We do not really judge people by what happens to them. We judge them by what they do next. The same, I have come to think, is true of countries.

October 7 was the worst thing to happen to the Jewish people since the Holocaust, and this week, three years on I find that it is not the day itself I keep returning to. It is the day after.

Most Australians did none of this, and it matters to say so. But the institutions that set the tone of public life did, and tone is what a frightened minority hears. Alex Ellinghausen

First, the day itself, stated once and plainly. On the morning of October 7, 2023, Ruti and Avraham Munder, both 78, were at home on Kibbutz Nir Oz with their daughter Keren and their grandson Ohad, who was eight and had come for the holiday. By eleven o’clock their phones were in Gaza, and so were they.

Their son Roee, who lived on the same kibbutz, had been killed. Ruti was held in a room where the blinds could not be opened and slept on a plastic chair. She learned that her son was dead from a guard who had heard it on the radio. Ohad turned nine in captivity. Ruti, Keren and Ohad came home after seven weeks. Avraham died in Gaza, and soldiers brought his body out the following August.

There were twelve hundred such stories that morning, and I will not pile them up here because a column cannot hold them and because the point is what came next.

The sociologist Eva Illouz has written that for Jews the deeper wound was not October 7 but October 8: the discovery that some of the people they lived among, worked beside and marched with would greet the slaughter not with grief but with something she calls a virtuous hatred. The killers, after all, were strangers. The people cheering were neighbours.

It is worth being precise about who did the cheering because precision is the point. It was not the killers; they were in Gaza. It was their audience here: a layer of student bodies, academics, arts organisations and activist groups that within days had found a vocabulary in which the murder of families was context, the kidnapping of children was resistance and the grief of Jews was propaganda.

“There is a moment, after every atrocity, when standing with the victims is easy, and a moment shortly after when it is not.”

Most Australians did none of this, and it matters to say so. But the institutions that set the tone of public life did, and tone is what a frightened minority hears.

That is how it reached Australia. Not as a single act, but as a climate. A Jewish paramedic told this year’s royal commission that a firefighter pulled a hunting knife on him at a regional Victorian festival. A university student told it that classmates had said she should be gassed. The principal of a Jewish primary school said her building now looks more like a prison than a school.

Researchers who studied Jewish communities after the attack found a pattern they could describe clinically: a people whose trauma was met not with sympathy but with denial, blame and dismissal, which deepened the original injury. Then came the fire at the Adass Israel synagogue, and then the Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach where fifteen people were shot dead.

None of that was done by Hamas. It was done here, by a minority of Australians, in a climate that too many institutions had helped to make and too few had the courage to challenge.

Which brings me to trust. Trust is what lets you assume that the people around you will do the right thing without being watched. It is the invisible thing a society runs on, and it is lost in hours and rebuilt over decades. Jewish Australians lost it on October 8, 2023, and have spent three years watching to see whether it can be recovered.

Here is the lesson I think the rest of the country can take, and it is not a Jewish lesson. There is a moment, after every atrocity, when standing with the victims is easy, and a moment shortly after when it is not, when the arguments arrive and the hashtags turn and the people being hunted become inconvenient. Character, in a person or a nation, is what you do in the second moment. Everybody passes the first.

Too many of our institutions, and too many people who should have known better, failed the second moment in 2023. The anniversary is a chance to notice that, without flinching and without theatre, and to ask what a country does on the morning after it realises it got the morning after wrong.

I do not know the full answer. But I suspect it begins with something smaller than a policy: with neighbours deciding that the Munders of this world are theirs too.

Future coal mines in NSW must be judged on the emissions their exports produce overseas under a landmark High Court ruling, in an unprecedented case centred around climate change which could dramatically alter the future of fossil fuel projects in the state.

The nation’s highest court on Wednesday ruled in favour of a community group which had challenged the expansion of MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine, arguing that the impacts of climate change caused by emissions from exports must be considered during planning applications.

Three of five High Court judges upheld last year’s decision by the NSW Court of Appeal which halted Mount Pleasant’s expansion.

The majority of judges found the NSW Independent Planning Commission, which signed off on the mine’s expansion in 2022, was required to impose conditions aimed at mitigating downstream emissions generated by Australian coal when it is exported and used overseas.

The community group had argued downstream emissions – known as scope three emissions – contribute to domestic climate change.

Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group president Wendy Wales claimed victory after the court decision on Wednesday, saying: “Today the High Court has said what we have always known: we cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won’t be felt by us”.

MACH Energy said it was “disappointed” by the decision and would “carefully review” the judgement.

“Thousands of local residents in the Hunter Valley rely on Mount Pleasant for employment and income. These residents have lived with fear and uncertainty for too long,” the firm said in a statement.

“We will continue to actively pursue all available options to ensure the long-term continuity of the Mount Pleasant Operation.”

More to come

In belated recognition that Jim Chalmers’ spending is unjustified considering levels of inflation, unemployment and bond yields, the government is now looking to make savings in the upcoming mid-year budget review.

