In this three-part series, I will discuss the problems with criminalising symbols, gestures and slogans and how it negatively impacts freedom of expression, creating absurd and unjust situations affecting ordinary people.

When a symbol is banned, it does not eliminate the desire to express an idea. The typical outcome is that a new symbol is adopted to express the same idea and, if authorities clamp down on the new symbol, yet another new symbol is adopted. This creates an endless game of whack a mole in which a lot of symbols become illegal and normal people find themselves in legal trouble for displaying an ever-growing list of symbols that are prohibited and branded as things they are not.

Sometimes, political groups and movements will resort to using symbols or imagery that are impractical to ban. For example, Pro Palestinian groups started using watermelon imagery in response to censorship of the Palestinian flag because to ban the depiction of a common fruit would make government authorities look stupid given the person can plausibly deny its meaning and claim they just like watermelon.

Another example is the adoption of all black clothing and specific haircuts amongst neo-Nazis in jurisdictions that prohibit Nazi symbols. For the government to ban people from wearing all black and to dictate hairstyles would constitute huge government overreach, impacting many people who aren’t neo-Nazis.

The risk of harm to ordinary people becomes especially high when official lists of current prohibited symbols are not easily accessible online. For example, the image below contains a recently banned symbol in South Australia which is meant to be associated with a neo-Nazi group. The only reason I know this is banned is because I read about it in a news article.

Given this, I could easily see a normal person buying a piece of clothing from an Op shop or just finding a piece of media depicting this symbol and reposting it or drawing it without any awareness that they are displaying a prohibited symbol.

And who decides what symbols to ban? If the government can ban the swastika, then what is to stop them from banning other symbols such as the Gadsden flag or depictions of Pepe the Frog, which is used in a range of political and non-political contexts in online communities?

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Just like with any law that intends to limit political expression, it creates a slippery slope that will inevitably be exploited by authorities. I believe it is preferable to live in a society that tolerates the swastika rather than a society where the government can simply ban symbols associated with unpopular (or even popular) political movements.

Another problem is that symbols can have different meanings to different people. While the swastika, for example, is almost universally considered a hate symbol in the West it is actually an ancient symbol originating up to 10,000 years ago, representing good fortune, the sun, or life. Derived from the Sanskrit svastika (well-being), it was used for millennia by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and Native Americans before being adopted by the Nazis in the 20th century.

Other symbols such as the Rising Sun flag and the US Confederate flag are also controversial with different groups holding widely different stances.

There is little to no consideration given to the range of contexts of which even a usually hateful symbol can be used in a manner that is not intended to promote hate. Although there are meant to be narrow exceptions such as allowing recognised religions such as Buddhism to use the swastika in the practice of their religion, allowing the symbol to be displayed for academic and artistic purposes, for a news report with ‘fair and accurate’ reporting, or in a manner that is meant to be in opposition to Nazism, fascism, etc, the reality is that these are merely legal defences.

(Legislation for South Australia)

This means that even if you are using the symbol in a manner that is meant to be lawfully permissible, you can still be arrested, and you will be made to suffer the financial, psychological, and social strain of going through the legal system with the recognition of ‘legal exceptions’ being based on the current political climate. This creates a chilling effect on legitimate expression.

In my next part of this series, I will discuss some examples in which such legislation restricts legitimate expression.

The Electoral (Accountability and Integrity) Amendment Act 2024, in force since July 2025, fundamentally restructured how political competition is financed. It has been described as “world-leading” in its attempt to remove private money from politics.

The legislation makes it unlawful for political parties, candidates, or MPs to receive electoral donations. Instead, public funding replaces private contributions, supplemented by strict expenditure caps and enhanced disclosure rules.

Public funding is distributed largely on the basis of electoral support. Parties receive payments per vote (for example, around $6 per vote up to a threshold), with funding capped at actual campaign expenditure. Additional streams include administrative funding, policy development grants, and advance payments to assist new entrants.

Certain new entrants and non-incumbents will be allowed to accept electoral donations subject to donation caps, including an individual donation limit of $5,000.

The reforms also regulate the political expenditure of third parties including businesses, unions and think tanks, with groups wanting to influence the outcome of an election subject to an expenditure cap of $450,000.

In effect, it is an attempt to create a closed financial ecosystem for elections: no private donations, controlled spending, and taxpayer-funded campaigns.

The policy has long been advocated by the Greens, who argue that the only reason they are unable to win elections is because their opponents spend more money.

Libertarians argue that it is not the government’s role to dictate how people choose to spend their own money, including contributing to the promotion of their preferred political party or viewpoint. While it might be tantalising to consider that the taxes of Greens voters are helping to fund One Nation’s campaign expenses, it is also true in reverse.

The rationale for public funding is to eliminate the perception (and reality) of political influence tied to money. Large donations have long raised concerns about access, lobbying power, and policy bias. The South Australian government explicitly framed the reform as a way to ensure decisions are made “because they’re the right thing to do”, rather than in response to donors.

By banning donations entirely, the reform goes further than most jurisdictions, which typically rely on caps and disclosure rules. In theory, this removes a key pathway for corruption.

There is also a goal of restoring trust in democratic institutions. If voters believe elections are not “for sale”, confidence in outcomes may increase. Public funding signals that elections are a public good rather than a marketplace.

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Another claimed benefit is greater equality between political competitors. Campaigns are no longer dependent on access to wealthy donors or corporate backing. In theory, this should make elections more about ideas and policies than financial resources.

The inclusion of advance payments for new parties and candidates is also significant, as it aims to reduce barriers to entry and encourage political diversity.

Despite its ambitions, evidence from the South Australian election suggests several complications. One is the shift of political spending to non-party structures. While parties cannot accept donations, third-party campaigners can still raise funds and spend within regulated limits. This is similar to “Super PACs” in America, which can accept unlimited contributions from individuals, unions, and corporations to spend on advertising, provided they do not directly coordinate with a candidate’s campaign.

Such groups are likely to become major players in Australian election campaigns, raising concerns about transparency and accountability. Banning donations to parties does not eliminate money from politics; it simply redirects it.

Public funding tied to vote share also tends to favour larger, established parties. A large majority of public funding flows to major parties, with only a small fraction reaching new entrants. This will reduce competition rather than enhance it.

The transition to a donation-free system introduces legal and administrative complexity. Questions have already arisen about what constitutes a donation versus a campaign expense, as illustrated by controversies over privately funded travel during the campaign.

The South Australian experiment has implications beyond the state. It represents one of the most comprehensive attempts globally to remove private money from electoral politics. If successful, the model could influence reforms at the federal level or in other states. Public funding systems already exist in many democracies, but few have gone as far as banning donations entirely.

The reforms aim to shift the basis of political competition away from financial capacity. However, it also highlights that money remains integral to politics, even if its channels change. That raises the question of whether the broader ecosystem of political communication is actually more important.

Further, the reforms raise fundamental questions about the balance between equality and freedom. Strict controls on funding and spending may enhance perceptions of fairness, but they also limit how individuals and groups participate in political debate.

Full public funding of election expenses is a bold attempt to reshape democratic practice. Its core promise – to remove the influence of private money and restore trust – addresses longstanding concerns in modern politics.

However, while the reform reduces certain risks, it curtails individual freedoms and introduces new challenges. Ultimately, it shows that public funding is not a simple solution but a trade-off. It can reduce direct financial influence on politicians, but has unintended consequences. As other jurisdictions watch this experiment, its long-term impact will be crucial in determining whether full public funding represents the future of democratic elections or is yet another imposition on liberty.

I doubt very much there will ever be a law which bans the use of cash and coins: there does not need to be. More and more businesses only accept cards, with the necessary surcharge of course. When the majority of customers use cards, increasingly on their phones, and there is no longer any stigma in swiping to pay for small amounts, continuing to accept cash is expensive and inefficient. Business owners also do not need to worry about sticky-fingered employees.

This love of convenience has handed the government an easy victory; they can track, trace, and tax every cent. Paying and accepting government printed legal tender, with the aid of ‘Cash is King’ signs, is now a conscious, rebellious act which falls, mostly, on deaf ears.

The only thing easier than killing people with convenience is seducing them with safety. All new security laws come with the in-built mantra, ‘if you have nothing to hide; you have nothing to fear.’ Most Australians agree with this sentiment. I would say, if you have nothing to hide, you are either the best liar or the most boring person on Earth, but that is an indulgent digression.

One of my biggest annoyances, when government acts in loco parentis, is how they interfere with business. The government determines everything from how much people are paid; the qualifications they need, and when recess is. Now, they can talk to your boss for you if you do not like the number of times your work calls or emails. In a more mature age, ‘the right to disconnect laws’ would have been laughed out of Capitol Hill.

But our working population has been so cowed into believing that being employed is a victimhood category of its own, with the oppressor being their evil, rapaciously greedy fat cat boss, that the government needs to play Mummy and talk to the meanie for you. Adults can and should negotiate appropriate terms with each other; if no agreement is reached, you can suck it up or leave.

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This is, strangely, a niche attitude.

If you were trying to convince someone to pay or accept cash; resist privacy violations on security grounds, or let adults decide the terms of their working contracts, it is difficult. They have given up freedom for convenience, perceived security and fairness. It is not even that they see the trade-off as worthwhile; they do not know the trade was made.

