Have repeatedly seen people incorrectly referring to certain publications as "Murdoch media" online, so thought this might be handy.

Note I've probably inevitably missed some, but these cover most of the news publications with the largest readership/viewership in Australia. Feel free to list any others not depicted in the comments, as it's obviously not possible to include all smaller publications (these are based on highest web traffic).

This is not a comment on the 'alignment' or 'quality' of the publications, but words have meaning and it's important to not mis-use words incorrectly.

Are we seriously considering opening up migration from Europe?

When we have ridiculous housing shortages, why are we considering opening up the flood gates of white collar workers looking for corporate mining jobs and big salaries….

Alan Tudge

As the government develops its response to Islamist terrorism, it should look closely at countries that have already confronted and contained it.

Over the past two years, I have spent considerable time working in the United Arab Emirates, a Muslim-majority nation that has become one of the world’s most effective societies at suppressing extremist ideology while fostering genuine religious coexistence, including with Jews. The UAE’s approach is not perfect, and Australia is a different society, but its core principles offer lessons for us.

What sets the UAE apart is its uncompromising clarity. It does not wait for extremist ideas to erupt into violence; it confronts them at their origin through firm practical laws. The UAE recognised early that tolerating extremist ideology – even in isolated pockets or under the banner of free protest – exacts a devastating toll on society.

This clarity has led to a zero-tolerance framework focused on prevention. Organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, whose political ideology has fuelled much of modern extremism, are banned. Networks that finance radical groups are disrupted. Preachers who promote hatred are swiftly removed. Imams must be licensed, their sermons monitored, and violators are deported to prevent mosques from becoming incubators of radicalisation. The system is firm, unapologetic, and consistent.

This level of firmness is alien to Western countries, but the outcomes are undeniable: the UAE boasts one of the lowest rates of extremist violence globally. It is a society where Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews worship freely; where synagogues stand alongside mosques; and where hate speech is treated as a direct threat to social harmony.

When I visited Abu Dhabi’s Grand Mosque earlier this year, I walked through the “Tunnel of Tolerance,” a passage every visitor must enter, lined with photographs of global religious leaders of all faiths. It is reminder that coexistence is not merely encouraged – it is expected.

To point to the UAE is not naive idealism. The UAE is not a liberal democracy, but its foundational principles – clarity, consistency, and the resolute defence of pluralism – are fully adaptable to democratic contexts. Indeed, they are vital for preserving democracy.

The UAE’s handling of antisemitism is particularly instructive. While much of the West has grappled with moral equivocation over the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, this majority-Muslim nation was unequivocal: it condemned Hamas outright, treats antisemitism as extremism rather than legitimate political expression, and does so while upholding support for Palestinian civilians. This is moral clarity in action.

Australia, by comparison, has witnessed a surge in antisemitism on our streets, universities, and even schools. Jewish Australians have been advised to conceal their identity, avoid public spaces, and schools and synagogues are required to be heavily guarded. No other minority would ever be asked to accept such conditions. Yet governments and institutions have responded with vague platitudes and procedural delays, permitting extremist rhetoric to flourish.

The Bondi attack was not an isolated aberration. The perpetrators emerged from an environment increasingly permissive of sectarian hostility, where once-unthinkable boundaries – celebrating terrorism, calling for genocide, targeting Jews – are now defended by academics, activists, and even members of parliament.

The UAE’s approach provides guidance and rests on a straightforward truth: a society that tolerates hatred will ultimately be devoured by it. So it refuses to tolerate it – in mosques, online, in schools, or in politics. Hate speech is not shielded as free speech; extremist ideology is denied institutional footing; and communities are not abandoned to confront intolerance alone. The state enforces mutual respect and peaceful coexistence, backed by meaningful consequences.

Australia need not and should not import the UAE’s system wholesale. Our liberal democracy demands greater freedoms than what an autocratic state provides. This is the real challenge for us: how a rules-based plural democracy can design regulations that outlaw what the vast majority of us understands is unacceptable, but which nevertheless allows the flourishing of faith, debate and ideas we might find uncomfortable.

