Is Anthony Albanese finished?
Albo is a sitting duck in the sights of the right. His “troubles” are being trumpeted from talk-back to the Melbourne tabloids and across social media, where the enormously well-funded dark-money megaphone of the right, the Advance Australia network, is busy amplifying outrage and sharpening its next campaign weapon. There is, and long has been, an industry devoted to vilifying Labor.
On my left is an historic organisation dedicated to humanity, equality and justice. Founded in 1891, the Australian Labor Party emerged from the trade union movement, built by working Australians who decided that if power resided in parliament, labour would have to confront it there.
On my right? Founded in 2018, Advance Australia is a right-wing political campaigning operation, structured as a web of charities and front groups, operating largely beyond the transparency rules that bind political parties and their donors, while running tightly targeted culture-war and electoral campaigns against Labor, the Greens, unions, climate policy, and progressive social reform.
With its Orwellian name and regressive purpose, Advance is taking no prisoners in its war on the party of the wage-earner. Its targets are predictable yet carefully chosen: Anthony Albanese for alleged weakness; Labor for timidity; government itself for failing to serve the mythical “real Australia”.
Clowns like Craig Kelly and Old King Coal himself, Matt Canavan, provide colour, but the deeper story is structural: the right-wing commentariat is now better funded, better organised, and more ruthless than at any point in Australia’s democratic history. The machinery shaping the national argument from the margins is no longer improvised. It is strategic, disciplined, and flush with cash.
Against that backdrop, Albanese is attempting to govern within a political and media ecosystem designed to grind him down. Every Labor leader since Whitlam has felt the same gravitational pull.
Each time, the Murdoch empire and its imitators treat Labor governments as temporary aberrations between the “proper” custodians of the realm. The idea no longer needs selling. It is simply assumed. The result is familiar: every Labor hesitation becomes a crisis, every Coalition failure a footnote, and every unforced error; a travel claim, a stadium stoush, a botched response to tragedy, another chance to land the cut.
The Small-Target Trap: Governing Like an Underdog
Albanese’s small-target strategy worked as a campaign tactic. It’s useless as a governing philosophy. The Prime Minister’s steady, understated style made sense in opposition, but in office, it too often reads as reticence. He speaks softly in an age that rewards loudness, compassionately in an age that scorns empathy, and with deliberation in a media environment that trades in snark, snide and speed. That makes him a rare kind of political figure: decent and disciplined, but branded as dull. The “weak Albo” trope thrives in this climate because it fills the silence his style sometimes leaves.
But the problem isn’t just style. It’s strategy. By failing to define his government’s narrative, Albanese cedes the field to opponents who are happy to fill the void. When Sussan Ley and Josh Frydenberg—neither known for political courage, vision nor caution with finances can land blows over the Bondi massacre, it’s not just a PR failure. It’s proof that Labor’s caution is being weaponised. When Labor-lite, “Cuisine minceur,” NSW Premier, Chris Minns outmanoeuvres the PM on Bondi it’s not just a state-federal spat. It’s a pattern. And patterns, in politics, become perceptions.
Minns’ leadership during the Bondi crisis is applauded as decisive, bipartisan action, upstaging Albanese’s federal response; making it seem cautious and reactive. Yet it’s not an isolated incident. The narrative of State leaders seizing the initiative while the PM plays it safe, has become a recurring motif in federal politics of late, from crisis management to policy rollouts.”
This is the death by a thousand cuts: not one fatal blow, but a steady drip of missteps, compromises, and missed opportunities. All capably played up by a Murdoch-led media. Travel rorts, stacked appointments, and the Tasmanian Stadium madness aren’t isolated gaffes. They’re symptoms of a government so focused on avoiding risk that it forgets to claim credit; or even defend itself.
The Environmental Own Goal: Climate Diplomacy as Surrender
Labor’s signature climate reform, the reworked Safeguard Mechanism, was billed as a cap on emissions from Australia’s biggest polluters. In practice, critics argue it functions more as a work-around than a brake. Facilities can expand emissions while complying on paper, relying on carbon offsets and accounting mechanisms rather than deep, on-site cuts.
The scheme has been dogged by controversy over low-integrity offsets, including so-called “avoided deforestation” projects where no credible deforestation threat existed, and carbon credits linked to mine-site rehabilitation that critics say should never have qualified at all.
Independent researchers and environmental law groups contend that, taken together, these design features allow new coal and gas projects to proceed under the pretence of a cap, effectively green-lighting fossil fuel expansion while maintaining the appearance of climate restraint.
Even within Labor, MPs acknowledge that compromises struck with mining and gas lobbies have drained the government’s credibility. This isn’t climate leadership. It’s carbon diplomacy of the old school. To anyone expecting strong environmental protections, the Safeguard Mechanism feels like a betrayal dressed up in bureaucratic finery; a replay of the politics that cost Rudd and Gillard their moral high ground a decade ago.
The message to voters is clear:
- The planet can wait.
- The donors can’t.
- The status quo will do.
Welfare and the Digital Workhouse: Polishing the Architecture of Cruelty
Labor promised to end the cruelty of the Coalition years, to shut down the “digital workhouse” of punitive compliance systems that stripped dignity from those already doing it tough. Yet despite the Robodebt Royal Commission and endless talk of compassion, the core system grinds on. Recipients still report fortnightly earnings through faceless portals. They still are forced to walk a tightrope over the poverty line. They still live on payments that barely keep the lights on.
A government that claims to have learned from Robodebt’s failures has merely polished the same architecture that enabled them. The language has changed. The lived experience has not. It’s hard to see how this squares with Labor’s professed moral mission; or how it escapes the charge of governing by focus group, not conviction. You may change the minister, but the machinery beneath them barely shifts. Departments restructure, language softens, reporting lines change, yet the culture that enabled Robodebt; risk-averse, compliance-obsessed, insulated from consequence, remains stubbornly intact.
Defence Drift and the AUKUS Mirage: Billions for a Maybe
Nowhere is the gulf between rhetoric and reality wider than in defence. AUKUS is the most audacious wager any Australian government has ever placed on a technological future it neither controls nor is likely to live to see. Hundreds of billions have been pledged for nuclear submarines that will not arrive for decades and which, if they do, risk arriving obsolete, overtaken by unmanned systems, ubiquitous surveillance, and rapid advances in undersea detection.