And, like the trade, the consequences are invisible to most. The majority of our fellow citizens will go through their entire lives without they themselves, or even anyone they know, having a serious or disturbing encounter with law enforcement or security agencies. When someone ‘gets into trouble’, no matter how ridiculous the alleged infraction, they are presumed to be guilty. When you can criminalise going outside in the name of ‘public health’, which most people supported, you can do anything.

There is a strange disconnect when most view government as benevolent and benign even though they would almost certainly tell you they don’t. Everyone complains about politicians and inconvenient laws, but will baulk at calling such things tyranny. In our eyes, tyranny is what happens in foreign lands when people are censored, imprisoned and beaten for going against the state. Certainly not us, the Internet police (the eSafety Commissioner), fair work commissions, equality and human rights bodies. These are ensuring social cohesion by preventing hurt feelings: we care. It is tyranny when China does it, but civilised when we do it.

The quangos led by our public masters all lead need to fall into redundancy; Australians need to decide to act like adults and take matters into their own hands. As Tom Valcanis wrote, when governments won’t clean up the beaches, the libertarians will.

While it is important to elect freedom-loving politicians, until we revivify the spirit of freedom in the hearts of the citizenry, we will take the comfortable, convenient road to tyranny.

What was once a perfectly ordinary workplace arrangement, freely negotiated by millions of adults, has suddenly been recast as a grand ideological struggle requiring urgent intervention from the state.

In a free society, the question of whether someone works from home, from an office, from a co-working space, or from a makeshift treehouse, is not a matter for politicians and bureaucrats. It is up to the two parties actually involved: the employee and the employer. One offers labour, the other offers pay and conditions; they negotiate, they agree (or not), and that is how free adults conduct their affairs.

But liberty is always under attack, and the increasingly authoritarian uniparty cannot help itself. The blue team wants to bark orders and force people back into the office. The red team wants to legislate a shiny new “right” to work from home.

As Opposition Leader in the lead up to the 2025 Australian Federal Election, Peter Dutton and his Shadow Cabinet flirted with the idea of ending all WFH arrangements for public servants. They fumbled it, failed to articulate the policy detail, and left the door wide open for a fear campaign that arguably shifted the momentum of the entire election campaign against them.

Victoria’s Labor Government under Premier Jacinta Allan cynically seized upon a political opportunity, promising to legislate WFH as an enforceable right. The new laws, poorly drafted, sailed through the Parliament this month and come into effect on 1 September 2026.

British MP and leader of Reform UK, Nigel Farage, has joined the chorus abroad, declaring war on working from home as if he, too, should have a say in where strangers open their laptops.

Why do so many politicians feel the need to express an opinion on how other people work?

These politicians pretend they are taking different positions. They are not. They are expressing the same rotten instinct, which is the belief that government should dictate the terms on which other people live and work.

There are valid arguments to be made for and against work-from-home arrangements. It’s not always good, nor is it always bad. It doesn’t suit every role or personality type, and some bosses are far too inflexible while some staff certainly abuse the privilege. Of course there are trade-offs, and of course different arrangements work for different industries. That is precisely why the government should stay out of it.

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The truth is that work-from-home arrangements are messy, varied and deeply context-specific. A suburban accountant, a software engineer, a call-centre worker, a lawyer, a tradie, a nurse and a cafe manager do not operate with the same labour market realities. Even within the same business, one team may function brilliantly in a hybrid model while another needs face-to-face contact. Some workers will value flexibility over salary. Some employers will value in-person collaboration over convenience. Some will get that balance right and prosper. Others will get it wrong and lose staff, customers or both.

Good. That is what freedom looks like. Trial, error, negotiation, competition and adaptation. Not a one-size-fits-all edict cooked up in some ivory tower.

The libertarian view is not that every employer is wise, or every employee entitled. The libertarian view is that adults should be left alone to sort out their own arrangements without a politician inserting themselves into the deal like an unwanted middle manager.

Freedom does not guarantee perfection; it guarantees choice, responsibility and the ability to walk away. Funnily enough, that is what the modern Australian political class hates. They’re regulating us into mediocrity.

Big Government – be it red or blue – cannot tolerate the idea that millions of people might peacefully organise their lives without supervision. If employees and employers are free to strike their own bargains, what role is left for the minister, the regulator, the tribunal member, the commissioner, the policy adviser and the press conference addict? Very little, and that, for them, is intolerable.

So they reach for their favourite trick: moralise, politicise and regulate.

The Coalition’s ‘back to the office’ rhetoric was classic top-down conservatism of the most illiberal kind. Putting aside their inability to effectively communicate that they only wanted to apply their WFH policy to public servants, they foolishly dressed the idea up as productivity and discipline. But the underlying message was simple enough: politicians know better than agencies, managers and workers how work should be organised. It was command-and-control nonsense, the sort of thing conservatives are supposed to oppose (until they get a whiff of authority and decide they like wielding it).

Labor’s answer is no better. In some ways it is worse, because it comes wrapped in the language of rights and compassion, which makes the overreach sound noble. Jacinta Allan’s push to legislate work-from-home rights is not some great leap forward for freedom; it is a cynical political stunt, and a deeply illiberal one at that. It takes an issue that should be governed by voluntary agreement and drags it into the swamp of statutory entitlements, quasi-judicial enforcement and political posturing.

Politicians love to signal their virtues. But as we know, once the state gets involved, the compliance machine follows and our rights and freedoms are quickly eroded. Whether or not someone should be able to work remotely is a private matter between an employee and their employer. It does not require government intrusion.

To quote one of our greatest public intellectuals, oh derrrr!

In fact, 50% of polled Australians blame either the Federal or State/Territory government for our current inflationary predicament (40% of the ire reserved for the feds and 10% for the states.) If you thought Tim Tams floated up to eyewatering prices, brace yourself: inflation has increased from 1.9% to 3.8% over the last six months.

With petrol edging $3 a litre (half of that being excise and GST) and Energy Minister Chris Bowen insisting that Australia’s fuel supply is secure and that there is no need for rationing.

Is it though?

Deep in Bowen’s chest, where his authoritarian Labor heart pumps away with the lifeblood of socialism coursing through his taxpayer-funded cholesterol-clogged veins, he cannot wait to institute some form of control over energy. He is the Minister, right? That means dominion over all that would go boom or pop to make things go?

On the 13^th of March he told reporters: “I ask Australians: buy as much fuel as you need, no more, no less […] There are other people, I’ve seen it on Facebook Marketplace, filling up jerry cans, Bunnings running out of jerry cans… selling fuel at inflated prices.

“That is un-Australian. It’s dangerous. It shouldn’t be done.”

You mean, it’s un-Labor. Because if you were in charge, we could sit on the world’s biggest oil reserves and have refineries in every major city and somehow come up desperately short.

Labor’s response to a crisis – pick your crisis, any crisis – is to increase their power over ordinary people. They do it because they think we’re panicky little peasants who can’t think or act for themselves. Bowen, if he cracked open an economics textbook (we recommend Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell) would realise that there’s no such thing as an “inflated price” – prices are determined by the available supply and the demand for the product. It’s so obvious, I have to point it out to a Labor politician. (A Greens politician: prices are racist.)

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Would Bowen go to the football and stomp his foot seeing “inflated prices” for Four N’ Twenty meat pies at the concession stand? No, because the comparison is ludicrous. You can’t compare the value of frozen pies in a supermarket with the value of baked pies at a venue with no alternative. Vendors could charge $10 for sauce, but they don’t – because prices are determined by how much people are prepared to pay.

Trust me, it’s true: we’ve all stood in line waiting for the pie warmer to go ding and forked out half a week’s wages for what plops out.

With successive governments bungling Australia’s management of fuel reserves, the phrase “we won’t need petrol rationing” will be the new “two weeks to flatten the curve” – it’s not only going to happen, but it’s going to happen and it’ll be a good thing, it’ll happen and be extended beyond what’s reasonable, and anyone opposed to it is a dangerous cooker who hates grandma, untaxed sunsets, and dancing nurses.

Perhaps our forebears were made of harder stock, because Ben Chifley’s Labor government was brought down in spectacular fashion over petrol rationing, imposed well after the conclusion of World War II. There is High Court precedent that Federal governments can’t ration petrol by decree, but force it through importing or releasing less than what’s needed. So, screwing it all up, in other words.

Then leader of the Country Party (the forerunner to the Nationals) Arthur Fadden said, “I am inclined to think that petrol rationing was the rock on which the government finally foundered.”

I don’t know – did the 1940s ALP have a vast apparatus of spin merchants and bullshit artists on hand to sell their crappy superannuated rationing regime? It’s Iran! It’s Ukraine! It’s the vibe! Yeah, It’s mostly the vibe.

Then again, will it? Australians seem pretty cool with tyranny, re-electing the most draconian COVID governments back into power (c.f. WA, Victoria, Queensland.) Hell, Victoria will probably do it twice.

The Reserve Bank has just turned up the heat on rates and probably will again, which usually boils governments to death. I don’t think it’ll touch Albo and Grim Jim; seeing the conservative (lol) side of politics bifurcated between One Nation and the Coalition. Half of Australia blames the government for cost of living – so stop voting for big government parties, maybe? Just a thought. And no, One Nation is not a “libertarian” party, stop pretending.

Instead of closing down refineries and chasing green ideological pipe dreams, the government should (hey here’s a shocker) get out of the way. To paraphrase a young rebel princess from a long time ago in a galaxy far far away: the more Bowen tightens his grip on energy, the greater chance it will slip through his fingers.

