Oz Politics Roundup 8/12/2025

Well, it’s official. The ‘dance of the seven Akubras’ has ended. Barnaby Joyce has officially joined One Nation.

Appropriately enough, the announcement was made on 88.9FM in Tamworth, home of both the Australian Equine and Livestock Events Centre and the Tamworth Country Music Festival. One Nation is at once playing to its biggest voting bloc – rural Australia – and moving its political weight outside of its Queensland heartland.

Joyce will lead One Nation’s NSW senate ticket at the next federal election.

Meanwhile, the coalition’s hopes of winning back its base just got even more remote. This time, it’s the South Australian state branch digging its grave even deeper in the ‘moderate’ muck. South Australia is clearly competing hard to win back from Victoria its crown as Australia’s Wokest State. The South Australian branch, like Victoria, has decided that the best way to win back disaffected conservatives is clearly to parachute a ‘moderate’ diversity hire into the top job.

The first-term Barossa Valley-based MP was communications director for former Premier Steven Marshall who lost the 2022 election after just one term […]

While the new SA Liberal leadership is moderate-dominated, the Australian understands [Ashton Hurn] will raise the profile of key conservatives to maintain factional balance.

As a senior advisor to Mr Marshall, and married to moderate supremo Chris Pyne’s former chief of staff Adam Howard, Ms Hurn has historic links to the moderate group.

Just stick a fork in Liberals: they’re done.

Barnaby Joyce used his first TV appearance since confirming the move to One Nation to rip into Albanese government minister Anika Wells’ taxpayer-funded travel expenses. The scandal just got worse: now it’s emerged that she billed taxpayers over $9000 for return flights between Brisbane and Melbourne, to fly her husband to the three successive AFL Grand Finals. That’s nearly 10 grand for her husband only, which means he almost certainly flew business class rather than slum it with the peasants in economy.

Nothing but the best pick of the slops when you’ve got your snout that deep in the trough.

The scandal is only going to get worse, the harder the Albanese government digs its heels in. Not only has the PM personally backed his grubby minister and revealed that his office specifically approved the flights, but now senior minister and Albanese factional ally Tanya Plibersek has gone into bat for Wells.

None of which is a good look at a time when taxpayers are enduring a government-inflicted cost-of-living crisis.

That’s far from the only political poison tree growing in Albo’s little garden. If interest rates start rising again, voter backlash will be furious.

Two months ago, financial markets were sure the Reserve Bank would cut by Christmas and again in 2026.

Now they’re betting on rate hikes, possibly as soon as February and certainly by September.

And with Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced the end of the household energy rebate, the government will even less be able to spin away the massive spike in electricity bills caused by its lunatic ‘Net Zero’ policies. A entire solar farm bursting into flame yesterday is an apt metaphor.

Rivalling the ‘Net Zero’ rollout for sheer, staggering, expensive government incompetence is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. New data shows that 66,000 people with a ‘psychosocial disability’ are creaming billions of dollars a year, getting everything from free cooking and cleaning to transport.

It’s not specified whether that includes all the paedophiles and serial rapists living high on the hog on the taxpayer purse, with million-dollar-plus ‘support packages’.

Serial sexual abusers, rapists and paedophiles are receiving substantial support from the National Disability Insurance Scheme, sometimes worth more than $1 million, to live under supervision in the community after their release from detention.

Court records show these potentially dangerous sex offenders, diagnosed with “mild to medium” intellectual disabilities and certain serious mental illnesses, have qualified for top-level NDIS funding support worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and in one case $1.4 million.

These offenders, some of whom are deemed too vulnerable or dangerous to be housed in state-based specialised sex offender facilities after completing prison sentences, are instead receiving some of the NDIS’ most expensive packages.

Well, here’s a thought: if they’re too dangerous to be in the community, keep them in jail.

The National Disability Insurance Agency, which manages the decade-old scheme now worth $42 billion a year, said it did not know how many sex offenders with disabilities received support.

Not only is it the single most expensive program on the government’s books, even they have no idea where the money is going.

Finally, in a spectacular result for the Streisand Effect, Brisbane concertgoers came well-armed and ready for Garbage’s first show after singer Shirley Manson’s epic rant about… beach balls.

Yes, beach balls.