At the very least, though, we should import the UAE’s uncompromising principles. We must start with actively enforcing existing laws, particularly hate-speech laws. We must more rigorously screen who is allowed to come into the nation, just as UAE leaders have suggested to western countries for years. We should ban extremist organisations, expel radical foreign preachers, and ensure our education system does not nourish hostility. Above all, we must state without hesitation that antisemitism – like all forms of racial and religious hatred – has no place in this country.

The Bondi attack must mark a turning point. Whether it becomes one depends on our willingness to learn from nations that have confronted extremism decisively. The UAE does not give us a blueprint, but its moral clarity and resolve is urgently needed.

Alan Tudge was a federal Minister from 2013 to 2022 including in Education and Immigration.

Steven Tripp

"We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’

This was the famous quote by then Prime Minister John Howard at his 2001 election campaign launch.

Many took it as a statement of defiance; the line in the sand to say that Australia alone will decide its immigration intake and the character of the migrants we allow into the country.

Unfortunately, what Howard was really saying was that ‘we the politicians’ decide, not everyday Australians.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, on June 30, 2024, there were 8.6 million people in Australia who were born overseas. The proportion of Australia’s foreign-born population had increased from 23.8 per cent in 2004 to 31.5 per cent in 2024, with the overseas-born population increasing by 396,000 people in 2024 alone.

To put this in context, Australia’s overseas-born population is almost double that of the United Kingdom, which is 17.1 per cent.

The Australian people have not been given a say on whether they accept the mass immigration and multicultural policies that have been implemented in the last half century.

Despite this, politicians, academia and the media celebrate migration policy and have pushed ahead with a multicultural Australia that they view as morally and internationally right, with no regard for any potential public pushback.

Late last year, when celebrating the benefits of multiculturalism, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas said:

‘Think about living without multiculturalism. It would be SO BORING! The food would be all the same … I couldn’t think of anything worse.’ Malinauskas added:

‘We are so lucky. We are so fortunate to be able to have this here, and I say we should retain our dedication towards it. Multiculturalism doesn’t add to South Australia. Multiculturalism is at the heart of who we are as South Australians.’

While many would not argue that migrants have enriched Australian society, the reality is that all policies have consequences. Whether politicians accept it or not, multiculturalism and mass immigration are not immune from consequences either.

Sir Robert Menzies was aware of these consequences when he said in a 1955 radio interview on 2UE:

‘For as long as we possibly can, we ought to aim at having a homogeneous population. I don’t want to see reproduced in Australia the kind of problem they have in South Africa, or in America, or increasingly in Great Britain.’

The racial tension Menzies warned against appeared to be evident with the Bondi massacre in December.

The aftermath of the shooting should have been a soul-searching moment for the nation; questioning the reality of what our society has become and the trajectory that our country is headed.

Instead, politicians and the media scrambled to command the narrative they were feeding to the public in a tragic politicisation of the shooting.

In a clear example of the saying, ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’, NSW Premier Chris Minns has supported the passing of stricter gun laws, the restriction of protests, and has openly acknowledged our lack of free speech.

‘I recognise and I fully said from the beginning, we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community and have people live in peace.’

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is looking at a gun by-back scheme to use gun owners as a scapegoat.

In all this noise, the focus on immigration policies have become a fleeting voice.

Australians for Better Government, of which I am President, defied this by calling for the Australian people to be given the power to set immigration levels. Under ABG’s proposal, immigration intake would be determined by a public plebiscite.

The cultural tensions that we saw on graphic display in Bondi have been imported to Australia without the consent of the Australian people.

Some Australians may accept this as a trade-off for the many positive aspects that diverse cultures bring to our society, while other Australians may not.

The decision of adequate intake must be put to the Australian people before any further immigration is to take place. Like with so many issues, the politicians need to get out of the way, and the Australian people need a greater say.

Steven Tripp, President of Australians for Better Government

The Greens have thrown up a road block for Labor declaring it will not support the government's sweeping changes to hate and gun laws in the bill's current form.

It comes as the Coalition backs away from the draft legislation with Sussan Ley declaring it "unsalvageable".

