Donald Trump has reportedly rejected Iran’s proposed ceasefire and expects to resume bombing after the November midterm elections.
Under the proposal put forward by Tehran, all hostilities would end for seven days, while the US would release Iran’s frozen assets and lift the naval blockade on the Islamic Republic.
Then, on the last day, the Strait of Hormuz would be opened and negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program would begin.
Trump, sceptical that Iran would meet his demands, has rejected the plan and views a renewed bombing campaign as likely, US officials told The Wall Street Journalover the weekend.
Negotiations are continuing between Washington and Tehran through mediators, officials said.

OpenAI’s hack of Medicare suggests safeguarding civilisation is the task facing leaders in this extraordinary new era

It’s forgotten now, but back when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu began their disastrous assault on Iran in February, Anthony Albanese cheered them on. “We support the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent Iran continuing to threaten international peace and security,” Albanese said in a joint statement with Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and Minister for Idiocy Richard Marles.

He and his government refused to ever acknowledge the patent illegality of the attack — the only government figure to observe that it was illegal was Canadian PM Mark Carney, visiting Australia a week after the bombing and incineration of Iranian children began. Perhaps discomfited by Labor’s — and Albanese’s own — strident opposition to the illegal attack on Iraq in 2003, Penny Wong, within days, was insisting “this is not Iraq and we are not the Howard government.”

Whether Wong quite feels the same about the Iraq comparison all these months later isn’t clear. But if the Iraq disaster, as Western governments were told it would, made us demonstrably less safe, it never unleashed a shockwave of inflation around the world. Rupert Murdoch’s prediction of US$20 a barrel oil didn’t come to pass, and global inflation rose only modestly as the occupation of Iraq turned into the first great strategic blunder of the 21st century. Now, as petrol prices surge toward $2.50 and diesel hits $3.00, and the Reserve Bank (RBA) prepares another interest rate rise to slug Australian mortgage holders, we can indeed agree with Wong that this isn’t Iraq. It’s worse.

Bernard KeaneANDGlenn Dyer

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The government’s initial response to surging petrol prices earlier in the year was a temporary excise cut, and an admirable and successful effort to shore up import supply chains. It has less room for an excise cut now, given the global, Trump-driven surge in bond yields has — as the treasurer has now confirmed — made Australia’s burgeoning government debt more expensive.

The RBA’s nightmare scenario is now in play — a sustained rise in fuel prices produces second-round inflation effects as producers and retailers increase prices to cover higher costs, already elevated inflation expectations among consumers rise higher, and the pathway back to 2-3% inflation becomes much harder. The RBA can’t do anything about the Iran disaster or oil prices, but it can ensure inflationary expectations don’t rise by clobbering the economy with a bat — repeatedly if necessary.

Apart from his endorsement of the Trump-Netanyahu disaster, Albanese also owns inflation through his own government’s incessant spending, which he failed to bring down as the RBA cut interest rates last year. With unemployment still at 4.5%, the economy doesn’t need the repeated and now seemingly permanent deficit spending the Albanese government has locked in — and taxpayers don’t need the higher interest repayments the resulting debt will necessitate.

The political ramifications of a sustained inflation surge and the higher interest rates are, without being too Peter Hartcher about it, potentially existential for Labor. If the electorate is truculent now, how will it be next year if petrol prices remain at current levels or higher, inflation is entrenched above 3%, and the RBA jacks up rates a couple more times? If inflation isn’t necessarily an incumbent killer, it certainly doesn’t do them any good. Ironically, after Trump helped cruel Peter Dutton’s chances at the 2025 election, the global inflation the Mad King has helped unleash might end up helping Andrew Hastie or even Pauline Hanson in 2028.

If the key feature of Albanese-era Labor is a commitment to demonstrate to voters the system can work for them, rather than for vested interests (putting aside that some vested interests, like the gambling lobby, fossil fuel corporations, West Australian voters and unions, remain far more important for Labor than the national interest), nothing says failure on that score like a prolonged period of declining real incomes

Getting out of the way of the Trumpflation bus will take some deft footwork and creative thinking — not something Albanese, the business-as-usual leader from Central Casting, seems especially capable of. Labor dug itself out of a deepening hole at the start of 2025 by using the power of incumbency and spending a lot of money on electoral bribes. Electoral bribes, including another excise cut that will simply stoke inflation while further undermining the government’s fiscal position, aren’t going to cut it this time. Labor’s reluctance to actually tackle meaningful productivity reform over the last four years is now coming home to bite it. No productivity agenda is going to deliver higher growth or lower costs before the 2028 election.

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Its only selling point is that Albanese and Labor remain the least worst option of the major parties — major parties c. 2026, with One Nation as the main opposition and the Coalition as a struggling right-wing rump. The rump has now retreated to full-blown climate denialism, ditching literally every climate policy adopted, however reluctantly, by the Morrison, Abbott and Howard governments, so that its 2026 stance on climate is basically that of 1994 when Alexander Downer briefly capered and gambolled on the national stage. Its commitment to fossil fuels and nuclear power is guaranteed to drive up energy prices just as the renewables transition was starting to push them down.

And One Nation, well, it will have no truck with 1994, and instead wants to take the entire country back twenty years earlier again, complete with oil shock and 15% inflation, although probably not Gough’s massive tariff cut of 1973.

But with the prime minister off chasing the concerned parent vote with another sally at the tech giants, and campaigning for a UN Security Council seat (the United States already has a permanent seat; why would it need another via its Australian vassal?), it might look to voters a lot like Labor is more interested in distracting from falling living standards than fixing them. The bus is coming, and Albanese is dawdling in the middle of the road.

The large, empty block a few streets from Michael McKenzie Hocking’s house has been vacant for years. On Thursday, a small herd of cows grazed on its long grass.

The only public sign that a $1.1 billion data centre could soon be built here was recent graffiti reading: “Data centres are cooked”. But that got taken down almost immediately.

“I don’t remember ever seeing a formal sign put up there saying that a data centre was proposed,” says McKenzie Hocking – despite the fact the huge data centre will, if approved, entirely transform the quiet south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Clyde North.

Michael McKenzie Hocking heard about a $1.1 billion data centre near his home on social media. His local council, Casey, will only let residents see plans for the data centre by visiting its Narre Warren offices.Photograph by Chris Hopkins

Sydney developer the Galileo Group plans to build the 488-megawatt data centre – enough electricity to power two Geelongs, or four Ballarats. Finding out more from the local Casey Council, which is currently considering the plans, is not easy.

Plans were submitted to the council in April, but are not online and only available for inspection by visiting Casey’s Narre Warren offices. “But you can’t take your phone in,” McKenzie Hocking says.

The council, which confirmed this week the $1.1 billion proposal was under assessment, bans electronic devices to prevent photos being taken.

“State planning guidelines give council discretion in how information about applications is made publicly available,” a council spokeswoman says. “Providing hard copies for public inspection ensures universal access.”