Buttery fingers at that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what government policy tells us about who society really values.Not what politicians say in press conferences, but what the rules quietly reward and punish.

Because when you strip away the slogans about “skills shortages” and “future jobs”, a very different story emerges.

Right now, an arts degree graduate can have up to $20,000 of their HECS debt wiped — courtesy of the taxpayer, no questions asked. No expectation that this produces anything measurable. No requirement that it fills a skills gap or contributes to productivity.

At the same time, if I hire an apprentice — a young person who turns up every day, learns a trade, and contributes real output while they train — my business gets taxed for it.

That isn’t rhetoric; it’s policy.

Under Victoria’s payroll tax system, apprentice wages are taxed at 4.85 per cent. That’s roughly $2,400 per apprentice, per year. If you train four apprentices, you’re paying close to $10,000 annually just for the privilege of building skills.

Over time, especially if the State Revenue Office decides to look back a few years, that can turn into tens of thousands of dollars — plus interest and penalties — even when you’ve acted in good faith.

So I’m left with a simple question: who does government think is more valuable to society?

The student who spends three years studying abstract theory, funded by debt that can later be forgiven?

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Or the employer who takes on the cost, risk, and responsibility of training the next electrician, fitter, or fabricator — the people who actually build, fix, and maintain the country?

The message seems pretty clear.

One path gets a gift.

The other gets a tax bill.

Imagine applying that logic anywhere else.

It’s a bit like rewarding someone for ordering a meal, then charging the restaurant extra for cooking it — and acting surprised when fewer kitchens stay open.

And then we wonder why young people are nudged toward university and away from trades.

This isn’t about attacking higher education. We need universities. We need graduates. But we also need a sense of proportion — and some honesty.

If government genuinely believes apprentices are critical to the economy, then why are apprentice wages excluded from WorkCover calculations but included for payroll tax?

If they’re trainees for one purpose, why are they treated as revenue generators for another?

And if governments are serious about closing the skills gap, why does the tax system actively discourage the very behaviour they claim to want more of?

Manufacturers aren’t asking for grants, subsidies, or special treatment. We’re asking for consistency.

We’re asking government to stop penalising businesses that invest in people, skills, and long-term productivity.

Exempt apprentice wages from payroll tax.

Align payroll tax with WorkCover definitions.

Stop punishing employers for doing the hard, unglamorous work of training.

Because every policy choice reveals a value judgement. And right now, the system is telling us that theory is worth a gift — while practical skills are worth a tax invoice.

If that’s not backwards, I’m not sure what is.

When space travel becomes mainstream like air travel did in the 1960s or thereabouts, a flurry of narcissistic elites and rich kids will reach for the moon as the ultimate flex. They’ll also be there to plant their social media flags in barren grey seas ripe for clout farming.

First selfie on the moon. First Coke drunk on the moon. First podcast on the moon. I’m sure a few spicy sites like OnlyFans will notch a lion’s share of adult-oriented firsts, considering American consumers spend more on that than the New York Times and OpenAI combined.

Eventually, the well will run dry of firsts as will our attention for them. First paper aeroplane that flew a distance of… eh, who cares.

Today, activists of the leftist persuasion are falling over themselves to come up with new firsts. They want to re-fight race relations, gay rights, women’s rights, and will even invent new categories and divisions just so they can look good instead of doing good.

Douglas Murray in his book The Madness of Crowds described it thus:

“[Activist] culture [can be likened] to a train that has just pulled near its desired destination, slowing down as it comes to a halt at the station. But suddenly, the train picks up speed again and begins careening recklessly down an unforeseen track.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, one could argue that these movements were necessary. In the eyes of the law at the very least, these injustices no longer exist. So why are well-off young people marching in the streets each weekend instead of, I dunno, getting drunk and making out?

If you really want to blaze a trail these days, you ought to be a libertarian.

Australia had the first “democratic socialist” Prime Minister in the Western world back in 1903, John Watson. Ever the protectionist, he was a staunch believer in worker’s rights and strict enforcement of the White Australia Policy. Someone no one should ever seek to emulate, ever. But hey, he was first!

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Because if you’re angling to pioneer some aspect of dunderheaded socialism, you’re shit out of luck. The leaderboards for most people starved, largest number purged, greatest number of generations immiserated… you really need to start gearing up for such goals in infancy, like aiming for admission at Harvard or Oxford university. NYC Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani started on his bullshit at just seven years old – and look where he is now!

In Australia, we’ve barely had a libertarian anybody do the first of anything. Our fearless Editor (David Leyonhjelm) was the first libertarian elected to Federal Parliament; David Limbrick the first elected to the Socialist Republic of Victoria; John Ruddick the first elected to New South Wales. On the global stage, we have Javier Milei of Argentina representing the first libertarian head of government – though if you want to keep warm at night, just mention this in a libertarian-leaning subreddit and the ensuing flame war will negate a need for blankets. How many examples is that? Four? How many chic leftie trends are cannibalising themselves right this very minute? Is this Keffiyeh I got for Palestine on eBay still good for Iran? Is Ukraine still a thing?

You should be thinking, can I be the first one to halve the public service? The first Australian to give people school choice? The first Australian to liberalise gun laws?

The great thing is that libertarianism doesn’t follow a whole lot of rules. You just go out and you do it. The damn government won’t clean up the beaches, so local Libertarian Party branches do it for free every other Sunday down in Victoria. Yeah! No permission required! Drive that train to the station!

That’s because we persuade people with the merit in our ideas, not with the threat of violence. Capitalism is great because even the most self-absorbed, selfish prick of a person needs to provide value somehow to gain the most benefit out of it. Of course, we don’t remotely live in that kind of society, when even microcosms of it can expropriate $15 billion from taxpayers and give it to criminals who spend it on strippers. Allegedly. Hell, funnelling money to a coterie of special interests has been done to death! Sooooo 1980s, right?

Just like buying up all the good houses, your parents and grandparents fought for these rights and all but won. It’s all been done and the vast majority of people – unless you’re clamouring for the same attention – won’t notice. These aren’t premieres, they’re repeats.

On the other hand, you could be like the upstart Will Shackel, who founded Nuclear for Australia as a wet behind the ears teenager. No updoots on the left-wing cesspits of InstaTok for him, but he did it anyway. Good for him! He was even on that big phone-looking thing old people have in their living room. It’s called a Tele… something.

So, if you want to make real waves, give liberty a shot. It will uplift your family, friends, and community and better yet – you just might be the first person to do it.

The Liberal/Nationals Coalition is powerless to block legislation unless it can enlist the support of the Greens and some crossbenchers. For obvious reasons, that is rare.

Even if the Coalition had won the 2022 and 2025 elections, it would still have had a problem in the Senate. The combined votes of Labor, the Greens and left-wing crossbenchers would have ensured that nothing controversial was passed.

This is not a new problem for the Coalition. In 2013, when Tony Abbott led his party to victory, the Senate proved his undoing. While he succeeded in repealing the carbon tax and passing legislation to deal with illegal immigrants, most of his economic policies were blocked in the Senate. That led to the perception that his government was failing, causing a decline in public support and his replacement in 2016 with Malcolm Turnbull.

Turnbull thought he could fix the Senate problem by changing the method of electing it. Rather than political parties negotiating to exchange preferences, in a system known as group voting tickets, preferences would be made optional and left entirely to voters.

Turnbull and his ministers, with Mathias Cormann the leader in the Senate, convinced themselves that under the new method the Coalition would gain sufficient numbers in the Senate to pass its legislation whenever it won government.

Historically, changes to the electoral system have had the support of both sides of politics. Not this time; Labor vociferously opposed the proposed changes (as did several crossbench senators, including me and Bob Day). As a result, the Coalition negotiated a deal with the Greens. The combined vote of the Coalition and the Greens ensured the changes became law and the 2016 double dissolution election was called soon after.

Labor opposed the changes because it foresaw a future in which it would be forever reliant on the Greens, with little prospect of achieving a majority in its own right. While the policies of the two parties overlap quite a lot, they compete strongly for the left vote.

The Greens supported the changes because they realised it would stop most minor parties from winning seats, and relished the prospect of having the balance of power with two Senate seats from each state.

As the 2016 and each subsequent election showed, Labor and the Greens were correct; Turnbull and the Liberals were wrong. Although the Coalition won the 2016 election (with a much reduced majority), its position in the Senate was not improved and it struggled to pass its legislation right up to 2022.

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There are competing arguments as to whether democracy was enhanced by the new voting system. While the group voting ticket system could be criticised for allowing political parties to exchange preferences in ways that disregarded the wishes of their supporters, it allowed minor parties to work together to win seats. It also only required voters to vote 1 above the line.

On the other hand, optional preferential voting in the Senate is confusing when there is compulsory preferential voting in the House of Representatives.

However, the method of voting is not the reason the Coalition has been so dismally unsuccessful in the Senate. They did poorly both before and after the system was changed.

The primary reason is the reluctance of the Liberals (as the dominant party in the Coalition) to establish beneficial relationships with minor parties on the right.

The party’s attitude, mostly found among its national and state directors rather than its elected representatives, is that any party that competes for primary votes is a foe, irrespective of any assistance they might provide via preferences.