Within defence circles, the project is increasingly derided as strategic theatre: a grand, expensive performance of alliance fealty that conceals the hollowing out of local capability. While ministers chant “sovereign capability,” shipyards remain bare, skilled workforces are wafer-thin, and costs climb with a stubborn indifference to arithmetic or accountability. This is not strategy so much as symbolism mistaken for strength, scale confused with power, and loyalty substituted for thought.
If this is deterrence, it is deterrence by press release: loud, brittle, and addressed less to adversaries than to editors, allies, and the anxious political class at home. AUKUS does not so much defend Australia as rehearse its dependence, outsourcing sovereignty in the hope that faith, money, and patience will one day be mistaken for capability.
The Structural Bind: Governing in a Rigged System
To blame Albanese alone is to ignore the architecture of his predicament. He governs in an environment where money, message discipline, and media amplification now flow overwhelmingly from the right. The modern outrage industry; talk back, tabloid, and online, is funded and networked in ways that were unthinkable even five years ago. Groups like Advance operate with campaign professionalism that matches, and in some respects outstrips, political parties themselves. Their narratives go from meme to headline to ministerial talking point in a day.
Labor’s communications machine, by comparison, looks analogue.
But structural constraints don’t absolve Labor of responsibility. The party still governs like a tenant, not an owner. It still fears scaring business, upsetting donors, or provoking the Murdoch front pages. And in trying to be the sensible centre, it risks becoming the static middle; busy holding the fort while the world outside demands transformation. Tightening expense allowances won’t fix anything.
A Party Too Small for Its Moment
So, is Albo in trouble? Inevitably. But not only because a hostile press or a cynical opposition have decided so. The deeper problem is that Labor’s exhaustion is showing. The policy muddle on climate, welfare, and defence suggests not so much corruption or arrogance as an exhausted pragmatism. And that, in a nation crying out for change, might be the most dangerous weakness of all.
Albanese’s personal decency, his work ethic, and his authenticity are rarely doubted. The trouble is, those virtues can’t substitute for vision. The question now is whether he’ll use the power he has; or let the thousand cuts bleed him dry.
In Part Two, we’ll explore how Labor might break the cycle – if it’s willing to risk the fight.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
Part 2:
How Labor Can Fight Back: Lessons from Whitlam, Keating, and the Greens
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Inviting Israel’s president for a friendly chat?Another extremely poor decision by a panicked PM.Albo’s leadership should be terminal.NEXT.
Spot on article David, and here are some more perspectives for thought….
https://michaelwest.com.au/king-plan-favours-foreign-buyers-gas-cartel-over-electricity-buyers/
https://michaelwest.com.au/decade-of-nauru-deals-ongoing-tragedy-of-human-rights-abuses-and-corruption/
https://michaelwest.com.au/biggest-compo-payout-for-robodebt-victims-is-scott-morrison/
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/12/how-to-become-earth-citizens/?
https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/12/year-in-review-and-in-prospect/?
John Menadue worked for both Whitlam and Frazer, maybe Albo should seek his counsel.
Continue what you have always done, and you will get the same results, let alone not recognizing that the game has changed.
That’s a fabulous summary of Albo and the Labor Party,David. Am looking forward to part two. Thank you.
I worked for Howard, Rudd and Gillard. I saw what they did right, and I saw what they did wrong.
Friends in the public service tell me Albo is doing a lot wrong. It would be a good start if he sacked his team of advisers.
David, everything you write is correct. Old supporters of Labor, say from the time of Gough, are bitterly disappointed that a Labor government with such a mandate is operating so timidly. In her book ‘Earthquake’ Nikki Savva urges Albanese to consider moving on. For a person from humble beginnings (equivalent to the George Washington log cabin) to have risen to the lofty heights of the Prime Ministership is admirable and one can appreciate a desire to prolong the experience but to not use his mandate to effect the huge changes needed is pathetic. Much is being made of Albanese’s measured response to Bondi, against the shrill, almost hysterical outpourings from Ley, Fraudenberg, Hastie, Patterson et al, and this piece of writing notes Albo’s essential decency. What I recall is the vindictive removal of staff from the Teals and Independents immediately on his election and his supine acquiescence to Marles’ knifing of Dreyfus and Husic. Savva rightly says that in no world should Marles ever be considered as a successor to Albanese and she is right, his handling of defence is shambolic and his full-blooded support for the execrable AUKUS submarine deal rule him out. Actually he should be sacked but as deputy leader can’t be. One consolation is that the Left, with the numbers, will decide Albanese’s replacement. I personally hope it is sooner rather than later. A new, activist left leaning leader with this mandate, and the prospect of at least one more term, could really shake things up regarding tax, intergenerational inequity, wealth redistribution, an end to fossil fuel indulgence, an end to the privatisation of childcare and the NDIS, ending the imbalance in funding of public education and the destruction of our universities to name just a few areas I think need an injection of guts.
Albanese has dug himself a hole from which he cannot ever fully emerge, by inviting Herzog to Australia. On what planet is that a good idea for social cohesion? It’s gobsmacking. I think the greatest cohort he should be afraid of next election, are the Labor voters who elected him based on all his election promises which he subsequently broke.
Jen
Israeli President Isaac Herzog was already planning a visit to Australia before receiving an invitation from the Prime Minister.
While Albanese only extended an official state invitation on December 23, 2025, following a terror attack in Bondi, President Herzog had previously received separate invitations from within the Australian Jewish community. The Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA) President, Jeremy Leibler, had written to President Herzog earlier, urging him to visit Australia to show solidarity after the Bondi attack. Herzog had indicated his intention to accept that invitation.
Albanese was probably heading off criticism by hopping on the band-wagon.
There was even a mischievous suggestion that Albo and/or the Zionist Federation should invite Netanyahu which would have been even more problematic with a current arrest warrant from the ICC which would have placed an obligation on Australia to apprehend this man.
Those cuts are self inflicted. “Albo” has a clear mandate to forge ahead. All he does is the bare minimum. Mediocrity is the norm now.
Hi Terry, I didn’t know that, but I’m shocked to know that Herzog could simply “accept the invitation” and come. I would have thought he’d be banned from the country. That Albo jumped on the bandwagon, is just as shocking…There’s utterly no integrity in government any more.
Max. I agree.
Gonggongche – The promised NACC tured into a Pollie Protection Racket. FAIL.
