Labor True Believers, Political Analysis and Satire

The Liberal Party Has Forgotten What Government Is For

There is something deeply revealing about the Liberal Party's response to the proposed rescue of the Tomago aluminium smelter. On one hand, James Paterson says he is glad Tomago is not closing; on the other, he describes government assistance as a “bailout” funded by taxpayers and warns that supporting major industrial facilities is a recipe for an “inefficient sclerotic economy”.

We are apparently expected to believe that the Coalition's preferred approach is to stand back and watch Australian industry disappear whenever the private sector cannot make the numbers work.

That raises a rather obvious question: what exactly does the modern Liberal Party believe government is for?

Tomago is not a corner shop struggling to pay its electricity bill. It is one of Australia's largest industrial facilities, employs around 1,000 people and produces up to 590,000 tonnes of aluminium a year. It is also an enormous consumer of electricity and a significant part of the Hunter's industrial economy. The federal and NSW governments' package is designed to keep it operating beyond 2028, with the owners themselves expected to contribute substantial capital and with new renewable energy capacity forming part of the arrangement.

This is not simply about “bailing out” a company; it is about whether Australia retains the capacity to make things. There is certainly a legitimate debate to be had about government subsidies, corporate welfare and whether taxpayers should continually be asked to support industries that cannot compete, but there is an equally legitimate question that the Coalition seems increasingly incapable of answering: what is the cost of allowing strategically important industries to disappear?

Because once they are gone, they are often gone for good.
We have seen this movie before, and Australia's oil refining industry provides perhaps the clearest example. When the Kwinana refinery closed in 2020 and ExxonMobil announced the closure of Altona in 2021, Australia went from four refineries to just two, increasing our dependence on imported refined fuel and leaving the country more vulnerable to disruptions in international supply chains. Who was in government when those closures occurred? The Coalition.

Indeed, the Morrison government eventually recognised the strategic importance of keeping the remaining refineries alive and introduced a package worth up to $2 billion to encourage them to stay open. The then energy minister was none other than Angus Taylor. So when James Paterson now complains that the government is “running around bailing out every industrial facility”, perhaps somebody should remind him that governments of both political persuasions have intervened when essential industrial capacity is at risk.

The difference is that Labor appears prepared to make the argument openly: some industries matter to the national interest, and sometimes government has to act to preserve them. The Coalition increasingly seems embarrassed by the very concept.

That is the extraordinary part. The Liberal Party once understood that national economic strength was about more than lowering taxes and hoping the market would sort everything out. It understood the importance of manufacturing, energy security, infrastructure, strategic capability and maintaining the industrial skills necessary for a modern nation. Now we get lectures about socialism whenever government actually tries to prevent another piece of Australia's industrial base from disappearing.

Apparently, allowing an Australian aluminium smelter to close and sending those jobs and production offshore is somehow “free enterprise”, while keeping it here is socialism. What an extraordinary inversion of conservative economics.

The real economic danger is not necessarily government intervention; it is deindustrialisation. Every time an industrial facility closes, Australia loses more than a factory. We lose skilled workers, apprenticeships, engineering capability, supply chains, technical expertise, regional economic activity and the ability to produce strategically important goods domestically. Once that capability has migrated overseas, bringing it back is vastly more difficult than keeping it in the first place.

That is why the Tomago debate matters, and it is also why the Liberal Party's apparent ideological discomfort with the deal is so troubling. If the Coalition believes the government should never support strategically important industries, then it should say so clearly. If it believes the government should simply allow Australian jobs to disappear whenever an international corporation decides production is cheaper elsewhere, it should own that position. But it should not pretend that this represents some grand commitment to economic freedom.

There is nothing economically liberating about becoming increasingly dependent on overseas manufacturers for the products we once made ourselves, just as there is nothing fiscally responsible about losing an industrial capability and then discovering during the next international crisis that rebuilding it will cost vastly more. There is certainly nothing patriotic about shrugging your shoulders while Australian jobs disappear overseas.

The irony is almost impossible to miss. The same political movement that spends so much time talking about national security appears remarkably relaxed about the erosion of Australia's industrial and manufacturing sovereignty. Energy security is national security, fuel security is national security, manufacturing capability is national security, critical minerals processing is national security, and industrial skills are national security. Yet when Labor steps in to preserve an important piece of that capability, the Coalition reaches instinctively for the word “bailout”.

Perhaps the Liberal Party needs to rediscover something it once understood: markets are a means, not a national purpose. Government’s job is not to replace the market, nor should governments endlessly prop up businesses that have no viable future. But governments absolutely have a role in ensuring that Australia remains capable of producing, refining, manufacturing and maintaining the things a sovereign nation needs.

