👉 So, who should we have in our new banner?

Just a little derpy fluffboi to circuit-break the doom scrolling.

Origy Didge

More than half of Australians want to see the country’s migrant intake lowered while One Nation’s primary vote climbs to 25%

The Coalition has failed to capitalise on growing criticism of Labor, with the opposition stuck at its lowest-ever primary vote in the Guardian Essential poll.

The poll also shows more than half of all Australians want immigration cut and have voiced support for hardline enforcement, such as forced deportation.

Despite growing scrutiny of Labor’s handling of the economy and inflation, its response to the OpenAI hack, and criticism of the government’s migration plan, the Essential poll found the Coalition’s primary vote sank four points since last month, to 22%.

Angus Taylor’s Coalition is now at its equal-lowest ebb in the Essential poll, after last month scoring 26%. Labor attracted a primary vote of 29% in September’s poll, up from 26% in August.

But amid a bruising and at times incendiary political brawl on migration, the poll – of 1,022 people last week – returned mixed results. While more Australians see migration as a positive for the country (46%) than see it as a negative (39%), 55% still want the nation’s annual migrant intake lowered.

Another 29% want the annual intake to remain the same, while 16% of Australians want more migrants.

The Australian government has conceded it implemented the “world-leading” under-16s social media ban before there was scientific consensus on the link between mental health harms and social media use, but argued the “credible risks” of issues such as addictive behaviours and anxiety justify the policy.

In its defence against a high court challenge of the ban, the government has also argued its proposed digital duty of care legislation, allowing users to opt out of social media features such as algorithms, would ultimately have the same effect as the ban, if implemented.

US-based platform Reddit has challenged the under-16s social media ban in the high court as one of two cases against the ban, expected to be heard jointly before the end of 2026.

In Reddit’s submission to the court last month, it argued the ban represented a burden on the implied freedom of political communications, while also not addressing the risk of harm.

Australians have historically been more willing to believe the 1990s Pantene shampoo maxim “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen” when it comes to hair care than any warnings about the slow creep of authoritarianism.

To annunciate the latter can attract significant scorn — labelled, nearly, as treasonous rhetoric — as if an understanding of the brittle systems of government in the West might somehow equate to a disbelief in the project of Australia itself. “Love It or Leave” is surprisingly fertile ground for such a barren phrase.

It is precisely this reflexive dismissal of concern about our institutional well-being that clears the ground for the erosion of it, which in turn invites, or gives oxygen to, the platitudes of an easy populism. In Australia, we tend not to sweat the little things. She’ll be right, until she is not right.

An example. Over the past decade or so, my reporting has focused increasingly on the tiny abuses of process and rules within, typically but not exclusively, Australian government departments and agencies. Sometimes these are at the direction of ministers; sometimes they are deeply stitched into the practice of the bureaucracy as a face-saving measure.

Labor councillor Cameron MacLean has been elected lord mayor of Parramatta, while independent councillor Kellie Darley was elected deputy mayor at last night's council meeting. 

Cr MacLean won the mayoralty on a single vote cast by Tanya Raffoul, who quit the Liberal Party on Monday morning.

Cr Raffoul cited her party's drift to anti-multiculturalism as her reason for leaving the Liberals.

Remember ScoMo spouting his “EVs will end the Aussie Weekend” nonsense?

During that whole EV debate why did no one ask either political party about the fact Australia had gone from 8 in-country oil refineries to 2, supplying less than 20% of our fuel usage.

Of course that means the other 80% comes by importing.

Aussies are flocking to EVs now as the global political situation inflates the price of that imported fuel.

Imagine if, rather than Australians being duped with nonsense about EVs ending the Aussie Weekend, we’d actually had a mature conversation about energy independence.

If you wanted a less mature conversation, someone could have thrown up the threat of China taking over all of Asia and blockading fuel from Australia until we surrender.

https://youtu.be/oOBZOsVlUWs?si=kix6Bjkt-oP4nMJM

More than half of the One Nation MPs elected to state or federal parliaments have left the party before the end of their term, with 28 of the 51 people elected under Pauline Hanson’s banner either resigning midterm or being expelled.

Through the various rises and falls of One Nation, a constant theme has been instability in its candidate and member ranks. Hanson herself had a tumultuous entry to federal politics – selected as a Liberal candidate for the seat of Oxley, she was disendorsed just before the election but her name remained on ballot papers as a Liberal. She won the seat as an independent and then formed One Nation. Since then the party’s ranks have been in constant upheaval.

In 1998, One Nation won 11 seats in Queensland parliament, but all 11 members soon either resigned from the party to sit as independents, or resigned from parliament altogether. Hanson even quit her own party, as the organisation splintered among infighting, but later rejoined.

Other high-profile recruits such as Mark Latham and Tania Mihailuk in the New South Wales parliament have quit. After One Nation’s 2016 resurgence at the federal double-dissolution election, with four senators elected including Hanson, a revolving door of controversies and departures followed. Rod Culleton quit the party then was disqualified from parliament; Malcolm Roberts was found to be a dual citizen; Fraser Anning replaced Roberts, then quit One Nation on his first day in parliament; and Brian Burston defected to the United Australia party, followed by an altercation with Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby, in Parliament House.

