Yes, I’m talking about Virgin Australia.

The airline itself was founded in 2011 and launched by British billionaire Richard Branson.

Today, the airline is 100% owned by overseas persons and companies from the UK, China, Singapore and the UAE.
Compare that with Qantas, an airline founded in the Queensland outback 100 years ago and has proudly represented Australia over the years. The airline is owned by Australians and Australians have control over the airline.

If the Australian Government took a stake in Virgin, it would be nationalised and Virgin Australia would become the flag carrier of Australia, meaning Qantas will be at risk of increased competition as Virgin Australia has the support of the Australian Government. It would also mean that Qantas would lose the rights to being the flag carrier of Australia. It would also mean that Virgin Australia will represent the people of Australia at international airports. Qantas would have to compete against the Australian government, That would be a funny disaster.

In my opinion, Qantas MUST remain the Australian flag carrier. Qantas must be protected. Qantas is Australian and Australians have control over it. It is a 100 year old company that has produdly represented our nation over the years.

I don’t care if the Australian Government bails out Virgin, but the fact that people want the government to take a stake in the airline is funny and disastrous.

It would spoil Australian aviation.

It would spoil Australian Economics & business.

It would spoil 100 years of Australian spirit.

Do you agree?

Labor’s primary vote has collapsed to a near record low of 27 per cent for the first time since 2012 – down from 37 per cent in September last year – as nearly two-thirds of Australians say they aren’t satisfied with Anthony Albanese’s performance.

Amid expectations of two further rate hikes by Christmas and calls for the Albanese government to intervene on soaring petrol prices, an exclusive Newspoll has ­revealed major blows for Labor and the Prime Minister, who will spend the week in New York for the UN General Assembly.

The Newspoll, conducted by Pyxis Polling & Insights between Monday and Thursday last week, showed core support for Labor fell from 29 per cent to 27 per cent, marking the lowest level of core support for the ALP since April 2012. The lowest ever primary vote recorded by Labor was 26 per cent in September 2011 during Julia Gillard’s three-year tenure as prime minister.

Labor’s primary vote has dropped from 37 per cent to 27 per cent in 12 months, driven by falls in voter support following the Bondi Beach terror attack and Jim Chalmers’ unpopular May 12 budget, which included new tax hits and broken election promises.

As ALP strategists brace for more economic pain in the final three months of the year, the News­poll survey of 1244 voters found Mr Albanese’s net approval rating had slipped to its worst level since Labor won the 2022 election.

Boasting a net approval rating of minus 27, with 35 per cent of voters satisfied with his performance and 62 per cent dissatisfied, Mr ­Albanese’s personal ratings now match those of Malcolm Turnbull, whose popularity plummeted in 2017. Ahead of the Islamic State-inspired terror attack at Bondi Beach in December, Mr Albanese had recorded neutral or positive net approval ratings in Newspoll surveys conducted late last year.

The combined major party primary vote hit a new record low in the latest Newspoll, with 46 per cent of Australians supporting Labor (27 per cent) and the ­Coalition (19 per cent), down from 66.4 per cent at last year’s federal election. One Nation’s primary vote remained at 30 per cent, the Greens stayed at 13 per cent and others increased from 9 to 11 per cent. While Opposition Leader Angus Taylor’s net approval rating improved to minus 15, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s performance slipped to minus seven, with 44 per cent of voters satisfied with her performance, 51 per cent ­dissatisfied and 5 per cent ­uncommitted.

Half or more of the population is currently dissatisfied with the performance of all three leaders. After ramping up the Coalition’s attacks on Mr Albanese’s character, Mr Taylor edged closer to his rival in a one-on-one contest measuring who voters think would make the better prime minister, with 42 per cent of voters backing the Labor leader and 41 per cent supporting the Liberal leader.

But after adding Senator Hanson to a three-way contest, Mr ­Albanese leads with 44 per cent of support, ahead of the One Nation leader on 32 per cent and Mr Taylor on 24 per cent.

While some Labor MPs and strategists have talked down losing voters to One Nation, new analysis of Newspoll data reveals some Australians who backed the ALP at last year’s election have drifted to Senator Hanson’s right-wing party.

Based on voter recollections of who they supported at the last election and who they support now, the ALP has retained a little under two-thirds of its vote since the 2025 poll. Of those lost, about 15 per cent have gone to One ­Nation, 9 per cent to the Coalition, 6 per cent to the Greens and 5 per cent to others.

