Paul Murray:
Chrysten Abraham is running for the lower house seat of Frankston in the upcoming Victorian election. She’s doing it as an independent. She joins us every Sunday. Daniel Wild joins us as well from the IPA. He joins us now from Adelaide. Lovely to see you both. So I want to ask you about what James McPherson was talking about in the previous hour, which was, so in TAFE, if you do online TAFE in New South Wales at the start of a module, you get a Welcome to Country. If you do four modules in a day, you get four Welcomes to Country. Can I suggest to you, Chrysten, that the way to do this is a loudspeaker, start of the day, one Welcome to Country. Or when you log on for the first time in 24 hours, that’s where you get your Welcome to Country. Four of them though? Please.
Chrysten Abraham:
Paul, before I answer that question, I do have to say your Bathurst Our Town sounds like a junket. I’m sorry. I hope the execs aren’t watching.
Paul Murray:
Excuse me. How could you say that? I mean, Anika Wells has played no role, no role in advising us on the location for our town a couple of weeks away from my favourite sporting event of the year. How dare you.
Chrysten Abraham:
You haven’t gotten any tips from Anika Wells on the Labour Party. Okay. I’ll go from there.
Paul Murray:
No.
Chrysten Abraham:
But just on the Welcome to Country, I do think that virtue signalling has gone too far. Didn’t we have Australian officials go to Azerbaijan and then do a welcome to country as well? And no wonder people are dropping out of TAFE at record rates and not finishing their trades because unfortunately when you do it like that, it loses its meaning and it’s a waste. It’s a waste of their time and schooling when they can be learning a proper education, Paul.
Paul Murray:
Again, look, I never went to an institution that did the Lord’s Prayer, and I don’t know whether it was ever done more than once in a day, even at the most Catholic of Catholic schools. But I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been done four times a day, Daniel. But that is the role of this. This is what they’ve simply gone, “What was, will be replaced with,” right? And in the same way that if you didn’t like that, well, we’ll shout at you about this. It’s a very obvious change here, and it’s not particularly organic. But four times in a day? Four.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah, it’s ridiculous. I mean, I’ll one-up you, Paul. I don’t reckon they should be doing Welcome to the Country on the loudspeaker. Why don’t they blast the national anthem?
Paul Murray:
Oh, yes.
Daniel Wild:
On the national speaker. Or you could do –
Paul Murray:
But not the version with that (singing) at the start. I don’t like the (singing), it’s unnecessary. I’ve never grown up with the extra (singing) but it’s always there when they just want to string it out a little bit. Just a though.
Daniel Wild:
That’s fair enough. I’ll go with you on that one. But look, I will say that does anyone feel welcomed by Welcome to Country anymore?
Paul Murray:
That’s a good question.
Daniel Wild:
Seriously, they are aggressive, they’re hostile, they’re demeaning, and they’re designed to demoralise us. I mean, when you’re sitting there, whether you’re at TAFE, whether you’re in the grandstand watching the footy, whatever you’re doing, I don’t know anyone who feels better. Do we feel more united? Do we feel more connected to our fellow Australian after a Welcome to Country? I certainly don’t. So just get rid of them. I mean, yes, when you go into a genuine situation of indigenous people, great. But on all other occasions, enough is enough. Get rid of them.
Paul Murray:
I never like being accused of not talking about what is the biggest story of the day and apparently the biggest story of the day was something Pauline Hanson said in a podcast, not last week, not last month, but back in February that magically returned to the news cycle this weekend because the Labour Party’s in no trouble whatsoever. And the media’s not doing any favours to try to quickly change the subject from particularly their big loss when it came to War and Pickering last week. That said, I won’t ignore the obvious. This is what she said. Now, you don’t have a go at someone’s mum. I’m not a fan of having a go at someone’s mum, but this is what she said.
Pauline Hanson:
Health commission houses should not be there for people to live in them for 30, 40. And he said his mother lived in the same one she was born in for 65 years. Sorry, that’s not on to me. It should be limited time. You’ve been given a hand up, moving on to the next one’s coming through.
Anthony Albanese:
I am stunned at these comments, but I’ll make this point. If Pauline Hanson wants to criticise me, then that’s fine. But my mother was way out of Pauline Hanson’s league, way out of it.
Paul Murray:
And magically, because this got put back on the table and the pearl clutching, right? Now hang on. Okay. Chrysten, here’s the thing. Again, not where I would’ve gone, don’t like where this went, right? But I also just might hold back some of the rage if it’s taken seven months for it to come out, a little bit like some of the rage about TV shows that two weeks later magically people get annoyed about or people who want to pretend, “We’re a week after that podcast with the Melon Lady. What are you talking about?” Come on.
Chrysten Abraham:
They’re trying to pile on to One Nation at the moment. That’s why they went looking for this kind of dirt to sling against them because Labour and Liberal are currently teaming up about the whole Andrew Hastie saga and traitor saga that’s going on at the moment. Commission housing should not be a long-term solution. It should be the opportunity for people to get back on their feet, get a roof over their head, and if they have the capability to get back into society and then let the next cohort of people go into commission housing.
But my question here for Anthony Albanese is he was elected as a member of parliament in 1996. His mother, which he has said passed away in commission housing in 2002, he was making three times the amount of an average Australian when he got elected. So why did his mom still pass away in commission housing? It kind of feels, and I know that it’s outrageous for me to say Paul, but it kind of feels like he left her behind and just like the Australian people are getting left behind at the moment.
