You want straight talking? Here it is. No jet required.

The system is not broken. It’s working exactly as designed. The headlines the mainstream media won’t run.

By Sue Barrett

The headlines you’re about to read will look like they belong in a tabloid.

That’s on purpose.

Because the mainstream media that usually writes those headlines won’t run the facts underneath them. Not because the facts aren’t true. Because the truth would cost them.

So let’s do what they won’t.

What follows is a fraction of the ledger – who took your money, who helped them take it, who told you to blame your neighbour instead, and who is still getting away with it.

If you only read one thing before you vote – if you share one thing with someone who is angry and looking for somewhere to put it – make it this.

A note before we begin. What follows is a sample. The full ledger of how this system was captured, who captured it, and what it has cost ordinary Australians would fill several books. This is not the complete case. It is enough of the case to show you the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

Before you read on, study the Closed Loop diagram below. It shows you the whole system at a glance – who funds who, who protects who, and exactly where One Nation sits inside it. Not outside pointing in. Inside. That is the argument this article makes in evidence, headline by headline.

Share what lands. These facts belong on every kitchen table in the country.

ACT ONE: HOW THE SYSTEM WAS CAPTURED

This is not how it got broken. This is how it was built.

Headline 1: YOU PAY MORE TAX ON A BEER THAN BHP PAYS ON $21 BILLION OF YOUR GAS

Let that land for a moment.

You walk into a pub. You order a beer. The tax on that single drink contributes more to the Australian public purse than the entire offshore gas industry – BHP, Woodside, Santos, Fortescue, Glencore, and INPEX combined.

Beer excise: $2.7 billion. Gas industry resource rent tax: $1.4 billion. Beer drinkers and cigarette smokers fund more public services than multinational gas corporations.

Senator David Pocock asked Treasury directly: does Australia raise more revenue from beer tax than from its entire offshore gas industry? The answer was yes.

INPEX. Ten years. $21 billion in exports. No royalties. No resource rent tax. No corporate tax.

We spent $14.5 billion subsidising fossil fuel companies. We collected $1.4 billion back. That is not policy. That is a protection racket in reverse.

The crossbench has pushed for a proper gas tax for years. Labor and the Coalition keep voting it down. The same gas companies funding both major parties also fund the think tanks that write the policy.

You are not being governed. You are being managed.

Headline 2: ADANI GAVE $600K. QUEENSLAND GAVE BACK $400 MILLION. THAT’S YOUR MONEY

No bank offers those returns. Only political donations do.

Adani donated $600,000 to the Queensland LNP. The Queensland government subsequently ended legal action over $400 million in unpaid royalties. That is a $400 million return on a $600,000 investment. This is not a donation to democracy. It is an investment in a specific policy outcome.

Here is who else is buying influence right now, with your future: Gina Rinehart, James Packer, Angus & Sarah Aitken, Ian Plimer (Hancock Energy exec), Adam Giles (Hancock Agriculture head), Gambling industry to name just a few. Note: both Plimer and Giles are employed by Gina Rinehart. So Rinehart’s employees are personally handing Hanson cheques for half a million dollars each, while Rinehart herself provides the private jet to collect them.

The Liberal Party designed its own donation disclosure exemptions, while it was the government responsible for writing those laws. The party that wrote the rules wrote itself out of them. This is in the Australian Electoral Commission’s own records.

Headline 3: THE SHADOW TREASURER WAS GROWN IN A LAB. HERE’S WHO FUNDED THE LAB

The Institute of Public Affairs was founded with corporate backing from Santos, Shell, BHP, Rio Tinto, and Gina Rinehart. It does not simply publish reports. It cultivates people who carry its ideology into public office and make it sound like common sense rather than institutional advocacy.

Tim Wilson – Australia’s Shadow Treasurer – is by any measure one of its most successful products, connected to the Atlas Network, the global franchise of free-market think tanks funded by the same interests he now shadows in parliament.

When a think tank funded by fossil fuel companies produces a report opposing a fossil fuel tax, that is not independent analysis. It is a service delivered to paying clients.

Headline 4: THREE MEN AND A WOMAN OWN YOUR NEWS. HERE’S WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO READ

Three companies control approximately 90% of Australia’s print media. News Corp alone controls roughly 70% of daily newspaper circulation. The people behind this are not abstract corporate entities. They have names.

