Population, housing and the next generation
Population growth should serve Australia rather than become an objective in itself. Migration levels should be aligned with housing, hospitals, schools, transport, water, energy, roads, other infrastructure and integration capacity.
Young Australians should have a realistic opportunity for independence, secure housing and home ownership. Addressing that challenge should focus on supply, infrastructure, construction capacity and population settings rather than retrospective punishment of older Australians who lawfully accumulated homes or savings.
Create opportunity for the young - do not manufacture equality by retrospectively diminishing older Australians.
Energy policy: technology neutral, resource neutral, evidence driven
Reliable, secure and internationally competitive energy is fundamental to Australian living standards, industry, national resilience and future technology.
Australian energy policy should be technology neutral, resource neutral and evidence driven. Coal, gas, hydro, solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, nuclear and future technologies should be assessed on complete system considerations rather than political preference.
Those considerations include affordability, reliability, security, emissions, environmental consequences, scalability, transmission and storage requirements, construction time, system life, decommissioning and national resilience.
Australia should build adequate replacement capability before removing generation on which households and industry still depend.
Energy policy should ultimately serve Australians - not an ideology or a preferred technology.
Nuclear power: allow the evidence to answer the question
Australia's nuclear position deserves scrutiny. Australia has operated nuclear research reactors at Lucas Heights since 1958. HIFAR (High Flux Australian Reactor) was originally constructed in part to test materials for future nuclear power reactors; OPAL (Open Pool Australian Lightwater reactor) now supports nuclear medicine, research and industry. Australia mines and exports uranium. Through AUKUS - the Australia-United Kingdom-United States security partnership - Australia is developing the skills, regulatory systems and industrial capability required for conventionally armed nuclear-powered submarines.
Yet Commonwealth law prohibits licensing a commercial nuclear power plant and specified fuel-cycle facilities including fuel fabrication, enrichment and reprocessing plants.
The statutory prohibition arose in the late 1990s against a much longer history of genuine concerns about nuclear weapons, testing, proliferation, safety and waste. A prohibition imposed in one political and technological era should not be immune from examination in another.
Australia also supports the use of Australian uranium for civilian nuclear generation overseas. Earlier Australian Government statements on uranium supply to India said it would help India meet rapidly growing electricity demand and improve the welfare of its people. More recent Australia-India cooperation has been framed around energy security and increased non-fossil-fuel capacity.
Those are legitimate objectives for India. They are legitimate objectives for Australians too.
None of this proves that nuclear electricity would be Australia's cheapest option. Nor does it prove that investors would finance it or that construction, waste and decommissioning challenges are trivial. It establishes a more basic proposition: Australia should be permitted to test the case.
Removing the prohibition would not build a reactor. It would allow proponents to demonstrate safety, environmental protection, security, waste management, financing, construction feasibility, decommissioning and economic competitiveness under a rigorous modern regulatory regime.
A prohibited industry cannot provide a meaningful market test of investment interest. If private capital will not invest once nuclear generation is lawful, the market has answered an important question. If nuclear cannot compete economically, the evidence should expose that too.
Prohibition should not answer the question before the evidence can.
AI, data centres and Australia's future electricity demand
Artificial intelligence is not merely a technology policy issue. It is becoming an energy policy issue.
AI-focused data centres are driving rapid growth in electricity demand internationally. At the same time, population growth increases demand from homes, transport, hospitals, schools, businesses and infrastructure. If Australia wants to support a growing population while hosting data centres, advanced manufacturing, AI capability and a modern digital economy, it will require substantial quantities of dependable electricity.
That makes it increasingly important to assess every credible generation technology on evidence. Nuclear is a low-emissions source capable of firm generation and is being expanded or reconsidered in a number of countries, but it should compete rather than receive a predetermined victory. Renewables, storage, gas, hydro and future technologies must be tested on the same complete-system basis.
Population growth, digital growth and future prosperity will require more electricity, not less - and Australians should be free to choose the best evidence-based mix.
Resources development, strategic assets and national resilience
Australia's mineral and energy resources are an extraordinary national endowment. The Australian Government's September 2026 Resources and Energy Quarterly forecasts resource and energy export earnings of about $422 billion in 2026-27, after about $403 billion in 2025-26. The sector supports investment, employment, wages, company profits, taxes and state royalties and makes a major contribution to Australian living standards and public finances.
