I mean, really. My words were always better suited for the page, where I get to edit them and no one is allowed to reply to my face.

In real life, I fumble all over myself when talking, taking in glances that say, “How the hell are you a writer, exactly?”

I’m like Homer Simpson after he loses his vocabulary tapes. “Where’s that metal dealie… you use to dig… food?”

Hey, I write for a living, not talk for a living. (That’s my excuse.)

Which comes to business networking; the small business owner’s slap in the face to their unearned LinkedIn magnificence. Here’s what my cat dying taught me about B2B sales, said no one out loud ever.

In a “lunch and learn” where you bring your own lunch and struggle to understand why you even agreed to it; an affable accountant presenter asked us what the top tax rate in Australia is.

“Forty seven percent,” I said, guessing.

A little higher, he ventured.

I could almost hear a troupe singing the Internationale marching towards us. I was also thinking, “did we lose a war?”

Fifty? Fifty-five?

“When you factor in the top marginal rate, the Medicare levy, and the surcharge it’s forty-nine percent. If you earn over one hundred and ninety thousand in a financial year, it can be as high as sixty-six percent.”

All confidence in the room deflated as he spoke. How do the nation’s perennial back-seat drivers (and thieves) get the lion’s share of our sweat, blood, tears, and toil? Two-thirds of my pay goes to empty suits while I drive over my fifteenth pothole of the evening? Screw this.

Speaking of war losing, I struck up a conversation with a French photographer at another exquisite networking function. This time, it was held in a jewellery shop (yes, this really happened.)

Hell, she might have even thought I spoke English properly. I asked why she got into business in Australia rather than her native France.

“You want to start a business in France?” She batted the notion away with fabulous Gallic flair. “Forget it!” Measuring out an invisible yet hefty tome of compliance documents, she said after a couple of years, the taxes and compliance become so onerous you may as well pack it all in.

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“They take about 25% of what you earn, then they tax you on the rental value of where you work after a year or two, then you have to pay social taxes, and the registration taxes,” she says, as if she was remembering a bad dream.

“Here it’s not great but it’s much better than France.”

Anecdotal evidence suggests if you want to make €300,000 each year as a sole trader, you better be billing in excess of €600,000.

Sounds better than trying to bill €900,000. I can’t even absorb the Alboministration SurChalmers ban on credit card processing fees with that amount of fromage.

In 2025, business insolvencies in Australia hit a twenty-five year high, recording 14,722 insolvencies – and as of the 30^th of June, we’re sitting at 14,153. That means owners, employees, and their families hitting the curb; hard.

France has three times the population that we have. In the first eight months of 2025, 68,400 French businesses became insolvent, putting 253,000 jobs at risk. There are 5.9 million businesses in France and about 2.81 million in Australia.

In France, that’s a 1.1% failure rate among all businesses; in Australia, 0.52%.

We’re still “ahead” when it comes to per capita numbers, but I wouldn’t jet off to a Pacific island and pat myself on the back for it. Our photographer friend is slightly better off residing here when playing the lottery of business insolvencies. I guess.

Of all Australian businesses, 16.9% of them started during the 2025-26 Financial Year and 13.8% exited – not all because they couldn’t keep up with Grim Jim and his all-dancing line up of crap taxes – some people wanted to retire, move on, or presumably sell up. Of which the Government takes HOW much?

It’s almost like our society doesn’t want people who are productive to win. No, it’s exactly like that.

What does that say for the next generation of entrepreneurs? For those that dream big, Australia says no. Australians ought to be ashamed of themselves for having it good for so long – and shouldn’t have even had anything at all. I mean, it’s what we teach our children.

As I sit back and gulp down the third glass of free chardonnay I already paid for in membership dues, I wonder what the business culture of Australia will look like in five to ten years.

Huddled underground as the Political Correctness bots above whip anyone even thinking of making a profit, I suspect. Merde.

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An example is the KYC or Know Your Customer requirements in which banks and other institutions are required to subject their customers to constant surveillance and mandatory reporting to government under the guise of fighting terrorism, fraud and organised crime.

This includes recently implemented requirements that require banks to ‘protect’ their customers from scams, in practice resulting in those who wish to withdraw or transfer money from their own bank accounts being interrogated and denied access to their money. Many banks have also implemented AI programs that seek to monitor your every move and could at any moment accuse you of wrongdoing based on an algorithm.

Individuals and groups are increasingly being debanked for ideological reasons, with those deemed to have controversial or problematic views having their bank accounts closed and even blacklisted from banking with little to no recourse. In the US, many gun businesses have been debanked or faced the prospect of debanking in recent years.

Politically motivated financial exclusion is not only restricted to banks. For example, over the past decade Paypal has frozen and closed online accounts for political reasons with the company admitting to working with politically driven special interest groups to identify politically ‘problematic’ accounts.

Some activist groups have turned to lobbying payment processors. Last year, Collective Shout, an authoritarian feminist organisation known for its puritan and pro censorship stance, lobbied major payment processors such as Visa and Mastercard to force various websites, developers and sellers to remove a range of online games it did not approve of.

How do individuals and society overcome this new control being exerted over our freedom and financial choices?

First, oppose invasive KYC policies. When doing this, it is important to point out not just the mass surveillance and intrusive questioning aspects of these policies, but also the disproportionate impact on those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Object to AI mandates or overburdensome requirements that can only be complied with using AI.

Oppose government policies that mandate or coerce the exclusion of certain individuals and groups from the financial system. Even if the individual or group is unlikeable or imperfect, it becomes a slippery slope that eventually affects you. In a healthy free market capitalist society, financial service providers have an incentive to serve all people.

Second, support infrastructure that is more resistant to censorship and control. For example, an artist who draws spicy artwork should have the option of accepting crypto currencies such as Bitcoin and allow people to send cash through the mail rather than internet payments that require the cooperation of credit card processors who may demand censorship.

Using systems similar to BPAY is another option that can allow people to bypass credit card processors. It is important to ensure people have options and to oppose legislation that restricts competition in the financial industry.

Third, make yourself resistant to debanking. Split your money between multiple banks. This makes it more difficult to debank you and reduces the risk of you having all your money frozen at the same time. Keep some money in cash. To determine how much, consider how much money would need to maintain your lifestyle or survive for a certain period of time.

Collect items that retain value such as gold and silver. Crypto currency is also an option, but be mindful that this requires access to technology and the internet which could be restricted by the government. Moreover, the value of crypto can sometimes fluctuate wildly.

Fourth, be informed about your rights regarding financial institutions, such as whether they prohibit certain types of transactions like buying porn and can legally deny you access to and seize your money, especially in the case of a financial crisis or bank collapse.

Lastly, oppose policies that make financial exclusion easier and more damaging. Preventing the implementation of a cashless society is vital - it doesn’t just empower the government to financially repress certain groups but also creates a state of involuntary bondage between citizens and financial institutions with citizens having less control over what is meant to be their own money.

By implementing these strategies and solutions, we can help protect individual freedom and privacy and make it more difficult for repression and control to occur via the financial system. The financial system must not be allowed to become a weapon of oppression.

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Apparently, algorithms feed us content, advertisers manipulate our emotions, misinformation influences our thinking, and social media companies know us better than we know ourselves.

The solution increasingly offered by government? More regulation. More oversight. More control.

Perhaps we should ask an uncomfortable question: Who is watching the people who want to do the watching?

There is nothing particularly new about influencing people. Newspapers have been doing it since newspapers existed. Television networks choose which story leads the six o’clock news. Editors decide what makes the front page and what disappears onto page 27.

There is an old newsroom expression: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

Long before anyone had heard of an algorithm or doom scrolling, mainstream media understood that bad news sells. Television bulletins could devote night after night to the same murder, disaster, scandal or political controversy because audiences kept watching.

Advertising has always worked on similar principles. Repetition, emotion, celebrity endorsement and saturation are hardly inventions of Silicon Valley. Launch a blockbuster movie and suddenly it is everywhere. Run a major sporting event and you cannot turn on a television, radio or website without seeing it.

We understood what was happening. Someone wanted our attention.

Social media has turbocharged the process. Algorithms learn what interests us and give us more of it. Watch one video and another appears. Click one story and suddenly your feed fills with the same subject.

That might deserve scrutiny, but does it justify government deciding what consenting adults should or shouldn’t be allowed to see?

This is where another favourite expression enters the conversation: “The public interest”.

What exactly is “in the public interest”? More importantly, who decides? A politician, bureaucrat or regulator? A government-appointed board? A media executive? An academic? An algorithm?

If an editor decides that showing Australians repeated coverage of a violent crime is in the public interest, how is that fundamentally different from an algorithm deciding that the same story interests you and showing you more of it?

If a government decides that repeatedly advertising one of its policies is in the public interest, why should that be automatically regarded as more legitimate than a private organisation trying to persuade you?

The term “public interest” might describe something genuinely important, but it can also become remarkably convenient when the people defining the public interest are the same people exercising the power.

Before handing them more of that power, Australians should understand something else: Government is itself an enormous advertiser.

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Commonwealth government advertising expenditure reached $204.1 million in 2024–25. Of that, digital advertising accounted for about $97.4 million, television $59.3 million, radio $16.7 million and out-of-home advertising $21.9 million.

We aren’t talking about Labor’s election advertisements here; these are taxpayer-funded government campaigns.

Victoria provides another remarkable example. The Victorian Government spent $97 million on advertising in 2024–25: $76.3 million on campaign advertising, $8.4 million on functional advertising and $12.3 million on recruitment. More than $54.6 million went to digital and social media alone.

Some of that is entirely legitimate: Governments need to tell us when laws change; people need bushfire warnings; citizens need information about services, road closures and genuine emergencies.

But where exactly is the line between informing the public and selling the government?

Victoria’s advertising categories include “public safety and behaviour change”, “social cohesion, civic pride and community spirit”, “commercial and economic investment” and legislative compliance.

There’s that phrase: behaviour change. Apparently, corporations attempting to change our behaviour deserve suspicion, but governments doing it with our money deserve a communications budget.

Then things become even more interesting. The Federal Government isn’t merely buying enormous amounts of media. It is also financially supporting parts of the news industry.

The News Media Assistance Program involves $153.5 million over four years, including $99.1 million in grants for the news sector and $33 million supporting Australian Associated Press.

Government is simultaneously a major purchaser of advertising, a financial supporter of parts of the media industry, a regulator of communications and social-media platforms, and one of the principal subjects the media is supposed to scrutinise.

Now it wants a greater role in determining how Australians navigate supposedly harmful, misleading or undesirable information. And inevitably we are told it is “in the public interest”.

This isn’t simply about Labor. For decades Australia has been governed by an increasingly managerial political class in which the two major parties argue ferociously over who gets to operate the machinery of government while rarely questioning why the machinery keeps getting bigger.

Government, regulation, departments, public relations, advertising – all grow.

And regardless of which side occupies the government benches, ordinary Australians are repeatedly told that another layer of government supervision is necessary for our own protection.