Rupert Murdoch owns News Corp. Nine Entertainment – The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Today show – answers to a tight network of institutional investors with no interest in journalism that challenges power. Kerry Stokes owns Seven West Media – Channel Seven, The West Australian, and regional outlets across the country.

And now Gina Rinehart – who funds the IPA, donates to Advance Australia, employs the men writing cheques to One Nation, and provided Hanson’s private jet – has bought a significant stake in Seven.

The woman funding the think tank that trained the Shadow Treasurer now owns a piece of the broadcaster covering him.

In some outlets, up to 55% of stories are largely PR-driven. This is not journalism. It is the amplification of power dressed in the clothes of news. Only 43% of Australians trust news sources. 69% actively avoid the news. This is not a public failing. It is an institutional one.

The UK has the BBC. Canada has the CBC. Germany has constitutional protections for media diversity. We have Murdoch, Nine, Stokes, and Rinehart – and a deliberately underfunded ABC.

ACT TWO: HOW THEY MADE YOU PAY FOR IT

The donations bought the policies. The policies built the crisis. Then they sent you the bill.

Headline 5: THE TAX CUT THAT BROKE AUSTRALIAN HOUSING (NO, IT WASN’T IMMIGRANTS)

In 1999, John Howard introduced the 50% capital gains tax discount. From that single moment, house prices and wages stopped moving together. They have not moved together since.

This is not a market failure. It is a policy choice – a deliberate decision to reward those who hold assets passively at the direct expense of everyone who earns their living through work. The people now voting for One Nation in their hundreds of thousands are living in the gap between those two lines.

Negative gearing costs the federal budget approximately $27 billion a year. Most of it flows to people who already own multiple properties. It is a taxpayer subsidy structurally unavailable to anyone paying rent.

Let’s call it what it is. The capital gains tax discount is welfare for the wealthy – publicly funded, privately pocketed, and defended by the same politicians whose donors benefit most from keeping it exactly as it is.

The capital gains tax discount was introduced by a Liberal government and kept by Labor for over two decades. The Albanese government finally moved on it in the 2026 budget – modest changes, long overdue – but the reforms still have to pass the Senate. The crossbench and the Greens will be decisive. Watch who votes which way. That vote will tell you everything about who each senator actually works for.

Headline 6: $6 MILLION IN DONATIONS. 900 DAYS OF DELAY. YOUR LOSS: $31 BILLION

Australians lose $31 billion a year to gambling – more than we spend on aged care.

The Murphy Report delivered 31 evidence-based recommendations in June 2023, including a phased ban on gambling advertising. The government still had not formally responded over 900 days later. Andrew Wilkie and the Greens brought a bill to ban gambling ads. Labor and the Coalition voted together to block it from even going to a committee. Zoe Daniel, when she was the independent member for Goldstein, was one of the most persistent and vocal advocates for gambling reform in parliament – pushing hard, naming the industry’s influence openly, and refusing to let the issue die quietly in a committee drawer. She continues that work today outside parliament. That tells you everything about the difference between someone who answers to their community and someone who answers to their donors.

Michael West Media’s FOI requests revealed secret government meetings with Nine Entertainment – one of the country’s largest gambling advertising carriers – about reform. A 32-page draft response existed since November 2024. The public never saw it.

The gambling industry donated $6 million. Reform died. These facts are related.

Headline 7: CEOs GOT $22 BILLION IN BONUSES. YOU GOT TOLD TO WORK HARDER

In 1965, the average CEO earned 20 times their typical worker’s wage. Today that ratio is 30 to 50 times. In the United States it exceeds 280 to 1.

In 1970, Milton Friedman declared a corporation’s only responsibility is profit for shareholders. By 1982 stock buybacks were deregulated. By the late 1980s executive pay was tied to share price. The machinery of extraction was assembled piece by piece and exported through business schools worldwide.

ASX-listed companies spent $22 billion on stock buybacks in 2023 – money into share prices and executive bonuses, not wages, R&D, or jobs. 91% of Australia’s top CEOs received performance bonuses last year. The crossbench pushed for pay ratio disclosure and gig economy protections. Labor and the Coalition blocked each one.

The wages you have lost are not an accident. They are a policy choice made by people who do not share your bank account.

