They are becoming more sceptical of institutions, more interested in national identity and increasingly willing to question mass immigration, multiculturalism and what it actually means to be Australian.

That is why I sat down with Andre Mamet — Ausmaxx.

Ausmaxx interview

He’s 19 years old, outspoken, unapologetically nationalist and already attracting the attention of mainstream media.

Something is changing. A generation pushing back

Andre’s political awakening started in Melbourne during COVID.

He was 14 when Victoria entered its extraordinary lockdown period. Schools closed, movement was restricted, protests erupted and police enforced public-health orders across Melbourne.

For Andre, watching that unfold created a lasting distrust of concentrated government power.

Then came education.

He describes moving through a school environment saturated with acknowledgements of country, Indigenous messaging and progressive identity politics.

Instead of accepting it, he started asking a fairly obvious question:

If everybody else’s identity matters, what about mine?

I know we’re going to hear that question increasingly from his generation.

We spent years teaching young people to view the world through identity, ancestry and culture. We shouldn’t act shocked when some young Australians begin exploring their own.

Housing changes everything

There is another reason this generation is becoming politically restless. They’ve been screwed economically.

Show a 19-year-old today’s house prices and then explain that Australia needs hundreds of thousands of additional people every year to keep the economy growing.

They’re capable of joining the dots.

Mass immigration is no longer simply a cultural argument. It’s a housing, infrastructure, wages, productivity and opportunity argument.

My position is clear: Australia needs a hard five-year immigration pause.

Stop using population growth to paper over structural economic problems and force governments to fix what is actually broken.

Interestingly, Andre independently arrived at essentially the same five-year position.

What makes an Australian?

This was perhaps the most important part of our conversation.

Andre speaks openly about Australia’s Anglo-European foundations and the connection between ancestry, culture and national identity.

I don’t shy away from that discussion either. Australia isn’t an economy with a flag attached.

We are the product of a particular history, people, culture and institutions, alongside an Indigenous history stretching back thousands of years.

And I reject the idea that anyone can simply become Australian because they arrive here and eventually receive citizenship papers.

Citizenship is a legal status.

National identity is something deeper.

That doesn’t require hatred towards anybody else. People can come here legally, work, contribute and be treated with dignity without Australia having an obligation to continually expand its citizenry.

I went further than Andre during our conversation.

After a five-year immigration pause, I believe we should fundamentally reconsider how Australian citizenship is granted.

That debate might make people uncomfortable. So be it.

We do not care.

Then the media arrived

Andre has only been seriously producing political content for a short period, yet mainstream media attention found him remarkably quickly.

His involvement in the Peter Drew “Aussie” poster controversy generated headlines, followed by stories examining his political associations and contact with Pauline Hanson.

Andre believes the objective was to define him before most Australians had ever heard him speak properly.

That’s precisely why long-form independent media matters.

If somebody is supposedly radical or controversial, put a microphone in front of them.

Ask them questions.

Challenge them.

Then let Australians make up their own minds.

You don’t need a journalist telling you what Andre believes.

You can listen to him yourself.

Free speech comes first

Andre is now helping lead the Brisbane component of the March for Australia national free-speech rallies on Sunday, August 30.

The principle matters regardless of whether you agree with Andre’s politics. Free speech isn’t important because it protects popular opinions.

Those don’t need protecting.

It matters when an opinion is offensive, unpopular or politically inconvenient. Without the ability to openly debate immigration, identity, government power and Australia’s future, every other political argument becomes meaningless.

And perhaps that’s the bigger story here. Andre is 19.

I grew up in an Australia where national identity largely went without saying.

His generation has grown up in an Australia where identity is discussed constantly, while the meaning of being Australian has become increasingly contested.

Calling young men like Andre “far right” won’t make them disappear.

If anything, it probably accelerates what’s already happening.

Australian Nationalism 2.0 isn’t about nostalgia.

It’s about a new generation asking what Australia is, who Australians are, and whether they have the right to preserve the country they’ve inherited.

I enjoyed this conversation precisely because Andre is prepared to go there.

Watch it and make up your own mind.

🇦🇺 National Free Speech Rally

Sunday, August 30, 2026 12:00 PM Roma Street Parklands, Brisbane

March for Australia is holding rallies nationally.

March for Australia: https://marchforaustralia.org/

Follow Ausmaxx: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/ausmaxx_ X — https://x.com/ausmaxx1 TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@ausmaxx_

September 13: Our Brisbane rally against mass immigration is a separate event with a different objective.

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If you’ve tried to build a new home in Queensland over the last couple of years, you’ve probably encountered the NatHERS 7-star requirement. On a government brochure they did their best to make it sound perfectly reasonable: more energy efficient, more sustainable, lower heating and cooling costs. The problem is houses aren’t built inside government briefing papers; they’re built with timber, steel, concrete, glass and labour, and every additional requirement eventually lands on the price paid by the person trying to build the house. That’s you and the government makes an absolute in motza in tax revenue on every single dollar that goes into that house build.

Take someone wanting to put a 50-square-metre granny flat in the backyard. Maybe Mum is getting older and they want her nearby, maybe an adult child can’t afford to enter the housing market, or maybe the family needs rental income to help carry a mortgage that has exploded over the past few years. It’s exactly the sort of small, relatively affordable housing we supposedly want more of, yet getting that little building to achieve 7 stars can mean additional specifications, design compromises, assessments and costs until eventually the quote lands on the kitchen table and the project simply doesn’t stack up. No home for Grandma.

I’ve watched this happen in the building industry for years. Government doesn’t need to ban something to stop it being built; it can simply keep adding requirements until the spreadsheet kills it. The customer disappears, the quote expires and the project never happens without ever becoming a statistic for a house that wasn’t built. Multiply that across granny flats, small homes and raised-floor houses throughout Queensland and you begin to understand how regulatory decisions can remove housing supply while politicians stand behind microphones promising to create more of it. Its a circus and no one in government at any level has a clue what they are doing.

That multi-layered circus is at the centre of Australia’s housing problem. One arm of government tells us we desperately need more homes while another arm keeps making those homes slower, harder and more expensive to deliver. Builders, developers and homeowners then carry the cost while governments announce increasingly ambitious housing targets that the industry is somehow expected to achieve inside the regulatory system government created.

Now Queensland is starting to unwind part of it. Under the proposed changes, homes of 50 square metres or less will effectively be able to comply at around 5 stars rather than 7, while raised-floor homes receive relief to around 6 stars. Heating and cooling load caps are also being removed under these pathways, meaning the practical benefit can be greater than the headline star reduction depending on the climate zone and design.

Then we arrive at one of those wonderful pieces of Australian regulation that almost writes the satire for you: the outdoor living credit. An outdoor living area can contribute half a star, while adding a ceiling fan can contribute another half. Somewhere inside an enormously complicated national energy-efficiency framework, we have reached the point where hanging a fan over the patio can materially alter the compliance pathway of your house. If that doesn’t demonstrate how arbitrary parts of the system have become, I’m not sure what does.

I want to give credit where it’s due, as this is a good change and it should allow real projects to proceed. Granny flats that previously didn’t stack up may become viable, small homes should become easier to deliver and raised-floor houses, something Queensland managed to build successfully for generations, should become less difficult to approve. The people inside the industry who pushed government to recognise the problem deserve credit for getting movement.

But celebrating the change without asking how we got here would miss the entire point. A regulatory benchmark was imposed, builders warned that additional compliance would increase costs, projects became harder to make viable and some housing simply wasn’t built. Plus many builders went broke trying to make unviable projects stack up. Years later, in the middle of a housing shortage, government begins unwinding part of the requirement through a technical amendment without any serious discussion about how much housing was delayed, abandoned or made more expensive along the way.

Even the 50-square-metre threshold deserves scrutiny. Why 50? What fundamentally changes about the thermal performance or social value of a home when it grows from 50 square metres to 51? Rules are written by people who will never have to price the job, explain another $15,000 or $20,000 to the customer, redesign the building, chase another consultant or watch the client finally decide it’s all too hard. Every regulation can be defended individually, yet stack enough individually reasonable requirements together and eventually you create an unreasonable outcome. The person trying to build the house then gets blamed for the price.