Different jerseys. Same game. That is the Uniparty problem.

One side introduces another government intervention and the other side argues about its implementation. One proposes a regulator and the other promises a better regulator. One spends millions telling us about government programs and the other complains about the advertisements until it gets into office and discovers how useful government advertising can be.

Meanwhile the fundamental question is rarely asked: Why does government need this much influence over the information choices of free adults?

Australians are perfectly capable of understanding that Sky News, the ABC, The Guardian and Newscorp each have a perspective, that Facebook, X, TikTok and YouTube use algorithms, and that advertisers want us to buy things.

Welcome to adulthood.

The most powerful influencer in Australia isn’t a teenager on TikTok. It is an institution that can regulate what others say, spend hundreds of millions promoting its own messages, subsidise parts of the information industry, define what it believes is in the public interest — and send you the bill.

Before Canberra protects us from doom scrolling, perhaps it should spend a little more time scrolling through its own bank statements.

The 20th century ushered in the technology revolution. Electricity, assembly lines and cheap steel transformed how we built things and made things.

By the 21st century we entered the information age. Mechanical and analogue tools gave way to digital microchips, the Internet, and a world run on laptops, smartphones and social media.

The fourth revolution is now with us – Artificial Intelligence.

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As anyone knows who has engaged with AI, it’s as though you’re communicating with a highly intelligent being.

Israeli historian Yuval Harari puts it this way: “AI has often been compared to previous technological breakthroughs like the printing press and the atomic bomb. But AI is completely different. Printing presses could not decide what book to print. Atom bombs could not decide which cities to destroy. An atomic bomb cannot invent a new and even more powerful weapon. But AI can. We are bringing into our ecosystem a very powerful and alien type of intelligence that we don’t yet know how to control.”

The CEO of AI leader Anthropic, Dario Amodei, responded with, “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems.”

Elon Musk has said, “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

American technology ethicist Tristan Harris responds: “That’s a warning from someone who is inside the room, and what this demon is already doing on its own without being asked.

“For every one dollar spent on making AI safe, 2,000 dollars is being spent on making it more powerful.”

Former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski said, “What is going to be created will effectively be a god. Not a god in the sense that it will make lightning or cause hurricanes, but if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else can you call it?”

British bioethicist and theologian John Lennox says we are building an entity that is created by human beings but will transcend them. “Is this playing God?”, he asks. “Is this another tower of Babel?

“We are sleepwalking into a future where we are gradually ceding control and information and data all the time which could be used by bad actors against us”, says Lennox.

The original Peter Principle, written by the Apostle Peter, states, “Therefore, seeing that these things are going to happen, what manner of persons ought we to be?”

Often, a good starting point in answering that question, is what we should not be doing! Or who we should not turn to.

Unequivocally, the answer to that question is politicians and public sector bureaucrats!

Artificial Intelligence is a veritable gift for politicians who love nothing more than scaring people into giving them more power – Exhibit A: Covid. Exhibit B: Climate Emergency.

AI ups the ante – ‘It could kill us all in a decade!’

As journalist and author Nick Cater puts it, “Pick a threat, make it sound nasty then propose extraordinary government measures to fix it.”

Niccolo Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century archetype of the ruthless political operator, whose name became an adjective for cunning, deceit and the cold calculation of power, saw the political advantages in using fear to control the masses.

UK Bishop N.T. Wright commented: “Do you know what the most frequent command in the Bible is? What instruction is given, again and again, by God, by angels, by Jesus, by prophets and by the apostles? Is it ‘be good’? Is it ‘be holy’? Is it ‘don’t sin’? No, the most frequent command in the Bible is, ‘Don’t be afraid’.”

Over recent years we’ve seen political issues being increasingly described as ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘malinformation’, ‘extremism’, ‘dangerous’, ‘far-right’, ‘divisive’, ‘hate speech’, and ‘threats to social cohesion’.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern gave us a glimpse of this with her declaration, “We will continue to be your single source of truth. Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth”.

It is noteworthy that the loudest voices calling for more government oversight hail from the Left – the UK’s Jacob Coxon, the US’s Bernie Sanders, Australia’s David Shoebridge (Greens Party) and Anthony Albanese’s hand-picked member for Parramatta, Andrew Charlton.

“This is starting to look more and more like Marxism for the algorithmic age’, says technology entrepreneur Shyam Sankar.

If and when the ‘Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill’ is reintroduced and becomes law, all the Government has to do is label something ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ to have it shut down.

Together with the Government’s ‘Online Safety Act’ and its ‘Digital Duty of Care’, these freedom-sapping pieces of legislation will become a mechanism for suppressing legitimate political speech and see personal freedoms deteriorate markedly.

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, ‘Those who surrender their freedoms for the promise of safety end up with neither’.

It was Adam Smith who first articulated the principle of ‘regulatory capture’, warning that merchants and manufacturers constantly attempt to manipulate laws and regulations to serve their own interests at the public’s expense. These days we call them ‘rent-seekers’.

The AI race is no different.

Dario Amodei heads up Anthropic, the current leader in AI development. Anthropic is a ‘closed’ AI model. Amodei is leading the call for government oversight. Hmm …

‘Open’ AI models such as GPT, however, are not so keen on government intervention.

To summarize what our response to AI might look like:

1. Stand fast; don’t be afraid.

2. Treat everything politicians and bureaucrats tell you with the utmost scepticism.

3. Be wary of industry players who call for more government intervention.

4. Be wary of (don’t vote for) any politician asking for more power to control AI.

5. Keep up to date with what is happening in the AI space.

6. Limit your own digital footprint and the amount of data you share.

7. Secure all your online accounts.

8. Defend against AI-driven cyber-threats with strong credentials and unique passwords.

9. As much as possible, be aware of everything that enters your home and family.

10. Be more deeply present in your local church and community.

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That’s an enormous amount of money. Unfortunately, it’s also an enormous temptation for politicians who have never encountered a problem they didn’t think could be solved by spending somebody else’s money.

Saving, investing and building wealth are fundamental to financial independence. The libertarian objection to the current compulsory superannuation arrangements is that Canberra dictates how much of our earnings must be saved, when we can access them and, increasingly, how that accumulated capital might serve the government’s priorities.

Having compelled Australians to accumulate trillions in inaccessible accounts, our political class is now discovering that it would quite like to decide what happens to the money.

Under the Superannuation Guarantee, employers must contribute 12 per cent of eligible earnings to super. We’re told this is an additional employment benefit, generously provided by employers. Of course, anyone who has employed someone knows that businesses count the total cost of employment, not how remuneration is divided between wages and benefits.

Treasury-commissioned research by ANU economists Robert Breunig and Kristen Sobeck found that between 71 per cent and more than 100 per cent of increases in compulsory super contributions were offset by lower wage growth. In other words, workers ultimately bear most, if not all, of the cost.

Compulsory super isn’t free money; it’s deferred wages, with the government deciding when we’re allowed to spend them.

Consider a 25-year-old earning $80,000. Their employer must contribute an additional $9,600 annually to super, or $48,000 over five years, assuming unchanged earnings. That’s before investment returns, fees and taxes.

Imagine what that money could accomplish during those five years. It could help that young person save a deposit for their first home, repay expensive debt, finance further education, support a young family, or provide the capital to start a business.

Instead, most Australians cannot access their compulsory savings until retirement after reaching preservation age, generally 60 or 65 depending on individual circumstances, although even those goal posts keep shifting.

The conventional response is that $48,000 invested today will be worth considerably more in forty years. That may well be true. But it completely ignores the value of having access to that money today – that’s the opportunity cost.

A young couple struggling to buy their first home might reasonably prefer to own the roof over their heads rather than accumulate shares they cannot touch. Someone facing financial hardship might prefer to extinguish a high-interest debt rather than earn investment returns inside super.

Who is better placed to make those decisions? The individual who knows their circumstances, aspirations and priorities, or a bureaucrat imposing the same savings formula on millions of Australians?

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As Tom Valcanis wrote last year, our housing crisis makes this contradiction particularly absurd. ABS figures show homeownership among Australians aged 25–39 fell from 65.8 per cent for Baby Boomers in 1991 to just 54.6 per cent for Millennials in 2021. The average age of a first homebuyer in Australia will soon be 40. Meanwhile, the government’s own Retirement Income Review recognises homeownership as fundamental to financial security in retirement and identifies poorer outcomes for retirees who rent.

So Canberra insists young Australians save for retirement while preventing them from using those compulsory savings to acquire one of the most important assets for retirement.

The First Home Super Saver Scheme hardly resolves the contradiction. It primarily allows access to eligible voluntary contributions, not compulsory employer contributions.

None of this means superannuation is a bad investment. APRA reported an annual return of 8.6 per cent for large funds to June 2026. You could even argue that many Australians would voluntarily contribute the full 12 per cent, or more. But it is still wrong to compel.

The case becomes particularly questionable for low-income workers, whose immediate financial needs may be greatest. Additional compulsory super can also reduce their future means-tested Age Pension entitlement, rather than increasing retirement income dollar-for-dollar.

And now there’s another, increasingly troubling problem: political interference.

In July, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the enormous superannuation pool as potentially a “national asset”, arguing that it could generate benefits for the nation as well as individual retirees. He encouraged greater domestic investment, particularly business lending.

Perhaps the Prime Minister has forgotten whose money it is.

Australia’s superannuation balances are private retirement savings, not Commonwealth revenue. Yet politicians are increasingly interested in mobilising this capital to address housing shortages, infrastructure requirements, the so-called energy transition and other government priorities.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has convened ‘Investor Roundtables’ to identify opportunities to channel capital towards national priorities.

In May 2026, the government announced another review of the superannuation performance test, explicitly discussing better alignment of investment with government productivity objectives.

There is nothing inherently objectionable about a member-controlled super fund voluntarily financing Australian housing, infrastructure or energy projects that they believe will deliver appropriate returns. The problem arises when political priorities begin influencing investment decisions.

If Canberra has a worthwhile infrastructure project, it can make the project commercially attractive and seek voluntary investment or fund it transparently through the budget. It should not pressure retirement funds into financing politically desirable ventures.

The distinction between private retirement savings and an instrument of national economic policy must be protected. Our political class already controls how much workers must save and when they can access their savings. Giving politicians influence over where that money is invested would compound the intrusion into individual financial freedom.

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As a response, the military regime chose a multipolar strategy to create a worldwide diplomatic shield by exploiting geopolitical rivalries, using anti-imperialist rhetoric, and establishing partnerships with states that view western liberal democracy negatively.

Ever since the start of the protests following the coup in 2021, the Russian state media “RIA Novosti” justified the coup, stating that the Myanmar military was the only institution able to provide unity and peace among the multi-ethnic population and calling the Myanmar Spring Revolution a Western “colour revolution”.