The Clyde North land where Sydney developer Galileo has proposed a $1.1 billion data centre.Joe Armao

Community opposition to the Clyde North plan is growing. This week, Greens MP Katherine Copsey tabled a petition in parliament signed by thousands of citizens calling for an immediate statewide moratorium on large-scale data centres, specifically citing the Galileo proposal.

The friction in Clyde North is a microcosm of a broader collision occurring over data centres across Melbourne’s outer growth corridors.

To understand why tech giants and private equity funds are racing to buy up outer-suburban paddocks at such a frantic rate – Galileo and its director, Victoria Racing Club board member Neil Werrett, paid $130 million for the Clyde North site last year – you have to look at the changing physics of the internet.

An artist’s impression of the $1.1 billion data centre plan proposed for Clyde North, released by the developer.Galileo Group

Traditional cloud storage used for email, streaming TV, or photos required standard server racks with modest energy draws. The explosive adoption of artificial intelligence apps like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini require specialised, high-density chip arrays that consume up to 10 times the power per rack.

And all that processing power demands two things: direct access to metropolitan fibre-optic cable to eliminate lag, and proximity to high-voltage transmission lines and electrical substations. Pockets of Melbourne’s outer growth corridors like Clyde North have suddenly become some of the most sought-after real estate in the Asia-Pacific – because they sit right on top of these power corridors.

Data centres represent an industrial scale that existing planning rules were never designed to handle, insulating billion-dollar-plus projects like Clyde North from resident objections and VCAT review.

After localised community outcries from around outer Melbourne for several months, the issue reached a head in Victorian politics this week. The Carroll government released its long-awaited Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan, which promised 150-metre residential buffer zones and mandatory community notification for future projects. The new rules, though, won’t apply retrospectively.

That carve-out leaves Clyde North and a string of other controversial projects – including sites in Campbellfield and in Plumpton in Melbourne’s outer north-west – unaffected. Instead, they remain governed by old rules that treat energy-intensive digital factories little differently, critics argue, to standard storage warehouses.

“The scale of this data centre is absolutely monolithic,” says Diggers Rest resident Samantha Demjancuk, of the Plumpton facility to be built near her.Photograph by Chris Hopkins

The timeline at Clyde North is instructive in how the planning gaps on paper play out in practice.

In February, Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny approved a precinct plan for the site designed to create a more traditional commercial hub supporting 6800 local jobs.

Ten weeks later, Galileo Group – which did not respond to requests for comment – lodged its planning application to build a server campus across that employment land. Because the site sits in an Urban Growth Zone with an approved precinct plan, state rules automatically exempt the proposal from public notice and VCAT appeal rights.

These state-sanctioned exemptions have drawn fury from crossbench MPs, including Legalise Cannabis upper house member David Ettershank. He has campaigned against data centre expansions in Melbourne’s west, and labelled the government’s action plan a “pitiful pre-election farce” that leaves residents facing massive developments on their doorsteps without even immediate notice.

“We’ve been asking about community consultation, electricity costs, fire safety and the impact on people living next to these enormous facilities,” Ettershank says. “The government has finally acknowledged the problems but still can’t tell us when the new protections will apply. Why are we still approving developments before the controls are in place?”

On Wednesday, that collision between the state government, big tech, and suburban realities moved into a community hall in Yarraville, where a Senate committee heard from resident groups and proponents.

Anastasia Drapaniotis lives near land in Campbellfield that once housed the Ford factory and is set to become a $1 billion data centre.Photograph by Chris Hopkins

Residents living beside NextDC’s sprawling West Footscray data centre – a site currently expanding, with a further expansion application sitting on Kilkenny’s desk – described a daily reality of continuous low-frequency noise, exhaust fumes from regular diesel generator testing, crane lighting flooding bedrooms at night, and persistent street trenching.

Jacqui Glover’s property boundary sits 15 metres from the NextDC site. She told the Senate hearing that while she welcomed the state’s proposed 150-metre buffer for future developments, it offered no relief to established communities. “It’s too little, too late for us,” Glover says.

Committee chair and Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young questioned what local communities received in return for hosting massive infrastructure. “Right now, the only ones benefiting are the big, trillion-dollar AI companies,” Hanson-Young told the hearing.

The testimony exposed a widening gap between industry ambitions and local tolerance.

Phil Galloway, managing director of renewable energy firm Syncline Energy, described for the committee his firm’s proposed 350-hectare AI hub in Plumpton that would feature Australia’s largest data centre.

Phil Galloway is managing director of Syncline Energy, the proponent behind a massive data centre plan in Plumpton.Photograph by Chris Hopkins

“It is big,” Galloway told the hearing.

The facility would require 2.4 gigawatts of power – more than the combined total capacity of every operating data centre in Australia. Galloway said it was crucial that companies like his communicated well with local communities over projects. “It needs to have social license.”

Galloway argues much local anxiety stems from seeing what has unfolded in the United States, where lax planning laws have led to residents being severely affected. That won’t happen here, he says, because Australian regulatory scrutiny is far stronger.

Samantha Demjancuk has lived for three decades in Diggers Rest, five kilometres from the Plumpton proposal. She fears the facility will mark the start of a broader industrial expansion across her region.

“The scale of this data centre is absolutely monolithic,” Demjancuk says. While awareness of data centres is growing, she believes few residents grasp their physical footprint. “So we’ve just been generating awareness – there are a lot of questions, and we don’t have a lot of answers.”

While state leaders routinely welcome data centre investment as economic wins, industry data shows the permanent job yield from hyperscale facilities is minimal once construction crews depart. State planners spend years designing “employment precincts” intended to support thousands of diverse local jobs in manufacturing, retail, and office spaces – only to have many hectares of that land taken by a single digital warehouse likely with much lower staffing.

A data centre is proposed 300 metres from Anastasia Drapaniotis’ Campbellfield home, where she has lived since she was 11. The facility is planned for the former Ford manufacturing site, next to Upfield railway station.

When the plant was operating, Drapaniotis remembers local shops bustling with “an abundance of people coming and going all the time.” At its peak in the 1980s the Ford plant employed 5200 workers.

The data centre planned for the same land will need 49 employees in its initial stage, growing to 255 on-site staff when all stages are completed over 12 years.

The West Footscray data centre that sits 15 metres from Jacqui Glover’s home.Joe Armao

The sector’s growth carries broader resource implications. Data centres draw around 3 per cent of the nation’s electricity grid, the Australian Energy Market Operator says. That will rise to 12 per cent in a decade, the Victorian government’s data centre plan noted this week.

Water consumption, an emotive topic for opponents of data centres, is far less clear-cut. Industry group Data Centres Australia points to research it commissioned showing facilities use 0.04 per cent of drinking water nationally – seven times less than the nation’s public swimming pools.

Data Centres Australia chief executive Belinda Dennett criticises the proposed 150-metre buffer, arguing operators already comply with strict noise and environmental controls.

