The 2026 World Cup final is at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The cheapest secondary market ticket is over $2,000. There’s no parking at the stadium. The nearest car park is at the American Dream Mall, where a single space costs $225. The normal price is $6. NJ Transit from Penn Station, an 18-mile trip, costs $150 return. The normal fare is $12.90. Only 40,000 tickets per match. No children’s discounts. FIFA’s own Chief Operating Officer called the pricing model a strategy that will have a “chilling effect” on attendance. We’re already seeing empty seats at the group games.

In December, Gianni Infantino created the FIFA Peace Prize and awarded it to Donald Trump. No nomination process. No panel of judges. Trump placed the medal around his own neck. Two months later he started a war with Iran.

At the FIFA Congress in Vancouver, Infantino tried to orchestrate a handshake between the Palestinian Football Association president and his Israeli counterpart, moments after the Palestinian had spent fifteen minutes explaining how Israeli football clubs operate in illegal West Bank settlements. The Palestinian refused. His vice-president told Reuters: “I cannot shake the hand of someone the Israelis have brought to whitewash their fascism and genocide.”

Infantino has changed FIFA’s statutes so that only full terms count toward the three-term limit. He could remain president until 2031. He has overseen the awarding of a World Cup to Qatar, where migrant workers died building stadiums. He has overseen the awarding of the 2034 World Cup to Saudi Arabia, elected unopposed, in a virtual meeting, with all participants applauding. A governance expert described the process as “a shocking illustration of what democracy means in FIFA.”

This is not a corrupt sporting body. This is a political project. The sporting arm of every authoritarian regime on earth, funded by fans who are being gouged, governed by a man who gives peace prizes to warmongers, and protected by a monopoly that has never been seriously challenged.

Until now. Because for the first time in football history, the legal, commercial and structural conditions exist to build a credible competitor. Not a fantasy. Not a pub argument. A viable parallel international competition modelled on the most successful insurgency in sporting history.

The Packer precedent

In 1977, Kerry Packer signed 35 of the world’s best cricketers without the cricket establishment hearing a word. He staged World Series Cricket for two seasons, forced the establishment to capitulate, and permanently transformed the sport. The establishment absorbed his innovations (coloured kits, night cricket, player payments, broadcast-first production) because the alternative was irrelevance.

Packer succeeded for one reason that every failed breakaway since has ignored: he signed the labour first, staged the product second, and recruited the institutions last. The European Super League reversed this order. Twelve owners, zero players, announced on a Sunday night and dead by Tuesday. LIV Golf had sovereign capital but no distribution. It bought players and then begged for a broadcast deal. Every failed insurgency in modern sport failed because it started with the institutions or the money and assumed the players would follow. Packer started with the players and let the institutions catch up.

And Packer succeeded for a second reason: he was the distributor. World Series Cricket was not an investment. It was programming for a television network he owned. Every dollar of “loss” was content spend. He didn’t need the establishment to broadcast his product because he was the broadcaster. The funder must be the distributor, or the venture rents legitimacy from the incumbents it is trying to disrupt.

The legal ground has shifted

Three rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union have fundamentally changed the terrain.

The European Super League ruling (December 2023) established that FIFA and UEFA may operate approval regimes for rival competitions, but only under criteria that are transparent, objective, non-discriminatory and proportionate. The self-executing ban hammer, the threat that killed the Super League in 48 hours, is gone within EU jurisdiction.

The International Skating Union ruling (same day) established that a governing body that is simultaneously a commercial operator cannot use eligibility rules to foreclose rival events. This cracks the Swiss procedural fortress that has protected FIFA for decades.

The Diarra ruling (October 2024) established that FIFA’s transfer rules restricting player movement violate free movement and competition law. The practical consequence: contractual architecture that engages players for windowed competition outside their club duties is more legally defensible than at any point in football history.

And the live institutional siege reinforces the doctrine. FIFPRO Europe, European Leagues and LaLiga have filed a formal competition complaint with the European Commission over FIFA’s unilateral control of the international match calendar. FIFA’s conflict of interest, regulator and promoter in one body, is now the subject of formal Commission scrutiny. Any new venture builds on terrain that is already being litigated by parties with standing, resources and grievance.

A parallel competition does not need to ask FIFA’s permission. It launches, and forces FIFA to choose: sanction the players (walking into Article 102 litigation it will likely lose, with damages exposure) or acquiesce (demonstrating to players and federations that the kill switch is unplugged). The lawfare is the product launch.

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The modern Packer is a streaming platform

Netflix, Apple, Amazon and YouTube have spent a decade rationed by sports-rights monopolies, paying inflated tolls for slices while FIFA auctions World Cup rights at monopoly prices each cycle. For a platform spending $15-20 billion annually on content, underwriting an entire international football property at roughly $1.5 billion per year is a line item. What it delivers is streaming’s scarcest commodity: simultaneous global live audience. The churn-killer.

Structure: one streamer as anchor plus one or two regional free-to-air partners, because cultural penetration requires free reach and full paywalls kill prestige (Packer understood this). That yields a $4-5 billion five-year war chest. Enough to sign the players, stage the tournament, absorb the litigation, and outlast FIFA’s counter-moves.

And here is the critical discipline: the cap table is the narrative. Gulf sovereign money is not suboptimal. It is disqualifying. It converts the project from reform movement to LIV overnight. The moral wedge is anti-authoritarian. The funding must match. Streaming capital is clean capital. It has no geopolitical agenda beyond subscriber growth. That distinction is the difference between a venture the world roots for and a venture the world rolls its eyes at.

Player economics: equity, not wages

LIV Golf paid salaries and bought attendance, not belief. Players spent press conferences apologising for being there. The fix: the first 200 players are not employees. They are founders. Guaranteed three-year contracts plus a meaningful equity pool of 15-20 per cent of the venture. Mid-career stars become owners with upside rather than mercenaries with a signing bonus.

Two hundred player-owners inside FIFPRO constitute a pre-positioned political army for the moment federations need to see that defection is already a fact. The venture is not buying labour. It is buying the union’s median voter. And the contracts are structured under Diarra: windowed commitments that never touch club employment, slotted into calendar gaps FIFA created by bloating its own schedule. Clubs, bleeding from the Club World Cup land grab, are at worst neutral and at best quiet allies.

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Governance as the product

FIFA’s deepest vulnerability is not legal but constitutional. A Swiss Verein, a members’ association with the accountability apparatus of a nineteenth-century gymnastics club, controlling a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. One-federation-one-vote means San Marino equals Brazil, which means the presidency is held by aggregating small federations dependent on development grants. There is no external regulator. No shareholder discipline. No meaningful scrutiny.

The competitor’s governance design is therefore not compliance overhead. It is the moral pitch, the legal shield, and the product differentiation in one structure.

Multi-stakeholder chambers: voting power split across federations, players (via their unions), leagues and clubs, and fans, such that no single constituency can capture the body. Federation voting weighted by registered players or competitive standing, not flat (which recreates FIFA’s purchasable Congress) and not by wealth (which recreates the Super League’s plutocracy).

Separation of regulator and promoter: commercial operations in a subsidiary with independent directors, sporting regulation in a non-profit that cannot own competitions. This severance is precisely the conflict of interest the EU complaint targets in FIFA. Building it cleanly from day one is both shield and story.

A global fan membership carrying genuine governance representation. The Barcelona socio model, scaled. Twenty dollars a year. Ten million members is $200 million in revenue that doubles as a political constituency no government or federation can dismiss. Every anti-fan decision FIFA makes becomes unpaid marketing for the alternative.

Manufacturing prestige

The competitor does not out-World-Cup the World Cup. It builds the inverse. Twelve to sixteen teams, best-only, no qualifying bloat. The tournament the World Cup was in 1970. Every match elimination-grade. Biennial, staged in the World Cup gap years. Never head-to-head, always the contrast.

The identity: the players’ tournament. Player-owned, fan-governed, honestly priced. Tickets capped as constitutional policy. Fan goodwill is the moat, not the margin.

The Ryder Cup proves that format can manufacture meaning without history. An Argentina-Brazil or France-England knockout in a sixteen-team field generates prestige instantly. And the calendar gods have supplied the recruitment posters: a 2030 World Cup sprawled across six countries and three continents, followed by Saudi Arabia 2034. The argument that FIFA has lost the plot does not need making. It needs scheduling against.

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The endgame

The realistic endgame is not FIFA’s destruction. It is the Packer outcome: a negotiated settlement on governance reform. Two seasons of credible parallel structure force the football establishment to capitulate and absorb the rebellion’s innovations, the way cricket absorbed Packer’s. Separated commercial and regulatory functions. Calendar co-determination with leagues and unions. Fan representation. Term limits with teeth. A venture whose stated objective is reform-and-reintegration is easier to sell to sponsors, broadcasters and governments than a new FIFA.

And if Zurich refuses to settle, the venture has accidentally built the thing that outlives it.

The assembler problem

This venture requires roughly $4-5 billion in committed capital and trusted access to football’s agency layer. No individual holds that key. Ventures at this scale are not founded. They are assembled. And the assembler is rarely the party with the money or the players. It is the party whose name is attached to the fully formed strategic case at the moment a platform executive, a league president, or a players’ union board goes looking for one.

The concept is not the moat. The moat is capital, relationships and convening credibility. What is ownable is attribution. This essay is my claim on that attribution. The full strategic architecture, including sequencing, raid mechanics and failure-mode analysis, exists in a detailed working paper. If you are in a position to act on it, I’d like to hear from you.

Jasper Clifford-Smith is Head of Commercial Partnerships at Thinkable.Events and Senior Advisor (Fundraising Development) to the Australian Greens. This piece draws on a Multiphonic working paper. Contact: multiphonic.com.au

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Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender held a joint press conference yesterday to confirm what the Sydney Morning Herald had reported the night before: the teal independents are in talks to form a political party. The announcement could come within weeks. Malcolm Turnbull has been making calls. David Pocock hasn’t ruled out joining. Bob Katter, Andrew Gee and Rebekha Sharkie have all said no thanks. The pitch is that Australian voters need an alternative to the major parties and to One Nation. Something “sensible,” as Steggall put it.

I lived in Wentworth for a couple of years. Allegra Spender was my local member. I should have been her target demographic: politically engaged, left-leaning on social issues, concerned about climate, frustrated with both major parties. At the local level, for Woollahra council, I spoiled my ballot because the only candidates running in my ward were a Liberal and an independent whose entire platform was keeping apartment blocks out of Vaucluse. That’s the teal ecosystem in microcosm. At the federal level, a glossy, well-funded campaign about integrity and climate. At the local level, NIMBYism and the Liberals. Nothing in between.

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Spender frustrated me as a local member for a specific reason that I think illustrates the broader problem with the teal project. After October 7 2023, Woollahra Council flew the Israeli flag outside their chambers, their libraries and every council building in the municipality. They flew it for over a year. When they finally took it down, they replaced it with permanent public art commemorating October 7. This happened in Spender’s electorate. As a genocide unfolded in Gaza, as tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed, as the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures, her local council was flying the flag of the state conducting the operation. Spender said nothing. No comment. No critique. No acknowledgement that her constituents might include people who found the display of a foreign flag outside a local government building during a mass killing campaign inappropriate. She supported it, or at the very least, she let it happen without objection.

This is what centrism looks like in practice. It’s not the absence of a position. It’s the strategic avoidance of any position that might cost you something. Spender can talk about climate targets because climate targets don’t alienate her donor base. She can talk about integrity because integrity is a motherhood statement that nobody opposes in the abstract. She cannot talk about Palestine because talking about Palestine would require her to choose a side, and choosing a side is the one thing the teal project is designed to avoid.

The broader teal movement has the same structural problem. Their pitch on climate is that we need to reduce emissions, transition to renewables, and meet our Paris targets. Fine. Nobody disagrees with the diagnosis. But climate is not a technical problem. It’s a political economy problem. The reason Australia hasn’t transitioned faster is not because we lack the technology or the engineering capacity. It’s because the fossil fuel industry has spent decades capturing both major parties through donations, lobbying and the revolving door. The reason we export 56 per cent of our gas without taxing it properly is not an oversight. It’s a policy outcome purchased by Santos and Woodside and Chevron. You cannot solve climate without confronting the corporate power that prevents climate action. And the teals will not confront corporate power because corporate power is, in many cases, their constituency.

Look at who funds the teal movement. Climate 200, Simon Holmes à Court’s vehicle, has been the primary financial engine. Holmes à Court is the son of Robert Holmes à Court, once Australia’s richest man. The donors to Climate 200 are overwhelmingly wealthy individuals from the eastern suburbs and the north shore. They want action on climate. They also want their property values maintained, their private school funding untouched, and the economic structure that made them wealthy preserved. Climate action that doesn’t threaten any of those things is welcome. Climate action that interrogates the role of capital in the crisis, that asks why billionaires are allowed to profit from the destruction of the planet, that connects fossil fuel donations to policy outcomes, is not.

This is why the teal project will have limited success. It can win seats from the Liberals in wealthy urban electorates. It has already done this. It may kill the Liberals in those seats permanently, which would be a genuine contribution to Australian democracy if it forces the Liberal Party to confront its own irrelevance. But it cannot become a governing force because it doesn’t stand for anything beyond a set of positions carefully calibrated to appeal to people who want to feel progressive without being confronted by the implications of progressivism.

Centrism has been tested globally and it has failed globally. Macron was the centrist project incarnate. He is now polling behind both the far right and the left in France. Starmer was the centrist correction to Corbyn. He is now less popular than the Greens. The centrist pitch, that you can transcend left and right and govern from the sensible middle, assumes that the problems facing the world are technical rather than structural. They are not. Housing is not a technical problem. It’s a distributional problem. Climate is not a technical problem. It’s a power problem. Inequality is not a technical problem. It’s a policy choice made by people who benefit from it. You cannot solve structural problems with centrist politics because centrist politics is, by definition, committed to preserving the structures.

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The teals are talking about forming a party because One Nation is polling at 59 lower house seats and they’re scared. Fair enough. One Nation is terrifying. But the answer to One Nation is not a party of wealthy urban independents who agree on climate targets and disagree on nothing else. The answer to One Nation is a political project that speaks to the material conditions of the people One Nation is recruiting: cost of living, housing, wages, the sense that the system is rigged. The teals cannot do this because their voters are, by and large, the beneficiaries of the system that is rigged. They don’t want to dismantle it. They want to decarbonise it.

Steggall said “staying still is not how you keep winning.” She’s right about that. But forming a centrist party in 2026 is not movement. It’s the formalisation of a position that has already been overtaken by events. The world is splitting into people who want structural change and people who want structural preservation. The teals are on the preservation side, dressed in teal, talking about the climate, carefully avoiding the question of who caused it and who is still profiting from it.

The centre cannot hold. Yeats wrote that a hundred years ago. He was talking about something else entirely but the line travels. The political centre, in Australia and everywhere else, is being squeezed from both sides by people who have decided that moderation in the face of crisis is not sensible. It’s complicit. The teals can form a party if they like. They can pick a name and write a platform and hold a press conference. But unless they’re prepared to talk about class, about corporate power, about the structural forces that make both climate inaction and housing unaffordability inevitable, they’re just putting a logo on a position that history has already moved past.

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If you’ve been on LinkedIn in the last fortnight, you’ve seen it. The hot takes. The open letters. The founders under 40 writing directly to the Prime Minister. The venture capitalists who have never posted about anything other than quarterly returns suddenly discovering a passion for public policy. The hashtag. #StopTheTechTax. The mood is apocalyptic. The CGT discount changes will destroy innovation. Kill ambition. Send talent offshore. Turn Australia into a backwater. Singapore charges zero per cent. New Zealand has no CGT on shares. We’re doomed.

Will Hayward, the former CEO of Private Media, put it best: “The media industry owes a debt of gratitude to the angry venture capital bros on LinkedIn.”