Similarly “Global Times”, a state-owned newspaper of China, warned the USA and other Western powers not to encourage a civil war in Myanmar. This official discourse was picked up by multiple Western anti-imperialist media outlets and authoritarian left-wing organizations. The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) pointed to Myanmar’s alignment with China and important role in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), arguing that Western imperialism is violently interfering with the initiative by attempting to overthrow the governments participating in it.

Journalist Kit Klarenberg in “The Gray Zone” described international media reports about resistance against the junta as propaganda to justify Western intervention. “Red Fire” magazine, issued by the Australian socialist organization Workers League, referred to the Spring Revolution as a pro-democracy war supported by the West, while the participants of the revolution were labelled “terrorists“. Similarly, “KATEHON”, a publication of Tsargrad Institute, described the opposition group “National Unity Government (NUG)” as a “Western backed exiled government“.

In 2024, Myanmar’s military regime announced that it will abandon the market economy and introduce a “state-run cooperative system”. Later, in the same year, the regime’s proxy political party, the “Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP)”, sent its chairperson “Khin Yi” to the first General Assembly of the “For the Freedom of Nations!” movement, an inter-party movement mainly dominated by Marxist-Leninist ruling parties, which included Communist Party of China, Communist Party of Vietnam, Worker’s Party of Brazil, Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, Workers’ Party of Korea and United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

In contradiction to the interests of the Burmese diaspora inside Australia, the “Communist Party of Australia” welcomed the movement as a promising framework and new model of international relations.

Philosophical foundations of the regime’s diplomatic policy have been greatly shaped by Russian philosopher “Aleksandr Dugin”, author of the theories of Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory. In March 2025, Dugin attended the junta-hosted “Forum on Myanmar Beyond 2025: Challenges and Opportunities in the Multipolar World,” where he delivered lectures on Eurasianism and multipolarity and referred to the Spring Revolution as a coloured revolution. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, a top leader of the regime, openly endorsed these ideas in his May 2025 interview with RT news agency.

Using the ideas of Dugin’s anti-liberal geopolitical philosophy, the regime expanded its relations with authoritarian countries, including Russia, Belarus, Iran, and China. Despite the travel sanctions imposed by the West, senior military officers made high-profile trips to other countries, participating in events such as the “2025 China Victory Day Parade” and the 80th anniversary of Russia’s Victory over Fascism. The regime has been also trying to reach out to other BRICS sub-imperialist countries. Min Aung Hlaing visited “India” from May 30 to June 3 for “International Big Cat Alliance Summit“. He also went to “Laos” on July 3, 2026, invited by President Thongloun Sisoulith of Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.

Acknowledging the rifts in the Western NATO alliance, the junta also sought to win the support of national conservative regimes in the United States and Israel. The regime even conducted lobbying, offering lobbyist Roger Stone $50,000 per month.

Echoing the same narrative as seen in authoritarian regimes of the sub-imperialist camp, Adam Dick from Ron Paul Institute condemned the BRAVE Burma Act (HR 3190) as legislation that would facilitate continuing sanctions against Myanmar, accusing it as a mean of US foreign intervention.

Those who are risking their lives for federalism and liberty disagree with Ron Paul’s rigid opposition, arguing that when it comes to Myanmar, while non-interventionism aims to restrain state power at home, applying a blanket anti-sanctions stance to Myanmar inadvertently mirrors the efforts of the junta who actively lobby against Western sanctions.

The regime in Myanmar is taking advantage of multipolarity and the BRICS sub-imperialist alliance to resist pressure from the West and fight back against the diplomacy battle put forwarded by the exiled National Unity Government (NUG), which symbolizes the hope of the people of Myanmar for a nation with a federal democracy.

Considering the way in which authoritarian alliances such as BRICS and other authoritarian western anti-imperialist organisations are aligning themselves to protect their interests and their fellow Myanmar military junta, those who believe in federalism and liberal democracy in the West have no choice but to speak out against such alliances. The revolution in Burma demands neither humanitarian aid nor neocon style intervention from Australia; what is needed is solidarity and a commitment to individual sovereignty, a market economy, federalism, and liberal democracy.

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Where are the visionaries? And what’s the difference between being ‘A Leader’ and merely holding the title of ‘The Leader’?

Fair questions. But eventually criticism has to give way to something more important. Where would I like Australia to go?

I want us to dream big again. Not Labor’s Australia. Not Liberal’s Australia. Not even One Nation’s Australia. Our Australia.

A uniquely Australian country that knows what it is, rewards effort, welcomes people who want to contribute to it, and leaves the next generation something better than we inherited.

That’s the vision.

And it starts by thinking beyond the next election.

Japan does this extraordinarily well. Its government talks about the society it wants to create decades into the future. Its Society 5.0 program doesn’t merely ask what technology Japan should buy next year, but what kind of society technology, education, industry and human ingenuity should create. Some Japanese government “Moonshot” programs explicitly target 2050.

Meanwhile Australian politics celebrates a four-year infrastructure pipeline as long-term thinking.

There’s our first problem.

Labor and Liberal have spent decades managing Australia from election to election. One announces something, the other opposes it. Government changes. Policies change. Reviews are commissioned. Billions are spent. Then we start again.

What if we agreed on where Australia should be in 2050 first? I have some ideas.

Australia should be the first destination in the world for skilled migrants who want to work and contribute. Not migration simply to make GDP bigger, but talent: engineers, doctors, researchers, scientists, toolmakers, fabricators, entrepreneurs, teachers, technicians.

People choosing Australia because it is the best country on Earth to build a life.

We should be an international education powerhouse, attracting the world’s brightest students while ensuring Australian education serves Australians first.

We should be a medical research powerhouse, turning our universities, hospitals and scientific institutions into magnets for global talent and investment.

Australia should become a major data and digital infrastructure hub. We possess something increasingly valuable in an unstable world: geographic security, political stability, huge land mass, and enormous energy resources. Austrade already identifies Australia’s stability and energy potential as advantages for data-centre investment.

We should remain one of the world’s great tourist destinations. And above all, Australia should again be known as the land of opportunity.

Work available for everyone capable of working. A pathway to home ownership. A country where an apprentice can become a business owner, an immigrant can build a company and a kid who isn’t academically inclined isn’t treated as though their future has already been decided.

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But none of this works without one thing. We must retain the ability to make things.

The SEMMA Manufacturing Blueprint I co-authored set an objective of increasing manufacturing from 5.9 per cent of GDP to 10 per cent.

Why? Not nostalgia; sovereignty.

COVID taught us what happens when global supply chains stop.

A sovereign nation must retain sufficient capability to feed itself, power itself, defend itself, repair essential infrastructure and manufacture strategically important products. That requires skills, investment, R&D, automation, competitive businesses and, critically, reliable affordable energy.

One Nation understands this emerging argument better than the two major parties. Sovereignty isn’t wrapping yourself in a flag. It’s having the capability to look after yourself when things go wrong.

Then consider our natural resources.

Norway discovered enormous petroleum wealth and asked an extraordinary question: How do we make sure people who aren’t even born yet benefit from this?

Its answer became a sovereign wealth fund specifically designed so petroleum wealth benefits current and future generations. (Regjeringen.no)

What a concept. We export iron ore, gas, coal, uranium and critical minerals, then frequently buy back finished products manufactured from our resources. We’ve exported the resources and the jobs. In some cases we even exported the emissions, then imported the finished product.

And our governments are drowning in debt.

Maybe Australia should ask Norway’s question: What inheritance are we leaving?

Sweden provides another lesson. It deliberately connects its natural resources with advanced manufacturing, research, innovation, energy and technical capability. Its current industrial strategy is explicitly about building future competitiveness and supply resilience. (Regeringskansliet)

Why can’t Australia?

And while we’re rediscovering economic confidence, let’s rediscover something else: the Unique Australia. The Australia where people arrived from every corner of the world and became part of something. Different backgrounds, religions, foods, family histories. But one Australia.

That’s what I mean when I talk about monoculture. Not everybody looking alike or thinking alike. A common culture.

Common standards. Common responsibilities. A belief in democracy, freedom, opportunity, equality before the law, reward for effort and an obligation to leave the place better than we found it.

Manufacturing demonstrates this beautifully. Walk onto a factory floor and you’ll find people born all over the world. The drawing doesn’t care. The Australian Standard doesn’t care. The tolerance doesn’t care. Everyone works towards the same outcome.

That’s Australia.

My vision isn’t complicated. A confident Australia. A productive Australia. A skilled Australia. A manufacturing Australia.

A country attracting the world’s best people rather than simply the greatest number. A country exploiting its extraordinary resources intelligently and preserving wealth for generations yet unborn. A country where government enables opportunity rather than attempting to control every outcome. A country with full employment, affordable reliable energy, world-class education and research, sovereign capability and confidence in its own culture.

We don’t need to become Japan. We don’t need to become Norway. We certainly don’t need to become Sweden.

We need to learn from countries prepared to think thirty years ahead and then do something much more ambitious: become Australia again.

The resources are already here. The people are already here. The opportunity is already here. What’s missing is the vision.

And maybe it’s time we stopped asking what Australia will look like after the next election and started asking what Australia could become in the next generation.

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We have thousands of federal and state MPs, political staffers, advisers and consultants, and tens of thousands of bureaucrats, supported by polling, focus groups, research departments and think tanks.

Yet ask one simple question: what should Australia look like in 2050?

Silence.

Not what our emissions target should be. Not how many houses we’ll build next year. Not the migration number. Not another subsidy, rebate or government program.

What sort of country are we actually trying to build?

And here’s the question that interests me even more: why aren’t genuinely visionary Australians attracted to politics anymore?

Whatever you think of Hawke and Keating, they knew where they wanted to take Australia. Open the economy, make it internationally competitive, engage with Asia, and modernise the country.

Howard had a different vision: enterprise, aspiration, home ownership, family, fiscal responsibility, secure borders and confidence in Australian institutions.

You could disagree with both. But at least there was something substantial enough to disagree with.

Compare that with today’s Labor and Liberal parties. Politics is increasingly administration with advertising.

Another housing program. Another energy subsidy. Another infrastructure announcement. Another target. Another review explaining why the previous target wasn’t achieved.

The two major parties argue ferociously about who should manage the machine. Far fewer people ask whether the machine is heading in the right direction.

Maybe the problem isn’t simply the politicians. Maybe our political system increasingly selects against visionaries.

Think about the pathway: Join a party; navigate the factions; win friends; win preselection; don’t say anything too controversial; learn the approved language; raise money; survive opposition research; stick to the talking points; don’t embarrass the leader; don’t frighten marginal-seat voters.

Survive that process for long enough and you might eventually run the country.

Where exactly was the test for leadership? Where was the test for courage?

Where did we ask whether you’ve ever built anything, employed anyone, risked your own money, created a product, managed a crisis, or made a decision knowing your own livelihood depended on getting it right?

Now look at it from the other direction.

Imagine a successful 50-year-old business owner, engineer, farmer, surgeon, scientist or community leader. Why would they enter politics?