Nor is this some sweeping deregulation of housing. Whole-of-Home energy assessments remain and ordinary family homes outside these concessions are still dealing with the 7-star requirement. Government hasn’t demolished the wall; it has simply recognised that one section was blocking too many houses and quietly removed a few bricks.

What makes this more important is that NatHERS is simultaneously moving beyond new construction and into existing homes. Energy ratings for existing dwellings are being developed and governments are considering how those ratings could ultimately form part of the information disclosed when properties are sold or rented. Once energy ratings become attached to existing properties, we also need a serious discussion about how that information could eventually influence valuations, lending, rental requirements and the cost of owning an older Australian home.

That deserves scrutiny before another enormous regulatory machine is built. We have just watched governments discover that energy requirements could make a tiny new dwelling unnecessarily difficult to construct, yet the same broad rating framework is now being expanded toward the millions of homes Australians already own. Energy efficiency itself isn’t the problem; creating another system that progressively turns voluntary information into mandatory compliance very easily could be.

Australia doesn’t have a shortage of housing announcements, strategies, roundtables or targets. We have a shortage of actual houses, and every layer of planning, approvals, energy regulation, building codes, infrastructure charges, taxes, consultants and reports adds time or money somewhere in the process. Each layer can sound perfectly sensible when presented by itself, but stack them together and you eventually arrive at the absurd position Australia finds itself in today: ordinary Australians earning ordinary wages increasingly cannot afford ordinary houses.

So take the win on 14 August. Builders should use these concessions, homeowners should benefit from them and hopefully more small homes will actually get built. But don’t mistake government removing part of a problem for government solving the problem. They built the regulatory wall in front of housing, the industry spent years telling them it was in the way, and now they’re quietly pulling out a few bricks while continuing to build the next section.

Please remember, the problem with Australian housing policy isn’t any single brick; it’s the wall that 3 layers of government built in front of us.

Scott Challen - Builder.

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I left Australia expecting to just learn more about Europe. Instead, I came home understanding Australia in a way I never had before.

Over the past month, I walked the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres where thousands of young Australians sacrificed everything. I stood in Villers-Bretonneux, where a small French town still honours Australians with the words “Do Not Forget Australia.” I visited Budapest, Prague and Dubrovnik, where the scars of communism, occupation and war are still visible, not in history books, in the buildings, the memorials and the stories of people who lived through them.

This isn’t a travel vlog. It’s a conversation about our identity and about history. Freedom and its real price.

About why Australia is one of the luckiest nations on Earth and why we should never take that for granted.

If this journey made you think, I’d love to hear your perspective. Leave a comment below and tell me what Australia means to you.

👍 Like this video if you believe Australia’s story is worth preserving.

🔔 Subscribe for more long-form conversations on Australian history, culture, economics and the future of our nation.

📤 Share this video with someone who loves Australia. Every share helps these conversations reach more Australians.

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🇦🇺 Join Us Around Australia

From September to November, the Australian Lobby Group is holding peaceful rallies in every Australian capital city, beginning with:

📍 Brisbane – Sunday, 13 September

If you’ve ever said, “Someone needs to do something,” this is your opportunity to get involved.

Come along, meet like-minded Australians, have respectful conversations and be part of a growing movement focused on Australia’s future.

➡️ Join the Australian Lobby Group

➡️ Register for a rally near you

➡️ Become part of the conversation

www.auslobby.com.au

Australia is an incredible country.

Let’s make sure we leave it stronger than we found it.

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On Australia Day 2026 we fed 5,000 people for free, ran the biggest BBQ Brisbane city has seen and marched to end mass immigration. 20,000 showed up. Still reckon no one cared?

We took that energy and built the Australian Lobby Group. A federally registered PTY LTD. We took your voices to Canberra and we walked out with commitments to free speech so our position and your voice will not be silenced if our side wins balance of power or government in 2028.

The last 12 months has been the biggest year of my life already and not just because of the politics. I'd been planning my 2026 travel list my whole adult life. This was the bucket list year and I'd been prepping for it ever since Covid ended. I quit drinking on 9 April 2025 and doubled down on everything good in my life so I'd be sharp enough to actually learn something from the places I went in 2026.

I've now hiked the mountains of Peru with my best mates and seen what resilience and the simple life really looks like.

I've walked through Japan and watched a culture guard its identity with both hands while still building one of the most modern nations on earth.

I've stood on the battlefields of Europe where Australians fought and died for a young country that was still working out what it was.

Every mile of it hardened something I already knew. Australia isn't struggling because Australians got weaker, or dumber, or lazier. We're struggling because the people we elected kept making decisions that served somebody else. Everyone else’s stupid ideas came first. We came last. Every bloody time.

I've now stood in nations that unapologetically defend their borders, their sovereignty, their culture and their industries. Nobody calls them extreme for it. They call it governing. But an Australian who asks the same of our own government gets told they are an unreasonable racist and a bigot.

We aren’t - we are Aussies and we know BS when we see it.

The more I've travelled, the more Australian I've become, and I believe with everything I've got that this country is still worth fighting for. Not because it's perfect. Because it's ours. It's our birthright. It was paid for in blood and we are not handing it over quietly. So I'm not giving up and I'm not backing off. I will never surrender our island home.

Next we take the message around the country. A national tour to end mass immigration and ban foreign lobbying.

The mission is simple:

• End mass immigration.

• Ban foreign lobbying.

• Restore government accountability.

• Put Australian citizens back at the centre of Australian public policy.

This isn't about hating anyone. It's about loving this country enough to make sure the mob who did this to us never get the chance to do it again.

The last year changed me. I intend for the next one to change this country.

Thank you for backing the Australian Lobby Group and our Australia Marches teams ❤️

You’ve been the reason we kept going and you are the reason we are prepping for “Fighting Season” to begin again.

More to come Patriots 🇦🇺🫡

Join us at the www.auslobby.com.au

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The coverage called it innovation. I watched it and saw an autopsy report.

Because think about what that pilot actually proves. It is now commercially sensible for Australia's largest home builder to have the bulk of an Australian family home manufactured in another country and freighted here, rather than built by Australians on Australian soil. Freight, handling, coordination across hemispheres, all of it, and it still stacks up against building locally. That is not a story about clever construction methods. That is a story about what we did to our own industry.

Australia didn't suddenly forget how to build houses. We made building houses progressively harder, one justifiable regulation at a time, for thirty years. The house you built in 1995 wouldn't get approved today

Anyone who was on the tools in the nineties and early 2000’s knows the difference. The National Construction Code was thinner. Planning was simpler. Engineering was lighter. Approval pathways were shorter. You could take a standard set of plans, get them stamped, and be pouring a slab inside a timeframe that would seem like fantasy to a builder today.

Nobody sensible wants those days back wholesale. There were shonky operators then, same as now, and plenty of the reforms since have made homes genuinely better. Better waterproofing. Better structural standards. Better consumer protection. Taken one at a time, most of these changes had a defensible case behind them.

That's exactly the problem. Every single layer was justifiable on its own, and nobody ever stood back and priced the stack. Each new edition of the code meant another report, another consultant, another specialist certification, another inspection, another signature, another slab of legal liability sitting on the builder's shoulders. Thermal performance requirements got tougher. Accessibility requirements got broader. Documentation got heavier. Each one added cost, and every dollar of that cost landed in the same place it always lands: the final contract price, and from there, the mortgage.

The first home buyer doesn't purchase regulations. They purchase thirty years of accumulated compliance, capitalised into their loan, paid off with interest. Permission is the real construction schedule.

Here's what people outside the industry never see. Building a house is the easy part. Getting permission to build a house is the job.

Permission from council. Permission from the state. Permission from the developer, the certifier, the utility providers. Environmental assessments, stormwater management plans, bushfire overlays, flood overlays, infrastructure charges, traffic assessments, neighbour objections. Every one of those organisations controls a small slice of the process, and not one of them owns the outcome. When nobody owns the outcome, delay is free. Free for them, anyway. The builder wears it, then the buyer does.

