The Narrow Pass

 


Cheers and jeers. One crowded hour.

The mood of the country had shifted downhill at remarkable pace.

On the way back from putting his car in the garage he stopped at the coffee van. With is head swirling, Old Alex needed to sit down for a moment.

He ordered a mixed juice, lichee and orange, some modern concoction, and complained about the price of absolutely everything when the bill was more than $8 for something that would have been circa $4 or $5 only a short couple of years ago.

"I never understood why everybody hated politicians so much until I had my own business," the young woman behind the counter said, while making what had become the a typical sarcastic, dismissive comment about Albo, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, being in all their pockets. 

"He's got his fingers in everything," Old Alex responded. "I hated Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull, but Albo takes the cake. Everybody hates his guts. Nobody can get ahead."

Or words to that effect. The disdain the Australian public felt for the political class was visible in the fluid air. 

Nobody can get ahead. Nobody can get ahead. The refrain repeated endlessly.

The muddling middle had become the struggling middle, and they didn't like it. Bring on the revolution. The authorities were deliberately creating chaos, and destroying the middle class, in a country which had once been fundamentally middle class.

NEWS

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who led Labor to a second-term win in 2025, has spent early September 2026 on the defensive. His approval ratings have been among the weakest of his time in office, with recent polls putting satisfaction in the mid-30s and dissatisfaction near 60 per cent. This week he has been answering questions about an undeclared honorary membership at Marrickville Golf Club in his electorate after the club received a $6 million grant through an invite-only scheme. Albanese said he was unaware of the membership, made “no apology” for the funding, and told the ABC it should “do better.” He has also been selling a Digital Duty of Care bill that would force platforms to let users opt out of algorithms, a plan critics on the right call political censorship and that has already drawn a warning from the Trump administration. 

abc.net.au

Those pressures sit on top of a broader squeeze: cost-of-living and housing argument, a messy immigration debate, and a domestic-violence progress report that found policy has not meaningfully cut sexual violence. Labor has tried to frame the next election around tech regulation and a third-term social agenda, but Albanese has also been pulled into a running fight with One Nation after telling party members that hard-right populists were “dangerous, divisive and downright dishonest.” That speech, coming after a by-election loss, gave Pauline Hanson more oxygen rather than shutting the contest down. 

smh.com.au

The White House responded within a day of Labor releasing its Digital Duty of Care draft. Economics spokesman Kush Desai said President Trump had “unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector,” and that the administration would keep raising the issue. The warning bundled the proposed algorithm opt-out and duty-of-care rules—complete with fines of more than A$100 million, or about A$109 million at the top of the published range—with earlier US complaints about Australia’s news-bargaining levy and tax treatment of cloud and streaming revenue. A US congressional committee has already sought testimony from Australia’s internet regulator over alleged censorship of American speech, including efforts involving posts on X. 

theguardian.com

Canberra’s reply was that the alliance is not at risk and that Australia will set its own rules. Communications Minister Anika Wells said US officials had not contacted her office and rejected the “extortion” label; Albanese said Australia is a sovereign country acting in the national interest and that the policy is about giving users control, not giving government control of feeds. The draft would require platforms to notify users and let them choose a chronological or follow-only feed instead of an algorithm-driven default, while also tightening duties around harmful content for children. The government still plans to introduce the bill this year and take the argument to New York around the UN meetings, even as Washington signals it will treat the package as part of a wider fight over how allies regulate US tech firms. 

One Nation’s rise is the other dominant story. After taking about 6.5 per cent of the House vote in 2025, the party’s national primary support has climbed into the mid-20s and, in several polls this year, the high 20s or around 30 per cent—sometimes level with Labor and well ahead of a weakened Coalition. It won the federal Farrer by-election and, more startling for Labor, the Western Australian state seat of Secret Harbour, breaking a long Labor hold in the outer-Perth suburbs. Analysts say much of the surge has come from conservative Liberal and National voters rather than a simple protest wave, with immigration, identity and distrust of the major parties as recurring themes. 

eastasiaforum.org

The picture is not one-way. Some polls after the WA win showed One Nation slipping a few points from its peak even as others put it back near 30 per cent. The party has also generated its own headlines, including a public clash over a cartoon that branded Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie a “traitor,” and an extraordinary press conference in which One Nation’s Warren Pickering admitted illegal drug use. Even so, Hanson remains a central figure in the national conversation, Labor is treating the party as a direct threat rather than a Coalition problem alone, and Australian politics is now routinely discussed as a three-way contest instead of the old two-party frame. 

pollbludger.net


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