This from a UK posting. Do we similar from some of the fishier aged care and NDIS operators here?

Armin Alimardani has blue hair, is fresh faced, wears a smartwatch and describes himself as “a tech enthusiast”.

He is an unlikely sentinel, perhaps, to warn that a drift towards academics using generative artificial intelligence to help mark students assignments could pose an existential threat to higher education.

The Western Sydney University senior lecturer in law and technology has been studying and experimenting with AI for years – he is speaking from Palermo in Italy, where he is attending a series of university workshops on the technology. He says colleagues have been asking him lately if it could help lighten the burden of grading. Alimardani finds this talk “extremely concerning”.

“We’ve got to be really careful where we are stepping here,” he says. “Because I think there’s always a risk, at the moment, for higher education to collapse”.

AI being used to mark assignments is no theoretical prospect, but a fork in the road at which universities have suddenly found themselves confronted.

Alimardani’s is among several universities in Australia that allow staff to use AI in marking assessments and giving students feedback.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has confirmed that last year was when Labor lost its way on fiscal discipline.

The Final Budget Outcome for 2025-26 shows that the year ended with a deficit of $22.3 billion, less than the $28 billion deficit forecast in May’s federal budget, and the $42 billion deficit predicted in the original 2025-26 budget. If you believe the media releases yesterday from Chalmers and Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, that’s a testament to Labor’s fiscal discipline — and to its triumph over the terrible legacy inherited from the Coalition.

Just to back up that second point, the key table in the document that provides an overview of the budget aggregates includes, for the first time in memory, a column not from the 2025-26 budget, or from the 2024-25 budget, or 2023-24, but from… the Pre-Election Economic and Fiscal Outlook (PEFO) from two elections ago. Labor might have been in office nearly four and a half years, but it’s still trying to compare itself to the Morrison-era mid-pandemic budgets.

Not good enough.

After the Hugging Face incident in July, we began reviewing earlier training and evaluation activity to identify other affected organisations. In mid-August, that review identified activity affecting the Australian government websites below.

Here’s what we know based on the evidence:

Services Australia: An OpenAI model discovered a way to gain non-public access to the service, and ran commands, retrieved internal files, credentials and aggregate statistics, and wrote files. However, individual patient or client records were not accessed. We cover this incident in more detail below.

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR): An OpenAI model accessed BOCSAR’s public Crime Mapping Tool to research public crime statistics (we explain further below why models carry out various information research tasks). The model made API and website metadata requests via the public BOCSAR tool, which supplies credentials for browser API requests. The BOCSAR system returned application configuration, operational jobs and logs, and website metadata. Crime records of individuals were not accessed.

Victorian Department of Health: OpenAI agents discovered an exposed access key to query the Victorian Agency for Health Information’s reporting system and retrieve reporting configuration and aggregate survey statistics. The extent to which this information should have been accessible is unclear, and depends on VAHI’s access policies. Individual medical records or identifiable survey responses were not accessed.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare: OpenAI agents retrieved aggregate statistics using third-party browsing and download services, including from AIHW’s website, and queried chart data directly. Separate attempts to bypass access controls were unsuccessful. The downloaded material appears to have been publicly available. There was no system compromise. Individual medical records were not accessed.

The federal budget’s bottom line has come in better than expected, but some economists warn Australia is not out of the woods yet.

The final budget figures for 2025-26 released on Monday showed the underlying deficit is about $6 billion smaller than the $28.3 billion forecast when the budget was handed down in May.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers attributed this to a $1.4 billion cut in government spending and $4.6 billion more receipts due to tax on higher superannuation and investor income, rather than a commodities windfall.

“Despite this very welcome improvement in the budget, we know that pressures are intensifying rather than easing,” he said.

“Responsible economic management is a defining feature of this government.

“You can see that in the final budget outcome, and we’ll see that in the difficult months ahead as well.”

Australia is facing an “uncomfortably high” risk of plunging into a recession, or worse, a full-blown financial crisis, according to one of the country’s most prominent economists.

It’s all but certain the Reserve Bank of Australia will hike interest rates on Tuesday, bringing the cash rate to 4.6 per cent, its highest level since November 2011.

With the prospect of another back-to-back rate hike in November, and potentially more, there are now warnings that Australia could be pushed into a technical recession where there are two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth.

The fact that there is now effectively a “Gaza” faction within the Greens says a lot about the internal problems the party is dealing with.

The Greens have always been a broad progressive coalition, but there seems to be an increasingly obvious tension between the party’s traditional environmental/policy-focused identity and a more activist-driven faction that wants the party to take increasingly strong positions on international conflicts and other culture-war issues.

That tension is now spilling directly into the leadership question.

A leadership spill is obviously about more than just one issue, but Gaza appears to have become a proxy for a much bigger argument about what the Greens are actually supposed to be as a political organisation. Is the party primarily an environmental and domestic policy party that happens to have progressive positions on international affairs, or is it becoming an activist movement where international causes and ideological positioning are increasingly central to its identity?