Builders cop endless criticism for how long projects take. A fair chunk of that time is spent waiting for paperwork to move between desks before a single tradie sets foot on site. We built a system where the critical path of a house runs through filing cabinets.

The apprentices we didn't train are the shortage we've got today.

Every housing debate eventually arrives at the same line: Australia doesn't have enough tradespeople. True. But shortages don't fall out of the sky. They're manufactured, slowly, over decades.

For a generation, schools pushed degrees, parents pushed degrees, and governments funded university expansion while vocational training quietly lost its standing. At the same time residential construction got more complex, apprenticeships got harder to carry, and experienced trades walked out of the industry rather than drown in compliance. Every apprentice we didn't sign up twenty years ago is a missing leading hand today.

And the standard political answer to the shortage completes the loop. Not enough workers to build homes, so bring in more skilled migrants. Migration does add workers. It also adds households, and every household needs a roof. Demand rises, the delivery system stays choked by the same approvals and the same code and the same thin trades pipeline, and supply never catches up. Round and round we go.

What the twenty days build tiny actually tells you about the industry.

To be clear about what I'm not arguing: prefabrication is not the villain here. Factory construction has real advantages. Quality control in a controlled environment, less waste, dramatically compressed build times. Twenty days from slab to completion is a genuinely impressive result and the people who delivered it should be proud of the work. Australia should absolutely be doing more of this.

The question is why we aren't the ones doing it. A country that once built entire suburbs at scale, with local factories and local trades and local supply chains, has structured its regulatory environment, its approval system and its labour market so thoroughly against domestic productivity that offshore manufacture plus international freight is now the competitive option. Metricon didn't import a couple of houses. They exported a verdict on the Australian building industry.

And follow the money before you expect anyone inside the system to fix it. Every compliance dollar becomes contract price, contract price becomes mortgage, mortgages become bank interest, and rising housing costs become stamp duty, infrastructure charges and fee revenue for governments. I'm not claiming anyone sat down and designed the affordability crisis. I'm pointing out that almost nobody in the chain gets paid more when houses become simpler, cheaper and faster to build. Incentives don't need a conspiracy. They just need time.

So when the next pilot program gets celebrated on the evening news, ask the question the coverage won't. Not whether the houses look good. Not whether twenty days is fast. Ask why the most productive way to build an Australian home is now to build most of it somewhere else.

We regulated our way into this. We can deregulate our way out, but only if the people who actually build things are in the room when the rules get written.

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Strap in for this tale of economic woe and misery. Extra Spicy!

We franchised QHI builders the year before. Did it properly. Disclosure documents, agreements, legals (mountains of legals) the whole process, signed and done. No disputes, no complaints, not a single franchisee who could say they’d been dudded. Then the rules changed underneath us and I was suddenly up for a stack of new contracts and paperwork to drag everything into line with rules that didn’t exist when we started the franchise system build.

Nobody at my end had done a thing wrong. We were just paying for someone who had. That someone was Nando’s and its head office who decided to try and rig the franchise game.

What actually happened

Between roughly 2015 and 2019, Nando’s franchisees across Australia started copping refurbishment demands. On the surface that’s reasonable. Brands need to stay current and no one wants to eat in a shop still running signage from 2004, think Sizzler.

But the numbers told a different story. By the accounts that later came out, mandatory refits were regularly running past $300,000. One operator said he was hit with a $400,000 renovation demand on a store that was only four years old. When franchisees went out and got independent quotes, they reckoned the cost of doing the work through the approved channels came in well above what they could have arranged themselves.

Put yourself in that chair. You’ve sunk your savings, and often your house, into buying the franchise. You’re running the hours, paying the fees, wearing the risk. Then a renewal condition arrives that says find another three or four hundred grand or you’re finished and plenty of them couldn’t find it. So they were finished.

Some lost the business. Some, by their own accounts, lost the family home. Over about three years, dozens of franchised locations stopped trading as franchises. And the stores didn’t sit empty. A large share of them went straight onto the company’s own books. Today Nando’s runs somewhere around 198 stores in Australia, and roughly 60 percent of them are owned by head office.

The company said refurbishment was about customer experience, brand relevance and staying competitive. Some of that may well be true. But if you’re the franchisee who just got pushed out by a refit bill you couldn’t afford, and you then watched the company take your shop back onto its own ledger, you’re entitled to notice the shape of it and you also have every reason to be salty.

It looks a lot like the United Kingdom model, where Nando’s is almost entirely company-owned. The franchisees carried the risk, built the sites, absorbed the lean early years, and got moved along once the hard work was done. Whether that was the strategy or simply how it played out, the outcome speaks for itself. The damage was bad enough that Canberra decided it had to move.

The government’s answer

So they rewrote the Franchising Code of Conduct. The new Code came into force on 1 April 2025, with parts of the disclosure regime phasing in from 1 November.

Some of it is sound. Franchisors now have to spell out any significant capital expenditure a franchisee might face, up front, in the disclosure document. Agreements have to give the franchisee a genuine opportunity to recoup their investment during the term. There’s new compensation where an agreement ends early and someone is left holding the debt. They wound back some of the more aggressive non-compete clauses. And they backed it with penalties running up to 600 penalty units per breach, which at $330 a unit is serious money.

If you were one of those Nando’s operators, that’s the law you wish you’d had five years earlier. I won’t pretend otherwise, it made it safer.

But who actually pays?

The company that caused this doesn’t carry the cost of fixing it. That job falls to everyone else. Me, you and anyone who is a franchisor or franchisee.

A global brand runs a play that squeezes small operators out of their own shops. The regulator can’t give those people their money or their houses back, so it does the one thing a bureaucracy is built to do. It writes a new rule and applies it to the entire industry, evenly, top to bottom.

That sounds fair right up until you’re the one wearing it and my new “Freshly Minted” franchise model had to wear it.

A company sitting on 198 stores and a legal department absorbs a Code change without blinking. New disclosure obligations, redrafted agreements, none of it moves the needle for an operation that size. The compliance cost is a rounding error to them.

The small franchise system is where it bites. The family business, the local operator, the outfit that franchised its operations in 2023 /24 or last year and never put a foot wrong. We’re the ones who front tens of thousands in fresh legals and contracts, not for anything we did, but because the fix gets spread evenly across every honest operator in the country while the outfit that caused it just prices it in and moves on.

That is the mechanism nobody ever talks about. Every scandal adds another layer, and every layer sits heavier on the small operator than it ever does on the big end of town. The regulation sold to us as protection for small business becomes one more cost that only small business genuinely struggles to carry.

The pattern

This is the same story I keep running into right across the country, in construction, in housing, in franchising, take your pick. A handful of large players with lawyers do something they shouldn’t. The response is never to go after those specific operators hard enough to actually hurt them. The response is a blanket rule that the big end absorbs and the small end wears. We’re told every time that this is how you protect the little bloke. On the ground the little bloke pays for the sins of the big one, and the compliance pile grows another storey every year until productive people quietly decide it isn’t worth the trouble.

I don’t want to see franchisees done over. What happened to those operators was ugly, and the protections that came out of it aren’t foolish. But don’t sell me the line that the system got fairer. It also got heavier. And I’m one of the poor sods holding the bag and the thousands in extra costs.

So no. It ain’t just chicken mate.

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The photo did the rounds. Two blokes grinning in front of the flags, and a headline about billions in uranium exports. Most people scrolled past it. Fair enough, it looks like every other trade announcement. New market, jobs, strategic partnership, cue the press release.

I want to walk you through what actually got signed, because on a building site we have a saying. When someone tells you the rules have changed, the first question is who benefits, and the second is who carries the risk. The answers here are not the same people.

The paperwork itself is an administrative arrangement that switches on a civil nuclear agreement Abbott signed with India back in 2014. That deal sat in a drawer for twelve years because of one stubborn fact. India has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Not in 1968, not after its first bomb test in 1974, not after the 1998 tests, not now. India, Pakistan and Israel are the holdouts, and India has said plainly it never intends to sign.

