that a lot of the conversation on lobbying — particularly what I’ve seen on social media — has a tendency to react to this information by saying we should “ban lobbying” which would have the (likely unintended) consequence of also essentially blocking advocates for social reform and NFPs from also “lobbying” for their issues and raising awareness. Just something to keep in mind when the conversation gets flattened into a more black and white issue than it actually is.

ONE MORE THING

Were you into “choose your own adventure” books as a kid? I loved them!! And G bought me the grown-up version for my birthday present: Can You Solve the Murder? The Forest of Death by Antony Johnston. It’s a choose your own story murder mystery where you make decisions about what actions you’ll take and which clues you’ll follow to solve the murder. I read it over the weekend and it was so much fun!! I desperately want to get his first book (The Forest of Death is his second) and also am keeping my eye out for any other similar books. So if you know of any, please let me know!!

That’s what’s had my attention this week. Tell me what’s caught yours.

—Lauren.

(A quick note: there was no Lately last week. G and I were both sick, and it turns out you can’t write a newsletter when you’re trying to sleep off RSV. We’re back now.)

ON MY MIND

Are you a birthday person? Some people love it. It’s a whole event, a birthday week, a birthday month, and you know it’s their birthday. I’m more of a non-event kind of person. Not in an “I hate getting older” way. More of an “I’m not really bothered” way. To me it’s generally just another day, a stance my birthday-fiend friends find frankly appalling.

I have been asked multiple times this morning why I wasn’t taking the day off work for my birthday. I did have a lovely weekend though. My parents came to stay — the first time they’ve visited since I moved in April — and G, my parents and I packed a lot in. I hadn’t realised how much my old house had dampened my enthusiasm for having people over until I had a place with room to actually host.

We went out for lunch, where G, well accustomed to being the only child among adults, happily read her way through another Percy Jackson book while we talked. We also went to the Botanic Gardens, which I’m embarrassed to say I’d never taken my parents to before despite the fact I’ve lived in Canberra for 14 years now.

Sunday morning, we went to the War Memorial. The new galleries on recent conflicts have just opened, and I hadn’t been back since the renovations. Actually, I hadn’t been back in about a decade. Fun fact: working at the War Memorial was my first ever job in Canberra.

Over lunch there, my dad asked what I made of the updates — he was asking partly from my reflections of working there but also partly for my professional opinion. For those who don’t know, I have a master’s in Museum Studies and spent the first part of my career working in Canberra’s museums and galleries, and I still think a lot about the way narratives are constructed in institutions.

Mostly, I thought the updates were well done. But what goes unsaid, or is said very carefully, definitely stood out to me. If you don’t already know what’s missing — which perspectives are absent or muted — you probably wouldn’t notice. But in all exhibitions, or any form of cultural storytelling, what’s not included is a deliberate choice designed to shape how people perceive the narrative.

The Ben Roberts-Smith of it all was front of mind, and the way it’s handled left me cold. There’s a single panel near the end of the Afghanistan exhibit on the investigation into alleged war crimes, and a line or two on his Victoria Cross panel. Beyond that, the treatment is generally pretty deferential. In the shop, the Chris Masters book about BRS (one that was supposed to win a literary prize at the War Memorial in 2024 before they overruled the decision of the judging panel) is barely noticeable in the back corner — despite likely being one of the most high-profile military history books recently published.

(As a side note, I recently read the book Getting Murdoched by Andrew Dodd and Matthew Ricketson and Chris Masters is one of the case studies they look at. Highly recommended reading on how the Murdoch empire uses their power and influence to target and discredit people.)

I wasn’t surprised by the approach I saw while wandering around the galleries. But it does make me worry about what a visitor takes away if they’re not across the detail, or have only heard about BRS’ war crimes from the perspective of Channel 7 (owner Kerry Stokes bankrolled BRS’ defamation cases) or The Australian (who continue to call him a war hero) or Andrew Bolt (who has written in defence of BRS).

As a quick reminder, in 2023 the Federal Court found the allegations that he was complicit in the murder of unarmed Afghans substantially true, on the balance of probabilities. He lost his appeal, and in September last year the High Court declined to hear the case. In April this year he was charged with five counts of the war crime of murder. Those charges are yet to be tested, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence. But none of that context is really there to guide anyone through it. The interpretive work simply hasn’t been done to the extent it deserves.

Setting the interpretation aside though, the other thing I raised when my dad asked me what I thought about the upgrades was the sheer scale and expense of it all. It’s hard to sit in the extended War Memorial and not compare its budget and building works to every other cultural institution in this city.

The War Memorial is a cultural institution, but it enjoys one enormous advantage: it doesn’t sit in the Arts portfolio. It sits under Veterans’ Affairs, itself a subset of Defence, and no politician wants to be the one who “defunded” the War Memorial. Meanwhile the National Gallery still needs major works to stop it leaking, Questacon funds most of its operations through the door because it’s a division of the Department of Industry, the National Film and Sound Archive require funding to support digitisation of quickly deteriorating film archives… every cultural institution has been hit by efficiency dividends and a general absence of public advocacy, particularly over the past decade.

In fact, it was 10 years ago that Liberal Senator James Paterson (who is still on the Liberals front bench) said we should sell the iconic Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles painting to pay down the national debt. This was also said in the midst of some of the biggest funding cuts to the public service and cultural institutions. And I know this firsthand because I’ve worked in a lot of them. I’ll also admit I’m biased because of what I studied.

But sitting between the very modern, very expensive extensions — which at times can drift closer to glorification than to commemoration and contemplation — knowing the situation of the institutions in disrepair and lacking funding across the lake…the imbalance was hard to ignore.

A nation shows what it values in what it chooses to fund (and what it lets fall apart). We are paying to enshrine how we fought — which isn’t an issue in itself — but we’re also letting the rest of the story of who we are and how we define ourselves be an afterthought. The values message is written in the budget, and it says a lot about what’s considered to be worth remembering.

WORTH READING

• Labor celebrates a couple of big wins — and doesn’t stop to ask who for (The Point). NDIS cuts and gambling “reform” both cleared parliament in the last fortnight on Coalition votes, and Amy Remeikis asks the question that’s needed: who are these “wins” for? When a majority government starts measuring success by what it can pass rather than who it actually serves, that’s not a great sign. These two reforms in particular are letting down millions of vulnerable Australians and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of the anger on this.

• Anti-abortion rhetoric is becoming entrenched in Australian right-wing politics(The Conversation) on the federal “born alive” bill. It’s dressed up as a human-rights measure, but it’s aimed at undermining existing state decriminalisation and clinical guidelines. I’ve been keeping an eye on Joanna Howe and her anti-abortion crusade for a while now and this bill has her fingerprints all over it. We can’t afford to be complacent when it comes to reproductive rights and justice — and being aware of the language they’re using to Trojan Horse anti-abortion rhetoric into the mainstream is a key part of that.

• From scroll to poll: influencers and Australian politics (Griffith News). New research from Griffith and Sentiment Agency finds digital creators are now out-publishing traditional media roughly four to one, and have become young Australians’ most influential source on politics. I’m really interested in this from a couple of different angles as admittedly I do sit a little bit inside this shift. To me, the real question isn’t whether creators should be shaping political attention, because they already are. It’s what standards, disclosure and accountability we ask of the people doing it. There’s definitely a bigger picture piece I’m still thinking about with this one.

WORTH LISTENING

Behind the Bastards two part episodes Alex Karp: How Palantir’s CEO Went From Marxist to Anti-Woke Crusader. It’s one of my favourite podcasts, profiling the the terrible people throughout history and their influence on the world, and I went in knowing almost nothing about Karp. He’s someone who is doing real harm to the world and has the potential for so much worse with the way Palantir is embedding itself in governments and fast-tracking the surveillance state. Worth understanding the worldview of the men (and it’s almost always men) destroying the world.

ICYMI

Streamers now the most important commissioners of Australian drama (Mumbrella, on Screen Australia’s latest figures). Streaming platforms now spend around six times what free-to-air does on local drama, while total Australian content investment has fallen more than 20% since 2017. While it’s great that streamers are investing in Australian content, it should be incredibly concerning that free-to-air broadcasters aren’t supporting local scripted content.

Australian adult drama made up just 2.7% of the $1.9b spent on programming by free-to-air networks in FY24 — and Australian children’s drama made up just 0.2% of the total. Compare this with “light entertainment”, which gets 31.9% of free-to-air expenditure, and Australian sport, with 31.4%.

This also comes back to what I mentioned up the top — what we invest money in matters and says a lot about what we value. The report this article is based on also says that around 2 in 3 Australians agree our screen stories support feelings of belonging and connectedness, and make them think about their identity as an Australian. Social cohesion anyone?

ONE MORE THING

The Cut ran a piece on Natalie Harp’s eyeliner, and there’s an Instagram post doing the rounds about it too. There are plenty of substantive things you could say about Harp. Her makeup isn’t one of them. It’s a weirdly retrograde take from a women-focused outlet, and surely, in 2026, we’re past reducing a woman in politics to her face. Pleasingly, most of the comments on the Instagram post called out the misogyny. This is not the reporting we’re looking for when it comes to women in politics — especially one who spends almost all her time with Trump yet didn’t have a national security clearance for a significant portion of her time in the White House. I also really recommend reading Regime Change by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan for more insight into Harp’s role in the Trump White House.

That’s the week from me — and if you’re the type who remembers birthdays, there’s a small suggestion just below.

Lauren

This entire edition is about what we choose to fund, and what that choice says about what we value. So it feels like the right week to make a small ask of my own.

My Lauren Lately platform is independent. It exists because people choose to pay for it and because I’m passionate about it, not because anyone commissioned it or sold ads against it. A paid subscription buys me the one thing this work actually runs on: time. Time to read the report instead of the press release, to check the detail before I hit send, and to keep this and other content landing in your inbox or in your Instagram feed.

If my work either here or on Instagram has helped you make sense of something this year, and you’re in a position to, a paid subscription is the most direct way to keep it coming. Think of it as a birthday present I’ll genuinely use.

Subscribe now

ON MY MIND

Watching the Kmart version of Meta glasses sell out almost immediately was a deeply uncomfortable sign of the times. On the plus side, it’s prompted a serious look at the privacy concerns of this kind of wearable technology. But that’s about where the good news ends.

The Privacy Commissioner has come out and said that our current privacy laws don’t cover our personal privacy from this kind of wearable, covert surveillance. New laws are required, but laws always move slowly when it comes to regulating just about anything.

The boundaries of privacy have been stretched thin already when it comes to being recorded in public without consent. Most of us are now unpaid extras in other people’s content in some way or another, captured in the background of someone else’s video at a cafe or the shops or the gym. And that doesn’t even start on the content that is explicitly filming people in public, capturing evidence of transgressive behaviour or just something someone doesn’t like.

Turning surveillance into an accessory feels like a new level of dystopia.

What does it do to public life when you’re never sure you’re being recorded?

There’s already anecdotal comment about how phones killed the night out. Gen Z don’t go out and dance in clubs the way many of us once did, because of a self-consciousness or awareness of the possibility of being filmed. We’re losing the ability to be unguarded, because an unguarded moment is now just someone else’s content. Or someone’s future blackmail.

Now put the camera on someone’s face. Meta’s glasses, and the low-cost versions, make filming more accessible and concealable than it has ever been. There are already tutorials online for switching off the little recording light, so the one signal that you’re being filmed quietly disappears.

We’re heading to a point where gyms and bathrooms will have to post “no wearables” the way they once posted “no phones,” because that’s the only language we’ve got.

The technology is moving faster than regulation can keep up with, sure. But the law was never going to be the whole answer. We don’t have the shared language or the social norms yet either, and it seems there’s no shame in quietly filming one another. But there really should be.

WORTH READING

• Pauline Hanson was once dubbed ‘queen of the men’s rights movement’. Blair Williams traces thirty years of Hanson positioning herself as the champion of aggrieved men. It’s a helpful reminder that however insulting her latest comments on domestic violence are, they aren’t a departure. She’s held consistently terrible views on these issues for her entire career.

• ‘Manosphere’ fuelling extremism in boys and young men. Evidence provided as part of the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion shows misogyny predicts susceptibility to violent extremism more reliably than politics, religion or ethnicity. The question worth sitting with isn’t whether the manosphere radicalises boys, we know it does. It’s why we still treat gendered hatred as a cultural nuisance rather than the early-warning system the evidence says it is.

WORTH WATCHING

Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation with Hasan Minhaj, “Is America The Bad Guy?” Coates is one of the few writers I’ll stop everything for, on the page or out loud. This conversation moves from the harm America has exported to the world, to the difference between intelligence and wisdom, to the violence built into the very idea of Empire. What stayed with me is how he holds moral clarity and real doubt at the same time, and how thoughtful he is about the positions he’s reached. I highly recommend watching the full thing — or you can also listen via the podcast Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, but I really think it’s worth watching rather than listening for this one.

Also worth reading his latest piece in Vanity Fair: “The Next Black President”

ICYMI

Right-wing activists in Victoria have been registering political parties with misleading names in order to funnel votes to conservative parties. This week, a Free Palestine party was rejected because the name had already been registered by far-right pro-Israel activist and self-proclaimed journalist Avi Yemini. (The same Avi Yemini who interviewed Charlie Pickering outside the ABC and asked what he thought about Grace Tame’s autism podcast…)

Victoria is the last jurisdiction which uses the old ‘Group Voting Ticket’ system, where you just voted ‘1’ above the line and the parties decided where your preferences would go. There is legislation before the Victorian Parliament to abolish the system, so it may not be in place for the November state election. But either way, this serves as a good reminder for us all to look into candidates and parties before we vote. The electoral system isn’t set up to regulate the claims of political parties and how they represent themselves to voters, and we all need to be mindful of the way bad actors can use the system for malicious purposes.

ONE MORE THING

Something that gave me genuine joy this week was IKEA's social team jumping on the Wicker trailer. I love it when a brand reads the room and plays along cleverly instead of awkwardly, and this was gold.

And while we're on Wicker: I need it noted that I love Alexander Skarsgård’s career choices as well as any press he does (his interaction with Miriam Margolyes on Graham Norton during the Pillion press tour lives rent-free in my head). I saw a post which said "I love whatever is wrong with Alexander Skarsgård" and that about sums it up.

That’s what’s had my attention this week. Tell me what’s caught yours.

—Lauren.

A note before we start. This is the first piece in the paid relaunch of my Substack. Most of what I write stays free: the Sunday newsletter, the explainers, the interviews. Paid is for the deeper reads like this one, and for keeping the work independent. Until the end of August, I'm opening the annual subscription at a launch rate of $72, down from $90. And that timing isn't a coincidence: there's a change coming this month that's the reason I'm doing this now. Paid subscribers will hear it first. Now, to it.