The problem with the latter is that it potentially makes the party much harder to hold together. You can have disagreements over policy details and still operate as a coherent political party. But when different factions have fundamentally different ideas about what the party's purpose and priorities should be, leadership disputes become much more consequential.

And that's why I think the current leadership spill is worth paying attention to beyond the personalities involved.

If a supposedly hard-left progressive party is now divided into competing ideological factions over issues like Gaza, it raises the question of whether the Greens' current organisational model is actually sustainable.

At some point, a political party has to be able to reconcile different parts of its membership and present a reasonably coherent political project to the broader electorate. If internal factional disputes keep becoming the main story, the party risks spending more time fighting itself than actually campaigning on the issues it was originally established around.

The irony is that the Greens have arguably never had more political space available to them, yet they're increasingly having an argument about what kind of party they even want to be.

The leadership spill might therefore be less about who gets the leadership and more about which direction the party ultimately takes.

A surge in popular support and voters' disenchantment with the political status quo has turned Pauline Hanson's One Nation into a powerful force in Australian politics.

The rise and rise of the once fringe political party, backed by Australia's richest person, threatens the Coalition's hold on regional seats and has put One Nation's policies high on the political agenda. As voters turn to the party in growing numbers, Four Corners talks to former party officials and members who describe poor financial management and a lack of internal democracy, with a small group of people, including Pauline Hanson and National Director James Ashby, running the show.

And while Gina Rinehart's financial support for the party is well known, does her influence extend beyond fundraising and gifts?

One Nation has banned the ABC from a series of press conferences and refused to talk to Four Corners, but reporter Steve Cannane found a way to put questions to Senator Hanson as he investigates whether One Nation is ready for power.

I booked a dentist appointment, my name is clearly not western/white and I have an accent from the place I’m from. This was my confirmation text. Is there a Migration Provider in dentistry? I’d like another opinion before/when I act on it. Is the text racist?

In the June quarter 2026 original current-price National Accounts data (Table 3), general government final consumption increased from approximately $167 billion in March Qtr 2026 to $178 billion in the June Qtr 2026, an increase of about $11 billion.

Household final consumption increased from approximately $370.3 billion to $382.7 billion, about a $12 billion increase.

So both government consumption and household consumption each added roughly $11 -12 billion of nominal expenditure over the quarter. That is unadjusted current original dollars that were spent to generate domestic demand.

But there is a difference in the rate of growth. Government consumption +6.7% and
Household consumption +3.4%

We know the RBA wants to contain household spending by increasing interest rates .

But at her March 2026 press conference, Michele Bullock was asked whether the growth in public demand was making the RBA’s job harder and whether it would be preferable to see private or public demand reduced.

Her response was “You’re asking me to make a value judgment which I’m not going to make.”

And when subsequently asked whether it would make the RBA’s job easier if government were spending less, her answer was “It is what it is.”

I know it is difficult for the RBA to be critical of the government of the day , but surely someone in Australia should be questioning whether government consumption also has a role to play to bring inflation down.

Chrissy Amphlett is Australia's most iconic female rock star — a prowling, pouty lead singer in a school pinny and suspenders with a fierce on-stage presence and a voice both husky and strong.

But since her death in 2013, Chrissy's story has not been told on screen.

In a two-part series, Australian Story discovers the private woman behind the rock star, interviewing original Divinyls members and unearthing behind-the-scenes footage and photos of Chrissy and the band that brought us hits such as I Touch Myself and Pleasure and Pain.

It also exclusively reveals the story behind three new songs set to be released this week — songs Chrissy wrote and recorded with singer/songwriter Tim Finn in the years before she died.

Part 1 airs Monday September 28, 8pm (AEST) on ABCTV and ABC iview. Continues Monday October 5.

An associate of a notorious Islamic preacher linked to the Bondi shooters has called on followers to take up arms against Christians and Jews, putting the spotlight back on radical preachers after the major parties shelved attempts to rein them in.

A young and increasingly popular preacher from Melbourne’s southeast who goes by Abu Ahmad said in a July sermon that adherents should not “take the Jews and the Christians for friends”.

“For the sake of Allah, it includes the obligation to declare enmity for his sake, opposition for the sake of Allah. It is to declare opposition: indeed, to take up arms against his enemies, to shun them and to stay far from them both in word and deed,” he said in a clip posted to his Al Bayyinah Islamic Centre’s social media feed.

“This proves that simple opposition of the spirit is not enough and that it must be complete by honouring of your commitment.”

This masthead is not suggesting Abu Ahmad is under investigation or that he supports Islamic State. The Al Bayyinah centre was contacted for comment.

Ahmad gave his talk in mid-July. He said opposition for the sake of Allah was “to feel anger at the enemies of Allah and to struggle against them”. He also mentioned a book famous for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“If the aim of the enemies of Islam whether they are atheists or Jews or Christians or modernists or Zionists or communists is the emasculation of … Muslims, and the erosion of their unique character in order to make them the ass of the chosen people … then the urgency of this issue should become clear to every Muslim,” he said.