Love this:
“I wish Labor had won the last election.”
Source unknown.
Albanese was extreamly lucky to be standing against the unelectable Peter Dutton at the last election. His luck is still holding with Sussan Ley as opposition leader. Albanese is a lucky leader,he is not even close to being a good leader. He himself has poor judgement. Trying to be Labor’s answer to John Howards’s legacy is pathetic for a Labor leader. It’s time Albo, to go.
Agree with everything Gonggongche said.Those of us that foolishly expected there to be serious changes made, remain bitterly disappointed.
Labor, under the stranglehold of the ‘factions’,are failing in the attempt to ‘manage’ anything, let alone expectations.
When Albanese is forced to leave the building, he could do us a last favour by taking the execrable Marles with him.
Accepting Zionist interference…FAILURE.
RomeoCharlie: I think you’ve captured what so many disillusioned Labor supporters are feeling right now, Romeo. There’s a deep sense of squandered opportunity — a government with moral and political space to act boldly yet choosing incrementalism over vision. Savva’s call for Albanese to step aside may be provocative, but it taps a growing unease about a leader who seems more caretaker than reformer.
You’re right to point out the contradictions between the mythology of Albanese’s rise and his apparent caution in office. The symbolism of “Albo from the projects” achieving the nation’s top job once carried enormous emotional weight; now it feels hollow when the government shrinks from confronting systemic inequity, the housing crisis, and fossil dependency.
Marles’ stewardship of Defence and his uncritical embrace of AUKUS are, as you say, emblematic of this deeper malaise. Labor once stood for sovereignty, restraint, and social responsibility in foreign policy — now it seems captive to Washington’s logic and the military-industrial class.
If this mandate is wasted, I suspect history will be unforgiving. A bolder, socially democratic Labor — the kind we glimpsed in the 1970s — remains possible, but only if the Left reclaims its moral confidence and policy imagination. The public appetite for authenticity and courage is there; it’s the leadership that’s missing.
GongGongche, your indictment of Labor’s first term is fierce; and to be fair, a lot of people on the progressive side would agree with much of it. There’s no doubt the government has played small-ball on crises that demand big structural reform: climate, inequality, integrity, housing. But I think there’s a difference between rightful disillusionment and writing Labor off as indistinguishable from the Coalition.
It’s true Albanese has governed cautiously; obsessively risk-averse, even, but that stems as much from the fear of losing government as from ideological surrender. Labor’s centrism isn’t new; it’s the Hawke–Keating inheritance reframed for a media environment utterly hostile to reform. That doesn’t excuse it, but it helps explain the timidity.
Where I think you’re absolutely right is on AUKUS and Palestine. Those two issues expose the moral vacuum at the heart of Labor’s foreign policy; a willingness to court Washington and appease donors while ignoring its own base and values. They confirm the deeper problem: Labor no longer knows how to articulate why it should govern, beyond pragmatism.
But if we lump them in with the Coalition and declare the project dead, we hand politics entirely to the Right. Change won’t come from resignation, only pressure; from movements, communities, independents, the Greens, and an unapologetic Left within Labor. There’s still a battle worth fighting; the question is whether Labor can be forced to remember what it once stood for.
Heather, thank you for the references. You will notice that some of my work does appear on Michael West’s site. John Menadue, always worth a read. One of my aims in this series is to gently illustrate the type of opposition which Labor faces, the Advance movement rather than Sussan Ley, who incidentally is getting her copy from Advance. The other, of course, as you note is look at Albo’s unforced errors. Michael is right, he needs to move away from Don Farrell and the other highly conservative advisers he surrounds himself with.
Menadue’s experience straddling Whitlam’s reformist idealism and Fraser’s pragmatic conservatism gives him a perspective that few living figures possess; he understands both the possibilities and the limits of government. His counsel might remind Albanese that steady management isn’t enough when the political and environmental terrain has shifted so dramatically.
You’re right that the game has changed: public trust in institutions is threadbare, inequality is entrenched, and global crises now move faster than our political machinery. Doing “more of the same”, managing decline politely, isn’t leadership, it’s triage. Someone like Menadue could at least help reconnect Labor with the moral courage, vision and intellectual ambition that once defined it.
ajogrady: Albanese has certainly benefited from weak opponents, first with Peter Dutton’s historically poor personal ratings and now with Sussan Ley struggling to establish authority as opposition leader. That electoral luck, however, does not translate into the kind of leadership many hoped for from a Labor prime minister.
Trying to cosplay as a Labor-branded John Howard reduces the party to risk‑averse managerialism at a time when the country needs structural reform, not nostalgia. If the best that can be said for a leader is that they are not their opponent, then the case for renewal is already made, and “it’s time” starts to sound less like provocation and more like common sense.
Jen, the Herzog invitation was indeed a profound miscalculation; a tone-deaf gesture that inflamed divisions at a moment when social cohesion is already fragile. Inviting the Israeli president amid Gaza’s horrors signalled priorities wildly out of step with Labor’s own base, many of whom voted Albanese in on promises of decency and change that now feel betrayed.
You’re spot on that broken election pledges, from housing to integrity to climate, risk alienating the very cohort that delivered his mandate. If those progressive Labor voters walk next time, no amount of opponent-bashing will save him; the hole he’s dug is as much about trust as tactics.
A leader who can’t read his own people’s moral compass, or worse, chooses to ignore it, has little claim to renewal. The question now is whether Labor learns this lesson before the voters teach it the hard way.
Hi David,
doesn’t “writing Labor off as indistinguishable from the Coalition.” misrepresent what I said? What I said was “Both Labor and the Coalition serve big corporations not the people.”
How does what I said go to Coalition demonization of the unemployed as too lazy? How does what I said go to the climate denial prevalent in the Coalition? How does what I said go to Coalition scapegoating immigration as the root of our ills?
Or do you see subsidizing fossil fuel industry to the tune of $15 billion every year as something other than serving big corporations? What was the approval of Woodside’s extension in the NorthWest shelf project for 45 years, that would see the destruction of the Murujuga rock art, alongside the other 30 odd new gas and coal fields against the express urging of the IPCC and climate scientists, if not serving corporations?