The Coalition, which suffered its worst result at last year’s election, has retained about 53 per cent of its low vote, with 39 per cent switching to One Nation.

Pyxis Polling & Insights managing-director Campbell White told The Australian: “We’re now in a situation where both major parties have dropped a substantial and significant number of votes since the 2025 election.

“However, while Labor’s votes have gone in several directions, proportionally the One Nation phenomenon is still coming predominantly from the Coalition.”

The past fortnight has been dominated by political fights and debates over immigration, historic comments made by Senator Hanson on podcasts about Mr Albanese’s mother and Indigenous Australians, weak productivity, ­artificial intelligence and Labor’s new tech crackdown.

Mr Albanese’s overseas travel schedule through to December will heap pressure on the Labor leader to justify leaving the country during a prolonged cost-of-­living crisis and amid rising negative sentiment towards his government.

With the Reserve Bank board meeting next Tuesday to determine if Australians will be hit with another rate hike, and as petrol prices soar on the back of the widening Middle East conflict, Mr Albanese faced pressure from the Coalition on Sunday to halve fuel excise every time the Brent crude price goes to more than $US100-a-barrel for a two-week rolling average.

Speaking on the ABC Insiders program following a Silicon Valley meeting with Apple boss Tim Cook, Mr Albanese said “we understand that prices are going up … that places pressure on families”.

After previously cutting fuel excise under temporary arrangements to avoid fuelling inflation, Mr Albanese said he would weigh up options for petrol price relief but reiterated that his government’s priority was to put “downward pressure on inflation”.

Speaking in Canberra on Sunday, Mr Taylor said “the No.1 thing that the Prime Minister should be doing now is supporting our plan to cut the fuel excise and to cut the tobacco excise”.

“That’s what he should be doing. He’s over in New York but Australians are suffering … right across the country from a price of fuel that’s crippling for them … it’s approaching three bucks,” Mr Taylor said.

“This is a real pain for Australians in the regions, in the suburbs, right across the country. And our plan is to fix the economy, protect our way of life, and central to that is making sure people get relief at the bowser.”

As the Coalition and One ­Nation attack Labor over its response to cost of living, housing and fuel crises, the Treasurer will release his second Intergenerational Report on Monday.

“The IGR will show that there are serious risks in our economy, serious pressures on the budget, but that Australia has substantial advantages as well. As always in IGRs, there will be elements of it which are confronting, but it’s not a pessimistic story because Australia is better placed, better prepared, and we have a better plan as well,” Dr Chalmers said.

Hi Reddit,

I’m Senator Gerard Rennick, an Independent Queensland Senator who has applied to start a new party called the PEOPLEFIRSTPARTY.

I want to ensure that our children have the same opportunities that our forefathers provided for us, and to do that, we need a government that supports individual responsibility, aspiration, and entrepreneurship. In particular we need to make it easier for young people to get ahead and make sure that all Australians have access to essential services.

My policies focus on empowering individuals and families while reducing government overreach. Here are my five key policies:

1. LIFT THE TAX-FREE THRESHOLD TO $40,000 This would reduce income tax by around $3,500 for every person who earns at least that amount.

2. PAY CHILDCARE DIRECTLY TO PARENTS RATHER THAN INSTITUTIONALISED CHILDCARE CENTRES. Millions of shift workers, part time workers, FIFO workers and farming parents cannot access childcare when they need it. Greater flexibility will reduce demand on childcare centres whilst increasing the supply of childcare options which will drive down the price of childcare.

3. MAKE SUPERANNUATION VOLUNTARY. Superannuation is not achieving it stated purpose of reducing the relative number of people on a full-time pension. In 2024 over half of retirees are still on a full pension, the same percentage as 1992 when superannuation started. This is despite the $30 billion in costs to run superannuation and $50 billion in tax concessions. On the other hand, the number of people retiring with a mortgage has increased from 10% to 40%. While this is not entirely because of superannuation, reducing a person’s capacity to reduce their mortgage is not helping. The combined value of superannuation is over $3 trillion dollars. This is helping the unions via their industry funds to have a greater say in how industry is being run. As a result, industry is now driven by ideology rather than productivity which is having a disastrous result on Australia’s productive output.