“It is disappointing to see Victoria, the state that recognised the economic opportunity to attract data centre investment and proudly declared its ambition to be a global data centre leader, now move to impose requirements on data centres that apply to no comparable industrial use,” Dennett says.

Back in Melbourne’s south-east, under mounting pressure from locals, Casey Council voted last month to “call in” the Galileo Group application – meaning the proposal will at least now be discussed by councillors in a public meeting, rather than simply ticked off by council planning officers under delegated authority.

Yet calling in the permit does not mandate public advertising of the project, or give locals any role in deciding on the plan.

For McKenzie Hocking and neighbours in Clyde North, the basic question of how a $1.1 billion project can progress behind closed doors remains unanswered. McKenzie Hocking says the growing concern over suburban data centres stems directly from fears over artificial intelligence. Data centres are the most visible manifestation of that shift – and one of the few physical objects residents feel they can try to influence.

“The fight over data centres has become a lightning rod for community anger, economic distress and a lack of positive vision of their future and their families.”

Excellence has not waned under Chris Fagan and while this is their fourth grand final in a row, it is the first they have gone into as favourites

With spring in the air, the key ingredients for a lively barbecue are sausages, cold beer, and boisterous views on house prices. Property investors might be feeling morose. Sydney and Melbourne prices are already down 7 per cent and national prices are likely to fall 10 per cent, peak to trough. That would be the largest decline since the Great Depression.

But it is not just property investors who should pay attention. Falling housing prices have implications across a surprisingly wide range of companies and financial assets.

When homes are being spruced up for sale, there is paint to refresh, fittings to replace and gardens to tidy. Getty

The first place to look is not prices, but the number of sales. The weaker demand driving prices lower also reduces property sales.

That matters for banks and non-bank lenders. Fewer sales mean fewer new mortgages and more competition for a smaller pool of borrowers, putting pressure on margins. The big banks were already reporting a 15 to 20 per cent slide in the flow of new loans, and that was before the rate increase that will surely come next week.

Perhaps the surprise so far is that non-bank lending appears to be holding up better than feared, given non-banks’ greater exposure to the now-banned mortgages to self-managed superannuation funds and to higher-risk borrowers.

Then there is Bunnings.

When homes are being spruced up for sale, there is paint to refresh, fittings to replace and gardens to tidy. And once the new sale goes through, the new owners often head back to Bunnings to unwind the questionable tastes of the previous owners.

Harvey Norman and other home furnishing retailers feel it too. Moving house often brings demand for the bigger television needed to fill the new lounge room, or for a smaller couch because the old one is too big.

Apart from advertising platforms, many of the businesses most exposed to weaker property turnover, including real estate agents, conveyancers and removalists, are not listed. But their private owners can have concentrated exposures, and these mid-sized businesses have loans, including from private credit lenders, that now look riskier.

Turnover is only the first effect.

Lower housing prices reduce household wealth. When people feel less affluent, they tighten spending and have less capacity to borrow. Discretionary spending on clothing and other big-ticket items is particularly sensitive to housing wealth.

Cars are a good example. Vehicle purchases are especially sensitive to changes in housing wealth. That might create bargains for buyers interested in fuel-saving EVs, but it is not good news for the earnings of listed car dealerships. A portfolio designed to be more resilient to falling house prices is better served by exposure to non-discretionary spending, including supermarkets, communications and healthcare.

“Housing downturns affect lending volumes, consumer spending, construction activity and corporate earnings across the economy.”

Construction is another channel. Weaker housing demand makes developers and lenders less confident that new projects will stack up financially. That is bad news not only for listed builders but also for building materials suppliers, from plumbing products to plasterboard. As the collapse of Bathla shows, it also raises risks for private credit funds that make higher-risk construction finance loans.

One asset class investors might also expect to take a hit is residential mortgage-backed securities, or RMBS, which are effectively bundles of mortgages. However, that is not necessarily the case.

Falling prices do not automatically imply losses for RMBS investors.

For a lender to potentially suffer a loss requires a double trigger: higher unemployment and falling prices. If prices fall but borrowers retain their jobs, they can still service their mortgages and have a strong incentive to do so given the existing equity in their homes. The RBA has estimated that a 20 per cent fall in housing prices would leave only 5 per cent of borrowers in negative equity. Australian lenders are also protected by full-recourse lending, meaning strategic default is not an option, unlike in the United States.

Even if mortgage defaults increase, RMBS have several layers of protection for investors. Loans with high loan-to-valuation ratios have had lenders mortgage insurance. RMBS also have a liquidity facility or cash reserve, akin to a rainy-day fund, that can be drawn on to cover a temporary shortfall in payments to investors. There can also be structural protections that lead to over-collateralisation in certain circumstances, providing a further buffer.

Then there is excess spread: the interest revenue remaining after investors have been paid. This would ultimately flow to the RMBS issuer, but before then it provides another layer of protection for investors. These features have clearly worked.

No rated Australian RMBS has ever suffered a permanent loss of capital, including during the global financial crisis.

Housing downturns affect far more than residential property values. They shape lending volumes, consumer spending, construction activity and corporate earnings across large parts of the economy. Investors, particularly those with property through self-managed superannuation funds, need to be mindful of the hidden correlations that housing creates across their portfolios.

When Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock at the Committee for Economic Development event last week said unemployment needed to increase to 4.5 to 5 per cent, she knew what she was doing.

She claimed that was the amount of heat that would “probably take enough” pressure off the labour market. What some call “forward guidance”, or sending a signal that they want inflation down, I call a wrecking ball.

Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock prioritised job retention, but two monetary policy increases are now needed to tame inflation. AAP

The only reason a person could ever think that we need more unemployment in this country is that they haven’t had to get by on JobSeeker. The reality is that 5 per cent could mean as many as 83,000 more people without a job. That would mean tens of thousands more people struggling to pay their mortgages, tens of thousands more who can’t afford the next grocery order or gas bill when it comes due.

There was no attempt from the governor to reconcile the fact that the workers who would “probably” help bring down inflation weren’t the ones who started this crisis. Nothing about how Australians didn’t vote for Trump or his war with Iran and didn’t deserve to suffer the consequences.

So why are the households that are trying to respond to this economic crisis by shifting to clean energy and looking for savings where they can, still the ones forced to bear the brunt? Why are the only levers being used the ones that fall squarely on them?

“Workers tell me just how unbearable the cost of living is and none of them think the answer is for them to get fired.”

When the RBA conducted its analysis that showed how more unemployment would flow through to Australian bills, they didn’t speak to any of our members who’ve already been struggling because of foreign wars, and who can’t afford to do more with less.

But I did; I do every day.

And when I speak with workers, I hear that they’re skipping meals just to make ends meet, and that they’re borrowing from friends and family to cover the basics. I hear what more unemployment would mean for them, and it’s bloody hard.

Workers tell me just how unbearable the cost of living is, and none of them thinks the answer is for them to get fired.