Labor understands that and thank goodness it does. While the Liberal Party argues about whether saving Tomago is socialism, the Albanese government is actually trying to keep Australian industry operating, protect thousands of jobs and build an energy system capable of supporting manufacturing into the future.

That is not socialism.

That is governing.

And if the alternative is to stand on the sidelines while Australian industrial capability is dismantled and the jobs are shipped overseas, then Australia should be very grateful that, at least for now, Labor is prepared to fight for Australian industry.

One Nation and the Politics of Division

There is something deeply revealing about the latest controversy surrounding One Nation. A candidate for the party’s Western Australian upper house ticket has reportedly described homosexuality as a “mental illness”, only for the party’s deputy leader, Barnaby Joyce, to publicly distance himself from the comments.

Joyce is right to condemn them. There is no place in Australian public life for the idea that being gay is an illness, a defect or something requiring correction. His observation that One Nation itself has a significant number of gay supporters and members is also worth noting. But it raises a much larger question: how did a party that claims to speak for ordinary Australians become such a fertile ground for rhetoric that encourages Australians to turn on one another?

This is not simply about one candidate saying something offensive. The problem is the political culture that allows this sort of rhetoric to flourish in the first place.

One Nation has built much of its political identity around grievance. Someone is always supposedly taking something away from someone else. Migrants. Refugees. Indigenous Australians. Trans people. The LGBTQ community. Governments. Elites. The media. International organisations.

Political correctness.

The targets change, but the formula remains remarkably consistent: find a group that can be portrayed as threatening the way of life of “ordinary Australians” and turn that anxiety into political support.
That is not leadership. It is division dressed up as political courage.

There is nothing courageous about telling a gay Australian that their sexuality is a mental illness. There is nothing courageous about suggesting that one section of society is responsible for another section's frustrations. And there is certainly nothing patriotic about deliberately widening the fault lines between Australians.

Australia has always been a remarkably diverse country. We have people of different religions, backgrounds, ethnicities, political beliefs and sexual orientations living alongside one another. We don't need everyone to agree. We don't even need everyone to like each other.

But we do need a basic understanding that our fellow citizens are entitled to dignity and respect.

That principle should not be controversial.

Joyce's intervention is therefore important, but it also exposes the contradiction at the heart of One Nation. The party wants to portray itself as the champion of ordinary Australians, yet some of the rhetoric emerging from within its own ranks tells millions of ordinary Australians that they are somehow less acceptable than others.

And this is where One Nation's politics becomes particularly corrosive.

A political party can campaign against government policy. It can argue for lower migration, tougher criminal laws, different economic policies or changes to Australia's approach to social issues. Those are legitimate political arguments.

What it should not do is turn human beings themselves into political punching bags.

There is a difference between arguing about policy and telling a group of Australians that there is something fundamentally wrong with who they are.

The irony is that Joyce himself appears to understand this. His comment that gay One Nation supporters do not want to be “glorified or vilified” but simply accepted is a perfectly reasonable proposition.

Perhaps the party should apply that principle more broadly.
Perhaps Australians who were born overseas would also like to be accepted rather than vilified. Perhaps Indigenous Australians would like to be treated with dignity rather than continually presented as a political problem. Perhaps refugees would prefer not to be reduced to a talking point. Perhaps transgender Australians would like to live their lives without becoming a permanent target of political campaigning.

And perhaps gay Australians would like politicians to stop treating their existence as a culture-war weapon.

This is the central problem with One Nation's politics of division. Once you build a political movement around resentment, eventually the resentment has to find somewhere to go.

And there will always be another target.

The extraordinary thing about Joyce's defence of gay Australians is that it demonstrates that there is an alternative available to One Nation. It could appeal to Australians through shared interests rather than shared enemies. It could talk about wages, housing, regional services, infrastructure, the cost of living and the pressures facing working families without needing to find another minority group to blame.

That would require political courage.

It is much easier to point a finger.

Australia does not need more politicians telling us who to fear. We have enough problems without manufacturing new ones.

The great challenge for Australian politics should be finding ways to bring people together in an increasingly complicated and uncertain world. Political parties don't have to agree on how to do that. They can fight fiercely over policy and ideology.

But there ought to be a line between political disagreement and deliberately fermenting social division.

One Nation has spent years walking that line.

The comments of its WA candidate demonstrate just how dangerous that political culture can become.

Barnaby Joyce is right: being gay is not a mental illness, and gay Australians deserve exactly the same acceptance and dignity as everyone else.

