Anthony Albanese is terrified of One Nation, and he proved it at Labor's national conference

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese spoke for 30 minutes at Labor's 50th national conference in Adelaide on Thursday and handed most of it to One Nation, a party that holds 2 out of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. What the conference served up over three days was propaganda, misinformation and lies, and we have gone through the lot.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas had warmed the room up before him with a lame dog joke, and Sky News host Andrew Bolt sat through both and played the tape back under the headline "The 'shocking' Labor government has only built One Nation up".

Bolt's point was that Labor spent its biggest set piece of the term swinging at a party with two lower house seats, and swung at it harder than it swung at the Liberals. If you want to know who a government thinks its opposition is, watch where it aims.

Stay with this one. It runs long because it has to, and by the end you'll see why this is the worst prime minister and the worst Labor government the country has produced and this week, Adelaide put it on a stage for the whole nation to see.

The Prime Minister's first order of business was division

Before the policies and before One Nation, Albanese's first act on stage was an Acknowledgement of Country, delivered in front of three flags and after a Welcome to Country ceremony. First order of business, division.

The two men in Sky's coverage are Mickey and Lewis O'Brien. Mickey O'Brien, a senior Kaurna and Narungga man Sky captioned as an Indigenous activist, gave the Welcome to Country. The elder beside him is his father, Uncle Lewis O'Brien, born at Point Pearce Mission in 1930 and, at 96, the oldest living Kaurna person.

Not power bills, not wages, not the housing you can't afford. Ceremony and category, top of the agenda. A Welcome speech is paid work, going for $300 to $750 per booking, and freedom of information figures released by the Coalition put the bill across 21 federal departments at $452,953 over two years, an average of $1,266 a ceremony and roughly $225,000 a year. Labor even spent the week writing support for Welcome to Country ceremonies into its national platform, alongside a new antiracism framework, in case the opening wasn't clear enough.

This is Hanson's whole argument, and Albanese walked on stage and acted it out for her. She says a government's job is to build one Australian culture that everyone belongs to without creating division. Labor's instinct, on show in Adelaide, is the opposite: sort Australians into groups and treat the sorting as the main event.

Peter Malinauskas's failed dog joke

Labor gets one national conference every three years, and this one gave it three days in a convention centre with 2,000 delegates and a platform to write for the next election. South Australia's Premier opened it, and this was his best material.

"In an erratic world filled with ill discipline and division, we've been reminded this week of that time honoured political truth: if you can't govern your dog, you can't govern the country,"

He means Barnaby Joyce, who paused an ABC 7.30 interview on Tuesday to tell his dog to sit down. That's the whole bit. A dog was where it wasn'ts supposed to be in front of a camera, and Labor built the opening of its biggest event in three years around it.

So that's the case against One Nation. Dog handling. And it was never really aimed at Barnaby Joyce, it's aimed at you, because every day spent on a dog is a day Labor doesn't spend explaining why real wages have gone backwards 5% since 2021.

Malinauskas also warned the conference about a cheap imitation of global populism. South Australians have already had a look at both and picked the original. At the state election in March One Nation took 24.4% of the Legislative Council vote and three seats, one more than the Liberals managed, with former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi at the top of the ticket.

It hasn't stopped climbing since. DemosAU from it's June 2026 poll has One Nation second in South Australia on 26% with the Liberals third on 18%, and the two party count is no longer Labor against the Liberals but Labor against One Nation, 56 to 44.

Peter Malinauskas is a Labor premier whose opposition is now Pauline Hanson's party, and his answer to that was deflection through a lame dog joke insulting everyone's intelligence.

Albanese attacked an escalator and One Nation which lasted 30 minutes

The Prime Minister arrived by escalator. It stopped working without warning while he was still on it, like his policies. He stumbled while holding the handrail, which is the only reason this stays a light story; Sky News described it as narrowly avoids fall.

In fairness to the escalator, stopping work without notice at a Labor national conference isn't a malfunction, it's solidarity. When he finally got to the microphone, it was time to drop the clown act.

Bolt's sharpest observation in his review was a comparison. At Labor's last national conference three years ago, he said, Albanese didn't mention One Nation once. On Thursday the Prime Minister couldn't stop.

"While you can go a long way in politics, for a long time, by raging against a system that you're a part of, without a plan to fix it, or blaming people who cannot defend themselves for a problem they did not cause, that doesn't build anything," Albanese said, as reported by Sky News.

Housing Minister Clare O'Neil went at the same target from a different angle, telling the conference One Nation "is trying to use the language of working people to sell an agenda that works against them". She might want a word with the tradies. One News reported this month on the death threats, the suicide attempt and the "CFMEU tax" that have been driving union members out of Labor's orbit and into One Nation's.

Albanese turns a green eye to Hanson's overseas trips

The passage Labor briefed hardest was this one.

"All those attention seeking culture wars, imported from overseas, all those trips around the world to talk Australia down, cannot disguise the fact that none of them have anything new or anything positive to offer our country,"

A few problems. The first is money. Hanson's European trip was privately funded and didn't cost taxpayers a cent, which is more than can be said for most of the travel done by the people complaining about it.

The second is the phrase "imported from overseas". The single most contested cultural practice in Australian public life right now is the Welcome to Country, and Labor has just written support for it into the national platform. Albanese opened his own speech with an Acknowledgement of Country. Whatever else that is, it isn't One Nation's import.