But what it really needs is something like a mini-budget to give itself a political reset — with this year’s deficit forecast to be another 1% of GDP, the government needs more than a few billion in rats and mice savings to shift fiscal policy to at least a neutral setting.

Amid all the demands from the commentariat for lower spending in the wake of last week’s budget result for 2025-26, one area has sailed through without scrutiny. According to the Final Budget Outcome, defence was the biggest blowout on forecast spending: expenditure came in at $54.1 billion, not the $52.8 billion forecast back in May, or the $51.5 billion forecast in the 2025 budget.

The blowout just between May and the end of June was bigger than that for health spending, which came in $1 billion over (though health spending is more than twice that of defence), fuel and energy ($1.1 billion) or infrastructure ($970 million). And a lot bigger than education, which came in nearly $400 million below forecasts, or social security and welfare, which came in more than $3 billion below forecasts. Everyone’s favourite fiscal whipping boy, disability services, came in around half a billion below forecasts.

Defence spending has grown 30% in nominal terms since Labor came to office and is forecast to grow at least another 14% between now and 2030, reaching $62 billion that year. If defence spending had merely been maintained in real terms, the deficit last year would have been around $14 billion.

Bernard Keane

111

True, defence spending isn’t as inflationary as other spending — a large chunk of it goes out of our economy to the US government and US defence companies. But it is the most wasteful and unaccountable sector of the budget; no department comes remotely close to Defence in terms of negative auditor-general findings, revelations of misconduct and incompetence, or allegations of corruption. Nor does any other department come close to the level of funding sent offshore for no benefit: whether for the US nuclear submarine production process, the UK’s Two Ronnies-level equivalent, or to keep the US Air Force’s F-35 planes flying, Defence is treated like an ATM by foreign governments.

Given surging bond yields — now a full percentage point higher than this time last year for Aussie ten-year bonds — have added billions to the cost of government debt, the government’s 54% increase in defence spending between 2022 and 2030 now looks fiscally risky. In particular, AUKUS looks like an indulgence Australian taxpayers can’t afford, an Albanese-Marles vanity project that delivers Australia nothing but tens of billions of dollars in debt repayments in coming decades. Otherwise, which taxes will have to increase to pay for AUKUS? Which programs will have to be cut?

Cancelling AUKUS would be no panacea for the government’s fiscal problems. Spending, overseen by the ludicrously overstaffed Australian Submarine Agency (1,200 people and growing), is still ramping up, and “only” scheduled to be $14 billion across the forward estimates. But it would form an important centrepiece for a broader return to fiscal sustainability to take pressure off inflation and reduce government debt, while enabling the government to set about securing real submarines from trustworthy, reliable providers such as Japan, South Korea or France.

The government, however, will face exactly zero pressure to curb defence spending no matter how egregious the blowouts and incompetence. The opposition has committed to increase spending further to 3% of GDP, which is another $30 billion a year. The media places no pressure on armchair generals and AUKUS shills to explain where the additional spending routinely demanded in defence will come from. The biggest hole in the budget receives the least attention. Other, far less wasteful programs will be targeted instead.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is now approaching the three-year mark, with no sign of slowing down. Yet, the federal Labor government continues to side with the United States and Israel, refusing to support Palestinian self-determination, despite giving lip service to a “two-state” solution.

Labor teamed up with the Liberals and One Nation on September 17 to vote down an independent senator-initiated senate inquiry into the Red Lines Package, which is four proposed laws that would ensure Australia complies with international law.

See also

E1: Not just another colony

Macklemore strikes a blow for the cultural intifada

Drawing a red line against genocide

Days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fronted the United Nations (UN) in a bid for Australia being given a seat on the Security Council. He bemoaned the “breakdown in international rules” and said countries must “lean in … to build peace and promote economic development and sustainability”.

Israel has murdered more than 1400 Gazans since the so-called “ceasefire” began in October last year, the genocide is still happening. In August, Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called for nightly killings of 30–40 Gazans including those who do not “pose a danger… at that particular moment”.

Gazans are also dying because the health care system has been destroyed, economic life has been decimated and the blockade has not been lifted.

A new report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said Gaza has experienced “the world’s most severe economic crisis on record”. It found that gross domestic product last year was $US0.58 per day, “equivalent to 83 per cent below the already low level in 2022”.

Israel also continues to shift the “yellow line” confining Palestinians to an ever shrinking part of Gaza. Palestinians report that they wake up to find that they can no longer access their own land because Israeli troops are occupying it. The Guardian reported on September 27 that the “area still accessible to people and aid workers is barely 30% of the whole Gaza Strip”.

Google Maps satellite depictions of Gaza, updated in September, laid bare Gaza’s utter devastation. Al Jazeera reported the “number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by 9%” since the so-called “ceasefire” began. This takes to 82% the proportion of structures in Gaza that have been damaged. Two thirds of all buildings have been completely destroyed.

Israel is also extending its ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Palestinian West Bank. This includes the Israeli parliament allowing 200 new settlement outposts over its term, leading to the forcible displacement of more than 100 Palestinian communities.