When I told my parents I was going to study history, they asked what it would lead to.

They weren’t being unkind. I was the first in my family to go to university, from a working-class family in south-west Sydney, and to them education was a pathway to a job. You did an education degree to become a teacher, studied law to become a lawyer. History and ancient history were a major with an unclear outcome.

From starting my arts degree 20 years ago, and through the intervening years, I’ve watched and listened as arts degrees have been devalued and looked down on. The official answer to “what will you do with that” seems to have always been: not enough. In 2020, the Morrison government wrote that belief into policy.

The Job-Ready Graduates (JRG) Package raised the price of an arts degree by 113 per cent, to more than $50,000, on the logic that the humanities don’t lead anywhere the labour market needs. While radically increasing the cost of a humanities degree, some STEM subjects deemed more essential were subsidised on the assumption the change in price would result in a change in degree choice. The message wasn’t subtle. Thinking is a luxury. Pick something “useful”.

The policy failed. Research from the University of Melbourne found only 1.5 per cent of students changed their course preferences in response. And enrolments of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds dropped.

The Universities Accord’s final report was blunt: the package “needs to be replaced.” Last year, more than a hundred prominent Australians signed an open letter calling for it to go. Even the current Government admits the policy “failed” and is “unfair.” And still it stands, quietly pricing a generation of working-class kids out of the one thing they can least afford to lose.

Then, while society was still equivocating over whether arts degrees were worth the money and the JRG policy was stuck in a painfully long review process, the ground moved. The arrival of generative AI was supposed to be the final word against the humanities. If a machine can write the essay, what’s the essay for?

Read more

ON MY MIND

This week I started doing something I’ve been wanting to do for ages and just never actually got around to. It’s nothing profound — or even important — but it’s been one of those ‘that would be nice to learn to do’ things I’ve had at the back of my mind for a while.

I learned how to solve a Rubik’s Cube.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever, and it’s easy to mistake access to it for actually knowing something. I’ve had the theoretical ability to solve a cube for years, sitting in all those tutorials online. What I’d never done was the thing itself.

It connects to a thought I keep coming back to: how valuable my arts degree actually was. There’s a mindset now that critical thinking, and the slow work of learning a skill by building the muscle, is a waste of time because AI can just do it for you. But access to information was never the same as knowing how. You only get there through the practice: the friction, the mistakes, the learning by doing.

The strange part is how long I put off something this easy, because it looked complicated or because I never made the time. It took an afternoon. Now I solve it a couple of times a day to let it settle into muscle memory, and it turns out it’s genuinely satisfying to be able to say I can.

We put things off because they don’t seem important enough to prioritise, even the small fun ones. But sometimes the point isn’t productivity, or optimising every second of the day. Sometimes it’s just in the doing: taking the time to learn something simple that stays complicated right up until the moment you can do it.

WORTH READING

• Boys don’t need “boy books.” They need someone to diagnose the actual problem. Luke Bateman, ex-NRL player turned BookTok star, says boys will read more if we give them books “written for boys.” It’s an appealing story built on the wrong diagnosis: the evidence points to socioeconomics, not gender, and “more boy books” treats a symptom while missing the cause. The real worry isn’t Bateman. It’s how readily a profile now sets the terms of a policy conversation the research underneath it doesn’t support.

• The ABC finally turns its attention to Monat. The ABC dug into Monat, the haircare brand sold through a multi-level marketing model, and the harm that structure quietly does to the women recruited into it. Good. MLMs have spent years dressed up as “women supporting women” and “be your own boss,” and the more that framing gets pulled apart in the mainstream, the harder it is to keep selling a pyramid as empowerment.

• “Disunity is death” has outlived its usefulness. “Disunity is death” has been Labor’s governing instinct for a generation, and this piece argues the instinct has outlived its use. Caucus solidarity was built for the labour movement’s founding fight; enforced unanimity now reads to voters as evasion, not strength. It’s the same warning Ed Husic gave me: a party that won’t argue in public looks like it’s hiding, and the silence does more damage than genuine debate ever would.

ICYMI

For the first time, the 2026 Census — this coming 11 August — will ask about gender identity and sexual orientation. That matters because you cannot fund, staff or design services for a population you have never actually counted, and LGBTQ+ Australians have been governed off guesswork for decades. Predictably, the “why does the government need my data?” line is already circulating, including some genuinely wild takes about the government harvesting “biometric data” in the Census, mostly from people who clearly don’t know what biometric data is. So, a reminder: the Census has always collected sensitive information, and individual responses are confidential and deidentified in the published statistics. It’s one of the most valuable tools we have for shaping policy, and being counted in it matters.

ONE MORE THING

Wired has a piece on writers building an “anti-AI literary counterculture”: deliberately keeping typos, ditching the em dash, breaking the rule of three, all to prove a human was here. What I find fascinating is the loop. AI trained on us until it produced a recognisable house style, and now we’re reshaping how we write in order to sound unlike the machine. It’s shaping language in both directions at once: not just in what it produces, but in how we write in reaction to it.

That’s me for the week. Read something that makes you think, not just something that makes you angry. Until next Sunday, Lauren

P.S. Go learn the small, useless thing. That’s the whole newsletter, really.

I’ve caught snippets of Dave Hughes interviews over the past couple of weeks, plus his ramblings interspersed through various algorithms. I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit through a full episode of his confident, ill-informed wrongness though. Even I have limits.

But this descent into political grievance from wealthy men — Hughes, Karl Stefanovic, and most spectacularly the recent interview where the world’s richest man crashed out over people not liking him — has me thinking about the way too much money really does seem to rot the brain.

I’ve been reading the latest Quarterly Essay, where Anna Goldsworthy reflects on AI. I’ll come back to it properly soon, because it’s fascinating. But one thing it’s stirred up is a question about the nature of work — not work as survival in a capitalist society, but the pull we feel towards it. The desire to create, to share, to labour on something of value.

I suspect most of us, freed tomorrow of the need to earn a wage, would keep working in some form. Better work, probably — study or pursuits we actually enjoy. But almost no one is satisfied by a life of nothing. We crave meaning from what we do, which is part of why so many of us bind our work so tightly to our identity.

The relationship between work and meaning is something I think a lot about, particularly in the last year or so when I’ve been doing serious career contemplation. Which is partly why the wealthy-men problem fascinates me. It isn’t that these men don’t work — they all do, in some capacity — but their enormous wealth insulates them. It buys distance from consequence, from accountability, from any genuine community of people whose lives look nothing like their own. The money doesn’t rot the brain so much as it removes every guardrail that would otherwise stop the rot.

Some of it is straightforward self-interest — the pivot to right-wing conservatism as a convenient justification for hoarding wealth they’re certain they’ve earned. But I think there’s something deeper in the disconnect. When you only ever associate labour with accumulation, you lose the ability to conceive of meaningful work outside a capitalist frame. And that atrophy shows up as a deterioration of compassion, of critical thinking, and in some cases of basic humanity.

Unfortunately, these meaning-bereft purveyors of right-wing talking points — with an understanding of politics as shallow as a puddle — hold extraordinary privilege, access and influence.

If only they’d take their need for relevance to therapy instead of a podcast studio.

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WORTH READING

• The ever thought-provoking Rebecca Solnit wrote about misogyny in the classics, the silencing of women and the violence perpetrated against them — using The Odyssey as a starting point for an incredibly interesting and crucial conversation.

• Peter Greste wrote an excellent piece for The Conversation on the ABC, journalism and the flawed concept of ‘false balance’ in response to comments out of the anti-semitism royal commission: “positive stories explicitly designed to cancel out the negative start to look like propaganda. And that is something journalists should never accept.”

• An interesting article from a professor and technologist on a way to think about how (or when) to use AI — framed as a question of whether the task is like work or like the gym. I found it a particularly helpful perspective when we’re seeing the atrophy of critical thinking skills, much like the atrophy of muscles from a sedentary lifestyle.

WORTH WATCHING

If you’re looking for a new show to watch, you simply must try Game Changer on Dropout.tv

If you haven’t heard of Dropout, it’s a streaming service that runs on a simple premise: put wildly talented improvisers in a room, give them a format, and let them cook. The shows are primarily unscripted comedy and the centrepiece is Game Changer, a game show where the game itself is the secret — contestants walk in with no idea what they’re playing or how to win, and figuring out the rules is the challenge. It’s like a masterclass in quick thinking, and it’s consistently one of the funniest things being made anywhere. Start there, fall down the rabbit hole, and enjoy the fact that your subscription actually goes to the people making the thing. The most recent episode (Count The Rice) is an absolute delight and it’s one of my favourite episodes ever.

ONE MORE THING

Elon Musk got himself so worked up about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that he’s said he’s going to use Grok AI to make a “historically accurate” full-length movie of The Odyssey. Unsure what ‘accuracy’ he’s aiming for given that it’s a mythological poem that was recorded centuries after the supposed time period. But safe to assume by “historically accurate” he really just means ‘white’. It’s still unclear whether he’s actually watched the film (or even read The Odyssey) but the fact that this is how the world’s richest man wants to spend his time and money is the perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with the capitalist tech bro billionaire class. (Never mind that to describe Greeks as ‘white’ would no doubt have been a surprise to the Greek immigrants who migrated to places like Australia and America post-WWII.)

Luca Lavigne has been named the next CEO of Mamamia. He is 28. His entire adult working life has been spent inside one company – the one his parents built. He started there as an intern a decade ago, rotated through its departments, and has now arrived at the top without ever having tested himself anywhere else.

No one is questioning his work ethic. That isn’t the story. The story is what it means for a business that has spent nearly twenty years billing itself as the voice for Australian women to hand its most senior role to a young man who has never worked outside the family firm.

The family business that insists it isn’t one

Mamamia has always been a family business, and the effort to suggest otherwise has always been faintly comic. Mia Freedman ran it until a restructure a few years ago made her husband, Jason Lavigne, the CEO. Two years ago the business brought in Nat Harvey – an experienced industry operator from outside the family – and it was read, rightly, as a maturing moment: a shift from family enterprise to a commercial women’s business led by women. Mia and Jason became ‘co-directors’, and Jason was Executive Chair of the business. But the CEO role, crucially, was held by a woman with industry expertise.

Harvey is now leaving after just over two years, returning to Southern Cross Austereo. And the succession plan turns out to be Mia and Jason’s son as CEO with Mia and Jason remaining as ‘co-directors’ — and Jason remaining as Executive Chair. Everything holds except the one seat that had gone to an outsider, returns to the family.

So a women’s media company arrives at a leadership structure where the two most senior roles are held by men. It feels more like a step backwards than a move forwards.

And look, this isn’t a comment on how people want to structure their family businesses. My own parents have run a small business my entire life — one that I worked in throughout high school and uni. But there is a big difference between a small family business of around 5 people, and a multi-million dollar media network of about 150 people that stakes its claim as the leading women’s media brand in the country.

“I don’t really touch content”

Pressed on his role, Luca has said he isn’t across the content — his job is strategy: making the agreed plan happen. Which invites the obvious question: then what, exactly, is he for? What is the value-add, beyond being Mia Freedman’s son?

To be a 28-year-old CEO of a media company you didn’t build is remarkable in itself. To be a 28-year-old man leading a company that speaks primarily to middle-aged women, having never worked anywhere else, is a genuinely strange business decision to defend. What insight can he bring to an industry he has only ever seen from a single vantage point? What does he know of the audience he’s meant to serve?

We are well past the era in which you join a company at the bottom and ascend, floor by floor, until you’re running it. Diversity of experience is not a nice-to-have; it is how good judgement is built. Rotating through the departments of one company – your parents’ company – is not the same as knowing the industry, or the world, or the readers.

And it’s fair to ask how a man leads a workforce that is overwhelmingly women.

There were reports a year or so ago about an inflated executive salary attached to his previous role. Whatever his CEO pay turns out to be, it isn’t going to settle that disquiet. Particularly when multiple staff were made redundant earlier this year, including senior podcast host Clare Murphy. Although reporting from the SMH says “Mamamia, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the value of Lavigne’s CEO remuneration package, but said there are other female employees of the company set to earn more than him.” Which is a curiously specific way of not answering the question.

You can’t un-ring that bell

The rollout of this announcement clearly was designed with the pushback in mind. Luca and Nat both did the Mumbrella podcast to discuss the move – you have to wonder how much Nat is there in the interviews to legitimise the decision. It’s not often an outgoing and incoming CEO do media together to announce the appointment. Luca, naturally, wants to push back on the inference that his personal connections are what got him this job. He limits discussion of the family connection to what ‘got him in the door’ but pivots to discussing his hard work since then and doesn’t want to be drawn on the whole family question.

There’s a particular richness to Luca pushing back on the relevance of his personal connection to the company. Mamamia was built on the opposite principle. The entire enterprise grew out of Mia oversharing her own life; the currency of the place has always been the private made public and then monetised. His own wife, Jessie, wrote about her relationship with a younger man (i.e. him) and turned it into content for the site. You cannot spend years mining your family’s private life for a women’s media brand and then, on becoming its CEO, insist that your family relationships are nobody’s business.

His personal relationships are not a distraction from this story. They are the story. You cannot extricate Luca-the-CEO from Luca-the-founder’s-son and Luca-the-husband-of-an-executive whose life has been editorial fodder for years.

The nepotism comparison doesn’t hold

The defence has already arrived in the shape of comparisons to other family dynasties: the Murdochs, the Packers. Lachlan Murdoch was 52 when he took over from Rupert. James Packer was 38 when Kerry died, and the empire passed to him. Set aside that both were considerably older and more tested – those empires were never built on the specific promise of speaking to women.

Mamamia was. “Making women feel heard, seen, and understood… nobody speaks to women like Mamamia” sits on its own about page. Can a man deliver on that? Perhaps. But the more useful question is: should he – and is he the best available person to?

Even Rupert Murdoch made his children go out and prove themselves elsewhere first. The results varied, but the instinct was sound. Jason Lavigne, for all the family-business optics, at least had a business career beyond Mamamia before he took the chair. Working in a business is not the same as being equipped to lead it.

Why this actually matters

Men do often end up leading women-focused companies, and it usually happens for one of three reasons: a founder who spots a commercial opportunity in women’s needs; a genuine leadership gap where women are underrepresented at the top of the sector; or a business that is women-oriented in its branding but never actually women-led.

