Rita Panahi:
Let’s bring in deputy executive director at the Institute of Public Affairs, Daniel Wild.
Dan, do you buy this late stage patriotism from Labour, particularly coming from the likes of Julian Hill?
Daniel Wild:
Oh, I don’t believe a word he says, and he doesn’t believe a word he says. How can you say you love Australia when you spent the first term of Parliament advocating for racial division with the voice to parliament and deriding people who want to cut immigration as racists? So he doesn’t believe any of this at all.
As you rightly said, this is all One Nation. We were told, “Oh, don’t worry. One Nation’s just taking votes from the Liberal party.” No, they’re not. They’re taking votes from the Labour Party as well. So it is all politics, but this is significant. So you have a very far left ideologue, good friends with Albanese, who is now saying, we have to celebrate Australia Day. Even if he doesn’t believe it, they now know that they have to say it.
Same with Jason Clare. He doesn’t believe anything he said about the national curriculum.
Rita Panahi:
No.
Daniel Wild:
And even he now has to say that the curriculum needs to have national pride. This shows that we have won the culture wars. We may not have won it in Parliament, but we’ve won it in the public. And the fact that these far left Albo said, “I love to fight Tories,” right? This is his government that is now saying, “Let’s get behind Australia Day. Let’s support the flag. Let’s not call people racists when they say we’ve got to cut immigration.” Doesn’t this to show that we’ve won that culture war that we were told we’re not allowed to fight?
Rita Panahi:
And really wanted without the coalition really doing much at all. It’s been left to the culture and to One Nation and other smaller players to have that fight because the coalition has just been too terrified to even enter these culture wars.
And when we talk about Julian here, let’s not forget it wasn’t too long ago that he demonised Jacinta Price, caught her commentary racist because she essentially repeated what a Labour pollsters said about the voting patterns of Indian migrants who naturalise and take part in our democracy. That’s the sort of fellow he is, to now pretending to be some faux conservative who loves the country and loves Australia Day. I ain’t buying it either.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah, I don’t buy it. And people will see through it. Now, in terms of your point about the coalition, what the Liberal party leadership needs to do now is they need to press labour on this issue. Are you going to stand in front of one flag? Are you going to legislate to protect Australia Day? Are you going to legislate to ban or criminalise the burning of the Australian flag? So these words are fine, but now the coalition needs to press the advantage and actually seize the opportunity to show Australians that he’s not fair dinkum about this at all. And if there’s legislation put into Parliament, they’ll vote no. Labour will vote no.
Rita Panahi:
Well, let’s look at some of the latest polling. This is for demos, and it shows that, this is an interesting figure, among female voters, Dan, One Nation is now leading with 29% of the primary vote, ahead of Labour on 27, and the Coalition on 21, up 1% there. I got to say that’s a turn up for the books. We assume, or the passion has shown that female voters tend to lean more left than male voters, particularly young female voters. But we are seeing there a really broad spectrum of support for One Nation. It’s not just your over 55. It’s not just those who are in regional areas. The support is coming from all sorts of quarters.
Daniel Wild:
I love this because we have all known that the trope used by the old Liberal party establishment that we have to appeal to female voters, we have to appeal to young voters. I agree. You have to appeal to all voters, but it was a cliche, a smokescreen for the Liberal party needs to go to the left. But One Nation has shown that that is completely wrong.
And guess what? Women care about our culture as well. They care about immigration. They want to cut immigration. They believe the things we were talking about, about the flag, our national identity. The idea that you have to quarantine certain policies for certain demographic groups was always just a trope used by the left-wing of the liberal party to justify getting the party to go to the left. And where did that get them? A 15% primary vote. That’s what happens when you do that.
Rita Panahi:
Every time they lurch to the left, whether it’s Malcolm Turnbull, whether it’s Sussan Ley, it’s whether it’s Scott Morrison signing up to net-zero, they lose and they lose badly. And they seem to learn no lessons from a Dan. I’m hoping this time around there’s been some learning.
Now this is a massive improvement in what we’ve seen from the Coalition when it comes to the East Safety Commissioner. They are now demanding that Labour establish a full review into the use of takedown notices by the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant after the courts ruled them to be unlawful and outside the scope of her powers then. Julie Inman Grant has attempted to force the removal of several posts, but the one that’s been in the courts and in the news recently was by a children rights advocate, Celine Bumgarten, who criticised a primary school, a primary school for teaching radical gender ideology to children as young as eight. And for some reason, Julie Inman Grant decided that post should not exist, try to take it down. And good on this mom, this single mom for fighting this because so many others wouldn’t. The stress, the cost of going through this process is something most people don’t want to take on.
Daniel Wild:
Well, Julie Inman Grant is out of control. She’s got to go. And the eSafety Commission needs to be shut down because it’s not a safety commission, it’s a censorship commission. And this is significant, as you mentioned, by Sarah Henderson to say this. And it’s an example of how we are winning on these issues on freedom of speech. Now remember, Julie Inman Grant famously wanted to ban the video of Mar Mari Emmanuel getting stabbed in the eye because it was violent, but then she didn’t want to get rid of the videos of George Floyd, for example.
Rita Panahi:
No, because that’s useful to her side of politics.
Daniel Wild:
So she has a political agenda, she’s a political activist. And if you believe that this role should exist, which I don’t, but even if you believe it should exist, we cannot have a political activist who wants to police and censor the internet in that role. So this is a very, very good development from Sarah Henderson and the Coalition.