Potentially sacrifice their career. Expose their family to scrutiny. Have everything they’ve said over thirty years searched for a headline. Navigate party pre-selections and internal factions, then discover that independent thinking isn’t regarded as an asset once they’ve arrived.

It’s hardly surprising many accomplished Australians say, “No thanks.” And that creates a dangerous cycle. Politics becomes a profession.

Staffer becomes adviser. Adviser becomes candidate. Candidate becomes MP. MP becomes minister. The minister is suddenly responsible for an industry they may never have worked in and don’t know much about.

That’s not an attack on every career politician. Some are extremely capable. It’s an attack on a system that increasingly mistakes political experience for life experience. Both major parties are guilty of it.

And perhaps that helps explain One Nation’s resurgence. Whether you agree with Pauline Hanson or not, voters know what she believes. After thirty years they don’t require a focus group to decipher it.

Recent polling suggests that authenticity matters. One Nation supporters overwhelmingly tell researchers that Hanson speaks for ordinary Australians, while broader surveys reveal extraordinary levels of disconnection from conventional politics.

That’s something Labor and the Coalition should think about before dismissing One Nation voters as angry, ignorant or temporarily disaffected. People are searching for conviction.

One Nation now talks about Australian energy, resources, manufacturing, fuel security and economic sovereignty as connected issues. Its fuel policy, for example, argues that dependence on overseas refining is an economic and strategic vulnerability.

Agree or disagree. It’s an argument about what sort of country Australia should be.

Meanwhile Australia faces enormous thirty-year questions.

How many people should live here? How will we house them? What will we manufacture? How will we power ourselves? How do we increase productivity? How do young Australians buy homes? What sovereign capabilities must we retain? How do we fund an ageing population? How dependent should we be on China economically and America strategically?

And here’s one that politicians particularly dislike: what should government stop doing?

These aren’t three-year questions; they’re thirty-year questions being answered three years at a time.

But voters carry responsibility too. We demand lower taxes and better services. Cheaper houses and ever-rising property values. Cheap energy and no generation infrastructure nearby. Higher wages and cheaper products. Smaller government while preserving every program that benefits us personally.

Leadership occasionally requires saying: you can’t have everything.

Australia remains one of the luckiest countries on Earth. Resources, agriculture, skills, institutions, capital and proximity to Asia. We don’t lack opportunity.

We lack a destination.

Maybe Australia’s next great political leader is already in Parliament. Maybe they’re in business, running a farm, designing something, teaching apprentices or building a company.

Perhaps they’ve never seriously considered politics. And maybe that’s the real problem.

Australia hasn’t simply developed a leadership vacuum. We may have built a political system that discourages leaders from entering it. Until we change that, we’ll keep arguing about the next twenty-five minutes while the next twenty-five years quietly arrive.

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Naturally, it’s all about the definition. Mental health is now described as a state of wellbeing in which an individual can realise their potential, cope with the normal stresses of life, work productively and contribute to the community. Mental illness or mental disorder, meanwhile, is a health problem that significantly affects how a person feels, thinks, behaves and interacts with others.

By those standards it is hardly surprising that so many people can be classified as having experienced a mental disorder. Almost everyone has periods when they are miserable, anxious, irritable, irrational, distracted, withdrawn or unable to function at their usual level. Bereavement, relationship breakdown, financial stress, humiliation, disappointment and ordinary adolescent turmoil can profoundly affect the way people feel and behave. It would be unusual not to experience at least some of them.

This raises a difficult question. If such experiences are so widespread, when does ordinary human distress become a medical condition? Once an ordinary response to life is classified as illness, the appropriate response changes. Sadness becomes something to treat rather than something to endure; poor judgement becomes a symptom; unruly behaviour becomes a disorder; eccentricity becomes a diagnosis. And of course, personal responsibility is out the window.

The consequences extend far beyond language. Mental health is increasingly invoked to explain behaviour that was once described as antisocial, irresponsible, immature, unwise or criminal. Sometimes that explanation is justified: severe depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder and other serious illnesses can be devastating and require professional treatment. But expanding the boundaries of illness does not necessarily help those people. When the category is so broad, the distinction between the seriously ill and the temporarily distressed becomes harder to maintain.

It also encourages governments to “do something” and creates a huge honey pot for the pharmaceutical industry. Australia’s enormous expenditure on mental health and disability services illustrates the problem. Almost one in five Australians were prescribed antidepressants, psychostimulants or other mental-health-related drugs in the 2025 financial year, according to Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. ADHD medicines alone were dispensed to about 761,000 people, or 2.8 per cent of the population, up from 0.6 per cent a decade earlier. Among boys aged five to 17, the proportion receiving psychostimulants and related medicines was about 10 per cent.

These figures do not prove that people are being wrongly diagnosed or medicated. There are undoubtedly many Australians whose lives have been transformed by appropriate diagnosis and treatment. But the scale and speed of the increase should prompt questions about where the boundary between disorder and normal variation now lies. Psychiatrist Ian Hickie has raised concerns about prescribing practices and, particularly, Australia’s failure to adequately monitor whether medications remain effective or should be discontinued. Starting treatment, he argues, is much easier than systematically assessing its long-term results.

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The same tension appears in the discussion of male suicide. Seven Australian men die by suicide each day, and suicide represents a substantial loss of potential years of life among Australian males. Yet many people who die by suicide have no diagnosed mental illness, while most people with a mental illness do not die by suicide. Is even more public expenditure on conventional mental health services an appropriate solution to that?

The response can also become distorted when social problems are medicalised. Teaching boys about gender equity might occasionally have merit, but it does not follow that it is a treatment for male suicide. Likewise, an anti-stigma campaign may help people seek assistance, but it cannot substitute for understanding why particular individuals become suicidal. A social problem can have psychological dimensions without itself being a psychiatric disorder.

There is a similar danger in the growing use of disability categories. The National Disability Insurance Scheme now supports tens of thousands of Australians with psychosocial disability, while rapidly increasing numbers of people diagnosed with autism and other conditions have contributed to intense debate about the scheme’s future. People with severe and enduring disabilities require support, but every difficulty encountered in ordinary life should not automatically generate an entitlement to medical or disability intervention.

The challenge is therefore not to deny mental illness but to define it carefully. A society that treats every deviation from happiness, productivity or conventional behaviour as pathology risks turning normal human variation into a permanent medical problem. It can also encourage people to see themselves primarily through the lens of diagnosis, rather than as individuals capable of adapting, recovering and sometimes simply enduring difficult experiences.

Being unusual does not make something pathological, and the fact that a behaviour causes inconvenience or social friction does not make it an illness. Being left-handed undoubtedly affects how a person feels, thinks, behaves and interacts with others, yet we regard it as normal even though it is a lot less common than 50%. Should we redefine it as also a mental illness?

Medicine should identify genuine disorders by their severity, persistence, impairment and clinical characteristics, rather than by the mere presence of unpleasant emotions or unconventional behaviour.

Mental health may indeed be one of medicine’s great remaining frontiers. But acknowledging uncertainty is part of understanding the problem. The objective should not be to make everybody psychologically comfortable at all times. It should be to ensure that people with serious mental illness receive timely, effective care while retaining enough room in our definition of normal life for sadness, eccentricity, mistakes, frustration, grief and poor judgement. If we medicalise too much of ordinary life, we risk not only treating what does not need treatment but also losing sight of those who desperately do.

Being A Leader and being The Leader.

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The Leader has the title. A Leader has people willing to follow them.

Occasionally we’re fortunate enough to get both in the same person, but Australian politics doesn’t manage it nearly often enough. Someone wins a party-room ballot and becomes Prime Minister, Premier or Opposition Leader and immediately we call them a “leader”.

Why? They’ve demonstrated they can obtain the position. That’s not the same as leadership.

A title provides authority. Leadership creates followership.

I’ve spent decades in business and manufacturing and have seen the difference. I’ve encountered people with impressive titles who couldn’t inspire anyone to follow them out of a burning building. I’ve also watched people on factory floors with no impressive title whatsoever become the person everyone instinctively looks towards when something goes wrong.

Nobody appointed them. Nobody issued a press release. People trust them. That’s leadership.

Real leadership is difficult to manufacture because it’s an accumulation of things that can’t easily be faked: judgment, courage, competence, consistency, character and the ability to make decisions when the information isn’t perfect.

Most importantly, it’s the ability to persuade people to travel somewhere difficult because the destination is worth reaching.

That’s where leadership and vision collide. You can’t lead if you don’t know where you’re going.

Yet Labor and the Coalition have become remarkably efficient at producing The Leader. Join the party. Navigate factions. Build alliances. Win preselection. Get elected. Accumulate supporters. Manage the media. Count the numbers.

Congratulations. You’re The Leader.

But when did anyone establish that Australians actually wanted to follow you anywhere? Perhaps that’s why we have so many people occupying leadership positions while Australia suffers from a leadership vacuum. Management has replaced leadership.

A manager asks: How do we make this system work better?

A Leader occasionally asks: Why are we doing this at all?

Managers administer. Leaders challenge. Managers measure progress against the plan. Leaders sometimes tear up the plan.

Modern Australian politics overwhelmingly rewards management. Another subsidy. Another department. Another review. Another announcement explaining the magnificent progress towards the previous announcement.

Real leadership begins with a much more dangerous question: where exactly are we going?

Leadership isn’t popularity either. If polling becomes your compass, eventually you aren’t leading the electorate. The electorate is leading you.

Focus groups tell politicians what people already think. Polling tells them what people currently want. Neither tells Australia what it will need in twenty years.

Real leaders occasionally tell people uncomfortable things. Government cannot provide everything. Debt eventually matters. Energy involves trade-offs. Population growth requires infrastructure. Sovereign manufacturing capability sometimes costs more than buying the cheapest thing from overseas. And taxpayers’ money remains taxpayers’ money even after politicians rename it “government investment”.

This is part of One Nation’s current opportunity. One Nation doesn’t need to become another major party with different coloured corflutes.

Its opportunity is to attract people who’ve actually done something before politics: manufacturers, farmers, tradespeople, engineers, business owners, doctors, community leaders. People who’ve created jobs, managed people and dealt with consequences.

One Nation’s growing emphasis on manufacturing, affordable energy, fiscal restraint and Australian resource sovereignty provides fertile ground for precisely that kind of representation.

But One Nation should be subject to exactly the same test. Winning seats doesn’t create leaders. A red tie doesn’t confer leadership any more than a red or blue one does. Business teaches leadership rather differently because reality votes every day.

Customers vote. Employees vote. Suppliers vote. Banks vote. Cash flow votes.

You can deliver the greatest speech imaginable, but if the wages aren’t in everyone’s accounts on Thursday, you’ve failed.And business teaches another lesson our political class might contemplate: credit travels down; responsibility travels up.

When something succeeds, give the team credit. When something fails, the person in charge owns it.

Compare that principle with Australian politics and draw your own conclusions.

Perhaps we should therefore change the questions we ask political leaders.

Forget the title, the party, the polling. Ask: where are you taking us?

