Politics

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese won’t be the only world leader hoping that reconvened peace talks between Iran and the United States actually deliver what Donald Trump proclaimed this week had already happened.

Pete Hegseth increasingly sounds like Vladimir Putin. That association would, no doubt, flatter him. Like Putin, the United States Secretary of War speaks in biblical terms. As with Putin in Ukraine, Hegseth likens his Iran campaign to a holy war. Like Putin, he revels in the language of vengeance and violence. Like Putin, he has the bread of apocalypse in his mouth.

If the seven One Nation members elected in South Australia last month follow party tradition, two thirds of them will have left the party before the next election.

Relations between Australia and its principal strategic ally, the United States, went on a wild ride over Easter. US President Donald Trump lumped Australia in with America’s post-World War II allies for ungratefully failing to help him secure the critical Strait of Hormuz.

Another world oil crisis, another period of stagflation – the combination of sluggish economic growth and rising unemployment with accelerating inflation. The current crisis, the direct result of the divisive and controversial war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, is likely to be the worst yet.

Pauline Hanson is dangerous not because she remains a grotesque nativist from 1990s Queensland but rather because her rhetoric has been absorbed into the ordinary calculations of Australian politics. That is the real story, not the tedious recitation of the polling data. For three decades, she has converted racial grievance into durable electoral power.

As fate would have it, the Albanese government’s key measures offering fuel price relief to motorists and crucial heavy transport operators coincided with April Fool’s Day. This was no prank, however; it was an intervention born of desperation, turbocharged by uncertainty over how long the global energy crisis driven by the Iran war will last.

Populists like Hanson are devastatingly effective at tribal warfare. Her followers want to take us back to the future. It is an irrational response to an irrational world. It is also political dynamite.

The entire planet is paying a very high price for the abandonment of a world order that once constrained the powerful from actions that weaker nations would struggle to survive.

The strong rise in the poll standing of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party since last year’s federal election is surprising. She has contributed very little to the nation in the 30 years she has been on the political scene – other than to divide our country and undermine social cohesion.