Politics

Occasionally something happens that turns our collective minds to history. That happened this week when Nazis dominated Australian headlines for possibly the first time since the end of World War II. Australia’s Nazis are rattling the cage, trying to transform themselves from a secretive, mask-wearing sect into a political movement that influences our political ideas and controls the streets through violence.

Australia’s multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, has no doubt the March for Australia rallies that dominated much of the political debate during the week were organised by Nazis with the main purpose of protesting ‘immigration from countries that have brown people’ … The politics of race and immigration is a dangerously combustible commodity, which helps to explain not only the tenor of the prime minister’s response but also the government’s handling of the announcement of a $400 million deal to deport former migrant detainees to Nauru.

The Home Guarantee Scheme was created by the previous Coalition government and was continued and this week dramatically expanded by the Albanese government. It has several cunning design features, none of which include relieving upward pressure on home prices. The guarantee helps first-home buyers by cutting the usual 20 per cent deposit of the sale price that banks require to consider a loan application to just 5 per cent, slashing the time needed to save the deposit.

Before I decided to run for parliament, like many Australians I was frustrated and angry about the many decisions the government made that clearly weren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of Australians. Over the years I’ve served as the first independent member for the ACT, I’ve come to see why: a lack of transparency and broken lobbying rules.

Drama, often confected, is never far from the theatre of democratic politics, but there was nothing synthetic about the sombre mood that gripped the suddenly called news conference in the prime minister’s courtyard on Tuesday.

Perhaps the fairest way to describe this week’s Economic Reform Roundtable – initially billed the productivity round table – is awkward, in a couple of respects. First, it’s difficult to know just how it might result in genuine reform. The necessary depth of detail for an idea to become policy wasn’t going to be delivered by the two dozen invitees sitting around the cabinet table.

When Tim Fischer called High Court judges ‘pissants’ in the ’90s, after they recognised native title and overturned terra nullius, he created the rare spectacle of a government minister excoriating a member of the judiciary in the media … This year, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Lia Finocchiaro, publicly dismissed a damning coronial report into yet another Black death in custody.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers summed up pretty well where Australia finds itself in a week of significant round tables in Canberra and Washington and a deepening humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. The treasurer said the Albanese government was seeking ‘to build consensus’. He was referring to the need to bring all sectors of the economy together on reforms to kickstart growth and recognise that self-interested fragmentation is a recipe for failure.

It’s pretty simple really: success in a liberal democracy like Australia comes when a political leader is able to bring a majority of the population on board with their agenda and responses to a crisis. Anthony Albanese, who entered parliament in the 1996 election that saw the Liberals’ John Howard win in a landslide, has proved himself an astute student of the Machiavellian arts as practiced by opponents and allies over the intervening years.

It is important to give credit where genuine credit is due, by recognising the success of the Albanese government’s patient, professional and focused diplomacy, mostly conducted behind closed doors.