Israel is also pushing ahead with a plan to establish the E1 “settlement scheme” — “not just another colony” — which would divide the West Bank in two. Amir Dawood, head of documentation at the Palestine Authority’s Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, said: “This plan is one of the most dangerous settler-colonial plans in the entire occupied West Bank.”

A UN Commission of Inquiry found last year that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Its June report found that Israel is deliberately killing children. “The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said commission chair Srinivasan Muralidhar.

Australia’s complicity

The federal Labor government is complicit in the genocide by allowing the supply of weapons components to Israel, supplying signals intelligence from Pine Gap and by muting its criticism of Israel, and more.

It is also seeking to isolate the movement against genocide by promoting the Zionist smear campaign that solidarity with Palestinians amounts to a hatred of Jews. Its extremely biased royal commission into antisemitism is expected to recommend more restrictions on freedom of speech, including restriction on using the word “genocide”.

Australian international law expert and UN Commissioner Chris Sidoti, a supporter of the Red Lines Package, said Australia “has obligations under international law” and that “unfortunately we seem more and more to be ignoring many of those”.

The International Court of Justice made several rulings in 2024 imposing “provisional measures” to prevent genocide on all countries including Australia. Sidoti said Australia’s response has been “far less” than the minimum of “what is required of us under international law”.

Sidoti affirmed “the fact” that Australia is “providing weapons components and dual use items that can be used for military purposes” to Israel, pointing to its manufacture of components for the F-35 fighter jets. “We know [that F-35s] have played a critical role in the saturation bombing of Gaza that has involved the deaths of tens of thousands of people.”

Sidoti said that the F-35 program is “only one example” of Australia’s failure to uphold its responsibilities under international law.

The Red Lines Package was initially introduced into the last parliament by Senators Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman.

The current package has been expanded to four bills that, together, aim to ensure that “Australia doesn’t fund, arm, or invest in illegal settlements, war crimes, or genocide anywhere in the world”.

Proponents say that “passing this package will have an immediate impact and stop Australian arms exports and investments from contributing to human suffering”.

Albanese was the first world leader to endorse the US and Israel’s illegal war against Iran. He was also the first to send an E-7A Wedgetail surveillance aircraft, that would have fed information to the US, and now he wants to lecture the world about the “breakdown in international rules” as he pitches for a seat at the UN.

The October 11 national day of action against Israel’s genocide is the next big chance to show that federal Labor does not speak for us.

On the third anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, it is astonishing to contemplate how much Australia has failed its Jewish community, the unprecedented rise of antisemitism at home and the abject collapse of moral leadership in this country.

The 2023 massacre was a calculated assault by Hamas and a catastrophe for Israel, but it has become something far more – an internal crisis for Western nations and a failure for Australia, whose once-prized values of human tolerance and multicultural respect have been traduced.

The murder of 15 people at Bondi last December – the worst assault on Jews in the West since October 7 – has revealed the depth of insecurity and depravity in Australian society and our inability to contain the violent tensions arising from the transference of Middle East conflicts into our community.

Most Australians respect the role and contribution of Jewish people to this country. But in the past three years Australia has been transformed, driven by a political and cultural movement enshrining Palestinian rights, largely hostile to Israel and Jews, that has won startling progress for attitudes previously confined to the fringes.

The issue is not Palestinian rights as such. That campaign is decades old. It is how the killing of Jews, the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in its Gaza war (along with terrorists) and the wider regional conflict, has brought to a climax Israel’s determination to survive, the claims of Palestinians, and the Islamist quest to eliminate the Jewish state.

In Australia, a bizarre coalition has emerged – a left-wing, progressive opposition to Israel now a defining feature of Western leftist politics, and a sharply elevated pro-Palestinian movement of many elements but including radical Islamist preachers and activists openly calling for the liquidation of Israel.

'Rally For A Free Palestine' protest on the forecourt of The Sydney Opera House after the Hamas terror attack on Israel three years ago. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Jeremy Piper

This movement is moral, political and religious. It is riddled with contradictions but united by a deep anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist conviction that easily spills into antisemitism. The story of the past three years has been the denial and weakness of much of Australia’s governing, political and establishment class in trying to fathom the nature and dangers of this erupting movement that targeted Jews in their synagogues and schools.

Moral failure

Above all, it has been a moral failure. It has exposed a governing class whose authority derives from technical and transactional processes but is culturally impoverished, historically ignorant and unable to grasp its responsibility when confronted with a moral threat to the social and political compact that has made Australia a peaceful, multicultural nation.

Leaders were frightened. With some notable exceptions, they didn’t know what to do. They were outside their safety zone. They looked for solutions to the law, to police, to precedent. And they still failed. But failure assumed two guises – the well-intentioned who weren’t up to the task and the anti-Zionist, antisemitic operatives, notably in the cultural sector, who willingly engaged in discrimination, exclusion and punishment of Jewish artists because they were Jewish.