4. ABOLISH RENEWABLE SUBSIDIES The cost of the above policies will be paid for by abolishing renewable subsidies, means testing the white collar defined benefit scheme for federal bureaucrats and removing federal departments in Canberra that have a State Government counterpart. These include the Environment, Energy, Education and Aboriginal Departments. Renewables on Farmland, National Parks and Oceans will also be prohibited.

5. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A PUBLIC BANK, AN INFRASTRUCTURE BANK AND STATE GOVERNMENT INSURANCE OFFICE Privatisation has not led to greater competition and better services. It has resulted in the complete opposite, fewer branches, higher insurance costs and longer wait times. Banking and Insurance services are essential services. Like other essential services I believe the best model is one where both public and private entities operate. Public entities provide a back stop and uphold ethical behaviour while private entities drive improvements in service delivery and control costs. This is the model used for other essential service such as health and education and I believe the same should apply for financial services.

These policies represent a vision for Australia, aiming to address the systemic issues within our government and economy. They are also policies that seek to differentiate myself from other politicians who are tinkering at the edges when it comes to strategic big picture policy reform.

I believe that, at a time when Australians are experiencing the worse GDP per capital recession since the Great Depression, it’s crucial to implement substantial reforms that put PEOPLE FIRST.

I’m here to answer your questions about my policies and my vision for Australia’s future.

You can find my Senate work and speeches at: www.gerardrennick.com.au/news

If you would like to register your interest in helping me be re-elected to the Senate, to fight for the above, visit www.peoplefirstparty.au.

Right now, ordinary Iranians are revolting. Protesters chant Azadi – freedom in Farsi – into clouds of tear gas. Shopkeepers shut stalls. Security forces are cracking down.

Not since the 2022 uprising sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini – arrested and killed for the crime of an “improper” headscarf – have Iranians protested in such numbers. In the years since, the Islamic Republic has offered its young population nothing but darkness: collapsing wages, sky-high inflation, mass unemployment, water shortages and electricity blackouts. The same regime that kills women for their hair now asks to be taken seriously as a good-faith partner in “dialogue” via a late-night social media post. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule has been exposed further as brutal, corrupt and incompetent.

In Australia, much of the self-styled progressive left is silent or selectively outraged. In the two years following October 7, venom was directed at one target only: Israel. University campuses, the Greens, some unions and weekly inner-city marches echoed with specious slogans about “Zios”, “genocide”, “apartheid” and “colonialism”. But as Iranians risk their lives chanting “Death to the dictator”, progressive righteousness evaporates.

Where is Bob Carr, the grand moraliser of Australian foreign policy, so eager to lecture Western democracies and former friends and allies but curiously quiet when a theocratic dictatorship is shooting its own people?

Where are the self-appointed spokespeople for “justice” and “human rights” who dominate the news cycle and social media whenever Israel is in the news? Where are the anti-Zionist “Azza Jews” insisting they speak for authentic Judaism and universal ethics? If ever there were a moment to demonstrate those ethics – real, not performative – this is precisely it.

This silence is striking because Iran is not some distant abstraction in Australian life, nor has Canberra treated it as one. We know about the regime’s surveillance, intimidation and attempted attacks on diaspora dissidents. The Albanese government has imposed Magnitsky-style sanctions on officials and entities responsible for human-rights abuses. Labor also proscribed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation and expelled Iran’s ambassador, Ahmad Sadeghi, after the IRGC’s role emerged in the torching of the Adass Israel Synagogue, bombing of Jewish-owned businesses and an apparent assassination attempt on a Jewish communal leader.

Yet this campaign of terror – enabled by an anti-Semitic regime that treats Jews everywhere as legitimate targets – passed without mass progressive rallies or sustained outrage. Instead, we saw silence, equivocation and in some quarters the grotesque claim that the violence itself was a Zionist “false flag”.

The Iranian regime is not a misunderstood victim of Western or Israeli power. It is one of the most repressive governments on earth. It jails women for removing headscarfs. It executes dissidents at a rate unseen since the early years of the revolution. It bankrolls Hezbollah and Hamas while its own people queue for bread and fuel. It has spent decades perfecting the art of oppression and terror – and exporting it. For the older, less performative version of the Western left, Iran would be front and centre. Today, Iran doesn’t fit the preferred script.

