The way the Labor Government and the Liberals have come together on the National Anti-Corruption Commission is an example of what you're suggesting - an attempt to make the Independents/Teals look less relevant

This GUI cost me the half hour or so it took me to compose a comment.

There is only so much time I'm willing to save the world, and that's gone for today.

Grrrr.

I think the Teals got such a big turnout is because they're not right-wing conservatives and didn't sign up to sell the country to the highest bidder.

the problem with foreign investment is foreigners and their allegiances! And the fact that they almost invariably come with tax avoidance, price gouging and profit repatriation.

If we want new infrastructure and new amenities, we need a superior paradigm to selling the family farm or borrowing evermore and then using more and more of a shrinking budget bottom line to fund government spending/responsibilities.

Any national survey taken today would probably tell us that nuclear power ought to be on the table. And only Dutton has embraced it post-election.

Nuclear power ain't all the same. solid fueled reactors still come with a plethora of potentially dangerous problems and still create massive waste.

Waste which in MSR technology is simply and mostly unspent fuel. And nations around the world will pay us annual millions to take their waste from them. But that window of quite massive economic opportunity is narrowing quite dramatically and soon could be no more.

Another issue is real not Clayton's tax reform. And if that reform isn't a flat and unavoidable tax of around 15% then our highly complex convoluted two-tier tax system. will continue to make more and more have-nots. We need to fix it not phuck it!

Then there's affordable housing and new homeowner grants. Grants which have served to put upward pressure on house prices.

What will lower house prices is rapid rail and much lower commute times. Tunnels and bridges are all well and good if we can pay for them rather than price gouging foreign investors. And that could be done by us via the sale of tax-free, low interest, infrastructure bonds.

It's the economy stupid!
Alan B.

The Teals are pretty, upper class, ladies who read the United Nations folderol on Net Zero Emissions and thought it was the most profound thing ever. Somebody find them some baskets to weave.

Steve S,
Ladies ?? You're right about the upper class thing & the basket weaving !

Citing Edmund Burke that “politicians are elected to use their judgement”, Syd Hickman might appear to be arguing against the 2party system. However, that’s only true if we take the simplistic, but popular view, that parties are the standards of opposing armies in a battle for power.

The better alternative view of the 2party design of our system is that the two are akin to prosecution and defence in the justice system. That is, a process of contest to find the best truth rather than an opportunity for dominance, in both debate and elections. A more generous assessment of the vision Teals sold to the electorate is that better process is possible, and that is surely true.

The design of our system wisely does what it can to avoid dominance in Parliament by not having a popularly elected leader. The media negates that advantage by exploiting the common human attraction to a charismatic leader because of the confidence they engender in the majority. That majority science tells us are emotionally dominated by fear, inclined to seek approbation and be followers.

The reality is that the system was designed to be a process for finding wise consensus in legislation and testing the fidelity of ministers in the use of executive power. The only reason the system doesn’t work more faithfully to its design principles is that our political culture isn’t strong enough to resist the myriad modes of influence that seep into every crack in our collective self-interested pragmatism and make politics sleazy rather than sacred.

Politics is perhaps necessarily inclined to the profane because the advantages of power. However, the Teals made clear that climate is an existential threat that demands the best governance we can achieve and further that corruption is the greatest obstacle to that outcome. Indeed, that’s exactly why the ethic of selfless service is the first of the 7 Nolan principles, which are validly part of our political heritage.

Why not give the Teals the benefit of the doubt and assume they want a better political culture more than power?