With Fred Pawle, Paul Collits and Rebekah Barnett
As always in Australia these days, some of the best political analysis is coming from independent media.
The faux Australian conservatives, who didn’t have the gumption, the courage or the integrity to stand up for conservative values and who betrayed their traditional base, have suffered an historic landslide against them, with the most left wing government in the nation’s history, Labor led by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, triumphant across the country.
Here’s but a sampling.
Fred Pawle
Australia has dodged the bullet of fake conservatism. It is now incumbent on those who can survive Labor’s treacherous incompetence to ensure a decent alternative is offered in 2028.
Phew. That was close! Had Peter Dutton’s Coalition won this election, we would be staring at three years of fake conservatives appeasing the environmental lobby, imposing new censorship laws, introducing a digital ID and central bank digital currency, ignoring the toxic National School Curriculum and locking us all up every time Anthony Fauci catches a cold.
The Coalition would have combined that with just enough sensible reform to keep both its base and its leftist focus groups onside come the next election. In other words, long-term, robust conservative policies would have been as likely as Albo’s newfound Catholicism preventing him from marching in the next Mardi Gras.
Thank goodness that instead we are staring down three years of unmitigated catastrophe at the hands of the most incompetent, nastiest bunch of politicians Australia has seen. Our contempt for them need not be moderated. Nor will we need to stifle our amusement as they impose arguably the worst agenda of any Australian government in history.
Conservatives who are lamenting that Labor’s divisive, illogical, unpatriotic and economy-destroying performance has been rewarded with another term are forgetting how much fun it is to be in opposition. We are the pirates, the rebels, the discerning minority who warned during this campaign that Labor would destroy the country. And now they will. It’s time to break out the popcorn and await vindication.
By far one of the best and certainly most entertaining political commentators, Fred Pawle is one of Australia’s most experienced journalists, having worked for The Australian, ADHTV, and is now making a financial success out on his own, uninhibited by dreary News Limited editors. For any observer of Australian media, it’s glorious to watch.
Follow him on his YouTube channel here:
Or his Substack page here: https://substack.com/@fredpawle
Or on X here: https://x.com/FredPawle
Paul Collits
As some of us began to suspect during the campaign, the Liberals appear to have run dead. We smelled a ponging rodent. It wasn’t just the Libs’ usual incompetence. Rather, it was factional malfeasance.
It is the old story. If it quacks like a duck… Here is George Christensen, who calls it sabotage:
Let’s not sugar-coat it — Peter Dutton was never meant to win this election.
Not because he lacked the leadership. Not because Australians didn’t want change. But because his own party made damn sure he’d lose.
- Peter Dutton’s campaign was deliberately undermined by internal factions in the Liberal Party who feared his conservative leadership.
- A clear and strategic campaign plan from Dutton’s office was sabotaged by party insiders through delay, message dilution, and refusal to fund ads.
- Leaks and internal betrayals by moderates, Photios loyalists, and even elements of the NSW Right were coordinated to destabilise Dutton.
- The party’s focus on winning back Teal seats alienated the conservative base and ignored the desires of suburban and rural Australians.
- The loss was not due to Dutton’s ideology, but to a calculated effort by internal rivals to ensure his defeat and preserve their own influence.
This is a big call. But for anyone remotely familiar with the inner workings of the Liberal Party and the warped priorities of its factions, especially in Sydney, it is entirely plausible. Christensen continues:
This wasn’t a stuff-up. It wasn’t bad luck. This was premeditated political sabotage—a coordinated takedown by factional cowards, backstabbing opportunists, and hollow men whose loyalty lies not with voters, not with the country, but with their own futures.
They’re already trying to rewrite history. The media narrative is locked and loaded: Dutton was too right wing to win. Rubbish. If anything, he was too restrained. He didn’t step to the right—he stepped aside. He avoided the fights he could’ve won. He muted his instincts in the hope of keeping the wreckers in the tent.
It wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough.
Months ago, Dutton had the momentum. He was ahead in the polls. Australians were listening. There was a clear plan, forged before Christmas, to start 2025 with a political onslaught: hit the ground running in January, frame the debate, take the fight to Labor early.
That plan came directly from Dutton’s office. A 12-point blueprint for restoring the nation—a structured, disciplined pitch to voters who were crying out for direction. It may not have been flashy, but it was real. It had intent. It had direction.
And the political machine killed it.
The Liberal Party’s internal wreckers—the “moderates”, enabled by weak-willed so-called conservatives in NSW—torched the strategy before it could take off. They scoffed at it. They delayed. They pulled the plug on ad buys. They muddied the message until there was nothing left but bland fog.
Instead of leading, the campaign limped. Instead of clarity, confusion. Instead of selling the vision, they buried it.
Paul Collits is one of Australia’s most intelligent political commentators, his acerbic coverage coming to the fore during the Covid era. He has an inside running on the machinations of Australia’s conservatives. You can follow his excellent, extremely well informed work here: https://paulcollits.substack.com/
Rebekah Barnett
Australia elects weak tea bag to lead the country
Labor wins ‘historic’ victory with a third of the vote, conservative Coalition kicked to the kerb
Given the choice between two weak tea bags, Australia elected a weak tea bag at the federal election over the weekend.
The result was not so much an affirmation of Anthony Albanese and his centre-left Labor Party as it was a repudiation of a pathetic opposition, led by Voldemort look-a-like Peter Dutton, who, like Canada’s Pierre Poilievre, not only lost the election for the centre-right Coalition, but also lost his seat.
In an election decided by Gen Z and millennial voters whose main concerns were the rising cost of living and the ongoing shortage and unaffordability of housing, both parties were big on rhetoric but short on meaningful solutions beyond the short-term vote grab.
Labor’s win has been reported as a historic landslide victory, and indeed, the party has secured more seats than any other Labor government in history.
Quite the achievement for a leader whose net satisfaction rating was negative for the entire campaign, in a contest that turned out to be more about who voters disliked the least than who they liked the most.
Unlike the US or other countries with a strong populist alternative, Australia’s political options are essentially a uniparty with relatively few meaningful policy differences. This was no more evident than during Covid, when both major parties backed wholesale the trashing of our economy, nixing civil and human rights, and blocking every effort to gain transparency and accountability.
Over the past 50 years or so, Aussie voters have been drifting away from the major parties, increasingly turning votes over to independents and minor parties. However, this has not yet translated to enough seats to significantly shake up the two-party hold on our parliament, which means that despite neither party or leader being very popular, we keep voting them in.
Rebekah Barnett is one of the very few Australian independent journalists with an international profile. She has been one of the most insightful journalists in Australia on the medical malpractice and breakdown of civil liberties during the Covid era.
You can follow her excellent work on her website Dystopian Down Under: https://news.rebekahbarnett.com.au/
Or at the Brownstone Institute: https://brownstone.org/author/rebekah-barnett/