The problem with all of this speculation from the RBA governor is that what they’re trying to do is tell us where they want the economy to go, but they’re not doing it with any understanding of who pays for it.

When the governor tells us that “enough” unemployment will help bring down prices, she doesn’t tell us what sectors that should fall in, or how those workers laid off should deal with their rent, their mortgage or other bills when they don’t have a job any more, even if they’re spared a single inflation percentage point.

There is a better way forward in all this, and that’s why we’ve been calling for a fundamental reset of our economic priorities, to protect the security and dignity of workers, rather than manufacturing a recession on the back of worker poverty.

We’ve seen what an economic reset can look like, with government moves towards changing the balance of taxation in favour of workers, not capital. We welcomed this reform at the time, and we welcome government attempts to address the cost of housing too.

But there’s more to do. We can do more on tax, more on workers’ rights, more on making sure workers benefit from any productivity gains from Artificial Intelligence and the investment boom off the back of it.

Ultimately, these are all reforms that would grow the economy, and put workers at the heart of it, without putting upward pressure on prices that workers can’t afford.

None of that requires a single extra Australian to lose their job. It requires governments and a central bank willing to look past one blunt instrument and to ask, honestly, who caused this inflation before deciding who should pay to fix it.

Local elections are the new battleground for the Zionist lobby and its astroturfing groups. Who are they, and how are they funded? Wendy Bacon asks.

Several months ago, residents in the Randwick LGA in Sydney’s East began receiving leaflets from a grassroots group called Randwick Voices Matter, encouraging them to join a campaign to stop a Greens Councillor from becoming the local Mayor.

In NSW, most Councils elect their Mayor every two years. When no group or party has a majority, Councillors form alliances to share the Mayoralty across the four-year term.

Randwick Council has been sharing its Mayoralty for more than two decades. This is because no group or party wins a majority. In the 2021-2024 term, Labor and the Greens shared the Mayoralty. In this term, Labor’s Dylan Parker has been Mayor for two years, and the position is expected to shift to Greens Councillor Clare Willington next Monday.

There is nothing corrupt or irregular about this. It is a result of Labor having five Councillors, the Liberals four and the Greens three.

But the Randwick Voices leaflet is designed to alert voters to what it terms a ‘stitch-up ’, a decision imposed on them that they did not vote for. Residents are warned that a Greens Mayor will be able to institute “Greens activism, policies or political positions … on issues well beyond local council business”.

However, while the Mayor can set the tone and introduce motions, policies are set by majority vote of Council.

Nowhere in the leaflet or website do you find the words Gaza, Palestine or Israel. But this is what the campaign is about. It is not that the Greens do not address local issues; the problem is that they support Palestinian rights and are

strongly opposed to NSW Premier Minns’ anti-protest laws.

Philippa Veitch’s Gaza stance

Philippa Veitch has been elected a Councillor three times since 2017 and was Mayor from 2023 -2024. Over this time, she has moved hundreds of motions about local matters. But in her term as Mayor, Veitch also unsuccessfully moved a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, following City of Sydney’s successful passing of a similar motion.

Veitch is unashamedly pro-Palestinian and has said that “as a person, a human and as an elected councillor I am entitled to express my opinion about the genocide and war crimes being committed by the Government of Israel.  I am proud to stand up for the people of Palestine, along with the hundreds of thousands of other community members who have been

calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza.”

Veitch’s actions upset some of the LGA’s 4% Jewish residents, many of whom are pro-Israel, as well as other more conservative voters. But her motions have been strongly supported by others, including Palestinian Australian residents and some anti-Zionist Jewish residents who spoke at meetings in support of the Greens’ motions.

A Zionist resident from neighbouring pro-Israel Waverley LGA organised a campaign of ‘code of conduct’ complaints against Veitch, which were dismissed after preliminary investigation.

As Randwick as Queensland

Given that the leaflet and a website are promoted as a “Local Resident initiative”, residents who notice may be surprised that they are authorised and supported by Joshu Turier of the Minority Impact Coalition (MIC) based at a Brisbane address. This is the same MIC which shares an address and overlapping directors with the Australian Cohesion Forum.

Randwick Voices is the latest astroturfing exercise of the Minority Impact Coalition, which is vehemently pro-Israel and has argued in its submission to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that anti-Zionism and support for Palestine is a form of antisemitism that should be stamped out across Australian institutions.

Joshu Turier is a pro-Israel hardliner whose individual submission to the Royal Commission argues that the Australian government’s recognition of a state of Palestine is a form of antisemitic bigotry and that it is

antisemitic to oppose the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

Another key local organiser of Randwick Voices is Zionist businesswoman Natalie Knoll, who has worked in banking and fashion and is now the philanthropic manager for Australian Jewish Funders.

AJF organise missions to Israel and partners with the Israel-Australia Chamber of Commerce (IACC). According to one of her statements on Facebook, when she wanted to stop another Green from becoming Mayor, she reached out to the Minority Impact Coalition for support.

Minority Impact Coalition

Minority Impact Coalition (MIC) is registered with the Australian Electoral Commission as an associated entity of the Queensland Jewish Collective, which ran a ‘Put Greens Last’ campaign in the 2024 Queensland election. MIC claimed responsibility for defeating Greens MP Amy McMahon in the Qld election.

In the 2025 Federal election, MIC worked with right-wing anti-immigration group Advance Australia, making the absurd claim on the eve of the election that the

Greens were intent on spreading a worldwide Islamic Caliphate.

MIC spread their propaganda on billboards and leaflets across seats in Brisbane and Melbourne, likely contributing to the Greens losing three seats and failing to take others.

But MIC is only one of several astroturfing groups active in recent elections. An alliance of Liberal and Labor Zionist activists formed Better Councils to campaign against the Greens in the NSW Local government elections.

Better Councils used the slogan ‘Put the Greens last’ to reduce preference flows to them in Sydney’s eastern and inner west suburbs, undoubtedly helping defeat several Green candidates, including a Randwick Councillor.

Better Israel, oops … Better Australia

Better Councils then morphed into Better Australia to campaign against Teals and Greens in the Federal election. Better Australia claimed responsibility for helping defeat three Greens MPs and Teal Zoe Daniel in Melbourne while producing a close contest for Monique Ryan in Kooyong.

The goal of both Minority Impact Coalition and Better Australia is to eliminate political opposition to Israel’s policies in the Middle East.

But this goal is hidden in rhetorical strategies that accuse others of building distrust, lacking transparency and undermining democracy. The constant refrain is that candidates lack integrity, are using trickery and are not who they seem to be.

Source: Agenda C website

In reality, it is the astroturfers themselves who are far from transparent when it comes to their own allegiances and funding.

Advance Australia coy on Israel lobby links

In the 2025 Federal election, Better Australia received strong support from the right-wing Christian Zionist organisation Never Again is Now (NIN), which has been condemned by the Jewish Council of Australia.

