The writer is in Australia

IT HAS been quite a week in Australian politics.

First, the abhorrent, ‘set-to-be-scuttled’ hate speech legislation, crafted in the aftermath of Bondi, actually passed both Houses of Parliament, with the support of the unconscionable, now all-but-defunct Liberal Party.

It wasn’t ‘scuttled’, after all.  Way too much optimism, right there.

Second, and related, we have probably seen the beginning of the end for the Liberal Party leader, Sussan Ley.  She was only ever a stop-gap. Terry Barnes of the Spectator Australia sums it up:

‘The Albanese hate speech and hate groups bill has passed in federal parliament, as has the now-separate gun control and buyback bill. All done in just one day. The Nationals supported neither bill, making Sussan Ley look an isolated and feeble an Opposition and Coalition leader – which she is. She effectively gave Anthony Albanese a get out of gaol free card, while angering half her MPS and getting two fingers from the Nats. If the knives aren’t being sharpened for Ley now, they soon will be. The only performance more shambolic than hers this week was Albanese’s.’ (Source: The Spectator’s Morning Double Shot newsletter, January 21, 2026.)

Third, and most arresting, the latest Newspoll, published by the Australian newspaper, found that Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has overtaken the combined Coalition (Liberal National) primary vote. One Nation has done a Reform UK, at last.

This has never happened before here.  We have always been two-party Dictatorship Central.

The last would have sent shockwaves through the polity and its guardians, the legacy parties. Or should have. The poll showed Labor at a pathetic 32 per cent, One Nation at 22 per cent, and the miserable Coalition at 21 per cent. Immediately apparent is the fact that, on this poll at least, the two legacy parties now pull barely half the nation’s primary vote. Starker evidence could not be found of the rupture of the democratic social contract between the governors and the governed and thus the demise of the current system.

The passage of the hate speech legislation, which, among other things, gives the Minister for Home Affairs the power to identify and punish designated ‘hate groups’, shows that the major parties, which combined in the Senate to pass the Bills, have simply no interest in changing their ways. The public had mere days to make submissions to the parliamentary committee ‘scrutinising’ the proposals. The two Houses of Parliament had a day to ‘debate’ it. This legislation is no mere trifle.

The new laws are an attack on free speech that even the Greens baulked at. They voted against worst parts of the legislation in the Senate, along with the Nationals (the country-based ‘conservatives’), One Nation and one Liberal, the heroic Alex Antic.

It was the day free speech, long on life support, finally died in Australia.  At the hands of the utterly disdainful, unapologetic political class.

The Liberals remain leaderless and hopelessly divided. They are totally controlled by (in some cases, unelected), leftist factional warriors who get the MPs to side with Labor on the things that matter, and maintain all-but-impossible internal barriers against genuinely conservative (and sensible) leadership.

Should the political class be worried by the latest polls? Yes and no.

Read More – Free speech banned, useless politicians and a public held in contempt. Sound familiar?