# Australia **Australia** appears in the vault mainly through two channels that have little to do with each other: the [[AUKUS]] submarine pact, and the fact that the [[Murdoch Family]] media empire began there. The second is the more consequential for this knowledge base — the template for partisan broadcast media was built in Australian and British markets before it was exported. > [!note] Canonical country record > This page owns the bare name **Australia** and is the default target for `[[Australia]]`. > Its history is at [[Australian History Hub]]. > A page covering its influence operations directed at the United States, if one is built, belongs in /Foreign Influence/ under an adjectival title and does **not** claim this name. ## Politics in 2025–26: the right breaks [[Anthony Albanese]]'s Labor government was returned in a landslide at the **3 May 2025** federal election and holds **94 of 150** House seats. The defeat broke the conservative side rather than disciplining it, and the beneficiary was [[One Nation (Australia)]] — a party that took about **6.4–6.6%** of the primary vote at that election. | Date | Event | |------|-------| | **8 December 2025** | Former Nationals leader and deputy prime minister **Barnaby Joyce** defects to One Nation, keeping his House seat of New England and taking the party's NSW Senate ticket | | **13 February 2026** | **Angus Taylor** ousts Sussan Ley — the Liberals' first woman leader, about nine months in the job — in a party-room spill, **34–17** | | **27 February 2026** | Ley resigns her seat of Farrer | | **9 May 2026** | **Farrer by-election**: One Nation's David Farley wins a seat the conservatives had held for over fifty years — the first time the party has won a House seat at an election rather than by defection. Two-candidate result reported at **57.6–59.3%** depending on count stage; Labor did not stand | The polling arc, as each outlet reported it: | Poll | Fieldwork | One Nation | Labor | Coalition | |------|-----------|-----------|-------|-----------| | Federal election | May 2025 | 6.4–6.6% | — | — | | Redbridge/Accent | early Feb 2026 | 26% | 34% | 19% | | Resolve | mid-Mar 2026 | 24% | 29% | 22% | | Newspoll | Apr 2026 | 24% | 31% | 21% | | Newspoll | 1–4 Jun 2026 | 31% | 30% | 18% | | Newspoll quarterly | 13 Jul–18 Sep 2026 | 30% | 29% | 19% | Through mid-2026 One Nation was level with or ahead of Labor on primary vote while the Coalition ran third; Labor still led on the two-party-preferred count in June. Australia had been the vault's early case of right-populism held at the margin by major-party absorption; in 2026 the margin stopped holding. ## AUKUS and the American defence-tech channel The Trump Pentagon opened a review of [[AUKUS]] in **June 2025**. Its findings reached Canberra in early December, and at the annual defence ministers' meeting that month all three governments declared it intact: Pillar 1 still supplies at least three Virginia-class submarines followed by the jointly built SSN-AUKUS class, and Australia committed a further **US$1 billion** to the US submarine industrial base, bringing its contribution to **US$2 billion**. The UK's John Healey: "The reviews are done. It's time to deliver." What the review asked to change was not disclosed. The program was amended again in 2026 — see [[AUKUS]]. The faster channel is [[Anduril]]. In **September 2025** Canberra announced a five-year **A$1.7 billion (US$1.1 billion)** program for the Ghost Shark extra-large autonomous undersea vehicle, built by Anduril Australia, with first deliveries due January 2026 — years before any nuclear boat arrives. See [[Australia Ghost Shark Order]], [[Anduril Indo-Pacific Partnership Push]] and [[Palmer Luckey]]. ## Why it appears in this vault - [[Murdoch Family]] and [[Rupert Murdoch]] — the empire's origin market - [[White Australia Policy]] — exclusion written as administrative procedure, from the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 to formal abolition in 1973 - [[One Nation (Australia)]] and [[Pauline Hanson]] — right-populism two decades early, now contending for first place - [[John Howard]], [[National Firearms Agreement]] and [[Port Arthur Massacre]] — the conservative who did the gun reform the American right calls impossible - [[Alexander Downer]] — Howard's foreign minister, whose 2016 conversation with George Papadopoulos fed the opening of the FBI's Russia inquiry - [[AUKUS]], [[Five Eyes Alliance]] and [[Quadrilateral Security Dialogue]] — the alliance stack aimed at [[China]] - [[Answers in Genesis]] — one node of the exported culture-war infrastructure ## See Also - [[Australian History Hub]] · [[Countries Hub]] · [[World History Hub]] · [[Anthony Albanese]] · [[Pauline Hanson]] · [[AUKUS]] · [[Anduril]]