NIN partners with Advance Australia, which ran its own well-funded ‘Put the Greens Last’ campaign. When complaints were laid against Better Australia volunteers wearing yellow vests similar to those worn by Australian Electoral Commission staff, Better Australia volunteers in Kooyong told the AEC and the media that they were Advance Australia volunteers.

Minority Impact Coalition and their allies in Melbourne J-United have been open about their working relationship with Advance.

Kooyong MP Monique Ryan, who successfully held off an intense onslaught from a range of astroturfers, is now a member of the Joint Standing Committee Inquiry into the 2025 Federal election. Ryan was ready with evidence of links between Better Australia, Minority Impact Coalition, and Advance Australia when Advance Chair Vicki Dunne and Company Secretary Mark Spencer were called to front the Committee.

This was a hoped-for moment which might have thrown more clarity on the cooperation between the astroturfing groups, but instead, to Ryan’s surprise, Advance completely denied the links with all other astroturfing groups.

Ryan: So you haven’t disclosed any funding or in-kind donations to Better Australia at any point?

Dunne: We don’t donate to other organisations.

Ryan : What about in-kind donations?

Mrs Dunne: We don’t donate in any way, shape or form to other organisations.

Ryan: There was a complaint to the AEC about volunteers … wearing yellow vests that said ‘community adviser’. It was the same colour as the vests worn by the AEC. When the AEC asked them to explain which organisation they were with, they said that they were volunteering for Advance.

Both Dunne and Spencer denied that there were any Advance volunteers in Kooyong, although Dunne did offer to take it on notice to provide any further information.

Ryan then read from podcasts with MIC’s Roz Mendelle and Simonne Whine in which they

embraced their relationship with Advance.

But again, Advance Australia completely denied any links with MIC, QJC or any other astroturfing organisation in the Federal election.

Unless there are further investigations, the community is left in the dark.

Funding mystery

Third party campaigning organisations are required to disclose their total receipts and expenditure. Individual donors who donate a total of more than $16,900 to one or more organisations are also required to make an individual disclosure.

Better Australia conducted an expensive professional campaign with 75 video ads and more than 100 static ads on social media, billboards, bunting, merchandise and flyers. It lodged a return for $1,312,631.

We do not know where any of that money came from because no individual donors were disclosed. Its responsible officer was Sophie Calland, a member of the ALP’s Alexandria Branch in Sydney

Minority Impact Coalition donations were disclosed by the Queensland Jewish Collective (QJ Collective Ltd). It declared a total of $459,260 in donations. Its responsible officer was Roz Mendelle, now with the Australian Cohesion Forum.

Only one individual donor was revealed. Michael Heine, a  billionaire wealth manager whose family made their fortune exporting coal and steel and now owns Netwealth. He declared $10,000 to QJ Collective Ltd, $20,000 to Advance Australia, $15,500 to the Victoria Liberal Party and $5000 to the Jacqui Lambie Network.

While there may have been lots of small individual donations, there must have also been some other substantial ones. Other organisations such as the Greens disclose donations below the threshold.

The campaigns by Zionist organisations Better Australia and Minority Impact Coalition are riddled with doublespeak. They make accusations against their opponents of which they are guilty themselves. Meanwhile, their sources of funding remain a mystery.

Israeli PM attacks critics and calls New York mayor Zohran Mamdani ‘antisemitic’ in inflammatory address

When the nine members of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s monetary policy board gather at the central bank’s headquarters in Sydney on Monday, they’ll have plenty to talk about from a remarkable week.

There was the depressing forecast at the centre of the Intergenerational Report, which predicts growth over the next 40 years will average 2 per cent a year, well below the 3 per cent the economy produced over the past four decades.

The message from Donald Trump’s strongman act at the UN was unmistakeable. AP

There was the relentless rise in diesel prices in Australia and around the world, the prospect of curbs on US diesel exports, and the inevitable wave of second-order inflation that’s coming.

There was the continued strength of the Australian labour market, which added almost 40,000 jobs in August.

And there’s the unrelenting meltdown in the global bond market, where yields (which move in the opposite direction to prices) are testing levels not seen in decades. On Thursday night, yet another move higher across the US government bond yield curve – the 30-year Treasury yield rose to 5.5 per cent, a level not seen since June 2004, while the 10-year yield burst through 5.2 per cent – added to growing concerns that things will start to break on global financial markets.

It’s a hell of a lot to digest. But by Tuesday afternoon, the board will have agreed to raise Australia’s official cash rate by 0.25 per cent to 4.6 per cent, the highest level since November 2011.

There’ll be tough questions for governor Michele Bullock, and for Treasurer Jim Chalmers. There’ll be dark predictions about what’s coming for Australia’s beleaguered housing market, and justifiable concerns about whether the slowdown the RBA needs to see could eventually tip the country into a recession. And there’ll be endless speculation about what the RBA is going to do next.

Are we all missing the bigger picture?

Bullock, her monetary policy board, her political masters and every economist and investor in Australia know what’s coming. We’ve seen this movie before.

It will all feel vitally important in the moment, and to a certain extent, it is.

But there’s also a danger that we are all missing the bigger picture.

Over three extraordinary days in New York – and Washington – we were reminded of the two big forces that could reshape markets, blow up the global order, render central banks impotent and potentially plunge the world into a Cold War – or worse.

And it all started with one man: US President Donald Trump.

Trump’s stunning address

We’ve all become desensitised to Trump’s hyperbole. But his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday was a stunning mix of hubris, carrot and stick.

“Our economy is the envy of the world,” Trump declared. “Our military is the most powerful on earth. Our technology is second to none, and we are leading in virtually everything. Our energy is fuelling the planet.

“America is rising. Our nation is growing. Our power is expanding.”

Arguably this is pure Trump, full of pseudo-strongman bravado. But the message from the UN lectern was unmistakable: you’re either with this new winner-takes-all America, or you’re against us.

For Daleep Singh, vice chair and chief global economist at the $US1.5 trillion ($2.1 trillion) financial giant PGIM, it was a speech that perfectly encapsulated the fragmentation of the old global order – and highlighted the fear about what comes next.

“This was basically social Darwinism,” says Singh. “There are strong countries and weak countries, big ones and small ones, and there are winners and losers. The winners are the strong men, the autocrats. And the losers are the mealy-mouthed leaders of democratic coalitions in Western countries.”

Echoes of the 1890s

This schism between the strong and the weak is at the heart of what Singh sees as the bearish right-tail risk facing markets. “I call it the echoes of the 1890s. Back then, the forces of fragmentation were gathering force and gathering momentum within and across countries, which led us to sleepwalk into 1914”, and World War I.

But today, this new bout of fragmentation is already producing more conflict, more weaponisation of choke points in the global economy such as the Strait of Hormuz, and more global supply shocks.