Headline 8: THEY FENCED OFF YOUR FUTURE. YOU WERE TOO BUSY FIGHTING EACH OTHER TO NOTICE

Housing, enclosed by negative gearing and investor-class landlordism. Wages, enclosed by union gutting and gig economy casualisation. Democratic voice, enclosed by dark money and captured media. Energy, enclosed by fossil fuel monopolies. Information, enclosed by News Corp and a defunded ABC.

These are not separate problems. They are the same system – the systematic transfer of shared resources from the many to the few, happening simultaneously at every level of Australian life.

Union halls. Community legal centres. Public sector workplaces. Local party branches with genuine authority. These did not fade naturally. They were enclosed – fenced off, defunded, restructured out of existence.

We were not born passive. We were managed into it.

Headline 9: BEFORE YOU BLAME YOUR NEIGHBOUR, READ THIS

“Anti-intellectualism is an authoritarian tactic used to control a population by robbing people of the tools to understand and solve problems, foster innovation, and build up communities. Education gives people power to improve their conditions.”

Simplistic answers to complex problems are always wrong. Not sometimes. Not in bad faith. Always – because complexity cannot be resolved by ignoring it. It can only be exploited by those who benefit from you not understanding it.

This is why “tell it like it is” politics, delivered without evidence, without policy, without accountability, is not straight talking.

It is the con inside the con.

ACT THREE: THE FALSE SOLUTION

They built the crisis. Now they are selling you the wrong answer to it.

Headline 10: FROM 6.4% TO 31%. HERE IS WHAT HAPPENED IN BETWEEN.

In May 2025, One Nation received 6.4% of the national primary vote – its best result in decades, but still a fringe party. By June 2026, One Nation was polling at 31%, ahead of both Labor and the Coalition.

Something happened in between.

In November 2025, Gina Rinehart – the same woman whose employees are writing One Nation cheques for $500,000 each and who has since bought into the Seven Network – flew Pauline Hanson and her chief of staff James Ashby to Florida in her private jet. They stayed at Rinehart’s mansion. They attended multiple events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Hanson spoke at CPAC, endorsing Trump’s policies and expressing her desire to replicate them in Australia. Rinehart was photographed in the background reading documents with Trump.

One Nation’s primary vote has more than tripled since that meeting.

As analyst Carrick Ryan documents, this surge has occurred despite Trump’s popularity being in freefall in both Australia and the United States, despite net migration having already fallen more than 40% from its post-COVID peak, and despite no fundamental societal shift that would explain a sudden explosion in anti-immigration sentiment.

What has changed is the money, the platform, and the algorithmic amplification. Rinehart redirected her resources to One Nation after the Liberal Party elected a moderate leader. The same billionaire class that funded Trump’s information operation – Musk’s manipulation of X’s algorithm, Zuckerberg’s incentivised compliance, YouTube’s alignment – operates without borders.

The US State Department’s 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly outlined its intent to provide material support to right-wing nationalist movements in Europe. It is a reasonable question – one Carrick Ryan asks directly – whether that support extends to Australia.

Hanson was caught by Al Jazeera in 2019 attempting to secure NRA funding in exchange for weakening Australia’s gun laws. She was willing then. Nobody in the mainstream media is asking whether she was willing again.

Correlation is not causation. But the timeline is the timeline.

Full analysis at Carrick Ryan’s FB original piece.

Headline 11: THE WOMAN WHO SKIPPED 90% OF HER JOB WANTS YOUR VOTE (AND A BILLIONAIRE’S JET)

Thirty years in parliament. Not one documented community benefit. Not one.

She skips 90% of her Senate estimates sessions. She has shut down four One Nation branches to stop far-right infiltration, admitting in June 2026: “I’m being infiltrated by these extremists… they set us up all the time.” She cannot control her own local branches. She wants to run the country.

She bragged about a $1.5 million private jet donated by Australia’s richest woman – the same woman whose employees are writing One Nation cheques for $500,000 each. She charged donors $15,000 each for an in-flight fundraiser. Then she told you the problem is immigrants.

Her housing solution targets foreign property owners – a fraction of a fraction of the housing stock. It was so poorly understood by her own party that Barnaby Joyce contradicted it live on Sky News and had to be rescued by Hanson herself. The capital gains tax discount, $27 billion in negative gearing subsidies, and gas companies paying less tax than beer drinkers go untouched.