“But if we lump them in with the Coalition and declare the project dead” we’ve had government by Coalition or Labor for the past 50 years that has seen inequality in this country get worse, since when was the project meaningfully alive over that period? We’ve seen housing become unaffordable, renting becoming a crippling financial burden, our hospital system crumbling, our education degraded, our aged-care system under both the Coalition and Labor, we’ve seen our mineral resources squandered, which part of the ‘project was meaningfully alive’?
“..an injection of guts..” may just be what brings Labor down. Politics is much more subject to shouty pile-ons, disgruntlement and querulous lability than in Gough’s day, yet look what happened to him. The running of executive govt, is not the same as punting for election.
There’s certainly a lot to be done, and to guard against, and the strangeness of the Albo Labor style of ‘incremental’ govt and legislation, may in part have been via lessons learned from the Shorten misadventure. It seems to be keeping opponents wrong-footed. For me, I certainly do not wish to see a return of the appalling LNP nor the build up of the likes of OneNotion. And it would seem the Greens and Teals haven’t designed themselves for executive govt, but as entities to ‘hold the govt to account’.
The world has rapidly become more technically complex. And with it, politics has become excruciating, particularly when saturated with innumerable styles of cultural hyperbole. It could be said that via television and social media, many are slowly but surely coming to grips with it. Nevertheless, the commentariat is much more sophisticated than that, and well capable of influence and diversion via well concealed bias.
To contend that we are not affected by it, to me, seems nonsense, even if we are microscopic and global in our deliberations and assessments.
By way of example, even the part headline, “Is Albo in trouble? ..” sets an agenda for thinking in the negative (depending on pov), with the subsequent posits potentially circumscribing the thought field.
Other than a double-dissolution of parliament, Albo has substantial choice as to the timing of elections:
Simultaneous half-Senate & House of Reps: earliest 7Aug2027 latest 20May2028
Half-Senate: ditto
House of Reps only: No earliest date and latest 23Sept2028.
So, because of the commentariat, and the rapidly changing environment, strategically, politically and economically, and the opportunistic screeching opposition, they may not want to reveal detailed plans. Detailed plans which may remain liquid until circumstances and timing coalesce. Including when and how to make announcements relative to MYEFO and Budget and elections, and how they’re going wrangling the House and the Senate.
None of that means they’ve stopped listening and moving in the direction of what they consider is of optimum benefit to Oz at any given time, aside from that, their formal policies remain online for all to read.
It would certainly be a disappointment to see Labor become a rah-rah government.
It is two years before the election, and already we are seeing Labor supporters indoctrinating us to believe that no matter how bad they are there is no alternative to Labor, other than the even shittier Coalition or One Nation. They have been bleating that ‘if only Albo had a backbone’ drivel for 4 years now – they are not prepared to face their own cognitive dissonance and face the actual facts of Labor’s governance.
They are even prepared to attack any other progressive alternative as ‘not a real alternative’. Is it that they are so wrapped up in ‘my team must win’ that they would see Australia turned into a serfdom rather than support some other progressive group?
What you never, ever here from such supporters is a debate about policies, because if they did, they’d have to face the reality that other groups such as the Greens or Socialist Alliance have the policies that represent what are supposed to be Labor values. Oh, no, just push One Nation/Dutton bogeymen stories, and those others aren’t really alternatives narratives to indoctrinate people into accepting more of the same garbage that is seeing Australia being taken to a dark place.
Hi Clakka,
which part of the Greens or Socialist Alliance policy platform do you see as “… haven’t designed themselves for executive govt, but as entities to ‘hold the govt to account’”?
Hi Clakka,
nothing yet, so let me guess.
Does having a policy design of handing over our national sovereignty of Australian defence forces, and what will be well over $368billion, to a foreign country constitute executive govt. capability to your way of thinking?
Does handing over determination of stringent environmental standards on the NW shelf project to Woodside constitute fitness to govern on policy design to your way of thinking?
Was handing over foreign policy on a genocide to the perpetrators of said genocide what constitutes fitness to govern on policy design to your way of thinking?
Does undermining the UN and International law by defunding UNWRA and materiel complicity in a genocide plus failure to defend the ICC and ICJ from sanctions constitute fitness to govern on policy design to your way of thinking?
Does being fit to govern mean you have to have housing policies that push the price of housing up?
Does being fit to govern mean you must be prepared to leave millions of Australians in poverty?
Does being fit to govern mean you have policies that place spending on defence above spending on our health system?
Does being fit to govern mean you have policies that pay foreign companies to take our mineral resources and exploit them for their profits?
Does a policy design of a NACC that has next to no transparency followed by appointing a close friend of a person of interest to the Robodebt inquiry make a party fit for executive govt.?
Is a policy design of locking in school funding inequity for a decade a prerequisite for executive govt.?
Is a policy design of altering FOI and electoral funding laws to favour yourself a prerequisite of fitness for executive govt.?
To be fit for executive govt. do you have to have a policy design of starving our universities of funding?
To be fit for executive govt. do you have to have a policy design of starving our research and development agencies?
To be fit for executive govt. do you have to have a policy design of maintaining dark money and dishonesty in elections, whilst crippling any small opponents?
What are these policies that were platformed by the Greens that reek of not being designed for executive government?
I don’t know about Albo being in trouble, but Minns appears to be going into a panic. If he’s so scared then why not just cancel the celebrations and be done with it!
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/dec/28/minns-government-actively-considering-if-jewish-security-group-should-be-armed-after-bondi-attack-ntwnfb
Wow, how good is this, we are five months into a second term, five months, that is less than one sixth into the term of government and we are writing Albo off, joining in the critique mounted by the rabid right!
So far, we have seen complaint after complaint, but legislation takes more than a few clicks of the finger to get through. parliaments. Can we see that for a world first, this government is standing up to the Tech Bros in trying to protect our kids from the corruptions of social media.
I recall a time when a new government was formed, the one after the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments and the frenetic activity taken to undo all the good laws passed, remember? Is it better to work methodically through, the continued push for renewable energy, the push to have a fairer tax system on superannuation. And other legislation in the pipeline.
I cannot believe the criticism, the harshness, so soon into a term of government when we take more notice of the criticisms from the far right, knee-jerk reactions from a no idea opposition, no idea but to criticise, but having no suggestions on what should be done.
Yes, I agree that a succession plan should be in place, but with he bullshit criticism, more a deflection of their having nothing to add from the dysfunctional mob called the opposition getting more traction on both social media and the press, we need to call that out.