The question now is whether One Nation will do more than condemn one offensive comment.

Because if the party genuinely believes that Australians should not be vilified for who they are, it needs to look much more seriously at the political culture it has helped create.

Australia has enough divisions already. We don't need political parties cultivating more of them.

The Pickles

Pauline Hanson is no battlers’ friend — look at the voting record but still maintains the fiction she is.

For decades, Pauline Hanson has presented herself as the champion of the Australian battler: the forgotten worker, the struggling family, the small business owner and the ordinary Australian who supposedly has been abandoned by the political establishment. It is a powerful political image, but there is a simple way to test whether the rhetoric matches the reality: look at what Pauline Hanson has actually done in Parliament.

When the slogans are stripped away, a rather different picture emerges.

Hanson and One Nation have worked hard to claim the mantle of the working class, particularly among voters who feel economically insecure, culturally alienated or abandoned by the major parties. The language is deliberately familiar — battlers, ordinary Australians, hardworking families, jobs, wages and national pride — but being angry about the political establishment does not automatically make a politician a champion of working people, just as attacking Labor does not automatically make a party pro-worker.

Its on the Public Record and Hanson's voting record tells another story

The independent parliamentary voting tracker They Vote For You currently categorises Hanson as having voted generally against increasing workplace protections, while also recording her as having voted generally against increasing trade union powers in the workplace. That matters because unions and workplace protections are not abstract ideological concepts for working Australians; they are mechanisms through which employees bargain for better wages, safer workplaces, reasonable conditions and protection against exploitation.

Hanson's record is not simply a matter of one controversial vote. The voting record includes opposition to measures associated with stronger workplace protections, while her parliamentary record also contains votes against measures aimed at improving pay and conditions. In 2025, for example, she voted against an amendment concerning flexible working arrangements during debate on legislation dealing with penalty and overtime rates.

There have also been exceptions, and that is precisely why the record needs to be examined honestly rather than reduced to a slogan. In March 2026, Hanson and the other One Nation senators voted for a Fair Work amendment concerning workplace determinations that would make mandatory terms no less favourable to workers.

But taken as a whole, the available voting data does not support the simple claim that Hanson is consistently standing up for stronger workplace rights. They Vote For You also records Hanson as having voted generally against increasing Newstart and Youth Allowance, as well as against increasing trade union powers and workplace protections.

Hanson’s supporters attempt to counter her voting record by claiming that the bills she voted against also contained measures she could not support. This is a valid claim however Hanson has never introduced stand-alone bills to introduce stronger workplace rights or to increase Newstart and Youth Allowance.

The battler rhetoric is politically useful

This is where One Nation's political strategy becomes particularly interesting. Hanson understands something that modern political parties sometimes forget: people do not vote purely on economic spreadsheets. A worker can be worried about their mortgage, wages and job security while simultaneously being angry about immigration, multiculturalism, political correctness or what they perceive as the metropolitan elite looking down on them.

One Nation has become extremely effective at joining those grievances together, creating a simple political narrative: Labor has abandoned you; the Liberals don't care about you, the elites despise you — and we are the people who will fight for you.
It is an extraordinarily effective political message, but voters should ask a more important question: fight for you to achieve what?

Opposing immigration is not the same thing as increasing someone's wages; attacking unions is not the same thing as improving workplace bargaining power; blaming migrants for economic insecurity is not the same thing as providing affordable housing; and railing against the political establishment is not the same thing as strengthening employee rights.

The oldest political trick in the book

There is nothing new about political movements presenting themselves as champions of ordinary workers while directing working-class anger towards another group. History provides plenty of warnings about that strategy, particularly in the political movements of the 1930s that combined nationalist rhetoric, promises to restore national greatness and claims to represent ordinary workers with hostility towards minorities, political opponents and organised labour.

That does not mean One Nation is N**i Germany, nor is such a crude equivalence useful. But the historical lesson remains important: calling yourself pro-worker does not make you pro-worker.

The test is what you do when you have power: whose bargaining power increases, whose wages improve, whose working conditions become safer, whose rights are strengthened and whose rights are weakened.

Those are the questions that should be asked of every political party — including One Nation.

Hanson's politics are about more than economics

Hanson's political rhetoric demonstrates how effectively One Nation combines economic anxiety with cultural grievance. At her June 2026 National Press Club address, Hanson criticised multiculturalism, attacked aspects of childcare and questioned the principle of paid parental leave. She subsequently clarified that she believed the government could continue funding paid parental leave but argued that small businesses should not be required to pay it themselves.

