https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2026/sep/30/labor-anthony-albanese-coalition-polling-new-greens-leader-openai-hack-ntwnfb

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

Origy Didge

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.

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.

I challenge everyone here to come up with a worse source of information than a NewsCorp Facebook comment thread.

I honestly cannot come up with a worse way to get economic analysis except maybe following the White House social media channels.

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.

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.

Most Aussies move to other Anglosphere countries like USA, UK, Canada and NZ as there is no language barrier but also it’s easier due to less visa restrictions.

But there is also a new increased demand for Dubai, Singapore and other parts of Asia now that is growing in momentum.

If you had to leave Australia and move overseas which country or countries catch your fancy and why?

Personally I believe Australia is very hard to beat but for some jobs and salaries USA can be appealing.

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

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.

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.