With the media still obsessed with Barnaby Joyce’s stern and immediately obeyed command to his farm dog, journalists ignored the fact that South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas’s intervention at the ALP national conference was a glaring faux pas. It was foolish to announce his discovered universal truth – ‘If you can’t govern your dog, you can’t govern the country’ – just when Barnaby had done precisely that. Imagine if Tony Abbott had said something like that.

Meanwhile, the ABC horrified viewers by broadcasting what amounted to a criminally delinquent incitement to torture and murder Mrs Gina Rinehart. Only those who continue to ignore the dangerous threat in extremist incitements highlighted at the Sydney Opera House would hide behind the defence that this was merely ‘satire’. No jury of twelve ‘good and true’ Australians would accept such a despicable excuse.

With the Albanese-led ALP national conferences demonstrating a degree of guided democracy worthy of President Sukarno, the script quickly moved to how terrible they claim One Nation is.

This anxiety exists because, as this column anticipated, Labor is losing the traditional tradies’ vote. That shift became inevitable when Labor ceased to be the party of the workers and, following Beijing’s example, began sordid love affairs with friendly big business.

The result is that Labor now loathes small business as much as it has long disdained farmers, entirely forgetting that tradies are small businessmen too. How unsurprising, then, that polling indicates 16 per cent of intending One Nation voters previously supported Labor.

With 48 to 49 per cent of intending One Nation voters last voting for the LNP, any Coalition politician endowed with basic common sense should know better than to take the media’s bait and attack One Nation. Their path forward is simplicity itself: ensure the minimum possible leakage of preferences, particularly among tradies.

Little wonder, then, that Labor’s national conference could think of little else beyond their fear of One Nation. And since John Howard locked in a statutory requirement for a plebiscite before any change to the national flag, that ambition will have to wait until Labor figures out how to revive their comatose politicians’ republic first. Their temporary consolation is settling for flying the other two flags – flags that no original indigenous Australian ever saw.

Like Labor, much of the press gallery hoped One Nation would do what an over-risen soufflé does – collapse.

Hence the innuendo-loaded question put to Barnaby asking whether Pauline Hanson possessed the ‘intellectual capacity’ to lead the country. Having known her for years, I can say that not only is she a remarkable and charming individual, when it comes to reading the public mood, she is, as the Americans say, ‘one hell of a smart cookie’.

One of the finest books on leadership ever published was written by Henry Kissinger, wherein he selects six fascinating recent figures. He makes no special point of ‘intellectual capacity’ because that is an obvious baseline – far more is required. What will outrage the media and the anti-Pauline commentariat is that a striking commonality among all six leaders was their divisiveness. What are the odds that this exact quality is what our modern pundits condemn most?

When it comes to Pauline Hanson, the media’s double standard could not be starker. When she consults or dines with major Australian wealth creators like Gina Rinehart – the nation’s largest individual taxpayer and a generous benefactor – the press gallery frames it as an inherently suspect, oligarchic conspiracy.

Yet when Anthony Albanese or senior Labor figures attend dinners with foreign-linked donors or commercial property developers with complex tax disputes – disputes where floors of AI-assisted counsel are deployed – the media responds with quiet procedural indifference. The press gallery affords Labor the presumption of legitimate governance while treating conservative leaders with reflex hostility.

We are now witnessing two competing visions for Australia – a conflict that no longer fits the traditional left-versus-right debate derived from the French revolution. This is a fundamental conflict between common-sense Australian patriotism and what I described in ‘Give Us Back Our Country’ as an emergent Anti-Australian Axis: a ruling political and media elite that fundamentally disdains traditional Australian values, much as Al Grassby did when he introduced state-sponsored multiculturalism.

Nothing illustrates this divide more clearly than recent events surrounding Australia’s most characteristic institution: sport. There was a time when supercilious critics dismissed Australians as ‘sports-obsessed’, contrasting our national passion with a supposedly sophisticated European cosmopolitanism. Today, sport is universally recognised as a natural, unifying human institution – and Australia led the world in elevating it.

Two contrasting figures demonstrate the difference between a true Australian patriot and the reckless posture of the political left.

On one side, we have the common-sense patriot Mrs Gina Rinehart, who has long stepped forward with characteristic generosity to support Australian athletes competing at the Commonwealth Games. Recognising the immense dedication required to represent our nation at Glasgow, Mrs Rinehart announced substantial cash incentives for medalists – and for breaking world records. Her private patronage ensures that our athletes are rewarded for bringing pride to the nation, stepping in where government administration so often fails.

Contrast Mrs Rinehart’s patriotic support with the disastrous legacy of former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews who won an election promising a multi-region Victorian Commonwealth Games backed by ‘superb new sporting infrastructure’.

Andrews subsequently abandoned the event entirely. Driven by massive cost inflations – heavily loaded by CFMEU union premiums that added up to a 30-per-cent burden on building costs – he claimed the price tag had ballooned toward $7 billion, and then walked away from his commitment.

The Victorian Auditor-General subsequently confirmed that this cancellation cost taxpayers $589 million for absolutely nothing, bringing international embarrassment to Australia and placing the very survival of the Commonwealth Games in jeopardy. Fortunately, Glasgow stepped in to host a frugal, sensible Games with a budget of roughly $300 million – proving just how artificially inflated the Victorian figures were.

Yet while Andrews – who, alongside the Prime Minister, continues to circulate in influential Labor circles despite ongoing tax disputes and controversies over foreign-linked fundraising dinners – escapes sustained media condemnation, the press gallery continues to insinuate without a shred of evidence that there is something sinister in Pauline Hanson conferring with a genuine Australian patriot like Gina Rinehart.

The point surely is that if Australia is to return to its true trajectory instead of going backwards, it is crucial that the next election be won by common-sense patriots, not the Anti-Australia Axis.