He’s right. Because the backlash worked. Within 24 hours of the budget, the government had added a consultation clause to the budget papers acknowledging the “unique characteristics” of startups. The Productivity Commission chief publicly warned the reforms risked startup growth. Chalmers is now actively working on a carve-out for early-stage investment. The VC bros screamed and the government flinched. That’s power. Good for them.

But I want to talk about what’s actually being said, because most of it is nonsense.

I founded a startup. Integristack. AI-powered software recommendations. I went through an accelerator. I built a product. I pitched to investors. I hired people. I wound it down when it couldn’t scale. At no point during any of that did I think about the CGT discount. Not once. I didn’t start the company because I’d calculated the tax treatment of a hypothetical future exit. I started it because I saw a problem and wanted to solve it. Every founder I know started for the same reason. The idea that reducing the CGT discount from 50 per cent to something closer to the Keating-era indexation model will kill the desire to build things is an insult to every person who has ever started a business out of passion, frustration, or sheer bloody-mindedness.

The argument being made on LinkedIn is not an argument about innovation. It’s an argument about capital. Specifically, it’s an argument about the tax treatment of returns on venture capital. VCs invest other people’s money into startups. If those startups succeed (most don’t), the VCs take a cut of the gain. Under the current system, that gain is taxed at half the normal rate if the asset is held for more than twelve months. The proposed changes reduce that concession. VCs are upset because their post-tax returns go down. That’s it. That’s the whole argument. Everything else, the open letters, the hashtag, the apocalyptic language about innovation dying, is decoration.

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The founders I feel for are the ones with employee share schemes who genuinely stand to be worse off. That’s a real issue and the government should fix it. But conflating the interests of a founder holding equity in a company they built with the interests of a VC managing a fund is dishonest. One of them risked everything. The other risked a line in a deck to an investor who knew the risks of putting their money in VC.

Now let’s talk about the “beast that has awoken.” The Coalition’s Tim Wilson has promised to repeal the CGT and negative gearing changes if elected. Shadow innovation minister Aaron Violi is running the #StopTheTechTax campaign alongside a NSW shadow minister. The message is clear: the Coalition will fight for you.

The problem is that the Coalition has 43 seats out of 150. The Nationals have withdrawn from the coalition agreement twice since the election. Angus Taylor is polling behind One Nation in the regions and behind the teals in the suburbs. The AFR’s own modelling suggests the Coalition would pick up only 12 seats if an election were held today. That’s 55 seats. You need 76 to govern. The “beast” can roar all it likes. Its political vehicle is in a ditch. The small business cohort that is furious about these changes has no viable political home. They can write as many LinkedIn posts as they want. Who is going to implement their preferred policy? Not this Coalition. Not in this parliament. Not with these numbers.

Which brings me to the thing that nobody in the LinkedIn discourse is talking about, because it would short-circuit the entire narrative.

The Greens.

The Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate. The budget cannot pass without them. They are currently negotiating with Labor to pass the CGT and negative gearing reforms, and they are pushing for them to go further, not less far. But here’s what the angry VC bros don’t know, or don’t want to know, about what the Greens actually advocate for when it comes to small business.

The Greens’ economic platform includes a proposal to give the ACCC and APRA the power to block banks from imposing unnecessary mortgage rate increases. Think about what that means for a small business owner with a variable-rate loan whose repayments just went up for the third time this year because the RBA raised rates to combat inflation caused by a war. The Greens want to put a ceiling on that. Neither Labor nor the Coalition has proposed anything similar.

They’ve proposed $250,000 grants for 1,000 startups and cooperatives that enhance local economies. $50,000 to $75,000 grants for 10,000 small businesses. Extension of the instant asset write-off. A Small Business Energy Incentive Scheme. Support for worker-owned cooperatives. A wholesale funding guarantee to help smaller banks compete with the big four, which would lower borrowing costs for small businesses across the board.

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This is not theoretical. This is policy. Published, costed, on the record. The party that the small business community has been trained to view as the enemy of enterprise is the only party in parliament with a comprehensive small business platform that addresses the thing actually killing small businesses right now: interest rates, energy costs, and the market power of the big four banks.

But nobody on LinkedIn is talking about the Greens’ small business policy. Because the LinkedIn discourse isn’t about small business. It’s about capital gains. It’s about the tax treatment of venture returns. It’s about a very specific, very wealthy cohort of people who have confused their financial interests with the national interest and are using the language of innovation to protect a tax concession.

I built a startup because I wanted to solve a problem. I would have built it with or without a CGT discount. I would have built it if the discount was 50 per cent, 30 per cent, or zero. Because the discount is not why people build things. People build things because they can’t not build them. The VCs invest because the returns are attractive. Those are different motivations. One is passion. The other is arithmetic. The budget changed the arithmetic. It didn’t touch the passion.

The beast hasn’t awoken. The beast’s accountant has sent an angry email. There’s a difference.

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James Talarico is a 36-year-old Presbyterian seminarian and Democratic state representative from Texas. In March he won the Texas Democratic Senate primary, beating Jasmine Crockett in a state where Democrats haven’t won a statewide race in 32 years. Joe Rogan told him he should run for president. First Things, the most prestigious conservative Christian journal in America, called him “one of the most naturally talented communicators to emerge from the progressive Christian world in a generation.” His slogan is not left versus right. It’s top versus bottom. And his foundation, the thing he keeps coming back to in every interview, every debate, every viral clip, is Jesus.

Not the Jesus of the prosperity gospel. Not the Jesus of the megachurch pastor with a private jet and a congregation trained to vote Republican. Not the Jesus who has been fused with the American flag and the AR-15 and used as a mascot for a political movement that would have horrified the man himself. The other Jesus. The one who actually appears in the scriptures. The one who threw the money-changers out of the temple. The one who said it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The one who fed the hungry, healed the sick, and told his followers that whatever they did to the least of these, they did to him. That Jesus. The one the right pretends doesn’t exist.

I want to talk about this because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I don’t think it gets discussed enough, especially by people on the left who tend to treat religion as either irrelevant or hostile.

I grew up around Catholicism. My parents weren’t religious but my grandma was. I went to church with her and liked it. The Mass, the quiet, the sense that something larger was happening in the room. Then at school I had a scripture teacher called Dr Sharah who used to beat us with Bibles. Literally. He was a child psychiatrist who later had his licence stripped for telling a young lesbian patient she was possessed by the devil. A man who took the word of God and used it as a weapon on children. I walked away from all of it for a long time after that.

I’d call myself agnostic now, culturally Catholic in the most left-wing way imaginable. I’m not drawn to the rituals. I’m drawn to the art. I cried when I went to the Vatican. Not because I felt the presence of God, but because I felt the presence of two thousand years of human beings trying to express something they couldn’t put into words. I identify with the Catholic struggle, especially in colonial Australia and Ireland. I find almost nothing of value in Protestant thought. The church as an institution has been responsible for some of the most heinous acts in human history. I’ve seen it myself, at close range, from someone who was supposed to be teaching me about love. But the people are not the institution. The faith is not the building. And the teachings of the man at the centre of it are not diminished by the crimes of the people who claimed to represent him.

Since COVID I’ve spent a lot of time going back to Catholicism on my own terms. I read Francis. I read the encyclicals. I watched what he did, not just what he said. He washed the feet of prisoners. He washed the feet of Muslim refugees. He called the unfettered pursuit of money “the dung of the devil.” He said the economy kills. He advocated for migrants, for the environment, for peace, for the poor, with a consistency and a clarity that most left-wing politicians would never dare attempt because they’d be accused of being radical.

Francis was radical. In the original sense of the word. He went to the root.

Pope Leo XIV has continued this. The first American-born pope, elected in May 2025, has spent his first year calling for climate action, welcoming immigrants, rejecting the death penalty, criticising the Trump administration on immigration and social justice, and urging the world to “build peace by disarming our hearts.” He visited a mosque in Turkey. He joined a two-hour divine liturgy with an Orthodox patriarch. He has called being truly pro-life a position that encompasses opposition to the death penalty, support for migrants, care for the environment, and advocacy for the poor, not just opposition to abortion. The American Catholic right is furious with him. Which tells you he’s doing it right.

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Here is the thing that has struck me most about studying what Christianity actually says, as opposed to what the political right says it says. The teachings of Jesus are, by any honest reading, radically left-wing. Love your neighbour. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Welcome the stranger. Give to those who ask of you. Do not store up treasures on earth. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice.

These are not centrist positions. These are not moderate positions. These are the most progressive, most redistributive, most anti-hierarchical ideas in the Western canon. And they have been hijacked, systematically and deliberately, by a political movement that uses the name of Jesus to subjugate women, persecute queer people, demonise immigrants, justify war, protect wealth, and consolidate power. The “Judeo-Christian values” that the right talks about have almost nothing to do with what Jesus actually said and almost everything to do with maintaining a social order that benefits the people invoking his name.

Talarico understands this and he says it out loud, in a Texas accent, to audiences that have never heard a Democrat talk about Jesus without flinching. “The clearest anti-Trump we have is Jesus,” he said. And he’s right. Not because Jesus was a political figure. But because everything Trump represents, the worship of wealth, the demonisation of the vulnerable, the celebration of cruelty, the reduction of human beings to instruments of profit, is the precise inversion of what Jesus taught.

What makes Talarico dangerous to the right is not his policies. His policies are standard progressive fare: healthcare, housing, cost of living, education. What makes him dangerous is the language. He is speaking in the language that the right has monopolised for forty years and he is using it to say the opposite of what they’ve been saying. When he says “love your neighbour,” he means your actual neighbour. The immigrant. The trans kid. The Muslim family down the street. The homeless man outside the church. When the right says “love your neighbour,” they mean people who look like you, vote like you, and go to the same church. Talarico is reclaiming the vocabulary. And because the vocabulary is theirs, because they’ve spent decades building an entire political identity around Christianity, they can’t dismiss him the way they dismiss a secular progressive. He’s speaking their language better than they speak it themselves.

This is what the left gets wrong about religion. Not everywhere, but often enough that it matters. The instinct on the left is to treat Christianity as the enemy, because the loudest version of Christianity in public life has been the enemy. The megachurches. The televangelists. The prosperity gospel. The Christian nationalists who want a theocracy and call it freedom. That version of Christianity is real and it is dangerous. But it is not the only version. And ceding the entire religious conversation to the right is one of the most consequential strategic errors the left has made in a generation.

Two billion people on earth identify as Christian. If your political project has nothing to say to them, you are choosing to be irrelevant to a third of humanity. If your instinct when someone mentions God is to roll your eyes, you are doing the right’s work for them. You are confirming every stereotype about the godless left that the megachurch pastor preaches to his congregation every Sunday. You are handing the most powerful moral vocabulary in human history to the people least qualified to use it.

Francis understood this. Leo understands this. Talarico understands this. The question is whether the broader left can learn from them. Not by faking faith. Not by performing religion for votes. But by recognising that the values the left fights for, equality, justice, compassion, solidarity with the vulnerable, care for the earth, are not secular inventions. They are ancient. They are scriptural. And the person who articulated them most powerfully was a carpenter from Nazareth who was executed by the state for threatening the powerful.

The right doesn’t own Jesus. They just shout louder. It’s time to shout back.

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There’s a stigma attached to voting for the left that doesn’t exist on the right. Everyone knows it. Nobody quite knows how to fix it.

You can vote One Nation and call it common sense. You can vote for a party funded by a mining billionaire whose entire platform is built on fear of people who look different, and that’s considered a legitimate expression of working-class frustration. You can vote for a party that platforms conspiracy theorists, climate deniers and people who want to strip rights from trans kids, and the media will describe your concerns as “valid” and your grievances as “real.”

But vote Green and you’re a virtue signaller. You’re an inner-city elite. You’re out of touch. You don’t understand the real world. You probably ride a bicycle.

This asymmetry is not an accident. It is manufactured, maintained, and enforced every single day by a media and political establishment that has a material interest in ensuring the left remains marginal, divided and culturally toxic.

Here’s how it works.

When the right takes a divisive position, it’s treated as robust debate. When Angus Taylor announces an ICE-style immigration plan, it’s covered as a “bold move” to “win back the base.” When One Nation campaigns against immigration, it’s “tapping into legitimate concerns.” When Sky After Dark runs a segment questioning whether Islam is compatible with Australian values, it’s “asking the tough questions.” The framing is always that the right is responding to something real, something felt, something the “ordinary Australian” cares about. The divisiveness is laundered through the language of authenticity.

When the left takes a position, even one grounded in international law, human rights and basic decency, it’s treated as provocation. When the Greens opposed the war in Gaza, they were accused of importing foreign conflicts into Australian politics. When they demanded a ceasefire, they were told they were being divisive. When they called out a genocide, they were told they were endangering social cohesion. The same political class that has no problem with One Nation vilifying entire communities for electoral advantage accused the Greens of divisiveness for opposing the killing of children.

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The double standard is so normalised that most people don’t even see it. Punching down is politics. Punching up is ideology. Going after immigrants, welfare recipients, trans people, disabled people, Indigenous communities, these are all considered acceptable terrain for political debate. Going after gas companies, property speculators, arms manufacturers, billionaires, the actual structures that extract wealth from working people and concentrate it at the top, that’s class warfare. That’s dangerous. That’s un-Australian.

This is what the right understands and the left historically hasn’t. Culture wars are not about culture. They are a redirection mechanism. They take the anger that should flow upward, toward the people who are actually making your life harder, and channel it sideways, toward people who are even more powerless than you are. As long as the population is fighting about pronouns and boat arrivals and whether a Welcome to Country is “political,” nobody is asking why gas companies pay less tax per dollar of revenue than a nurse in Penrith.

But something is shifting. And it’s coming from people who have worked out how to break the frame.

Gary Stevenson was a trader at Citibank. He made millions betting against the poor during the financial crisis. He’s from Ilford in East London. Working class. Grew up broke. Got into finance, saw how the system actually worked from the inside, and walked away. He now runs a YouTube channel called Gary’s Economics with 1.5 million subscribers where he explains, in plain language, why wealth inequality is destroying the economy. His slogan is “Tax Wealth Not Work.” Four words. Everyone understands them. Nobody can argue with the logic without sounding like they’re defending billionaires.

Stevenson’s breakthrough is not ideological. It’s linguistic. He doesn’t talk about capitalism or socialism or any of the words that make people’s eyes glaze over. He talks about the price of your house. The size of your rent. The reason your wages haven’t moved in twenty years. He talks about it in an East London accent that immediately communicates: this is not a man from the establishment telling you what to think. This is a man from your street telling you what he saw when he got inside the machine.

He’s also brutally clear about the redirection trick. He’s done entire videos explaining how, at the exact moment inequality and taxation of the rich were being discussed on every news show, the media narrative suddenly shifted to immigration and asylum seekers. He names it. He diagrams it. He shows you the timeline. And then he asks: who benefits from you being angry at a refugee instead of angry at the person who owns your landlord’s landlord?

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Zohran Mamdani is doing something similar from a different angle. A 34-year-old democratic socialist, born in Uganda, raised in Queens, elected to the New York State Assembly, and now the mayor of New York City. A year before his election, nobody outside his district had heard of him. He entered a crowded primary as a longshot against Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor backed by the Democratic establishment and serious money. Mamdani beat him. Then he beat him again in the general when Cuomo ran as an independent. He won with 50.4 per cent and 100,000 volunteers who knocked on 3 million doors.

His platform: tax the rich, make buses free, freeze rents, open city-run grocery stores, raise the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030. Funded by a $10 billion tax hike on businesses and the ultra-wealthy. Bernie Sanders called it “inspirational.” The donor class called it terrifying. New Yorkers called it obvious.

What Mamdani understood, and what most left-wing politicians don’t, is that people do not vote for ideology. They vote for someone who sounds like they give a shit about their rent. Mamdani didn’t campaign on abstractions. He campaigned on the price of groceries. He filmed himself in bodegas and on subway platforms asking people what was making their lives hard and then telling them, specifically, what he would do about it. He didn’t ask people to join a movement. He asked them how much they paid for eggs. The movement formed around the answer.

