Newsroom edition: three leadership contests and the future of Australian politics
Reged Ahmad talks to head of newsroom Mike Ticher, national news editor Jo Tovey and chief political correspondent, Tom McIlroy, about whether changes in leadership could mean a change in our politics
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The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Kemi Badenoch says she does not feel Nigerian and no longer has passport
Kemi Badenoch has said she does not see herself as Nigerian and no longer has a passport for the country. The Conservative Party leader was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria. When the country's economy collapsed in the 1990s, her parents took advantage of her British passport to get her out, sending her at the age of 16 to live with a family friend in south London to continue her education. She said she had not renewed her Nigerian passport in two decades in an interview with the Rosebud podcast. 'I have not renewed my Nigerian passport, I think, not since the early 2000s. 'I don't identify with it any more, most of my life has been in the UK and I've just never felt the need to.' She said she had to get a visa to visit the country when her father died, which she described as a 'big fandango'. 'I'm Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents… but by identity I'm not really. 'I know the country very well, I have a lot of family there, and I'm very interested in what happens there. 'But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it's my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family – my extended family, I call it,' she said. The North West Essex MP said her early experiences in Nigeria shaped her political outlook, including 'why I don't like socialism'. 'And I remember never quite feeling that I belonged there,' she added. The Tory leader said the reason she returned to the UK as a teenager was a 'a very sad one'. 'It was that my parents thought: 'There is no future for you in this country'.' She has not experienced racial prejudice in Britain 'in any meaningful form', she said. 'I knew I was going to a place where I would look different to everybody, and I didn't think that that was odd,' she said. 'What I found actually quite interesting was that people didn't treat me differently, and it's why I'm so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.'
The Sun
3 hours ago
- The Sun
Who asked for population of Greater Manchester to flood UK in just 4 years? Politicians are so out of touch with public
WHAT holds a country together? It's one of the most important questions a nation can ask. Yet, today, were you to quiz anybody in Westminster, they would probably stare back at you with a blank expression, unable to give you a convincing answer. 11 This was not the case in the most ancient civilisations, such as Greece and Rome, of course, where this question was always on the minds of leaders. In Ancient Greece, the writer Pericles warned that leaders will only hold their state together so long as they listen to the people they lead, 'for only then can leaders rule with their trust'. And in Ancient Rome, too, the statesman Cicero reached the same conclusion, warning the leaders of the city state that unless they look after their own people first — which he considered their 'highest duty' — then their civilisation will rapidly crumble from within and become vulnerable to external invaders. Why, you are probably asking yourself, am I rewinding the clock to these ancient thinkers? Because what they understood is what far too many of our politicians in Westminster today fail to understand — that once this sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled breaks, there is no going back. Once leaders become so out of touch, so adrift from the people they claim to represent, then their civilisation will plunge into chaos, carnage and darkness. And is this not what is happening in Britain today? A political class, a ruling class, that increasingly looks utterly adrift from the hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding majority? Take another issue some of those ancient philosophers alluded to: The influx of outsiders and foreigners through the deliberate policy of mass uncontrolled immigration. Who voted for this? Only this week, shockingly, we learned that the population of England and Wales is growing at the fastest rate in history, with some 707,000 people added last year and some 2.5million since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic. Who voted for this? Seriously? Who voted for this population explosion, for a pace and scale of change that is now leaving many of our communities and our country unrecognisable? Who asked for their leaders to add the equivalent of the entire Greater Manchester area in only four years? And just look at how dramatic and historically unprecedented this is. Between the election of Margaret Thatcher, in 1979, and Tony Blair, in 1997, the annual rate of population increase in England and Wales never surpassed a peak of 188,000 people in a single year, and averaged roughly 111,000 people over each 12-month period. 11 But since Covid? Well, thanks to policies introduced by the hapless 'Uniparty', by politicians on both the Left and Right who are now openly ignoring what the people want, if not treating them with total contempt, these numbers have rocketed. Some 618,000 people were added to our population in the year to June 2022. Another 821,000 in the following 12 months. And now, in the year to June 2024, as we learned this week, another 707,000. What is the main reason for this? Well, it's definitely not what's called 'natural growth' among the native English and Welsh people — the kind of growth that ensures a country grows and evolves at a natural pace, where change is manageable. No. Far from it. Almost all of our population growth today is because of mass immigration, with 1.1million people migrating into England and Wales in the 12 months to June 2024, and 452,200 leaving. Think about that. Around 1.1million people in just one year — equivalent to adding a city the size of Liverpool, comprised entirely of migrants, in just 12 months. This is insane. Claims are nonsense And on top of that we can add another fact we discovered this week, which is that the number of small boat crossings this year alone has now surged above 25,000, up 51 per cent on the same point last year, and taking the total to more than 170,000 illegal migrants since 2018. The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. What would those ancient thinkers have made of this, too, I wonder? A nation-state that cannot even control its own borders, where mainly young men of fighting age from distant lands are flooding freely into our country on a daily basis? In Westminster, our completely hapless politicians will try to distract you and downplay all this by blabbering something like 'we have always had an asylum problem', or, even worse, 'we have always