Why should we go there? What will it cost? What are you prepared to risk to achieve it? And why should we trust you to get us there?

Australia will always have The Leader. The Constitution and parliamentary system guarantee somebody gets the office. What they can’t guarantee is leadership. That has to be earned.

A Prime Minister can command a party room. A Premier can command a parliamentary majority. But A Leader achieves something much harder.

People voluntarily say: I understand where you’re taking us. I believe it’s worth going there. And I trust you enough to follow.

That’s the difference.

And Australia could use a few more of those.

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These policies harm not just the average person but also people who require internet anonymity to ensure their own safety and protect themselves from legal repercussions.

Victims of abuse seeking to leave their current situation are one of many examples. Those living in or from repressive countries depend on internet anonymity to safely communicate and discuss certain topics while avoiding persecution. Being in a freer country does not always shield someone from persecution.

For example, in the last decade, there have been reports of fake Chinese police cars being used to target Chinese dissidents and citizens in nations such as Australia and the US. There have also been various incidents where Russian political dissidents have been killed in state sanctioned assassinations while physically located in Western countries.

Internet anonymity empowers those from disadvantaged and oppressed groups. A good example is the gay community; despite widespread acceptance in Western countries, same sex relations are illegal in 66 countries as of August 2026 not including countries such as Russia which criminalise ‘gay propaganda’. The ability to communicate anonymously helps protect and empower them and their supporters.

I believe the gay community in the West is a significant beneficiary of internet anonymity. Throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s, they and their supporters were able to find each other and organise into a movement that would allow for wider acceptance and outcomes such as gay marriage. Without this, such progress would have occurred at a far slower rate.

Internet anonymity benefits victims of rape and sexual assault, and those from other stigmatised groups such as HIV positive or dealing with addiction. Meeting up online invites less exposure and barriers to entry than meeting in person. It also reduces legal complications. For example, many countries (including Australia) subject victims of sex crimes to gag orders, meaning that attaching one’s real name to an online account creates legal risks and leaves fewer legal avenues to seek support.

Anonymity also helps protect and gives more flexibility to journalists and their sources. For example, if a journalist wants to interview a political dissident from China, they can do this anonymously and leave their source with a far lower risk of being exposed. The same applies when conversing with whistleblowers.

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As for the average person, I argue that everyone has an interest in and should have the right to remain anonymous online. To force everyone to require identification on all internet accounts represents a significant and unreasonable government overreach and invasion of privacy, and will not stop bad actors.

A good comparison with online identity verification is SIM card registration, although I would argue it is far more invasive. In many countries, including Australia, you must connect your identity to every SIM card that you register. As with online identity verification, the government justifies this policy on public safety grounds.

In reality, it harms vulnerable groups who may sometimes lack identification, and encourages bad actors to steal the identities of innocent people to engage in the same activities they would have been engaging in anyway. This is especially relevant with many people having their IDs exposed in mass data leaks.

As for how the average person benefits from being able to create an anonymous online account in day-to-day life, imagine you are someone who has a boss you really don’t like. Maybe you want advice on whether this person is truly crazy and whether you should just quit.

Let’s imagine your identity is connected to your account and gets leaked. If someone connects your account to your real identity, they can also figure out who you work for and who your boss is. This means you could be in trouble at work or even face legal action if what you said breaches a non-disclosure agreement or is considered damaging to the business, your boss or other employees.

Maybe you want to ask advice about a partner or a friend from a party with whom you have no personal relationship, or maybe you are simply seeking to have a political discussion online without an angry internet mob trying to ruin your life and get you fired from your job because they don’t like your political opinion or have decided whatever you said was offensive for some random reason.

Maybe you just don’t want your ID leaked in a data leak as has already occurred so many times, because that puts you at risk of identity theft from which you must pay to replace whatever identification has been compromised.

Without internet anonymity, the internet becomes a far less free, a far less private and a far less accessible place for everyone.

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Section 27 currently allows a vendor to access a purchaser’s deposit before settlement, provided certain legal conditions are satisfied and the purchaser’s interests remain protected. For decades it has played an important role in facilitating property transactions by allowing vendors to use those funds as the deposit on their next property purchase.

The proposed reform would replace this statutory right with a model that requires early release to be explicitly negotiated as a contractual condition prior to signing, while also preventing estate agents from taking their commission from an early-released deposit before settlement.

For vendors this may result in mismatched financial needs, such as putting down a deposit on a new home, funding retirement accommodation, or covering moving expenses, that typically arise after a home is sold, not before.

If an early release clause was not negotiated into the contract before signing, vendors have no legal mechanism to request funds later as circumstances evolve.

Vendors also risk losing negotiating power: early deposit release changes from a statutory entitlement to a private negotiation point. Buyers may refuse or demand concessions (e.g. price reductions or favorable terms), penalizing vendors under financial pressure who have the least leverage.

If deposit access is blocked, vendors may be forced to rely on costly bridging finance, delay their next property purchase, or attempt to negotiate longer settlement windows.

For real estate agents, the change would prohibit them from retaining their commission or auction expenses from an early-released deposit prior to final settlement.

Settlement periods in Victoria often range from 90 to 180 days. Holding back reimbursement of a completed marketing campaign and negotiations for months places a significant financial and cash-flow burden on real estate firms, particularly smaller or independent agencies. It takes an average of 60 days to sell a home with another 60-90 days for settlement. An agent can complete the work, sell the house, spend many hours on paperwork leading to settlement, but not receive payment until 5-6 months later.

It may sound like a minor drafting change, but it shifts a familiar statutory entitlement into the realm of contract negotiation. A vendor who fails to secure the necessary clause before signing may later discover that the deposit is unavailable when it is needed to purchase another home.

While the intention may be to strengthen consumer protection, the practical effect is likely to increase financial pressure on ordinary Victorians who are buying and selling simultaneously.

The reforms may also have broader implications for the efficiency of the Victorian property market. If vendors are unable to secure deposits for their next purchase, transactions may be delayed, become more complex, or even fail altogether. This has the potential to reduce market liquidity and create unnecessary obstacles in an already challenging housing environment.

Another significant consequence is the impact on the Victorian Property Fund.

Historically, purchaser deposits have been held in real estate trust accounts prior to settlement, with the interest earned contributing directly to the Victorian Property Fund. This fund supports a range of services including consumer protection initiatives, legal assistance, and property-related regulatory activities.

Industry estimates suggest that interest generated from these trust accounts has contributed approximately $115-125 million each year. By requiring deposits to remain in alternative trust arrangements, where this interest is no longer generated in the same way, the proposed reforms could substantially reduce this source of revenue.

Any reduction in funding would inevitably raise questions about how these valuable consumer protection and legal assistance programs will be maintained into the future. The government will no doubt increase taxes elsewhere to meet the shortfall.

Protecting purchasers is an important objective, and one that enjoys broad industry support. However, effective reform should carefully balance consumer protection with the practical realities of property transactions.

Before these changes are implemented, there should be further consultation with industry participants to ensure they do not unintentionally increase costs for homebuyers, restrict market activity, or diminish funding for important public services.

Government has a legitimate role in punishing fraud and ensuring that buyers receive accurate information about the risks they are accepting. It should not, however, presume that every property transaction requires the same arrangement. A purchaser may prefer the security of leaving the deposit in trust, while a vendor may need early access to complete a linked purchase. Where both sides are properly informed and voluntarily agree, the state should not make that bargain more difficult.

Consumer protection is not free merely because its cost does not appear in the state budget. Regulation shifts costs into bridging interest, legal fees, deposit-bond premiums, delays and failed transactions.

Well-intentioned policy should deliver better outcomes for consumers; not create new financial or regulatory barriers for the very people it seeks to protect.

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Elder Generation Z (1997-2012) might have escaped round the clock surveillance, but Generation Alpha (2012-2025) has likely had their entire existence recorded, stored, analysed, tabulated and retrieved by governments and institutions without their express consent or knowledge.

According to co-editor of the Surveillance Futures journal, Dr. Emmeline Taylor Ph.D. of the Australian National University says, “A survey of parents in 10 countries revealed that more than 80 per cent of parents with social media profiles had shared images of their children under two years old.”

Dr. Taylor also says some schools in the United Kingdom and United States had their student’s fingerprints biometrically scanned or movements at school and elsewhere tracked with radio-frequency identification devices (RFID), or their precise location tracked via their mobile phones.

If you’re a parent and impose this on your kids, it’s my opinion that you’re creepy, bad, and you should feel bad for doing it. That said; it’s your right as a parent. The same goes for social media – you should be the sole arbiter of determining whether your kid is on social media or not, not some bureaucrat or unelected eKaren. (Imagine our shock when most kids got around it anyway.)

What should concern every libertarian is that this data could be intercepted or forcibly handed over to government. Not only that, but it also has deleterious effects on freedom and liberty for all.

Just like in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, being snooped on 24/7 carries with it chronic psychological effects. NeuroLaunch says they “show up as chronic hypervigilance, decision paralysis, eroded self-esteem, and a documented ‘chilling effect’ where people quietly edit their opinions, choices, and even their private behaviour to match what they imagine an observer would approve of.”

Over a long enough period, kids won’t simply mimic what they need to say to be on the right side of cancellation – they’ll start believing it.

A child or adolescent’s constant hypervigilance opens the door to learned helplessness – that they’re so afraid of making mistakes, they won’t even try.

Amanda Lambros, psychologist, mental health educator, and world’s first Master of forensic sexology says that kids making age-appropriate mistakes is part of a child’s preparation for adulthood.

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“When I was young, I got to make age-appropriate mistakes and learn from those mistakes that I know all my friends were doing as well,” she says. “Whereas now it’s like if you’re so hyper-surveilled, your parents look at an app and stop it before it begins. They’re like, ‘Well, why aren’t you here? How come you’re there? I’m going to come and get you.’

“It’s not really giving them the opportunity to learn any lessons, even if they are stupid things like having one too many beers.”

Kids may think twice about passing a dutchie to the left-hand side in fear of parents, institutions, or government finding out; and it might also dampen their resolve for entrepreneurship, experimentation with identity, or sexuality. We already know Gen Z have less sex than the last generation and don’t drink as much, perhaps too afraid to blunder into potential messes that hardened our resolve.

Another quirk is that they are now so cavalier in giving over their information to big corporations and government, its conditioned them into a “new normal.”

“It’s creating a population of people to think of handing over their data as a blasé, ‘Okay, yeah, that’s cool.’,” Amanda says. “Yet another organisation needs our details. Here it is, fine. ‘I need to give the bank my details or else I can’t access my account, and I need to give Centrelink my details otherwise I can’t get my $100 fuel voucher.’ They just go with the flow and do it.”

If I’m under watch and I know all my friends are, there tends to be a homogenisation of behaviour. This process of behavioural contagion means kids are observing the actions of their peers and adopt similar or identical behaviours. If Tall Poppy syndrome already discouraged Australians to aspire to better things, surveillance could murder ambition while it’s still in the cradle.