The first might describe Mia’s original vision. It still doesn’t explain why a man should sit at the helm now. The second obviously doesn’t apply — there are plenty of women in this industry (and in this company). Which leaves the third, and most uncomfortable, possibility — that the “leading women’s media network in the country,” with a workforce that is overwhelmingly women, could not, or would not, find a woman to run it.

In an industry where women are overrepresented in the workforce, underrepresented in leadership and underpaid across the board, it is dispiriting to watch a young man handed the top job – not because he couldn’t grow into it, but because there is no shortage of accomplished women who could have stepped in and kept faith with the identity that made the brand work. It’s no longer enough that men run most media companies. Now they run the women’s ones too.

The question we’re allowed to ask

None of this is misogyny. Asking whether a man with no outside experience is the right person to lead Australia’s largest women’s media network is not an attack; it’s exactly the scrutiny any serious appointment invites. We are rightly wary when men are put in charge of businesses built for women, because the track record is patchy and the reasons are rarely reassuring.

Mamamia has spent two decades telling women it hears them, sees them, understands them. The least its audience can do, at a moment like this, is ask whether the company still means it.

I went to see The Odyssey today and really enjoyed it, but I’ve also been seeing all the takes online. For those who say Christopher Nolan’s writing and characterisation of women is not great — a fair critique — this is almost besides the point for me when it comes to a Nolan film. There are a lot of things I go to a Christopher Nolan film for; exceptional women characters or stories aren’t it.

Based on his films, I think Nolan is primarily interested in the question of “great” men who, in doing something considered “great”, contribute to the destruction or decline of the world. Whether that’s the world in more of a relational context (like in The Prestige), the world in terms of a city (like the Batman trilogy) or a civilisation level like in The Odyssey or Oppenheimer. The choices he makes in the stories he tells are in the broader service of his central premise. Do I wish he had more curiosity about the lives of women within this structure? Of course. But it’s also not the most egregious crime in art — especially when you take Nolan, his work and his character as a complete package and can compare to some men who are true art monsters.

I don’t entirely love some of the adaptation choices, but I can also see why he made them in service of the larger story. And they make sense in the world he’s created. People getting frustrated by the language or casting or costuming is kind of ridiculous to me — especially when most of the people getting their takes out haven’t even seen it yet. I think we need to take the art in its totality. The elements don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re part of the broader tapestry of the story.

As someone who has been obsessed with mythology — and particularly Greek mythology — for most of my life, I really enjoyed this interpretation of the story and it’s a reminder of how relevant these stories continue to be. There is no one true interpretation of the story. That’s the beauty of art — the same basic story beats can be arranged, adapted, interpreted and depicted in a vast array of different ways and the story can be different depending on who is telling the story, and to what end.

I think Nolan is deeply interested in understanding the world, particularly how we continually manage to break the social contract. Do I wish he spent more time with some of the women in the film? Yes, of course. But again, it’s not really something I’m looking to a Christopher Nolan film for. As a mythology nerd, I would love to have more of the gods and the mythology, but I also understand that’s not the story Nolan is telling.

If anything, I’m glad the film seems to be encouraging people to explore more of these stories and engage in ancient myths and legends. The universal truths at the heart of these stories — and how we use them to make sense of the world — are as relevant today as when the original stories, songs and poems were first shared.

To me, mythology has been an enduring obsession throughout history because these stories helped people to explain and make sense of the world. In a world where an increased access to knowledge has led to greater divisions and a “post-truth” world full of chaos and bad news, I think there is something grounding in looking to the explanations and stories of the past to find that central thread of human experience.

Worth Reading

• This piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom is one of the best things I’ve read about the influx of menopause content and awareness. She explicitly speaks to the lack of investment in women’s healthcare as the core issue that has created both a lack of awareness and understanding of menopause as well as the conditions for an increase of content and a new marketing opportunity: “The race to sell menopause solutions to women isn’t improving our health outcomes; it’s obscuring chronic disinvestment in research that could save our lives.”

• This fascinating article on Aeon considers the way the tech-bros have perverted the promise of progress and equality that underpinned so much of the science-fiction they claim to be inspired by. Science fiction is political and so much of it offers a vision for a better world. We need to stop the weaponisation of science fiction aesthetics by these tech elites as cover for their rollback of social progress and pursuit of profits at any price: “This is the path of selective science fiction operationalised as political reality – technological progress as cover for social regression.”

Worth Watching

This is a bit of an unusual recommendation, but hear me out — The Sheep Detectives. G and I watched it over the school holidays twice in as many days because we loved it that much! It’s that holy grail of a movie suitable for kids that is as enjoyable for adults. It’s incredibly funny but also made me tear up! Such a sweet movie and I think everyone will enjoy it, regardless of whether or not you watch with kids. (On Amazon Prime)

One More Thing…

This week I moderated a panel discussion on the gas tax. Ed Husic MP hosted a town hall for his electorate and was joined by Paul Farrow (National Secretary of the AWU) and Richard Denniss (The Australia Institute). It was a fascinating discussion and showed that there is serious interest behind this policy. With the Labor conference coming up in this week, hopefully the momentum can continue and we’ll see some real progress on getting a tax on gas exports. Definitely one I’ll be watching closely and will talk more about over the coming months.

L.

In doing all of this, we have handed Pauline Hanson exactly what she wanted.

I watched the entire National Press Club address (more than once) and have spent more time than is strictly helpful thinking about it and all the subsequent coverage. I’m about to make an argument about the word “monoculture” and why I don’t think we should be using it, which I’m aware is exactly the kind of participation in the debate I’m critiquing. But I’m hoping the broader point is worth it.

The numbers don’t support the coverage

I reviewed the transcript and analysed how Hanson allocated her time: immigration and multiculturalism made up 9.8% of Hanson’s prepared speech. Energy policy and climate change took up 17.2%. Housing got 6.6%. Transgender ideology – which also generated significant coverage – got 9.7%, almost identical to immigration.

The word “One Nation” appeared 32 times. The word “immigration” appeared 10.

This was not primarily an immigration speech. And yet immigration, specifically, the word “monoculture”, is where the national debate broadly landed.

How did that happen? Partly by design, and partly because of how media ecosystems and algorithms work in 2026 – and those two aren’t unrelated.

The technique

In 5,688 words of prepared remarks, Hanson asked 34 questions she didn’t answer. “Is that what Australia supports?” “Do Australians feel the nation is losing its identity? We all know the answer to that.” “What kind of Australia have we become?”

This is a rhetorical technique designed to manufacture consensus. Each question recruits the listener into a shared position they haven’t consciously adopted. There is no argument to rebut, because no argument is being made – only an implied majority being created.

The monoculture framing operates on the same logic. The word is not a policy position. It’s an invitation to argue about national identity on terms she has set, using vocabulary she has introduced, in a frame she controls. And the media – and we, in responding to the media – participated in and amplified it.

What the Q&A revealed (and what coverage missed)

The Q&A ran almost as long as her speech and covered ground not mentioned in the speech at all. The coverage of the Q&A largely focused on what was easiest to package: Hanson’s combativeness, her attacks on individual journalists, and her contempt for the media, particularly public broadcasters. These are legitimate stories. But they’re also the stories that fit the existing Hanson frame: the provocateur, the anti-media outsider, the grievance politician performing for her base. Covering them reinforced a narrative that, by this point, practically writes itself.

What received considerably less attention was the policy substance underneath. One Nation’s policy positions are often dismissed as insubstantial, but the Q&A suggests they’re more consequential than that.

Her dismissal of the gender pay gap as “smoke and mirrors” – because if women take time off and aren’t paid, “fair enough. Why should business pay them if they’re not at work?” This is a direct statement about paid parental leave and structural inequality, from a party leader who says she’s ready to be Prime Minister.

Her proposal to abolish the First Nations program funding and the National Indigenous Australians Agency (or what Hanson referred to as the “Aboriginal Affairs Department”) and return funding to consolidated revenue. Not rhetoric – policy. A structural position with real consequences for First Nations communities that appeared nowhere in the prepared speech.

Her abortion position – opposition from 20 weeks, a preference to “educate women to use contraceptives” – emerged only under questioning. One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts announced shortly afterwards that he was pushing the party towards an outright anti-abortion platform.

European countries with increased Muslim migration described as “s-holes.” Her word. On the floor of the National Press Club.

These are not footnotes or rhetorical flourishes. They are the policy platform. The grievance politics and the press club theatrics got covered because they were dramatic. The substance didn’t, because it required sitting with the full transcript rather than the highlights. The prepared speech is the version she wanted covered and the culture wars she wanted to inflame. The Q&A is the version she’d prefer you didn’t examine too closely.

The structural problem

There is an issue here beyond any single word or any single piece of coverage. Hanson has been permitted to set the terms of the debate.

“Monoculture” is not a word she used in passing. It’s a word she introduced into a prepared speech to a national audience, knowing it would travel. It’s punchy, it’s inflammatory, it’s vague enough to mean different things to different people – which makes it ideal for outrage cycles. Outrage generates clicks. Clicks fund coverage. And Hanson’s brand – the outsider who says what everyone’s thinking – is amplified every time we respond to the provocation rather than the policy.

The language audit from the full transcript is instructive here. Across both speech and Q&A, “lie,” “lied,” or “liar” appears 12 times, directed almost exclusively at Albanese and Labor. “Radical” appears 5 times – paired with Islam every time, which is well understood to be damaging Islamophobic rhetoric. “Insurgency” and “subversive” appear twice each – applied to the transgender movement, language that carries specific political histories and constitutes a meaningful rhetorical escalation. “Cancer” appears once, describing Islam as what she calls a “social cancer.”

This is not the vocabulary of a politician making an argument or putting forward a vision for the country. It’s the vocabulary of a politician constructing a moral panic, and the monoculture debate is a product of that construction.

What a more useful engagement looks like

It doesn’t start with her vocabulary. It doesn’t accept a debate she’s designed to win.

It notes that energy policy – Hanson’s dominant topic, despite what you’d think from the coverage – has the fingerprints of corporate interests all over it, even as she positions herself as champion of working people. It asks who benefits from the rollback of climate action she’s proposing, and what that implies for the communities she claims to represent. It examines the industrial relations framing – where she says it should be easier to sack people, and that workers are “lazy” and “don’t turn up” – and asks what that implies for labour protections. It asks serious questions about the proposal to abolish First Nations funding and programs. It names the 34-unanswered-questions technique rather than engaging with the consensus those questions manufacture. And it resists the pull of the click-friendly word, even – or especially – when that word is doing the most to drive the story.

The word “monoculture” was not in the mainstream Australian political lexicon a fortnight ago. It is now. That’s not nothing. Words shape what’s permissible and what becomes normalised, and Hanson understands that better than most of her critics.

But the way we’ve engaged with it – amplifying, rebutting, dissecting – has done more to establish it as a legitimate framing than any speech could have managed alone.

The prepared speech is the version she wanted covered. The Q&A is the version she’d prefer you hadn’t read. The fact that we’re arguing about monoculture and not about her proposal to abolish First Nations funding suggests she got what she wanted.

That’s worth sitting with.

The article annoyed me. And here’s why he’s wrong.

Australia was first

Let’s start with the history, because Creighton skips it entirely.

In 1984, under the Hawke government, Australia became the first country in the world to produce a Women’s Budget Statement. I know it’s hard to picture now, but Australia was a world leader in gender equity in the 1970s and 80s. The Women’s Budget Statement asked the question previously seen as optional: who does this policy actually affect, and how?

Prime Minister Bob Hawke committed that within the government’s overall economic objectives, budget decisions would be made “with full knowledge of their impact on women.” Within a decade, every state and territory had followed suit. The IMF, the World Bank, and the UN spent the following years urging other countries to do what we had already done.

In its early years, the WBS averaged around 300 pages and was a rigorous gender analysis of the entire budget – not just programs targeted at women, but all expenditure and revenue, examined for differential impact. It was, by international standards, world-leading policy infrastructure.

Creighton frames the WBS as an imported ideology. It is, in fact, an Australian invention – one we have repeatedly abandoned (under Coalition governments) and had to rebuild.

What it actually is

The Women’s Budget Statement is not a sympathy card. It is not a charity program. It does not hand women anything.

It is an accounting tool.

Budget decisions are not gender-neutral. Tax settings, superannuation rules, childcare subsidies, infrastructure spending, workforce programs – all of these land differently depending on your circumstances. A policy that looks neutral on paper can systematically advantage one group and disadvantage another. The WBS asks whether anyone in the room has done that modelling before the decision is made.

Creighton describes this as “highly political” and “contestable.” He’s right that it reflects values – the value that policy should be designed with knowledge of its actual impact. That’s what rigorous public administration looks like.

The numbers Creighton doesn’t mention

He’s selective about data, so let’s be precise.

Australian women currently earn 21.1% less annually than men (WGEA) – at the current rate of change (in a best-case scenario), we’ll reach pay parity sometime around 2050.

At retirement, women hold superannuation balances 25–30% lower than men. For women aged 60–64, the average balance sits around $340,000 against men’s $440,000.

That $100,000 gap is not the product of women working less hard. It is the compound result of taking parental leave (historically without super contributions), working part-time while raising children, and earning less across their careers.

Every one of those factors accumulates over forty years of superannuation. The July 2025 change making super payable on Commonwealth Paid Parental Leave was a direct policy response to this structural problem – and it appears in the WBS.

Then there’s the unpaid care economy. Australian women contribute 61.5% of all unpaid care and domestic labour – work independently valued at approximately $650 billion annually, or roughly half of GDP. This invisible economy subsidises every other sector. It makes paid work possible. It keeps children, elderly parents, and disabled family members alive and supported. It does not appear in national accounts. The WBS is one of the few government documents that attempts to count it.

Creighton doesn’t mention the super gap. He doesn’t mention unpaid care. He mentions that women now comprise 55% of senior executive roles in the public sector, which is true, and implies this settles the question.

It does not.

On young men

Creighton’s central alternative proposition is that if any group warranted a budget statement, it would be young men and boys, whose socioeconomic circumstances are, he argues, deteriorating.

He’s not wrong; this is a real issue. Young men are disengaging from education and employment in concerning numbers. Male youth not in education, employment, or training outpace their female counterparts. These are legitimate policy problems, and they deserve serious attention.

But this is a false choice, and Creighton knows it.

The existence of one structural problem does not negate another. If he wants a Young Men’s policy paper, he should make that case on its merits – and I’d read it.

What he is actually doing is using genuine concern about boys as rhetorical cover for dismantling a gender equity accountability mechanism. That serves neither young men nor women.

It just means neither question gets asked.

The violence statistics aren’t spin

Creighton takes particular exception to the WBS’s treatment of domestic violence, suggesting the document engages in “selective outrage” by identifying men’s violence against women as an ongoing problem.