He also refused to back down on Palestine, which was supposed to be the thing that killed his campaign. It didn’t. He built an unprecedented coalition of Muslim and Jewish supporters. A Jewish voter commented on one of his videos: “As a Jewish kid I was raised to never forget the hatred that gave rise to the horrors of the Holocaust. The Islamophobia directed at Zohran is every bit as evil.” Mamdani showed that you can be pro-Palestine and win, not by softening the position but by placing it alongside a domestic agenda so concrete and so compelling that voters understood the consistency. He wasn’t being divisive. He was being principled. And the voters could tell the difference.

This is the lesson. The stigma attached to the left is real but it is not immovable. It is maintained by a media infrastructure that punishes anyone who challenges the interests of the powerful and rewards anyone who redirects public anger toward the powerless. The way to break it is not to become more moderate. It is not to sand off the edges or avoid “controversial” positions. It is to be so relentlessly specific about the material conditions of people’s lives that the ideological framing falls away. When you say “tax wealth not work” or “how much did you pay for eggs,” you are not speaking the language of the left or the right. You are speaking the language of the kitchen table. And the kitchen table is where elections are won.

The Greens in Australia are closer to this than they think. The gas export tax now polls at 72 per cent nationally, up from 61 per cent earlier this year. Housing affordability is the number one issue for under-40s. The cost-of-living crisis has a clear causal chain from policy decisions to people’s bank accounts. The materials are there. The challenge is not policy. It’s communication. It’s finding the Gary Stevensons and the Zohran Mamdanis who can say the thing in a way that doesn’t sound like a pamphlet and doesn’t trigger the stigma reflex. People who talk like people. People who make the left sound like common sense, because it is.

The right has spent forty years making selfishness sound like freedom. The left needs to spend the next ten making fairness sound like survival. The first side to figure out that this isn’t a culture war but a class war, and to say so in language that everyone understands, wins.

The kitchen table is waiting.

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Something is breaking on the global right and most Australian commentators have not noticed yet.

In the United States, the post-Cold War conservative consensus is coming apart. The coalition that held together since Reagan, neoconservative foreign policy welded to free-market economics welded to social conservatism, is fracturing along a line that nobody predicted. The Heritage Foundation is at war with itself. Tucker Carlson and the Daily Wire have split. JD Vance is carefully triangulating on issues that would have ended a Republican career in 2015. Among Republicans under thirty, sympathy for Israel has fallen below fifty per cent and is still dropping. Among those under twenty-five it’s closer to a third. That’s not a polling blip. That’s a generational break.

In Britain, Reform just won 1,428 council seats. The Conservatives are a third party. Badenoch can’t hold a position on whether to collaborate with Farage for longer than a morning. The Greens are polling at 14 per cent. The two-party system that governed Britain for a century is dissolving in real time.

In Australia, the Coalition just polled a combined 21 per cent in Farrer. One Nation won a seat the Coalition held for eighty years. Angus Taylor is chasing Pauline Hanson’s voters with an ICE-style immigration plan while the party burns down around him. The internal diagnosis is that they need to be either more conservative or more moderate. Both diagnoses are wrong.

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The correct diagnosis is that the Liberal Party needs to become something neither wing currently understands: economically nationalist, foreign-policy sceptical, willing to break with the donor class, and pitched at voters the party has been losing for twenty years rather than voters it lost in 2022.

This is not a theory. It’s a pattern that has already played out in the US and is playing out in the UK right now. The fusionist right is dying everywhere. The politicians who recognise this early inherit the next generation. The ones who don’t become the next Liz Cheney.

Australia has four conditions that make this realignment not just possible but likely, and they compound each other.

The housing crisis has produced a generation structurally locked out of the asset base that defines middle-class life, and they correctly identify both major parties as having designed the system that locked them out. Negative gearing and the CGT discount are not abstract policy. They are the visible mechanism by which one generation transferred wealth from another.

The cost-of-living shock from the Iran war has translated foreign policy into a domestic economic grievance with a clear causal story. Australians are paying more for petrol because Australia rubber-stamped a war that closed the Strait of Hormuz. That is a sentence a populist politician can say. It is also, broadly, true.

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The Liberal Party is in genuine existential crisis. Not the manageable crisis of being in opposition. The structural crisis of being out-flanked by One Nation in the regions, hollowed out by the teals in the suburbs, and led by a man whose political instincts are calibrated for 2007.

And Labor has spent years narrowing its own definition of acceptable opinion to the point where significant constituencies are preparing to leave. The Muslim and Middle Eastern communities of Western Sydney swung 7 to 8 per cent against Labor in 2025, with Muslim Votes Matter mobilising across 32 seats. Labor held on, but barely. Independent candidates pulled 15 to 20 per cent of the primary in seats like Blaxland and Watson on their first attempt. The foundation for a much larger challenge has been laid. Those voters are increasingly available to whoever speaks to them.

The question is who.

Andrew Hastie is the only figure in the federal parliament with the biography, the positioning, and the apparent appetite to lead this realignment. Former SAS officer. Served in Afghanistan. Walked away from the frontbench over a foreign policy disagreement. You cannot call him a coward. You cannot call him soft on national security. You cannot call him naive about how the world works. The standard attack lines the establishment uses against anyone who questions the forever-war consensus do not land on a man who has actually been in the wars under discussion.

His Insiders interview earlier this year confirmed three things. He is willing to break ranks publicly. He has an intuitive grasp of the structural problems, housing, deindustrialisation, fuel sovereignty, even when his specific policy answers need work. And he is genuinely interested in the question of who his party is for, in a way that Taylor is not. The most revealing detail from that interview was the report that his inbox afterwards was dominated by non-Liberal voters. That is the signature of a politician with cross-coalition reach. That is the thing the realignment requires.

The keystone move, the one that signals which side of the realignment a politician is on, is foreign policy. Specifically, a sustained critique of the relationship between Australian foreign policy and the wars Australia has been drawn into, conducted in the language of national sovereignty rather than human rights. The sovereignty frame travels everywhere. “Australia should not be paying for petrol because we rubber-stamped someone else’s war” is a sentence that lands in Western Sydney, in regional Queensland, in the outer suburbs of every capital, and in the kind of inner-city seat that is currently teal. The same critique in human-rights language only lands in one of those places.

This is not about Israel specifically. Israel is the surface. The deeper question is whether the Australian right is still loyal to the donor-class, alliance-management, forever-war framework that has defined Western conservatism since 1979, or whether it is willing to break with it. Every politician on the right now faces this question whether they want to or not. The ones who answer it early will shape Australian politics for a generation. The ones who don’t will watch someone else do it.

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The coalition this realignment unlocks is broader than most people realise. It is not just the diaspora vote, though that matters in specific seats. It’s the cost-of-living voter who can be made to understand the causal chain between Middle East policy and the price of petrol. It’s the anti-forever-war voter who has been growing for twenty years and has never had a political home. It’s the young male voter currently bleeding to One Nation and abstention, looking for a politician who treats them as adults rather than a problem to be managed. Hastie’s biography is unusually well-suited to that last group. A former SAS officer who breaks with the foreign policy establishment is a more credible figure to a disaffected nineteen-year-old in Penrith than any Labor politician can ever be.

None of this is guaranteed. The donor networks that fund the Liberal Party will fight it. The Murdoch media response would be coordinated, sustained and brutal. Hastie’s existing factional base may not hold under pressure. And the timing may not cooperate. Realignments happen when conditions are ripe, not when politicians decide. If the Middle East conflict subsides and fuel prices fall, the underlying force weakens.

But the materials are lying around. The housing crisis is not going away. The cost-of-living shock is not going away. The generational break on foreign policy is not going away. The Liberal Party’s existential crisis is not going away. Someone is going to pick up these materials and build something with them. The question is whether Hastie does it, or whether he watches someone else do it and wonders what might have been.

Taylor is not the answer. Farrer proved that. Chasing One Nation into regional Australia while the teals hold the suburbs and Labor holds the cities is a strategy for permanent opposition. The path back requires something bolder, something that breaks with the donor class, reorients foreign policy, speaks to a generation that has been locked out of everything, and does it in the language of sovereignty and national interest rather than progressive idealism.

That path exists. Whether the Liberal Party is capable of walking it is another question entirely.

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Peta Murphy was a Labor MP who chaired a parliamentary inquiry into gambling harm. She spent months hearing testimony from addicts, families, researchers and advocates. She produced a report with 31 recommendations, including a comprehensive ban on gambling advertising. The report was called “You Win Some, You Lose More.” She presented it to the government in June 2023. She asked, publicly, for the government to act quickly. She was dying of cancer at the time. She died later that year.

The government responded to her report this week. 1,049 days later. They tabled it during the budget lock-up, while every political journalist in the country was literally locked in a room going through the budget papers. If you wanted to bury something, you could not design a better burial.

Senator David Pocock called it “cowardly.” The Greens called it “gutless” and “an insult to the legacy of Peta Murphy.” The Alliance for Gambling Reform said the government had “half adopted” a “handful” of the 31 recommendations. Andrew Wilkie accused the government of putting the commercial interests of gambling, sporting and media companies ahead of the public interest.

The response “notes” Murphy’s recommendations. It does not implement them. There is no total ban on gambling advertising. There is no national regulator. Online gambling ads are still permitted for verified adult users. Social media platforms just need to offer an opt-out. The government banned betting logos on sports jumpers and in stadiums, restricted TV ads during live sport, and called it a day. Albanese told parliament the changes “get the balance right.”

The balance. Between what and what? Between the $31.5 billion Australians lose to gambling every year and the tax revenue governments collect from it? Between the 1.1 million people at risk of problem gambling and the lobbyists who were briefed on the policy before Labor’s own caucus? Between a dead woman’s dying wish and the commercial interests of an industry that profits from human misery?

Let’s talk about who is losing.

Australians are the world’s biggest gambling losers per capita. Not second. Not close to second. First, by a wide margin, at roughly double the losses per capita of the next nearest country. We lose $31.5 billion a year. That’s $1,527 for every adult in the country. NSW alone has 95,800 poker machines, a number beaten only by the state of Nevada. Three per cent of the world’s pub and club pokies are in Australia. We have 0.3 per cent of the world’s population.

And it’s getting worse. Sports betting among men surged 57.6 per cent between 2015 and 2022. Among men aged 18 to 34, it surged over 60 per cent. One in five Australian men in that age bracket now reports experiencing gambling harm. Young men make up 22.5 per cent of the population but account for 34.3 per cent of problem sports bettors. Almost 90 per cent of problem sports bettors are male. These are not degenerate gamblers in the old stereotype. These are kids in their early twenties, watching football on the couch, with a betting app on their phone that was designed by psychologists to be as addictive as possible, advertised to them by athletes they admire during the game they love.

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The apps are engineered for addiction. The multi-bet. The cash-back offer. The bonus bet. The “bet with mates” feature that turns gambling into a social activity. The live odds updating in real time during a match, turning every passage of play into a potential transaction. These are not neutral products offered to consenting adults. They are psychological traps designed to exploit the neurological vulnerabilities of developing brains, deployed at scale through the one medium young men are guaranteed to be watching: sport.

And the government lets it happen. Not passively. Actively. State governments collect billions in gambling taxes every year. NSW takes over $2 billion annually from poker machines alone. The gambling industry is not just tolerated. It is a revenue stream. The government is not a bystander in the gambling crisis. It is a business partner. It takes a cut of every dollar lost by every addict in every pub and every betting app in the country. It is, to use language that fits, a profiteer. It feeds off the misery of the people it is supposed to protect.

This is where the duty of care argument becomes impossible to avoid. We pay taxes for hospitals. For roads. For schools. For defence. For a social safety net that is supposed to catch people when they fall. The implicit contract between citizen and state is that the state will, at minimum, not actively facilitate the destruction of its citizens’ financial and psychological wellbeing. Gambling breaks that contract. The state licenses the product. The state collects the revenue. The state allows the advertising. The state hears testimony from addicts and their families, commissions reports, receives 31 evidence-based recommendations, waits 1,049 days, and then tables a gutted response during a budget lock-up so nobody notices.

Eighty-one per cent of Australians support banning gambling ads. Eighty-one per cent. That number should sound familiar to anyone who’s been reading this newsletter. It’s the same structural problem as the gas tax. Overwhelming public support for a policy that the government refuses to implement because the industry that would be affected has more influence than the people who would be helped. The gambling lobby operates the same way the gas lobby operates. Donations to both parties. Lobbyists with direct access. Former politicians on boards. A revolving door that ensures the people making the rules are the same people who will profit from them after they leave office.

Peta Murphy saw all of this. She documented it. She made 31 recommendations to fix it. She asked the government to act before she died. The government waited three years and buried the response on budget day.

The house always wins. In this case, the house is the government. And the people losing are the ones it was elected to serve.

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Two companies control over 90 per cent of metropolitan newspaper circulation in Australia. News Corp owns 64.2 per cent. Nine owns 26.4 per cent. Between them, two organisations, one owned by a 95-year-old American citizen and the other chaired by Peter Costello until he was filmed shoving a journalist at Canberra Airport, control almost everything that gets printed on paper and distributed to newsagents across the country.

This would matter more if anyone were reading it.

The Australia Institute published a report last year called “Bellowing from the sidelines.” The title tells you everything. In the 2022 federal election, the majority of Australian newspapers endorsed the Coalition. Labor won comfortably. In the 2025 federal election, every single News Corp masthead and the Australian Financial Review endorsed Peter Dutton. He suffered the worst defeat in Liberal history and lost his own seat. Anthony Albanese is the first Prime Minister since The Australian was founded in 1964 to have never been endorsed by it. He’s won twice.

Neither News Corp nor Nine can regularly reach more than 20 per cent of Victorian voters. The first leaders’ debate on Sky News, behind a paywall, reached at best 2 per cent of enrolled voters. Two per cent. A debate that was supposed to shape the election was watched by fewer people than a moderately successful YouTube video. For the first time ever, most Australians said their main news source was social media or online content, not television, radio or print. The masthead era is not declining. It has declined. The people bellowing from the sidelines just haven’t accepted it yet.

So why does it still matter? Because the political class behaves as though it matters. Politicians still court News Corp. They still fear the front page of The Daily Telegraph. They still structure their media strategies around morning television and radio hits. The gap between where the audience actually is and where politicians think the audience is has become one of the defining features of Australian politics. It’s why Labor saves its best policies for election campaigns instead of implementing them in government. It’s why the opposition chases culture war headlines instead of developing a serious platform. The entire political class is performing for a media infrastructure that the public has already left.

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The grift

Into this vacuum has stepped Karl Stefanovic.

In January, Stefanovic launched a podcast from his position as host of the Today Show. In his first ten weeks, his guest list told you everything: Pauline Hanson (twice), Barnaby Joyce, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Clive Palmer, Gerard Rennick, Alex Antic, Matt Canavan, Bob Katter. He had Albanese on once and hosted a debate between a Nationals senator and Konrad Benjamin from Punters Politics. But the centre of gravity is unmistakable. This is a platform built for the populist right. When Drew Pavlou, the University of Queensland activist turned anti-China internet celebrity turned failed Senate candidate, asked him on air if he was trying to be Australia’s Joe Rogan, he didn’t deny it.

A Region Canberra review noted that his interview style “makes Rove McManus seem like ABC interrogator Sarah Ferguson.” There is little pushback. No interrogation of claims in real time. Guests are given space to air grievances about immigration, cultural change and political correctness. The appeal is obvious. The execution is a grift.

Rogan didn’t start as a political project. He spent over a decade building trust through thousands of hours of long-form conversation with scientists, comedians, fighters, musicians, weirdos. He earned the audience before he weaponised it. When he platformed Trump, and then Musk, and then Palantir, he had credibility reserves to spend. The trust was the trojan horse. Stefanovic doesn’t even have the trojan horse. He came from mainstream television. He’s still on mainstream television. He skipped the decade of trust-building and went straight to the payload: populist right-wing guests, no pushback, manufactured controversy, millions of views. Reports suggest the podcast is partly an insurance policy in case Nine doesn’t renew his contract. It’s a career move dressed up as a media revolution.