Lambros also says that over-regimentation and a parent’s drive for kids to be high achievers can lead to premature burnout, especially when every single minute out of every single day is filled with activity – that’s constantly accounted for.

“I think if kids feel too overwhelmed by the demands of everyday life without getting a break or having that opportunity to go, ‘No, you don’t really need to achieve this,’ then I think we are setting them up for poor mental health outcomes.

“When are kids allowed to actually be kids? Why can’t we say, ‘Just go out and kick a footy and I don’t care where you are as long as you’re home before the lights go on.’ It doesn’t happen anymore.”

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Mercifully, after about a minute they stopped playing, and in a reference to Live Aid, said, “We’ve just demonstrated that economists don’t make good rock stars. Likewise, rock stars don’t make good economists!”

Conference delegates were then treated to a systematic dismantling of the folly of events like Live Aid and the damage that people such as Bob Geldof, Bono and others do with their fatuous statements along the lines of, ‘they have nothing, because we have everything’.

The ‘they’ of course refers to the third world, and the ‘we’ refers to us in the West.

In other words, their problems are all our fault.

To quote British writer Gareth Roberts, “In a way, it is our fault. The Ethiopian famine, for example, certainly was our fault – but not in the way Live Aid blithely assumed. It was the direct result of the deadliest of all western exports, Marxism.“

The Derg regime of Ethiopia – the Red Terror – forced farm collectivisation and so-called ‘land reforms’.

“The Marxist government of the dictator Mengistu is estimated to be responsible for the deaths of two million Ethiopians in the famine.

“We exported Marxism to Ethiopia, and it starved to death.

“But don’t worry, Mengistu is living in luxury in exile in Harare, today.”

It was former South Australian MP Bert Kelly who said, ‘The really bad ideas never go away’.

That is certainly the case with Marxism – or its modern-day stalking horse, ‘democratic socialism’, led globally by the Democratic Socialists of America.

We have seen this ideology play out in both Australia and the United Kingdom, where its influence continues to shape policy debates and public discourse despite repeated historical failures.

Modern socialists increasingly integrate indigenous and anti-racist struggles into their analysis. They focus on the displacement of indigenous populations through the lens of ‘settler colonialism’ and ‘indigenous sovereignty’.

Groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America portray the history of the United States and other Western nations as ongoing projects of ‘settler colonialism’.

These projects, they argue, persist through systemic ‘racial oppression’, ‘land theft’, and ‘corporate exploitation’ of native territories.

This framing turns complex historical and economic realities into a simple narrative of perpetual guilt and redistribution.

Global solidarity to the cause further defines the modern socialist project.

The movement also strongly aligns with the Palestinian cause, explicitly framing Israeli government policies in Gaza and the West Bank as an extension of ‘Western-subsidised settler colonialism’ – the ‘red-green alliance’ of Marxists and Islamists.

This alignment reinforces a worldview in which Western success is treated as original sin, while failures elsewhere are attributed to external oppression rather than internal governance, institutions, or culture.

As a result, efforts to reform traditional top-down government aid packages to developing nations are becoming harder, not easier, even though the evidence against them is compelling.

Decades of experience show that large-scale financial transfers have failed to produce lasting prosperity. Instead of lifting people out of poverty, such aid frequently entrenches corruption, props up inefficient or authoritarian regimes, and disrupts local economies by creating dependency and distorting incentives. Palestinian aid was routinely funnelled into building terror tunnels and purchasing weapons.

A better approach rests on three interconnected principles.

First, market-based development, with a strong emphasis on individual property rights, offers the most reliable path out of poverty.

When poor citizens can hold clear title to land, homes, or businesses, they gain the ability to leverage those assets for credit, investment, and long-term planning. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has shown that the lack of private ownership in many developing countries leaves vast amounts of ‘dead capital’ that cannot be productively used.

Formalising those rights unlocks economic potential far more effectively than external grants.

Second, free trade. Eliminating global trade barriers allows developing countries to grow through commerce rather than charity. Access to larger markets encourages specialisation, innovation, and the creation of real jobs.

History demonstrates that nations which opened themselves to trade achieved sustained growth that foreign aid alone never delivered. Protectionism and preferential treatment for favoured regimes, by contrast, often shields inefficiency and punishes the very producers who could drive progress.

Third, the rule of law and transparent legal systems.

Democratic accountability, independent courts, and predictable enforcement of contracts create the institutional foundation on which markets and property rights can function. Without them, even well-intentioned reforms collapse under the weight of arbitrary power, corruption, or political favouritism.

Establishing these institutions is slower and less glamorous than writing large cheques, yet it is far more durable.

These alternatives – secure property rights, open trade, and the rule of law – directly challenge the central Marxist/Socialist claim that poverty is primarily the product of Western extraction or systemic oppression.

They locate the solutions inside the societies that need them, rather than in perpetual transfers from outside. They also refuse the moral blackmail that treats every disparity as evidence of guilt.

Bert Kelly’s observation remains as relevant as ever. The really bad ideas never go away; they simply reappear in new clothing – democratic socialism, settler-colonial theory, or solidarity politics – each time promising justice while delivering the same familiar results: dependency, stagnation, and the quiet empowerment of those who thrive on grievance rather than growth.

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It is the sound of voters walking away from the two-party establishment.

An ABC report on Liberal leader Jess Wilson’s campaign through Gippsland reveals just how serious the revolt has become. A recent RedBridge poll placed One Nation on 32 per cent of the primary vote in the Eastern Victoria Region, ahead of the Coalition on 28 per cent and Labor on 22 per cent. Across Victoria, One Nation has also polled 27 per cent, marginally ahead of both major parties.

These numbers cannot be dismissed as a temporary tantrum. Nor can voters be patronised as angry people looking for somewhere to lodge a protest. They represent the accumulated consequences of governments that have treated regional communities as expendable and an opposition that has too often watched it happen.

Gippsland has seen coal mines, power stations and timber mills closed or condemned. Secure industries that sustained families and towns have been replaced with transition plans, glossy brochures and promises of green jobs that seldom arrive in the same number, location or wage bracket.

Labor calls this progress. The Coalition calls it regrettable. The people who lose their jobs call it reality.

After 12 years in government, Labor cannot pretend it is an innocent observer. Its energy and environmental policies have been imposed with the enthusiasm of people who will never have to explain to a worker why his job has disappeared or to a small manufacturer why electricity has become less reliable and more expensive.

Yet the Coalition’s defence is hardly more inspiring. Nationals leader Danny O’Brien says that voters who want to remove the Allan government must vote Liberal or National because other parties represent “protest and grievance” rather than solutions.

This is the cry of a political establishment discovering that the electorate no longer belongs to it.

Regional Victorians have supported the Nationals and Liberals for generations. They are entitled to ask what that loyalty has delivered. Where was the effective opposition while power stations were marked for closure? Where was the political fight when the native timber industry was shut down? Where was the alternative economic plan before communities were presented with another fait accompli?

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The Coalition wants the electorate to believe that voting for it is the only practical way to remove Labor. That argument might carry more weight if it had not spent so many years treating conservative voters as captives who had nowhere else to go.

The Liberals drifted towards the fashionable centre, surrendered arguments before making them, and seemed more frightened of being criticised by the ABC than of disappointing their own supporters. The Nationals continued relying upon inherited loyalty while regional industries disappeared around them. Now that voters have found alternatives, both parties demand unity—provided everyone unites behind them.

That is not unity. It is entitlement.

One Nation’s rise presents a genuine opportunity, but polling alone will not change Victoria. The party must convert public frustration into credible representation. That means selecting capable local candidates, properly vetting them, and producing a Victorian platform addressing matters the state government actually controls.

Affordable and reliable energy must be central. Regional jobs, responsible resource development, sustainable forestry, manufacturing, small-business regulation, roads, health services and the growing concentration of power in Melbourne are also important.

One Nation does not need a telephone-book-sized manifesto written by consultants. Voters have endured enough policy documents that promise everything and deliver nothing. It needs a short list of clear commitments, accompanied by an explanation of what will be done, how it will be achieved, and what it will cost.

Other non-major conservative parties and credible independents also have a role. They should resist the temptation to spend the campaign attacking one another for ownership of the same disillusioned electorate. The objective should be to break Labor’s hold on Victoria, end the major-party duopoly, and ensure that conservative preferences are not exhausted or delivered back to the government through vanity, incompetence or personal feuds.

Cooperation does not require ideological uniformity. It requires political maturity. Smaller conservative parties can retain their identities while reaching practical agreements on preferences, upper-house strategy and a core program of shared principles: cheaper energy, smaller government, lower taxes, stronger regional economies, individual responsibility and an end to ideological attacks on productive industry.

The most damaging mistake would be allowing several conservative alternatives to divide the vote while Labor wins through the wreckage.

One Nation must also avoid overconfidence. Social-media enthusiasm is encouraging, but comment sections do not elect members of parliament. Candidates, volunteers, booths, scrutineering, preference discipline and local credibility do. Declaring victory months before nominations close risks turning momentum into complacency.

Nevertheless, the opportunity is real. Morwell may be “ground zero”, but the revolt extends well beyond Gippsland. Outer-suburban families, tradespeople, manufacturers, farmers and small-business owners increasingly recognise that Labor and the Coalition are competing managers of a system that no longer listens to them.

The major parties will call it grievance because they cannot admit it is judgement.

Victorians are not abandoning the political establishment because they have stopped caring about government. They are abandoning it because government stopped caring about them.

November 28 offers voters something more powerful than another change of management. It offers them the chance to change the political equation itself—and remind both major parties that no electorate is their property.

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But public sector unionism is not the same as private sector unionism; the employer is not a private business but the state; the money being negotiated belongs to taxpayers, and citizens often have no practical alternative but to use the services being withheld during organised industrial action.

That changes the equation. Why should employment by the state include a legally privileged power to bargain collectively over public resources, or interrupt public services, to compel concessions from a democratically elected government?

Australian union membership is increasingly concentrated in the public sector. Unionism has collapsed across much of the private economy, yet remains comparatively strong among government employees.

ABS data from 2024 puts public sector union membership at approximately 32.2 per cent, compared to 7.9 per cent in the private sector. Government itself has grown into a massive employer, with around 2.6 million public-sector jobs in Australia.

This creates an obvious problem. A public sector union seeking a pay rise has a concentrated incentive to organise, campaign and apply pressure. The cost of whatever it wins is dispersed across millions of taxpayers.

In the private sector, a union bargains with an employer spending its own money. Push too hard and the company can lose customers, shrink or fail. There is a natural limit to what can be extracted.

Governments do not face the same discipline. Ministers and senior bureaucrats negotiate with money raised through taxation. If costs rise, the government can tax more, borrow more, cut somewhere else, or pass the bill to future taxpayers.

Public sector unions also allow public servants to exercise political influence more than once.