The data: on average, one woman a week is killed in Australia by a current or former partner. Intimate partner violence is the leading contributor to death, disability, and illness for women aged 18–44 – ahead of cancer, ahead of car accidents, ahead of heart disease. The annual economic cost of violence against women has been independently modelled at $21.7 billion.

Creighton notes, correctly, that not all men are violent (but does it in a ‘not all men’ way). Nobody serious has argued otherwise. But describing a gendered pattern of violence in a policy document is not a slur on men as a class. It is a description of reality, and a basis for designing policy that addresses it.

Every time it’s scrapped, nothing replaces it

This is the most important part of the history.

The Howard Government narrowed the WBS in 1996 before abolishing it completely. It narrowed the focus first, replacing the comprehensive gender analysis with a “family budget statement,” then got rid of it altogether. The Rudd government reinstated it. Abbott abolished it again in 2014, while serving as his own Minister for Women, a decision that aged poorly.

The Morrison Government reestablished a light-touch version of the WBS in the 2021-22 Budget (likely under public pressure in light of their ‘women's issues’), and the Albanese Government reinstated it along with gender-responsive budgeting in the October 2022-23 Budget.

Each time it was cut, nothing more rigorous replaced it. No alternative analytical framework. No different mechanism for tracking gender impacts of fiscal decisions. The question simply stopped being asked.

This is Creighton’s actual proposal: stop asking the question.

The discrimination didn’t end. It changed form.

Creighton’s nostalgia for the days when a WBS was supposedly warranted – when women “faced significant discrimination in the workplace” – contains its own rebuttal. The discrimination he’s describing didn’t end. It changed form.

It moved from explicit exclusion – women barred from professions, fired upon marriage, denied credit – to structural disadvantage embedded in superannuation rules, care penalties, and pay systems that have proven stubbornly resistant to correction.

The barriers became less visible. They did not become less real. The Women’s Budget Statement is one of the few tools we have for making them visible again.

Visible things can be changed.

That is the point of the document. That is why it matters. And that is why the argument for abolishing it – dressed up as a defence of rigour – is, to use Creighton’s own word, spin.

What do you think? Has the Women’s Budget Statement been effective, or does it need reform rather than defence? I’d genuinely like to know – reply below.

He’s argued that taxing gas exports is both fair and fiscally responsible, and called the government’s refusal to do it a “tragic missed opportunity”. He sees the housing measures in this Budget, particularly the capital gains tax changes and money for enabling infrastructure, as evidence that crossbench pressure works. He thinks the government deliberately buried its response to a major report on gambling harm. He wants the next budget to talk about revenue, not just spending, and to stop treating spending on nature as an afterthought. And underpinning his approach and his politics is a consistent question: who is the system actually for?

I sat down with Pocock the day after the Budget to talk housing, gambling, big tech, and what a more ambitious Budget would look like.

This is an edited version of our conversation.

On housing, the CGT, and how pressure works

Several of the measures in this Budget were crossbench proposals. The $2 billion for housing enabling infrastructure is a policy the independent MP Helen Haines has championed for years. The capital gains tax reform is, according to Pocock, essentially one of the options he and Senator Jacqui Lambie put directly to the government as a way into the housing crisis.

A standard criticism of the crossbench is that it’s ultimately powerless – good at generating media attention, but without meaningful policy impact. Pocock is a useful test of that. His 2022 win ended the Liberal Party’s federal representation in the ACT – and, as the measures above show, the ideas he and his crossbench colleagues push have a way of turning up in government policy. (I will claim my obvious Canberra-based bias here.)

I asked whether he read the Budget as an acknowledgement that the status quo isn’t working, and whether this is what a strong crossbench is for.

David Pocock: I think it shows that pressure works in politics. When you have enough representatives who are connected to their communities and actually talking about the things that matter, like housing, and pointing out how insane it is as a country to have a tax system that incentivises investment in an unproductive asset … you finally get a government that has the courage to make that change.

Obviously, I’m biased as an Independent, but I see every day in here that it’s been the crossbench leading the conversation on tax reform, getting a fair return from gas exports, gambling reform. Take yesterday: the government responds after three years to their own report, which recommended banning gambling ads, during the one afternoon of the year where almost every journalist is in Budget lockup without their phones. If it wasn’t for the crossbench, we wouldn’t have heard a peep.

The gambling response, buried in the lockup

That brings me to one of the more cynical moments of Budget week.

During the lockup – aka the one time of year when political journalists are sequestered without phones or internet, entirely focused on the Budget – the Albanese government quietly released its response to the Murphy Report.

The Murphy Report (formally You Win Some, You Lose More) was a 2023 parliamentary inquiry into online gambling harm, led by the late Peta Murphy MP. It was a serious piece of work: unanimously backed by the committee, with 31 recommendations including a phased ban on online gambling advertising and a public health approach to gambling harm. The report was explicit that harm reduction couldn’t be left to individual responsibility; it required structural regulation.

The government’s response adopted only a fraction of those recommendations: a partial ad ban, not the full one. And it landed at the precise moment the press gallery was least equipped to scrutinise it.

I asked Pocock why he thought the government would release it on the one day of the year that all but guaranteed it would be buried.

DP: I think they’re deeply embarrassed and they know that it doesn’t fly with Australians. Yet again we’re seeing vested interests put ahead of everyday Australians. The polling was 77% of Australians – and 80% of Labor voters – wanting a full gambling ad ban. All the experts are saying we should do it. The government’s own regulator is saying partial bans don’t work, and last time we did a partial ban, we saw more ads. The cost-benefit analysis says a full ban is cheaper and more beneficial. But you can see the government is on the side of the gambling companies, so obviously they’re going to try to bury that. It’s out of step with what Australians want and with what’s good for our kids.

(Note: the polling Pocock was referencing came from this recent Australia Institute report.)

On big tech, misinformation, and political courage

On another front where corporate interests have an outsized influence over the rules, I asked Pocock about something the Budget didn’t mention at all, but is an increasing focus of mine: misinformation, disinformation, and the infrastructure of our democracy. It’s one of the most serious long-term threats to civic life, but it gets little to no policy attention.

DP: For a whole bunch of reasons, we’re seeing a lack of appetite – a lack of courage – to take on big tech. The government’s been willing to ban under-16s from social media, but isn’t willing to ensure that algorithms aren’t harmful. It isn’t willing to force these multinationals to pay tax here. And I think we’ve seen that flow into the regulation of artificial intelligence and data centres where the approach is basically: as long as these big tech companies are investing in Australia, they don’t have to pay much tax, and we won’t put guardrails in place.

I think there’s a huge amount of work to be done, and we know that a lot of it comes down to privacy online and the kind of information social media giants are able to collect and use to send people down very specific rabbit holes. Talking to people who spend their lives looking at tech regulation, they say if you actually stopped social media companies from collecting data on young people, they wouldn’t be able to send you down these rabbit holes.

I think this is a huge challenge and something that major parties just aren’t willing to take on. Everything from how do we deal with these enormously powerful tech companies in an age where the US doesn’t want any regulation on them anywhere, and things like truth in political advertising, where the major parties change electoral rules to suit themselves but won’t say, ‘we’re going to have to tell the truth on social media and in campaigns.’

On political narratives, structural change, and the winners-and-losers trap

Something I’ve been testing with people in my post-Budget conversations is the way the political narrative gets built around individual winners and losers rather than structural change. The backlash to the CGT reform is the obvious example – argued almost entirely through the lens of self-interest rather than what the tax system is actually for. I asked Pocock whether the way politicians and the media frame these debates around individual outcomes actively prevents us from having the conversation about structural change.

DP: You see this governing by focus group – governments doing things they’ve already tested and know will be okay, rather than leadership that says: ‘We’ve got some really tough decisions to make. We’ve got this tax system that isn’t working for us as a country. Yes, there are going to be people who potentially don’t like this, but actually this is the best thing for our country, for everyone.’ I think we’ve been missing that bigger picture.

Every time I speak to people, or it comes up at a town hall or in a meeting, I say, ‘Well, what’s housing for?’ Let’s answer that question: what is housing for? Is it something that has to be accessible – more of a human right – or is it an asset class and investment vehicle? If it’s an asset class and investment vehicle, then the system is working incredibly well because you can make a lot of money out of property… But that means that young people can’t afford housing, there’s a growing cohort of homeless people in this country, and it’s a disaster for things like fertility rates, where young double-income people are saying, ‘Can I afford to have kids at the moment?’ That’s the bigger picture.

I think there are a lot of good people in this parliament trying to talk like that, but often the system doesn’t reward it.

What Pocock wants from the next budget

I asked Pocock to look ahead to next year’s budget and what he’d want to see in it.

DP: I find it strange that every budget is just an obsession with spending, with very little talk about revenue. Something like a gas export tax – $17 billion a year – is fiscally responsible. We’re one of the biggest gas exporters in the world. There are $3-4 billion in fuel tax credits going to the biggest miners, and we now know that’s actually stopping them from transitioning off diesel.

And if we’re talking about intergenerational inequity: Job-ready Graduates has to go. You have humanities students with $50,000-plus HECS debts taking a quarter of a century to repay. We still have a million children living in poverty. We were told for four years that we couldn’t afford to fix that, and then last night we found out that $4.80 per week per worker is enough to lift them out of it. If you asked most Australians, ‘Do you want $4.80 back, or do you want to live in a country where no child lives in poverty?’ – I think a lot of people would say keep the $4.80.

Finally, I think the most tragic and the biggest hole in this budget is spending on nature. We’re not making decisions like we plan to be here for a long time.

Even if ministers and decision-makers feel no connection or see no value in nature and the environment, it is in our self-interest to invest in it. Half of our economy is reliant on the natural world and ultimately, if nature goes down, we’re coming down with it. It is just tragic seeing the absolute pittance that we spend on managing and protecting this country.

I’ve spoken with David Pocock a few times now in different contexts. But what always stays with me after any conversation with him is his commitment to understanding the issues and asking the questions that need to be asked: who is the system designed to serve, whose interests are being prioritised, and what does the country lose in the process?

The former Industry Minister has been speaking publicly about Gaza, about the gas exports tax, and has already been talking about the capital gains tax changes. He’s worried about the impact on startups, on employee share schemes, on the early-stage ecosystem that doesn’t have the cash flow to compete for talent the way bigger firms can. He thinks the CSIRO job cuts shouldn’t be happening. He’s tired of seeing Australian ideas leave the country to be commercialised somewhere else. And he says it’s unhealthy and unsustainable when people feel like they can’t speak up.

I sat down with Husic shortly after the Budget to talk tax, R&D, what it costs the country when its government doesn’t back its own ideas and what’s changing about ‘politics as usual’.

This is an edited version of our conversation.

On CGT, startups, and employee share schemes

While the changes to the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and negative gearing weren’t a surprise, some of the strongest reactions to the changes have been from the business community. The changes to CGT weren’t limited to property investments, like the change to negative gearing, which impacts shares and other assets – like the sale of a business.

Property investors have, of course, been vocal on the changes but there is also a large cohort of small business owners, entrepreneurs and startups speaking up about their concerns on how the changes will impact them. I should flag at this point that a lot of what I’m seeing online, particularly on social media, is misinformation or fear-mongering – I’ve seen posts around the government “taking 50% of your business” or how there is “no point starting a business in Australia anymore”. These statements are just not true. And the measures also aren’t yet legislated, which leaves scope for consultation.

I asked Husic, as the former Minister for Industry and Science, his view on the changes and the concerns with how they might impact the business community.

Ed Husic: Let me start with the positive. I think it’s good that we have budgets actively talking about research and development, talking about new firms driving growth in the economy. The biggest weakness we have in our economy is that it’s constantly dominated, in different sectors, by duopolies. We need more competition. In the current environment where inflation has been high, we need – at the right point, when things calm down – to see prices drop. Competition helps drive those prices down, instead of us setting a new equilibrium and calling that healthy. New firms biting at the heels of bigger ones is important. So I think it’s good that budgets are talking about it, and that we’re talking about improvements in R&D off the back of the strategic examination – which I pushed for as a minister, on multiple occasions internally, and which finally happened, because we have a lousy investment in R&D in this country.

However – I can understand fully, and I’ve had people from the startup community already approaching me, worried. I’ve already been engaging with the Treasurer. I’m glad he’s got an open mind. He really needs to have an open mind on it. Because when we start talking to people about the shape of the legislation, we’ve got scope to think about how we can ensure we’re supporting – not making it harder for – early-stage innovation to continue.

There’s sometimes an issue in Canberra of not understanding the value of things like employee share schemes to startups. I’m often explaining this to colleagues: it’s incredibly vital for startups who don’t have the cash flow or the revenue to remunerate in traditional terms. Shares provide a means of being able to bring talent in. We’ve got to make sure those changes don’t impact on startups.

Some good things in the budget have been overlooked. Changes to the thresholds for early-stage venture capital limited partnerships and the VCLP program – really good to see. Some of the loss provisions for smaller businesses too. But every budget is an invitation to cheer and jeer, depending on what corner you’re sitting in.

What’s not getting enough attention

We’ve all seen the inevitable winners-and-losers budget coverage and the focus on CGT and housing – but this is a big budget with a lot to unpack, so I asked Husic what wasn’t getting enough attention.

EH: I am tired of seeing an idea begin in an Australian mind and be finished off by hands in another part of the world. By that I mean: converting our know-how – which we’ve demonstrated we’ve got in spades – into products and services. The R&D tax incentive, boosting venture capital, encouraging superannuation to back VC and make capital available – that’s really important. We went through a period pre-COVID where the world was awash with money, then we saw the tightening occur, impacts on supply chains and the way VCs were re-evaluating their investments – making it harder to get capital. So we do need to push more.

As a country – I don’t want to get on a soapbox here – we don’t back our ideas enough. We think someone else will do it better, and that we don’t need to invest in the process. This place, Canberra, is the worst at it. We spend so much money on procuring goods and services, yet we don’t have an expectation that we’ll involve Australian business enough. We’ve made some reforms. We can do more. But we just don’t think it’s worth our while. Particularly the big departments – Treasury and Finance – do not think it’s worth our while investing in that know-how. And this is letting the country down. The mentality has to be absolutely shattered and rebuilt.

I’m not talking about throwing money around. Where we’ve proven ourselves and we’ve demonstrated efficiency, we should back it and scale it. And in future budgets the big productivity gain is to scale up businesses. We need more SMEs going from S to M. We don’t have a national approach on scale-ups. I’m a great admirer of the small business sector in this country, but we have to scale up. We have to break down market concentration. You asked me about the budget today, and I’m thinking about the budgets next year and onwards. There’s a big reform agenda we have to have the courage to embrace.