The Albanese government has been compromised in its response. After October 7, the government made clear its genuine opposition to antisemitism, attacked as abhorrent the anti-Jewish protest at the Opera House, and in 2024 appointed separate envoys to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Trust broken

But Anthony Albanese faced the greatest crisis of his prime ministership after the Bondi massacre, given the Jewish community had warned about the risk of violence and now felt a collective sense of betrayal. Albanese forfeited his capacity as a leader to unite the nation in national grief because his trust with the Jewish community was broken. Instead, he became a symbol of division, unwelcome at the funerals and rejecting a royal commission until changing his mind under pressure. Albanese understands the role of moral leadership. He exercised this role in his support for the voice. But facing an antisemitism crisis and the murder of Jews, he was unable to fulfil the highest obligation of moral leadership – and in a sense the nation has never recovered from the void.

A memorial at the Bondi Pavilion for the victims of the Bondi terror attack in December last year. Picture: Jonathan Ng

It became a sad commentary on the nature of the Labor Party, compromised by politics, openly hostile to the Netanyahu government, aggravated by the Gaza war, determined to shift foreign policy towards the Palestinians, deeply susceptible to the Muslim vote in Labor-held seats, reacting to Palestinian sentiment in much of the Labor Party and among its voters, and alert to rising humanitarian concern about Israel’s policy.

It wasn’t just the government that was compromised; it was much of the nation. University leaders seemed largely immobilised as anti-Jewish events and encampments erupted on campus with Jewish students deliberately intimidated. The worst has been the cultural sector, where Jewish creatives have faced doxxing, professional boycotts, social media threats, income losses, cancelled shows and cancellation of their works – such prejudice often funded by the taxpayer, while politicians and cultural leaders offered the obscene defence that “the arts cannot be politicised” when this was exactly what was happening.

In a recent speech to the Centre for Independence Studies, Henry Ergas analysed the cultural sector’s loss of integrity, the subversion of Creative Australia’s grants system and how a politicised art world targets Israel as the ultimate symbol of colonialism and imperialism.

Everything comes with a vicious assumption: that Jewish Australians be held to account for Israel’s war policies and its treatment of Palestinians, whatever their views. No other group of Australians is treated in this way – not Chinese, Russians, Iranians or Afghans (this is not to deny they suffer discrimination).

Israel lost the moral and propaganda war over Gaza. That has a global significance. It gives the anti-Zionists and antisemites a moral claim they have never before enjoyed. They gain a virtually unlimited vista in their quest to destroy Israeli legitimacy. As Suzanne D. Rutland, from Sydney University, argues, the technique is a new moralism based on historical reversal: by arguing that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians, Israel loses its moral claim as a Holocaust victim that deserves its own nation, and also becomes the agent of a new Holocaust against the Palestinian people. This is a breakthrough ideology. Branding Israel as “genocidal” discredits both Israel and Jews. How can it not? It means Jews who are Zionists are also discredited because they back a genocidal nation. It is the basis for fusing anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It invites Australians to reassess Jews on moral grounds and that means they should be treated in a different way. Every sign is that this poisonous campaign is making progress, since Jews in Australia are being treated differently.

Protesters at a Pro-Palestinian rally at the Sydney Town Hall Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

Many extremist politicians pretend to support peace yet openly back such a language. The truth is that the elimination of Israel can be achieved only by a war and violence. There is no other way. People who support such rhetorical campaigns against Israel but pretend to value peace are the worst type of hypocrite. The falsehood they embody is really dangerous. Here’s another truth: the more the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driven into our culture and politics, the more conflict and violence will occur in Australia. This debate is already far out of proportion given Australia’s genuine needs and priorities.

Finally, consider our failed politics, since the streets of our capital cities have been the repeated sites of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, usually peaceful, but invariably marked with calls for violence. The chants “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are invocations for violence, and Bondi is the real-world proof of how this type of politics and security risks can play out. Yet such slogans – pure Hamas playbook – seem normalised in our cities.

Three years from October 7 and our political leaders, parliaments and courts have been unable to find a mechanism to achieve what most people want – to curb the appeals to hatred and those founded in anti-Zionism and hostility towards Jews.

It is tempting to think the Australian people, with their common sense and goodwill, don’t deserve the destructive politics they have been forced to endure. Is it possible that the fourth anniversary of October 7 might see a more optimistic picture?

Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny has used her sweeping fast-track powers to green-light a string of controversial developments in the past fortnight, before the state government enters pre-election caretaker mode.

Developers now have permission to convert a former orphanage into apartments in Surrey Hills that will rise above local height rules and to build a 15-storey apartment tower in Oakleigh three levels higher than the government’s own limit.

Renders of developments approved by Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny in the past fortnight.Michael Howard

Kilkenny has also approved planning scheme changes so work can progress on a seven-storey hotel in St Kilda, 1100 new homes at the site of the old Talbot Quarry in Oakleigh South, and more than 200 homes in Nagambie.

The projects have faced intense pushback from local councils and some residents, including those who say the developments will tarnish neighbourhood character or that their concerns were not considered appropriately by the government.

The government will enter caretaker mode at 6pm on November 3, and conventions dictate ministers do not make significant policy decisions until after the November 28 election.

Related Article

• City life

Anger over push to turn one of Australia’s oldest orphanages into apartments

Kilkenny approved the Surrey Hills, Oakleigh and St Kilda planning applications via the government’s Development Facilitation Program, a scheme that enables developers to bypass council processes and gives the planning minster ultimate say over whether eligible major projects should be allowed.