The third is the word pretend. Albanese calls the culture wars attention seeking, as though someone made them up for effect. His own government doesn't act like it. Labor appointed a special envoy to combat antisemitism and a second to combat Islamophobia, and put close to $90 million into security and social cohesion around the Hamas-Israel conflict, on top of ongoing funding to guard Jewish places of worship. You don't spend that kind of money protecting people from a culture war that isn't real. He stood on a stage and called it pretend anyway.

What Hanson actually did overseas was walk through Luton and describe what she saw. Australians are free to decide whether that counts as talking the country down. Labor would rather they didn't get the chance.

And here's the part Albanese never touches. What Hanson went to Britain to see, and came home warning about, was Islamist extremism, the violent ideology and not the faith, and how far it has been allowed to spread. Britain has just raised its national terror threat level to severe, still rates Islamist terrorism as its primary threat, and ended last year with 267 people in custody for terror offences, the most since records began. In April it finally opened a national inquiry, chaired by Baroness Casey, into the grooming gangs with around 250,000 victims its own authorities spent decades refusing to name.

That is the warning Hanson brought home. Albanese files it under talking the country down, and has not a word to say about whether any of it is already here.

Albanese proves he doesn't understand multiculture or monoculture, so we explained it for him

The Prime Minister's set piece rebuttal was a incorrect history lesson with no fact checking, and he was pleased with it.

"Even the very first Labor government was not a monoculture. There were Protestants and Catholics, English, Irish, and Scots. One was an American pretending to be a Canadian, and no one was quite sure if the leader was born in New Zealand or Chile."

That was Albanese's proof. A Labor cabinet from the White Australia era, sorted into English, Irish and Scots, Protestant and Catholic. Every man on it white, British and English speaking. His example was to hold up a room full of Britons who went to different churches and calling it multiculture.

Every man on that list was white, British descended and English speaking. They shared one language, one crown and one legal system. Sorting them by denomination and county doesn't describe a multiculture. It's a very detailed description of a monoculture.

And it's the two men he singled out that finish the argument off.

The leader he's attempting to reference is Chris Watson, Labor's first prime minister but overall third prime minister in office from April to August 1904, born in Valparaiso, Chile, to a German Chilean father and an Irish mother. Watson was also one of the principal architects of the White Australia Policy. During the debate on the Immigration Restriction Act he told the Parliament that racial purity was the larger and more important object.

That's the man Albanese chose to prove Labor was never a monoculture. The one who helped build one.

And nobody was unsure about his birthplace by accident. Watson was taken to New Zealand's South Island at the age of one and raised in Oamaru, he let biographical profiles list him as New Zealand born, and later he misrepresented his parents on legal documents. Birth overseas to a non British father would have made him an alien and ineligible to sit, so Australia's first Labor prime minister was probably disqualified from the Parliament he led, and he kept it quiet for the rest of his life. Historians only confirmed the Chilean birth after his death.

His biographers put the concealment down to convenience at first and then to politics, including his eligibility and the risk of xenophobia. So, Watson hid a foreign birth and a German father because he had reason to fear the prejudice of the country he was helping to build.

The American pretending to be a Canadian is King O'Malley, born in Kansas in 1858, who claimed a birthplace in Quebec because a United States citizen couldn't sit under section 44. The claim was doubted in his own lifetime and historians still don't accept it. O'Malley wasn't in Watson's government either. He didn't reach cabinet until 1910.

Albanese either knew exactly what these men were, White Australia founders who hid their foreign nationality to keep their seats, and maniuplated the story that flattered him anyway, or he stood up at his own national conference with no idea who he was talking about. Deceptive or clueless. Neither is what you want in a prime minister.

The party itself wasn't a bystander in any of this. Labor pushed for a harder line than the Barton government took, wanting the excluded races named outright rather than filtered through a dictation test. The historian James Jupp records that the strongest support for White Australia came from the left of politics, and that Labor and the trade unions were the most militant opponents of Asian immigration well into the 1960s. The Australian Workers Union didn't abandon the policy until 1972.

So Albanese went looking for the moment Labor proved it was never a monoculture, and landed on the government whose party platform was built to create one.

None of it answers what Hanson actually said. Her monoculture argument has never been about where Australians are born. It's about what a government promotes once they're here, one law for everyone, one flag and one shared Australian culture, with everybody welcome inside it.

A monoculture is one shared national culture that everyone living here belongs to, one flag, one law for all, one common set of values, regardless of where they were born. One News went through the difference between a monoculture and a multiculture and put simply, it's a shared national culture that everyone living here belongs to, one flag, one law for all, one common set of values, regardless of where they were born.

Bill Kelty joined the Labor Party in 1964 and says something is wrong with this place

The most damaging thing said about Albanese's economy this week didn't come from Hanson, Bolt or anyone at One Nation. It came from a Labor member of 62 years standing.

Bill Kelty, a central figure in the union movement's role in the Hawke and Keating economic reforms, gave a written submission to a parliamentary committee this week citing OECD figures showing a 5% fall in real wages since 2021.

"We know the underlying malaise, productivity change is the third lowest in the OECD. Investment is low. Growth per capita is non existent. Government expenditure is rising much faster than inflation. The tax on working people is increasing faster than their wages."

He finished with a line no speechwriter in Adelaide would touch: "Something is wrong with this place and we need to do something about it." Kelty wasn't a delegate. The economic session at the conference passed its amendments without a single speaker against.

This Adelaide conference was three days for this party to prove why it should still govern. Andrew Bolt watched it and said Labor had only built One Nation up. He was being kind. They didn't just build it up. They handed it the microphone, sold the merchandise and read out the polls.