Acknowledge that yes, the attack of 14 December was a vile act of terror. But if Sussan Ley were PM would she have been able to stop it? That effectively is the sub text… but wait who was PM when the terrorist arrive in the 1990’s… OH dear, quietly whisper was it John Howard???? and who was PM when ASIO said nothing to see here for the terrorist son, again quietly listen to the sound of silence…. Scott Morrison?????
Stop expecting miracles in such a short time.
Bert,
It is one week from 3 Jan 2026, 3rd May to 3rd Jan is by my reckoning 8 months, not 5 months. That the Albanese government chose to do nothing other than pump itself up and attack the Greens for the first 3 months by your reckoning, but two if I remember rightly, was Labor’s choice. Gough Whitlam didn’t take two months to act.
How about we stick with facts Bert, and not pluck figures out of the air to suit our narrative. How long does it take to meaningfully raise the jobseeker payments? another almost 4 years?
My bad, I forgot it only took Labor three weeks to approve the extension of the Woodside’s North West shelf gas project for another 45 years – faster than even Dutton said he would get it done. Labor obviously can get things done quickly when it suits their priorities.
How long is it going to take Labor to meaningfully raise jobseeker payments? Wouldn’t it be basically crossing out one figure and writing another, how long does that take? 5 Labor years? 6 Labor years? never?
Labor has been in government 43 months,how long does it take to enunciate a vision?Find some courage?
At this point they are the least bad side of a neoliberal duopoly.
Good overview, but Australians, being ‘gold fish’ miss two key demographic features including ageing and diversity, plus media consolidation with a ‘skip’ RW MSM, ABC and influencer ecosystem.
Like the UK the latter is lazily informed by imported US fossil fueled policies, strategies, tactics and talking points inspired by Atlas Koch* ‘segregation economics’ and Tanton ‘anti-immigrant’ Networks with News central to messaging and PR.
*While everyone sees and shouts at the symptoms in Gaza and Bondi atrocity, everyone misses the strategy of Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, reported by NYT etc May 2025…..
The same Heritage is partnered with Abbott’s Budapest workplace the Danube Institute with support of govt. of PM ‘mini Putin’ Orbán, Netanyahu’s ally; like the Kremlin is pro-fossil fuel, anti-Ukraine, anti-EU and anti-western.
The big one of late in US, via Heritage (Opus Dei) head passively observed the recent Carlson-Fuentes interview peppered with positive references about Hitler/Nazis and anti-semitism, without any disapproval? Personnel jumping ship……
Nothing Australians need to know offshore as that would contradict onshore talking points and RW echo chamber; too easy too lax….
Andrew, you’ve nailed the architecture of our manufactured consent.
Dead right about the goldfish memory syndrome: we’re so busy gawping at the symptoms we miss the disease vectors. Your point about media consolidation creating that perfect storm of Murdoch’s News Corp echo chamber, a neutered ABC running scared of funding cuts, and an influencer ecosystem pumping out imported Koch-funded talking points is spot on.
The laziness is strategic, not accidental. Why develop Australian arguments when you can offshore your thinking to Atlas Network-affiliated think tanks? The IPA, Centre for Independent Studies, and their mates are basically franchise operations for US libertarian extremism; climate denialism, anti-union agitation, privatisation theology, the whole catastrophe. Same script, local accent.
Your Heritage Foundation/Project Esther observation cuts deep. While we’re all doom-scrolling about Gaza or processing Bondi trauma, the institutional machinery keeps grinding away offshore. The Danube Institute connection you mention – Abbott playing court intellectual to Orbán’s authoritarian nationalism – that’s the canary in the coal mine we’re ignoring. These aren’t isolated nutters; they’re nodes in a network that spans from Budapest to Washington via Canberra.
The demographic dimension you raise; aging and diversity, they’re the twin terrors keeping the right-wing commentariat awake at night. An ageing population that might actually demand decent healthcare and aged care? An increasingly diverse electorate that won’t buy the old cultural warfare? Hence the constant manufacturing of immigration panic, the “African gangs” moral panic, the Voice referendum hysteria. Standard Tanton Network playbook: use immigration as the wedge, racial anxiety as the hammer.
What really gets me is the Carlson-Fuentes Hitler-curious interview you mention. Heritage Foundation sits there mute while their ecosystem goes full Brownshirt curious, and our media treats it as just another US culture war sideshow rather than recognizing the ideological supply chain that feeds our own discourse. When Ley or Joyce dog-whistles about immigration or when News Corp runs its daily “anti-woke” agitprop, they’re drawing from the same poisoned well.
The real story – as you rightly identify – is how this offshore thinking colonizes our political imagination while remaining conveniently invisible. We debate the symptoms onshore while ignoring the disease imported from abroad. Too easy, too lax, as you say. And far too convenient for those who profit from our goldfish amnesia.
Keen to hear more of your thinking on this. The connections you’re making need wider circulation.
MWM have reported the case of the NSW police dropping charges against a man who wore a T-shirt critical of Israel and Zionism at Bondi. Mr. Brown had been arrested more than a year ago, ‘he says he was led along the sand, paraded around Bondi “like a prop in a public lesson”. Charges followed. Bail conditions followed. A year of legal struggle ensued. And now, he says, the whole thing has been quietly abandoned. ‘
There are four points of concern about this case:
• ‘Brown says that early in the matter, the police prosecutor rang his barrister. The prosecutor, according to Brown, said he had reviewed the evidence across the matters and could not see how police could obtain a conviction. The prosecutor said he was recommending the charges be withdrawn. Two weeks later, Brown says, the prosecutor rang again. This time he said his position had changed, not because the evidence had changed, but because he had received instructions which had come directly from the Commander of Strike Force Pearl. Proceed with all matters regardless of the likely outcome.’
That is, the antisemitism taskforce had instructed the prosecutor to proceed with all matters regardless of the likely outcome. Was the purpose of this to punish via the process and not the outcome and to serve as a warning to others?
• ‘..Brown claims, even at station level, the arrest was understood as an instruction, not an evidentiary response.’
• ‘Brown says several former police and the partners of serving and former officers from Waverley Local Area Command have reached out privately. He says these contacts described pressure within that command to do what the local Jewish community demanded in politically sensitive matters.’