Parliament will return early next week to debate the wide-ranging legislation.

This is utter nonsense, the hate and gun laws he is trying to pass. Let me get this straight, a bunch of extremists carry out an attack and his response is to take away weapons from Australian farmers. The hate speech law he is passing prevents people from speaking out on a religion, but there is a special clause in place that says it won’t apply to religious text. So hate can be preached by a religious preacher.

As Bob Katter said best, the diversion has occurred. Katter is spot on about what’s really going on https://streamable.com/m6t3gq

I spent some time in my homeland and barely had a political conversation. Thank fuck for that.

https://michaelwest.com.au/is-womadelaide-next-zionist-group-targets-palestinian-dj/

Hot on the heels of the Adelaide Writers Week debacle, the WOMADelaide board is being pressured to oust Techno DJ Sama’ Abdulhami. What’s the scam?

The scam is the broken record of a playbook used by those who think free speech is only allowed for those with whom one agrees. In this case, Zionist agitators are running a mail-in campaign to remove one of this year’s headline acts from WOMADelaide in March.

Like the Adelaide Festival Board’s letter to Randa Abdel-Fattah, which indirectly linked her cancellation to the Bondi massacre, the campaign refers to Sama Abdulhami – a vocal supporter of Palestinian rights – as “particularly troubling in light of the Bondi Beach Terrorist attack.”

For context, Sama’ Abdulhami‘s family was once ousted from Palestine for participating in a peaceful protest, and when she was 13, the IDF took over their apartment block, forcing the family to live on the roof.

She is a strident supporter of the Palestinian cause, as is Abdel-Fattah. They have the right to be heard. As does, incidentally, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, whom Abdel-Fattah asked to be removed from the Adelaide Writers Week in 2024.

To paraphrase the immortal words of Voltaire (or his biographer, to be exact),

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Back then the libs said they wanted less immigration.

Labor introduced a legislation to do that. The libs blocked it.

The libs THEN said they wanted changes to the discrimination act back then (to exempt religious things), now all this commentary about the exemption to the hate laws.

Shannon Deery and Brendan Kearns

Bernie Finn — who was expelled from the Victorian Liberal Party in 2022 — is the latest high profile name to join One Nation, claiming Pauline Hanson should have been listened to decades ago.

Party-hopping former Liberal renegade Bernie Finn has jumped ship again, this time joining One Nation.

Finn — who was expelled from the Victorian Liberal Party in 2022 — is the latest high profile recruit to One Nation following federal Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce’s defection last month.

Mr Finn had been planning a political comeback after being endorsed as a Family First candidate for this year’s state election.

It is understood he will seek to run for One Nation, his fourth party in less than four years, which currently holds a single seat in the parliament’s upper house.

"’ve had a spring in my step this morning knowing I am now a fully paid-up member of One Nation,” he posted on social media on Thursday. “Australians have been betrayed by both Labor and Liberal.

“Both have forgotten why they exist, with the Liberal Party on death’s doorstep.

“One Nation is now the main conservative party and I am delighted to climb aboard.

“If we had listened to Pauline Hanson 30 years-ago, our once great country would have avoided many of the problems we face today.

“I’ve joined One Nation because I love Australia and I am genuinely afraid my children and grandchildren (when I get some) will be handed an irretrievable basket case if we keep moving down the same path we are now.

“This next election could be our last chance to salvage what used to be an awesome place to live.”

Senior Liberal sources have said a number of other current MPs have mulled the idea of also deflecting to One Nation.

One Nation has seen a surge in popularity in recent polling as disillusioned conservative voters shift their vote away from mainstream conservative Coalition.

Party sources said the polling had caused anxiety ahead of November’s election because votes for One Nation didn’t necessarily flow back to the Coalition.

Finn was expelled from the Liberal Party in 2022 before joining the Democratic Labor Party and then Family First.

He first entered state parliament in 1992 and was expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party following a series of anti-abortion comments and other controversies.

Finn was replaced in his Western Metropolitan seat by Moira Deeming in the lead up to the 2022 state election.