Stefanovic’s distribution ceiling is his audience. The people watching him are the same people watching Sky After Dark. They’re older, they’re conservative, they already agree with everything his guests are saying. He’s not converting anyone. He’s entertaining a shrinking room. His audience is ageing out of political relevance, and the nostalgia he trades on (a simpler Australia, a less “woke” culture, the vibe of a country that never actually existed) has a shelf life that ends when the people who remember it do.

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The hope

Abbie Chatfield launched her podcast “It’s A Lot” from a bedroom in 2019 with zero listeners and dodgy editing. Six years later it has nearly 40 million total downloads. Her peak month hit 1.2 million listens. She has 580,000 Instagram followers and 711,000 on TikTok. She interviewed the Prime Minister during the federal election. She hosted events with the Greens leader. She was named on the AFR Power List as one of Australia’s most influential podcasters. She’s 30 years old. This year she went fully independent, taking complete creative and commercial control of her show.

Chatfield and Stefanovic are the same phenomenon from opposite ends: celebrities who crossed into political media. But the distribution trajectories are completely different because their audiences are at different life stages. Chatfield’s audience is 18 to 35. They’re aging into mortgages, into parenthood, into marginal seats. In ten years they’ll be the demographic that decides elections. Her distribution grows as her audience grows. Stefanovic’s audience is 45 to 65. In ten years they’ll be smaller, older, and less electorally decisive. His distribution shrinks as his audience shrinks.

The structural advantage of progressive independent media is not ideological. It’s demographic. The audience is younger, it’s growing, and it’s forming its political identity right now, through podcasts, through TikTok, through Substacks, through formats that the old media cannot replicate because the old media’s entire business model depends on an audience that has already made up its mind.

And Chatfield is not alone. Cheek Media, co-founded by Hannah Ferguson, is building a politically engaged media platform from the ground up. Ette Media, founded by Antoinette Lattouf and Jan Fran, is carving out space for voices that mainstream outlets have historically excluded or tokenised. Punters Politics, run by former economics teacher Konrad Benjamin, has built an audience by taking the opposite approach to Stefanovic: policy over party, data over vibes, respect for the audience’s intelligence. Benjamin appeared before a Senate committee on gas taxation. That’s an independent creator testifying to parliament about policy. Try imagining that five years ago.

Michael West Media has been doing investigative work on corporate influence and political donations that the mastheads should be doing but aren’t, because the mastheads are owned by the corporations being investigated. Independent Australia, the AIMN, Crikey, The Saturday Paper. All of them operating on a fraction of the resources that News Corp has and reaching audiences that News Corp can’t.

I write a daily newsletter before my daughter gets up in the morning. I started it three months ago with zero subscribers and no plan. I have no editor, no proprietor, no advertising department, and no obligation to anyone except the people who subscribe. I mention this not because I think I’m important but because I’m one of thousands of people doing the same thing. Some of us are better than others. Some of us will last and some won’t. But collectively, we represent something that the old media cannot replicate: trust earned through independence, sustained by an audience that chose to be there rather than one that was inherited from a distribution monopoly built in the twentieth century.

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Who tells the story

The question has never been whether News Corp is biased. Everyone knows it’s biased. The question is whether the bias matters. And the answer, increasingly, is that it doesn’t. Not because bias is acceptable but because the audience has moved. The people who read The Daily Telegraph were going to vote the way they voted regardless of what the front page said. The people who watch Sky After Dark were already converted. The people who listen to Stefanovic’s podcast already agree with his guests. None of these platforms are persuading anyone of anything. They’re confirming what their audience already believes, and the audience that doesn’t believe it has gone somewhere else.

The somewhere else is fragmented, scrappy, underfunded and sometimes unreliable. It doesn’t have the polish of a News Corp masthead or the production values of a Nine broadcast. But it has something the old media has lost and cannot recover: the trust of people under 40. That trust was not given freely. It was earned by people who said what they actually thought, who didn’t have a proprietor telling them what to write, who didn’t have an advertising department telling them what not to say, and who built their audiences one subscriber at a time because they had no other option.

The future of Australian political media is not a masthead. It’s not a podcast hosted by a breakfast television presenter trying to be Joe Rogan. It’s a thousand independent voices, unevenly distributed, inconsistently funded, saying the things the old media won’t say because the old media can’t say them without biting the hand that owns them.

The old media is bellowing from the sidelines. The game has moved. The people telling the story now are the people who lived it. That’s not a revolution. It’s just what happens when a monopoly stops being useful.

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Jim Chalmers stood at the dispatch box last night and announced changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. The CGT discount is being replaced with an indexation model from 1 July 2027, with a minimum 30 per cent tax on gains. That change applies to everyone, which is fair enough. But negative gearing is a different story. From 1 July 2027, negative gearing on residential property will be limited to new builds only. And every property owned or under contract before 7:30pm on budget night is fully grandfathered. If you already own an investment property, your negative gearing deductions continue indefinitely. Chalmers framed this as fairness. “People have already made decisions,” he said. The government needed to “respect those decisions.”

People have already made decisions. Remember that phrase. We’re going to come back to it.

Three weeks ago, Health Minister Mark Butler announced that 160,000 people will be removed from the NDIS. The scheme’s participant base will be reduced from 760,000 to 600,000 by the end of the decade. Social and community participation funding will be cut by 30 per cent, starting July 1 this year. Average plan costs will be reduced from $31,000 to $26,000. Eligibility will shift from diagnosis-based to functional capacity assessments, meaning people who currently qualify under their diagnosis may no longer qualify under the new criteria.

These people made decisions too. They structured their lives around NDIS support. They moved into housing that their NDIS funding made possible. They took on employment because their support workers enabled them to get there. They enrolled their children in programs. They built routines, relationships and daily structures on the assumption that the support they were assessed as needing would continue. Disability activist Jarrod Sandell-Hay, who relies on the NDIS to manage his cerebral palsy, called it “a dark day.” Inclusion Australia’s CEO said: “You can’t burn the house down until there’s somewhere else for people to go.”

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Nobody grandfathered them. Nobody stood at a dispatch box and said “these people have already made decisions and we need to respect those decisions.” The 160,000 people being removed from the scheme are being removed, full stop. The replacement system, called “foundational supports,” doesn’t exist yet. The states haven’t agreed to fund it. The details haven’t been developed. But the cuts start in July.

So let’s talk about who gets protected when the rules change in this country, and who doesn’t.

In 2023, HECS debts were indexed at 7.1 per cent, the highest rate since 1990. Students who took on debt under the assumption of low, stable indexation saw their balances blow out overnight. A graduate with $26,500 in debt had more than $1,800 added in a single year. These people had made decisions. They enrolled in degrees. They took on government loans. They planned repayments based on the system as it existed. Nobody grandfathered them. The government eventually adjusted the indexation retrospectively, but only after a national backlash and only after the damage had already been done.

In 2017, the pension age was raised from 65 to 67. People who had spent their entire working lives planning to retire at 65 were told to keep going. They had made decisions. They had saved. They had structured their superannuation, their mortgages, their working patterns around a retirement age that had been set for decades. Nobody grandfathered them. The pension age moved and they moved with it.

In the same year, superannuation contribution caps were slashed. The non-concessional cap went from $180,000 a year to $100,000. A $1.6 million transfer balance cap was introduced. People who had structured their retirement savings around the old rules, often on the advice of financial planners who were working within the existing system, had the goalposts moved overnight. Nobody grandfathered them. The government explicitly acknowledged the changes were retrospective but argued they were necessary.

Also in 2017, Australians living overseas were suddenly required to repay HECS based on worldwide income. People who had moved abroad under rules that said they didn’t have to repay while overseas had the rules changed mid-stream. They had made decisions. They had built careers in other countries on the assumption that their HECS debt would sit dormant until they returned. Nobody grandfathered them.

The pattern is obvious. When the rules change and the people affected are students, retirees, disabled Australians, or workers who moved overseas, there is no grandfathering. There is no standing at a podium talking about “respecting decisions.” The goalposts move. People adjust. The government says it’s necessary and moves on.

When the rules change and the people affected are property investors, suddenly we need to protect them. Suddenly their decisions are sacred. Suddenly the government discovers a deep and abiding respect for the principle that people should not be disadvantaged by retrospective policy changes, a principle it has cheerfully ignored every other time it’s changed the rules on everyone else.

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Let me be clear about what grandfathering actually does here. Treasury’s own notes say that over half of negatively geared properties are sold or become positively geared within four to five years. Seventy-five per cent within ten years. The grandfathering has a natural expiry date. But in the meantime, the investors who have benefited most from the existing system get to keep benefiting while everyone else waits. The revenue that would be generated by applying the changes to all properties from 1 July 2027 is delayed by years. The housing market correction that would flow from removing the tax incentive to speculate on residential property is softened to the point of irrelevance. The “intergenerational fairness” that Chalmers invoked is deferred to the next generation, which is the opposite of what intergenerational fairness means.

If you genuinely believe negative gearing on existing housing is inflating prices and locking out an entire generation, and Chalmers says he does, then grandfathering is an admission that you’re not willing to actually fix it. You’re willing to announce the fix. You’re willing to take the credit for the fix. But you’re not willing to impose the fix on the people who benefit most from the distortion, because those people vote, donate, and own the properties that the political class also owns.

Either the policy is right or it isn’t. If negative gearing is inflating house prices, it’s doing it right now, through properties that were purchased before 7:30pm last night, not just through properties that will be purchased after July next year. Grandfathering a policy you’ve just argued is harmful is not fairness. It’s sacrificing working people to the gods of passive income.

160,000 people are about to lose their disability support. Nobody asked whether they’d made decisions. Nobody asked whether their lives were structured around the rules as they existed. Nobody offered them a grandfathering clause.

But property investors? Property investors had made decisions.

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Somewhere in western Sydney, a concrete slab is being poured for a building that will never think. It won’t create anything. It won’t cure anything. It will sit on a piece of land that used to be farmland, draw more electricity than a small city, and store the mathematical predictions of machines that are trained to guess what word comes next in a sentence. This is a data centre. There are hundreds of them being built around the world right now. Thousands more are planned. They are the physical infrastructure of the AI boom, and the amount of money being poured into them is so large it has started to warp the global economy.

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have committed to spending $650 billion in 2025 and 2026 on AI infrastructure. Most of that money is going into data centres. In the United States alone, 12 gigawatts of new data centre capacity was promised for 2026. Only a third has broken ground. Only 20 per cent will be operational by the end of the year. Half of all planned US data centre builds have been delayed or cancelled. The 7 gigawatt shortfall is equivalent to 30 to 70 large AI training facilities that were promised, funded, and announced but will not exist on schedule.

The bottleneck is not money. There is plenty of money. The bottleneck is reality. You cannot build a gigawatt-scale data centre without power, and the American electricity grid cannot deliver power fast enough. In Northern Virginia, connecting a large data centre to the grid takes up to seven years. Transformers, switchgear and batteries are in short supply globally, partly because the same components are needed for electric vehicles and home electrification. Communities in at least ten US states have proposed moratoriums on new data centres because of water use, grid strain and environmental damage. A proposed $1 billion Meta facility in Michigan was cancelled after months of public opposition. OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate project in Texas, the centrepiece of America’s AI ambitions, is the most prominent casualty.

The money, however, keeps flowing. The four hyperscalers have not cut their spending. They can’t. The strategic logic of the AI arms race means that slowing down is a bigger risk than overspending. So the capital is committed 24 to 36 months ahead of delivery, at the land acquisition stage, before a single server rack is installed. Committed supply has increased six times since 2019. Operational capacity has grown far more slowly. The gap between what has been promised and what has been built is widening every quarter.

Analysts at Bernstein, Goldman Sachs and TD Cowen have all flagged the timing mismatch as a hidden risk. A six-month construction delay on a typical data centre project cuts the return on investment almost in half. When dollars are committed but the facilities slip by a year or two, the depreciation schedules, the return-on-capital maths and the AI revenue projections all have to be quietly reworked. The companies don’t talk about this publicly because admitting that half your builds are delayed would crater your share price. So the capital expenditure guidance stays firm, the press releases keep coming, and the gap between what investors think they’re buying and what physically exists keeps growing.

This is what a bubble looks like. Not in the stock price. In the concrete. In the steel. In the half-finished shells sitting on industrial land waiting for a grid connection that’s years away. The buildings are the bubble. And if the AI revenue that’s supposed to justify them doesn’t materialise on the timeline investors expect, the buildings become monuments to the most expensive misallocation of capital since the dot-com crash.

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The Australian exposure

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Australia is now one of the top five data centre markets in the world. Amazon has committed $20 billion to Australian data centres, the largest technology investment in the country’s history. Microsoft has committed $5 billion. Blackstone paid $24 billion for AirTrunk. Industry estimates suggest Australia needs roughly $26 billion in new data centre investment this decade.

The ASX has a growing ecosystem of companies riding this wave. NextDC raised $1.5 billion in April and is building a $2 billion “AI Factory” in Melbourne. Goodman Group, once an industrial property company, now has 73 per cent of its $14.4 billion development pipeline in data centres, up from 40 per cent eighteen months ago. Macquarie Technology hosts 42 per cent of the Australian Federal Government’s data. Infratil’s CDC arm signed a 555 megawatt deal, the largest data centre contract in Australian history. DigiCo Infrastructure REIT listed at $5.00 and has already fallen to $2.28.

If you have Australian superannuation, you almost certainly own these companies. They’re in the index funds that your default super option invests in. When Goodman Group pivots 73 per cent of its pipeline to data centres, your retirement savings are pivoting with it. When NextDC raises $1.5 billion for a facility that depends on AI demand materialising on schedule, your super is part of the capital being deployed. Nobody asked you. Nobody told you. But the same timing mismatch that’s hitting the US applies here. Capital committed years ahead of delivery. Valuations dependent on builds happening on time. And the same global supply chain constraints (transformers, switchgear, grid connections) affecting every market simultaneously.

The DigiCo share price is the canary. Listed in late 2024 at $5.00, it’s now trading at $2.28. More than half its value gone in eighteen months. The company owns 13 data centre facilities across Australia and North America. It’s not a speculative start-up. It’s a real estate investment trust that owns actual buildings with actual tenants. And the market has cut it in half because the growth story isn’t materialising fast enough. If that’s happening to a company with real assets and real revenue, what happens to the companies whose valuations are built on facilities that haven’t been built yet?

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The China contrast

Meanwhile, China is doing AI differently. DeepSeek trained its R1 model for approximately $6 million. OpenAI spent roughly $100 million on GPT-4. DeepSeek’s API costs approximately 1/180th of equivalent GPT pricing. Chinese AI models run at one-sixth to one-quarter the cost of American systems. This is not a temporary subsidy. It’s structural.

The Chinese approach is efficiency over scale. Instead of building gigawatt campuses that drain entire grid systems, Chinese companies are optimising algorithms to do more with less. DeepSeek’s architecture activates only 37 billion of its 671 billion parameters per query, slashing compute requirements while maintaining performance. The Chinese government subsidises electricity for data centres. Provinces like Gansu, Guizhou and Inner Mongolia offer to slash cloud providers’ power costs. The entire ecosystem is designed to turn the constraint of limited hardware into an advantage of superior efficiency.

And now China is building a parallel chip ecosystem. DeepSeek’s V4 model runs on Huawei’s Ascend chips rather than Nvidia hardware. Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have collectively ordered hundreds of thousands of Huawei processors. China is no longer dependent on the American chip supply chain that the US spent years trying to weaponise through export controls. The sanctions designed to cripple Chinese AI have instead produced an industry that’s leaner, cheaper and increasingly self-sufficient.

Two AI ecosystems are forming. One is American, built on $650 billion in capital expenditure, gigawatt data centres that can’t be connected to the grid, and a growth story that depends on physical infrastructure being delivered on time. The other is Chinese, built on algorithmic efficiency, domestic chips, subsidised power and a fraction of the capital. One of these approaches looks like an empire building monuments. The other looks like an insurgency travelling light.