As citizens, members of public sector unions have the same vote as every other Australian. But in addition, their union can campaign, donate, lobby and pressure MPs individually and governments generally, as well as gain a second institutional channel of influence by bargaining directly with government over public expenditure and, in some cases, threatening to withdraw services if their demands are not met.

That does not literally give public servants two votes, but it does give an organised minority leverage that ordinary taxpayers do not possess. An organised public sector union can exert significant control over government, even if that government may have received an overwhelming electoral mandate.

This is where the democratic question becomes unavoidable: should a powerful minority of organised public servants be able to organise against the democratic voting majority?

The problem becomes more acute when bargaining extends beyond wages and conditions into public policy. Staffing levels, outsourcing, deployment, disciplinary rules and organisational structures can constrain the ability of an elected government to change how public services operate.

At that point, collective bargaining can become a shadow political process. Voters elect a government to govern, yet it can be constrained by agreements no voter approved, and that may outlast the politicians who signed them.

Then there is industrial action. A private sector strike usually imposes its greatest immediate cost on the employer. A public sector strike typically imposes the greatest cost on innocent third parties: the people.

When public transport workers strike, commuters suffer. When teachers strike, parents and students suffer. When health workers take action, patients may suffer. If police, prison officers or emergency workers withdraw their labour, the consequences can become far more serious.

Unlike consumers in a competitive market, citizens cannot usually take their business elsewhere. There is no rival passport office, alternative police force or competing criminal justice system across the road. Government frequently grants itself a monopoly over the very service being withdrawn.

Australia already accepts curtailed public sector unionisation in one important area –Australian Defence Force personnel do not enjoy ordinary trade union rights. We recognise that national defence, military discipline and obedience to lawful civilian authority are incompatible with soldiers collectively withholding their labour.

Once that principle is accepted, the debate is no longer about whether public sector union rights may ever be restricted. It is about where the line should be drawn.

Other democracies draw it in different places. Britain prevents police officers from belonging to ordinary trade unions and from striking. Germany allows career civil servants to organise but prohibits them from striking. In the United States, North Carolina allows public employees to associate but prohibits collective bargaining arrangements. Japan imposes strong restrictions on police, coast guard and prison officials.

These examples point toward a more defensible libertarian position than simply banning public sector unions outright.

A group of nurses who want to meet after work and campaign for better salaries should be free to do so. Public sector workers should be free to join associations, publish criticism and lobby for political change.

However, none of those freedoms necessarily creates a right to compel the elected government to bargain collectively, obtain exclusive bargaining status, bind future governments over matters of public policy, or withdraw monopoly public services as leverage against taxpayers.

Those are not natural rights; they are powers created and protected by law.

Libertarians should be especially suspicious when the state creates legal privileges for organised interests inside the state itself. Reform should begin by removing those privileges. Public sector unions should not have an automatic entitlement to collective bargaining. Matters such as outsourcing, staffing structures, headcount policies, deployment and agency design should remain with elected governments. Strikes should be prohibited in coercive and essential services, with a strong case for special restrictions covering police, prisons, emergency services and similar institutions where continuity is fundamental.

Liberal democracy is supposed to rest on political equality: one person, one vote, with governments accountable to the whole electorate. Public servants should enjoy the same civil liberties as every other citizen, but they should not enjoy a privileged capacity to organise against the public that employs them.

Government in Australia is already large and powerful enough. We should be wary of building another layer of organised power inside it.

It must be voters through democratically elected representatives who ultimately decide how taxpayers’ money is spent and how public services are run, not an organised minority of government employees with special leverage over both.

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No seriously, they should.

Let’s have a Karen for banning apps when a face-to-face interaction could do the same in half the time.

We’d hear announcement after announcement about the Anti-App Karen crawling into every nook and cranny of our lives, sniffing out annoying app transactions like a pig finding truffles. Though the Anti-App Karen would lose every lawsuit she ever filed, the perception of her threat would chill would-be “innovators” to force their idle, doomscrolling workers to *gasp!* ask people if they want extra fries with that.

We can’t stop there. Let’s have a Karen for deciding who stands where on escalators, if failing to wave at fellow drivers for letting you pass should mean jail, and if “learnings” is a word (it isn’t.)

The public would think it was gross overreach; nanny state micromanagement gone mad. It would inspire a mass uprising against unelected, broad-spectrum fun and common-sense killer commissioners. Well, everywhere but Victoria.

Yet, we have the eSafety Commissioner, non-lovingly referred to as the eKaren by anyone with half a brain, intruding into the most mundane of mundanities as if she was on a tireless crusade like Alexander into Persia and through to India. We’re not stopping Hephaestion, until every PC and phone is SAFE!

Safe from what, exactly, we’ll never quite know.

The eKaren’s latest escapade has seen two major casinos bringing in billions of dollars suddenly shut down by its parent companies. You didn’t hear this on the news because the casinos and/or houses of ill-repute reside in Los Santos, Valentine, and Saint Denis, locations only accessible if you purchase and play Grand Theft Auto: Online or Red Dead Redemption 2.

In the latest power grab guised under “won’t somebody think of the children”, parent company Rockstar Games pulled the ability for Australian players to access casinos or gambling features in the titles, despite being available for over seven years.

For those not familiar with either game, you play as either a present day (GTA:O) or Old West outlaw (RDR2) that’s given an entire open world to steal, maim, murder, destroy, and/or deceive for personal profit.

Not real dollars, obviously, but in-game currency. Though you can buy the currency using real world dollars, you can’t “cash it out.” It’s how Rockstar makes massive billion-dollar revenues on ten-year-old titles. The currency isn’t exclusive to gambling; you can buy in-game items such as vehicles, property, and weapons to gain an edge over opponents. It’s a much-maligned feature called “pay-to-win” – like in almost every mobile game.

There’s no real “object” to the game either – you can spend your entire time playing minigolf or dominoes if you so desire. Most players don’t, of course. But they sure as hell don’t sit there playing poker or slots for eight-hour stretches when you have a literal, consequence-free murder simulator – using frickin’ lasers mounted on helicopters – to roam around in.

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So why remove the gambling part?

It’s another example of the government not understanding video games, part eleventy-billion in a series.

In the 1990s, the halcyon days of Doom and Mortal Kombat, governments of both flavours needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20^th Century, only introducing a R18+ adult rating for video games in 2011. Prior to that they were limited to MA15+, like films and television. If a title “exceeded” the amounts of gore or sex or whatever arbitrary element the censors deemed unacceptable, they were outlawed. Even under the new regime, 17 games were refused classification (although some were re-classified after developers agreed to cut “offensive” content.)

When broadband became available (sort of) we could sail the high seas for “free” from about 2002 to 2010. When massively multiplayer online gaming or gaming as a live service became popular, there was no more getting around paying full price for entry. Therefore, when it came to gambling content, the Australian Classification Board introduced M and R18+ ratings. Though not prohibited outright, games with “an element of chance such as paid loot boxes” (so pretty much all of them) would get an M rating, while any game with simulated gambling receives an R18+ rating. In a perfect world.

The eKaren’s introduction of an eSafety (lol) code that sits alongside an imperfect yet “functional” classification regimen is unnecessary duplication of bureaucracy if we ever saw it. Video games aren’t a niche for nerds, but mainstream. A Screenhub survey shows 82% of Australians play online games of some kind (think Candy Crush Saga rather than Battlefield 6 – see you on Tsuru Reef, scrub) and 71% are over 18. Not exactly pimply teens playing Goldeneye 007 anymore.

Most live service games like GTA:O must be purchased via gated digital distribution platforms, which require credit cards or online payment processors; something under 18s can’t (easily) access. Hell, the same report says 89% of parents play with their children as a bonding experience. Minecraft, we hope. As for GTA:O, most players are over 18 because it’s an adult game aimed at adults.

If we must concede one liberty to protect children from harm, surely the classification system and half-decent parenting should be able to do the job? Surely consenting adults should be able to access all features of a live service video game if they choose? Or am I asking for too much? (eKaren: yes.)

Like everything in Australia – if it’s not mandatory, it’s banned.

So, I’ll continue to load up Red Dead Redemption 2 so I can shoot up a gun store, kill the owner, and use my blood money to buy more unregistered guns just to shoot Pinkertons and US Marshals faster. I just can’t walk across a gore-soaked dirt road and play blackjack. In a saloon. Teeming with outlaws, prostitutes, and bootleg everything.

I know this will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes but Julie, if you’re reading this: at least make your censorship make sense.

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Apparently, I was capable of leaving school, learning a trade, building a manufacturing business, employing people, surviving recessions, risking my home, meeting payroll, paying millions in wages and taxes, and accumulating my own wealth, but I cannot possibly be trusted to manage my retirement savings.

For that, I apparently require the paternal supervision of unions, politicians, regulators and generously remunerated financial experts from the top end of town.

Chief executive of Cbus, Kristian Fok, wants minimum balance requirements imposed on Australians establishing self-managed super funds (SMSFs) in case they encounter sharks, schemers and scammers.

No doubt they might. Fraud exists, as does bad advice, and some people make poor investment decisions. The proper response is to prosecute fraud, regulate conflicted advice and provide Australians with clear information — not prevent competent adults from controlling their own property.

What makes the argument particularly brazen is that the article quoting Mr Fok acknowledges that most investors caught in the Shield and First Guardian disasters were channelled into those investments through platforms managed by regulated trustees, including Macquarie, Netwealth, Equity Trustees and Diversa. Yet the lesson we are expected to draw is that SMSFs require additional restrictions. That is rather like the captain of the Titanic warning me that my rowing boat looks unsafe.

Cbus does not come to this with clean hands. In February 2025, APRA accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from Cbus trustee United Super and launched an investigation following findings of fundamental deficiencies involving governance, fitness and propriety processes, and expenditure management. Those are APRA’s words, not mine.

The conflict of interest is impossible to ignore. SMSFs are competitors to large industry funds. Every Australian who leaves an institutional fund takes their retirement capital and the associated fees with them. Cbus is therefore not merely a concerned observer offering disinterested public advice, it is a participant in the market asking government to make it more difficult for customers to leave that market.

Naturally, this proposal will appeal to the Australian Uniparty. Labor has deep political and historical ties to the union and industry-superannuation establishment. The Coalition, meanwhile, will probably mutter something about choice before accepting another compromise that leaves government with more power and Australians with less. That has become the familiar routine: Labor proposes the ratchet, the Coalition complains about how quickly it is turning, and neither seriously considers turning it back.

Compulsory superannuation has created an enormous pool of private wealth over which governments, unions, fund managers, banks, consultants and activists all want influence. They describe it as retirement policy, national capital or an economic asset. I describe it more simply: it’s my money. It did not appear through government generosity. It represents years of work, deferred consumption and personal sacrifice.

A compulsory minimum balance would be especially perverse. It would tell Australians that financial independence is reserved for those who government considers sufficiently wealthy. Someone capable of establishing an economical SMSF with $150,000 would be prohibited because a regulator or industry lobbyist had nominated $200,000, $500,000 or some other arbitrary figure. It would also ignore the obvious point that funds grow. What matters is not simply the opening balance but costs, contributions, investment knowledge, strategy, time horizon and the trustee’s willingness to accept responsibility.