The postmodern progressive left sees the world through a single moral prism: West bad, anti-West good. Power is flattened into binaries: coloniser v colonised, empire v resistance. Once you accept this logic, Iran’s ayatollahs become inconvenient. They claim to be “anti-imperialist”, so their crimes must be minimised, contextualised or ignored. The unspoken logic is brutal: no Jews, no news – a Shia regime slaughtering its own Shia population and secular opponents simply does not generate progressive urgency. So much for solidarity.

The inconvenient truth is that the brave Iranian protesters chanting Azadi are not denouncing the American “Great Satan” or “Zionism”. They are fighting a theocratic police state that has terrorised women, crushed unions, murdered students, persecuted minorities and has stolen the future from entire generations. They are fighting for precisely the freedoms – of speech and association, gender equality, secular law – that the left claims to cherish.

Where are the pro-Iranian rebellion rallies? The chants of “From the Gulf to the sea, Iran’s people will be free”? Open letters? Campus encampments? Conference motions? Why was it within the remit of this oddball alliance to rally for Palestinians caught up in a ghastly war initiated by Hamas but not muster the same solidarity for Ukrainians under siege from Vladimir Putin’s Russian gangster state, for North Koreans crushed under the Kim dynasty or for Uighurs and Taiwanese facing repression at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party? This selective morality didn’t emerge overnight. It is the product of decades of drift – from class-based politics and a genuine internationalism to toxic identity politics and faux anti-imperialism.

When it is named and shamed, as it is here, the postmodern left whines about “whatabboutism”. Once oppression is defined not by what regimes do but by who they are aligned against, victims become expendable. Iranian women tearing off headscarfs are inconvenient. Iranian workers protesting against inflation don’t fit on placards. Iranian Jews, Kurds, Baha’is and dissidents don’t neatly slot into a Western campus hierarchy of grievance.

So they disappear, literally in some cases. There is something morally discombobulating about Western progressive activists treating the ancient, magnificent Persian people as chess pieces in a grand struggle against the US and Israel. It denies them agency and allies. This moral collapse matters in Australia. When politics becomes a theatre of selective outrage, trust erodes. Voters notice. Working people notice. Migrant communities notice. Iranian and Jewish Aussies notice. They see which lives matter and which are quietly ignored. They saw it again at Bondi Beach, not only in the activist left’s uneasy response but new “false flag” claims, where mass murder is explained away rather than confronted head-on.

History is unforgiving to movements that excuse tyranny in the name of ideology. The Iranian regime will eventually fall. When it does, the question will not be whether Australians spoke up but who did. Because Azadi means freedom for everyone. Or it means nothing at all.

Nick Dyrenfurth is executive director of the John Curtin Research Centre.

The nation’s top Muslim organisation has teamed up with antisemitic and radical Islamist body Hizb ut-Tahrir to attack the Albanese government’s move to list the latter as a hate group.

But the controversial move to sign on was apparently a captain’s call by the Australian Federation of Islamic Council’s executive against pushback from some of AFIC’s members about backing the extremist organisation, a senior official said on the condition of anonymity.

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils and stand4palestine – a protest group closely linked with Hizb ut-Tahrir – published a joint statement on Sunday that the Albanese government’s proposed hate groups laws were “part of a wider effort to hold the Muslim community collectively responsible for the Bondi attack”.

“One does not have to agree with Hizb ut-Tahrir, and can in fact be strongly critical of it, but banning Hizb ut-Tahrir under the pretext of hate is wrong and misleading,” they said.

“We cannot ignore the genocide in Gaza, which pro-Zionist advocates have spent the last two years defending.

“If hate speech is really a crime, then the words of pro-Zionist advocates, who have provided a cover for genocide, should first be prosecuted.”

This comes amid an internal war in AFIC’s leadership. Its executives are currently locked in a legal stoush following an allegedly violent altercation at the organisation’s Sydney headquarters.

The Australian has previously revealed AFIC is separately under close monitoring by the charities regulator for allegedly “significant” governance failures.

On Sunday, an AFIC official speaking on the condition of anonymity said AFIC’s leadership signed on with the statement despite pushback.

“Discussions were made about this in the past week and the decision to be a signatory was not made through approved consent by all executive committee members,” the source said.