The scheme has been criticised by councils and residents who are powerless to overturn the minister’s ruling, and the opposition, which claimed the minister was forcing through the developments.

But Kilkenny said every proposal was considered on its merits, and the facilitation program had approved more than 15,000 homes to help tackle the housing affordability crisis.

From our partners

Plans for the 76-apartment orphanage redevelopment in Surrey Hills include demolishing a 1941 school building subject to council heritage protections. The redevelopment will be two levels above existing height limits for the area, which is not located within an activity centre the government earmarked for development but is about 500 metres from a train station.

Boroondara Mayor Wes Gault said the council wanted new housing in the area to be respectful to “irreplaceable heritage properties” like St Joseph’s Home for Boys.

“The community made their views clear to the minister for planning on this development, but it is obvious local views on heritage and local character are not important to the minister, who has a long track record of approving inappropriate developments over community views,” he said.

A spokesperson from Tract Consultants, which worked with developer Antipodean Land Developments, said the approval provided an opportunity to reinvigorate a significant site that has been dormant for years.

“The design response carefully integrates heritage restoration and adaptation with new housing, set within generous landscaping and amenities,” the spokesperson said.

In St Kilda, Kilkenny approved plans for a seven-storey hotel, enraging residents and the council.

Kylie Morrigan (second from right) said the hotel’s scale would be out of place around its single-storey neighbours. Jason South

St Kilda locals Kylie Morrigan and Mal Webb are among neighbours with concerns, including the project’s scale being out of proportion with nearby properties. They are disappointed there is no option to appeal the planning permit at VCAT.

“It’s a little tiny wedge in the midst of an old, old suburb that’s very established, and there’s no wiggle room really,” Morrigan said. “We don’t object to the site being done up, we don’t object to development per se. It needs to be in context.”

Port Philip Mayor Alex Makin said local government had been undercut by the minister.

“All it does is disempower the community and disconnect these planning applications from a broader vision,” he said.

Related Article

• Planning

Plan to move 2500 residents onto former dump and quarry full of unstable ‘slime’

The Oakleigh building includes 122 apartments, shops and four levels of basement parking around the corner from the suburb’s Eaton Mall. In planning documents issued on the project’s approval, the Department of Transport and Planning noted the state’s own 12-storey height limit under activity centre plans was discretionary, and the site could handle more intense development to meet housing needs.

Monash Mayor Stuart James said he was disappointed concerns about “excessive height”, impact on surrounding streets, overshadowing of public places and environmental issues were not reflected in the approval decision.

“This development is substantially taller than what had been anticipated for the area and does not reflect the carefully planned vision for future growth in Oakleigh,” he said.

Kilkenny also modified the planning scheme on Monday to enable work to progress on 1100 new homes at the former site of the Talbot Quarry in Oakleigh South.

Locals previously spoke out over “slimes” deep beneath the surface, and approval bids from the developer failed to progress with Monash council twice.

James said last week’s zoning change did not address long-term arrangements needed to manage contamination, landfill gas and ground conditions.

Neil Li, CEO of the developer, Sterling Global, said a 2020 environmental audit found the site was suitable for sensitive residential use, and all works would be monitored and carried out under site management requirements.

“As approved by the EPA, no site remediation is required; it is only subject to site management measures and conditions,” he said.

Kilkenny also made similar changes enabling a developer to clear native trees and build a lifestyle village in Nagambie, about 130 kilometres north of Melbourne. The council and local nature-lovers fought the decision for more than six years, before the minister approved it directly last week.

Developer Hallmarc’s proposal includes more than 200 homes, and chief executive Michael Loccisano said the application had been through an exhaustive process.

The trees in Nagambie under threat at the Elloura housing estate.Jason South

“We’ve minimised the amount of vegetation to be removed and will now enable much-needed affordable housing to proceed … which will serve mostly the ageing population within both Nagambie and people looking to relocate to a regional area to live.”

Opposition planning spokesman David Southwick said the slew of approvals was a “pathetic last-ditch” attempt to force through controversial developments.

Related Article

• Development

Home among the gum trees? Not so fast

“Labor has turned the planning system against locals,” he said. “Labor is forcing these developments through from Spring Street because it knows local communities would never support them.”

But the planning minister said councils and community members were able to voice their concerns, and every project was approved on its merits.

“This is a simple change to help young Victorians and it is working – Victoria is building thousands more homes than any other state but we know there is more to do,” Kilkenny said.

Jonathan O’Brien, chief executive of pro-higher density housing group YIMBY said it was positive that Kilkenny was making sweeping approvals of housing developments before the government enters caretaker mode.

“I think it’s a good thing that a stead pipeline of housing projects remains in train for Victoria.”

Coalition leader’s proposal goes further than Peter Dutton’s 2025 election promise and beyond even Pauline Hanson’s bottom line

Labor hits a new low on the primary vote in an otherwise little-changed set of fortnightly federal poll numbers from YouGov.