• ‘Brown says he lodged a challenge to the constitutionality of the charges, arguing they offended the implied freedom of political communication and the practical freedom of political participation that flows from Australia’s constitutional system. He says the NSW Attorney General joined the proceedings to defend the charges.’
‘Were NSW Police resources expended on a prosecution understood internally to be unsustainable? Were there internal concerns raised and, if so, by whom? And are there officers who can corroborate a culture of political pressure within Waverley Local Area Command?
The Attorney General’s involvement raises another set of questions. Who authorised the intervention? On what basis? What advice was received? And why was it considered appropriate for the state to defend charges that were later withdrawn?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16zohienzMA
It is bizarre that in Australia we can criticize our own government and any other foreign government, except for one, which if we criticize it, we will be arrested, paraded around the streets like a villain, bankrupted if that’s possible and then the charges will be dropped.
I believe Minns sees blind aggressive support for Israel and oppression of solidarity with Palestinians as a winner for him, but what is galling is the lack of backlash within Labor. Where are the Labor branches in protest at the attack on freedom of speech? Where is the rank and file protest? I’ve read of branches passing motions on Federal Labor’s stance, which have gone nowhere, has the Labor rank and file turned into doormats en masse? or do they support this?
What about the Labor MPs? Is a vote for Labor just a vote for either Albanese or Minns or Allen for that matter? The political commentariat would say that unity is everything, but what is the point of voting for Labor if all you get is Albanese pissing down our backs and telling us it’s raining or at a state level Minns, whatever that is.
I don’t get it. Albo didn’t criticise Israel and object to the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. And, Albo is supporting Palestinians and not supporting Israel (and their treatment of Palestinians), so therefore he is anti-semetic, anti-Jews.
This has all the hallmarks of political stitch up that ignores what Albo and his government is actually doing.
Sure there are things that I think they could do, should do, better, however I suspect people either have short memories after the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison, govt so soon after the long hard Howard era, or they are part of the right wing crew.
Well, he wouldn’t fess up to Gaza. Now people know he tells dark fibs also, no just Morrison or Abbott.
That is an UGLY Expose from Gonggong.
As Ive said before, a very sharp writer.
Very much ‘a long game’ according to Nancy MacLean of ‘Democracy in Chains’ fame while the Danube Inst is meant to be an Atlas Koch and Anglo ultraconservative Trojan horse, continuing on from Brexit to break up the EU, an implicit threat…..now a strong presence across far right and ultraconservatives in Europe (both US & Russia supporting).
Danube Institute personnel include Abbott’s advisor, their lead John O’Sullivan who was with Heritage in past, is Quadrant’s Euro correspondent and familiar with Tanton Network figures (+ Koch Heritage = Project 2025 & locally SusPopAus); Lucy Hamilton has written related articles here at The Aim.
Another symptom, published by Tanton’s TSCP is the dystopian novel of Jean Raspail* ‘Camp of the Saints’ which inspired Renaud Camus’ The Great Replacement’, while SusPopAus patron*, Melbourne academic and colaborator with ‘Australia’s best & most protected demographer’, bagged an interview with Raspail for Tanton’s Social Contract in ’90s….
That novel, or codebook, what a conga line of influence starting with Bill Buckley* of National Review fame (recruited O’Sullivan), Ronald Reagan et al., then Berlusconi, Le Pen, Steve ‘great replacement’ Bannon, Orbán, Stephen Miller, Musk, Carlson et al.
Buckley was intent on staunching the open bigotry and anti-semitism of the GOP & right inc KKK by using Raspail’s novel as a PR Comms blueprint to encourage attacks on the centre and have far right blame centrists for immigration and ‘the great replacement’; see Breivik, Christchurch etc.
Worse, one thinks it may have been inspired by late Weimar era NSDAP attacks on ‘cultural Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School; see post Oct 7 attacks on US university campuses defying free speech to claim anti-semitism.
A US indie journo Sandra Kendzior joined &/or observed pro-Palestine protests and left quite disturbed, not by anti-semitism, but proliferation of glib Kremlin talking points; helping the three amigos Putin, Netanyahu and Trump.
There are many good indie outlets and journos offshore, but they are avoided by both the local right MSM, and left….
“On my left is an historic organisation dedicated to humanity, equality and justice.”
‘humanity’ – we saw that humanity when Labor backed a genocide – only Sen. Fatima Payman had the decency to call it a genocide when it mattered. Wong and Albanese still haven’t called it a genocide. What does it say when Marjorie Taylor-Greene makes you look bad?
‘equality’ – the gap between the rich and the poor continued to rise dramatically under Albanese’s Labor; yeah, right equality goodonya.
‘justice’ – a section of the pro-Israeli lobby in Australia have been able to conduct a pernicious campaign to erase Palestinian solidarity and even Palestinian existence in Australia using lawfare. What has Labor done about our not-fit-for-purpose defamation laws and the abuse of 18C of the racial discrimination act. What has Labor done about a system that favours the rich? ‘justice’ – pull the other one, ask Mr. Brown about justice under a Labor government.
‘Its targets are predictable yet carefully chosen: Anthony Albanese for alleged weakness; Labor for timidity; government itself for failing to serve the mythical “real Australia”.’
What David neglects to mention is that members of the Labor party collaborated with Advance in the last election to demonize the Greens and Teals. Albanese was quick to shut down the AI medicare attack on Dutton but did nothing about members of Labor working with Advance to nobble the Greens, you know, that party that really wanted to do something about inequality, the party Advance hates because they want to tax billionaires.
https://michaelwest.com.au/labor-and-liberal-powerbrokers-join-to-attack-teals-and-greens/
https://michaelwest.com.au/right-wing-astroturfers-infiltrate-local-councils-unrest-over-israel/
https://michaelwest.com.au/israel-activists-infiltrate-labor-party-in-grassroots-putsch-to-hit-greens/
“Against that backdrop, Albanese is attempting to govern within a political and media ecosystem designed to grind him down. Every Labor leader since Whitlam has felt the same gravitational pull.”
Before Bondi Labor enjoyed a TPP of 58%, Albanese’s rating as PM had risen to net zero and the ‘media ecosystem’ had been talking of nothing other than the Liberal party imploding ever since last May. Or did I miss something?
Yes, since Bondi Labor is under coordinated attack by MSM, but show me the evidence of a media ecosystem grinding Labor down before Bondi. As I said I don’t watch or read the commercial media other than The Guardian.