At a time when I’m seeing so many people on social media saying that it’s not worth starting a business here now because of the tax changes, I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture. And what I took from Husic’s comments was encouragement that industry and business should back themselves and advocate for the way the government can back them too. I’m interested in seeing how the conversation moves when it comes to business, and particularly the scale-up of SMEs.

CSIRO, the quantum bet, and the 95,000 scientists

The foundations of Wi-Fi came out of CSIRO. So did large parts of what we now think of as Australian scientific reputation. After years of cuts, the agency has new funding – but has announced they will still be cutting jobs. Meanwhile, the Australian Academy of Science is openly trying to recruit US researchers who’ve lost work under the Trump administration. Building on our discussion of Australian ideas and businesses, I wanted to ask Husic about our investment in science and how we can better retain and attract talent in the context of ongoing job losses in the industry.

EH: I’m really uncomfortable with CSIRO still pursuing the job cuts. I’ve publicly advocated this past year that we needed to prise open the jaws of Treasury and deliver funds. We have done some of that. We need to hold on to talent.

If we have Australian industry engaged in R&D more, you can have movement from CSIRO into industry – accelerating the process of ideas turning into products and services. Countries that do well are economically diverse, and their complexity is broader. They invest in new industries and new technologies. So we need Australian scientists and researchers to engage in that. From a productivity perspective, it’s really important. CSIRO cutting jobs runs the risk that, if industry isn’t keeping pace, we lose people altogether. It’s an issue, and I worry about where they’re going to go.

In the US – you’re right to point that out – my understanding is there are 95,000 scientists who’ve lost their job because of the poor decisions of the Trump administration. We should snatch them up. They’ve got to come here and be put to work. We need our national science agencies plus business and industry engaged in this space.

One of the reasons I pushed so hard for the PsiQuantum deal was that they would be an anchor tenant in a precinct that levers off the fact that we produce so much quantum talent in this country. Ten years ago, I watched a lot of Australian AI talent just leave the country because we didn’t know what to do with them. We didn’t invest in the development of AI. And boy, that decision’s aged well.

With quantum being the next big thing in frontier tech, we need to put that talent to work here. Across computing, sensing, communications, this will transform industry. If we get a commercial-grade quantum computer in this country, this will be huge for industry, for research, and for improving quality of life. But we need a mindset that says we’re going to pursue it. That we’ve not just got the guts, but the confidence in ourselves as a country, to make that happen. Which I think we lack, too often.

On Labor, the crossbench, and politics for the times

Husic is one of the few MPs who won on first preferences in the last election, and he has a reputation for being strongly connected with his community. He has also been openly committed to diversity of thought and opinion in politics.

I’d spoken to Senator David Pocock the day before, and I reflected to Husic that a number of measures in this budget were things community independents had been publicly advocating for. So I wanted his opinion on whether the budget was an acknowledgement from the government that status quo ‘politics-as-usual’ isn’t working and more voices and ideas are needed.

EH: I’m careful about trying to build that up to be bigger than it is. There are a lot of good things in this budget. But Australian politics – and the major parties – need to recognise that there is an impatience in the community for better.

This is not a criticism, by any stretch, of my side of politics. I just think we’ve become comfortable with the way that things get done. And we’re seeing this seismic shift before our eyes that cannot just be explained as the implosion of the Liberal and National parties. There is impatience for better. People want to see that happen.

The thing that will help us respond to that, and tune ourselves in more, is – we have to stop thinking that different views within the Labor party represent disunity, dysfunction and death. We are overcompensating for what occurred in the Rudd-Gillard years. I keep saying to people: that period of time was not about policy difference. It was personality clash. That is not what we are at.

We’re in a cycle of economic change where the old way of thinking – the way shaped by Hawke and Keating – has run its course. The big lesson out of Paul Keating was not to mimic them entirely. It was that they shaped policy for the times, with a view about what would drive the country and its economy forward in the years ahead.

I see this on the conservative side of politics: “big government’s over.” No, it’s not. It can’t be. With the challenges we have geopolitically, in energy, in global warming, they demand leadership out of government – it works in tandem. It doesn’t substitute or crowd out industry and entrepreneurship, but actually taps into them to see change. But for that you need people speaking about it. You need individuals representing their communities and their viewpoints, so that as you’re going through the process, you understand that there will be impacts, that we have to factor things in in delivering that reform.

In my own community, the thing that gets me is an indignation about the fact that too many people in my area have been told to just wait their turn in line and we will get to them. There are big issues that need to be dealt with. I want to see more homes over people’s heads. I want them secure in affordable housing. I want us to invest in their brains and know-how. I want to be able to open up development in my part of the world with the right investment in infrastructure. The intersection of issues like migration, housing, infrastructure – they all play out in our part of Western Sydney. They are absolutely solvable issues. But they require governments to stump up. And that requires us to think differently about how we go about it.

On speaking up

A recent piece in The Saturday Paper quoted Labor figures comparing the relationship between caucus and the PMO to Pyongyang. Since moving to the backbench after the 2025 election (after some factional politicking that saw both Husic and former Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus dumped from Cabinet), Husic has been one of the most vocal Labor MPs. He is often seen speaking out on issues that others in government won’t – or possibly can’t.

I asked Husic whether his ability to speak out comes from the political capital he’s accumulated over his career combined with the passion and ambition he clearly still has.

EH: I think it’s unhealthy that people feel like they can’t speak up. That is not a sustainable situation.

It is a big caucus. People can have their views and still function very well. I joined the party young. I was inspired, before I joined, by what the party stood for. And having studied the history, I know we can have big disagreements and still do big things. Just because you have an argument around a family dinner table doesn’t mean the family splits up. That’s just life. But you still build stronger bonds. So I think it’s from that point of view; that’s what I bring.

When I signed up [for the Labor Party], I did not sign up for the status quo. I am like a lot of members of the party I’m proud to be a member of. And so I think you’ve got to fight for it. From my point of view, I’m not simply here just for a job. I’m here for change – change for the better. And if I’ve got a voice, I’m going to use it.

There’s a version of Australian politics where a senior Labor MP saying “I’m here for change, not the status quo” would be unremarkable. But talking to Ed Husic reminds me of the passion and ambition we should expect and want in our parliamentarians. I think that is part of what appeals to so many people about the community independents – they bring that experience, that knowledge, that passion and that push for change to make things better.

It’s also a reminder that, as I mentioned in my Budget analysis, the Budget is a starting point – not a fixed policy. There is an opportunity and need to advocate for the issues you care about, to demonstrate public sentiment to elected officials, and bring to light any unintended consequences that could be avoided with some adjustments to policy settings.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers called this “the most important and ambitious Budget in decades.” He’s probably right. But that says as much about the decade as it does about the Budget.

Think about what preceded this. Years of global crises. Economic instability. The exhausting, internecine party politics of the 2010s that made boldness feel like a liability rather than a virtue. Budgets became exercises in careful management and desperately trying to hold onto power rather than any genuine attempt at reform. We got used to it. In some ways, we stopped expecting anything else.

So yes — by comparison, this Budget is ambitious. But that’s a low bar, and it’s worth naming that before we start arguing about any individual line item.

Some other descriptions of this Budget have included “controversial” (SMH), “anti-Boomer (AFR), and “communist” The Daily Telegraph).

Reading the headlines gives no real sense of what is actually happening in this Budget and really just inflames existing fractures in our society.

What I want to do here is give you some context you might not have — about how Budgets actually work, what this one is genuinely trying to do, and why so much of the public debate is missing the point entirely.

The thing most Budget coverage gets wrong

Here’s something that gets lost in most Budget coverage: a Budget is, in many cases, a starting point — not a final answer. Measures that require legislation still have to pass through parliament. They can be amended, negotiated, and shaped through consultation. The community does have a role in that process, even if we rarely talk about it in those terms.

I raise this because a lot of the debate around this Budget has treated individual measures as fixed and final. They’re not. And understanding that changes how you might think about engaging with them.

It also means that framing every policy as a binary — in or out, good or bad — is not only reductive, it’s strategically useless. If something concerns you, the more productive question is: how does it get shaped from here?

Keep that in mind as we go.

A 1999 tax break that was never meant to do what it does

The Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount has been part of the Australian tax system since Peter Costello introduced it in 1999. It was designed to encourage Australians to invest in shares.

“If we could introduce such a rule you could get all those mums and dads investors that are currently caught up in the capital gains tax system out of the capital gains tax system, make it easier for them to invest, and that would help the Governments policy of encouraging shareholder and wider shareholding in this country. “

— then Treasurer Peter Costello (February 1999)

What it actually did — almost immediately, and in ways that have compounded ever since — was incentivise people to pour money into property instead.

Property offered better returns. The CGT discount made those returns even more attractive. And housing — an essential need, not a luxury — became an investment vehicle. The inequity this created has been understood for a long time. The political will to address it has been absent for most of that time.

When I spoke to Senator David Pocock after the Budget, he framed it in the clearest terms I’ve heard:

“What is housing for? Is it something that has to be accessible — more of a human right — or is it an asset class and investment vehicle? If it’s an asset class and investment vehicle, then the system is working incredibly well because you can make a lot of money out of property.”

— Senator David Pocock

But the CGT changes are also about something bigger than housing. At their core, they’re about how we tax different kinds of income in this country. Income earned from labour — from working — is taxed differently to income earned from assets and investments. The current system gives preferential treatment to people who have capital to invest, and disadvantages those who earn a wage. The “working Australians” framing you keep hearing from the government is an attempt to name that distinction — even if it can feel like hollow optics when repeated often enough.

Some of the loudest criticisms have been that the changes don’t go far enough. There’s a legitimate argument that grandfathering existing investments — honouring previous decisions made under the old rules — entrenches the very intergenerational inequality the policy is meant to address. I understand that frustration.

The pragmatic counter is that people made long-term financial decisions based on promises that CGT and negative gearing wouldn’t be touched. Applying changes retroactively would have been politically untenable, and arguably unfair in a different direction. Senator Pocock acknowledged this tension directly:

“Not everyone is going to like it, because you’re honouring previous investments — and I actually think that’s quite an important thing given how sensitive and fraught this debate is. But really this is about the bigger picture as a country. How do we start to turn our housing crisis around?”

— Senator David Pocock

One area worth watching is the impact on business owners and entrepreneurs. The CGT changes apply to all assets — not just property — which means they affect share sales and business sales too. I spoke with Ed Husic, who’s been a consistent advocate for Australia’s start-up and innovation sector, about what this might mean:

“I’ve had people within the start-up community already approaching me, worried about it. I’ve already been engaging with the Treasurer on it. I’m glad that he’s got an open mind on it. He really needs to have an open mind on it — so that when we start to talk to people about the shape of the legislation, we’ve got scope to think about how we can ensure we’re supporting, not making it hard for, early-stage innovation.”

— the Hon Ed Husic MP, former Minister for Industry and Science

The Treasurer has also indicated openness to consultation on this specific concern. That’s the legislative process doing its job. Watch this space.

Why the Coalition’s housing argument is a deliberate distraction

The Coalition’s central argument against the CGT and negative gearing changes is that reducing investment in property will reduce housing supply. The Budget papers actually acknowledge this — for this particular measure, in isolation, that’s true.

But that’s exactly the problem with how this debate is being conducted. In isolation.

A budget is not a single policy. It’s a package — a set of interconnected measures designed to work together. The demand-side intervention of CGT reform exists alongside a raft of supply-side measures aimed at increasing housing availability. Pulling one thread out and analysing it in isolation doesn’t just distort the picture — it’s an argument made in bad faith, and it’s worth saying that plainly.

The housing crisis is not going to be solved by one lever. Senator Pocock put it simply: there is no silver bullet. What there is, is a set of interlocking policy responses — and evaluating any one of them as if the others don’t exist tells you more about the political agenda of the commentator than it does about the merits of the policy.

The shortest Women’s Budget Statement — and what it still managed to prove

The Women’s Budget Statement was the first thing I turned to in the Budget lockup. And the most significant measure — the changes to the Child Support System — is genuinely important.

The numbers alone make the case. As of March 2026, there is $2 billion in outstanding child support debt in the government collection system, owed across more than 229,000 paying parents at an average of $8,699 each. Women make up 83 per cent of recipient parents. And that figure doesn’t even capture the private arrangements — the ones the government doesn’t monitor — where research shows abuse, coercion and non-payment are most prevalent. This is debt owed to children. The $182.6 million investment to address weaponisation and non-compliance in the scheme is responding to a real and documented crisis.

When Minister Plibersek outlined the policy in the lockup, she noted it would be considered controversial. That wasn’t a surprise to me. Anytime child support is in the public conversation, it draws a predictable response from men’s rights activists who frame the system’s inequity entirely around fathers. Anytime there’s a policy focused on gender equality, there’s backlash.

The numbers from the Statement are worth sitting with more broadly. The gender pay gap is at its lowest recorded level — 11.5 per cent, down 2.6 percentage points since 2022, with women’s full-time weekly earnings up $291.60. Australia’s international gender equality ranking has moved from 43rd to 13th in three years. More than 430,000 women have accessed newly subsidised menopausal therapies. More than 380,000 people accessed affordable contraception that wasn’t available on the PBS a year ago — saving them collectively more than $36 million. In just its first five months, the Leaving Violence Program supported over 10,000 victim-survivors leaving violent relationships.

These are not abstract policy outcomes. They are the cumulative result of sustained, deliberate investment — and they make the case that this approach is working.

My overall read of the Women’s Budget Statement, though, was that it was thinner than previous years — the shortest the government has produced. Most of the measures were continuations of existing programs rather than new commitments, which is admittedly underwhelming.

The more tempered version of my disappointment is this: we’re approaching the midpoint of the 10-year strategy to eliminate violence against women, and the third year of the gender equality strategy. These are natural evaluation points. Before committing significant new funding, it’s reasonable — arguably responsible — to assess what’s working. Not all programs produce the intended outcomes. Not all investment is well-targeted.

But “reasonable and responsible” shouldn’t become a reason to ease pressure. The gains are real. They’re also not enough. We should keep saying so.

The thing about Budget week is that it’s designed to overwhelm. Hundreds of measures, thousands of pages, and a media cycle that needs a narrative — and a list of winners and losers — by 7.30pm. In that environment, nuance doesn’t just get lost — it gets crowded out on purpose.

It’s often not until days or weeks later that the less visible measures start to surface — the ones nobody was briefed to argue about.