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The environmental cost

Data centres consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. A single large facility can use as much water as a small town. The grid strain is real. In Virginia, data centres are competing with households for electricity. In Australia, the promise is that renewable energy will power these facilities, but the renewable capacity doesn’t exist yet at the scale required. Amazon’s 11 solar and wind projects in Australia will generate 1.4 million megawatt hours annually. That sounds impressive until you realise that a single hyperscale data centre can consume 500,000 megawatt hours a year. The maths doesn’t add up. Not yet. Maybe not ever at the scale being promised.

Communities are pushing back. Moratoriums in ten US states. Cancelled projects in Michigan. Local opposition in Virginia, where the concentration of data centres has fundamentally changed the character of entire counties. In Australia, the conversation hasn’t started yet. But it will, because the same dynamics apply. The water. The power. The land. The heat. Data centres generate enormous amounts of waste heat. In a country that’s already getting hotter, that’s not a trivial consideration.

The questions

The money has been committed. The builds are underway, or announced, or delayed, or cancelled. The valuations have been set. Your super fund is invested. The question is simple: what happens if the AI revenue doesn’t arrive on schedule?

What happens if the models plateau? What happens if the efficiency gains that China is demonstrating make gigawatt campuses unnecessary? What happens if the grid connections don’t come through and half these facilities sit empty? What happens if the bubble is not in the stock price but in the concrete?

You get shells. Beautiful, expensive, climate-controlled shells dotting the industrial landscape from western Sydney to northern Virginia. Buildings that were supposed to house the future, standing empty, drawing no power, generating no revenue, depreciating on balance sheets that your retirement savings are exposed to.

Nobody is asking these questions loudly enough. The capital keeps flowing. The press releases keep coming. The ASX companies keep raising billions. And somewhere in western Sydney, they’re pouring another slab.

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The Liberals and the Nationals polled a combined 20 per cent in the Farrer by-election on Saturday. Twenty per cent. In a seat they’ve held for eight decades. One Nation’s David Farley won with 41 per cent. The independent Helen Milthorpe came second with 28 per cent. The two parties that have held Farrer since the seat was established finished behind both of them.

Antony Green, who has been calling Australian elections longer than most politicians have been in parliament, said the result was “so bad it could rule out any possibility of the Coalition winning a majority in its own right.” He then asked the question that nobody in the Liberal Party seems willing to answer: “If One Nation sweeps up Coalition rural and regional seats, what is the alternative government to Labor?”

Three days earlier, on Thursday, the English local elections delivered the same message in a different accent. Reform UK won 1,428 council seats, up from two. The Conservatives lost 552 seats and finished third. The national equivalent vote: Reform 27 per cent, Conservatives 20 per cent. The same number. Twenty per cent. Two countries, the same week, the same humiliation, the same number.

Kemi Badenoch responded by saying on Friday morning she’d be “happy” to see Conservative and Reform councillors collaborating. By Saturday morning she’d reversed herself. The leader of the Conservative Party cannot hold a position on the most important strategic question facing her party for longer than it takes the papers to print it.

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This is what happens when a major party spends years chasing a populist insurgency on its own turf. The Conservatives tried to be Reform. They spent £240 million on a Rwanda deportation scheme that removed nobody involuntarily. They abandoned net zero. They picked every culture war fight Farage demanded. Reform ate them anyway, because voters who want the harder line will always prefer the party that was there first.

Angus Taylor is making the same mistake. His “Australian Values Migration Plan,” modelled on ICE, his social media screening for visa applicants, his entire rhetorical posture since taking the leadership, is an attempt to occupy One Nation’s ground. Farrer just showed him what that gets you. Twenty per cent. In your own heartland.

And here’s the detail that should terrify both major parties. On the night One Nation won Farrer, Hanson’s gas policy was front and centre. A 15 per cent domestic gas reservation. Royalties levied at the point of production based on volume, not profits. One Nation introduced a domestic gas reserve bill in the Senate and Labor blocked it from even being debated. Seventy-five per cent of Farrer voters support a 25 per cent gas export tax. One Nation campaigned on resource nationalism and won. On gas, the populist right is now outflanking Labor from the left. Read that again. One Nation is to the left of the Australian Labor Party on gas. That is where we are.

The thing that frustrates me is that the path back is obvious. I’ve written about it before and I’m not going to rehash the full argument, but the short version is this: the gap in Australian politics is not to the right of One Nation. There is no gap there. One Nation owns that space and always will. The gap is to the left of Labor, on the specific issues where Labor is captured, cautious, and completely out of step with what voters actually want. The war. The gas tax. Housing. These are issues where polling consistently shows massive public support for positions that Labor refuses to take because of donor relationships, institutional inertia, or political cowardice. A Liberal leader willing to occupy that ground would be running in open space.

Andrew Hastie has shown he understands this. He went on Insiders earlier this year and broke ranks on housing, on tax reform, and most significantly on the war. He said the Iran war was a miscalculation. He said he wouldn’t send his brother into the Strait of Hormuz. He openly questioned forty years of Liberal energy policy. He positioned himself as a conservative who could read the electorate rather than the donor list. That interview was a blueprint for a Liberal Party that could actually compete: not by shouting louder than One Nation on immigration, but by occupying the ground Labor has vacated on the issues that matter most to the people the Liberals are losing. The war that most Australians don’t support. The gas tax that most Australians do. The housing crisis that’s locking out an entire generation. These aren’t left-wing positions. They’re popular positions. Labor has finally moved on CGT and negative gearing, but only after a war blew a hole in the budget. The gas tax, which is even more popular, remains untouched. Hastie showed you can talk about the things that matter to voters without waiting for a crisis to force your hand. Hastie showed you can talk about them and survive. Taylor looked at that blueprint and decided to announce an ICE-style deportation plan instead. Farrer is the consequence.

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But here’s the thing that the Farrer result and the UK results together tell you, and it’s bigger than the question of Liberal Party strategy. The traditional conservative party, as a concept, is dying in the anglosphere. The Conservatives are a third party in Britain. The Liberals just polled 20 per cent in their own seat. In Canada, Poilievre ran a “Canada First” campaign that his own side’s campaign manager described as “giving off Trump-like vibes” and lost to the Liberals despite increasing his vote share, then lost his own seat. Three countries, three conservative leaders, three variations of the same failure: mimicking the populist right and discovering it doesn’t work. The Coalition’s model of holding rural and regional Australia while competing for suburban seats has been shattered. One Nation takes the regions. The teals and the Greens take the suburbs. What’s left?

The answer, right now, is not much. And the response from both the Australian Liberals and the British Conservatives has been to accelerate into the skid. Chase the populist right harder. Talk tougher on immigration. Abandon the centre. Hope that if you shout loud enough, the people leaving will come back.

They won’t. The UK just proved it. 1,428 seats for Reform. The harder the Conservatives chased, the faster the voters ran. The Australian Liberals are about to learn the same lesson, one by-election at a time.

Meanwhile, the Greens gained 363 council seats in England on Thursday. They’re polling at 14 per cent nationally. In Australia, the trajectory is slower but the direction is the same. The two-party system isn’t being replaced by a one-party system. It’s being replaced by a fragmented parliament where major parties need coalition partners to govern, where independents and minor parties hold the balance, and where the old certainties about who wins what seat have evaporated.

That’s not a crisis. It might actually be democracy working the way it’s supposed to. The problem is that the major parties, all of them, are still behaving as though the old rules apply. As though Farrer is a safe seat. As though 20 per cent is a blip. As though the voters will come home.

They’re not coming home. They’ve already moved. The question is whether the parties are capable of moving with them, or whether they’ll stand in the empty house and wonder where everyone went.

Twenty per cent. In Farrer. Remember that number.

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There’s a passage in Revelation where four riders appear on horseback. A white horse for conquest. A red horse for war. A black horse for famine. A pale horse for death. The horsemen don’t arrive separately. They ride together. Each one creates the conditions for the next. War produces famine. Famine produces pestilence. Pestilence produces death. The sequence is the point. You don’t get one without the others.

I’ve been writing about this administration for weeks now, one crisis at a time. The war. The inflation. The fuel. The interest rates. The shipping lanes. But standing back and looking at the full picture, the thing that strikes me is how completely the pattern maps onto the oldest catastrophe narrative in Western civilisation. This isn’t metaphor for the sake of drama. It’s a structural observation. The Trump administration has produced all four horsemen. In order. Each one feeding the next.

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War

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. The stated objective was to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. The actual objective, as far as anyone can determine, was to reassert American military dominance in the Gulf at the urging of an Israeli government that needed an existential threat to justify its own survival.

The war has now lasted over two months. The US destroyed 158 Iranian naval vessels. It sank every Iranian submarine. It dropped 5,000-pound bunker busters on hardened missile sites. It killed the Supreme Leader. By every conventional military metric, it won.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Iran is still attacking the UAE. The toll system operates in yuan. 1,500 commercial ships are stranded. This week the US launched Operation Project Freedom to force the Strait open. It lasted less than 36 hours before Trump paused it because Iranian “pea shooters” made it untenable. On Tuesday, Rubio declared the war “over.” He called Iran’s leaders “insane in the brain.” He said the War Powers Act is “100 percent unconstitutional.” Even a Newsmax reporter asked Hegseth when the president decided to capitulate.

The war is not over. It has simply moved beyond the phase where American military power can influence the outcome. Iran controls a 34-kilometre strait and no amount of sunk submarines changes the geography. The red horse rode out in February. It hasn’t come back.

Famine

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut off approximately one-fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and a third of global fertiliser trade. Urea prices spiked 50 per cent. Australia imports over 60 per cent of its urea through the Strait. The autumn wheat planting was compromised. Diesel powers the trucks that move the food, the tractors that plant it, and the ships that carry the fertiliser that grows it. When diesel doubles, everything doubles. Not immediately. With a lag. The lag is now arriving.

In Australia, inflation hit 4.6 per cent in March. Fuel rose 32.8 per cent in a single month. Food prices are climbing. A family of four is paying roughly $3,600 more this year for the same life. The RBA has raised rates three times, punishing mortgage holders and renters for an inflationary shock that has nothing to do with domestic demand and everything to do with a war they didn’t vote for.

Globally, the picture is worse. Oil above $100 a barrel. Supply chains disrupted. Shipping routes rerouted at enormous cost. The fertiliser lag means the worst of the food price shock hasn’t hit yet. It will arrive in the second half of the year, when the crops planted with more expensive inputs (or not planted at all) come to harvest. The black horse rode out in March. The hunger follows.

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Pestilence

A Dutch cruise ship called the MV Hondius left Argentina on April 1 carrying 147 passengers and crew. By April 11, a man was dead. By April 26, three people had died and several more were critically ill. The Andes strain of hantavirus, one of the only hantaviruses capable of human-to-human transmission, was confirmed. The ship is currently stranded off Cape Verde. The Canary Islands refused to let it dock. Forty passengers disembarked at St Helena before the outbreak was fully understood and are now scattered across multiple countries. The WHO is tracing 80 people on a flight with an infected passenger. A case has been confirmed in Switzerland. Another in the Netherlands.

Here is the detail that matters. In 2025, the Trump administration fired every full-time civilian inspector in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program. Every single one. This was the team responsible for investigating cruise ship outbreaks, conducting health inspections, coordinating with state and local health departments, and maintaining the databases that track disease on vessels. The programme wasn’t even funded by taxpayers. The cruise lines paid for it. Trump’s people gutted it anyway, under the direction of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who has spent his career questioning the safety of vaccines and who now oversees the nation’s public health infrastructure.

One trainee epidemiologist remains. Nearly 200 inspections were conducted last year. The programme that would have caught this outbreak earlier, that would have coordinated the response, that would have tracked the passengers, was deliberately dismantled twelve months before the outbreak happened.

This is not a coincidence in the conspiratorial sense. Nobody planned a hantavirus outbreak. But when you systematically destroy the systems designed to detect, contain and respond to disease outbreaks on ships, and then a disease outbreak happens on a ship, the connection is not mysterious. It’s causal. You removed the fire alarm and now the building is burning.

The pale green horse of pestilence didn’t appear from nowhere. It was invited by people who believed public health infrastructure was bureaucratic waste.

Death

The fourth horseman doesn’t need his own section. He’s in all the others.

He’s in the 170 children killed when a strike hit an elementary school in the first week of the Iran war. He’s in the tens of thousands dead in Gaza, the thousands dead in Lebanon, the hundreds killed by settlers and soldiers in the West Bank. He’s in the crew members who died on stranded ships waiting for a strait that never reopened. He’s in the three passengers on the MV Hondius who would probably be alive if the people responsible for monitoring disease on cruise ships hadn’t been fired by a man who thinks vaccines cause autism. He’s in the families paying $700 more a month on their mortgage and choosing between the doctor and the grocery shop. He’s in the Iranian civilians forming human chains around their power plants. He’s in the 14 million people who volunteered to be human shields because their government couldn’t protect them and nobody else would.

Death is not a separate horseman in the Trump administration. Death is the compound interest on the other three.

The ride

The horsemen ride together. That’s the point of the allegory. War closes the Strait. The closed Strait causes famine. The gutted public health system fails to contain pestilence. And death accumulates in all of them, quietly, in hospital wards and on stranded ships and in kitchens where people are doing maths they shouldn’t have to do.

This is one administration. One set of decisions. One president who started a war he couldn’t finish, destroyed the public health infrastructure that might have contained the collateral damage, and is now calling the weapons that defeated his navy “pea shooters” while his Secretary of State begs the United Nations for help after spending years trying to burn it down.

Four horsemen. One man sent them all.

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On Sunday, Trump announced Operation Project Freedom. On Monday morning US time, it launched. The mission: use the US Navy to force open the Strait of Hormuz and restore commercial shipping. The Pentagon held a press conference. Pete Hegseth called it “defensive in nature, focused in scope, temporary in duration.” CENTCOM said it had “just begun.” Two American-flagged merchant ships made it through.

By Tuesday evening, Trump had paused the operation. Less than 36 hours. The most powerful navy in human history launched a mission to open a shipping lane and abandoned it before the week was out because Iran fired cruise missiles at US warships, launched drones at commercial vessels, and hit the UAE with 12 ballistic missiles, 3 cruise missiles and 4 drones. The US sank seven Iranian boats. Iran set the Fujairah oil refinery on fire. 1,500 commercial ships remain stranded.

Trump called the Iranian boats “pea shooters.” He said Iran has no navy left. “You know why? Because they don’t have any boats anymore.” This from the man who just paused his own operation because those pea shooters made it untenable.

Two questions.

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Has America lost this war?

The United States destroyed 158 Iranian naval vessels. It sank every Iranian submarine. It dropped 5,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on hardened missile sites along the Strait. It killed the Supreme Leader. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood at a White House podium on Tuesday and declared Operation Epic Fury “over,” saying “we achieved the objectives of that operation.”

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Iran is still attacking the UAE. The toll system is still operating. 1,500 ships are still waiting. Oil is still above $100 a barrel. The IRGC has issued a new map with an expanded Iranian area of control and warned that any ship violating its corridors will face a “decisive response.” Iran’s Foreign Minister called Project Freedom “Project Deadlock.” He’s not wrong.

The US won every engagement. It destroyed Iran’s conventional navy. It achieved total military dominance in every measurable sense. And it cannot get commercial shipping through a 34-kilometre-wide strait. Iran doesn’t need a navy. It needs drones, cruise missiles, sea mines and fast boats. It needs the willingness to keep firing at ships until the insurance premiums make transit impossible regardless of how many escorts the US provides. As one defence analyst put it, “the risk profile for vessels and crews remains unchanged” no matter what the US military does.

This is what losing looks like when you’ve won every battle. You declare the war over from a podium. You rename the operation. You call the enemy’s weapons “pea shooters.” And the strait stays closed.