Gonggongche,
Just a quick note in reply to your question to me at 2:48pm (28/12), and then, without waiting for my response, your impatient diversion at 3:35pm (28/12) started, “Nothing yet, so let me guess.”
As to your initial question 2:48pm. My “..haven’t designed themselves for..” refers to:
The original stated purpose of the entities, and since the clearly demonstrated m.o. of activism, and years of statements equivalent to or actually, holding govt to account and controlling the balance of power. I did not say this was a bad thing or inappropriate.
As for your splurge at 3:35pm, I observe that you did not counter my contention of “… haven’t designed themselves for …” by elucidating any plan or strategy by the entities for obtaining legislative dominance in the House of Reps and formation of executive govt.
On the contrary, you seem to be asking me to ‘hold govt to account’ via a scattergun of questions that are in effect rhetorical, as both you and I know they cannot be responded to without going to the minutia, and complexities of opinion.
And in that, as opposed to parliamentary duties undertaken in detail, it seems your splurge is typical of activism, designed to elicit a response based primarily on emotion rather than a thorough navigation of facts and cause and effect.
In its entirety, your splurge is a vulgar and hostile imputation; your “guess” of my mindset. A “guess” which you have no evidence or foundation for.
It seems your splurge is convenient to what appears to be your objective, dragging an emotional response from any audience.
So it seems you will be left to do your own research to answer your own questions, such are the complexities and the excruciating nature of politics today.
Hi Clakka,
thanks for your reply. I take your point to about my guesses being rhethorical.
However, to suggest ‘My “..haven’t designed themselves for..” refers to:
The original stated purpose of the entities,…’ belies the context within which you took that quote. It was preceded by “For me, I certainly do not wish to see a return of the appalling LNP nor the build up of the likes of OneNotion. And it would seem the Greens and Teals …”, “And” is a conjunction, so that suggests strongly that you were ruling them out as alternatives for government. It also says nothing at all about being the original stated purpose, it is in the present tense, not past tense.
Here is their ‘about the Greens’ from their website, what says ‘not designed for executive government’ in this?
“The Australian Greens are a political party based on four key principles: ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice and peace and non-violence.
Our movement is focused on delivering the plans we need to ensure that everyone has a good life. We’re committed to ensuring that all people are treated equally, that our environment is protected, and that big donors can no longer buy the influence of politicians and governments.
The Greens’ plans will see billionaires and big corporations pay their fair share, so we can invest now to create hundreds of thousands of good jobs, ensure everyone has an income they can live on and bring down the cost of living, set young people up for the future, and tackle the climate crisis.
The Greens are powered by an amazing network of grassroots supporters and members across the country. This grassroots approach has delivered Greens at all levels of politics, from local councils to federal parliament.
Your involvement and support will only make our movement stronger.”
My question to you though was what was it about their policy platform. I don’t believe you’ve answered that. What is in or lacking from their policy platform that says ‘not designed for executive government, but as entities to ‘hold the govt to account’’?
Hi GongGongche,
You’re right to pull me up – I did misrepresent what you said and I apologise. There’s a world of difference between “indistinguishable from the Coalition” and “both serve big corporations not the people.” Your formulation is more precise and, frankly, harder to rebut.
Your points about fossil fuel subsidies, the Woodside approval, and the litany of policy failures under both parties are spot on. I won’t dispute them. The $15 billion in fossil fuel subsidies alone makes a mockery of Labor’s climate rhetoric, and yes, that’s serving corporations over people.
But here’s where I’d push back, or at least complicate the picture: there remain meaningful differences between Labor and Coalition governments even when both are captured by corporate interests. The Coalition actively demonises the unemployed, traffics in climate denial, and scapegoats migrants. Labor, for all its neoliberal sins, doesn’t typically do these things. That’s not a defence of Labor’s corporate servitude – it’s just acknowledging that there are gradations of harm.
Your question “which part of the project was meaningfully alive?” cuts deep. Over fifty years, we’ve seen precisely the degradation you list: housing crisis, hospital collapse, education decline, aged care neglect, resource pillage. The project – if by that we mean a Labor Party genuinely serving working people – has been on life support since the 1983 Accord. No argument there.
Yet I’d still contend there’s value in not surrendering the distinction between the parties entirely. When we say “both serve corporations,” we’re describing a real and damning pattern. When we say they’re indistinguishable, we erase differences that matter to vulnerable people – LGBTIQ Australians, refugees, public sector workers, Indigenous communities.
My concern isn’t that your critique is wrong – it’s largely right. My concern is strategic: if Labor can’t be pressured to reform because progressives write it off entirely, we’re left with permanent Coalition rule by default. That said, you’ve earned the right to ask whether that pressure has achieved anything meaningful in fifty years.
Thanks for the thoughtful and spirited challenge.
David
I take it that you won’t be answering the question I put to you – that you support your suggestion that they weren’t serious about executive government, so I’ll address the other point you raised.
“I observe that you did not counter my contention of “… haven’t designed themselves for …” by elucidating any plan or strategy by the entities for obtaining legislative dominance in the House of Reps and formation of executive govt.”
Which part of the strategy to put up candidates in the vast majority, if not all, electorates didn’t you notice? Note: I only say ‘vast majority’ out of a tendency to be cautious, I firmly believe it would be all electorates.
Did you even look at their website and read it? Did you read their policies?
You talk about a clearly demonstrated mo. of activism, well, that is what a party looking to form government, reform and change does. It puts out policies and then advocates for them.
As for “and years of statements equivalent to or actually, holding govt to account and controlling the balance of power.” Well, they had the balance of power in the Senate or thereabouts for years so what were you expecting them to do, just sit there with their mouths shut and abstain?
David,
I respect that last reply deeply. I regarded my father as the smartest man I’d ever met. He was member of the Labor party and I helped by handing out ‘how to vote’ cards in 1972. At some point I asked dad what was the point of voting Labor – he said the difference between Labor and the Coalition was that Labor had compassion.
Labor has recently shown a lack of compassion that I’m glad my dad didn’t get to see, but I agree with your assessment of the difference between Labor and the Coalition.
It is easy for commentators like me to say if you get it wrong you just say so and move on, but I write from anonymity. I believe the writers of articles here are wearing their heart and soul on their sleeves. I apoligize for my earlier disrespect.