Paul Murray:
Well, again, right, you’re right to say it. My right to respond, which is that his response would be, of course, that obviously we don’t know what her illness was and obviously certain people of a certain age, and she was only in the 60s when she died, they don’t want to move at all. But Daniel, again, and again, it feels like a Rorschach test, right? This is the classic one of everything Pauline Hanson says is the worst thing ever. Or the prime minister, oh, there’s this area you can’t possibly go near. Again, if this was a blow up that happened in the week the podcast came out, I would be treating it a little more seriously.
Daniel Wild:
Look, I agree with you. What you’re going to see from now until polling day is these things on Pauline Hanson are just going to be put out week by week. So they’ve got a dossier from here to Gibraltar about things Pauline Hanson has said, and they’re now going to engage in the systematic politics of personal destruction.
Paul Murray:
Yup.
Daniel Wild:
Because One Nation just wiped the floor with Labour in Western Australia by winning Labour voters. This wasn’t One Nation taking the right wing vote. They took Labor’s vote. So alarm bells are ringing. They’re going to try to do to Pauline, what they did to Peter Dutton, which was Albanese is very unpopular, so they’re going to try and drag down Pauline’s numbers down to below his numbers because it’s all you can do when you’re unpopular. So you’re going to see more and more of this. So if you’re Pauline Hanson, what you need to do is you need to tell your story to the Australian people. Otherwise, you will be defined by Labour in the same way Peter Dutton was, and it could be all over.
Paul Murray:
Well, I also think that there’s an opportunity here where, don’t forget, both of them were elected in 1996. Telling the story of he was where I was in ’96, where was he in ’96? Where was I in ’98? And explaining the differences. And again, going back to that central value about always being on the money and him being a complete machine of Canberra. So Chrysten, we’ve discussed before about social media and the social media laws the government’s putting in place, whether it is going to be too much or not. Again, it’s not that I am trying to find a backdoor way to curry any points for the government I couldn’t care less about with people who clearly are not going to tuck me into bed at any one time.
Again, is this one of those moments where there’s a kick from right in front? Okay. So if all the system is a system that says, “If all I want is to get Daniel and Chrysten in my feed, because they’re the ones I follow. I don’t want random stuff from other people, I just want those two.” Well, okay. The problem for me is when the minister has the power to nuke either of your accounts if the content is harmful. And remember, harmful has changed as a word and its definition. Remember? Widen it and then lower it so that everything you don’t like becomes harmful. Remember, silence is violence.
Chrysten Abraham:
Well, their MAD bill didn’t get up and what they’ve done, they’ve gone away behind closed doors. They’ve stripped it back completely and they’ve cut it up into provocative size pieces where they can make it sexy and say, “Your algorithm, your choice,” or whatever that may be so that the everyday punter, and I’m not calling you an everyday punter, Paul-
Paul Murray:
Can any time you want.
Chrysten Abraham:
… but the everyday punter can’t see that we’re in a boiling pot and the Labour Party is slowly turning up the heat and our freedom of speech and freedom of choice is slowly being eroded. Now, people vacated MySpace and went to a different social media platform. And if social media is so bad, something else will come up and someone else will move onto it. But we cannot risk our freedom of speech and give ministers powers like this. It’s not on.
Paul Murray:
Yeah, 100%. Even the watered down version. I don’t want that, right? But I want that to be, in my view, the way to get to either the heart of the death star or the outer limits of it and perhaps it’s weapons here. Daniel, obviously the IPA, it’s baked into your bones that this is not the place to be, but what do you think of what is being offered here? Is it what Kristen said which is, look, we couldn’t get the whole thing through, so let’s get a whole bunch of little Trojan horses and shove them through one by one by one by one.
Daniel Wild:
Yeah. I mean, what they’re doing, so this government’s hell-bent on censoring the internet. This is the third crack they’re having at it, right? So the first crack was with what Chrysten said, the misinformation laws, which was so toxic that they didn’t even bother putting it for a vote in the Senate because it was going to get defeated. Now, misinformation was if you don’t support this, you don’t sport democracy. Then they had a crack after Bon died with the hate speech laws. Now they got their hate group laws through, but they had a crack with hate speech laws. And what they said there was, “We need hate speech laws because of social cohesion. In other words, don’t talk about immigration.” Now again, these were so toxic that they had to get rid of those.
So this is attempt number three. Attempt number three is if you don’t support these laws, you don’t care about kids. So that’s the line they’re running now. They’re all basically similar incarnations. It’s all about giving the government or some kind of authority like the e-safety commissioner more control over what can be said on the internet. But I reckon the digital duty of care is kind of going to die, right? I mean, you look at Anika Wells trying to defend it. She doesn’t know who’s included. She won’t admit how much power she has, but she won’t deny it. I think the government will backtrack a bit on it, but certainly this law has to be completely kiboshed because it’s unconscionable to give government control over what can and can’t be said online.
Paul Murray:
I’m with you. All right. Thank you guys. Do appreciate it. We’ll see you again next week. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you very much too, Chrysten-
This transcript with Daniel Wild talking on Paul Murray Live – News24 from 13 September 2026 has been edited for clarity.