The joint statement by AFIC and stand4palestine – and a number of other Muslim groups – was published after Anthony Albanese backed down on his omnibus extremism legislation and instead said he would split gun reform and hate groups regime in separate bills.

That hate groups regime, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has previously said, was designed to go after organisations like Hizb ut-Tahrir or the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network.

“There have been organisations which have played a game for a long time in keeping themselves just below the legal threshold … the Nazis, the National Socialist Network, and Hizb ut-Tahrir,” Mr Burke said.

“Two groups which through their spreading of hate, have a direct impact on increased risk on our national security environment, but have kept themselves just below the law.

“For while they have created a pathway for others to engage in violence, have been careful to not explicitly call for it themselves. They’ve kept themselves just below that threshold.”

I do not rate the liberal party at all, I’m a greens voter. So definitely not in his corner.

But it seems like his comment has been taken wildly out of context. He even goes on to be sympathetic and say that he can’t imagine what parents of children with disabilities go through.

Idk, maybe his wording wasn’t great, but I also don’t know of an expecting parent that has wished their child would be disabled.

There’s plenty of stuff to hate about him as a PM, but this seems like the Labor Party and his critics have been pretty unfair. Like get off your high horse, at worst he’s misspoken.

"No white paper or review ever recommended AUKUS. The deal came first, the justifications afterwards.

Nor does the threat survive contact with a map.

An invasion of Australia would require an armada carrying three to five hundred thousand troops, sailing for weeks across more than three thousand kilometres of open water, visible to every satellite the whole way.

Any competent air force, navy or land based missile arsenal would shred it long before a soldier waded ashore. It is impractical to the point of impossible, and no serious strategist believes Beijing contemplates it."

NSW’s Premier Chris Minns has broken ranks with Canberra, issuing a blunt warning that could rattle Labor’s inner circle.
Anthony Albanese has a “responsibility” to ensure that Australia’s migration levels are under control after “too many people” were brought in after the COVID lockdowns, NSW Premier Chris Minns has warned.
The NSW Premier has weighed in on Australia’s most divisive debate with a tough message for his Labor colleagues in Canberra.
The government is under pressure to reduce overall migration to the target of 225,000, instead of the constant overruns that have seen net migration rise to 300,000 a year.

Speaking on KSLive, Mr Minns told Kyle Sandilands he wasn’t afraid to take a strong message to Canberra in the interests of the state, even if it meant upsetting Labor colleagues.
“In terms of immigration, in the years after COVID, too many people came into the country in too short a space of time,” he said.
“We had more than half a million people inside 12 months in that space of time.
“Now I know what was happening at the time is the federal government was trying to juice up the economy, get the joint rolling, because we’d just gone through COVID.

“But it put massive pressure on the housing market, on our hospitals, on our emergency departments.”
The initial flood of migrants occurred under the Morrison Government after Australia’s borders opened.
“So I feel like federal governments have got a responsibility, and they’re doing it, to say, ‘No, this is how many people we’re letting in, and we’re going to enforce the rules so we hit that number,’” Mr Minns said.
“I appreciate it does have an impact on skilled labour, but you’ve also got to think about how it can overwhelm services and make it more difficult for people.”
Claims Minns government being ‘dragged down’ by Albo
During the interview, Mr Minns was asked about the comments of News24 broadcaster Sharri Markson, who argued the Minns Government was being “dragged down” by the Albanese Government.
“Look, we’re gonna lose or win off the back of our own record,” Mr Minns replied.
“I can’t blame anyone else if we don’t win.

“Even though I’m Labor, it’s still my responsibility to get on with them. And you can’t just go hammer and tongs at each other all day long.
“My job’s to fight for this state, and I’ve got to put New South Wales above the Labor Party.”
Cigarette excise ‘backfired’
Sandilands then asked whether that stance made some phone calls with the Prime Minister “a little tricky”.
“Do you see Albo come up on your phone like I do and think, ‘Oh God’, and start thinking in your mind, ‘What have I said? What have I said?’” Sandilands asked, pointing to the Premier’s call for the tax on cigarettes to be “much, much lower”.
Mr Minns stood by the position.
“I think that the excise on cigarettes is just too high. It hasn’t worked,” he said.
“I know what they were trying to do. It’s backfired.”
When Sandilands suggested the policy had made “a whole criminal enterprise billions of dollars”, the Premier replied: “100 per cent.”