Rubio’s declaration that Epic Fury is “over” is also conveniently timed. The 60-day threshold for congressional war authorisation is approaching. By declaring the combat operation finished and rebranding what follows as a “defensive operation” to guide ships, the administration avoids having to ask Congress for permission to continue a war it insists has already ended. When a reporter pointed this out, Rubio responded that the War Powers Act is “100 percent unconstitutional.” They didn’t end the war. They renamed it. And when the law says they need permission to keep fighting, they declared the law itself invalid.

At the same press conference, Rubio called Iran’s leaders “insane in the brain.” This is the Secretary of State. This is diplomacy in 2026.

Even Newsmax, the administration’s house network, isn’t buying it. A Newsmax reporter asked Hegseth directly: “When did the president decide to capitulate?” When your own propaganda outlet is using the word capitulate, the narrative has collapsed.

Meanwhile, Iran’s own president Pezeshkian is reportedly furious with the IRGC for launching the UAE strikes without civilian government approval. He described them as “completely irresponsible.” The civilian government and the military are publicly split. This matters because it suggests Iran’s negotiating position is genuine even while the IRGC keeps shooting. There are people in Tehran who want a deal. There are people in Tehran with missiles who don’t care what those people want. The US is negotiating with one while being attacked by the other and pretending both are the same entity.

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Why does America suddenly care about international law?

On Tuesday, Rubio proposed a new UN Security Council resolution declaring Iran’s closure of the Strait and its toll system a violation of international law. He said Iran “continues to hold the world’s economy hostage” and that its actions threaten global commerce.

This is the same administration that withdrew from the International Criminal Court. The same administration that defunded UNRWA while Palestinian refugees starved. The same administration that vetoed every UN resolution critical of Israel during the Gaza war, the Lebanon invasion, and the initial strikes on Iran. The same administration whose ambassador to the UN laughed at the General Assembly. The same president who gave himself a FIFA peace prize and then started a war.

International law, for this administration, has never been a principle. It’s a tool you pick up when the other tools stop working. Military force failed to open the Strait. Economic blockade hasn’t brought Iran to its knees. Sanctions haven’t produced the regime change they were designed for. So now, having spent years burning the international rules-based order to the ground, they’re standing in the ashes asking the UN to please help them enforce it.

The hypocrisy would be funny if the consequences weren’t so severe. Every country sitting in that Security Council chamber knows what’s happening. China knows. Russia knows. The Global South knows. The country that has done more than any other in the 21st century to undermine international institutions is now invoking those institutions because it has run out of alternatives. The credibility required to make that case was spent a long time ago. You can’t burn the rulebook for a decade and then complain when someone else stops following the rules.

Iran’s foreign minister put it simply: “There’s no military solution to a political crisis.” He’s right about that too. The political crisis is that the US started a war it couldn’t finish, declared victory from a podium, and is now watching the country it “defeated” control the most important shipping lane on earth with drones and fast boats and the one thing the US military can’t destroy: geographic advantage.

The Strait of Hormuz is 34 kilometres wide. Iran sits on one side of it. That fact doesn’t change no matter how many submarines you sink or press conferences you hold. The pea shooters keep firing. The ships keep waiting. And the most powerful country in the world keeps finding new ways to say it won.

It hasn’t.

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The Reserve Bank raised interest rates again yesterday. The third consecutive hike this year. The cash rate is now 4.35 per cent. If you have a $600,000 variable mortgage, you’re paying roughly $700 more a month than you were at the start of the year. If you’re renting, your landlord has a mortgage too, and they’re passing the cost on. Either way, you’re paying more for the same roof over your head because of a war in the Middle East that you didn’t vote for, didn’t cause, and can’t stop.

The RBA knows this. In their own statement, they acknowledged that the inflation is being driven by “the conflict in the Middle East” and the “expected inflationary implications” of oil supply disruption. They said a “longer or more severe conflict could put further upward pressure on global energy prices.” They said the quiet part out loud: this inflation is not because the economy is overheating. It’s because a war closed the Strait of Hormuz, and fuel got expensive, and that expense is flowing through to everything else.

And then they raised rates anyway. Because it’s the only lever they’ve got.

This is the problem. Interest rates are a demand-side tool. They work by making borrowing more expensive, which reduces spending, which cools demand, which brings prices down. If the economy is running too hot because people are spending too much money, raising rates makes sense. It’s a brake pedal. You slow things down.

But this inflation isn’t caused by too much spending. It’s caused by too little supply. Oil is expensive because a shipping lane is closed. Fuel is expensive because we import almost all of it and the supply has been disrupted. Food is getting more expensive because fertiliser costs have spiked and diesel powers the trucks that move the food. Electricity is up because government rebates expired. None of this has anything to do with how much money Australians are spending. You could cut consumer demand to zero and fuel would still be expensive because the Strait of Hormuz is still contested.

Raising rates in response to supply-side inflation is pointless.

Here’s who benefits from a rate hike. Banks. Their margins widen immediately. Anyone with significant cash savings earns more interest. Property investors with no mortgage and no debt collect higher rents because their tenants are absorbing the costs that leveraged landlords pass on. The wealthy, in short. The people who don’t need help. The people who will keep on spending and driving inflation up.

Here’s who gets hurt. Mortgage holders. Renters. Small businesses with variable-rate loans. First home buyers who were already priced out and are now priced further out. Young families. Single parents. Anyone whose monthly costs just went up by hundreds of dollars while their wages stayed flat. The RBA’s own governor said “we know that today’s decision makes things more difficult for a lot of people.” She’s right. She did it anyway.

And let’s talk about who is making these decisions. Michele Bullock earns $1.08 million a year in base salary. With super and entitlements, her total package is nearly $1.2 million. That’s almost twice what the Prime Minister earns. Her deputy earns $880,000. The assistant governors earn between $694,000 and $770,000. The part-time board members who vote on whether to raise your mortgage repayments are paid $34,000 for the privilege. These are not people who feel the consequences of their decisions. Nobody on the RBA board is lying awake wondering how to cover the extra $700 a month. Nobody on that board is choosing between the electricity bill and the grocery shop. They are insulated, completely, from the pain they are inflicting, and their institutional silence on fiscal alternatives is not neutrality. It is a choice. They could say publicly that rate hikes cannot fix supply-side inflation and that the government needs to act. They choose not to. That silence protects the government and punishes everyone else.

So what else could be done? If the lever the RBA is pulling is the wrong one, what are the right ones?

The gas export tax. I know. I keep saying it. But a 25 per cent tax on gas exports would raise $17 billion a year, which could fund direct cost-of-living relief without requiring the RBA to crush demand. It addresses the supply side of the equation by capturing revenue from the companies profiting from the crisis and redirecting it to the people being hurt by it. Australians support it. The government won’t do it.

Windfall profits taxes on energy companies. When oil prices spike because of a war, energy companies don’t become more efficient. They just make more money from the same product. A temporary windfall tax captures the excess profit and puts it back into the economy as relief. The UK did this during the Ukraine energy crisis. It’s not radical. It’s arithmetic.

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Price gouging regulation with teeth. The government doubled penalties for petrol price gouging in April. Good. But penalties only work if they’re enforced, and the ACCC has historically struggled to prosecute price gouging in a market dominated by a duopoly. Mandatory divestiture powers, the ability to break up companies that consistently gouge, would change the incentive structure overnight.

Direct fuel subsidies targeted at diesel. The excise cut helped petrol prices but barely touched diesel, which is 56 per cent of total oil product consumption and powers the trucks, the farms and the mining equipment. A targeted diesel subsidy for primary producers and freight operators would reduce the cost of moving food and goods without broadly stimulating demand.

Government investment in domestic refining capacity. This is the long-term fix. Australia closed four refineries in the last decade. We now import almost all of our refined fuel. Building domestic refining capacity, even at a modest scale, would reduce our dependence on imported fuel and insulate us from exactly the kind of supply shock we’re experiencing. It takes years, not months. But the fact that we haven’t started is the point.

None of these are perfect. Some of them would take time. Some of them are politically difficult. But all of them address the actual cause of the inflation, which is supply disruption, rather than the symptom, which is rising prices. The RBA is treating the symptom by punishing the patient. The government has the tools to treat the cause and is choosing not to use most of them.

The vote was 8-1 to raise rates. Eight members of the board looked at inflation caused by a war, acknowledged it was caused by a war, and decided the appropriate response was to make mortgages and rents more expensive for millions of Australians who had nothing to do with the war. One member dissented.

Westpac is forecasting two more hikes this year. If they’re right, the cash rate will hit 4.85 per cent by August. That’s the highest since 2008. For a family on a $600,000 mortgage, that’s an extra $12,000 a year compared to the start of 2025. Twelve thousand dollars. Not because they spent too much. Not because they were reckless. Because a war closed a shipping lane and the only institution with the power to respond decided to use the one tool that hurts the people who can least afford it.

There are other levers. The RBA just can’t reach them. The government can but won’t.

That’s the problem.

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Mick Lynch went on Newsnight last week and said something that stuck with me. “I’m not voting Green in this election because I still believe in a Labour movement.” He paused, then added: “Maybe they’ll be part of a bigger labour movement in the future.” In the same interview, he said it could be the end of the Labour Party.

He can see where this is heading. He just can’t bring himself to get there first.

I have enormous respect for Mick Lynch. He is one of the most effective communicators the British left has produced in a generation. He made industrial action cool. He took apart hostile journalists with the kind of working-class clarity that most politicians would sell their children for. He is the real thing. And his loyalty to the Labour movement, the movement, not the party, is genuine. It comes from a place that I understand. The labour movement built the world that people like Lynch and people like me grew up in. Weekends. Sick pay. Public education. The NHS. Medicare. The minimum wage. Workplace safety. Pensions. These things didn’t fall from the sky. They were fought for by working people who organised, who struck, who got arrested, who sometimes died, because they understood that capital would never voluntarily share the wealth it extracted from their labour.

That movement was one of the great achievements of modern civilisation. I mean that without a gram of irony. The idea that ordinary people could organise collectively to bargain with the people who employed them, and that governments should exist to protect that right rather than crush it, is as important as any constitutional principle or democratic institution. It changed the world. It made life liveable for hundreds of millions of people who would otherwise have been ground into the machinery of industrial capitalism and discarded.

But here is the question Lynch can’t quite answer, and it’s the question that matters more in 2026 than at any point in the last forty years. Is the party still the movement?

In Australia, the answer is no. It hasn’t been for a long time.

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The Australian Labor Party takes money from Woodside. It takes money from Santos. It takes money from the Minerals Council of Australia, which directed two-thirds of its $33 million in political donations to Labor over the last two decades. Adani, Hancock Prospecting and INPEX made a combined $1.51 million in contributions to both major parties before the last election. APPEA, the gas industry lobby group, donated to both sides while pushing for public money for carbon capture and storage. Santos, the company that would be most directly affected by a gas export tax, donated $83,360 to the ALP in a single financial year. Labor declared $67 million in donation receipts in 2021-22 and only provided the source details for $47 million. Twenty million dollars in donations they won’t tell you who they came from.

This is the party that won’t tax gas exports.

This is the party that still refuses to touch the one policy that 61 per cent of the country supports and 5 per cent opposes.

When Santos donates $83,000 to your party and you subsequently refuse to tax gas exports despite overwhelming public support, you are not a labour movement. You are a machine. A very effective machine, with excellent branding and a proud history and an incredible talent for convincing working people that it still represents their interests. But a machine nonetheless, one that exists to perpetuate itself, to win elections, and to service the relationships that fund its campaigns.

The revolving door tells you the rest. Politicians move from parliament to lobbying firms to corporate boards with the ease of someone changing seats at a dinner party. Former Labor defence ministers Kim Beazley and Stephen Smith both went through EY’s defence consulting arm. Labor senators retire and surface on the boards of the companies they were supposed to regulate. The system produces people who govern in the interests of the industries that will employ them after they leave government. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a career structure.

Lynch’s loyalty is to the movement that built the world he grew up in. I share that loyalty. The movement matters. The principles matter. Collective bargaining, public ownership, universal services, the redistribution of wealth from those who have too much to those who don’t have enough. These ideas are not outdated. They are more urgent now than they have been in decades, as AI reshapes the labour market, as the cost of living crisis deepens, as the gap between what working people earn and what it costs to exist continues to widen.

But the party is not the movement. The party is a vehicle. Vehicles wear out. They break down. They get captured by people who use them for purposes their builders never intended. When a vehicle stops taking you where you need to go, you don’t sit in it out of loyalty to the people who built it in 1891. You get out and find one that works.

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In the UK, people are getting out. The Greens are polling at 22 per cent, ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. In Australia, the Greens got more primary votes than Labor in the Newcastle mayoral election. In both countries, the pattern is the same. The traditional party of the working class has been captured by corporate donors, hollowed out by the revolving door, disciplined by billionaire-owned media, and rendered incapable of doing the things its base is begging it to do. The base is not moving right. The base is moving to whoever will actually do the thing.

Lynch said “maybe they’ll be part of a bigger labour movement in the future.” He’s right about that. The Greens, the independents, the community organisers, the union movement itself, the small parties, the content creators, the people who are building alternatives from the ground up because the machine stopped working for them. All of it is the labour movement now. The movement didn’t die. It outgrew the party. The party just hasn’t noticed yet.

If you take money from the companies that are profiting from the crisis your voters are living through, you are not a workers’ party. If you save your best policy for an election campaign while the people who voted for you are struggling, you are not a workers’ party. If your former ministers end up on the boards of the companies they were supposed to regulate, you are not a workers’ party. You are a machine. And machines, when they stop working for the people they were built to serve, get replaced.

The movement is alive. It’s just not where Mick Lynch, or most rusted-on Labor voters, are looking for it.

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Inflation hit 4.6 per cent in March. That’s the highest since September 2023. It was 3.7 per cent in February. In a single month, the number jumped by nearly a full percentage point. If you’ve been feeling like everything got more expensive overnight, it’s because it did.

The biggest driver is fuel. Automotive fuel rose 32.8 per cent in the month of March alone. That’s the largest monthly increase since the ABS started tracking it. Transport costs are up 8.9 per cent over the year. Housing is up 6.5 per cent, with electricity up 25.4 per cent after state and Commonwealth rebates expired. Goods inflation nearly doubled in a month, from 3.5 to 5.5 per cent. The war in the Middle East, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the disruption to global oil supply chains. All of it is now landing on your grocery receipt, your power bill, your petrol gauge and your rent.

Let me translate this into a kitchen table. If you’re a family of four earning a combined $140,000 and spending $1,500 a week on the basics (rent, food, fuel, utilities, transport), a 4.6 per cent annual increase means you’re paying roughly $3,600 more this year for the same life. That’s before the rate hikes that are almost certainly coming. If the RBA moves to 4.6 per cent as the futures market is pricing, your mortgage goes up too. Or your landlord’s mortgage goes up and they pass it on. Either way, you’re paying for a war you didn’t vote for with money you don’t have.

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Now. Credit where it’s due.

The government halved the fuel excise on April 1. That’s 26.3 cents off every litre, saving about $19 on a 65-litre tank. They reduced the heavy vehicle road user charge to zero for three months so truckies aren’t bearing the full cost. They doubled penalties for price gouging. They released 20 per cent of the strategic fuel reserve for regional areas. They secured a supply agreement with Singapore. Chalmers estimates the package will knock about half a percentage point off headline inflation through the June quarter, at a cost of $2.55 billion. Petrol prices have dropped 12 to 25 cents a litre in the first week of April depending on where you live.

That’s a real policy response. It’s expensive, it’s temporary, and it expires on June 30, but it’s doing what it’s supposed to do right now. Regular people are saving money at the bowser this month because the government acted. I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t matter.

But. And you knew there was a but.

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Diesel is still approaching $3 a litre in parts of the country. Diesel powers the trucks that move the food. Diesel powers the mining equipment that generates the export revenue. Diesel is 56 per cent of Australia’s total oil product consumption. The excise cut helps petrol drivers. It barely touches the diesel problem. And when the cut expires in three months, the underlying pressure hasn’t gone anywhere. Oil is still above $100 a barrel. The Strait is still contested. The war hasn’t ended. The excise cut is a painkiller, not a cure.