Albanese has achieved his ambition of being PM by sitting in the middle of the road. Trouble with that is, you’ll eventually get run over. “When you stand for nothing,you fall for everything”. He’s made a rod for his own back by lying and capitilating to everyone. I have no respect for him, or this shambles of a government that promised so much, and delivered so little.
Many observers here have made many good points, while no conclusive line seems established on this government. It seems to be “forced” to reign rather than rule, or posturing, as would, say, a Trump type of administration. We live in a nation developed into a ramshackle social and political slobbery of media/mining/financing/retail/consumer/Merde Dogged existence where little ruddering or navigation actually happens to suit most of us. We had one Whitlam waltz, lovely, giddy, short, regrettably one…but Trumpery stinks as it focusses on one defective. More and better for Australia would be nice. Much will be said and hoped in vain.
Gonggongche,
Again you impatiently do not wait for me to respond, before jumping in, clutching at straws, with most posits being only your assumptions and imputations outside what I have written. You are entirely wrong in you assumption that I put the ‘Greens’ in the same basket as ‘LNP’ and ‘One Nation’.
I could agree that activism is a path to executive govt, but in Oz, it apparently requires much more than activism. For a start, for bills to pass to law, they must be passed by both Houses, and regardless that the Greens’ policies are very similar to Labor’s policies, it requires a statement and/or demonstrable intent, which the public apparently perceives does not exist.
Amongst others, even the Greens poured their preferences into Labor giving them their landslide in the Reps, while many cunningly gave the Greens a ‘hold govt to account’ franchise in the Senate. It’s the voting public that have decided what the ‘Greens’ are. And, given you say the ‘Greens’ have held the Senate balance of power for years, and your tirade against the Labor govt there must be a level of disappointment in the Greens’ efficacy there.
That’s not discounting that by extension, Oz could move towards ongoing govts of minorities like in western Europe, which by necessity would require a prodigious amount of negotiation and compromise.
You seem to assume my ideological bent and/or political affiliations, which you have scant evidence for. Other than what I’ve said in this comment, I’m not about to discuss them with you, as the communications initiated by you, pointed at me, have been far from discursive.
Clakka,
your last sentence was “So it seems you will be left to do your own research to answer your own questions…’, now you want to be critical of me for doing exactly that; how disingenuous, how pathetic of you.
“AUKUS is the most audacious wager any Australian government has ever placed on a technological future it neither controls nor is likely to live to see.”
Great piece and interesting discussion.
A side note on the ‘future”:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/10/23/the-price-of-tomorrow-discounting-the-future-doganova/
Clakka,
your advocacy for Labor and willingness to tell a litany of falsehoods to denigrate any progressive alternative to Labor makes matters worse. Labor left millions of people suffering for two years in a cost-of-living crisis, meanwhile they screwed our children’s future in order to pay gas companies to export and profit from our gas for free, and allowed companies to profiteer while mortgage interest rates went up. By rewarding Labor for bad governance, we accept bad governance and can expect bad governance.
If a child asked you why vote for a party paying gas companies to open new gas and coal fields, would you look them in the eye and tell them I’d rather see Labor in government then a planet conducive to habitation for you to live in? judging by your false claim that the Greens ‘haven’t designed themselves for executive government’, to which you then falsely claimed they had no strategy or plan to win government, that you’d likely answer I voted for ‘net zero’ rather than deal with the truth. Now you want to falsely claim that the Greens ‘haven’t designed themselves for executive government’ because of how the public has voted in the past. You want to pretend that you know what was in the public’s mind and that that determines for what purpose the Greens have designed themselves.
Clearly, the Greens have not been successful in winning government so far, but I have given you credit for being able to understand the difference between lack of success and being deliberately designed to fail, which would make it near impossible to avoid coming to the conclusion that you’re telling lies, but proving intent is difficult, so I assume I was wrong and you don’t have the intelligence to understand the difference.
By the way, telling someone that they will be left to answer their own questions then denigrating them for doing so is a scumbag act, I would have thought beneath anyone on here, but apparently not.
Thanks Herbert for your side note on the ‘future’. Via your URL, the article was an excellent read, albeit the trace of realities through to today left me musing over the predominance of monetary abstraction, arse-guarding and opportunism over today’s tangible realities and those likely in the future.
In my erstwhile business pursuits, I have developed and presented both here in Oz, and internationally, numerous proposals and feasibilities for significant projects.
In all cases, increasingly, the stakeholders want to see, interrogate and make directives on (not the fundamental estimate and time programme, but) subsequent financial mechanics:
Discounted cashflows, discount rates, interest rates, inflation rates, forex rates, net present value etc.
And invariably they require an explanation of the rationale for all those things, so it’s down to risk-alleviation provisions in contracts, s-curve extrapolations, life-cycle costings, target rate analysis, risk-adjusted discount rate analysis, Monte-Carlo simulations, risk transfer or avoidance ….
And even then they usually require an add-on of cost for overarching risk insurance and hedge contracts (the big winners for the time being).
All that extremely expensive and highly reaction-sensitive cost gets added on to guard arses, and then passes down the line to end users.
It’s the grasp all impatient investors do. It develops its own spiral of cost / price increase, and leaves their care for the real future voided. And absurdly, premature pronouncements of ‘stranded asset’ write-off, and unnecessary resource consumption for replacements.
The sophistication seems to drive anxiety and paranoiac behavior dressed in suits.
Hi Paul Walter,
“zionist Guardian”, yeah, I cancelled my support, it was not called a subscription apparently, yesterday when I found out the editor had been on one of those media junkets to Israel, paid for by a pro-Israel lobby group apparently. Perhaps that explains the strict no comments on Israel committing genocide allowed policy.
Meanwhile, Bibi the Butcher visiting the Orange fake in his Florida Palace, busy massaging the manbaby’s fragile ego,so he doesn’t forget who’s really pulling the strings in America.
He’s not just kissing his arse, he’s fondling his balls.
When everything goes to shit in the Middle East,and it will,what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza will look like a minor incursion.
Herbert,just finished reading Don Watson’s latest book “The shortest history of the United States of America”He lays out quite clearly how we got here, and most people who have paid attention over the years, would not be surprised at the rise of Trump..he’s following a well worn path.
You’d have to wonder when the country will awake from it’s disremembering.