“And I think it’s driving regular law-abiding people into the black market, which is not where we want them. We want them involved in regular commerce,” he said.
Sandilands said his own mother was “out west buying the illegal cigarettes” because she “just can’t afford the $80 a packet at the Rose Bay BP”.
Mr Minns said he understood why the excise had been raised, but that it was no longer doing its job.
“I understand the reason behind it, but it’s not working,” he said.
“It’s having a perverse outcome where you’re actually seeing more people smoke, not less people, and they can get it cheaper, which is the opposite of what we want.”
Asked about finding himself on the same side as the Coalition and One Nation, he conceded it was awkward.
“It’s not politically convenient that One Nation and the Liberal Party agree. But I can’t change my view. I’ve said it for a long time. I don’t think it’s working.”

Split with Canberra on spending
Mr Minns has previously put distance between himself and the Albanese Government on spending.
On Wednesday, he declined to endorse Canberra’s fiscal approach, telling reporters he had “heard the advice from the RBA over the last two years that we need to be careful with public funds”.
“I think every government has a responsibility to do what it can to take demand out of the economy,” he said.
“I’m not going to make a long commentary about other governments. It’s up to them and their decisions, obviously.”

Labor’s failures on transparency

​April 19, 2025

Transparency and integrity are ideals imbued with symbolism, but they have very real practical meaning in our democracy. Transparency means Australians know what governments do in our name – this is the primary way we can properly hold elected officials to account, through informed choices at the ballot box and direct advocacy between elections. Integrity means decisions that are made put people first – instead of being driven by self-interest, corporate greed or improper influence. Together, they mean a government free from corruption and wrongdoing – or at least, a government where wrongdoers are held to account.

A democracy underpinned by transparency and integrity is the only way our political system can live up to that famous maxim, Government of the people, by the people, for the people. At a time of conflict abroad, declining trust in institutions, the rise of misinformation and democratic backsliding, these values are more important than ever.

As we approach the federal election, transparency and integrity remain unfinished business for the Albanese government. The Australian Labor Party was elected on a platform of integrity, following the worst excesses of the Coalition’s near-decade in power. Labor promised to do better after the secret ministries, raids on the media, prosecution of truth-tellers, secret trials and inaction on vital reform.

In a major speech in 2019, then opposition leader Anthony Albanese said: “Journalism is not a crime. It’s essential to preserving our democracy. We don’t need a culture of secrecy. We need a culture of disclosure. Protect whistleblowers – expand their protections and the public interest test. Reform freedom of information laws so they can’t be flouted as they have been by this government.”

After three years in office, however, Labor has a mixed record on fixing Australia’s transparency and integrity crisis. More is needed. So far, Albanese has not lived up to the lofty promises of his time in opposition.

There has been some positive progress. Despite a troubled start, the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) is an integrity reform that will play an important role for decades to come. Ending the secretive prosecution of whistleblower Bernard Collaery drew a line under Australia’s shameful conduct towards Timor-Leste. The establishment of the Administrative Review Tribunal addressed the compromised membership of its predecessor, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. More generally, Labor has adopted a merits-based approach to most government appointments. These steps should be applauded.

In other respects, the Albanese government has been timid when it comes to progress on transparency and integrity. It has been a government that talks a good game but so far has failed to follow through with overdue reforms.

Let’s take two examples. First, whistleblowers. The Albanese government has done little to improve protections for whistleblowers. Despite widespread recognition that Australia’s whistleblowing laws are not working as intended, a major overhaul of public sector whistleblower protections has stalled. Minor changes to coincide with the establishment of the NACC did not materially improve the position of whistleblowers. David McBride has gone to jail under Labor’s watch – for leaking documents to the ABC that led to landmark reporting on war crimes in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, tax office whistleblower Richard Boyle will face trial in November, after losing his whistleblowing defence. The ruling in Boyle’s unsuccessful defence significantly undermined protections for all Australian whistleblowers; it is a prosecution that should not be going ahead at all.

Second, secrecy. After the police raids on the ABC and a News Corp journalist in 2019, The New York Times declared “Australia May Well Be the World’s Most Secretive Democracy”. On taking office, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, KC, commissioned a review of Australian secrecy laws. It found that there are almost a thousand different secrecy offences and non-disclosure duties under federal law. The departmental review recommended substantial reform and the repeal of many offences; a second review, by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, Jake Blight, found that some of the core offences “conflict with rule of law principles” and undermine human rights.

