Australia news live: Liberals rue ‘fairy floss politics' and policy black hole under Dutton; looting warning follows floods

The Guardian

26-05-2025

Update:
Date: 2025-05-26T20:38:08.000Z
Title: Culture war cost us seats, senior Liberals tell Four Corners
Content: Current and former Liberal party MPs and senators have said the party's focus on culture war has seen their inner-city constituencies abandon them and contributed to their election loss in what one called 'fairy floss politics'.
Speaking to ABC's Four Corners on Monday night, former NSW Liberal president Jason Falinski, former senator George Brandis and NSW senator Maria Kovacic criticised their party's focus on small, hard-right constituencies and culture wars.
The party alienated women, especially those who wanted to work from home, offended public servants, multicultural communities, people in the inner cities, students and 'other minority groups as well', Brandis said:
It was almost as if we were running out of new people to offend.
People who felt the party needed to lean harder into the culture wars were 'nuts', Brandis said:
The people you have to persuade are the people who didn't vote for you last time but are open to persuasion. And those people live in the centre ground of Australian politics. And if you spend your time drinking your own political bathwater and only living in an echo chamber of far-rightwing opinion, you're never going to get them.
Falinski said that 'fairy floss politics' – that is, 'high-calorie, low-nutrition politics' such as copying Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, concept – was 'not healthy for us'.
Kovacic said:
I don't think that everyday Australians are particularly interested in culture wars. People have abandoned us in the cities because our messaging doesn't resonate with them, and they haven't gone to the right. They voted for Labor and the teals because what we're selling them isn't aligned with them.
Update:
Date: 2025-05-26T20:36:49.000Z
Title: Coalition wanted to erase Aboriginal people from national memory: Dodson
Content:
Pat Dodson has also decried what he called the 'new assimilation' policies pushed by the Coalition during the election campaign, saying it is another way of trying to erase Aboriginal people from national memory.
Speaking to 7.30 on Monday night, Dodson said:
If you looked at what they were talking about in the opposition at the last election, getting rid of land councils, revising a whole range of symbolism, throw out the welcome to country, get rid of the flags, rescind the ambassador. Anything that indicates the presence of Aboriginal people would have gone. That's what the new assimilation's about, is completing the obliteration of Aboriginal people from the landscape.
Cultural heritage is another very important aspect of that. The more you smash and destroy the cultural heritage of Aboriginal people, the greater it is to say that there is a substantive argument to say that they had a substantive presence here, because there's no evidence – you've blown it up.
Update:
Date: 2025-05-26T20:30:55.000Z
Title: Labor should return to 'treaty-making process', Pat Dodson says
Content:
Yaruwu elder and former Labor senator Pat Dodson has urged the Albanese government to 'go back to the treaty-making process' in order to continue the project of reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, arguing the 'resounding victory' of Labor at the election gave them a new opportunity.
Speaking to ABC's 7.30 on Monday night, Dodson said he was 'very confident' Albanese could lead that process, but it would require going back to the Uluru statement from the heart.
Dodson said:
That doesn't mean they have to go down the constitutional path for a voice. But it does mean that they've got to honour the two aspects of the Makarrata commission. That wasn't voted on by the people. That wasn't part of the provision that we voted on, to vote down. So they have to go back to the treaty-making process and the truth-telling process. And they can do that, because it doesn't require constitutional referendum. That can be done by way of legislation.
Truth-telling needed to be a two-way street, Dodson said, and it needed to result in a 'national narrative' that was not simply 'Captain Cook came here and no one was here'.
Dodson continued:
I think that the government's come back with a resounding victory. The horror that they anticipated [of electoral defeat] passed by. They've now got the confidence of the Australian people. The Australian people want to see unity. They don't want to see hatred. And they want to live with a national sense of Australian pride.
The time has come. We can't keep kicking it down the road, and even the prime minister was saying during the referendum – if not now, when? So, OK, the referendum went up and it went down. That doesn't mean that that is the end of reconciliation. Reconciliation is about the substantive issues.
Update:
Date: 2025-05-26T20:30:55.000Z
Title: Welcome
Content: Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I'm Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then it'll be Luca Ittimani with the main action.
Current and former Liberal party MPs and senators have said the party's focus on culture war and a failure to properly develop and present policies cost the party the election. Speaking on Four Corner last night, former NSW Liberal president Jason Falinski said 'high-calorie, low-nutrition politics' – so-called 'fairy floss politics' – had proved costly. More details coming up.
We have an exclusive story this morning from the veteran-led organisation on the frontline of disaster recovery calling for federal government support to help establish a 10,000-strong volunteer army. It comes as police are pouring resources into flood-ravaged towns in NSW to prevent a breakdown in law and order after two men were arrested for alleged looting. More coming up.
In another exclusive, one of the architects of the Indigenous voice to parliament, Megan Davis, who says Aboriginal Australians increasingly feel the government is not listening to their views on laws and policy design, warns against closed-shop public consultations in the wake of the referendum defeat.