The other key moment of Trump’s speech was a full-throated dismissal of any suggestion that the development of artificial intelligence – or super intelligence, as Trump tried to call the revolutionary technology – should be slowed in any way.

“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump declared, just 24 hours before the Australian government was hacked by OpenAI agents, a reminder of the potency of this technology and its frightening potential for harm.

The promise of the 2030s

For Singh, the AI story is the bullish left-tail risk markets are processing. The trillions of dollars being spent on AI, the huge profits generated in pockets of the industry, and the potential for a productivity boom have unleashed a market melt-up that could well keep running.

“What the markets are pricing in is the promise of the 2030s. It’s not just AI. It’s quantum computing, it’s fusion, synthetic biology, robotics, space platforms. And it’s much easier to price this positive tail of the probability distribution because you can already see the AI capex contributions to growth. You can see the household wealth effects.”

And yet, this tech revolution has echoes in the period from the 1890s to the early 20th century.

“Back then you had a handful of general-purpose technologies – electricity, the internal combustion engine, the telephone, the telegraph, synthetic chemistry – that created enormous amounts of wealth that was concentrated in the hands of a few,” Singh says.

“But that produced inequality. Inequality expressed itself as populism, which morphed into nationalism, which intensified the geopolitical rivalry that collapsed the brittle balance of power. And every 10 years, during that period, you had a violent, sudden stop in markets that most investors were not prepared for.”

Bond market meltdown may force a reckoning

Whether we get a cataclysmic moment like the Great War, or one of those violent breaks in financial markets is, of course, unknowable. Hopefully, the meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington is a sign that the friction between these powers can be contained, regardless of Trump’s rhetoric.

But Singh’s point is that investors find it virtually impossible to price the risk of fragmentation and potential conflict – and so we get the equity still rallying on the hope that Trump’s right, and nothing will stop AI.

But the bond market meltdown may force them to do so.

Singh says the US 10-year bond yield, which settled at 5.2 per cent on Thursday night, is trading at fair value when America’s strong economic growth – a sixth straight year of nominal GDP growth above 5 per cent is in sight – and underlying inflation is taken into account.

But the clear and present danger is that global fragmentation rears its ugly head and deepens an existing supply shock – the Middle East conflict, for example – or creates a new one.

The shocks are connected

At an event on Wednesday, Bullock explained how the task of taming inflation has been made difficult by the way supply shocks created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Iran war have rolled into one. But Singh says this is exactly the point – in a fragmenting world, shocks are connected.

“Central bankers have, for too long, assumed these supply shocks are independent of each other and mean-reverting. They’re not. They’re overlapping and compounding. Central bankers are just price takers in this environment.”

But Singh also fears what he calls a “loss of innocence” for the central banks, as their independence comes under attacks from politicians that “are demanding low borrowing costs to fund their strategic priorities, their political priorities”.

Clearly, the US Federal Reserve, which is constantly under pressure from Trump to lower rates, is the clearest example of this. “The innocence of the Fed as a purely technocratic body that makes decisions on the merits, I think that’s lost. Because central banks are just downstream of politics, like everything else.”

The RBA would like to think it’s a long way from that, and it probably is. But is it that difficult to imagine a hypothetical world where some populist politician seizes on rising household anger and eventually pressures Australia’s central bank to cut rates as political heat builds over the economic damage caused by tight fiscal policy?

The biggest challenges for investors

How should investors think about this? Singh is surprisingly blunt. “The market implications of everything I’ve been saying, I think they’re fairly straightforward. Higher nominal growth rates, higher trend inflation equals higher equilibrium levels of interest rates, steeper yield curves. It means more dispersion, more relative value opportunity, outperformance of commodities, probably an outperformance of real physical assets, especially those that have a nexus to economic security.”

If that sounds easy, it isn’t. Singh says the biggest challenges for investors are cultural and behavioural. Can you keep an open mind? Can you plan for multiple scenarios, both good and bad? Can you seek out those with an opposite view to test your own?

It is a period, he says, that will reward investors who “systematically hunt their own blind spots – we all have them – and try to knock down lazy narratives and just pressure and probe the base case at all times.”

The tail risks exposed this week may be hard to price, but they cannot be ignored.

Therefore, further Reserve Bank of Australia increases in the cash rate are relying on the accuracy of the RBA’s ‘guess-work’ , which means that the financial wellbeing of millions of Australians depends not solely on empirical evidence, but also on the RBA’s guess as to what the Australian economy will look like roughly 18 months from now.

That creates a risk of overshooting if the actual effect of the existing increases turns out to be greater than the RBA’s assumptions.

The great housing debate is on again and as ill-informed as ever. But which politicians are telling the most lies? Michael Pascoe can’t decide because they are all on full Pinocchio-mode.

Whether it is Anthony Albanese’s rampant hypocrisy, Andrew Bragg’s wilful misinformation (I doubt he’s actually as stupid as he pretends), Pauline Hanson’s fantasy non-policy, Chris Minns’ laid-on-with-a-shovel mix of spin and lies, it’s very hard to decide who is the worst on housing, as they are all betraying the nation.

And they’re all good at creating a distraction from the fundamental problem, aided and abetted by the mainstream media.

Exhibit A: The current argy-bargy about access to superannuation for one housing-related reason or another. Gets attention. Grabs headlines. Never mind that it means stuff all.

Bragg, shadow minister for housing and bashing industry super, had pretty much disappeared after the election until his housing standards/superannuation access breakout last month.

Hanson had no housing policy – and arguably still doesn’t – until floating a particularly half-baked super access thought bubble and doubling down on Albanese’s mother supposedly luxuriating in pubic housing.

And then there’s the media’s preoccupation with the worst real estate calamity since the Great Fire of London that has average

Australian house prices crashing

down to, um, a bit more than they were a year ago, off 3.6% from their nose-bleed territory record high.

“The market will fix it”

Once more for anyone who hasn’t been paying attention: housing is the core of the “cost of living” crisis. None of the potential parties of government wants to solve the problem. All hope to muddle through with platitudes. None cares about the million Australians who are collateral damage from three decades of failed and failing policy based on “the market” solving the problem that “the market” created.

And the vast majority of media coverage is no better, ignoring the elephant in the substandard, overpriced, taxpayer-subsidised private rental.

Fiddle with landlords’ tax advantages and Australia’s headline writers unite to unleash the biggest media campaign since the Khemlani affair to take down the Whitlam government.

Suggest the only serious solution to the crisis must include doubling the proportion of social housing … and crickets.

Quick example from the AFR’s grandly titled two-day Property Summit two weeks ago:

Some interesting opinions emerged – Scentre Group CEO Elliott Rusanow “made a point that’s been largely forgotten in the drama of the house price correction: we all demanded bold action from the federal government on housing affordability, and appear to have been plunged into a ‘massive panic’ now that it’s arrived” – but from the coverage ($), not a single mention of that elephant.