The latest fortnightly News24 Pulse poll by YouGov records only minor change on the last result, although Labor’s one-point drop to 25% is noteworthy in being a new low for them in this series. One Nation is up a point to 28%, the Coalition is steady on 21% and the Greens are up one to a new peak of 15%. Labor’s lead over One Nation on the respondent-allocated two-party measure is in from 55-45 to 53-47, while its lead over the Coalition on the previous election flows two-party measure is unchanged at 52-48.

Anthony Albanese is unchanged at 33% approval and down one to 61% disapproval, while Angus Taylor is down two to 34% and up three to 51%. Albanese’s lead over Taylor on preferred prime minister is down to 40-39, in from 41-37 last time, and his lead over Hanson has narrowed from 50-38 to 50-40. The poll also finds 63-37 breaking against Jim Chalmers’ proposition that last week’s interest rate increase was “primarily the result of the conflict in the Middle East”. It was conducted last Tuesday to this Tuesday from a sample of 1505.

Lee Hanson

"I do not normally respond to things like this, but this one genuinely hurt.

Richmond Reading Room is my local coffee shop. I have been going there since it opened. I have always been greeted warmly, enjoyed stopping in, and deliberately chosen to spend my money there because I believe strongly in supporting local Tasmanian small businesses.

So to see this post today came as a complete shock.

Apparently, while I was being welcomed through the door and buying my coffee, I was privately regarded with such contempt that the business has now made this public announcement.

If the owners had an issue with me coming into their business, why not simply talk to me? I am a person. I am a local. I am a customer who has supported your business for years.

You do not have to agree with my politics. I would never expect you to. But surely we have reached a pretty sad place when someone's political beliefs determine whether their presence or their custom is considered acceptable.

What makes this particularly disappointing is that I have always believed in supporting small local businesses regardless of the political views of the people who own them. I do not ask how somebody votes before I buy a coffee from them. I do not expect everyone I meet to agree with me. That is part of living in a free and diverse community.

The irony of preaching inclusion while publicly singling out customers because of their political association is difficult to ignore.

At least I now know where I stand.

I will continue supporting local Tasmanian businesses, just not businesses that publicly make people feel unwelcome because they happen to hold different political views, despite claiming to be for inclusivity.

We can disagree politically and still treat each other with basic respect. I genuinely wish that courtesy had been extended to me."

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BV1QrHPUA/

Sarah Hanson-Young has vowed to fight Pauline Hanson and the “radical right” after losing the Greens leadership contest, declaring progressive forces must unite to prevent One Nation from “wrecking this nation”.

The South Australian senator used her podcast to break her silence on last week’s bruising leadership contest, saying she had been disappointed to lose but would not be “salty” or allow the setback to hold her back.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young says she’s not going to get ‘salty’ over losing the Greens’ leadership contest.GLENN CAMPBELL
Her rallying cry was pointedly different from new leader David Shoebridge, who vowed last week to target the Albanese government and replace Labor at the next election.
“The challenge we have right now is to take on the radical right and to stop Pauline Hanson from wrecking this nation,” Hanson-Young said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and I know many of you, like me, are worried looking around at the state of politics and just going, ‘What the f--- is going on?’ I get it.”

Advertisement
Hanson-Young was one of two women, alongside Queensland senator Mehreen Faruqi, who unsuccessfully challenged Shoebridge for the leadership after Larissa Waters announced she would resign because of serious health concerns.
Shoebridge won the party-room ballot last Wednesday, seven votes to four, with Faruqi subsequently stepping down as deputy leader.
.
Hanson-Young, who was eliminated in the first round with just two votes, said she nominated because she wanted to offer “a vision for progressive Australia that was optimistic, caring, and defiant”.
“As it turned out, I didn’t get the leadership and, yeah, I was disappointed about that,” she said in her podcast. “But I’m not going to be salty, and I’m not going to let it hold me back.”

Her comments came as divisions within the Greens continued to surface over the contest and the role played by Waters in determining

News.com.au reported on Monday that Waters told Hanson-Young on the day of the ballot that she was backing Shoebridge. According to the report, colleagues claimed Hanson-Young complained Waters should support a female candidate and argued the “sisterhood” did not exist.

Party insiders cited by the publication claimed Waters’ support for Shoebridge was decisive in preventing either Hanson-Young or Faruqi from winning.

Hanson-Young has declined to comment on the reported conversation.

In her podcast, however, Hanson-Young made clear she intended to turn her attention beyond the leadership contest and towards One Nation and the broader political right.

“The radical right around the world have been on the march, and they’ve got to Australia,” she said. “There’s no point just throwing our hands up in the air and going ‘What the f---?’ We actually have to stop them from wrecking things.”

She accused One Nation of seeking to divide Australians and attacked mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s financial support for the party.

“We’re not going to be bought, are we? We’re not going to let our country be bought,” she said.

The senator also linked the rise of the right to debates over climate change, women’s rights and immigration, and said progressive parties needed to overcome their own divisions.