For decades that was the end of the conversation. Australia holds the largest known uranium reserves on the planet, and our export policy was simple. Sign the NPT or buy your yellowcake somewhere else. Labor governments in particular treated this as bedrock. Kevin Rudd in 2007 called the idea of selling uranium to a non-signatory a very bad development. Stephen Smith as foreign minister told the Indians no to their faces in Canberra in 2008.

What changed is not India's treaty status. India remains exactly as outside the NPT today as it was when Rudd was thundering about it. What changed is that India passed its own domestic nuclear reform bill in December, agreed to IAEA inspections on its civilian reactors, and offered a bilateral safeguards deal. The government line is that this architecture makes the NPT requirement unnecessary. Trust, verified by inspectors, replacing a treaty signature.

And this week ex Labor minister drop kick - Stephen Conroy argued it doesn't matter that India hasn't signed the treaty at all.

Sit with that for a second. A Labor elder statesman, from the party that built its identity on non-proliferation, now says the signature was never the point.

Twenty years of running building companies taught me something about rules. Every rule on a worksite exists because someone, somewhere, got hurt. Fall protection isn't there because regulators enjoy paperwork. It's there because blokes died.

The NPT rule was the same. Australia decided that a country wanting our uranium had to make a binding, permanent, international promise about nuclear weapons. Not a bilateral arrangement that either side can walk away from. Not an inspection regime covering only the reactors India chooses to declare civilian. A treaty.

The counterargument is real and I'll give it a fair run. India has a genuinely clean proliferation record. It has never sold nuclear technology to anyone, which is more than you can say for Pakistan, whose chief scientist ran a global nuclear Kmart for years. India separated its civilian and military programs, took the IAEA safeguards, and the whole world effectively waved this through when the Nuclear Suppliers Group granted its exemption back in 2008. Canada already sells uranium to India. So does Kazakhstan. Australian ore in Indian civilian reactors does not put Australian atoms in Indian warheads.

All true. Here is what the argument quietly skips. Every tonne of foreign uranium India burns in its civilian reactors is a tonne of its own scarce domestic uranium freed up for the weapons program. India's local reserves are thin. That scarcity was a natural handbrake on both its power stations and its arsenal. We just helped release it. Nobody has to breach a single safeguard for our exports to make India's weapons program easier to fuel. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's arithmetic, and arms control analysts have been pointing it out since the American deal in 2008.

In May 2025, India and Pakistan fought the most serious military exchange between two nuclear powers in history. Missile and drone strikes landed deep inside both countries, well beyond the usual Kashmir grievance zone. Their air forces fought one of the largest air battles in decades. And by multiple reports, American intelligence picked up signals alarming enough that Washington dropped everything and brokered a ceasefire inside four days. Vance was on the phone to Modi personally.

Nobody outside a handful of situation rooms knows exactly how close it got. What we know is that the world's superpower looked at the intelligence and panicked. And the analysts' takeaway afterwards was chilling in its blandness. Both sides are now comfortable using serious conventional force under the nuclear threshold. The ceiling holds until the day it doesn't.

Fourteen months later, Australia signed up as uranium supplier to one side of that conflict.

There's a domestic angle here that our political class will not touch, so I will.

Australia is home to large and growing Indian and Pakistani diaspora. And we have already watched overseas conflicts play out on Australian streets. We saw it with the Middle East after October 2023. Protests, counter-protests, communities that lived side by side suddenly eyeing each other across a divide imported from eight thousand kilometres away.

If the subcontinent goes hot again, and the analysts say the next round starts from a higher rung of the ladder, that tension lands here too. Except this time Australia will not be a bystander. We will be the country fuelling one side's reactors while telling the other side's diaspora we're neutral. Try explaining our safeguards architecture to a Pakistani-Australian family watching Karachi on the news.

I'm not arguing India and Pakistan are equivalent. They're not. India is an ugly democracy, an economic giant, and its proliferation record genuinely is clean. If you're going to pick a side on the subcontinent, India is the right pick. But picking a side is what this is, and the government is pretending it's just a trade deal.

I'm not a unilateral disarmament guy. I'm a builder. I deal in what's in front of me. Australia was always going to end up in India's corner, the strategic logic is real, and the export dollars are real too.

But a decision this size deserved a debate this size, and we didn't get one. No serious parliamentary scrutiny of what happens to the arrangement if the next India-Pakistan round goes worse than May 2025. No answer on whether exports pause during a shooting war. No acknowledgement that fifty years of stated principle just got retired with a handshake and a selfie at the MCG.

Whinging online changes nothing. Getting in the room is what counts. The Australia Lobbying Group exists to ask exactly these questions of the people who signed this deal, in the rooms where the answers have to be given. If you think a fifty-year principle deserved more than a photo op on its way out, come lend your weight.

What was the price we got for the principle? Someone in Canberra knows the number. I'd like to hear it.

I visited the bridge at Arnhem before making my way to the Airborne Museum in Oosterbeek. It’s an outstanding museum, one of the best I’ve been to. The Dutch countryside is beautiful in summer. Warm sunshine, a light breeze, quiet streets and visitors speaking half a dozen different languages. It’s peaceful now, almost impossibly so, considering what happened here eighty years ago.

What strikes you most is the sheer weight of history. Everywhere you turn there’s a name, a building or a landmark that feels strangely familiar. You know you’ve heard it before, read about it, or seen it on an old documentary. History here isn’t locked away inside museums. It surrounds you. Just beyond the museum sits the Airborne Cemetery. Row after row of immaculate Commonwealth headstones stretch across the grass. More than 1,600 servicemen are buried there from the fighting around Arnhem. I was surprised to discover that among them are four Australians. They served with the RAF but were members of the RAAF, their aircraft brought down during Operation Market Garden. Even here, thousands of kilometres from home, Australians had paid the ultimate price.

From Arnhem it’s an easy drive south into Belgium. The roads are excellent, built for European touring, but nothing prepares you for arriving in Ypres. Without warning, you find yourself driving through the Menin Gate. I instinctively hit the brakes as I couldn’t imagine driving through such a sacred place but that’s exactly what you are meant to do. Drive through it and remember. Built in 1927 and inscribed with the names of thousands of soldiers who never got a marked grave, this is a testament in stone to personal sacrifice.

Thousands upon thousands of names surround you on the stone walls. Soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient during World War 1 and have no known grave. Australians, British, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans and men from across the Empire, remembered only by their names carved into the memorial. It is impossible not to feel the weight of this. How many tears have been shed for these men? countless I imagine.

Ypres itself feels like stepping back several centuries. Medieval buildings, narrow cobbled streets and towering cathedrals dominate the town square. Yet almost everything you see was painstakingly rebuilt after the First World War. The original city was virtually obliterated by shellfire. Looking around today, it is difficult to comprehend the destruction that once existed here.

Passchendaele, Polygon Wood, Hill 60, Messines… these are names I’ve read since I was old enough to understand what Australians achieved, and endured, on foreign battlefields. To finally walk these streets and stand where so many of those stories began felt surreal.

By complete coincidence, today was also a Flemish public holiday. The locals were celebrating the Battle of the Golden Spurs, fought on 11 July 1302, when Flemish militia defeated an army of French knights. The town square was alive with music, food and celebration.

It wasn’t lost on me that I had arrived on the very day the people here commemorate ordinary citizens defeating an entrenched aristocratic elite. Every nation sees its own history through its own lens, but standing there I couldn’t help reflecting on Australia and what I see as our own political struggles today. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it often reminds us that societies are continually debating who holds power, whose interests are served, and what kind of country they want to build.

As evening approached, I joined the crowd beneath the Menin Gate for the Last Post ceremony. Every night since 1928, except during the German occupation of the Second World War, the buglers have played in honour of those whose names fill the memorial. Standing there, looking up at the endless walls of Australians and so many others who never came home, I found myself thinking about service. What we are asked to give and how good men can face truly awful things for the greater good. The truth of it is that none of these men died for the hot mess Australia is in right now. We all know that.