There is also little interest in helping a candidate from a sympathetic minor party win a Senate seat rather than Labor or the Greens, if the Liberals cannot win it themselves

There have been exceptions – a couple of minor parties that supported them on every vote – but the contrast with Labor is stark. While Labor has always been open to negotiating with other parties, somewhat irrespective of policies or history, the Liberals engage reluctantly if at all. And when they do it is often too late, being close to the election when deals with other parties are already in place.

Their treatment of my party, the Liberal Democrats (now Libertarian Party), illustrates their thinking. Not only were they always reluctant to engage on the issue of preferences, in 2021 they changed the law to prevent my party from having the word “liberal” in its name. That cost the Liberals many preferences. The architect of the change was a former state director.

Under the group voting ticket system the Liberals could probably have won several more Senate seats if they had negotiated preference deals with some of the many minor parties. They not only did not know how to do this; they did not want to.

Under the Turnbull system, preferences are mostly exchanged via how-to-vote cards, which many voters automatically follow. If they had negotiated deals with minor parties on these, there is similarly a good chance the Coalition could have won more Senate seats.

Whether the Liberals can recover from their current malaise to regain government is a moot point at the moment, with One Nation snapping at their heels. But even if they do, unless they adjust their thinking to the realities of the voting system they introduced, their ability to govern will continue to be severely compromised.

Real name policies have long been associated with authoritarian regimes such as China, where users of a website are required to register their account under their real name and hence lose any anonymity and privacy. If implemented in Germany, it will most certainly spread to other Western countries.

Victims of stalking and domestic violence will pay a significant price by being forced to choose between safety (often life or death) and connection with others. Even if this demographic was to be granted a legal exemption, proving and getting police to believe that you are a victim of stalking or domestic violence isn’t always guaranteed.

The policy will have a chilling effect on expression and will be used by governments to target and punish those with dissenting political views including activists, journalists and whistleblowers. This is especially relevant given the recent increase in arrests in Western countries over what people have said online. Foreign students and refugees from repressive regimes would be at a heightened risk of repression and tracking from abroad.

The chilling effect would go further than just political discussions. Those who are HIV positive, those who need to keep their sexuality secret, and people struggling with addiction and mental health issues would be forced to either suffer in isolation or out themselves publicly and risk real world discrimination to get help and support online. People who have a reasonable interest in keeping their personal and professional lives separate would be placed in precarious positions; for example, a teacher with non-child friendly interests such as BDSM.

There are also practical considerations. For example, some platforms such as Discord require users to have a unique username. If you happen to be one of many people called Tom White, would you be barred from Discord because another Tom White beat you to it, or would you be able to add letters and numbers that aren’t part of your name?

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Would variations of names be allowed? I personally go by both Jess and Jessica. Would I be required to be Jessica in all online spaces? Should I assume going by a nickname online would be illegal? Would real name requirements extend to online gaming and role-playing usernames such as for World of Warcraft or online DND? If yes, being forced to use your real name rather than picking a fun fantasy name for your online avatar would ruin some of the fun.

Would those who are transgender but are yet to legally change their names be forced to use their legal name online? This reminds me of a situation involving a friend who is a detransitioner who tried to create a new Facebook account and had his account immediately banned because it didn’t match his current legal name. Would there be a legal loophole that allows people claiming to be transgender, non-binary, etc to use an alternative name?

What about people who use stage names for performing arts? Organisations such as SAG AFTRA, which is a guild that controls much of the entertainment industry in the United States, do not allow members to share the same stage name. Even when two people have the same legal name.

How would such a law apply to business social media accounts? Especially if a business is run by a sole trader rather than a company? Wouldn’t those with common legal names be at increased risk of copyright disputes if forced to use their real name in their business name?

Real name requirements aren’t just invasive, but they are also ineffective. For example, South Korea had real name requirements from 2004 to 2012. Studies found that there was no significant decrease in online abuse, with ‘hateful’ comments decreasing by less than 1% and no decrease in the spread of misinformation or conspiracy theories. One thing the policy does do is increase the collection of data and put people at risk of having sensitive data leaked in large scale hacks.

Given the significant privacy and practical problems with the policy along with evidence of its ineffectiveness, it’s clear there is no benefit. Its proposal is clearly driven by a desire to further suppress dissenting political views and the persecution of political dissidents in Western countries.

Even before Bondi, we had a raft of civil and criminal hate speech laws at the state, territory and federal levels. I do not need the Minns Government’s (yet to be released so it must be hiding something good) report on hate speech to know this approach has been a colossal failure.

You cannot banish the hatred from people’s hearts by making offense, phrases, or salutes, illegal. I am not even making the argument that such measures push certain attitudes underground: anti-Semitism was very public and common in the two years before the Bondi massacre.

I am arguing such approaches are futile. No one who is willing to commit or advise murder is going to be concerned about a hate speech law under the purview of some human rights bureaucrat.

All these laws have done is weaponise the worst attributes of snitches and authoritarians. We have seen broadcasters, cartoonists, ministers, and university students railroaded for non-woke approved opinions or jokes.

Likely, these laws have made society worse because issues like Muslim integration, and Aboriginality, could not be openly and honestly addressed. You do not make society safer by telling people some opinions or words are so dangerous that to utter them will land you in court.

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Hate speech laws have become an easy scapegoat for governments. They can ‘be seen to be doing something’, while not addressing difficult topics like immigration. As Chris Minns has already said, we do not get freedom of speech because we chose multiculturralism, and apparently with that, social cohesion delivered with a jackboot.

One of the justifications you will hear from the pro-hate speech enthusiasts is that we do not have the right balance in the laws, or they do not cover enough attributes, or phrases. Pray tell, what are the right laws? No one can say. It always seems to be more. We need more powers, more of your freedoms, more of your rights, then you will be safe.

Safety was supposed to come with the National Firearms Agreement (written about at length by David Leyonhjelm in Liberty Itch and his book Gun Control). It did not stop the Bondi massacre, the Lindt cafe siege, or any other shooting, whether it was‘inspired’ by a religion of peace or some garden variety nutter.

If ordinary citizens were armed, Bondi likely would not have happened or would have been over much quicker. Look at what some people were able to achieve with only their fists; firearms, pepper spray, or knives would have made a significant difference.

But alas, we banned guns in the past after a tragedy so we must do it again.

As Gerardine Hoogland’s piece The Case for “Liberty” Epigraphs, recently asked, “What has happened to our free press and their once fervent support for the freedom to speak and write?” Such a question could be posed about our universities, schools, workplaces, and government.

Freedom is now seen as a threat; something to be managed by our bureaucratic betters to ensure social cohesion. Government has fully taken on the role of the oedipal mother, and is promising eternal safety in exchange for eternal submission. Many, I am afraid, are happy to take that bargain.

During recent research for a different topic, I came across an 1869 edition of a regional newspaper, Wagga Wagga Advertiser and Riverine Reporter, – today known as The Daily Advertiser.

What struck me was not the old-style print associated with ‘ye olde’ printing presses, or the beautifully poetic writing of the editorials and letters to the editor, but something far less noticeable in size, yet more poignant for its brevity and literary power:

‘This is true liberty, when freeborn men,

Having to advise the public, may speak free.’

This iconic liberty-inspired phrase is most associated with John Milton, political thinker of the 1600s, but its genesis goes back to ancient Greece.

The Greek playwright, Euripides, wrote a play called Suppliant Women, from where the inspiration for this particular phrase derives. It is premised on the section where Theseus, king of Athens, explains how democracy and tyranny work to a visiting herald.

Milton wrote the now renowned but at the time, controversial, pamphlet, Areopagitica, in 1644 as a plea to the parliament of England to have a free press. He opened the pamphlet with reference to Euripides’ powerful words:

‘This is true liberty, when free-born men,

Having to advise the public, may speak free,

Which he who can, and will deserves high praise;

Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace:

What can be juster in a state than this?’

In light of the tenuous nature of democracy and the current instability occurring throughout the West today, it is worthy of relaying here the entire section leading up to that infamous phrase:

‘This herald is a clever fellow, a dabbler in the art of talk.

But since you have thus entered the contest with me, listen awhile, for it was you that challenged a discussion.

Nothing is more hostile to a city than a despot; where he is, there are first no laws common to all, but one man is tyrant, in whose keeping and in his alone the law resides, and in that case, equality is at an end.

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But when the laws are written down, rich and weak alike have equal justice, and it is open to the weaker to use the same language to the prosperous when he is reviled by him, and the weaker prevails over the stronger if he has justice on his side.

Freedom’s mark is also seen in this: “Who has wholesome counsel to declare unto the state?” And he who chooses to do so gains renown, while he, who has no wish, remains

silent. What greater equality can there be in a city?’

That the first two lines were positioned directly underneath the title of the Wagga Wagga Advertiser and Riverine Reporter, and separated by the date which was written in large capital letters ensconced with double lines above and below, is testament to how our respect for liberty has slipped so far down the proverbial totem pole of free speech today.

The Daily Advertiser used that motto until sometime in the 1950s. Upon further research, I found that not one Australian news outlet has used such a motto to liberty since the early twentieth century. The only mention to free speech and a free press is contained within charters, policies or editorials, an example being the Australian Press Council’s Charter for a Free Press.

What has happened to our free press and their once fervent support for the freedom to speak and write?

We should not underestimate the impact a short and pointed phrase can have on our perceptions.