The cure, or at least part of one, is sitting right there. Sixty-one per cent of Australians support a 25 per cent tax on gas exports. Five per cent oppose it. It would raise $17 billion a year. Every week of delay costs $350 million. I wrote about this last week and nothing has changed except the inflation number, which has made the case even stronger. The government is spending $2.55 billion on a temporary excise cut. A gas export tax would generate nearly seven times that amount every year, permanently. The excuse that it would antagonise trading partners is wearing thin when those same trading partners are watching us export gas at a fraction of what it’s worth while our own citizens can’t afford to fill their cars.

If Albanese is saving the gas tax for an election campaign, as many suspect, then I have a simple question. You have the largest parliamentary majority in a generation. Inflation just hit 4.6 per cent. Fuel rose 32.8 per cent in a single month. Families are paying $3,600 more a year for the same life. The NDIS is being cut. Disability services are being reduced. And you’re sitting on a policy that practically nobody opposes, that would fund everything you say you can’t afford, because you want to announce it at a campaign launch with a slogan and a jingle? Is now really the time to be playing politics?

Which brings me to Angus Taylor, who has spent the last month criticising the government’s handling of the fuel crisis with the confidence of a man who has apparently forgotten his own career.

This is the bloke who was Energy Minister when four Australian oil refineries closed. Under his watch, Australia’s refining capacity shrank to the point where we now import almost all of our refined fuel. This is the bloke who, in 2020, signed the deal to store Australia’s strategic petroleum reserves in the United States. Our emergency fuel supply, physically located in the country that started the war that caused this crisis. This is the bloke who resisted domestic gas reservation, fought against intervention in the gas market, and championed the same export-first, refine-overseas, import-everything model that has left us exposed to exactly the kind of supply shock we’re now experiencing.

Taylor doesn’t get to complain about fuel prices. He built the vulnerability. Every refinery that closed on his watch is a refinery that could be producing fuel domestically right now. Every litre of strategic reserve sitting in an American storage facility is a litre we can’t access without Washington’s permission. Every policy decision he made as Energy Minister optimised for the short-term interests of gas exporters at the expense of the long-term energy security of the country he now claims to want to lead.

And what is his alternative? What is his plan? An “Australian Values Migration Plan” modelled on ICE. Social media screening for visa applicants. A race war dressed up as border security. The country is paying 32.8 per cent more for fuel because of decisions he made and he wants to talk about immigration. He wants to talk about values. He wants to talk about anything other than the fact that he personally, as the responsible minister, made Australia less safe, less resilient and less capable of withstanding exactly this kind of crisis.

The inflation number is 4.6. It will probably get worse before it gets better. The government deserves credit for the excise cut and criticism for everything it’s not doing. The opposition deserves nothing but contempt from a man whose record is the reason the crisis is this bad. And somewhere in Canberra, a 25 per cent gas export tax sits on a shelf, gathering dust, waiting for an election that might not come soon enough for the families who needed it yesterday.

4.6. Remember that number. It’s going to get bigger.

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Yesterday I watched a reel by the critical theorist Louisa Munch, in which she made a distinction that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. She was talking about Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the difference between nationalism and patriotism. It’s a distinction most people think they understand, but almost nobody applies correctly, and once you see it through Freire’s lens, it reframes everything. Including everything I’ve been writing about this week.

So let me try to lay it out.

Patriotism is love of your country. Your actual country. The people in it, the land under it, the systems that keep it functioning, the communities that make it liveable. Patriotism is wanting those things to be better. It is critical by nature because you can’t love something honestly without seeing its flaws. A patriot looks at their country and says: this is worth fighting for, and here is what needs to change. Patriotism is a parent’s love. It holds and it demands. It doesn’t look away.

Nationalism is love of an idea of your country. Not the country as it actually exists, but a mythologised version of it that serves the interests of whoever is doing the mythologising. Nationalism doesn’t want the country to be better. It wants the country to be purer. It is not critical. It cannot be, because criticism implies imperfection and nationalism cannot tolerate imperfection in the thing it worships. A nationalist looks at their country and says: this is already great, and anyone who disagrees is a threat.

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Freire understood this distinction at a structural level. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he describes how oppressive systems maintain themselves not through brute force alone but through the internalisation of the oppressor’s values by the oppressed. The people at the bottom of the hierarchy absorb the logic of the people at the top. They begin to see the world through the oppressor’s eyes. They police each other. They punish deviation. They mistake the system that subjugates them for the natural order of things.

Nationalism is this mechanism applied to national identity. It takes the interests of the powerful (the resource extractors, the arms dealers, the property speculators, the media owners) and repackages them as the identity of the nation. “Australia” becomes not the 27 million people who live here but a set of symbols and narratives that serve a very specific set of interests. The flag. The ANZAC myth. The troops. The border. “Australian values” as defined by people who wouldn’t survive a week in the communities they claim to speak for. Once that repackaging is complete, any criticism of the powerful becomes an attack on the nation itself. You’re not questioning a policy. You’re attacking Australia. You’re not objecting to a war. You’re disrespecting the troops. You’re not asking why gas companies don’t pay tax. You’re undermining the economy. The sleight of hand is seamless: the interests of the few become the identity of the many, and the many defend those interests as though they were their own.

This is what Freire called the internalisation of the oppressor. The person booing an Indigenous Elder at a dawn service has internalised a version of Australia in which that Elder doesn’t belong. Not because the Elder hasn’t served. Uncle Ray Minniecon is an ADF veteran whose grandfather rode with the Light Horse at Beersheba. The booer hasn’t served at all. But the booer has absorbed a nationalism that tells him he is more Australian than the Elder, because the nationalism he’s absorbed was never about service. It was about race, wrapped in a flag, protected by a myth.

The patriot, by contrast, sees Uncle Ray and thinks: this is my country at its best. A man whose family has been here for 65,000 years, who served in the military, who stood up at dawn to acknowledge the land and the people and the history that made this place what it is. The patriot doesn’t need the myth. The patriot has the reality.

Freire also wrote about what he called “horizontal violence,” the tendency of the oppressed to attack each other rather than the systems that oppress them. This is nationalism’s most effective trick. Instead of looking up at the structures that are extracting your wealth (the gas companies that pay no tax, the property investors who are subsidised by the tax system, the defence contractors who profit from wars you didn’t vote for), you look sideways at the person next to you and decide they’re the problem. The immigrant. The Indigenous person. The welfare recipient. The Muslim. The trans kid. The person on the disability pension. Anyone who is slightly more vulnerable than you becomes the target, because attacking upward is dangerous and attacking sideways is easy.

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This is why every culture war issue, without exception, punches sideways or down. You will never see a nationalist campaign against corporate tax avoidance. You will never see a “protect our values” rally outside a mining company’s headquarters. The energy is always directed at people who have less power, not more. Because the entire point of nationalism is to redirect the anger that should flow upward into channels that flow horizontally. Keep the population fighting each other and they’ll never notice who’s actually taking their money, their housing, their healthcare, their futures.

Patriotism does the opposite. Patriotism looks at a country and asks: who is this working for? Is it working for the 61 per cent who want a gas export tax, or for the five per cent who don’t? Is it working for the people who need the NDIS, or for the people who need it cut so the budget can absorb a war they supported? Is it working for the kids in public schools, or for the private institutions operating as investment banks? Patriotism is not comfortable. It is not polite. It does not drape itself in a flag and tell you everything is fine. It looks at the country with clear eyes and says: we can do better than this. And then it demands it.

I’ve been writing this newsletter for a few weeks now and I think this is the frame that ties it all together. The gas companies that don’t pay tax while disability services get cut. The Prime Minister who saves his best policy for the election instead of deploying it when people need it. The opposition leader chasing One Nation voters instead of building a serious alternative. The accused war criminal getting selfies at a dawn service while an Indigenous veteran with a century of family military service gets booed. All of it is the same structure. The interests of the powerful, dressed up as the identity of the nation, defended by people who have been taught to mistake the flag for the country.

Freire believed the way out was education. Not the banking model, where knowledge is deposited into passive students like coins into a machine. But critical pedagogy, where people learn to read their own situation, name the forces acting on them, and act to change them. Louisa Munch, in that reel and in her wider work, is doing exactly this. She is taking the theoretical framework of Freire and Giroux and bell hooks and making it accessible, visual, shareable. She has a huge following because people are hungry for this language. They know something is wrong. They can feel it. They just don’t have the words for it yet.

The words are: nationalism is not patriotism. Nationalism serves the powerful and disciplines the rest. Patriotism loves the country enough to demand it be better. The flag is not the country. The country is the people in it, all of them, and a system that works for all of them is worth fighting for. A system that works for a few and wraps itself in symbols to disguise that fact is worth dismantling.

That’s the distinction. It’s the one that matters. Everything else follows from it.

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I found a bank statement this morning. It was from April 2026, stuffed inside a book I hadn’t opened in years. Commonwealth Bank. A real one, from before they went under. The numbers on it are almost funny now. $2.47 for a litre of petrol. $6.20 for an iced long black. A rental payment that, adjusted for what happened next, looks like monopoly money. I sat with it for a while, the way you sit with a photo of someone who’s changed so much you barely recognise them. Then I thought: I should probably write about what happened.

So. Ten years. Where to start.

Trump

He died on June 14, 2026. Flag Day, which the writers among you will agree was a bit on the nose. It was during a televised National Security Council meeting. He fell asleep, which wasn’t unusual, and then he didn’t wake up, which was. The footage was broadcast live. He soiled himself on camera. The President of the United States died on live television and shat himself, and I’m telling you this not to be cruel but because it genuinely happened, and it was the first moment in a decade of chaos where nobody knew what to say. Fox News cut to an ad break. The rest of the world just sat there.

What followed was worse. Vance assumed the presidency and immediately began consolidating power in ways that made Trump look like a libertarian. By 2027 the National Guard had been deployed in eleven states. By 2028, California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii had formally seceded as the Pacific Republic of California. The civil war, which historians now date from the January 2027 Capitol siege to the Treaty of Denver in 2034, killed somewhere between 180,000 and 300,000 Americans depending on which Californian university you ask. Numerous members of the Trump administration were killed during the conflict. Texas declared independence in 2029 under Governor Greg Abbott before being taken over by Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian best known for making racist jokes at a Trump rally in 2024, who is now the President of the Republic of Texas and has reintroduced Jim Crow in all but name. Nobody wants Texan oil because nobody needs oil anymore. Marjorie Taylor Greene is the President of the Republic of Georgia and the Carolinas, which functions as an African-style tin-pot basket case with an economy roughly the size of Paraguay’s and a human rights record to match. New York tried to become a city-state but without the financial sector, which relocated to Singapore and Shanghai, it’s basically a very expensive museum with massive fuck-off rats.

Stephen Miller is at The Hague. Vance and Pete Hegseth are living in Buenos Aires under the protection of President Milei, who has turned Argentina into the world’s most well-appointed ratline. Milei doesn’t care about the warrants. Some things don’t change.

What was the United States is now nine republics. California (which absorbed Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii) is the only one that functions as a democracy. Utah is a theocracy that you cannot enter without being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The rest are various shades of authoritarian, corrupt, or both. None of them are on speaking terms with each other. The Treaty of Denver ended the fighting. It did not end the hatred.

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Israel

Israel doesn’t exist anymore, at least not as a state in the Levant. The economy collapsed when the tech sector fled in 2027. The Houthis took control of the Red Sea approaches that same year and choked whatever was left of Israeli trade. In 2029, in what historians now call the Masada Ultimatum, the remnants of the Israeli government prepared an all-out nuclear strike on Iran and Yemen. It was Vladimir Putin, dying of pancreatic cancer in a Moscow hospital, who stopped it. In his last significant act as Russian president, he released a statement: if Israel uses a nuclear weapon, Russia will annihilate the country. Israel blinked. Three weeks later, a coalition led by Turkey invaded. Erdogan, who had spent decades playing every side of every conflict, walked into Jerusalem and announced the beginning of the process to establish the free state of Palestine. He won the Nobel Peace Prize. Then he died of his third stroke in three months. He was 77 years old and had been President of Turkey for longer than most of his citizens could remember.

There are scattered communities around the world that still call themselves Israel. The largest is in Patagonia, though “largest” is generous. They function more like Jonestown than a government. There are settlements in Greece that the authorities periodically shut down when they start arming themselves, and a community in Morocco that was initially welcomed and is now considered a security threat. None of them have international recognition. None of them are likely to get it.

Netanyahu died of prostate cancer in 2027. Smotrich and Ben Gvir killed themselves before arrest warrants could be served. Virtually every Western politician who once described Israel as “our closest ally in the Middle East” now acts as though they never said it. It’s the Iraq War all over again, except the footage is worse and the denials are louder.

The Gulf states are administered by Iran under a regional framework negotiated with Turkey. The KSA is essentially a Turkish client state, which would be funnier if you’d told me in 2026. The Strait of Hormuz operates under a toll system denominated in yuan. It has done since 2026. Nobody even talks about it anymore. It’s just how shipping works now.

China

China is the only country on earth that can credibly call itself a superpower and it has been since about 2028, when it became clear that the United States was not going to recover from its civil war in any timeframe that mattered. Taiwan was absorbed in the late twenties, peacefully, which gave China control of the world’s most advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Every chip in every device you own was made in a facility that used to be TSMC and is now a Chinese state enterprise. The UN relocated to Shanghai in 2032. The headquarters is genuinely beautiful. We visited last year as a family. Shanghai is where Australians take their kids now the way they used to take them to Disneyland. My daughter’s conversational Mandarin really helped us out. She’s been learning it since primary school, like most Australian kids her age.

The global economy runs on yuan. AUKUS died with the Americans. The protection of trade that the US used to guarantee has been replaced by a system of tollways administered by regional powers. Things are more expensive as a result, but they move. The world feels remarkably stable, which is the thing nobody predicted. After a decade of American chaos, Chinese hegemony feels less like domination and more like relief. I’m aware of how that sounds. I’m telling you what it feels like, not what it means.

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Australia

Where to begin.

Chalmers got the leadership in 2027. Albanese was rolled after the economy tipped into recession and the caucus decided that a man whose crisis management strategy was “enjoy your Easter and take the bus” was not the man for a depression. Chalmers governed well. He made the pivot to Asia that Keating would have made. He cancelled what was left of AUKUS. He taxed the gas. He reformed housing. But he couldn’t hold the country together through the downturn, and in 2031 Andrew Hastie led a motley coalition of Liberals, Nationals, One Nation and right-leaning independents to a narrow victory. He only got the chance because Labor, even after losing its majority, refused to form government with the Greens. That stubbornness cost them three years in opposition and the country a smoother transition.

Hastie was a better Prime Minister than anyone expected, mostly because he wasn’t stupid. He maintained the China relationship. He didn’t touch the gas tax. He oversaw the acquisition of nuclear weapons, which we inherited from the American bases that were already here and supplemented with our own program from 2031. He made one spectacular error at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics when he revoked the visas of several Chinese officials at the last minute over a diplomatic spat, overshadowing both the (chaotic) games and the historic first full appearance of the free Palestinian Olympic team. The Olympics were a shambles anyway. The venues were late, the transport was broken, and it rained for eleven straight days. Brisbane.

At the 2034 election, Chalmers came back. The Chalmers-Hastie years had developed into something resembling a Disraeli-Gladstone rivalry, two serious men with fundamentally different visions for the country who respected each other enough to make the parliament actually function. Chalmers finally agreed to form government with the Greens and the centre-left teals. It had taken them the better part of a decade to accept that the era of single-party majority government was over. The Greens now hold more lower house seats than the Liberals. A third of the parliament are independents. If you’d told me in 2026 that this was coming, I’d have believed you. If you’d told me Labor would take that long to accept it, I’d have believed that too.