Over the next few days I’ll visit more of the battlefields where Australians fought and died across Belgium and northern France. Places I’ve read about for decades but never imagined I’d one day walk myself. For now, though, arriving in Ypres has been an unforgettable introduction to one of the most historically significant places on Earth.

A day and a moment I will never forget.

More to come Patriots.

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There's an older bloke sitting in the drive-thru queue at a Guzman Gomez sometime in 2024, and his grandkids are in the back seat arguing about who gets the last burrito. He's watched these shops pop up on every second corner for five years. The kids love the place, the car park's always full, and now the thing's floating on the Aussie stock exchange. So he does what any sensible Australian with an investment portfolio does. He backs what he can see with his own eyes.

And I get it, because that's not stupid logic. Buy what you know is the oldest rule in the book. Warren Buffett built a fortune on it. But there's a catch in that rule, and every parent in this country already knows it, they lived it with their kids and social media. By the time mum and dad finally worked out Facebook and started posting photos of the barbecue, the kids had already packed up and moved to Snapchat. The moment the older generation can see the trend clearly enough to join it, the trend has already peaked. That's not a coincidence. That's how trends work.

Guzman Gomez was that moment, in float form. It listed at twenty two dollars a share in the middle of 2024 and closed its first day near twenty nine. By early last year it touched forty six dollars. Everything grandad could see from the drive-thru queue, every new store, every full car park, every churro, was already baked into that price, plus about ten years of growth that hadn't happened yet. Since then it's fallen more than thirty per cent in the past year alone. It got booted out of the ASX two hundred index last month. It shut down its American stores in May and copped a write-off of up to forty million US dollars on the way out. Two years after listing, it's trading below its float price.

And this is the shitty part. Revenue's up twenty three per cent. Profit's up. The burritos are fine. Guzman Gomez didn't fail. It just got asked to do a job it was never sized for. It was asked to carry the growth hopes of an entire nation's sharemarket, because for two straight years, it was the only interesting thing this country floated. Think about that. The most exciting new business the thirteenth largest economy on earth could offer its investors was Mexican takeaway.

I've been on the tools and running building companies for over twenty years, and there's a rule on every job I've ever priced. You don't buy into a project after the frame's up. By the time you can see the thing from the street, the margin's gone. Someone earlier, someone closer, someone with better information already took it. Buying what you can see is fine logic in a market that keeps producing new things to see. In America, buy what you know gets you Costco, Microsoft, Nvidia. In Australia, it got you a burrito chain at more than a hundred times earnings, because that was the whole shelf.

Woefully, the shelf is the story. JP Morgan put out a chart last week that the Financial Review ran, and it's ugly. Since twenty ten, the Australian sharemarket has trailed the world index in eleven of the last seventeen financial years. This past year was the second biggest miss since nineteen ninety six, nearly twenty per cent behind. Four straight years behind the world, which has never happened before. Put it in plain money. A hundred dollars in Australian shares in twenty ten is now worth about half what the same hundred dollars earned in global markets. Your super fund did nine, ten, maybe twelve per cent last year and sent you a cheerful letter about it, while the world did twenty two. And the big funds know it, because they're now openly telling us new money is heading offshore.

So why can't we build anything worth buying? Independent researchers at a think tank called e sixty one just answered that, and the answer stings. American owned manufacturers operating right here in Australia, under our rules, our wages, our energy prices, produce roughly twice the value per worker of Australian owned firms in the same industries. Same country, same conditions, double the output. Costco runs under the exact same wage and regulatory framework as Coles and Woolies, and its sales per labour hour are several times higher. So spare me the excuse that it's all red tape and penalty rates. When two builders price the same job under the same rules and one finishes in half the time, the problem isn't the rules. The problem is the bloke running the job. I've watched that bloke my whole career. He's the boss who won't buy the nail gun, still hand driving everything, then blames the apprentice when the job runs three weeks over. Our companies don't invest in their own capability, so nothing new gets built, so nothing new gets floated, so grandad's money piles into the only burrito shop on the shelf.

When the sharemarket's a dud, where does the money go instead? You already know, because this country only ever built two escape valves. Property, and super. The property ponzi now runs at eight to ten times household income in most capitals, and nearly fourteen times in Sydney. When I got out of the RAAF IN 2004, the national figure was under three. Servicing a new mortgage today takes forty six per cent of a household's gross income, against a stress line of thirty. Only fourteen households in a hundred on the median income can afford the median home, and a deposit takes eleven years to save.

Now hold that number against super, because super was designed with one quiet assumption buried in the slab. It assumed you'd retire owning your home outright. Super was never built to pay rent for thirty years of retirement. At ten times income, a growing slab of Australians will hit sixty five still renting, or still carrying a mortgage they'll torch their entire super balance clearing on day one. Meanwhile the young sparky on your site has twelve per cent of every pay packet compulsorily locked into a pool that's overweight a sharemarket returning half the world's money, and he's not allowed to touch a cent of his own savings for the deposit that takes him over eleven years to save. That's not a retirement system.

That's theft in a system designed for a country that stopped existing about fifteen years ago.

Now, some smart people will tell you the real story is America, that the world's capital is getting hoovered into a handful of AI giants and everyone else is starving. And there's truth in the gravity. Seven American companies are now worth around twenty two trillion dollars, a third of the entire S and P five hundred. Maybe it's a bubble, maybe it's the future, the Yanks argue about that among themselves. But before anyone uses it as an excuse, chew on this. Strip America out of the world index entirely, and Australia still falls behind what's left. That's not their bubble. That's our rot.

Which brings me to the grimmest document I've read this month. Deloitte Access Economics has been putting out quarterly forecasts for thirty years, and this one's among the darkest. Three months ago they had next year's growth at just on two per cent. Now they reckon one point three. That puts us into the longest stretch of sub two per cent growth since the recession of the early nineties. And their chief economist, Stephen Smith, said the quiet part out loud. For too long, strong population growth has masked a weak underlying productivity performance, lifting the headline number while doing little for living standards. Then he forecast more of the same. Population growth heading back up toward record territory, nearly double what it ran in the early two thousands. In other words, keep the intake running hot, keep the mask on the corpse. And anyone who's looked honestly at that intake knows the rorts inside it run hotter than the intake itself.

So pull it all together. A burrito shop as the flagship float. A sharemarket earning half the world's returns even with America removed from the comparison. Managers who won't buy a new nail gun. Houses at ten times wages. A retirement system built on a homeownership assumption the housing market already killed. And a government whose only working strategy is to import enough people to hide all of it in the headline number. That's not an economy. That's a bloke tied to the top of a stone wheel, rolling down the hill, while everyone at the top claps.

No business survives by hiding weak output behind a bigger headcount. Eventually the client wants to know why nothings happening. Ask your super fund why it's overweight a losing market. Ask your MP why the only things this country can sell you are a mortgage and a burrito. And stop settling for the headline number, it’s all BS. Whinging online changes nothing, Getting in the room is what counts and that’s why we created “The Australian Lobby Group”

You can see our work on www.auslobby.com.au

Never quit Australia, you come from battlers.

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Thinking about the budget the other day while I was in the gym, I reckoned I could fix the whole housing mess in about five minutes.My idea was this: if the government really wanted to help first home buyers, bin the negative gearing circus. Just give a full capital gains tax exemption to anyone who sells a house to a first home buyer. Seller pays no CGT, so they can drop the price a bit and still walk away with the same money in their pocket. The young couple finally wins an auction against some investor with four rentals. Clean, targeted, aimed straight at the people they keep saying they want to help, instead of herding them into an off-the-plan dogbox that loses its tax perk the second they try to sell it.Then I read my own idea back and laughed, because it's still rubbish.