Rita Panahi:
It is a very positive development because for too long, the Coalition and labour have been on a unity ticket when it comes to the office of the eSafety Commissioner. While that office has been used to push politics, it’s supposed to be there to protect children from online harm, but it’s morphed into something entirely different and we see it again and again, whether it’s to do with radical trans ideology, whether it’s got to do with Islamism. And it’s always this notion of social cohesion and safety that’s used to justify this censorship.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah, it is. And like with almost anything, it’s started under the Coalition-
Rita Panahi:
Always.
Daniel Wild:
… as the Children’s eSafety Commissioner. And I get the arguments, there’s a lot of content that children can access and they shouldn’t access online. And I’m not talking about social media. I’m talking about the very violent and obscene material. Now, whether the government can stop that or not, I’ve got no idea, but I understand why a lot of people want it. But then they drop the word children. It’s no longer the Children’s eSafety Commissioner. It’s the eSafety Commissioner. So it’s a classic example of mission creep that the bureaucracy always engages in.
Rita Panahi:
Yes, the slippery slope is a… Well, it’s a rollercoaster.
Daniel Wild:
It is.
Rita Panahi:
It has changed into something entirely different in a very quick period of time.
Now let’s have a look at the latest inflation figures released today. Headline inflation came in at 3.8% while trimmed meat inflation. The Reserve Bank’s preferred measure rose to 3.4%. That’s up from 3.3 in December. And Dan, that’s well outside the Reserve Bank’s target band of 2 to 3%. This isn’t good news for interest rates, for mortgage holders. This is pretty grim really, because we’ve had such pressure put on households with consecutive interest rate rises. We’re expecting to see a whole raft of decreases. And the last movement was up and it looks like the next one may be up as well.
Daniel Wild:
Oh, definitely. I mean, when people say inflation is steady, that still means prices are going up. So it’s still going up-
Rita Panahi:
Yeah. It’s steady at a high level.
Daniel Wild:
The increase is the same. It’s not accelerating. But look, the RBA stuffed it. I mean, they chose to cut rates before the election in what was, in my view, a political exercise. I think they came under pressure and they buckled. And they cut rates when they should not have done that.
Michelle Bullock herself said that if you cut rates, you’re going to end up with higher rates in the future because inflation will get out of control. That is exactly what has happened. Now, the government’s not off the hook because they’re pumping money into the economy without growing the economy. So that’s why you’re getting an increase in inflation.
Rita Panahi:
But should the RBA just keep increasing rates? It seems to be such a simplistic measure when we can see so much of that inflationary pressure is coming from government spending. So while are we punishing households that are doing the right thing, that are already hurting, that are already experiencing quite severe cost-of-living pressures, why are we punishing them further when it’s just the government that is pumping more and more money into the economy and causing inflation to stay well above what the RBA considers to be an acceptable level?
Daniel Wild:
Well, that’s a really good point, and I think there’s a couple of things. The only way you can really get inflation down is by taking money out of the economy. So you can do that, as you say, interest rates mean that you’ve got less spending power if you’ve got a mortgage. You can increase taxes, which we don’t want, but it does mean that you’ll have less money. Or you can cut spending, so there’s less welfare and government spending going out so then you’ll have less spending. But no matter what happens, someone’s going to have pain, right? There’s going to be pain associated with getting inflation down. There’s no way around it.
Rita Panahi:
Now, the New South Wales government has turned the police forces Operation Shelter into a 24/7 rapid response unit, armed with 250 officers tasked with tackling hate-related and religiously motivated offences.
Dan, the programme was originally established in October 2023 to crack down on anti-Semitism, but has now been made a permanent fixture of New South Wales police. How do you see this development? We obviously have an issue with increase in anti-Semitism, and that sometimes is resulting in acts of violence, threats, things that are against the law. But when you’ve got a unit devoted to hate crimes and we’ve got new hate speech laws, it makes me a little bit nervous.
Daniel Wild:
I’m alarmed. I’m really alarmed. And I think this is going to be… How long is it before someone gets a knock at their door about a Tweet? I think that’s going to happen. And the whole problem is it’s not as if we haven’t had the laws to deal with the problem, like intimidating people are being… That’s already unlawful. The police just didn’t enforce the laws. So now they’ve got these broader laws, which is about hate speech or hate crimes or hateful activity. I’m alarmed at where this is going to go. And I really do think that this is going to take us… And it’s not going to go fully there yet, but it’ll be bits and pieces and you’ll see someone is going to have a knock at the door from police for something they’ve said, and then the horses will have bolted on this.
Rita Panahi:
Well, Dan, you say, we don’t know where this is going to go, but we’ve got an idea because we’ve seen these sort of laws in countries like Germany and the UK. And it has a really quite a sinister impact on everyday folks, sometimes even saying mainstream opinions that are not acceptable. And there seems to also be a development of a two tier system where certain beliefs and certain groups are targeted while others are allowed to do as they wish.
Daniel Wild:
And we saw this in COVID, right? The two tiered policing system that the New South Wales… I mean it wasn’t as bad as Victoria, but there were different rules that applied to different people. We saw that with the October 9 so-called protests where I guarantee you, if the shoe was on the other foot, the cops would’ve been there with batons and everything. Unfortunately, we just can’t have any, I guess trust that this is going to be used in a impartial and equitable manner.
Rita Panahi:
And now we’ve got, in New South Wales alone, 200 and police officers devoted to policing this. So I think we’re going to see the impact fairly quickly.
Daniel Wild, thank you so much for your time tonight. Thank you.
This transcript with Daniel Wild talking on The Rita Panahi Show Sky News Australia from 25 February 2026 has been edited for clarity.