The issue is not whether every individual policy position is inherently right or wrong; it is the contradiction between claiming the mantle of the working family while advocating positions that can reduce workplace protections or shift risks back onto employees and families. That contradiction deserves scrutiny.

The billionaires and the battlers

There is another uncomfortable question for Hanson. If One Nation really is the political movement of the working class, why does its politics increasingly intersect with some of Australia's wealthiest and most powerful interests?

Hanson has cultivated a populist image in which she stands outside the establishment and fights the powerful, yet the political reality is considerably more complicated. A politician does not become a champion of ordinary Australians merely by standing in front of a camera and declaring that they are, just as a billionaire's support does not automatically discredit a political movement.

But when a politician presents herself as the great defender of battlers while simultaneously moving comfortably among some of the country's wealthiest interests, voters are entitled to ask whether the political performance matches the underlying agenda.

Don't listen only to the slogan — read the record
This is ultimately the point. Pauline Hanson has every right to describe herself as a champion of working Australians, and her supporters have every right to believe her, but voters should not be expected to accept the claim simply because it is repeated often enough.

Read the speeches, read the policies and, most importantly, look at the votes.

The parliamentary record is not perfect, and it does not provide a complete picture of a politician's beliefs. They Vote For You itself warns that voting records cannot predict with certainty what a politician will do in the future, but voting records provide something political slogans cannot: evidence.

And the evidence makes it difficult to sustain the argument that Pauline Hanson is simply the champion of the Australian battler. She is a populist politician who has become extraordinarily successful at speaking the language of working-class grievance but speaking that language is not quite the same thing as delivering for working people.

The battler does not need another politician telling them who to blame. They need decent wages, secure employment, safe workplaces, affordable housing, accessible childcare, paid leave, retirement security and a genuine voice at work — things that are delivered through policy, legislation and parliamentary votes rather than political theatre.

So the next time Pauline Hanson tells Australians that One Nation is the party of the battler, perhaps the most appropriate response is a very simple one:

Show us the voting record.

Because when the rhetoric stops and the parliamentary lights come on, the battler deserves to know exactly whose side their representative has been standing on.

Everything is communist now

(Charlie Lewis and Crikey)

Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg used a quite bonkers National Press Club address to continue his fight against the commies, who apparently are everywhere.

“What sort of peculiar capitalist country is this, in which the workers’ representatives, predominate in the upper house and, till recently, did so in the lower house as well, and yet the capitalist system is in no danger?
The Australian Labour Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually it is a liberal-bourgeois party, while the so-called Liberals in Australia are really conservatives.
The leaders of the Australian Labour Party are trade union officials, everywhere the most moderate and ‘capital serving’ element, and in Australia, altogether peaceable, purely liberal.”
So wrote a disappointed Lenin in a 1913 edition of Pravda.

Nearly 100 years later, in 2008, with the Liberal Party in the doldrums at state and federal level, conservative think tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) suggested this might be because of the Labor Party’s shift to the right: “The ALP has dumped socialism and seems to be a pro-business, pro-market political machine. It receives more funding from the business community than from the unions.”

Well, in what is some good news for both Vladimir and the IPA, that’s no longer the case, apparently.

Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg made it his business yesterday to ensure there will be one area in which One Nation will not best the Liberal Party in 2026: bonkers National Press Club addresses.

Attempting to outdo Pauline Hanson’s calls for a return to monoculture amid a transgender insurgency, Bragg — lest we forget, nominally a leading Liberal “moderate” — gave a speech that continues his definitely necessary fight against the commies.

Labor’s changes to housing investments in self-managed super funds? “Communist taxes”, according to Bragg. Australia’s weak household spending is because “it feels like we’re living in a communist state”. Skilled migration targets? “Sounds like communism”! The South Australian Royal Commission into Artificial Intelligence? “Again, sounds very communist”.

To avoid any doubt, Bragg separately described himself and his party as “not communists” and that their “priority is to beat the communists”.

Which is a relief, because if the last 20 years have proven anything, it’s that there is a hive of far-left agitation at the highest levels of politics in Australia. Here is everything that is communist, socialist, marxist, or otherwise far-left according to Australia’s politicians and media:

The Albanese government
ACTU secretary Sally McManus
The Greens, obviously
Criticism of Malcolm Turnbull’s $1.75 million donation to his own party
Changes to capital gains
Pro-Palestine protests
The Albanese government
Nick Xenophon
Anthony Albanese
Bill Shorten
Julia Gillard
Kevin Rudd
Monique Ryan’s volunteers
The Albanese government
The Safe Schools anti-bullying program
Matt Canavan (briefly, according to Matt Canavan)
Kristina Keneally
Critics of Sussan Ley’s abuse of taxpayer funds
The Age
Islamist terrorism
Marriage equality
N**ism

America is fencing out Chinese robots – and may be fencing itself in

(Thomas O. Falk, Pearls and Irritations)

Washington says its restrictions on Chinese robots are about security. But shielding US manufacturers from their strongest competitors may leave Chinese firms to gain the scale, data and global markets that determine who ultimately wins.