One Nation won government in Queensland in 2030 under Karl Stefanovic, who took over the leadership after Pauline Hanson choked on a dry lamington at a fundraiser in Ipswich in 2029. I wish I were joking. Stefanovic has been pushing for an Australian republic ever since, primarily because he wants to be the first president. Most Australians would rather keep the monarchy than risk that. King William sends his regards.

Stefanovic recently described the transition away from diesel freight as “woke nonsense,” which was undermined somewhat when it emerged that he is a major investor in a solar farm in central Queensland. One Nation: the party of contradictions since 1997.

We have a new flag, by the way. It’s nice.

The Economy

The depression happened. It was bad. A lot of the jobs that AI was supposed to augment, it simply replaced. White-collar work was hit hardest. Law firms, accounting practices, consulting shops, all of them shed staff at a rate that made the GFC look like a scheduling adjustment. Entry-level jobs effectively disappeared in several industries. A 22 year old graduate in 2030 faced a job market that their parents would not have recognised.

But something else happened too. People started building things. Small community enterprises. Local manufacturing. Repair shops. Neighbourhood food co-ops. The stuff that neoliberalism had spent forty years making unprofitable became, in the absence of the corporations that had killed it, viable again. Governments scrambled to undo the damage. Flag carriers that had been privatised decades earlier suddenly had government-launched competitors undercutting them. This is what happened to Qantas. The government launched a national carrier, offered cheaper fares and more routes, Qantas went bust, and the government bought it back for a fraction of what it had been sold for. This pattern repeated across banking, energy and telecommunications. The great privatisation experiment of the late twentieth century was quietly reversed by governments that had run out of options.

SaaS is dead. Venture capital is an antiquated model that people study in business schools the way we used to study the Dutch tulip bubble. Everyone vibecodes their own software now on cheap Chinese hardware. AI is everywhere but it runs locally, on your own machine. There is no “cloud.” The companies that built the cloud don’t exist anymore. Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, OpenAI, Tesla, X, TikTok. All gone. Everyone is on Weixin, which is what the rest of the world calls WeChat. People only buy Chinese tech because Chinese tech is what works.

The UK

The Greens have been in government since 2028. Gary Stevenson, the former Citibank trader turned inequality campaigner, is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The UK is flourishing in a way that would have been unimaginable during the Starmer years. Rail has been renationalised. British Airways has been renationalised. The monarchy now pays its own way after being required to liquidate significant assets, the proceeds of which funded the renationalisation programme. William seems fine with it. He was always the pragmatic one.

Murdoch is still alive, incredibly, at 105. He doesn’t do much. Lachlan was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2031 on charges related to News Corp’s role in anti-Chinese propaganda during the American civil war. He’s still in prison. The News Ltd empire, such as it was, collapsed without him. All media that matters now is independent. Individual accounts, newsletters, small collectives. The boomers who sustained traditional media are mostly gone and nobody replaced them as an audience.

The Climate

Bad. Better than it was going to be, but bad. The death of the oil economy helped enormously. The mass adoption of solar, which China drove harder than any country in history, has plateaued emissions. But the damage that was already locked in has played out exactly as the scientists warned it would. Sydney feels like Brisbane used to. Subtropical. Thredbo gets maybe one decent snow dusting a year. The ski industry is dead. Nobody under 25 has ever seen a proper Australian snow season.

Florida is largely uninhabitable. Mar-a-Lago was destroyed in a Category 5 hurricane in 2031. Looters picked through the wreckage. Photos of them carrying out gilded furniture went viral on Weixin. It felt like the closing scene of an era, which it was.

The worst of it has been in Bangladesh. The floods of 2033 displaced 90 million people into India and Myanmar, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in recorded history. The response was inadequate. It remains inadequate. This is the thing that makes the stability of the Chinese century feel hollow. The world is more orderly. It is not more just.

Education

One genuine bright spot. The great private school rort was exposed in the early 2030s when a series of investigations revealed that many of Australia’s most prestigious private schools and universities had been operating as de facto investment banks, using tax-exempt status to accumulate property portfolios and financial instruments that had nothing to do with education. The scandal led to the removal of tax concessions for private institutions and the redistribution of that funding to the public system. Public schools are better resourced than they’ve been in a generation. It turns out that when you stop subsidising the education of children whose parents can already afford it, you can do quite a lot for the children whose parents can’t.

2036

I’m sitting in my kitchen. It’s April. It’s warm, warmer than April should be, but you get used to it. There’s a streamer on in the background talking about the news. The UN passed a climate adaptation resolution yesterday. The new Qantas launched a direct route to Nairobi. Stefanovic said something stupid. The Greens are polling at 22 per cent nationally, tied with Labor and two points ahead of the Liberals.

I found a bank statement from 2026. Commonwealth Bank. Petrol at $2.47 a litre. I don’t even know where I’d buy petrol now. The car in the driveway is a BYD. It charges from the solar panels on the roof. I bought it for $18,000 and it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.

The world outside this window is not the one I was promised when I was growing up in the nineties. It’s not the world I expected when I started writing this newsletter in 2026, sitting in a house in Newcastle wondering whether the Strait of Hormuz was going to stay closed and what that meant for the price of bread. It’s messier than the one that came before it. It’s less free in some ways. It’s more honest in others. The systems that were supposed to last forever didn’t. The ones replacing them are imperfect and new and being built by people who are making it up as they go along, which, if you think about it, is how the old ones were built too.

The bank statement goes in the recycling. The newsletter goes out. Same as it ever was.

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I grew up in Dulwich Hill in the nineties. If you know the Inner West now, you know the cafes and the breweries and the $2 million terraces. That’s not the Dulwich Hill I grew up in. The Dulwich Hill I grew up in was families speaking different languages on the same street. It was Vietnamese restaurants in Marrickville where my parents took us every other week. It was going to a mate’s house, and his parents had different art on the walls, and different food on the table, and none of it was weird. It was just what home was.

My primary school had kids from everywhere. Greek, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Pacific Islander, Indian, Italian, Anglo. This was completely normal. Nobody explained multiculturalism to us. Nobody gave us a pamphlet. We just went to school together, played soccer at lunch, went to each other’s birthday parties, and ate each other’s food. Multiculturalism wasn’t a policy. It was Tuesday.

High school was rougher. There were tensions between groups. Asian kids, Lebanese kids, Islander kids. Some of it got ugly. But even then, it didn’t feel existential. It felt like teenagers being teenagers in a place where different communities were still figuring each other out. It was not the dominant experience. The dominant experience was losing to Fraser Park on a Saturday morning. Sydney Olympic. Apia Leichhardt. Inter Lions. Dulwich Hill Madeira. Clubs named after the places people came from, playing in a competition that was as Australian as anything Don Bradman ever did. People proud of who they were, working hard to be the best they could be in a country that, at its best, made room for all of it.

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I know I was a kid. I know a white kid in the Inner West was sheltered from a lot of what other people experienced. I’m not pretending racism didn’t exist before I noticed it. But I am telling you what my experience was, honestly, because I think it matters. I genuinely did not see racism as a defining feature of my country until I was sixteen. And then 9/11 happened, and overnight, kids I’d gone to school with for years became targets. Middle Eastern kids. Kids whose families ran the bakeries and the corner stores. Kids who had been part of the furniture of my life since kindergarten. Suddenly, they were suspects. It was very weird. It was the first time I understood that the version of Australia I’d grown up in was not the only version.

When I was nineteen I went to live in London for a bit. I made friends with a guy studying political science who kept asking me, “Isn’t Australia a really racist country?” I was confused. I genuinely didn’t think it was. I told him about Dulwich Hill. About the soccer clubs. About my mum cooking Thai and Vietnamese and Moroccan food at home because that’s just what she did. I told him he was wrong.

I got back to Sydney on a Wednesday in December 2005. On the Sunday, the Cronulla riots happened. Five thousand people draped in Australian flags chasing anyone who looked Middle Eastern through the streets of a beachside suburb. My mate in London emailed me straight away. “What were you saying about Australia not being a racist country?”

I got it then.

Ever since Cronulla, I see it. It was always there. I just grew up in a place where it wasn’t the dominant frequency. The racism comes, almost always, from areas with little to no immigration. From places where difference is theoretical rather than lived. From people whose experience of other cultures is limited to what they see on the news, which is to say, limited to whatever version of other cultures the news has decided to be scared of that week. The people who booed Uncle Ray Minniecon on Saturday at Martin Place were not from where I’m from. They were not from Lakemba or Auburn or Cabramatta or Fairfield. They were not from places where you grow up eating pho with your mum on a Thursday night because the place on Marrickville Road is cheap and good and has been there since before you were born.

I live in Newcastle now. I moved here a few years ago and I love it in a way that’s different from how I love Sydney. Newcastle has working-class DNA that’s still visible everywhere. The steel might be gone, but the culture it built remains. It’s incredibly bohemian. It reminds me of Sheffield after it was resurrected from what Thatcher did to it, or what Collingwood and Fitzroy felt like in the early 2010s before the money arrived. There’s an energy here. People are freer in Newcastle than they are in Sydney. Less performative. Less anxious. Less obsessed with property prices and status. More willing to be odd, to start things, to build things with their hands and see what happens.

My daughter turns four soon. I want her to grow up around all kinds of different people. I want her to go to a friend’s house and eat food she’s never tried and see art on the walls that doesn’t look like ours and come home thinking that was interesting rather than that was strange. I want multiculturalism to be her Tuesday, the way it was mine. I want her to be sixteen before she has to learn that not everyone sees it that way, because that delay, those years of normality before the ugliness becomes visible, is what builds the foundation. It’s what makes you certain, in your bones, that the multicultural version of this country is the real one, and the flag-draped, monocultural, frightened version is the aberration.

Yesterday I wrote about what’s going wrong with this country. The booing. The flag-shaggers. The accused war criminal getting selfies while Indigenous veterans get heckled. All of that is real and all of it is worth being angry about. But it’s not the whole story. The whole story includes Dulwich Hill on a Saturday morning in 1996, with kids from fifteen countries playing soccer on the same oval. It includes my mum’s kitchen, which smelled like lemongrass and garlic and cumin because she thought the best way to understand people was to cook their food. It includes Newcastle right now, a city that’s rebuilding itself on creativity and community and a quiet refusal to be what Sydney has become.

If you think white Australia is the best version of Australia, I feel sorry for you. Not angry. Sorry. Because you’re missing the thing that makes this place genuinely extraordinary. Not the beaches. Not the weather. Not the flag. The fact that people came here from everywhere, built lives next to each other, fed each other, raised kids together, and made something that works. Not perfectly. Not without pain. But it works. And it works because of the difference, not in spite of it.

We all make this country. That’s not a slogan. It’s what I saw from my kitchen table in Dulwich Hill when I was eight years old, and it’s still the truest thing I know about this place.

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Yesterday, a man accused of five counts of war crime murder attended an ANZAC Day dawn service at Currumbin Beach on the Gold Coast. He shook hands. He posed for photos. He told cameras that everyone should be “reflecting and commemorating the service of all those Australians that have given us the country that we live in.” Nobody booed.

Also yesterday, Pastor Uncle Ray Minniecon delivered the Acknowledgement of Country at the dawn service in Martin Place, Sydney. Uncle Ray is an ADF veteran. His grandfather served in the Light Horse Brigade at the Battle of Beersheba in 1917. His family’s military service stretches back to the First World War. He was booed for nearly a minute. A 24-year-old man was arrested. Several others were moved on by police.

In Melbourne, more than 50,000 people gathered at the Shrine of Remembrance. Uncle Mark Brown, a Bunurong and Gunditjmara Elder, delivered the Welcome to Country. He was booed. Neo-Nazis booed him at the same service twelve months ago. In Perth, Whadjuk Noongar Elder Di Ryder, a female veteran, was booed during her address at Kings Park. Police issued 14 move-on notices.

Three cities. Three Indigenous Elders. Three of them with direct military service or family military lineage. All of them booed on a day that is supposed to honour exactly the kind of service their families gave.

Meanwhile, Ben Roberts-Smith got handshakes and selfies.

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I wrote about Roberts-Smith two weeks ago so I won’t repeat the details. But the short version is this: a Federal Court found, over 110 days of evidence, that he kicked an unarmed, handcuffed Afghan farmer named Ali Jan off a cliff and ordered him shot dead. That he machine-gunned a man with a prosthetic leg and brought the leg home as a drinking vessel. That he forced a junior soldier to execute a prisoner as a “blooding” exercise. Three courts upheld these findings. He is now facing five counts of war crime murder. He is on bail. And yesterday he stood at a dawn service on the Gold Coast and was treated like a hero.

This is ANZAC Day in 2026. A day where an accused war criminal is welcomed and Indigenous veterans are heckled. Where the descendants of Beersheba Light Horsemen are booed by people whose most significant act of national service is owning a flag bumper sticker. Where the RSL’s own acting president has to call his audience “louts” and say “I’m pretty convinced that none of that bunch of louts who were booing have ever done anything constructive for our nation.”

Brigadier Williams is right. But the problem is bigger than louts.

ANZAC Day attendance has surged this year. Thirty-five thousand in Canberra. More than 50,000 in Melbourne. Record crowds at Cronulla, in the Illawarra, across regional NSW. Some of this is the war. When there’s a real conflict on, when the news is full of missiles and shipping lanes and fuel rationing, people feel drawn to commemoration. That’s understandable. But the growth in crowds has not been matched by a growth in solemnity. It has been matched by a growth in something else entirely.

ANZAC Day has always been conservative coded. That’s not new. The RSL has historically leaned right. The marches have always attracted a certain kind of flag-waving patriotism. But there was a time when the day was anchored by the physical presence of returned veterans, people who had actually been to war and come home with the kind of knowledge that makes jingoism impossible. My grandfather’s generation didn’t wave flags. They stood quietly. They didn’t talk about what they saw. The day belonged to them and their silence gave it weight.

That generation is gone. The World War II veterans are dead or in their late nineties. The Korea and Vietnam veterans are elderly. The Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are a much smaller cohort and many of them, as the Brereton report revealed, are grappling with the moral complexity of what was done in their name. The massive political bloc of returned servicemen and women that once shaped ANZAC Day’s character no longer exists. What has filled the vacuum is not service. It’s performance.

The booers are the most visible symptom but they’re not the disease. The disease is the transformation of a day of solemn reflection into a day of nationalist performance. The dawn service as content. The march as a photo opportunity. The two-up game as a drinking session that happens to have a historical justification. The “Lest We Forget” bumper sticker on the ute of someone who couldn’t name a single battle from either World War but has very strong opinions about Welcome to Country. This is Karl Stefanovic ANZAC Day. Flag-shagger ANZAC Day. A day that has been hollowed out from the inside and filled with the aesthetics of patriotism while the substance of it rots.

And the Roberts-Smith situation is the proof. If ANZAC Day were genuinely about honouring military service, the people at Currumbin Beach would have turned their backs on a man accused of murdering unarmed prisoners. They would have recognised that his actions, if proven, are the precise opposite of the values the day claims to celebrate. Instead they shook his hand. Because the day isn’t about service anymore. It’s about tribe. It’s about who belongs and who doesn’t. Roberts-Smith belongs because he’s the right kind of soldier. Uncle Ray Minniecon doesn’t because he’s the wrong kind of Australian. That’s the logic. It’s not spoken. It doesn’t need to be. The boos say it clearly enough.

The RSL condemned the booing. Politicians condemned the booing. The crowds at all three services applauded the Elders and drowned out the hecklers. That matters. It shows that the majority of people who attend dawn services are still there for the right reasons. But the minority is growing. It’s organised. Last year it was neo-Nazis in Melbourne. This year it was coordinated across three capital cities. Next year it will be louder. The taboo against disrupting a dawn service has been broken and it won’t be repaired by press releases from the RSL.

Uncle Ray Minniecon’s grandfather rode with the Light Horse. Uncle Ray himself served in the ADF. He stood in Martin Place yesterday morning and delivered an Acknowledgement of Country while people booed him for a minute straight. He kept going. When he finished, the crowd applauded.

“I think they’ve got to understand,” he said afterwards, “that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land.”

Lest we forget.

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