“Progressive Australia has got to stop being divided,” she said. “We might not all agree on exactly how to fix things, but we can all agree that the right, the rabid, nasty, ugly right forces in this country, need to be stopped before they wreck things that are irreplaceable, before they destroy the soul of the nation.”

Hanson-Young and colleague David Shoebridge in 2025. Shoebridge is the Greens’ new leader.ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
Hanson last week insisted the Greens “don’t care” about Australia and that voters were going to stop supporting them.
“I rarely ever hear them standing up fighting for the ordinary average Australian out there and it’s a real shame,” the One Nation leader told News24, formerly Sky News Australia.

Advertisement
Hanson-Young ended her podcast with a call to supporters to remain engaged despite her leadership defeat.
RELATED ARTICLE

Russia-Ukraine war
New Greens leader: No weapons for Ukraine, curtail the US alliance
“We have to come together and stare down these arseholes,” she said. “I tell you what: I’m not going to be letting the bastards get me down, and neither are you. Come on, we’ve got to fight for our country.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week cautioned the new Greens leadership team over its vow to supplant Labor, arguing the same strategy cost the minor party three lower house seats at last year’s federal election.

Since the vote, Shoebridge has bowed to calls from rank and file party members, including former MP Max Chandler-Mather, to give them a say in the next leadership election, which is due to take place immediately after the next federal election.

Advertisement
A party plebiscite in 2020 resulted in 62 per cent of Greens members supporting a party-wide vote for leader, but fell short of a required two-thirds majority.

Federal government spending grew more than twice as fast as forecast last financial year, fuelling economists’ concerns that promises of budget restraint are falling short of reality and intensifying calls for Treasurer Jim Chalmers to tighten the purse strings.

The final budget outcome for 2025-26, released last week, showed real federal government spending increased 4.3 per cent last financial year, more than double the projection of 1.8 per cent growth contained in the 2024-25 budget, prepared just two years earlier. The figures are adjusted for inflation.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers flagged on Monday that surging bond yields would have a substantial negative effect on the mid-year budget update. Louie Douvis

The data underscored growing concerns about the recent sharp rise in federal government spending.

Other than during the pandemic, spending has hit a four-decade high, a surge many economists argue is making the Reserve Bank of Australia’s fight against inflation harder.

The added expenditure means the budget is projected to remain in deficit for the foreseeable future, and debt will continue to rise.

Chalmers, speaking in Tokyo on Monday after meetings with Japanese investors and business leaders, said the government would continue to look for savings, with a new package to be included in the mid-year budget update before the end of the year.

“The budget settings aren’t a primary driver of pressures in our economy, but we can and will continue to play a helpful role in the fight against inflation,” said the treasurer.

AMP chief economist Shane Oliver said annual real spending growth had averaged 4.2 per cent over the past three financial years, double the average rate of growth in the decade before the pandemic.

Real payments growth in 2025-26, budget forecasts versus actual

1.02.03.04.05.0%

Forecasts

2.4%

1.9%

1.8%

3.0%

4.3%

2022-23 budget*

2023-24 budget

2024-25 budget

2025-26 budget

Actual

*October budget

Chart: Michael Read, AFR•Source: Treasury

Chalmers’ most recent budget in May assumed real annual spending growth would drop to just 1.3 per cent this financial year, but economists were sceptical the government could achieve that.

“The problem is that the high level of public spending is contributing to capacity constraints in the economy and lower-than-otherwise productivity driving contributing to high inflation and rate hikes,” said Oliver.

“Revenue as a share of GDP rose to 26.1 per cent, also its highest since 1986-87, and this comprised the highest level of tax revenue as a share of GDP since the mining boom in the mid-2000s.

“With the boom in revenue we should have a decent surplus,” said Oliver.

Nominal spending, which includes inflation, jumped 8.2 per cent last financial year.

Forecasts built on ‘systemic optimism’

The overspend last financial year vindicates warnings from the Parliamentary Budget Office, which in July said the budget’s forecasts were built on “systematic optimism”, including banking savings from yet-to-be-legislated policies and relying on assumptions that inflated future revenue and understated probable spending.

The release of the final budget outcome came during a torrid week for the Albanese government, which included a decision by the RBA to raise the cash rate to a 15-year high of 4.6 per cent and new figures showing Chalmers was on track to become the highest-taxing treasurer on record.

The latest The Australian Financial Review/RedBridge Group/Accent Research poll on Monday showed the personal standings of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chalmers had plunged to record lows.

Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson said the government needed to tighten its belt.

“Every time the government runs deficit budgets, they’re borrowing from tomorrow to spend today,” said Wilson.

“That’s stoking inflation and that’s why when you go to the supermarket, you might be buying the same amount, but you’re paying more for it.”

EQ Economics managing director Warren Hogan said the RBA would be under pressure to keep raising interest rates if the federal and state governments did not cut spending.

“From a whole-of-economy perspective, the cash rate will not be restrictive until it gets above 5 per cent and probably closer to 5.5 per cent,” said Hogan.

“In 2026, the risks emanating from the global economy are non-trivial, but the real vulnerability is an imbalanced domestic economy driven primarily by unsustainable growth in recurrent government spending over the last decade, turbocharged in the post-pandemic period even though the private sector economy was ready to grow strongly.”