The noise around this Budget — the culture war framing, the bad-faith arguments about single measures in isolation, the breathless takes in both directions — that’s not complexity. That’s spin. And it serves a purpose: to make the architecture underneath harder to see.

What I hope this has given you is a different way of reading it. Not the argument about any individual line item, but the logic beneath it. Who benefits from which framing. What’s actually being debated versus what’s being performed. Where the real fights will happen — in the legislation, in the consultation, in the quiet months after the cameras move on.

Once you can see that, you can’t unsee it. And that’s worth more than any hot take.

A by-election can be viewed as a referendum on leaders. Peter Dutton explicitly named the Aston by-election as a leadership test. A test, it turns out, he failed rather spectacularly. It’s unusual for a Government to win a seat off the Opposition in a by-election. Anti-incumbency sentiment runs deep. But the Labor government did win the Aston by-election in 2023.

A by-election can also have a significant impact on maintaining power in a minority government or one with a slim majority. It can impact policy direction or stability of government when concessions can form part of the negotiations of power.

The Farrer by-election is relatively low-stakes by these measures. There is no risk to the government’s huge majority, and neither major party is likely to score a win as a way to shore up the position of the leader. Labor isn’t even challenging the seat.

But in a very real way, this by-election is also high-stakes. The contest looks set to come down to the Independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe and One Nation candidate David Farley.

A contest of third-party candidates is unusual. ‘Non-classic’ contests, where the final 2 candidates aren’t a Labor v Coalition contest, are becoming more usual in the election. 35 seats in 2025 were considered ‘non-classic’. All came down to a ‘major’ party (ie Labor or the Coalition parties) v a third party (Greens, One Nation, Independent candidates etc).

None were third party v third party.

The crossbench looks set to grow by one seat either way, and while this doesn’t impact the political calculus for the government in needing to negotiate in the House to pass their legislative agenda, the newest member of the House of Representatives will send a clear message. Particularly to the Coalition.

The Coalition have announced that they’ll be ‘preferencing’ One Nation above Milthorpe on their How to Vote cards in the by-election. And while only about a third of people even use How to Vote cards anymore — and preferences are a matter for the individual voter — this signals a lot to potential Coalition or conservative voters.

When Pauline Hanson and One Nation first appeared, under John Howard’s Coalition government, Howard demanded One Nation appear last on the Liberal’s How to Vote cards. Howard changed his mind in 2017 to support the WA Liberal x One Nation preferencing deal. For all the good it did at the time — WA Liberals suffered one of the worst defeats of a sitting government in Australia.

Almost 10 years on, the Coalition recognises its vulnerability and is making a strategic, if selfish, play. Once a seat goes Independent — particularly a regional seat — it becomes hard to win back. The Coalition are betting on One Nation voters being closer to ‘their base’, these voters becoming disenchanted with One Nation as we get closer to the next federal election and ‘returning’ to the Coalition.

Farrer has always been held by a Liberal or National MP, and you get the clear sense they feel they ‘own’ the seat. It reminds me of the way the Liberals felt entitled to the ‘blue-ribbon’ city seats previously dominated by the party that have since turned Independent (Wentworth, Waringah, Curtin, Kooyong etc).

Farrer, if it turns Independent, is likely to be the next Indi. Indi was one of the first major seats in what’s seen as the new ‘wave’ of Independent MPs. Cathy McGowan ran a grassroots campaign to unseat Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella at the 2013 election, making Mirabella the only Coalition MP to lose their seat. It’s been in Independent hands ever since.

Farrer also happens to border Indi, which is why you’re likely seeing Helen Haines campaigning alongside Independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe.

Milthorpe contested the 2025 election against Sussan Ley in Farrer and ended up with almost 20% of first preferences, and a 2 Candidate Preferred count of 43.81% against Ley’s 56.19% once all the preferences were allocated.

Ironically, Milthorpe’s biggest competitor in this by-election is David Farley who, just last year, endorsed her in the election as a good candidate. (“Straight shooter” and “good woman” were the words he used… plus he made a small donation to her campaign). And before that, he sought pre-selection as a Labor candidate.

Now, this man, who seemingly has the political conviction of a wet noodle, is challenging the seat running for One Nation. So he’s clearly someone with a lot of loyalty and policy consistency 😒.

The Coalition, hoping not to lose a seat for the long-term, are obviously backing in this fair-weather politician with the hopes he’ll act as a temporary seat-warmer for them while they get their shit together.

If the Coalition’s calculus lands One Nation their first elected MP, the problem is far larger than this seat-warmer. While he’ll have no real say and no power in the House, he will stand to legitimise Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce’s push for increasingly racist and isolationist policies.

It will signal to the Coalition that they’re correct to push further to the right and essentially be ‘One Nation Lite’ in the populist policies they continue to churn out.

You can’t out-racist Pauline Hanson, but the Coalition are certainly giving it a red-hot go. And in doing so, their political machinations, designed to save their own skins, set us up for potentially irreparable harm to Australia’s democracy and our ability to pressure the Government to make more progressive policy choices.

For such a low-stakes by-election by usual standards, the Farrer by-election next weekend will certainly tell us a lot about where the future of our politics is heading.

If you search “International Women’s Day”, the first result you’re likely to find isn’t the official UN Women theme. It’s a different one entirely: Give to Gain—served to you by internationalwomensday.com, a privately owned website run by a for-profit PR management company called IWD Support Ltd, with no connection to UN Women or the UN’s official campaign.

The official UN Women Australia theme for 2026 is Balance the Scales.

These are not interchangeable. And the difference matters more than it might seem.

This corporate site has been creating an alternate, more market-friendly IWD theme for around 20 years. Its themes are short, vague and highly hashtag-able:

Accelerate Action.

Inspire Inclusion.

Embrace Equity.

Break the Bias.

Choose to Challenge.

Each for Equal.

Balance for Better.

Press for Progress.

Over the same period, the official UN themes have looked like this:

For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.

Count Her In: Invest in Women. Accelerate Progress.

Cracking the Code: Innovation for a gender equal future.

Changing climates: gender equality today for a sustainable tomorrow.

Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID‑19 world.

The contrast is not subtle. The UN themes are policy-anchored, structurally specific and designed to direct attention toward measurable change. The corporate themes are designed to be adopted without friction—by any organisation, at any level of genuine commitment.

[Note: In 2025 and 2026, UN Women Australia announced its own national campaign theme, which differs slightly from the wording of the official global UN theme but is still aligned to the broader thematic intention. I asked them about the reason behind choosing a separate theme from the official UN theme wording, and I’ve shared their response at the end of this article.]

The corporate site includes this statement: “All IWD activity is valid. IWD is a movement. This special day of impact belongs to all groups, everywhere. That’s what makes IWD so inclusive, not exclusive.”

Technically, yes—no one owns IWD. But the statement functions as pre-emptive insulation against critique. By asserting that all activity is equally legitimate, it dissolves the distinction between symbolic participation and structural action. It also obscures the history.

International Women’s Day did not begin as a corporate calendar event. Its roots are in labour movements and socialist organising in the early 20th century—women striking for voting rights, safer working conditions and economic justice.

The UN first formally recognised 8 March as International Women’s Day in 1975 as part of International Women’s Year. Since then, it has designated an annual theme tied to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to focus global attention on structural barriers and meaningful action. UN Women, established in 2010, now leads the global IWD campaign.

Which brings us back to this year’s themes.

Balance the Scales directs attention to power and justice inequities—UN Women Australia describes it as focused on ensuring fair, inclusive and accessible justice for every woman and girl.

Give to Gain centres reciprocity and goodwill, but at an individualised level.

One implies structural imbalance requiring correction. The other implies voluntary generosity.

That is not a semantic quibble. It is a political difference.

This tension reflects a broader dynamic: when social justice movements intersect with corporate capitalism, their language is softened, individualised and depoliticised to fit within market logics. The corporate themes aren’t malicious—but they are strategic. They make IWD comfortable for institutions that would prefer cultural affirmation over institutional accountability.

And the reason those institutions prefer “Give to Gain” over “Balance the Scales” isn’t hard to identify. One invites applause. The other invites scrutiny.

The corporate IWD site clearly invests heavily in SEO and professional marketing infrastructure—in a way no not-for-profit, UN entity or government organisation can match. It ranks first in online searches. This means many organisations adopt its theme without questioning its provenance, reaching for a ready-made campaign kit rather than doing the research.

That’s worth naming plainly: using the corporate theme rather than the UN theme is, at minimum, a failure of due diligence. It signals that the event has been organised to meet an obligation, not to advance a commitment.

And we should hold organisations to that standard—particularly given the context.

Research from ANU ahead of the 2025 election found that 27.8% of men believe Australia has gone too far on gender equality. Ipsos research in 2022 found that one in five Australians—and 30% of men—believe gender inequality doesn’t really exist. And 60% of Australians believe we’re close to or have already achieved gender equality (Plan Gender Compass), yet structural inequity persists.

In that environment, framing is not a minor concern. It is doing political work, whether we intend it to or not.

If your workplace is running an IWD event in 2026, these are the questions worth asking:

• Are we using the official UN theme—and if not, why not?

• Are we paying speakers?

• Is our speaker lineup intersectional—including First Nations, migrant, disabled and LGBTQIA+ women in substantive roles, not tokenistic ones?

• Are we publishing our gender pay gap data with meaningful context and an action plan?

• Are we reviewing procurement spend with women-owned businesses?

• Are we funding frontline services and women’s organisations year-round, not just in March?

And—who is doing the organising, the catering and the clean-up? If the answer is “the women,” that tells you something.

Symbolism is not irrelevant. Culture matters, and IWD events can be a genuine part of shifting it. But culture without structural follow-through is just theatre.

If organisations want to engage seriously this year:

• Anchor to the UN theme and its policy framing.

• Release measurable commitments on pay equity, leadership and procurement.

• Fund women’s services beyond one-day sponsorship.

• Audit internal policies on flexible work, parental leave, safety and harassment.

• Engage men not as audience members, but as accountability partners.

• Report publicly on progress.

International Women’s Day is not owned by anyone. But it is shaped by those with the loudest platforms and the deepest marketing budgets.

Gender equality will not be achieved through goodwill alone. It requires structural change—policy reform, resource redistribution and institutional accountability. Themes signal which version of that project an organisation is willing to participate in.

So pay attention to the theme your workplace adopts this year.

It will tell you whether you are attending a celebration—or engaging in a movement.

[Note:

In 2025 and 2026, UN Women Australia announced its own national campaign theme, which differs slightly from the wording of the official global UN theme but is still aligned to the broader thematic intention.

I asked them about the reason behind choosing a separate theme from the official UN theme wording, and I’ve shared their response below:

The UN Women theme for International Women’s Day (IWD) each year is tied to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) – the largest gathering of activists, governments, philanthropic and corporate stakeholders working to advance gender equality.

As you mentioned, the UN Women global theme for IWD 2026 is “For ALL women and girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” The theme aligns with the 70th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, which focuses on ensuring and strengthening access to justice for all women and girls.

The UN Women Australia theme, “Balance the Scales – For ALL Women and Girls”, shares this overarching focus on addressing systemic barriers and ensuring access to justice will remain at the heart of International Women’s Day.

In recent years there has been confusion over the theme and fundraising efforts for IWD, with the emergence of profit-based entities seeking support for initiatives unrelated to charity or philanthropic efforts for women and girls. As the Australian chapter of UN Women, we use IWD as a powerful moment to raise funds for the women and girls of the world who need it most. The most effective way for us to accelerate the pace of gender equality globally is to unite in these efforts.

www.internationalwomensday.com is a separate entity to UN Women and we recommend that people choose a trusted registered Australian charity for International Women’s Day.

For more detailed information you can visit www.iwd.net.au to view our key messages for 2026.

But what does this new leadership actually mean? Beyond personality and positioning, what is materially different? (Aside from rolling the first female leader of the Liberal Party after just nine months.)

When Taylor resigned from the shadow cabinet and positioned himself for the leadership—not quite calling for a spill, but clearly arguing for change—he said the Liberal Party is at its lowest point since 1944, since its founding.

He’s not wrong that the party is in an existential crisis. But there was no strong policy differentiation in that pitch. It relied heavily on polling. The framing was that the party is in electoral trouble, and leadership renewal is the answer.

That is a risky benchmark. Just ask Malcolm Turnbull.

Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership challenge of Tony Abbott was explicitly linked to the polls, with Turnbull arguing Abbott couldn’t win the next election with 30 consecutive Newspoll losses. When Turnbull’s own polling faltered, that same benchmark was turned back on him. The logic that brought him in was the logic that removed him.

If you justify leadership on polling, you create a clear test for your own survival. Even though Taylor was less explicit about polling numbers than Turnbull was, if Taylor doesn’t turn the polling around relatively quickly, the sharks will no doubt start to circle.

Taylor’s ascent to the leadership feels more cosmetic than substantive. There isn’t an obvious policy reset. There isn’t a clear ideological repositioning. The main difference appears to be that he, as a conservative, replaces Ley, who is technically a moderate but has seemingly been held captive by both the conservative faction and the Nationals. The return to a conservative, and a male, to the leadership seems to be a sense of “righting the ship” or a “return to the status quo” for this iteration of the Liberal Party.

In his first speech as leader, Taylor talked about “our standard of living” and “our way of life” without actually defining what any of that means. But that’s kind of the point, I suppose. The vagaries allow people to project their own definition onto what he’s saying while allowing him a veneer of plausible deniability about the dog whistles being used—particularly when it comes to immigration.

Speaking of immigration, and Taylor very much did, this is probably the main potential point of difference. Not because of having a different policy position to Sussan Ley per se, but because of the vacuum Ley left and allowed others to fill with noise.

After being elected leader, Ley said all policy positions were on the table and that the party would review and consult before announcing its policies. This was clearly a reaction to the very “command and control” leadership of Peter Dutton, where the majority of the policy decisions were taken from his office with very little consultation or collaboration. But unfortunately for Ley, this time taken to review and consult left a policy vacuum—and nature abhors a vacuum. This space has allowed the Nationals and One Nation, as well as some key Liberals who are more vocal on immigration, to dominate the conversation.

Taylor referred to immigration in his press conference:

We’ll stand for an immigration policy that puts the interests of Australians first and puts Australian values at the centre of that policy.

If someone doesn’t subscribe to our core beliefs – the door must be shut.

If someone wants to import the hatred and violence of another place to Australia – the door must be shut.

And in response to a question from the press gallery:

Our policy will be for lower numbers and for higher standards.

This raises many obvious questions. What standards aren’t high enough? How do you test for people who “hate Australia”? What “core beliefs” and “Australian values” are at the centre of their immigration policy?

