Politics

By Chas Underwood This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue six of Pelican. You can view our print archive here. It’s th...

Fatima Payman is one of twelve senators representing Western Australia in the federal parliament. Elected in 2022 as a member of the Labor Party, Payman made international headlines when she crossed the floor in June 2024 in support of a Greens motion recognising Palestinian statehood. She has since resigned from the Labor Party, electing to serve as an independent senator on the crossbench. In October, she announced the creation of a new political party, Australia’s Voice.

In late February, the long-awaited Independent Analysis into Navy's Surface Combatant Fleet (the Surface Fleet Review) was released. Although the full report is classified, we can glean considerable material from the executive summary alone. Based on the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and conducted in that year’s third quarter, the Surface Fleet Review recognises Australia's "strategic circumstances" require its Defence Force to provide a greater deterrent to potential foes.

To say Wilson Tucker was “elected to the WA Legislative Council” in 2021 attributes a certain intentionality to the good folk of the Mining and Pastoral Region that is perhaps undue. For sure, Tucker did win the fifth available seat for the district, fair and square, in an election conducted scrupulously according to the laws of the day. But his constituents can only be said to have “elected” him in the sense they “elected” to stub their toes while walking past their coffee tables that morning. The people spoke, but it came out a bit funny and sounded better in their heads.

Support for Yes dropped fifteen per cent from its peak, falling a further ten per cent leading into 14 October. No’s eventual victory with 60% of the national vote was about the magnitude polling aggregations had predicted. Why did we change our minds so rapidly?