It was that single line alone of Euripides – borrowed by Milton – that gave me pause and set the tone for what I would then go on to read and later write about. But more than this, the power of such a potent phrase as this one is rooted in the authority of the ancient Greek democratic ideals – the very same ones which we inherited and have lived by for hundreds of years.

This is both provocative, in the sense of reminding us of where our freedom came from and how its precious underpinnings require constant vigilance to preserve; and alarming, in the fact that today in 2026, most western democracies have regressed to become captives of the Leviathan’s enormous surveillance tentacles.

I am an avid supporter of collecting, categorising and preserving worthy sayings, thoughts or memories, because it can serve us well when we seek to recall the minutiae of ideas, particularly the important ones relating to our civic lives.

It was a highly valued practice in the ancient world, and Renaissance era. Known as Commonplace, people in those times would collect and preserve statements they considered to be worthy of remembrance from either their ancestors or even contemporaries if considered credible and important enough.

In Latin, this is known as Meminesse – ‘to remember.’

We would do well to reprise this practice and hand it on to our descendants in the hope they will be enriched by the achievements of those who have paved the way for freedom, liberty and lives worthy of remembrance.

Very few governments even acknowledge they have a spending problem (in public at least), and almost none are willing to tackle it. A major reason is that voters repeatedly elect governments based on generous spending promises, while opposing increases in taxes. Australians are notorious for doing that.

Until a libertarian government can be elected, like in Argentina, or voters can be convinced to vote for fiscal responsibility, for which there are few precedents, the challenge is to reduce spending without it becoming too controversial.

Traditionally, budgeting systems are anchored in the past: each year’s allocations are driven by the previous year’s expenditures. This incremental approach offers stability and predictability, but it also tends to entrench inefficiencies, perpetuate outdated programs, and obscure opportunities for meaningful cost savings.

An alternative is what’s known as bottom-up (or zero-base) budgeting. It is based on the requirement to justify each expenditure starting from “zero” – providing a disciplined, transparent, and service-oriented framework that can reduce public spending without sacrificing essential services.

Instead of treating past expenditures as a baseline to be adjusted, zero base budgeting compels each department to articulate its objectives, identify specific activities to meet those objectives, and justify the costs of those activities from the ground up.

The method asks a simple but transformative question: If this service were being created today, would we fund it, at this level, in this form, and with these resources? This enables decision makers to reassess long-standing assumptions and uncover hidden inefficiencies.

It is also valuable for promoting accountability, because each activity must be justified. The process produces more detailed documentation of what services cost, why they cost that amount, and what outcomes they deliver. Such visibility helps policymakers, and the public, distinguish between high-value programs and lower-priority expenditures. Rather than relying on broad departmental totals or vague line items, decision-makers gain a clearer understanding of operational realities, which in turn fosters more targeted and evidence-based resource allocation.

It can also expose inefficiencies that incremental budgeting conceals. When the previous year’s budget serves as the starting point, spending habits can become entrenched even when circumstances change. For instance, a department that once required a large travel budget may continue to receive similar allocations long after technological improvements or policy changes have reduced the need for travel. Similarly, staffing levels may remain inflated even if service demand has decreased.

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Zero-base budgeting encourages managers to be more creative by asking whether tasks can be automated, partnerships can be leveraged, or processes can be redesigned. Through this scrutiny, agencies frequently discover opportunities to streamline service delivery, consolidate overlapping programs, or eliminate outdated activities altogether.

In the private sector, zero-base budgeting is a well-known technique for driving costs out of a business. Savings of at least 30% are typical.

In the public sector, perhaps the most compelling reason to adopt bottom-up budgeting is its capacity to reduce expenditure while preserving key services. Because it emphasizes outcomes and service priorities, it helps governments identify which functions are indispensable and which are not. Managers are compelled to rank activities by their importance, which creates a structured framework for making resource trade-offs.

Services are not arbitrarily protected simply because they are large, longstanding, or seen as untouchable, but because their value is clearly demonstrated through the justification process. Conversely, lower-impact or inefficient activities are far more likely to be redesigned or discontinued. In times of fiscal constraint, this prioritisation ensures that savings are achieved in a strategic, not indiscriminate, manner.

Zero-base budgeting also has the potential to foster innovation within the public sector. Traditional budgeting often focuses on maintaining the status quo; departments may feel pressured to request only slight increases or decreases in order to avoid political scrutiny. Zero-base budgeting, however, invites a more entrepreneurial approach by encouraging agencies to propose alternative ways to achieve their goals.

By re-examining how services are delivered – not merely how much they cost – governments can discover new methods that are both cost-effective and more responsive to community needs.

Zero-base budgeting is more time-consuming than incremental budgeting, and it demands substantial analytical capacity from both managers and finance staff. Agencies accustomed to stable budgets may initially resist what they perceive as a disruptive process. However, these challenges can be mitigated through phased implementation, appropriate training, and effective use of digital tools that automate much of the analytic work.

Governments that have adopted zero-base budgeting typically do so on a rolling basis, reviewing different departments each year rather than restructuring the entire budget simultaneously.

Ultimately, the case for bottom-up budgeting rests on a simple principle: public money should be spent in ways that demonstrably serve the public good. Zero-base budgeting provides a systematic method for ensuring that.

The first and most obvious issue is that when funding is based on the total number of votes received in an election, those who win more votes get more funding. This results in more funding for major parties and less funding for minor parties.

When combined with the severe restrictions on political donations, the potential for minor parties to grow, promote themselves and gain votes becomes severely restricted. Smaller parties that have less brand awareness need to spend more money to attract votes and grow their supporter base while major parties that already have significant brand awareness can spend significantly less to attract the same votes and support.

Restricting the ability of people and businesses to donate to political parties directly restricts public political participation. Political donations allow voters with limited ability to volunteer, and those with concerns about outing themselves politically to participate in politics, especially those who hold unpopular political stances. They also financially incentivise political parties to care more about the desires and needs of voters.

Although concerns about money in politics are not unfounded, restricting the ability of voters to financially assist parties they support while forcing them to fund political parties they don’t support is unfair and unreasonable. Surely requiring the public disclosure of political donations that are over a significant financial threshold would be a more fair and proportionate response. This would achieve the desired transparency without hampering political participation and the anonymity of the average voter.

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The restrictions on political donations are not the only problem caused by the new legislation. One of the reforms requires political parties to register eight months prior to an election to be able to run in state elections. With the next South Australian election on the 21^st of March 2026, just over nine and a half months after the legislation came into effect, this meant that new and reregistering political parties had just over one and a half months from when the legislation came into effect to register and be able to run in the state.

I find this to be both underhanded and undemocratic, especially given that at least three parties have been caught out by this requirement including the SA Libertarian Party and For Unley. This of course does not include other currently unregistered parties that stumbled across this new rule, realised they couldn’t run and decided not to register. The three affected parties are not just unable to run but are also unable to attract funding as there will be no votes on which to base funding and hence no funds for future elections and party promotion.

Despite the significant drawbacks of these new laws, this new party funding model creates an interesting opportunity: to defund the Big 4 (SA Labor, SA Liberals, SA Nationals and of course SA Greens). This is because under the new system, every first preference vote in the upcoming South Australian election becomes a donation to the political party that is preferenced first.

When you choose one of the Big 4 as your first preference, you don’t just contribute to their success in the election; you also grant them a small profit. When you choose a minor party that isn’t one of the Big 4, although the success of that party isn’t guaranteed electorally and Big 4 may still prevail, you at least deprive the Big Four of the profit they would gain from your vote and allow that funding to flow to a party you actually prefer.

All parties will be relying on their success in this election for survival, since most of their funding will depend on the votes they get. If enough people choose to put minor parties as their first preference, we can deprive the major parties of a portion of the financial windfall that will make up most of their income and resist the system that seeks to crush minor parties.

When I was a kid, my old man was really into computers.

That meant we’d putz around with a Commodore 64 (which I may have stomped on), do actual work on a 386SX, then upgraded to an Internet-enabled 486DX a couple of years later. I absolutely loved it.

Before the New Tax System computers were subject to some hefty levies. Thanks to economies of scale prices plummeted and stabilised. 10% GST on the whole kit and kaboodle, not 48% on, hell, I don’t know, silicon.

Back then, if your brand spanking new PC could play Doom, one of the early first-person shooter video games (if you’re too much of a boomer to understand, it’s the game you all pinned Columbine on) there was no chance in hell it would play Quake, a giant leap for graphics just two years later.

In the 90s, obsolescence didn’t need planning. It was a natural consequence of Moore’s Law, named for Intel engineer Gordon Moore. He said that transistor counts in central processing units doubled every 18-24 months. In between Rachel and Ross debating whether they were on a break, the blazing fast superchip powering your beige box might have turned into a Dorito.

Malcolm Turnbull knew how money worked, investing in one of our first ever Internet Service Providers, OzEmail, which sold internet access by the hour. It set you back $5 an hour (or $2.50 after 12am.) In today’s money, that’s $10.69. Logging on at 28.8kbps, it meant ten minutes checking your email and another forty-five downloading a thumbnail sized, minute-long video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee enjoying a pleasant sun-kissed boat ride. Surfing the net was prohibitively expensive.

But we could avail ourselves of Net Cafes. These were businesses that invested in computer and coffee hardware in bulk, and sold internet access by the hour or half-hour. It was cheaper than sinking money into your own setup, especially when its depreciation schedule was just a big “Yes.”