It's rubbish for the same reason nearly everything these clowns announce is rubbish. It doesn't build a single new house. An investor sells their rental to a first home buyer, one young family gets the keys, and the renter who was living there gets shown the door and has to fight for the next place. Nobody added a house. Just shuffled the same pack of cards and dealt them out differently.Negative gearing, first home grants, shared equity, my clever little CGT wheeze, all of it. Everyone's arguing about how to carve up the houses that already exist, and not one of them is talking about laying another slab.I know what it costs to lay that slab, because I do it for a living. By the time you've paid the government's charges, jumped every hoop in the code and satisfied a compliance regime that grows a new limb every year, a huge slice of the price of a new home is stuff that got bolted on before a single tradie turned up. Every one of those clauses was waved through by someone who'll never build anything, and every one of them lands on the price the young couple pays. Then the same people who added the cost stand up and tell you the market is the problem.So spare me the tax tinkering. There are only two levers that move this, and everyone in Canberra is too gutless to touch either one.Cut immigration, so you stop stacking record demand onto a market you refuse to let anyone build in. And wind the building codes back to something sane, so a young family can afford the thing at the end of it. Fewer people bidding, cheaper to build. That is the whole answer.And yeah, I can hear it coming. Racist. Dangerous. You want people living in unsafe houses. Mate, I'm a builder, not a bigot, and I'm not talking about deathtraps. I'm talking about who decided the kid buying his first home should pay for every feel-good line item in the code, while we run one of the biggest intakes in the rich world straight into a housing shortage and then act shocked when the numbers don't add up.Until a politician says those two words out loud, immigration and codes, they are not serious. They are just rearranging the deckchairs and calling it a lifeboat.

The wall has a name, and she is the richest woman in the country. Gina Rinehart, the lady helping to bankroll the orange wave and openly called an unofficial policy adviser by Hanson herself, stood up at summit her own company sponsors and started letting thought bubbles out. Free Aussie land for a foreign state’s arms makers to build war drones near Townsville. Improve their domes here. Manufacture them here. On a movement whose entire pitch is Australia first, the highest profile supporter just stood up and proposed importing foreign interference, then called it a vision.

This is the real critical mineral. Not lithium. Not rare earths. The unfiltered brain of a billionaire, mined live at a summit, refined by the news cycle and piped straight into a party’s policy platform. No quality control. No filter. Just whatever bubbles up between the bulldozer noises.

Anyone who has run a build site knows the feeling. The slab is perfect. The frame is square. The carpentry is tidy. Then the tiler turns up, does a shit job on the finish, and that is the only thing the customer ever sees. Does not matter how good the rest of the build was. The bit on show got botched, so the whole job looks like shit. That is what happened here. A week of solid structural work from One Nation, and the finishing trade made it look like shit in one afternoon.

But the botch runs deeper than one bad afternoon, and this is where the “boomer” part of the brain really shows. The engine of this movement is young. And the young have checked out of everyone else’s wars. A Pew poll this month had almost nine in ten Australians under 35 viewing Israel unfavourably. That is not just the left. A big chunk of right-leaning kids sit in that number too. They are not antisemites. They are a generation that watched us get lied into Afghanistan and Iraq, then watched the bill land on their own streets, and decided they want no part of anyone else’s fight.

So picture the mismatch. A 71 year old billionaire stands up and pitches a tighter hug with a foreign war machine, to the exact generation that has already walked away from foreign wars. She is reading a 1967 script to kids who were born black pilled on the whole project. The mob is not asking for foreign drone factories in Townsville. The mob is asking for houses they can afford, borders that mean something, and a fair go for the people who already live here.

Foreign interference does not only wear a lanyard from Beijing. Sometimes it turns up in a designer jacket at a Townsville summit, dressed as economic vision and funded by the same person writing your policy. If One Nation cannot tell the difference, the people demanding Australia first will work it out for them.

You cannot run on Australia first and let someone else quietly import the exceptions.

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https://youtu.be/PFCek0FED28?si=TqSSfG8ThVPWVYwT

In this breakdown, Ed Schuller and I dive deep into the key moments from Sam Bamford’s recent interview with Dr Joanna Howe. We unpack the intense discussion and heated immigration debate, and the core question: “What does it mean to be Australian?”

If you care about Australian identity, culture, and honest national conversations, this one’s for you.

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Watching the South Australian result unfold, it would have been easy to accept the headline narrative of a comfortable Labor victory and a clear endorsement of the current direction, but that interpretation falls apart the moment you look beyond the surface and examine what is actually happening beneath the numbers. What emerges is not stability in the true sense, but a state that has been economically hollowed out over time, increasingly dependent on government spending, carrying rising levels of debt, and offering fewer real pathways for productivity and private sector growth than it once did, which inevitably flows through to the lived experience of ordinary Australians.

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That experience is becoming harder to ignore, because housing is tightening, cost of living pressures are mounting, and younger Australians are finding it more difficult to access the same opportunities that previous generations took for granted, all while being told that the system is working as intended. The most telling part of this state election is not who formed government, but the scale of the protest vote, which reflects a growing segment of the population that is no longer willing to accept that narrative and is actively searching for alternatives that better reflect their reality.

At the same time, the collapse of the Liberal Party highlights a broader structural failure within the traditional opposition, where a loss of identity and a disconnect from core voters has created a vacuum that is now being filled by parties and movements capturing that dissatisfaction, even if the current system does not always translate widespread support into lower house power. This is where the role of the Senate becomes more significant, because it is the one place where a broad statewide vote can convert into representation and influence, providing a pathway for pressure to be applied federally within the system rather than remaining on the outside of it. One Nation needs to narrow its aim point in my opinion.

Ultimately, what South Australia demonstrates is not a settled political environment, but one that is fragmenting under the weight of unresolved issues, where governments continue to operate without addressing the underlying causes of economic and social pressure, and where legitimacy increasingly depends not on electoral victories alone, but on whether the outcomes being delivered are actually improving the lives of Australians, because once that gap between policy and reality becomes too wide, it does not close on its own, it forces a response.

New Nationals leader Matt Canavan was hosting, alongside Henry Pike, the sitting Liberal Party MP for Bowman, and Garth Hamilton, the federal member for Groom. Around 350 people filled the room, which tells you something straight away. These guys can draw a crowd, and there is still an appetite for a different conversation in this country. But the deeper question started forming before anyone even picked up a microphone. Who was actually in the room?

The average age wasn’t 35 to 55, the group you need if you’re serious about shifting a nation. It was 65 plus, with a scattering of younger faces hovering around the edges, not quite part of it, more there to support than to lead. And that’s when the doubt crept in, because I’ve seen that demographic before, year after year, voting the same way, endorsing the same policies, nodding along as the country drifted further into the mess we’re now trying to escape.

The room was convicted. They believe Matt is right. They know something has gone badly wrong and to their credit they are on team now.

Garth Hamilton opened the night with something you almost never see in modern politics. He stood up in front of that crowd and said they were wrong. Not once, not vaguely, but clearly. Wrong on the direction, wrong on the decisions, wrong more than they’d like to admit, and now it’s time to start getting it right. He even had it up on a PowerPoint behind him, like a line in the sand.

I’ll be honest, I found that warming. It made me feel good to see a politician show a bit of contrition, to actually own past decisions instead of spinning them into something else. That’s a rare trait in the political class these days, and it deserves to be acknowledged.

He might have missed the mark on other votes, including the anti-Semitism and hate speech bill, but on this issue, he picked the ball up and ran with it. Henry Pike has been consistent on this path for a long time. He spoke with conviction about the history of this country, where we’ve come from, and where we should be heading. It wasn’t just policy, it was direction, identity, and purpose, and you could feel that land with the crowd. Henry also voted for the anti semitism and hate speech bill and NO I will not give up hounding people about that. It was dumb.,

And Matt, as always, was steady. No surprises, no sudden shift. Just the same message he’s been delivering for years, now finally starting to land with people who probably should have listened earlier. And here’s the problem no one wants to say out loud. These are the same rooms that signed off on net zero - I have seen this crowd vote down motions to end it in 2023 and 2024.