Nobody claims an SMSF is suitable for everyone. It requires work, record keeping, compliance and sound judgement. Some people quite reasonably prefer an industry or retail fund. That is their choice. What I reject is the institutional arrogance that treats voluntary dependence as sensible but voluntary self-reliance as dangerous.

This is precisely the political territory One Nation should occupy: defending the right of ordinary Australians to control the fruits of their own labour against the combined power of the political class, union establishment and corporate elite. The party should unequivocally oppose arbitrary barriers to establishing SMSFs and demand genuine transparency from every superannuation fund—industry, retail or self-managed.

One Nation’s opportunity is to articulate the principle the major parties have abandoned: government exists to punish wrongdoing and protect individual rights, not to infantilise responsible citizens. The law should pursue scammers, dishonest advisers and fraudulent promoters with full force. It should not use their existence as an excuse to herd Australians into large institutions favoured by politically connected insiders.

The reader response to the Cbus proposal reveals something the establishment repeatedly fails to understand: Australians are not merely comparing percentage returns. They are asserting ownership. Many would prefer to accept responsibility for their own decisions than surrender control to distant boards, consultants and political fellow travellers who may have priorities very different from theirs.

If Cbus wants Australians to remain members, it should earn their confidence through performance, service, transparency and accountability. It should not ask Canberra to build a higher fence around its customers.

I accumulated my wealth myself. I accept the risks of managing it and will live with the consequences of my decisions. I do not need Labor, the Coalition, the unions or the top end of town deciding that freedom is too dangerous for me.

Stay out of my wallet. Stay out of my retirement. Stay out of my life.

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Ultimately Labor, the Greens and Teals would be happy to ban all firearms, while the Liberals might exempt water pistols. None has made a serious effort to engage Australia’s one million licensed firearm owners as a constituency.

The National Party has been more supportive, with figures such as Senator Bridget McKenzie advocating on behalf of sporting shooters. However, the party’s position remains cautious and largely defensive. Rather than questioning the foundations of Australia’s firearms laws, the party accepts the National Firearms Agreement as an appropriate framework, arguing only that additional restrictions should not be introduced without consultation with rural stakeholders.

One Nation adopts a somewhat stronger position by explicitly recognising the legitimacy of sporting shooters, firearms businesses, clubs, farmers, landholders and recreational hunters. It argues that government efforts should focus on criminal misuse of firearms, illegal trafficking and organised crime rather than imposing additional regulatory burdens on law-abiding firearm owners, and advocates an evidence-based and practical approach to regulation.

However, both the Nationals and One Nation frame firearm ownership primarily as a rural and regional issue. This overlooks an important reality: the majority of licensed firearm owners live in metropolitan areas, even if many travel to rural locations for hunting or other recreational activities. The persistent assumption that legitimate firearm ownership is principally rural contributes to recurring proposals that would effectively confine civilian firearm ownership to country areas. Such proposals are founded on misconception rather than demographic reality.

More concerning is that no party with the potential to determine government policy approaches the subject based on principles. None addresses the assertion in the National Firearms Agreement, subsequently enacted in state laws, that the ownership of firearms is a privilege. None attempts to identify what gun laws are intended to achieve, or considers how to assess their effectiveness. And even when they claim that evidence is needed to justify changes, they do not specify what kind of evidence is relevant.

The National Firearms Agreement is not evidence-based. It has no objectives, no assessment of outcomes, and no review process. It was an emotion driven reaction to the Port Arthur tragedy, just like the changes introduced in response to the Bondi shooting.

If an objective can be implied, it is to prevent future mass shootings. That would, at least, be measurable. On that basis, the Port Arthur gun law changes have been a complete failure. While there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes a mass shooting, based on the common definition of four or more victims including the perpetrator there have been at least seven mass shootings in Australia subsequent to Port Arthur, including Bondi. Furthermore, that is more than what occurred in the same period prior to introduction of the Port Arthur gun laws.

Another objective might be inferred from the statements of former Prime Minister John Howard, who argued that Australia should avoid importing “American gun culture.” Unlike reducing firearm homicide or preventing mass shootings, this objective is inherently subjective. It lacks any measurable definition, making it impossible to determine whether policies are succeeding or failing. Moreover, the emphasis on American culture is itself arbitrary. Countries such as Switzerland and New Zealand also have longstanding traditions of civilian firearm ownership, yet are rarely invoked in Australian policy debates.

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Developing measurable objectives for firearms policy is neither difficult nor controversial. Reducing firearm-related crime, minimising mass casualty incidents, lower firearm homicide rates or preventing firearms from being acquired by individuals who present a demonstrable risk to public safety, for example. Once such objectives are specified, policy can be evaluated according to evidence rather than political symbolism.

The question then becomes whether Australia’s existing firearms restrictions contribute to achieving these objectives. That question is rarely examined. Comparative evidence from other jurisdictions indicates that countries with substantially less restrictive firearms laws can nevertheless experience comparable, and in some cases lower, rates of firearm violence. Such comparisons do not by themselves establish causation, but they do challenge the assumption that tighter restrictions produce better public safety outcomes.

In the absence of measurable objectives, public policy is shaped by personal sentiment. John Howard famously declared that he “hates guns,” a statement that reflected a personal value judgement rather than an empirical policy rationale. Some people hate alcohol, cigarettes and boxing too.

More recently, the governments of Western Australia and New South Wales have justified legislation designed to reduce the number of firearms owned by licensed individuals on the basis of “getting guns off the streets.” Yet there is no evidence that reducing the number of legally owned firearms will produce measurable reductions in firearm violence.

Without clearly defined objectives and supporting evidence, such policies amount to political gestures rather than effective public safety measures.

A principled approach would instead distinguish between regulating people and regulating objects. Firearms do not commit crimes independently; criminal acts are committed by individuals. It is therefore logically defensible to prohibit firearm ownership by those demonstrably incapable of exercising responsibility, including children, individuals with severe mental incapacity and persons with histories of serious violence. The same reasoning supports secure storage requirements intended to prevent unauthorised access. These measures can be directly connected to identifiable public safety objectives.

By contrast, restrictions based primarily on firearm design or cosmetic characteristics are difficult to justify empirically. Both the Port Arthur and Bondi legislative reforms expanded prohibitions on particular categories of firearms, yet there is no evidence that a straight-pull rifle presents a greater public safety risk than a conventional bolt-action rifle, or that a lever-action shotgun with a seven-round magazine is more dangerous than an otherwise identical firearm limited to five rounds. Without empirical evidence linking such distinctions to measurable public safety outcomes, these classifications appear arbitrary.

History demonstrates that regulating weapons is not a modern phenomenon. Roman authorities restricted the carrying of swords while permitting daggers and clubs, and Elizabethan England imposed limits on sword length. The issue has always been political rather than technological: who should possess weapons, who should decide, and on what basis should those decisions be made? Should regulation rest upon clearly defined objectives and demonstrable evidence, or upon symbolism, emotion and personal preference?

Political parties that are genuinely seeking the support of Australia’s licensed firearm owners should therefore articulate a principled philosophy of firearms regulation. That philosophy should begin by identifying legitimate public safety objectives, defining measurable outcomes, and evaluating laws according to evidence rather than political instinct.

Without such a framework, firearms policy will continue to be driven by reaction and rhetoric instead of reasoned public policy.

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A digital first society poses a significant risk to civil liberties due to the centralised nature of data. It creates a system in which disenfranchisement can occur with the single click of a button, with a person or group deprived of the ability to rent, travel, buy and sell property, do business, use telecommunications and the internet, and even access basic needs.

This can already be observed in China, which has a network of digital and real-world surveillance that determines whether a person can access certain benefits or activities based on a social credit score. The mostly digital nature of Chinese society makes the system very difficult to evade.

Digital first systems incorporate significant amounts of personal data and allow for a level of mass surveillance that wasn’t possible in the past. Data can be utilised by corporations and government to build profiles on individuals that affect the way they are treated. This is especially relevant when governments implement polices such as predictive policing, which criminalises those who have committed no crime based on invasive data driven predictions.

Digital first policies prioritise the use of digital payments while discouraging and even stigmatising the use of cash. Many jurisdictions already subject cash-based or cash dominant businesses to a higher level of scrutiny. This creates a society in which those who prefer cash or are unable to access banking services can find themselves unable to access certain services and even essential goods.

This includes those fleeing abusive and domestic violence situations, low-income individuals who struggle to afford bank fees, those who are homeless, and even those who have been legally excluded from certain digital based services.

This is especially relevant with the rise of debanking based on political criteria and the ever-increasing KYC (know your customer) requirements, which encourage surveillance and the pre-emptive debanking and freezing of accounts of those who fail to comply. Banks increasingly cite KYC and corporate social responsibility obligations as a cover for politically motivated and malicious debanking.

There are recent examples of the banking system being weaponised by governments against individuals and groups for political reasons. In the 2022 Canadian Trucker Convoy even those who donated to peaceful protests found themselves with frozen bank accounts. In practice, debanking becomes a weapon which the government uses to silence dissent and punish people for things it doesn’t like.

Those who struggle to use or are unable to utilise certain technologies become de facto second-class citizens. In practice a digital first society requires people to pay to access the infrastructure including buying a computer or a phone, along with internet or a phone plan. Those who live in rural and outback areas can struggle with connectivity regardless of the ability to pay.

A digital first society also faces significant security issues. Digital payment structures can become non-functional during natural disasters and during cyber-attacks. Hackers recently deleted the entirety of Romania’s land registry, for example, which crippled its real estate market. The nation is currently in the process of trying to replicate it from non-digital back-ups.

A digital first society sets up a digital ecosystem which governments can use to mandate and coerce digital ID. Mandatory digital ID combined with a digital first policy creates significant problems in terms of freedom, privacy and security, including data leaks, loss of anonymity on the internet, and the need to hand over an unlocked phone to police and random strangers to prove identity.

As civil participation becomes increasingly digital, many governments have implemented invasive and repressive internet policies including online and operating system identity verification and chat control to manage access to online spaces and speech. If offline modes of communication are further neglected, we may very well become a society in which our ability to communicate and organise with others is dependent on permission from governments and corporations.

Governments are also resorting to measures such as internet blackouts to suppress protests and political movements. This has become standard practice in Iran, and India recently implemented an internet blackout to curb recent student protests.

This also has the effect of disrupting local digital payment infrastructure, meaning no one could pay with a card and businesses cannot make money. This demonstrates the importance of cash, which is resistant to restrictions on digital infrastructure.

To protect civil liberties and to prevent the further centralisation of government power, governments should adopt a policy of digital neutrality in which citizens and businesses have the right to decide whether they conduct their lives through digital and non-digital means. We must ensure the right to paper, the right to conduct business in cash, and freedom of choice.

Digital systems should be an option, not a mandate.

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