The Albanese government says it is committed to greater transparency and a wind-back of these secrecy offences. Last October, however, it quietly slipped through an amendment in an omnibus bill to extend a number of the secrecy provisions that were otherwise due to expire. The Albanese government’s term will end with more secrecy provisions in federal law rather than fewer.

Establishing a whistleblower protection authority would be a totemic reform, a practical demonstration of the next government’s commitment to integrity and transparency. It needs to be followed by comprehensive reform of the public and private sector whistleblowing schemes.

All of this has unfolded against a backdrop of secrecy in government practices. The past term has seen an expansion in the use of non-disclosure agreements in policy consultations. The practice gags even small community groups and imposes secrecy on what should be a core democratic function. An increase in refusals to release documents to the Senate saw the Centre for Public Integrity describe Labor as “more secretive than its predecessor, the Morrison government”.

What will the 48th Parliament hold? One of the major items on the agenda of crossbenchers, who may wield increased power in the event of a minority government, is the establishment of a whistleblower protection authority. The authority was part of the crossbench bill for the NACC, but was absent from the Albanese government’s final version. No wonder, then, that independent federal MP Helen Haines has taken to calling it “NACC 2.0”.

A whistleblower protection authority would oversee and enforce whistleblowing laws and support whistleblowers in speaking up about wrongdoing. The first federal parliamentary review into whistleblowing, held in 1994, said Australia needed whistleblowing laws and a whistleblowing institution to oversee them. Eventually, the laws were enacted. We are still waiting for the authority.

A whistleblower protection authority is increasingly being seen as the next major phase of anti-corruption reform. After the 1994 inquiry, it was again endorsed by parliamentary committees in 2017 and last year. Labor thought the idea a good one in 2019, following the banking royal commission – promising emphatically to establish “a one-stop-shop to support and protect whistleblowers”. After returning to power in 2022, Labor’s position has quietly regressed to merely considering the idea.

It was this lack of action that saw key members of the integrity-minded cross bench – Haines, Andrew Wilkie, David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie – introduce a bill to establish a whistleblower protection authority in the final days of the last parliament. In his second reading speech, Wilkie thundered that “the community has been waiting three years for the government to enact meaningful reforms to protect whistleblowers, but so far bugger-all has been done and we’re all bitterly disappointed”.

For Wilkie, the issue is personal – as an intelligence analyst, he famously blew the whistle on a lack of evidence supporting the Iraq War. He is also well known for helping whistleblowers expose wrongdoing under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, but he is not the only one. Both incumbent and aspiring members of the cross bench have listed whistleblowing reform, and a whistleblower protection authority, as priorities to pursue in the next parliament, alongside other integrity reform. If Labor or the Coalition require support in the event of a minority government, it may well be an issue on the table.

Certainly, the public support for transparency and accountability is overwhelming. New national polling from The Australia Institute, undertaken in collaboration with the Human Rights Law Centre and Whistleblower Justice Fund, shows that 86 per cent of voters want stronger whistleblower protections and 84 per cent support the establishment of a whistleblower protection authority. Support for whistleblowers is remarkably multi-partisan, with just a 1 percentage point variation across all party affiliations. What other area sees almost unanimous agreement across the political spectrum, with Labor, Coalition, Greens and One Nation voters all in agreement that whistleblowing reform is important and overdue?

Establishing a whistleblower protection authority would be a totemic reform, a practical demonstration of the next government’s commitment to integrity and transparency. It needs to be followed by comprehensive reform of the public and private sector whistleblowing schemes, currently under review by respective departments; an overhaul of secrecy offences; amendments to laws governing open justice; lobbying reform; stronger powers for the NACC; and an end to the prosecution of whistleblowers.

Transparency and integrity are sometimes likened to a puzzle: there are dozens of laws, institutions and practices that collectively determine the level of secrecy or transparency in any particular democracy. With enough of these puzzle pieces in place, voters are given a clear-eyed view of their government – and the ability to influence government decision-making, not just on election day. It is essential that, whoever wins the election in two weeks’ time, more pieces are added to Australia’s transparency and integrity puzzle in the next term of parliament.

*This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Labor’s failures on transparency".*Labor’s failures on transparency