Somehow, I think in the age of “you’ll own nothing and be happy”, this will all make a comeback. Not in a pleasant, coloured-squiggle décor and big mug of latte kind of way either.

Hapless PC gamers like me have been subject to price slings and arrows for the last decade, despite mere incremental gains in computing power. Moore’s Law is dead. Remember that two-year obsolescence gap? My ten year old CPU can still play AAA games at 1440p (just pretend you know what that is and gasp.) We were subject to the Cryptomining squeeze in 2018, the semi-conductor shortage during 2020-2022, and now we’re battling AI slop merchants to procure two crucial computing components: RAM and graphics cards.

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Graphics cards mean rendering scenes of space aliens getting their heads blown off with lasers in photorealistic detail becomes possible in real time. It also powers Large Language Models and Stable Diffusion – the computing that powers Generative AI and machine learning.

Of course, those billions of parameters need storage. Hence, they’re stored in RAM. They need lots of it. With data centres hoovering up all the RAM they can slot, prices for consumers have soared – up 171% year on year. One of the world’s leading manufacturers, Micron Technologies, has pulled out of the consumer market altogether chasing those venture capital and government megabucks before it all evaporates.

The Australian Government, in its infinite stupidity, is also looking to dump money into AI data centres through its National AI Plan. “The government is backing local capability through significant investment in sovereign AI for the public service,” it says.

Is this how the real robot apocalypse begins? A Centerlink clanker issuing grants to NDIS “Learing” Centres in my name, forever? Naturally, the government is handing over billions of our cash to something that’s yet to return any investment, anywhere, ever.

They also need to pick a lane. Do y’all want Net Zero or data centres? I’ll break it down for the Cabinet in terms they can understand: Those data centres you want - they use lots of electricity. Either you build nuclear or you keep hoping the sun shines at night. I know which option they’ll pick, of course.

I’m not saying AI is a massive grift; but I’d hope any money I put into it at the start will make more at the end of it. The 1960s saw a massive AI boom, then a 1980s “winter”, and now we’re having another “boom”. If there’s a winter, it might resemble the one at the start of The Terminator. Oh man, how far away IS 2029 again?

If the government keeps distorting the market, data centres will become wholesalers of graphics cards and RAM, renting it out to us by the hour just like they used to with Internet. Computing as a subscription service – you know they all want it. Hell, it fulfills their dual-pronged authoritarian fever dream of monitoring our thoughts as well as our wallets.

The superhighway to serfdom terminates at the Comrade Albanese Information Commune, where we’re allocated three hours of Sims 4 gameplay per month provided our player characters all look different and earn the same salary.

My old man? He hung up his BASIC chops a long time ago. He’s content watching YouTube on his iPad while MasterChef plays on TV. It must be bliss.

Because they are irrational, phobias are typically not amenable to facts or reason. Someone who is terrified of flying or spiders, for example, is unlikely to overcome that fear by reading facts about how safe they are.

An intense, irrational fear of firearms is known as hoplophobia. The word stems from the Greek word ‘hoplon’ (weapon) and is distinct from a healthy caution around guns.

Many Australians, including quite a few policy makers, politicians and the media, suffer from hoplophobia. Like the fear of flying or spiders, their fear is not founded in knowledge or facts; it is irrational, instinctive, and self-reinforcing.

Australia has never had a strong gun-culture. For the first 190 years of European settlement, guns were tools to remove pests, kill for food, euthanise injured livestock and, rarely, protect property and personal safety.

Unlike Switzerland, Australia is not surrounded by other countries that might be tempted to invade. Unlike the Czechs, Australians have never endured a communist government at the barrel of a gun. And unlike the Americans, we never had a war of independence, a civil war, or a wild west scramble for land in the face of Indian opposition. Each of these three countries has a much stronger gun culture than Australia.

Whenever there is a series of plane crashes, fear of flying increases. It is the same with guns. Australia’s hoplophobia can be traced to five mass shootings.

The first was a gunfight between rival motorcycle gang members at Milperra in 1984. The firearms used were mostly shotguns, with no semi-automatic rifles involved.

Then came Hoddle Street and Queen Street, both in Melbourne in 1987. Of three firearms used in Hoddle Street, one was a semi-automatic rifle. In Queen Street the firearm was originally semi-automatic but had been sawn-off, which meant it had to be cocked between each shot.

The fourth was in 1991 in Strathfield, Sydney. One death and a wounding were from stabbing with a knife; the rest were shot with a semi-automatic rifle.

Then came Port Arthur in 1996, in which 35 people were killed and 23 wounded using semi-automatic rifles. The Prime Minister was John Howard. He had strong views about guns, and famously declared:

“I hate guns. I don’t think people should have guns unless they’re police or in the military or in the security industry. There is no earthly reason for people to have … ordinary citizens should not have weapons. We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.”

Howard used his political capital and control of the purse strings to coerce his party, Coalition partners, the media, and each state and territory government, to cooperate with a plan to restrict firearms, particularly semi-automatics. The details were helpfully supplied by a group of anti-gun activists who had been waiting for just such an opportunity.

Post hoc assessments were classic truthiness – people wanted to believe the new gun laws made a difference, and it sounded like it ought to be true, so they began with that conclusion. Some claimed there had been no more mass shootings, until there were.

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Data from the ABS told a different story – the murder rate had been slowly declining prior to the introduction of the gun laws, and continued to decline at the same rate. But the conclusions were repeated so often they were rarely questioned. Hoplophobia had set in; facts didn’t matter.

Three decades later, hoplophobia is now deeply entrenched among policy makers, opinion leaders, politicians and the media. This is manifest in various ways.

Tougher gun laws are said to result in fewer guns “on the streets”, although most guns on the streets belong to the increasingly heavily armed police. Legally owned private guns are locked away, as the law requires.

Advocates calling for “tougher” gun laws cannot nominate what that means. Some propose restrictions that already exist, or bans on guns that don’t exist (e.g. semi-automatic revolvers or belt-fed shotguns). They think black guns are assault rifles.

Driven by their phobia, what they really want is a total ban. But don’t mention police weapons, or the Beau Lamarre-Condon case.

Completely harmless guns are banned merely because they look like military weapons. That includes water squirters and gel blasters.

Bureaucrats encourage police to use minor transgressions (e.g. non-compliant storage) to cancel licences and reduce the number of guns in the community, and there are pointless limits imposed on the total number of guns that can be owned.

While claiming nobody living in a metropolitan area needs a gun, politicians and the media celebrate the success of Australian shooters in the Olympic Games. Most sporting shooters and hunters live in cities.

People are taken seriously when they claim they feel safer knowing there are no guns in a house, a street or a suburb, as if the guns are plotting something bad.

A national firearms database is claimed to be desperately needed, although gun registration only affects the law-abiding and has probably never saved a single life.

In WA, merely having the wrong opinion is sufficient for your firearms licence to be revoked and guns seized, with no evidence of violent intent or advocacy needed. But only sovereign citizens need be concerned; radical Islamists are fine.

Hoplophobic Australians regularly assert that our gun laws are an example to other countries, yet cannot name any. Policies motivated by a mental condition are not a model for anyone. Indeed, there is no objective reason why they should be: countries with more liberal gun laws and more guns per head of population, such as Switzerland, Czechia and even New Zealand, have firearm homicide rates that are as low or lower than ours.

Australia cannot even explain what its gun laws are intended to achieve. If they are to reduce the criminal use of firearms, or lead to fewer firearm homicides, there was no obvious need for change even in 1996. Firearm homicides were already low by international standards and falling.

If they are to keep guns out of the hands of people who are likely to misuse them, there’s no point prohibiting certain types of guns. Someone who is not safe with guns, whether due to criminal intent or mental instability, is obviously not safe with any kind of gun.

If the billions that Australia devoted to bans and buybacks had instead been used to understand and treat mental health, including phobias, perhaps we would have something other countries would be interested in.

Recognised in international treaties that Australia has signed, these freedoms enable the search for truth. Without them, individuals cannot reach their full potential. More freedom, more potential.

Australians—not politicians, bureaucrats, or regulators—own our language. We delegate to governments the power to protect us from harm, not the power to shield us from offence. Being offended is the price of liberty. Regulating hurt feelings differs fundamentally from prohibiting incitement to violence.

‘Hate speech’ has become the cause de rigueur. It is a term designed to obscure the real issue.

No one, of course, should be rude or insulting, but should rudeness be criminalised? Of course not.

Tolerance has also become one-sided: conform or be silenced.

In the name of ‘acceptance’, an anti-freedom culture threatens individual rights and voluntary associations. History shows repression of speech, without fail, leads to tyranny.

Free to Believe

Without free speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, truth-seeking dies.

Western democracy rests on Christian foundations and the family—precisely why Marx and Engels sought to undermine both. They viewed faith and family as rivals to the state – independent sources of moral authority that resisted central control.

People resent being dictated to about their faith, morals, or what they teach their children. They reject being labelled bigots or homophobes.

The Left’s calls for ‘equality’ and ‘tolerance’ mask their contempt for religious people. What they demand is not debate, but state-enforced conformity—celebration of their worldview.

True freedom includes parents’ right to raise children in line with their convictions, as affirmed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The State’s role is to protect freedom of conscience and religious practice, not override it.