For the better part of three decades, Australia has been running headfirst into an ideological wall dressed up as policy. Net zero, energy transition, global frameworks, whatever label you want to give it, the outcome has been the same. Higher energy costs, reduced industrial capacity, and a slow hollowing out of the very economy that made this country strong in the first place, suddenly, we’re all shocked by the consequences.

We’re staring down a fuel vulnerability that should terrify anyone paying attention. We’ve got an energy crisis layered on top of a cost of living crisis, stacked on top of a housing crisis, all while the cost of government continues to blow out like it’s untouchable. This isn’t one problem. This is a system-wide failure.

And yet we’re still praying it can be fixed with a speech and a ballot box.

Matt Canavan has been consistent on this. You can’t fault him for that. While others bent the knee to the narrative, he kept saying the quiet part out loud, that you cannot cripple your own energy sector and expect prosperity to follow. Now, as leader of the Nationals, he has a platform to push harder than ever.

But consistency doesn’t mean timing is on your side. Because sitting in that room, looking around, one thought kept coming back. Is he too late?

Or worse, was he too early, and the country simply wasn’t ready to listen when it mattered? The real fracture isn’t just political. It’s generational. The people in that room are engaged, vocal, and invested, NOW. But the younger generations, the ones who will actually live with the long-term consequences of these policies, have largely checked out or been absorbed into the very ideology that created the problem.

They’re not in the room. They’re not part of the fight. And in many cases, they don’t even see the issue or they do and they have checked out completely.

That’s not an accident. That’s the result of years of influence through education, culture, corporate messaging, and policy. From school curriculums to HR departments, from university lecture halls to government departments, the same worldview has been embedded, reinforced, and protected.

This isn’t just bad policy. It’s a fully integrated system.

And that’s why the idea that we can simply vote our way out of it feels increasingly disconnected from reality. The problems we’re facing aren’t surface level. They’re structural, layered, and deeply entrenched across every part of how this country now operates.

You don’t unwind that with a campaign cycle and you don’t fix that with one election. I support Matt, Henry, and Garth in what they’re trying to do. One hundred percent. They’ve got a massive job ahead of them, and it’s a fight that absolutely needs to happen. I’ll back them all the way, and if you’re paying attention, you probably should too.

But support doesn’t mean blind optimism, what I’m saying is that I fear we’ve left it just a little bit too late. So where does that leave us? Somewhere between urgency and reality. There is still a window, but it’s closing, and the people who need to drive the change aren’t the ones filling those rooms. Until that shifts, until the demographic balance changes, until the next generation actually steps in rather than standing on the side-lines, the question will keep hanging there.

Are we a day late and a dollar short? because last night didn’t feel like the beginning of a movement, it felt like the echo of one that should have started twenty years ago.

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We talk about our politics as though it sits at the heart of global affairs, but when you step into Washington and start having conversations with people who operate in the machinery of global politics, it becomes obvious very quickly that we are a very small player in a very large game.

That does not mean we are irrelevant. It just means we need to be realistic about where we sit.

I came to Washington to attend the Alliance of Sovereign Nations conference hosted by Turning Point Action. The purpose of the trip was straightforward. The Australian Lobby Group is still young and if you are serious about building an advocacy movement you go and study where advocacy is taken seriously.

Washington is the global capital of lobbying.

Every interest group in this city understands something Australians are only just beginning to grasp. Politics is not simply about elections. Elections are the visible part of the system, but influence happens constantly in the background through lobbying, networking and organised advocacy.

Corporations do it. Unions do it. NGOs do it. Foreign governments do it. Activist groups do it. Everyone is organised except ordinary citizens.

That is one of the reasons the Australian Lobby Group exists. Australians deserve representation that is structured and persistent rather than simply hoping that the political class will eventually start listening again.

The conference itself was exactly what these types of gatherings are supposed to be. Over several days I met politically active influencers, campaign organisers and politicians from Romania, Estonia, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Croatia and the United States. These are people operating in completely different political systems with very different histories and cultures, yet the conversations repeatedly circled back to the same pressures.

Mass immigration pushed far beyond what citizens were ever consulted about. Governments increasingly hostile to national identity and sovereignty. Energy policies driven by green ideology that weaken the economic capacity of their own countries. And political elites who often appear far more comfortable speaking the language of global institutions than the language of the citizens they represent.

It became very clear that these are not uniquely Australian problems. Across Europe and North America the same debates are unfolding in slightly different forms.

But the timing of the conference also added an unexpected layer to the experience.

While we were in Washington the United States launched strikes against Iran in support of Israel. Suddenly a conference that had been primarily about political strategy and networking was also taking place in the middle of a very real geopolitical moment.

And this is where things became interesting.

Many of the Americans in the room were strongly supportive of the strikes and broadly supportive of Israel’s position in the Middle East. The idea of confronting Iran militarily was treated by some almost as an obvious course of action. The American political culture carries a deep confidence in its own power and a belief that the United States can project force wherever it chooses.

From an outside perspective that confidence is both impressive and slightly surreal.

Polling inside the United States consistently shows that many Americans are deeply tired of endless foreign conflicts. The country has spent decades fighting wars across the Middle East while facing rising debt, domestic political division and growing economic pressure at home.

Yet inside the political and activist circles of Washington there remains a powerful instinct toward intervention and an assumption that American military power can always shape outcomes overseas. It was a fascinating insight into the American political psychology.

Americans often think about geopolitics from the perspective of a superpower. They assume their country is strong enough to act, strong enough to absorb the consequences and strong enough to remain dominant regardless of how complex the international system becomes.

For someone coming from Australia the contrast is striking. Australia is an important country in its region, but we do not have the luxury of imagining that we are geopolitically invincible. We live in a far more fragile strategic environment and our margin for error is much smaller. That perspective makes you think a little differently when people start talking casually about war.

One of the takeaways from the trip was that the Alliance of Sovereign Nations conference is not about everyone agreeing with each other. It is about connecting people who are operating in similar political environments and allowing them to compare notes about what works and what does not.

Some of the discussions were about messaging. Others were about grassroots organising. Many were about the mechanics of building movements that can survive media hostility and political pressure.

For the Australian Lobby Group the value of the trip was not ideological alignment. It was exposure to the way advocacy movements in other countries operate. The United States treats lobbying as a normal part of democratic participation. If you care about an issue you organise, you raise money, you build networks and you attempt to influence the political system.

Australia pretends this process does not exist even though it already happens every day in Canberra. Corporate lobbyists operate openly. Industry groups shape legislation. International interests maintain influence inside the political system.

The only people who remain largely unorganised are ordinary Australians. That is the gap the Australian Lobby Group intends to fill.

This trip to Washington was not about spectacle or symbolism. It was about preparation. Learning how advocacy movements build structure. Learning how networks form across borders. Learning how political pressure is applied effectively rather than simply expressed emotionally.

The reality is that movements do not succeed because they are angry. They succeed because they are organised.

Australia is entering a period where many of the same political pressures affecting Europe and North America are beginning to emerge domestically. Housing stress, migration debates, energy policy, economic sovereignty and the widening gap between political elites and ordinary citizens are no longer abstract discussions.

They are becoming defining political questions.

The Australian Lobby Group is still young, but the objective is clear. In the coming years the organisation will focus on building a structured advocacy movement capable of lobbying government, applying pressure where necessary and activating citizens who feel politically unrepresented.

Washington was not the final destination, it was part of the training. Like most useful training, it confirmed something simple for me -

If ordinary people want influence in politics, they have to organise for it themselves.

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It isn’t. Politics is the scoreboard. Culture is the real game.

Link to podcast - No Culture = No Country

In this conversation with Rob McMullen, musician, former UAP candidate and Natural Law advocate, we go deeper than elections and party rooms. We talk about identity, art, meaning and why a nation that loses its cultural confidence eventually loses its political sovereignty.

You cannot legislate pride.

You cannot regulate belonging.

And you cannot vote your way out of a cultural vacuum.

Music, storytelling, shared symbols and connection to country shape the ground long before parliament ever moves. By the time laws are passed, culture has already decided the direction. If Australia is going to change course, it will not start in Canberra. It will start in the arts.