One Nation supports restricting access to abortion. In a country where women already face significant barriers to reproductive healthcare – particularly in regional and rural areas – One Nation’s answer is fewer rights, less access, and more government control over women’s bodies. The same party that cannot find a policy solution to housing, wages, or gas tax has strong opinions about what women should do with an unwanted pregnancy.

Her voting record: against the gas tax. No gambling reform. No housing tax reform. No wage action. Anti-abortion. Ever consistent in who she does not fight for.

In South Australia, One Nation surged to 22%. Labor won an increased majority. Nothing changed. This is arithmetic, not conspiracy.

This is not a government in waiting. This is a grift with a logo.

Headline 12: THE FOREIGN LOBBY NOBODY WILL MENTION

One Nation has built its entire brand on opposing foreign influence – Chinese farm ownership, foreign housing investment, international organisations setting domestic policy.

However, there is a foreign-influence operation in Australia that One Nation never mentions. Neither do the major parties. Former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr put it directly: “The Israel Jewish lobby in Australia is a foreign influence operation. It’s designed to put the interests of Israel above the interests of Australia and its foreign policy, and no one else has an operation as well funded.”

Carr recorded in his diaries – never contradicted – that Tony Burke told cabinet that in “just about every discussion” of how Australia votes on Israel-Palestine, “someone had made reference to the importance of campaign donations as a consideration.”

This is not a fringe claim. It is a former foreign minister’s on-the-record account of what was said inside a Labor cabinet meeting. The lobby has offices in every Australian capital city. It funds campaigns. It organises primary challenges against politicians who deviate from its preferred line. It operates across both major parties.

One Nation rails against foreign influence when it suits the narrative. The major parties stay silent when the donations are flowing. The question neither will answer: if foreign-influenced political donations corrupt our democracy, why is this lobby the exception?

Source: Bob Carr’s published diaries and multiple on-record interviews including with Michael West Media.

Headline 13: YOU’RE FIGHTING YOUR NEIGHBOUR. THE PEOPLE ROBBING YOU ARE WATCHING.

One in three Gen Z men now believe women should be subservient to men. They did not arrive at this belief on their own. They were actively recruited – by algorithms, influencers, and political movements that profit from division.

It is not just One Nation. The major parties have spent decades playing culture war politics while the wealth pump ran undisturbed. Restrict reproductive rights. Demonise minorities. Keep people fighting each other. A divided population is an extractable one.

The same political class that cannot find money for public housing always finds moral clarity when regulating women’s bodies. The crisis is not men versus women. It is everyone being sold a model of power that is breaking everyone.

Headline 14: WHAT SHOULD BE MAKING HEADLINES BUT ISN’T

Adani’s $400 million royalty forgiveness after a $600,000 donation. The gas industry paying less tax than beer drinkers. 900 days of gambling reform delay with secret industry meetings running in parallel. The think tank that produced the Shadow Treasurer funded by the companies he now shadows. The party that wrote Australia’s donation disclosure laws writing itself out of them. A housing policy blaming immigrants for a crisis created by a 1999 tax discount. A leader who stepped off a billionaire’s jet to demand gas returns – then voted against the only mechanism that would deliver them. A political class that spent $22 billion on buybacks while telling you to work harder.

This is a sample. Not a summary. The full documentation would run to volumes. We have shown you enough of the surface to understand what lies beneath it.

The system must change. Not reformed at the edges. Not managed more carefully by slightly better people. Changed – structurally, democratically, with citizens rather than donors in the room.

The scale of what has been taken is the measure of what must be reclaimed.

The reason these facts are not making headlines is the same reason the headlines don’t make you rich, healthy, housed, or represented.

The system is working exactly as designed

One Nation is the wrong answer to the right question.

The right question – who and what can we vote for to replace a dying two-party system that no longer works for ordinary people – deserves a serious answer. That is what this series is building.

Next week we look at what a country that actually works for ordinary people looks like – the policy platform, the philosophical foundation, and the international proof that it is not a utopian fantasy. It has been built elsewhere. It can be built here. We will show you exactly what that looks like and who is already doing the work.

You know what to do.

Onward we press

Sue Barrett is founder of Democracy Watch AU and Before You Vote, and writes Every Solution Begins with a Conversation on Substack. suebarrett.substack.com | beforeyouvote.com.au © 2026 Sue Barrett

This article was originally published on Sue Barrett