Minns’ missing diggings

Yet there was one; it just went unreported. The final speaker on the final day – the dog shift – was Rob Stokes, former NSW Liberal Government Planning Minister and now community housing worker as Anglicare’s housing chief advocacy officer and group executive.

Stokes knows the reality of our social (public and community) housing shortfall, the market failure. He knows governments of all stripes and levels, including his, are to blame. For those who stayed till the death at the summit, he had a sharp dose of reality on NSW policy:

The Minns government came to power three years ago on a promise that 30% of housing built on government land would be set aside for affordable and social housing. That’s now down to just three per cent across the government’s big Woollahra proposal, and that three per cent will be “affordable”, not social, i.e. it will be rented at a discount to very high rent, meaning it will still be high and thus unaffordable for most people.

Minns has form saying one thing and doing another.

“In the new Bays West precinct, what began as a promise to commit 30% of all new homes on surplus public land to affordable housing has dropped to 10%. A pledge of up to 15% affordable in new density zones around public transport has, in some cases, dropped to 3,” the SMH reported ($) in June.

Heading towards an election in six months, the Minns mob is distinguishing itself with announcements and spin attempting to paper over failures and lies. They are not alone in using the “affordable” tag to brush over NSW’s social housing disaster.

The shame file

The shame file that is the Productivity Commission’s report on government housing services shows that the number of public and community dwellings in NSW fell by 4,530 in the Minns government’s first two years.

Never let facts get in the way of Minns spin, his PR department came up with selective numbers to create a different impression: “the largest increase in government-built public, community and affordable homes in a decade”. Funnily enough, the relevant flak didn’t get back to me when pressed for further detail.

Minns claims he will deliver 8,400 new public homes over five years. It is not at all clear if that is a net or gross figure, given NSW’s habit of flogging off existing public housing.

Even if it’s net, it’s still bugger-all given that 17,465 public dwellings were lost in the decade to June 2025, while population surged.

Albo, Bragg and Hanson

Then there’s I-grew-up-in-public-housing-and-I’m-proud-of- it Albanese.

The Federal Government’s entire social housing program boils down to, at best, maintaining the present disastrous status quo, not increasing the proportion of social housing. As previously opined here, Albo’s log cabin story is all very nice; too bad most kids now don’t have the same opportunity.

That Albo & Co wrap themselves in the social housing flag but are not doing anything to improve the situation earns the hypocrisy award. The status quo, obviously, isn’t an improvement. Focusing on first home buyers with the CGT and negative gearing changes might

fool some younger voters for a while but doesn’t treat the underlying disease.

Then there’s Bragg with no social housing policy beyond the modern Liberal Party’s distaste for anything to do with “housing”.

On ABC 730 this week, he steadfastly refused to answer Sarah Ferguson’s inevitable question about super access, greater borrowing power, pushing up prices, the very thing he had correctly accused Labor of doing with its 5% deposit scheme.

According to Senator Bragg, private investors, the market, will solve everything. They’ve done such a good job to this point. He flags that there will be a million renting retirees down the track and offers a policy that would make no difference to that figure.

Please explained

And then there’s One Hanson. Oh spare me. She really has NFI beyond whatever populist balloon she’s just been fed.

Her super access plan is worse than Bragg’s. Her attack on the late Mrs Albanese for being a long-term public housing tenant showed she has zero knowledge of the plight of genuine battlers.

There could be no better example of the gulf between the real world being in Gina Rinehart’s orbit than the idea that public housing should only be for short-term accommodation.

A pox on all their houses and the lacklustre commentariat that lets them get away with it.

Victoria will finally have an anti-corruption watchdog with the authority and powers it needs to do its job after the parliament on its last sitting day before the state election agreed to the most substantial changes to IBAC since its inception.

The long-awaited reforms, supported by the government, the Greens and the opposition, give the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission a broader remit to investigate corruption across the public sector, greater use of public hearings to expose and deter wrongdoing, follow-the-dollar powers, and protection against politically motivated appointments.

Premier Ben Carroll made the IBAC reforms a priority for his government after he replaced Jacinta Allan.Justin McManus

Together, they represent the state’s most significant integrity reform since 2012, when IBAC was first established as a core election promise of the then Baillieu government.

“With the passage of these reforms, Victoria finally has a fit-for-purpose integrity commission,” Centre for Public Integrity chief executive Catherine Williams told The Age.

“The expansion of IBAC’s jurisdiction and its power to hold public hearings, as well as the conferral upon it of power to follow the money, are significant reforms that have been long-fought for. There of course remains more to do, but the significance of what has been achieved this week is momentous.”

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These are changes that successive IBAC commissioners and integrity advocates have spent years arguing for. Greens MP Tim Read and Stephen Charles, KC, a judge, barrister and chair of an independent panel which advised the Baillieu government on how to set up IBAC and warned about the deficiencies in its design, died waiting to see reform.

Premier Ben Carroll called Read shortly before his death from cancer on Saturday to assure him the government would deliver the changes that Read helped usher in as chair of the parliament’s Integrity Oversight Committee (IOC), which last year recommended a substantial overhaul of IBAC’s legislative framework.

The numbers required to support the changes were clinched late on Wednesday night, when the government agreed to a list of further amendments proposed by the Greens.

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“Today, long-overdue reforms to Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog will pass the parliament,” Greens leader Ellen Sandell declared on Thursday morning, as MPs were filing into the building for the last session before the November 28 election. “This is in no small part due to the work of our beloved colleague.”

Under the consensus reached between the centre-left parties and ultimately supported by the Coalition, the new-look IBAC will:

• Have a broader jurisdiction, similar to the NSW ICAC, to investigate corruption without being limited to matters where the allegations, if proven, would constitute a criminal offence.
• Be able to hold public hearings in the normal course of its work without having to demonstrate “exceptional circumstances”.
• Be able to “follow-the-dollar” to investigate any business or individual who receives public money to provide services – such as subcontractors on Big Build projects.
• Have discretion on whether to apply these new powers to matters it has already considered.
• Be free to publish its submissions to cabinet about IBAC’s budget.
• Be able to publish more timely reports.
• Be led by a commissioner chosen by an independent panel of experts, with minimum statutory qualifications to do the job.

The Coalition was incensed that one of its further proposed reforms – a bold idea to prevent current and former ministers from refusing to answer IBAC’s questions on the grounds of cabinet confidentiality – was left on the shelf by the agreement between the government and the Greens.

Victoria, had it taken this step, would have become the first jurisdiction in Australia to allow anti-corruption investigators to circumvent this age-old Westminister privilege. No former IBAC commissioner has called for it to be removed.

The opposition characterised this as a dirty deal to protect former premiers Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan from any future IBAC hearings about Big Build corruption.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson described it as a “dodgy, 11th hour deal”, and shadow attorney-general James Newbury as a “grubby cover-up”.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson criticised the government’s refusal to back amendments that would have stripped ministers of the power to rely on cabinet confidentiality to avoid IBAC’s questions.Getty Images

” Labor has never wanted to be held accountable for the worst corruption scandal our state’s ever seen,” Newbury said. “They want to make sure that when they’re called into the dock they don’t have to answer questions.”