And he was asked by journalists during his press conference:

How will you find out if people hate Australia? Will it be a citizenship test? Will it be a patriotism test? Will some countries be off limits? Will there be a pause from some countries? How will you determine who hates and doesn’t hate Australia ahead of them actually coming here when they’re in another country?

But there was no real answer. In fact, newly minted Deputy Leader Jane Hume actually took this one:

The first point I would make is that most people who come to this country understand that this is one of the greatest gifts a human being could ever have received in history. This is the greatest country on earth. And for someone to come here, it is an enormous gift. And I am absolutely sure that the vast majority of people who come to this country understand it. But if people want to come to this country who don’t believe in democracy, don’t believe in the rule of law and don’t believe in our basic freedoms, that is a problem and it is unacceptable.

The truth is that some people do not want to change in order to fit with our core values. And those core values are pretty simple, they’re pretty fundamental, and they have stood the test of time for a great nation.

Jane Hume is (generally) better at message discipline than Taylor. Probably why she appeared on Insiders rather than Taylor yesterday morning.

But any real substance was lacking. The whole press conference felt like rhetoric aimed at consolidating the Coalition’s middle ground in the short term, rather than a serious interrogation of why the Liberal Party’s vote has collapsed so spectacularly.

Finding some kind of internal unity seems to be the immediate priority, along with staunching the loss of voters to One Nation. But the deeper issue remains: what is the party for?

If there is one strategic consensus across commentators, it is that the only way for the Liberals to regain meaningful ground is to repair their reputation for economic management.

The 2025 election was the first time Labor ranked ahead of the Coalition on the economy. That is not a marginal shift. The Coalition has historically treated economic credibility as its core brand asset—its stake in the ground.

And they lost it.

Labor outperformed the Coalition on every key measure in voter perception. The Liberals have ceded ground not only on immigration and home affairs, but crucially on the economy—the issue they traditionally claimed as their comparative advantage.

So if repairing economic trust is the central strategic task, the question becomes: Is Angus Taylor the person to do it?

Especially when you consider that he was the shadow treasurer going into the last election. Presumably, alongside Peter Dutton, he was central to shaping the Coalition’s economic offering. He admits that opposing the tax cuts was a mistake, and that the Liberal Party should “always be the party of lower taxes”.

Now we have the former shadow treasurer and the former shadow minister for finance leading a party that urgently needs to rebuild its economic credentials. If the Coalition’s reputation for economic management deteriorated on their watch, it raises a legitimate question about whether the same leadership cohort is best placed to restore it.

As shadow treasurer, Taylor rarely asked questions in Question Time—so rarely that it became a running joke in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ responses. As shadow defence minister, he asked only three questions on defence since the election.

He has not been a particularly visible parliamentary performer, and he isn’t that well-known across the broader electorate.

Senator James Paterson, a Taylor supporter and expected to have a prominent role in the shadow cabinet, described Taylor as “the smartest policy brain in the shadow cabinet”.

Malcolm Turnbull offered an alternate opinion, saying people describe Taylor as “the best-qualified idiot they’ve ever met”. (I do so enjoy sassy Turnbull in his post-politics era).

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But this instinct—to treat One Nation’s rise as cyclical, accidental, or unserious—I think fundamentally misunderstands the political moment Australia is in.

Australia has long believed itself immune to the forces reshaping democracies elsewhere. We point to compulsory voting, our entrenched two-party system, and our political pragmatism as evidence that “it couldn’t really happen here”. Yet history suggests something else: Australia is rarely exceptional, only delayed.

And delay, in politics, is not protection.

Australia is traditionally a cycle or two behind the rest of the world in political trends. We have one of the most entrenched two-party systems in the democratic world. That is largely due to compulsory voting, among other things, but it has also meant that Australia often lags behind other countries when it comes to political movements.

In 2024—a so-called “super year” for elections, with half the world’s population voting—there was a clear anti-incumbency swing in almost every election. Over the past few years in particular, we have seen a sharp increase in right-wing parties across France, Germany and Italy; the rise of Reform in the UK; and, of course, Donald Trump and the increasingly fascistic MAGA movement in the United States.

These movements were also initially treated as curiosities. Novelties. Punchlines. A failure to grapple seriously with the conditions that allowed them to grow came at a cost.

The media treatment of One Nation and Pauline Hanson still reflects this same failure. She is framed as a sideshow: good for ratings, good for outrage, good for injecting drama into a political landscape that can otherwise feel dull. Someone who “says what everyone is thinking” while also being faintly risible. A long-term fixture with no serious impact. A side character in the dramedy of Australian politics.

That framing no longer fits the evidence.

Over the last six months, One Nation’s polling has been steadily rising. Multiple pollsters are now suggesting that if an election were held today, One Nation would be on track to form the formal opposition—or at least become a central player in a coalition of right-wing parties.

Most polls now place One Nation between 18 and 25 per cent of the primary vote, far beyond the six per cent they received at the 2025 election. As many as one in four voters are indicating they would choose One Nation above any other party, with more Australians now willing to vote for One Nation than for the Coalition parties. (Even with the Coalition “back together again” for the second time in less than 12 months, One Nation is still generally polling better than the combined Coalition.)

Obviously, there is no election today—and likely not one for another two years. But ignoring this trend, or hoping it will correct itself closer to polling day, would be a mistake. Hope is not a strategy.

Much of the current commentary explains One Nation’s rise almost entirely through the collapse of the Liberal–National Coalition: historic losses at the 2025 election, Barnaby Joyce’s defection to One Nation, and the latest iteration of Coalition instability.

There is a relationship between these developments, but it is far too simplistic to treat the chaos within the Coalition as the sole explanation for One Nation’s growth.

The decline of the major parties is structural, not temporary. Labor won a “landslide” in 2025 with a primary vote that would have been considered a devastating loss two decades ago. The combined major-party primary vote now sits below two-thirds of the electorate. Fewer than ten seats at the last election were decided on first preferences alone.

This is no longer a political environment in which the return of a stable, coherent opposition can be relied upon as a natural corrective. Waiting for politics to revert to the past is an exercise in futility.

Fragmentation is now the defining feature of Australian politics—and in a fragmented system, preferences matter more than ever.

One of the few factors that has historically limited One Nation’s parliamentary representation is preferential voting. For decades, One Nation was typically preferenced last by the major parties, or at least placed below the other major parties. It was rare for the Liberals to preference One Nation above Labor on how-to-vote cards.

That changed in 2025. The Coalition preferenced One Nation above Labor in a number of seats and in the Senate. While this had limited impact in the House (only really mattering in Hunter, where the final two-candidate-preferred count was between Labor and One Nation), it had a significant impact in the Senate, where One Nation doubled its number of senators.

At the same time, fewer and fewer voters are using how-to-vote cards at all. Only around a third of voters did so at the last election.

It is in this context that Pauline Hanson’s plans for an “educational campaign” on preferential voting should set off alarm bells. (Something she announced when appearing on The Karl Stefanovic Show).

This is no longer just the progressive side of politics investing in civic education. Hanson is explicitly targeting the politically disadvantaged and politically disengaged, offering guidance—effectively instructions—on how to use the voting system to elect her party.

It is tempting to assure ourselves that Australia is different. But the UK offers a stark warning. Keir Starmer won a landslide after 14 years of Conservative Tory rule—and has so far failed to use that mandate to stabilise public trust. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage’s Reform Party continues to grow, drawing defections from the Tories and positioning itself as a future governing force.

If Australia fails to learn from these patterns, we will repeat them.

America offers another warning. Donald Trump was treated as farcical, a novelty candidate, a joke. And yes—he was and remains all of those things. But he is also dangerous. His presidency has contributed directly to the unravelling of the global order, creating instability that will compound for years and be extraordinarily difficult to reverse. Trump shows us that absurdity and danger are not mutually exclusive.

Ta-Nehisi Coates captured this succinctly in The Message, writing of book bans: “American history is filled with men and women who were as lethal as they were ridiculous.”

Pauline Hanson should be understood through the same lens.

Like Trump, she understands television. She understands entertainment. She understands grievance politics and plain speaking. She understands how to present herself simultaneously as victim and strong outsider, railing against “the establishment” while benefiting from extraordinary media exposure.

She is also highly effective at message discipline.

The left has long struggled with clarity and brevity. The right excels at three-word slogans. “Stop the boats” remains the most potent example of how a single, simplified message can unite disparate voters. Internal disagreement matters less than shared grievance.

There is also growing appeal in Hanson’s ideological consistency. She has not softened her views on immigration. She has not shifted on climate change. She has not moderated over time. She is as hardline now as she was three decades ago.

Those views were once considered radical, but the Overton window has shifted. One Nation has not expanded by evolving—but by holding steady in a period of instability. For voters who no longer trust institutions or political promises, that consistency is reassuring.

Many voters feel they do not know what they are getting from the major parties—who they believe campaign one way and govern another. While those shifts may reflect policy complexity and national interest, they are rarely explained well. What voters see instead is broken promises and incoherence.

Against that backdrop, Pauline Hanson offers certainty. We know exactly what she is telling us. That clarity, however corrosive, is appealing to many. And that appeal is seemingly growing.

This dynamic is reinforced by media coverage. Pauline Hanson is compelling television. Like Trump, she is rarely interrogated seriously on policy, economics, or foreign affairs. She is treated as a spectacle rather than as a serious contender for power.

But that airtime, while absent of real policy discussion, is building ongoing brand awareness for Pauline Hanson to an audience who aren’t all that interested in policy. And for the media organisations, it signals to their audience that they’re “listening to real Australia”. It’s telling that Karl Stefanovic chose Pauline Hanson for the first episode of his new solo podcast/YouTube venture.

The rise of One Nation presents a genuine test for Australian media in an era of political fragmentation and volatility. It will test whether they can move beyond outrage and entertainment, and return to the core function of the fourth estate: scrutiny, accountability, and context.

Underestimating Pauline Hanson has never been a harmless mistake. Doing so now, in a fractured political environment that rewards grievance and certainty, is not just naïve—it is dangerous.

Complacency is not the absence of action. It is a political choice. And we should not allow our media to pretend otherwise.

Many of them focused on challenging power and structures. And it’s definitely true of my top 5 books. I read 36 books last year (less than I would have liked to be honest), and it was a 50/50 split between non-fiction and fiction. I always have a hard time choosing favourites as I tend to enjoy or value most of the things I read, for a range of different reasons.

But this top 5 really captures the books that stayed with me and shaped my thinking in interesting, surprising, or impactful ways.

Non-Fiction

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This book got a lot of coverage and discussion at the time for the chapter on Palestine, but the whole book is fantastic. Coates addresses the book to the students of his 2022 writing class at Howard University, which in itself is a fascinating insight into how he thinks about writing and journalism – both the craft and the responsibility. He explores how stories are used to justify power and shape our perception through writing about three trips he takes: to Senegal, to South Carolina, and to Palestine. He unpacks the role of art – particularly writing – in challenging preconceived ideas and mythmaking, as well as the deleterious effects of censorship. I learned so much about writing from this book, but also about the importance of how these stories are created and amplified. This is the kind of book that stays with you. It asks you to challenge yourself and your perspective, and question who is telling the stories you read – and why.

Unfinished Revolution by Virginia Haussegger

Out of all of the books I read last year that would fall broadly under the “feminist” category, the reason I picked this one for my top 5 is that I learned so much from it that I didn’t know about the feminist movement in Australia and all the history behind it. I love the structure of the book as well. Most histories will start in the past and move forward through time. But Haussegger starts from the present and moves backwards through 50 years of the feminist movement in Australia, which is a clever framing because it unpicks a lot of assumptions along the way. Progress isn’t linear, so the structure really does expose some things that we’ve lost in the movement and the discourse as we’ve “progressed”. I highly recommend reading this book, particularly if you’re Australian. It is a great history of feminism in Australia as well as a spark of inspiration and momentum to continue pursuing progress.

The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein

I’m probably one of the few people who didn’t consume any of the “mushroom trial” coverage at the time, and had no real interest in the glut of content that has come since (and is still to come). But the concept of this book really intrigued me, and I have a lot of respect for these writers, so I was drawn in based on their credibility. All three are award-winning writers and have experience in covering criminal cases, but this isn’t a straightforward account of the trial. Rather, this book is a depiction of recordings of their private conversations as they travelled to and from regional Victoria for the murder trial of Erin Patterson. While they do talk through the case and their thoughts as it progresses, it’s also a rich exploration of the process of writing, the different approaches each writer takes and the perspective they bring. They reflect on the ethics of true crime and on the unprecedented media interest in the trial, including grappling with their own contribution to the discourse. It’s a fascinating insight into their thought processes – as well as their friendship. I love that it really is like listening in on a private conversation between three great writers and colleagues.

Honourable mention to some of my other non-fiction favourites from last year:

• The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History by Laurence Rees

• Patriarchy Inc.: What We Get Wrong About Gender Equality – and Why Men Still Win at Work by Cordelia Fine

• Deficit: How Feminist Economics Can Change Our World by Emma Holten

• What Would Adam Smith Make of Modern Australia by Joseph Healy

• The New Age of Sexism: How the AI revolution is reinventing misogyny by Laura Bates

• The Right Hand: Conversations with the Chiefs of Staff of the World’s Most Powerful People by Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks

Fiction

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

I really love the Hunger Games series. I think Suzanne Collins is incredible at using the dystopian setting to explore current issues in a really intelligent way. This story focuses on Haymitch’s games and adds such interesting depth to all the events of the original trilogy. I ended up re-reading the trilogy after finishing Sunrise to fully appreciate how it all comes together with this new context. There is a saying often attributed to Collins, which is that she writes when she has something to say, and I think that really feels true of her work, whether or not the quote is real or apocryphal. Something I really appreciate in her writing is how she weaves philosophical questions into her stories. Sunrise adds another layer to how this series questions human nature, society, compliance, and rebellion. The way power structures in this world are both challenged and maintained – whether overtly or covertly – is a timely and terrible reminder of the power of propaganda. And a message that is more important in our real world than ever.

Katabasis by RF Kuang

RF Kuang also incorporates a lot of philosophical ideas and academic experiences into her writing, but in a very different way. I know Katabasis had a bit of a mixed reception, but I really enjoyed it. I loved the exploration of hell and the different ways to look at ambition, success, power dynamics and purpose. Plus, I’m a massive classics and mythology nerd, so it really appealed to me from that perspective. Kuang also excels at writing deeply unlikable characters that you somehow still want to read about – and sometimes empathise with. I think it’s probably not the most satisfying book if you’re looking for a neatly contained story and resolution. But that’s also part of the appeal to me. I really love books that challenge your worldview, pose interesting questions and have you thinking about them long after you’ve finished. And that’s definitely true for Katabasis, even if it’s more of a philosophical exploration than a moral learning kind of experience.