been a nation of immigrants'. Both of these claims are nonsense. If you want to get a sense of just how historic and unprecedented this population explosion really is then consider just one astonishing fact, shared this week by an expert on the topic, Dr Paul Morland. In every single year since Tony Blair came to power, since 1997, there has been more immigration into these islands than there was throughout the entire period between the Anglo-Saxon era in the 5th and 6th Centuries and World War Two. At least until the last quarter-century, in other words, this country was defined by what those ancient thinkers thought was essential to maintaining the unity and survival of a state — a stable population with manageable rates of change, and where, on the whole, the people did trust their leaders because those leaders did make an attempt to listen and respond to the people. But today all that is long gone. Today, in sharp contrast, we are living in a much more fragile and febrile civilisation where, as the likes of Pericles and Cicero warned, our leaders are no longer fulfilling their first duty of keeping their own people safe. Far from it. Our borders are completely and utterly out of control. We do not know who is coming in and who is going out of the country. Bound by shared history We have even discovered that our own leaders have been importing members of the Taliban, alongside thousands of other Afghans, while gagging the Press and refusing to tell their own people. And now, because of this policy of mass uncontrolled immigration — a policy that nobody in this country ever voted for — we have a sense of what is about to unfold. White Britons are now forecast to become a minority in this country by the year 2063, and much sooner for the under-40s. 11 11 The foreign-born and their descendants will emerge as a majority by the early 2070s. And roughly one in every four people on these islands will be following Islam by the end of the current century. Unless something changes, and changes soon, then all these trends will only accelerate in the years ahead, completely transforming our communities and nation, and ushering in enough people to fill six cities the size of Birmingham in the next 12 years alone. The English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said that a nation is held together by something deeper than a contract — it is bound by a shared history, a shared culture and the sense we belong to one another. Is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe. But how on Earth can we ever hope to hold a nation together that is experiencing this scale of population change? That is imposing policies and broken borders on a people who never voted for this, and never asked for it. And how, we might also ask, is it even possible to maintain things like a shared sense of history and culture when millions of people are being added to the population, more than 80 per cent of whom are today coming from outside Europe? I do not know for certain what those ancient thinkers Pericles and Cicero would make of it were they to come back to life and assess the state of Britain today. I suspect that, like thousands of years ago, they'd warn we are living in a civilisation that looks set to crumble from within — a place where our leaders no longer appear all that interested in fulfilling their responsibility to the people and where mass immigration is blowing apart that once sacred bond between the rulers and the ruled. And for these reasons alone, they would probably conclude that unless we can somehow find our way to a radical change of direction then our civilisation, as we currently know it, will most likely not survive. 11 11 11
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
Victorians could soon have the right to work from home two days a week under Australian-first laws
Victorians could soon have a legal right to work from home two days a week, under proposed Australian-first laws to be introduced to parliament by the state Labor government in 2026. The Victorian premier, Jacinta Allan, will use Labor's state conference on Saturday to announce the proposal, which, if passed by parliament, would make the state the first in the country to legislate the right to work remotely. Allan will tell party faithful if a job can reasonably be done from home, employees would have the legal right to do so for at least two days a week. The law would apply to both public and private sector workers, though how it would be enforced and other specifics were not outlined ahead of her speech. In a statement, the premier said that working from home was popular, it saved families money, cut congestion and allowed greater workforce participation, particularly among women with children, carers and people with a disability. Sign up: AU Breaking News email 'Work from home works for families and it's good for the economy,' Allan said. 'Not everyone can work from home, but everyone can benefit.' The announcement sets the stage for a political fight in the lead-up to the November 2026 state election, given the Coalition opposition has previously signalled plans to return the public service to the office full-time. The shadow treasurer, James Newbury, told the Herald Sun in February that the government 'should be requiring public servants to work from the office' but stopped short of confirming whether the Coalition would enforce a mandate. The issue was also a flashpoint at the recent federal election, with Peter Dutton forced mid-campaign to reverse a policy to restrict work from home arrangements for public servants due to public backlash. Allan's statement said consultation on the legislation would be led by the Department of Premier and Cabinet and would cover the types of businesses and the size of businesses that would be included, as well as the definition of remote work and who was able to do it. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion It stressed the consultation process 'won't determine whether working from home should be a right' as that position had already been decided. Instead, it would focus on 'the appropriate laws to reflect it'. It said 'several legislative options were available'. Allan will be left to rally the room of 600 Victorian Labor delegates, with the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, unable to attend as he will be at the Garma festival in the Northern Territory. It will mean the deputy prime minister, Richard Marles, will be the most senior party figure at the two-day event and placed in an uncomfortable position as delegates vote on a review of the Aukus submarine deal he has strongly backed. Other urgency resolutions up for debate include a call for the federal government to immediately recognise a Palestinian state and impose sanctions on Israel, rejection of the Allan government's proposed protest laws – described as 'anti-democratic and regressive' – and for all 44 public housing tower sites slated for redevelopment to remain in public hands.