Concession speeches follow a formula: the vocabulary of defiance, thanks to the faithful, a promise that the fight goes on. Last month, Brendan Carr, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), essentially delivered one on behalf of American robotics.

Acting on findings from a White House task force, Carr added new foreign-made humanoid robots, quadrupeds and power inverters to the agency’s Covered List, denying them the authorisation nearly every electronic device requires to be sold in the United States. The stated grounds for the restrictions are cybersecurity and supply-chain risk.

The unstated ground is arithmetic. Chinese manufacturers account for roughly 85 per cent of the global humanoid market. There is no established American industry to protect, only an infant to be raised behind a wall.

That’s the message the industry received. Evan Beard, CEO of Standard Bots, hailed the order as among the strongest technology-security actions in modern American history, vowing that foreign-subsidised machines would not “dominate US robotics as they did solar”.

The security case deserves a fair hearing. A networked machine with cameras, microphones and limbs, stationed in a factory or a care home, is a plausible platform for espionage and sabotage. But the order makes clear how seriously Washington takes its own warning: it exempts the federal government, which may keep buying the machines deemed too dangerous for ordinary citizens. A menace to every American except the American government is less a threat assessment than a tariff in uniform.

Which returns us to Beard and solar. Although Washington began walling out Chinese panels with anti-dumping duties under the Obama administration in 2012, China now controls over 80 per cent of every stage of global solar panel manufacturing. The wall decided who could sell to Americans but not who won the industry.

Protectionism shouldn’t be dismissed outright, because Beijing has spent two decades proving it can work. China built the world’s dominant electric vehicle sector behind joint venture requirements and lavish subsidies.

But the shelter came with a whip. Dozens of domestic carmakers were thrown into a price war so brutal that most will not survive, and the survivors have been driven out into the world. In the Chinese model, protection is a training regime with an expiry date.

In the US, Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures made the infant-industry case in 1791. In the 20th century, the experiment ran both ways. Latin America’s import-substitution economies sealed their markets and their industries stagnated for a generation. Japan and South Korea tied every favour to export performance and produced Toyota and Samsung. The FCC has chosen the Latin American variant.

Every year spent selling into a captive home market is a year the rest of the world spends standardising on Chinese machines.

Chinese robot exports reached nearly 20 billion yuan (US$2.96 billion) in the first five months of this year, spread across 150 countries and regions. Just days before the US ban, Unitree Robotics launched its humanoids commercially in Europe. In June, AgiBot staged a product launch in London, and Volkswagen, in the middle of a bruising restructuring at home, already has UBTech’s Walker robots working the lines of its Chinese joint venture.

Labour-starved Europe, with no humanoid champion of its own producing at scale, will not wait for Texas and California to catch up. It will buy what exists.

And what exists, overwhelmingly, is Chinese. Humanoids improve through deployment: every warehouse shift generates the data that trains the next model.

American robotics, meanwhile, is rich in capital and short on production. American AI company Figure has a valuation of US$39 billion; Unitree Robotics is heading for a Shanghai listing at US$9 billion while shipping more robots.

Even Beijing’s outrage is theatre. For all the Commerce Ministry’s talk of unilateral bullying, Chinese vendors, one analyst noted, had largely written off the American market already and view Europe as their prime destination.

American firms may yet build superb robots: Figure, Apptronik and 1X are all close to shipping at volume. But they will now mature in a paddock, selling into a market from which their fiercest rival has been excluded, while Chinese firms fight one another, and everyone else, across five continents.

Concession speeches usually end the same way: the candidate vows that the cause endures and the comeback starts tomorrow. Perhaps it does; American industry has staged revivals before, and the humanoid market, at barely US$3 billion today against forecasts of US$200 billion by 2035, is young enough to turn.

But when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in the US next month, he will find a country that has conceded the present to campaign for the future, while his country’s machines continue staffing the factories, warehouses and, soon enough, care homes of everyone else.

The FCC calls it security. Beijing calls it bullying. Posterity will file it under concessions.



Republished from South China Morning Post

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.

Note - Thomas O. Falk is a journalist. He writes about German, British, and US politics.