My subscribers receive early access to these conversations before public release. If you want to stay ahead of the narrative rather than react to it, that is where you start.

Plus it’s Free!

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Generationally - we are a mile apart and this was glaringly obvious in her assessment of Gen Z and their work ethic. I give the kids a break - Pauline has zero empathy.

But - you’re all going to vote for her anyway and if the worst thing that ever happened was we ended up with a pissed off grandma pulling the levers for a while - I’m sure that’s better than the slop currently being offered up by the una-party.

Check out my conversation with the Senator here.

https://youtu.be/Vh7Qc_Kg8a0?si=oDrQDe7qh9ZpQBdy

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Every period of national stress produces the same split. Two responses emerge from the same underlying instinct. One is emotional, symbolic, confrontational. The other is structural, procedural, and slow.

Both are born from the belief that something essential is being lost.

Only one survives.

The outpost moment

When trust in institutions collapses and legitimacy thins, outposts appear.

Outposts are not governments. They are not movements built to endure. They are pressure points. Forward positions occupied by those willing to stand where others hesitate. They draw attention, provoke response, and force uncomfortable realities into the open.

Outposts exist to be seen.

They plant flags. They create spectacle. They dare the system to respond.

And the system always responds.

This phase is not meaningless. Outposts serve a function. They expose fault lines. They test the tolerance of a society. They reveal how much dissent can be absorbed before law, force, or moral condemnation is deployed. They flush adversaries out of hiding and turn abstract unease into something tangible.

But outposts are not designed to last.

They are designed to be sacrificed.

History is mercilessly clear on this. The men who occupy the outpost rarely inherit the city. They absorb pressure so others can later move through the space that was opened. When outposts mistake exposure for leadership, collapse becomes inevitable.

The institutional turn

After the outpost phase comes something quieter.

Institutions do not announce themselves with drama. They do not rely on uniforms, symbolism, or confrontation to validate their existence. They speak in the language of process, legitimacy, leverage, and endurance. Institutions exist to last.

They trade purity for scale. They understand that persuasion outlives provocation and that boring power reshapes societies more effectively than emotional spectacle. They operate within systems not because they revere them, but because they understand how those systems actually work.

Where outposts force attention, institutions apply pressure.

The winners in history are rarely the loudest in the opening chapters. They are the ones who arrive after the dust settles, when the public has processed the shock and ideas once considered extreme have softened into questions rather than slogans.

This is where outcomes are decided.

How we arrived here

Australia is not unique in this moment. It is simply late to it. Economic pressure has collided with demographic change. Trust in political parties has thinned. Many Australians feel decisions are being made about them rather than with them. When that happens, emotional politics thrives.

Marches, symbols, confrontation, moral certainty. These things feel clarifying in times of confusion. They offer belonging, purpose, and direction. That impulse is not pathological. It is human.

But emotional politics has limits.

It does not scale.

It does not govern.

And it invites state responses that shrink the space for dissent rather than expand it.

We are now watching the transition between phases.

What is not working

History teaches the same lessons every time.

Symbolic confrontation without institutional follow through burns political capital.

Purity tests fracture movements faster than any external opponent.

Treating the state as a moral enemy instead of a mechanical system guarantees defeat.

Confusing attention with influence leads movements to consume themselves.

Outposts that refuse to evolve become trapped in escalation. Each action must be louder than the last. Each loss must be reframed as proof of righteousness. Eventually the movement becomes defined not by what it seeks to build, but by what it is willing to sacrifice. That path always ends the same way. Containment. Marginalisation. Footnotes.

What is working

What is working now is not meant to be glamorous. It is just organisation.

Not identity driven movements, but structures built around participation. Membership. Funding. Policy articulation. Legal discipline. Media discipline. Message discipline.

The groups that survive this period will be those that translate frustration into specific demands, operate lawfully without becoming timid, refuse symbolic excess, and understand timing, legitimacy, and pressure.

They will not look radical.

They will look boring to the radicals.

And that is precisely why they will endure.

A glimpse forward

Twelve months from now, most Australians will not remember who shouted the loudest in 2026. They will remember who was still standing.

That future does not belong to the outpost. It belongs to those who knew when to move beyond it.

History does not reward intensity, it rewards durability.

Durability has always required the same things. Patience. Discipline. The willingness to trade ego for outcomes.

That is where this moment is heading, whether people like it or not.

The question is not who burned brightest when the system pushed back.

The question is who adapted, learned, and stayed in the game long enough to shape what came next.

Comment

Organised money is the first piece people misunderstand. It’s not about secret donors or influence peddling. In practice, it’s infrastructure. Staff. Research. Legal compliance. Technology. Coordination. The unglamorous machinery that allows an effort to persist long after the dopamine of outrage fades. Elections cost money. Visibility costs money. Sustained pressure costs money. Anyone who has built anything that lasts understands this instinctively.

Data is the second pillar. Not spin. Not vibes. Reality. Data tells decision-makers where Australians actually sit, not where activists assume they sit. Polling. Economic impacts. Demographic trends. Measurable consequences of policy decisions. Data is what turns frustration into something that can’t be dismissed with a talking point. It replaces emotion with orientation.

But the word that really matters, and the one people dance around, is pressure.

Pressure is not intimidation. It is not secrecy. It is not coercion. Pressure is accountability made visible. It is the moment when decision-makers understand that choices have consequences, and that ignoring Australians comes with a cost. Without pressure, money becomes background noise and data becomes trivia. With pressure, both suddenly command attention.

This is where the Australian Lobby Group exists deliberately, not accidentally.

Organised Money, Data, and Pressure Actually Matter

ALG was created because Australians have been trained to perform politics rather than organise it. To march, post, rage, and then go home. Meanwhile, other interests quietly fund, research, coordinate, and apply pressure relentlessly. The gap between how citizens express dissatisfaction and how power actually responds has grown enormous. ALG exists to close that gap.

I approach this with a mindset that was formed long before hashtags and outrage cycles. I’m a 1972 Gen X kid, wired during a brief window of human development that no longer exists. A childhood with freedom, risk, boredom, and responsibility. No constant supervision. No emotional buffering. No one rescuing you from discomfort.

If you were bored, you found something to do. If you got hurt, you learned. If something went wrong, you adapted. That environment hardwired problem-solving, risk calibration, emotional regulation, and delayed gratification. You learned to sit with uncertainty instead of outsourcing it. You learned that feelings pass, but consequences don’t.

That wiring matters more than ever right now.

It produces adults who don’t wait for perfect information, don’t confuse motion with progress, and don’t procrastinate when execution is required. Flexibility wasn’t a strategy. It was survival. You learned to move, adjust, and finish.

Layered on top of that was something historically unusual. I grew up alongside the early internet. I watched information move from scarce to infinite, from centralised to decentralised, from controlled to contested. I learned how narratives spread before algorithms curated them, how communities formed before platforms monetised them, and how coordination happens before institutions even realise what they’re facing.

Today’s technologies don’t just distribute information. They organise people. They connect latent frustration into shared understanding. They allow clarity of purpose to scale at speed. When you combine that with disciplined execution and real-world resources, you get something institutions struggle to respond to: citizens who can organise themselves faster than bureaucracies can adapt.

That’s why this moment is different.

Not louder. Not angrier. More precise. More organised. More disciplined.

When organised money creates capacity, data shapes persuasion, and pressure signals consequences, power responds. The only question that matters is how those tools are used and who they serve.

The Australian Lobby Group is being built to use them openly, lawfully, and in the interests of Australians themselves. Not to posture. Not to feel virtuous. But to produce outcomes.

This isn’t a movement built on vibes. It’s built on execution. And once systems realise they’re dealing with people who understand how power actually moves, the conversation changes.

Not because anyone demanded it.

Because ignoring Australians became too expensive to maintain.

https://youtu.be/BTpemvtIL0Y?si=9VSZ3osSYHAVckXt

Link to video above 👆

While Australia’s political class applauds from the sidelines using “rules-based order” language, the world is quietly reorganizing into spheres of influence.

Australia is going to be left behind….again.

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