The assault on freedoms is broadening: targeting churches, faith-based schools, farms, mines, cars, children, the elderly (via euthanasia), the unborn (via extreme abortion laws), teenagers (via drug liberalisation), and even cultural markers like Christmas and Anzac Day.

Faith-based organisations—schools, hospitals, charities—should not depend on precarious exemptions from anti-discrimination laws. They must be permitted to freely select staff according to faith – just as political parties select for ideology; environmental groups for climate views; women’s shelters for gender – or even chess clubs and the like. Saying you can only become a member of a chess club if you play chess is not discriminating against people who don’t play chess!

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Faith matters in faith-based settings. Forcing religious schools to mirror secular ones is senseless—no one is compelled to join or attend them. Expressions of faith must be lawful by right, not temporary exemption.

Religious freedom should be pre-eminent, overriding state and territory anti-discrimination laws via Commonwealth legislation. Human Rights Commissions should have no role.

Free to Work

Work carries dignity, even sanctity. The Hebrew word for work and worship is the same—Avodah. Denying work is like denying worship. As Calvin Coolidge said, “He who builds a factory builds a temple; he who works there worships there.”

Excluding people—especially youth—from work brings massive social costs: crime, substance abuse, depression, family breakdown, even suicide. Young people are locked out of the labour market precisely when ready for independence, relationships, and family.

It is both morally wrong and economically foolish.

For example, a single JobSeeker recipient gets about $400 a week. The minimum wage is $900 a week — a $500 a week gap!

Volunteering to work for no pay is praised, yet being paid any amount below the minimum is banned. It is absurd.

These barriers hit hardest the low-skilled, disadvantaged, or unconnected.

Penalty rates block entry-level jobs: someone willing to work for $20/hour (far above welfare) is not permitted to if the weekend rate is $40/hour. The job vanishes, the business closes, and customers lose.

The solution: let people own their labour. No one should be barred from working on terms that suit them.

If workers want awards, minimums, and unfair-dismissal protections, fine, but ‘opting-out’ should also be allowed.

Past reforms like WorkChoices failed by over-regulating. A simple opting-out from the more than 1,000 pages of workplace regulations would suffice — workers can choose regulation or they can choose freedom.

Mandated ‘accords’ among politicians, unions, and executives demean those who know their circumstances best. Individuals should be permitted to decide for themselves the value of their labour.

High earnings and entry-level opportunities are not un-related. Many successes began modestly yet often these high earners are the ones who support barriers against others!

Regulated workplaces are effectively prisons. One can marry, drive, vote, fight, drink, smoke—but not work on one’s own terms.

Youth unemployment exceeds 20% in some areas. The nation’s productivity would improve if the unemployed were freed. Let them opt out of the industrial framework.

Disruptors like Uber, AirBnB, and DoorDash thrive by letting people work on their terms.

Prosperity depends on low entry barriers—jobs, homes, businesses, even political parties. As we know all too well, industry incumbents unite against new entrants who challenge them. It is that sort of opposition that stifles dynamism.

We need to reclaim our freedoms: free to speak, free to believe, and free to work.

While these policies are presented as advancing fairness, inclusion, and opportunity, their practical effect has been to embed non-commercial criteria directly into procurement decisions. For Victoria’s suppliers and manufacturers — particularly small and medium enterprises — this shift has created significant unintended consequences.

I believe current DEI and social procurement settings are structurally detrimental to local industry, and that procurement grounded in the libertarian principles of neutrality, merit, and voluntary exchange would better serve Victorian businesses, workers, and the public interest.

Public procurement has historically rested on a clear foundation: competition, probity, and value for money. Governments specified what they needed, suppliers competed on price, quality, and delivery, and taxpayers benefited from efficiency and accountability.

In recent years, that clarity has eroded. DEI and social procurement requirements now routinely require bidders to demonstrate workforce composition targets, gender participation plans, social enterprise engagement, and other policy outcomes that are unrelated to the technical performance of the goods or services being purchased. These requirements are often weighted in tender evaluations or embedded as mandatory eligibility criteria.

For Victorian manufacturers, this represents a fundamental change in risk and cost. Businesses are no longer competing solely on capability and efficiency. They are required to absorb administrative, reporting, and compliance burdens that function as indirect regulation, even where those obligations have no bearing on product quality or project delivery.

A Victorian manufacturer bidding for government-linked work is typically required to demonstrate compliance with workplace relations codes, social procurement plans, diversity reporting, and project-specific participation requirements. These obligations carry real costs — consultants, documentation, audits, internal systems, and management time — all of which must be priced into bids.

By contrast, imported fabricated goods enter the Victorian supply chain without those social costs embedded at the point of manufacture. Offshore producers are not subject to Victorian employment law, DEI reporting, or social procurement frameworks. Their products arrive as finished items, stripped of the regulatory burden imposed on local firms.

This creates an uneven competitive field:

• Local manufacturers face higher bid costs and reduced price-competitiveness

• Offshore supply chains benefit from regulatory arbitrage

• Head contractors are incentivised to source fabrication offshore while meeting “social value” obligations elsewhere

The result is that Victorian suppliers increasingly lose work not due to lack of capability, but because policy settings penalise onshore production.

Proponents of social procurement often argue that compliance requirements are reasonable and proportionate. That is not the case. Furthermore, they are not neutral.

Large multinational contractors can amortise compliance costs across vast portfolios. Small and mid-sized Victorian manufacturers cannot. For a firm employing 20–50 people, the marginal cost of DEI documentation, reporting, and tender compliance can determine whether bidding is viable at all.

This produces three predictable outcomes:

1. Market concentration, favouring large incumbents

2. Reduced competition, driving higher prices and lower innovation

3. Increased import substitution, as offshore supply avoids local compliance costs

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Ironically, policies intended to promote inclusion and fairness end up hollowing out local manufacturing capacity, reducing employment opportunities in the very communities they are meant to support.

Anyone who has spent time researching manufactured products online will recognise a familiar — and increasingly uncomfortable — phenomenon: the endless stream of YouTube videos showing goods being made offshore.

What often begins as curiosity quickly becomes confronting. Video after video reveals workers operating without guards or personal protective equipment, manual handling performed inches from live machinery, sparks flying near exposed wiring, and production lines where quality control appears minimal or non-existent. Measuring instruments are rare. Traceability is absent. Documentation is unheard of.

Comment sections frequently fill the gap left by the footage, with viewers openly questioning whether the products could comply with Australian requirements set by bodies such as Standards Australia, or whether they would pass even a basic site inspection in Victoria. Many remark that such conditions would shut a local workshop down within hours.

And yet, these are often the same products that arrive on Australian docks, are incorporated into government-funded projects, and compete directly with goods manufactured locally under strict safety, environmental, and quality regimes.

This is not an argument against trade, nor a claim that all offshore manufacturing is substandard. It is a simple observation: the expectations placed on Victorian suppliers are demonstrably not mirrored across many imported supply chains, despite the rhetoric of fairness and responsibility.

The consequences of this imbalance are no longer abstract. Structural failures occur. Signs detach and fall onto vehicles on major transport corridors such as CityLink. Asbestos is discovered in imported wind-tower components. Battery energy storage facilities ignite and burn. Combustible cladding catches fire and spreads rapidly.

Each incident prompts inquiries, reports, and expressions of concern. Yet the underlying procurement settings remain largely unchanged. Victorian manufacturers are held to exacting standards of safety, quality assurance, traceability, and compliance, while imported products that bypass equivalent scrutiny continue to enter critical infrastructure and public assets.

The policy question is not whether these incidents are unfortunate. It is why risks that would be unacceptable for local suppliers are tolerated when the same goods are sourced offshore.

Markets function best when participants are rewarded for efficiency, innovation, reliability, and quality. DEI procurement frameworks dilute these signals by elevating group-based outcome targets over operational performance.

For manufacturers, this distorts incentives:

• Hiring and subcontracting decisions are influenced by tender scoring rather than operational need

• Management focus shifts from productivity to compliance

• Risk aversion increases, discouraging investment and innovation

Over time, this weakens competitiveness — not only against imports, but against international peers operating under more neutral procurement regimes.

A libertarian approach to procurement does not reject fairness or opportunity. It rejects coercion and distortion. Under a neutral procurement model:

• Government purchases goods and services based on price, quality, safety, and delivery

• Social objectives are pursued through separate, transparent policy mechanisms

• Businesses retain freedom over workforce and supply-chain decisions

• Competition — not compliance — drives innovation and inclusion

If governments wish to support training, apprenticeships, or disadvantaged groups, those goals should be funded openly through budgets and debated transparently — not embedded indirectly through procurement penalties.

Re-anchoring procurement in libertarian principles would deliver tangible benefits:

1. Restored competitiveness for local manufacturers

2. Greater SME participation and stronger competition

3. Improved value for taxpayers through lower costs and innovation

4. Stronger sovereign capability driven by merit, not mandate

5. Clear accountability, separating economic purchasing from social policy

Growth-driven employment creates more genuine opportunity than quota-driven procurement ever can.

Victoria’s DEI and social procurement policies might be well-intentioned, but good intentions do not override economic reality. When procurement frameworks penalise local production, distort competition, and incentivise offshoring, the long-term cost is borne by Victorian manufacturers, workers, and communities.

A libertarian procurement framework offers a credible alternative: let procurement buy value, let markets allocate work, and let social policy be pursued openly and honestly.