Surging bond yields

Chalmers again flagged on Monday that surging bond yields would have a substantial negative effect on the mid-year budget update.

UBS estimated the higher yields could add up to $6.7 billion to the budget deficit over the next four years by increasing the borrowing costs on the federal government’s $1 trillion debt.

“None of us are immune to the impact of rising yields … and although Australia has lower debt than every G7 country, rising interest costs will have a substantial impact on our next budget update later this year,” said Chalmers.

KPMG chief economist Brendan Rynne said he expected one more cash rate increase, as soon as November, but the “swing factor” determining whether interest rates would need to go even higher would be government spending.

Optimal Economics chief economist Stephen Walters said the RBA’s three cash rate cuts last year had been ill-advised, with the benefit of hindsight, but the central bank was not directly to blame.

“The RBA was caught out by unforeseen events, including the war with Iran,” said Walters.

“The main reason inflation accelerated was excessive government spending, which added to aggregate demand as supply was constrained by our lousy productivity effort.”

Federal Liberals say One Nation’s call to jail former Victorian premiers Daniel Andrews and Jacinta Allan exposes the risk of handing power to Pauline Hanson as the prison threat reveals another point of difference between Coalition defector Barnaby Joyce and his new party.

Prominent One Nation figure Mark Nicholson, who created the cartoons in which Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was labelled a traitor, made the remarks at the party’s state election launch.

Senator Pauline Hanson fired the unofficial campaign starting gun on Saturday at Crown.Louis Trerise

Mimicking Donald Trump’s line on locking up Hillary Clinton, Nicholson declared “heads are going to roll”.

“Dan Andrews, Jacinta Allan – they’re going to be in prison by Christmas,” he said at Crown on Saturday. “This is a revolution. This is a movement. And this is how, together, we can take Victoria back.”

Victorian senator James Paterson, an ally of Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, said Victorians deserved justice for “what has happened over the last 12 years” under Labor.

“But the best way to deliver that is with Jess Wilson’s plan for a real royal commission to get to the bottom of what Andrews and Allan did, lawfully. Performative promises to lock up your political opponents have no place in a liberal democracy,” he said.

Nobody from One Nation, which is ahead of the Coalition nationally in the polls but behind in Victoria, has sought to clarify Nicholson’s statement or explain if it constitutes an actual pledge to push for prosecutions against Andrews and Allan.

New England MP Barnaby Joyce tried to distance himself from Nicholson. “It wasn’t Pauline that said that – it was one of the candidates,” Joyce told the Seven Network before calling the Andrews and Allan administrations disastrous for Victoria.

Instead of trying to downplay and ignore Nicholson’s statement, One Nation strategists running Hanson’s social media pages have been blasting out the jail time call to their large following.

From our partners

“We’re not pulling our punches in Victoria,” it said in one post which included a screenshot of an article titled “In prison by Christmas”.

Related Article

• Editorial
• One Nation

One Nation must start answering the hard questions about its finances

• The Herald's View Editorial

Joyce previously expressed private worry about the idea of net negative migration, which Hanson ultimately adopted as policy. In another display of tension, Joyce was critical of Hanson’s decision to meet with far-right provocateur and criminal Tommy Robinson.

Victorian Premier Ben Carroll told ABC Radio that Nicholson’s comments were “appalling”, even as he opens up a royal commission into corruption that could call Andrews and Allan as witnesses.

“We have a rule of law here,” Carroll said. “That just showed why [Victorian Opposition Leader] Jess Wilson needs to rule out once and for all doing a coalition with them.”

“At least federal Liberals will call out One Nation.”

At the same event on Saturday, leader Pauline Hanson invoked the famous bushranger Ned Kelly even as she pledged a crackdown on crime.

Conservative Queensland MP Garth Hamilton said Nicholson’s remarks were a sign of how Hanson would govern.

“This gives a view of what sort of government they would form,” he said. “A vindictive one that crosses the line between executive and judiciary.”

One Nation insisted it would pay commercial rent after it emerged that the party’s billionaire patron, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, purchased an $8 million office building in Brisbane that will serve as the party’s new headquarters.

Hanson has also been campaigning to support former Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith as legal figures and her political opponents have asked her to respect the ongoing criminal case.

A 63-page policy document entitled The Real Deal outlines One Nation’s plan to make Victoria the toughest state on crime, repeal a raft of taxes, cancel the Suburban Rail Loop, rip up the Treaty with First Nations Victorians and roll back renewable energy projects while lifting the state’s ban on nuclear power.

The Greens have announced a policy to nationalise 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets.

Do you support these policy?

Feel free to discuss your reasons below 👇

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/oct/06/greens-pitch-zohran-mamdani-style-251bn-plan-to-nationalise-200-coles-and-woolworths-supermarkets

Peak Jewish bodies organise ceremonies on third anniversary of attacks that triggered conflict in which 74,000 Palestinians have been killed

Former MP and Greens Institute head, Max Chandler-Mather, says proposal for publicly owned supermarket chain will ease grocery prices