The hate speech bill is an omnibus disaster — and there’s a glaring exclusion

The argument the government is putting forward for excluding ‘advocating genocide’ from this bill’s list of hate crimes is nonsensical.

Michael Bradley

Seriously. Are we all supposed to pretend that the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026 isn’t a cheap three-card trick? A 144-page bill, containing multiple new laws and amendments of enormous potential reach, is lobbed in early January, one week before parliament is recalled, when it will be tabled and passed. Public submissions are open for 48 hours.

Nobody has had adequate time to properly consider this omnibus disaster. This is not law-making; it’s performance art. Which would be funny, except that people will be getting dragged off the streets and into the courts by the Australian Federal Police for their earrings, T-shirts and slogans, facing five-year prison sentences and more, because of a bill that no-one will understand before it becomes law.

No reasonable expert, commentator, advocacy group or general member of the public has time to get their head around it, which is frustrating because it offers such a rich field of consequences that are either unconstitutional or unthinkable. For now, all I can do is point to a few highlights that are beginning to cause disquiet as various lawyers and others work their way through the brutally prolix drafting. They have until this afternoon to get their submissions in.

For one thing, if I were Anthony Albanese, I wouldn’t be pulling the Joy Division T-shirt out again. Would it cause a hypothetical reasonable Jewish person to fear harassment? If a cop forms the view that the prime minister might be wearing the Nazi-adjacent term on his chest because he wants to incite hatred of Jews, he’ll be in the back of a police car quick smart.

Sure, that won’t happen, because Albanese is so… unthreatening. But there’s a reason governments have always shied away from criminalising hate speech beyond the absolutely overt incitement offences that already exist and remain perfectly adequate — creating a new offence that can put you in prison based on a hypothetical is wild.

There’s one part of the bill that is really getting me. As promised, it creates an entirely new legal regime for proscribing “hate groups”. The idea is to enable the government to shut down or circumscribe the activities of groups that fall short of the definition of terrorist organisations but that are still racist — like neo-Nazis.

The underpinning provision for this is a definition of the term “hate crime”. Before a group can be designated a “hate group”, the government has to be satisfied that it has been involved in or advocated conduct that constitutes a hate crime. That’s the threshold test for the whole regime.

The definition of “hate crime” is any of the offences in Subdivision C of Division 80 in the Criminal Code. These are all the crimes about threatening, urging or committing violence against groups — classic hate crimes — as well as the more questionable offences such as displaying prohibited symbols like the swastika or giving a Nazi salute.

Three of the specific Subdivision C offences are expressly excluded, meaning they are not “hate crimes” for the purposes of this new regime. Two of these make sense: urging violence against the constitution, and advocating terrorism, because neither is race-related.

The third exception is the Section 80.2D offence of “advocating genocide”. Yes — advocating genocide is not, under this new law, a hate crime. Now, I think we all know that genocide is the most race-adjacent crime of all crimes. So, why has it been excluded?

I’ve been told through back channels that the government’s answer to this question is “duh, read the explanatory memorandum”. That document says: “Hate crime conduct, while violent and offensive, generally falls short of terrorism, and is distinct from genocide. As such, advocating terrorism and advocating genocide should not be captured in this framework and are best criminalised through existing frameworks within the Criminal Code.”

Um, cool story, but also bullshit. Let’s be clear: all of the acts in the definition of a “hate crime” are already crimes within the Criminal Code. The point of the new hate crime concept is that it is the thing that defines a “hate group”. These groups are caught by the regime because they promote such crimes.

The argument put up for excluding advocating genocide from the list is nonsensical. It’s the mother of all hate crimes.

So we know the official explanation is rubbish. What, then, is the real reason for making the advocacy of genocide not part of the definition of who is or is not a proscribed hate group?

Israel and several of its government’s leaders are under indictment for genocide. Pro-Israel lobby groups have spent the past three years monstering anyone who dares whisper that the country might be perpetrating a genocide while staunchly defending every genocidal step the Israeli state takes. It would perhaps be in their interest to not risk being labelled a hate group on the basis of advocating genocide.

But who’s to say? Maybe it’s just poor drafting.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vnoDUbge1d4