For Victorian suppliers and manufacturers, neutrality is not ideology. It is survival.

This law, cynically marketed as an antisemitism measure following the Bondi Beach shooting on 14 December, is in truth a draconian assault on freedom of speech.

If you’re wondering how the “uniparty” managed to draft, debate and pass such comprehensive legislation within 6 weeks, many commentators and analysts are convinced the measures were already conceived, awaiting a prime opportunity.

Unelected bureaucrats, at the behest of an initially reluctant Labor Government, dusted off the draft, sprinkled in references to antisemitism, and the Liberals gave their blessing.

The subsequent political fallout for the so-called “Liberal” Party doesn’t come as a surprise. The Liberal Party is no longer the liberal political movement they once claimed to be. Justifiably, the Nationals aren’t interested in a coalition partner that has abandoned its principles by supporting laws that are completely antithetical to its stated values and platform.

As the Institute of Public Affairs’ Daniel Wild so succinctly put it, this was “an act of bipartisan cowardice, and a failure of our political leaders which has left Australia less free, less safe, and less unified.”

It is a bitter betrayal by those who claim to safeguard our liberties. While primary blame lies with the Labor Government for concocting such appalling laws, the Liberal Party’s complicity is especially disgraceful given its supposed commitment to free speech and individual freedom. As is often the case, hypocrisy amplifies the backlash.

The substance of the new legislation is as frightening as its passage was fast. Branded as targeting neo-Nazis and jihadists, the sweeping provisions empower the government to ban organisations, jail speakers, and even deport individuals for speech or associations – all under disturbingly vague pretexts.

The laws grant Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke (oh dear) the power to declare, at will, any organisation a prohibited hate group. No conviction required, no procedural fairness, and it can even be done retrospectively.

The definition of a hate crime in this legislation is so elastic and subjective that it veers into thoughtcrime. It includes any conduct that “would, in all the circumstances, cause a reasonable person who is the target, or a member of the target group, to be intimidated, to fear harassment or violence, or to fear for their safety”. Note the conditional “would” cause – no actual harm or intimidation need be proven. A person can be imprisoned for up to 15 years for speech that authorities believe might make someone feel afraid. Whatever happened to proving intent?

Key terms like “hate group” and “hate crime” are defined with breathtaking vagueness, practically begging for abuse. A “hate group” under the Act is essentially whatever the government says it is – any organisation the Minister declares to be one. Add to that, our security agencies need only be “satisfied” that a group’s activities are likely to increase the risk of politically motivated violence. I’m sure they’ll be very satisfied. Such open-ended powers are a tyrant’s dream.

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These examples barely scratch the surface of a law so broad and “unintelligible” (in the words of Greg Barns SC, of all people) that even legal experts are alarmed.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland absurdly insists the law is “tight” and precise, yet Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the government “would have liked the laws to be even stronger”. If this is their idea of restraint, one shudders to think what an “even stronger” version would look like.

The notion of “hate speech” as a legal category is inherently ripe for abuse. It hands to the government the power to arbitrate truth and permissible opinion. As Dr Jordan Peterson famously warned, whether or not something you’ve said is defined as hate speech gets determined by “the last people in the world you would want” defining it.

Hate speech regulation means empowering politicians, unelected bureaucrats and ideological elites to police discourse, and those are exactly the people most likely to misuse that power to silence dissent.

Today our political leaders tell us these laws are essential, and will only be used against neo-Nazis and jihadist extremists. But once the machinery of censorship is in place, it will not stop at the obvious villains. It never has. Indeed, when “hate” is whatever the ruling class hates to hear, any passionate political speech can be painted as extremism. The history of free societies teaches us that the answer to hateful speech is more speech, not empowered censors.

The passage of these new laws is a dark day for Australian liberty: laws ushered in by an establishment tag-team of left and right authoritarians. The uniparty has shown its willingness to sacrifice fundamental freedoms on the altar of combatting speech it hates.

It’s not a partisan issue. Whether they’re blue, red or green, all authoritarians pose a threat when they agree on gagging the public “for our own good.” It seems the fight for free expression in Australia will now have to be waged against the entire political class.

It’s incumbent on all of us to defend the principle that no government has the right to regulate thought and speech. Free speech is not a gift from government; it’s a birthright that we must constantly defend from governments of all stripes.

The events of this fortnight prove that the fight for freedom is never won, the struggle continues. Let this blatant betrayal by the uniparty serve as a rallying cry: if we want Australia to remain a free and open society, we’ll need to claw back our right to speak freely – before there’s nothing left to say.

I made payments upfront to get discounts on my student loans and paid the rest off throughout my degree with assistance from family members. As the result I had no student debt when I finished university and felt I had made responsible decisions.

From December 2025, the Albanese Government rewarded those with HECS debts with a 20% reduction on debt accrued prior to June 2025. Although those with large student loan debts felt incredibly relieved, those who no longer had student loan debt like me, as well as those who had been making concerted efforts to pay theirs down, were left incredibly irritated. It’s like being punished for making financial responsible decisions.

Student loan forgiveness creates a variety of issues for society. For a start it discourages people from paying off their student loans. After all, if people think they will be rewarded for not paying off their student loans then what incentive is there to pay them off?

This results in more student debt to pay off in the long run as people will hold off paying their student debts in the hope of being rewarded with a taxpayer funded refund. Especially given student debt accrues interest which can result in a significant increase in total debt over time. They may even be more careless in taking out larger loans in the first place as they expect it may be forgiven eventually.

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Secondly, it does not eliminate the debt but rather shifts the burden to the taxpayer. Even worse, it creates a situation of reverse wealth transfer in which professional workers who have a degree are funded by lower income workers who did not choose to, or could not, go to university.

It also does not prevent people from accruing new large student loan debts. All it does is make the government and society feel better about the issue of large student loans for a short period of time. And of course, if large government handouts are expected, then universities will account for this when determining the prices of classes and degrees.

I would argue that student loans ought to be handled by the private free market system rather government backed loan programs, as this will encourage universities to charge more reasonable prices that graduates can more easily pay back. Government intervention in the student loan system, such as occurs in Australia and the US, only inflates the prices of degrees and leaves many with debts which they will never pay off.

A private free market student loan system would also give universities an incentive to provide more useful degrees which help people get a job and pay back their student loans. This will in the long-term benefit graduates as more useful degrees will result in fewer people believing that getting a degree has not helped in acquiring a job.

Libertarians, anti-authoritarians, haters of government overreach and freedom lovers alike, are abandoning (or threatening to) tech platforms - like Substack - in the wake of demands for us to submit our digital papers to protect the children from social media.

This is an understandable but shortsighted reaction.

To be a libertarian in a bureaucratic, rule-loving society, like Australia, is an ongoing battle to stay true to one’s principles while living in reality. We may think taxation is theft but we comply with tax law unless we want to incur the ire of one of our of largest bureaucratic bodies. Gun laws, anti-self defence laws (as nicely illustrated in David Leyonhjelm and David Limbrick’s pieces on self defence) infringe on our most basic right to defend ourselves. But it is a brave soul who deliberately violates these laws, as their lives will, mostly, be destroyed.

Leaving social media and blogging platforms will not cause significant or catastrophic personal consequences - you wouldn’t be violating any law of course. But in our tech driven, authoritarian society, we are in danger of losing more ground via a poorly timed retreat. If those of a freedom-loving persuasion, who counter the zeitgeist on everything from lockdowns to climate change, leave these platforms, we know who will be left. Yes, a certain number of loyal fans will follow you wherever you go, but what about the young, the not yet politically engaged, and the libertarian-curious?

Even if such people are actively looking for alternative views, they may not find them on the sites they frequent most. That could give the false impression that many of these ideas are so ‘settled’ that there is not even a cogent opposition to speak of.

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Laws such as age verification for social medial are obviously pushing us toward digital IDs; Jessica Colby has written extensively on the horrors that will unleash. Substack’s willingness to add age verification, even though they were not captured on the original list of companies required to comply, shows, like many other changes in society, there will be a great deal of ‘voluntary’ agreement with digital IDs. I will not denounce Substack as I do not know what conversations took place behind the Zoom windows: companies hire teams of lawyers to avoid vulnerabilities. It is possible they saw this as a necessary, mostly low-risk move to protect their place in a growing market.

This speaks more to the anti-business nature of Australia, and the many impositions we have on freedom of association, as opposed to any latent Orwellian tendencies within Substack. We can keep wishing companies would be more like Musk vs. The eSafety Commissioner, and we should make it clear such bravery will be rewarded, but unfortunately, revolution in reality is a lot more boring.

In much the same way that the Covid response purged the emergency services and military of anyone who would not follow immoral orders and not comply, the tech world may end up a petty tyrant’s paradise - even more so.

The concerns about capitulating or appeasing one’s enemy are real. The Liberal Party has become a shell of its founding shelf because it relinquished its core principles; under the pretense of ‘modernising’, and appeased those who hate them and would never vote for them anyway. They are now politically irrelevant, an astonishing turnaround for a party which held government for so many decades. But staying, persuading, and recruiting new people online is, currently, our best course of action.

It is also imperative that we rebuild the offline world, by reinvigorating the print industry and such, to make us more robust. These days I often wonder if tech will not prove to be the greatest destroyer of freedom, disguised as its ultimate saviour (but that is a question for another day). But until then, we must stand our ground.