Honourable mention to some of my other fiction favourites (and my romance obsession) in 2025:

• Heated Rivalry, The Long Game, and Role Model by Rachel Reid (inspired by my ongoing addiction to the Heated Rivalry tv show)

• Lights Out by Navessa Allen

• An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister

• Slipstream by Madge Maril

What were your top books of 2025?

(My TBR pile thanks you in advance 😉)

While the physical attack was localised, the flow on effects continue to spread.

The fear for safety and grief of the Jewish community. The way blame is being spread. The grasping for explanations. The proliferation of misinformation. The impact of seeing such violence every time you open a social media app or news site. The scapegoating of migrants and Muslims.

The speculation. The politicisation. The weaponisation. The fear.

No one should be made to feel unsafe or that they don’t belong in Australia.

Not Jewish people gathering with their community.

Not Palestinians advocating for their community.

Not people protesting the actions of an authoritarian government.

Not people opposing genocide.

Not First Nations people.

Not Muslims.

Not Christians.

Not women.

Not migrants.

Not refugees and asylum seekers.

No one deserves to feel unsafe here.

It should be antithetical to our national identity, to our values, to the way we interact with one another.

I cannot pretend to know the deep pain, fear and grief the Jewish community is experiencing and has experienced. The Jewish community deserves to feel safe and not be targeted for their identity. I am also not surprised by what happened.

Antisemitism is persistent and often overlooked.

So, too, is Islamophobia.

Both have increased. Both must be addressed.

We cannot let a response to one fuel a rise in the other.

We cannot weaponise one prejudice to silence critique of another.

Terrorism isn’t an ideology. It is a tactic. A strategy.

To create fear in the targeted group.

To shake our sense of safety.

To create division and blame.

To sow seeds of doubt, misinformation, confusion, and suspicion.

To attack at the core elements of our identity and values.

And to provoke harsh responses from the State.

We saw the worst of humanity in the individuals who perpetrated this crime. But we have also seen some of the best of humanity amid this violence and tragedy.

Countless people who responded, protected, supported, intervened. Many at great personal risk or cost to themselves.

The police, the lifeguards, the first responders — those who found themselves at work that day serving their community in ways they never could have imagined.

And then there are those people who aren’t trained professionals, but who acted in the moment to make a difference. To confront and disarm a shooter. To shield a child. We call them heroes, and praise their bravery. And rightly so.

But truthfully, the ordinariness of these people and their actions is the thing I find most praiseworthy and comforting.

The instinct to protect, to care, to come together with others. How easily it is reached for. How it is a reminder that the goodness within people isn’t remarkable or rare. It is who we are. That goodness, generosity, selflessness, kindness, care…they all are far bigger and far more common than the hate that drove the terrorists.

When we see ourselves as part of community, as part of something bigger than ourselves, that is where the strength is. Our communities and connections are stronger than we think. And those who would seek to destroy us are weaker than they think.

We can respond to acts of terrorism by refusing to allow the terrorists to get what they want. Refuse to allow them to create cracks or division. Refuse to allow their hatred to infect our society. Refuse to offer up one community under the guise of protecting another. Refuse to participate in spreading hate speech and misinformation.

Questions will — and must — be asked about how this terrorist act was able to occur. But investigations into intelligence, into motive, into failures or weaknesses of policy takes time. Weaponising emotional responses for political point-scoring or moral high ground does nothing productive, and does nothing to address the issues or prevent it from happening again. Blame in the moment is easy and attractive. But once false narratives, later disproven, gain a foothold — they are hard to eradicate.

We have a responsibility to be mindful of the words we use, the stories we share, the actions we encourage.

What we can, and should, do is centre the victims — the innocent lives cut too short by this act of violence — and the bystanders caught in this tragedy who showed the very best of our humanity and our values. To talk to the people in our lives. To listen to those most affected. To show up for our communities.

And not allow this calculated act of terror to tear us apart.

It’s almost 40 years of election data, voter attitudes and a vibe check on the electorate.

Political nerd that I am, I’ve gone deep with the PDFs and data (think: highlighters, graphs, spreadsheets, an unreasonable number of tabs, my daughter unimpressed).

And I have been absolutely fascinated by the data. Late last week, I did a reel on the shift in Millennials and it went off. I genuinely think it’s my most popular post ever! Who knew you were all looking for some political insight and generational validation?

Because I have far too many notes and things I want to share with you from the study, today, I’m kicking off a new five-part series where I unpack what the AES really tells us about:

• the fragile Labor landslide

• the Coalition’s structural collapse

• the generational left turn

• the gender gap now reshaping federal politics

• the rise of independents and dealignment

• foreign policy anxiety

• and what Australian democracy looks like heading into 2030

You’re getting Part 1 as today’s Latest.

The rest will be standalone deep dives, released to paid subscribers over the coming weeks (so I can keep mixing up The Latest with culture, civic explainers and general life chaos… also because I realise that relentless political discourse is maybe not the most fun end-of-year content).

This series is the clearest, sharpest political analysis I’ve done all year (if I do say so myself). So, if you’ve been thinking about becoming a paid subscriber… this is your moment.

Plus, beyond the paywall, the only piece of “mushroom trial” content I’ll be consuming; what happened in the Liberal party killing season; and an article about the RFK Jr/Olivia Nuzzi scandal that will get you up to speed (but may mentally scar you 😂)

PART 1 — The Fragile Landslide

Labor won 94 out of 150 seats. It was called a decisive victory, a landslide, a super-majority. But the AES makes it very clear that Labor didn’t surge. The Coalition collapsed.

Labor’s primary vote only increased two percentage points from 2022, which was already its worst primary since 1934. Not exactly a tidal wave. But still, a so-called “super-majority”. Almost two-thirds of the seats, with just over a third of the primary vote.

The Coalition, meanwhile? Their vote fell to its lowest level in the history of the Liberal Party.

More Australians voted for a minor party or independent than for the Coalition for the first time.

There is a saying in politics that people vote parties out, not in. But even still, it feels like this collapse in vote share was a clear comment on the Coalition’s relevance and their policies.

Cost of Living dominated voter concerns

Two-thirds of voters said their top issue was economic, which is the highest on record.

The top concerns:

• cost of living (36%)

• health & Medicare (13%)

• the economy (12%)

Meanwhile, climate change halved as a top concern (from 66% in 2019 to 43% now).

Not because people necessarily stopped caring, but because existential dread about groceries, rent and mortgages drowned everything else out.

This is a global pattern: when people are under economic pressure, long-term issues become background noise.

The Coalition lost its main selling point

For the first time in nearly 40 years of data, Australians preferred Labor over the Coalition on:

• economic management

• taxation

• cost of living

I cannot overstate how much of a shift this is in our political narrative.

The core issues the Coalition relies on to sell its credibility to voters (and frequently uses as a cudgel against Labor) have always been their record as preferred economic managers, and their approach to national security.

But in 2025, Labor outscored the Coalition on every issue other than national security. And even then, the Coalition scores equal to ‘no difference’.

Even on tax policy, once core Coalition messaging as the ‘party of lower taxes’, Labor is now seen as having the better policy, reversing a decades-long trend.

Without economic credibility, the Coalition has lost a long-standing foundation of their narrative. And rebuilding it will take more than rebranding.

The Coalition has never had to rebuild its economic identity before.

They’ve assumed “strong economic managers” was an immovable fact. It no longer is.

The rise of “Not the Coalition” voters

Another striking AES finding: non-partisans are now one of the largest political identities in the country.

25% of voters say they feel close to no party at all — the highest ever. And the first time non-partisanship has overtaken one of the major parties, with the Coalition sitting at 24%. Only Labor partisans rate higher, at 31%.

That matters, because under compulsory voting:

• non-partisans turn up

• and they have to vote for someone

• and that someone, increasingly, is Labor, Greens or an Independent — not the Coalition

Around half of people who voted Independent in this election previously voted Labor or Greens (possibly indicating some level of tactical voting).

The Coalition hemorrhaged support across multiple demographics, but especially among:

• women

• Millennials

• renters

• university-educated workers

• moderate liberals (small-l)

• and voters in metro/suburban seats

The Coalition has no pathway back to government that doesn’t begin with women and Millennials. And right now they’re losing both.

Millennials broke the rules of politics

We’ll go deep on generations in Part 2, but we need the headline here:

Millennials did not drift right as they aged. They moved further left.

Between 2016 and 2025:

• Coalition support among Millennials fell from 38% → 21%

• Labor rose from 33% → 37%

• Labor won 64% of the 2PP vote among Millennials this year

This is a structural break from every generation before them.

The old rule — “people become conservative as they age” — relied on stable housing, rising wages, and increasing prosperity. Millennials have none of those.

And Australia is only getting more Millennial.

By 2028 (and the next federal election), Millennials and Gen Z will be close to a majority of all voters.

The gender gap has changed (and is growing)

Historically, women were slightly more likely to vote for the Coalition.

Now the trend has flipped and is only growing. Women’s support for the Coalition has fallen 19 points in 12 years.

In 2025:

• 37% of men gave their first preference to the Coalition

• just 28% of women did

Women supported Labor more, the Greens even more, and independents more.
Men were more likely to vote for minor right parties.

This gender voting gap, particularly for the Coalition, is now one of the defining features of Australian politics.

Record-setting leadership numbers (and not in the good way)

This year’s AES produced a remarkable footnote in the political history books: Peter Dutton is the least popular major party leader ever recorded.

Anthony Albanese ranked 13th out of 28 leaders in AES history. Voters saw him as competent and compassionate, but not inspiring.

But voters rated Dutton much lower on every leadership trait.

Outranking your opponent on leadership characteristics isn’t always necessary to win. (Beazley outrated Howard on a number of characteristics but still lost. Twice.) But we generally do like our leaders to be good at something.

What next?

The AES doesn’t just explain 2025. It previews the next decade of Australian politics.

Economic insecurity, generational realignment, gender polarisation, declining trust in major institutions, and a more assertive independent movement are reshaping the political landscape.

This could be pivotal moment in our electoral history, and the start of a new look to our political landscape.

Over the next four posts in this series I’m going to deep dive the Millennial generational shift; the gender voting gap and how the Coalition continue to have a ‘women problem’; the era of dealignment and how we’re moving away from two-party politics; and what this means for the future of Australia’s political landscape.

I’m looking forward to sharing my deep dives with you!! And hopefully they help you make more sense of all the data too.

📺 CONSUMED

What I’m watching / reading / listening to… basically a running list of the things currently taking up too much of my time, attention, or personality.

The Mushroom Tapes by Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

I avoided all the “mushroom trial” content. And this is the only thing out of the flurry of books, podcasts and all manner of content that I’ve actually consumed on this trial because I was fascinated by the concept rather than the trial itself. These three writers recorded themselves as they travelled to and from the trial together, as they put their thoughts together over the trial and what they observed.

I found the insight into how these three different writers approach a subject, what they grapple with, how they puzzle out their story or what they think. It’s as much an insight into the process of investigative writing, court reporting, true crime, and the writers insight into the condition of existence and domesticity as it is about the murders themselves. I listened to the audiobook version on my recent trip to Sydney which was great because they all narrate their parts of the text, so it was like sitting in on a conversation between these three incredibly intelligent, thoughtful and impactful writers.

Wicked: For Good

Obviously. I loved it, and I know it’s divided people but I was so happy with it. I did make the strategic call not to wear makeup when I went to watch it because I suspected no mascara would hold up to For Good and I made the correct call. I had tears streaming down my face for the last 30 minutes of the movie!! I did take G to see it separately and she did not cry because “they’re just acting”… 😒

Amazing acting, gorgeous costumes, and powerful songs aside, I did also find it incredibly timely with the lying ruler of it all, and a population unwilling to accept facts once they’ve bought into the “sham and hokum.” And I think it’s a useful example for talking about how differently people can respond to a broken system, even when they are driven by the goal of “good".

Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty on ABC

As a democracy nerd, it’s probably unsurprising that I watched all three episodes of Civic Duty as soon as it came out on ABC iView. It’s a really interesting look at the uniqueness of Australia’s electoral system (really!!) as well as what the future of our democracy might look as our voting patterns continue to change. This series, as well as Crabb’s new book There’s a Prawn in Parliament House: The Kids’ Guide to Australia’s Amazing Democracy are also a good way to engage kids in democracy and help them to appreciate our political system. Got to keep that generational shift coming!!

📰 ICYMI

• Last month the Liberal Party went all out for the killing season with NSW and VIC Liberal parties swapping out their leaders. In a twist no one really saw coming, the Liberal Party now have more female leaders than the Labor Party (although it’s clear from polling that they still don’t actually speak to women…). Kellie Sloane and Jess Wilson are the new leaders for the Libs in NSW and VIC, respectively, and it is an interesting time with Sussan Ley being exceedingly unpopular and holding a rapidly fraying Coalition together. Maybe with the two biggest states running with female leaders, the federal Liberal party might feel that the blowback of knifing their first female leader of the party will easier to endure? Time will tell how long Ley has left in her as leader, I still don’t think she’ll be leader this time next year, but she should see out the year at this stage.

• The Trump White House has added a new section to its website, designed to call out media organisations and journalists they don’t like. In theory, it’s about addressing reporting they don’t think is accurate…but let’s be honest, it’s just the newest way Trump and his staff are threatening and attacking journalists and freedom of the press. (Let alone Trump’s attacks on female journalists, which are really ramping up.)

• If you’ve heard about the RFK Jr, Olivia Nuzzi, Ryan Lizza scandal but aren’t across the details, may I humbly recommend this article from The Ringer to catch up. But it comes with a disclaimer up front that is genuinely hilarious while also capturing the absolute chaos of this scandal. The article opens: “There’s no way around it. If you read this article, you are going to have to imagine Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the United States secretary of health and human services, having an absolutely eyeball-melting orgasm.” I shall leave it to your judgement as to whether you click through or not 😂

Final Note

Continuing my democracy filled day, tonight I am going to an event for Niki Savva’s latest book: Earthquake. Savva’s books are the perfect election post-script. She has an excellent eye for a story and is whip smart. I inhaled her previous post-election books (The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, Bulldozed), and I expect this one to be exceptional as well, but am particularly looking forward to hearing her speak about it!

Thank you so much for being a paid subscriber. This series is a big lift — time, research and analysis — and your support genuinely makes it possible.

L.