Export earnings are not the same as government revenue. Government receives revenue through taxation, royalties and the wider economic activity generated by productive industries. That distinction matters when discussing how Australia's prosperity is created and how public services are funded. What is clear is that Australia's resources sector makes a significant contribution to our national prosperity, living standards and public finances.
Resource projects should face rigorous environmental, economic, heritage and safety assessment. They should be approved or rejected on evidence - not mythology, political fashion or slogans. Legitimate Indigenous legal rights and genuine heritage should be respected without turning unverified claims into an automatic veto over national development.
Foreign investment can bring capital, expertise and jobs, but strategic assets - including critical minerals, energy, ports, water, farmland, technology and essential infrastructure - warrant appropriate scrutiny.
Australia should remain globally engaged without becoming strategically helpless. Defence capability, domestic maintenance and manufacturing, fuel and energy security, communications, cyber capability, medicines and critical supply chains form part of national resilience.
Develop our national inheritance responsibly. Respect its contribution to our living standards. Welcome investment. Protect sovereignty. Let facts decide.
Civic education
Australian students should understand Parliament, Federation, the Constitution, the rule of law, democratic rights and responsibilities, and the complete Australian story before and after 1788.
Civic education should be neither mythology nor a catalogue of shame. If Australia expects new citizens to understand the country they are joining, Australian-born children should understand it too.
Teach the whole story - institutions and achievements, failures and injustices.
Australia Day
I support retaining 26 January as Australia Day. That does not require pretending Australian history began in 1788 or denying that the date is painful for some Indigenous Australians.
The date marks an event without which modern Australia would not have developed as it did. A mature country can acknowledge painful history while celebrating the shared country that subsequently emerged.
Changing the date would not necessarily create greater unity. It could itself become divisive by asking Australians who regard 26 January as an established national day to surrender a tradition they value. The test should therefore be practical as well as symbolic: would changing the date genuinely strengthen national cohesion, or risk replacing one source of division with another?
Our history cannot be rewritten. It can continue to be added to.
Constitutional stability and the republic
Australia is already a sovereign democracy with elected governments and stable institutions. Constitutional change should solve a meaningful practical problem rather than operate primarily as symbolism.
The burden should remain on proponents of major constitutional change to demonstrate the practical national benefit. Stability is itself valuable, particularly when Australia faces substantial challenges in productivity, housing, energy, defence, infrastructure, cohesion and living standards.
Change what needs changing. Do not discard functioning institutions merely to demonstrate that change has occurred.
Responsible government, spending and accountability
Government resources are finite. Every dollar ultimately comes from taxation, other public revenue generated by the economy and Australia's national resources, or borrowing. Borrowing itself must ultimately be serviced from future public revenue.
When governments describe a service, benefit or program as 'free', what they usually mean is free to the person at the point of use. The service itself still has a cost. Medicare is an obvious example: a patient may not receive the full bill personally, but doctors, nurses, hospitals, medicines and equipment still have to be paid for.
This does not make publicly funded services undesirable. Some are among Australia's greatest achievements. It does mean they are not costless. Governments should explain what a program costs, how it will be funded, whether it is sustainable and what competing priorities may consequently receive less.
Excessive government expenditure can eventually require higher taxation, additional borrowing, reduced expenditure elsewhere, create inflationary pressures - or some combination of them. Higher taxation can reduce the disposable income available to individuals and families, while inflation reduces the purchasing power of the money Australians retain.
Australians are also entitled to know how large government is becoming relative to the economy that supports it. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total value of goods and services produced in Australia over a given period. A useful discipline would be for governments to state a long-term target or range for normal public expenditure as a percentage of GDP. The precise percentage should be openly debated rather than invented here, and it need not necessarily be legislated. Its value is accountability.
Only One Flag presents serious opposing positions fairly and answers them respectfully. Issues such as the flag, Indigenous recognition, protest restrictions, nuclear economics, constitutional change, migration, government spending and sex-based sporting categories all have serious counterarguments.
Taxation as a percentage of GDP and government expenditure as a percentage of GDP are different measures and should not be confused. For context, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported total taxation revenue across all levels of government of $839.0 billion in 2024-25, equivalent to 30.2 per cent of GDP. That figure is not itself a target for expenditure; it simply illustrates the scale of public revenue relative to the economy.
The question is not always whether government should spend less. It is whether expenditure materially advances the interests of Australia and Australians and whether the benefit is sufficient to justify the cost imposed collectively upon them.
A fair go applies to the taxpayer too. Governments spend Australians' money; Australians are entitled to understand the cost, purpose and consequences.