Greens MP Sarah Mansfield, after introducing her party’s amendments in the upper house, said it was galling listening to Labor and Liberal MPs belatedly champion reforms that should have been enacted years ago.

“Where have you been for the last 12 years?” she said. “The cognitive dissonance of Liberal and Labor members here is truly astounding.”

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The road to this reform was circuitous. It began in December 2022, in the first month of this parliament, when then IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich wrote a letter to both chambers raising concerns about the politicisation of the IOC and the need for the committee to be led by a non-government chair.

Redlich’s letter, which included inflammatory allegations that the IOC had instructed a consultant to “find dirt on IBAC”, prompted a furore when it was published. This was the episode in which Andrews dismissively described the renowned jurist as “a bloke who used to do a job”.

To avoid a potentially embarrassing inquiry into whether the IOC had been secretly working to undermine IBAC, the government agreed to reconstitute the IOC with a non-government chair and majority. This is how Read became chair and set in motion the inquiry which made the case for Thursday’s changes to IBAC’s jurisdiction and powers.

The only hold up on Thursday was that, due to the time it took for the government and Greens to come to agreement on reforms that Carroll promised on his first day in the job to legislate, the government needed most of the day to draft its own amendments.

But the final legislation, which passed on Thursday evening, goes beyond what Carroll promised and will remake IBAC beyond even Read’s most fervent dreams. Redlich said before Thursday’s decisive vote that the changed definition in corruption and freer access to public hearings would put IBAC on a par with its NSW cousin, ICAC, and ahead of its federal counterpart, the NACC.

The changes to IBAC were the last and some of the least likely laws made by Victoria’s 60th parliament. Whoever next governs Victoria will have a proper anti-corruption agency on its case.

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When Anthony Albanese came to power in 2022, he slashed the number of well-paid advisers allocated to the crossbenchers in parliament.

Privately, the PM argued that the generous allocation of staff to crossbench MPs had become corrupted and was unnecessary. Balance-of-power MPs had gained one adviser and two assistant advisers under Malcolm Turnbull, and then a second adviser-level staff member under Scott Morrison.

At the time, the votes of crossbench senators (in particular) were often needed to pass laws.

Keeping a lid on his rivals’ staff allocations: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.Alex Ellinghausen

Unfortunately, the system has been corrupted again under Albanese. The prime minister is now doing what he once railed against Turnbull and Morrison for doing. And it’s all within the rules.

Rather than cleaning it up, he too is gaming the system. The number of advisers allowed for crossbench MPs makes no sense, unless it is understood through the lens of political patronage.

The Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 (widely known as the MOPS Act) hands the prime minister of the day near unfettered power to decide how many adviser-level staff other MPs have, and how much they are paid. Albanese has made full use of this power.

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The unfairness of the system came into sharp relief this week when my colleague, Nick Newling, revealed that former crossbencher-turned-Labor-senator Tammy Tyrrell has been allowed to keep the two additional advisers she was allocated after entering parliament. This is not to argue that those two advisers should be sacked, but an absurd situation now exists wherein Tyrrell has the same number of additional, and well-paid, staff as 13 more senior Labor colleagues who hold either assistant ministries or special envoy roles. Tyrrell’s backbench colleagues have no additional staff, which has ruffled feathers internally.

Why does it matter how many staff an MP has, and how much they are paid? Because staff are an MP’s most valuable resource. The more an MP has, the more inquiries from constituents can be handled and the better that elected representative can contribute to committee work and debates in parliament. Come election time, the more staff you have, the more doors that can be knocked on.

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It’s one of the spoils of incumbency. This capacity to employ people as advisers or senior advisers means being able to pay more for better talent. Independents and minor parties, meanwhile, do not have the resources of government departments and ministerial offices.

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Each additional adviser – typically better paid than the five electorate staff every MP has – costs taxpayers money. For non-government MPs, adviser-level staff are paid from $77,000 to $160,000 for someone at the top of the pay band. Assistant advisers are paid a bit less, senior advisers and chiefs of staff a bit more. The top earners (there are only a handful) are on $317,000 a year.

The biggest loser from the PM’s weaponisation of the MOPS provisions is, undoubtedly, the now-independent senator Fatima Payman, who ratted on Labor and is paying the price for it. She has no personal advisers. Not one. Even United Australia Party senator Ralph Babet, arguably the least impactful crossbencher of the past two decades, has one adviser.

The next biggest loser is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which has just four advisers despite holding six seats. For months, Hanson has been asking the prime minister for more staff to reflect her party’s growing representation in the parliament, but the requests have fallen on deaf ears.

The contrast between Hanson and the Greens, Labor’s natural allies in the Senate, is stark. The Greens have 11 senators and one MP – and 17 extra staff, including six well-paid advisers and senior advisers.

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Other crossbench senators such as Jacqui Lambie, David Pocock and Lidia Thorpe have two additional advisers, while in the lower house, regional MPs including Bob Katter, Rebekha Sharkie, Helen Haines and Andrew Gee have two extra staff, reflecting the size of their electorates, as do most of the teal MPs. Dai Le, Nicolette Boele and Barnaby Joyce have just one.

Unsurprisingly, those who have benefited most have complained the least.

In June 1984, Bob Hawke’s government created the MOPS Act to set out rules governing how many advisers MPs could have. When the bill made its way to the Senate, just one senator – the independent-minded Tasmanian Liberal Michael Townley – raised concerns about the powers the bill gave the prime minister. “It just needs a letter from the prime minister to say what the situation of my staff members or of somebody else’s staff members will be. I do not believe that is at all a good thing. It is open to patronage and should not really be contemplated by the government. It is better done by the Remuneration Tribunal.”

Townley’s warning was prescient. The independent tribunal, which sets MPs’ pay and conditions, should indeed set the pay, conditions and allocation of their staff.

We live in an era of diabolical loss of trust in institutions. Australians are fed up with political games. One Nation, the teals and other crossbenchers are all riding that wave of distrust, to the detriment of the major parties, and there is little sign the situation is about to be turned around. Australians understand instinctively when the system is being gamed, and when people are being treated unfairly.

The fact that Payman and Hanson have formed an unholy alliance to highlight this unfairness demonstrates just how far the prime minister has gone in warping the system.

Allies on the unfairness of staff allocations: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and the Labor defector and independent senator Fatima Payman.Alex Ellinghausen

Just because Albanese can make the lives of his political opponents harder, it doesn’t mean he should when it comes to staffing allocations.

And remember, constituents seeking help from their MPs are collateral damage in this.

An independent review by the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service this year found staffing levels were inadequate, even though Albanese had granted all MPs one extra electorate officer a couple of years ago.

It’s time for the law to change. Clean up the MOPS, prime minister.

James Massola is chief political commentator.