Any poll taken in the next few weeks will show an even sharper increase in the vote for One Nation. Pauline Hanson should send a bouquet to Sussan Ley and the Liberal Party leadership, because it will be all their own doing.

It’s finally happened, Newspoll considered the most accurate of all the polling groups has One Nation ahead of the Coalition.

So One Nation are ahead of the combined vote of Liberals and Nationals.

One Nation should now be considered the main Opposition party. pic.twitter.com/JaYBnX7AxH

— Craig Kelly:??Foundation for Economic Education (@craigkellyAFEE) January 18, 2026

It’s hard to imagine Australia has ever had a less competent Opposition. Perhaps Labor during its long twilight under Sir Robert Menzies, but surely even Calwell had more resistance than Ley…

There is nothing that gets the Liberal Party base more riled up than the right to speak their mind – free speech.

Then Section 18C of the Racial Hatred Act 1995 came to centre stage. It remains one of the great failures of the Abbott government that this legislation was not repealed. Liberal voters are still talking about it.

Here we are, 12 years on, and a successor Liberal Opposition is agreeing to a Labor bill to extend the definition of hate crimes with serious criminal offences.

When you ask people why they vote for Pauline Hanson and One Nation, one of the most common responses is: ‘I don’t agree with everything she says, but I agree with her right to say it.’

She is a walking advertisement for the larrikin right to free speech. People support her no matter how she exercises that – wearing a burqa into Parliament, standing and delivering on the steps of Parliament, or in the studio at Sunrise.

Unless One Nation has an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment, its senators will vote against the government’s legislation. No doubt they will be condemned by Labor and the Greens as racist or enabling terrorists. If this happens, it will make One Nation and Pauline Hanson more emblematic of free speech than ever because Australians know the accusations are not true.

After freedom of thought, free speech is the most basic of rights. Without it, we cannot be who we are as a people. Liberals of all stripes, as well as conservatives, understand that. But it has been hard to win arguments based on the right to free speech because part and parcel of this right is that we must accept speech that is ugly and offensive. I believe that is why, in 2014, the Abbott government withdrew from the fight to repeal Section 18C.

But you can win that argument without fighting on those grounds. There are other ways of framing this debate, and one of those is around the growing perception that this government is about fantasy, not reality.

It is dawning on a majority of the community that our government, instead of being run by a cabinet of serious human beings, is being run by a student union collective that puts the performative before the practical.

These are people who couldn’t run a student refectory profitably who are trying to run a country, and everything they do turns to ordure. Instead of cleaning up they paper over.

Can you name me one thing where Canberra has been successful?

If it wasn’t for massive inflows of migrants, our economy would be visibly running in reverse. The energy ‘transition’ is a farce, with coal-fired Eraring just today being confirmed to run for yet another two years. 1.2 million new dwellings have been promised in five years, but that target is likely to be missed by 20 per cent. Record numbers of households are living in mortgage and rental stress. Jim Chalmers’ ‘surpluses’ are piling up as ‘surplus debt’. And spending is comparable to the Covid years while tax has risen to record levels in absolute terms and as a percentage of GDP.

These are the things that struggling households care about most.

There’s a litany of failures here, to which you can add the Bondi massacre. Australia’s troubles are not due to a lack of laws. There have been plenty passed since Labor came to office. Instead, it’s due to unrealistic presumptions as to what is possible, combined with managerial incompetence.

These bills that have passed the House today will also add to the pile of mostly useless legislation.

Take the gun buyback. John Howard initiated tougher gun laws in 1996. What is proposed in this legislation will make virtually no difference to how tough our legislation is. It’s a bit like deciding that, even though we have seat belt legislation, some people are still dying in car accidents, so we’ll legislate to make people wear two seat belts instead of one.

The hate crimes legislation masks the failure to enforce the current laws against terrorism. These are laws directed not at thought crimes, but at crimes against the person and property. As a free speech absolutist, I can say Amen to the proposition that any person, minister of religion or other, who promulgates violence against members of any community, on whatever grounds, ought to be guilty of a crime, no matter what his religion might say.

Just as freedom of religion cannot allow suttee, stoning, honour killings, child marriage, or female genital mutilation, neither can it allow preaching harm to your fellow citizens.

This legislation already allows the government to identify terrorist groups.

If the full force of the law had come down on those displaying symbols related to terror groups two years ago it might have dawned on everyone involved that creating a hostile atmosphere towards Israel and Zionists could easily lead to the torching or graffitiing of synagogues, the harassment of Jews, or even a massacre on Australia’s most iconic beach.

The social environment in this country could have been completely different if the existing laws had been applied. So too could the security environment if our intelligence agencies had been properly resourced and funded. Headcounts now are down on what they were ten years ago.

Will these additional laws make it safer for Jewish Australians? If we can’t enforce the laws we have, why would you think more laws are going to make a difference? Has anything this government done worked for the better?

This is the framing that would have turned this debacle for human rights into a debacle for the government. It would have shown that the Opposition has more than tactics, that they have strategy. That they can avoid the difficult areas and zero in on issues that unite their base and show the weakness of the government.

Instead, the Opposition are in danger of allowing themselves to be sucked into the government’s narrative.

Less bad isn’t what people on the right are looking for, which is why they are turning to One Nation.

All of this suggests we need a revolution inside the Liberal Party, or a completely new party of government. I can’t see that revolution happening, so it will have to be a new party of government.

All the while our situation continues to deteriorate right across the board.