Happy New Year from The Last Place on Earth

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t feeling very festive leading up to the summer break. I was slow, tired and weirdly unfocused - the end of a big year, for sure, but it felt like something more global was at work on top of my seasonal depression. It felt like an especially low-key Christmas everywhere, which in Australia was doubtless due to the large shadow of the Bondi anti-semitic terror attack and the weeks of reaction, grief and upheaval that has followed.

I didn’t post anything about Bondi in December (in fact, I didn’t publish anything on the website in December) because I didn’t know what I could add, really. The significance was immediately obvious, and the rapid response from certain quarters that same evening confirmed the symbolic impact. As we approach a month of front page banners every day in both of WA’s newspapers, and when a range of right-wing politicians were jumping on it within hours, it feels to me like the only thing missing was a bit of context.

15 innocent civilians killed for their religion or ethnicity would have been a slow day for the IDF in 2025. For months last year, they slaughtered starving civilians in circumstances not a million miles away from those at Bondi Beach on that terrible Sunday. In just five weeks from June 1 2025, 798 Gazans were murdered by the IDF while queueing for food, starving families trapped in a fenced in cordon within the slightly larger Gaza cordon. The Bondi terror attack could hardly have more to damage the cause of Palestinian protest and activism, leading immediately to a tightly coordinated push to clamp down on expressions of collective horror and outrage at the appalling, endless backdrop to life in 2025. But exploiting the actions of a couple of maniacs to suppress peaceful protest against an ungodly horror is unlikely to lead to the social cohesion the politicians claim to seek.

Chris Minns claimed that "when you see people marching and showing violent, bloody images, images of death and destruction, it’s unleashing something in our community that the organisers of the protest can’t contain." But if the intifada was globalised, it wasn't by protests or people in keffiyehs but by Israel gunning down civilians with sub-machine guns and automated drones and double-tap missile strikes - despite or even because the eyes of the world were watching horrified on our phone screens, the same way I watched images of the Bondi terror attack almost as it unfolded.

The responses from both sides of politics have been atrocious. Labor has been weak and lead-footed, and it is curious that the Prime Minister continued to refuse calls for a Royal Commission as they grew to a deafening chorus (it makes me wonder what he thinks it might uncover). But by the same token Albanese's acknowledgement of the suffering and anger of the Jewish community and others in the aftermath was grandiloquent and empathetic, even if it opens him up to attack. Compared to the Coalition’s ongoing blitzkrieg at a time of national shock and mourning, Albanese seems conservative while Sussan Ley leads a MAGA-style assault on common decency. It may pay off but in the short term it is off-putting and ill-fitting. It’s hard to see any meaningful leadership out of any of them. The Greens meanwhile have seemed sidelined, presumably aghast at what has become of the movement they located themselves in the middle of. Everyone just seemed numbed.

In 2025 it felt like the fight had kind of gone out of things. Even just writing about it retrospectively I can feel the lethargic, apathetic undertow. It sucked. And I say this from a position of seeing significant gains in our ongoing campaign against Woodside’s Burrup Hub, another topic I plan to dissect more this month. 

2025 was a year in which the climate got cancelled by Trumpism (if I were to draft a political messaging guide for 2026, it would probably lead with “Don’t Say Climate”). 2026 looks set to be the year that things begin to fall apart in a big way. The insanely avoidable fire in the Swiss Alps hours into the New Year seems like an appropriate augury for highly contagious international news that hasn’t really let up since. People on a picket line asking me whether this is what it felt like before World War II is one thing (in some ways I reckon World War I ending the gilded age is a better reference point), but even the New York Times Opinion board reckons “the world is in chaos. What comes next?”

It could be enough to make you wonder what political commentary based in Western Australia has to offer in these times. Naively, I maintain the answer is plenty. The perspective of The Last Place on Earth has always been a studied innocence in the face of the corruption and hypocrisy of government, while never expecting anything else than to be lied to and let down again. In 2026, I’m rebranding our social media tagline to "exposing the cover-ups.” The West Australian government overplayed its hand in trying to protect the gas industry in 2025, as the Murujuga narrative gradually came apart in their hands, but the public hasn’t paid enough attention to the media class to realise it yet. But the integrity and credibility of WA Labor is at record lows at precisely the time that federal Labor looks west to model its own approach to forever government. Mainly, that’s because the people who made McGowan look good have either moved into Parliament themselves or followed McGowan out the door and back into the private sector, while Roger Cook mugs for the cameras like a smiling sunbear on quaaludes.

WA has moved from direct political interference to a general cultural course-setting for the country. Albo may just want to be the longest-serving PM in Labor history, but he should beware of the baggage that builds up along the way we do it in WA. As Labor continue to lead with a glass jaw, they finished 2025 by bedding in more laws that cement WA’s slide into tinpot authoritarianism. The only thing saving Labor from itself is that so far no one has been paying attention. This year we’ll see if that starts to shift.

In 2026, I won’t be podcasting (even if a veteran journalist last week referred to one of my social media reels as "your podcast"). It’s ironic - given that audio is my natural medium, talkback radio is a treat and I count this interview as my favourite media clipping - that I’ve never recorded a podcast I’ve been happy with. Now that may be equally true of my print pieces, which usually feel like tortuous exercises in fishing for objects lost in a lake, but the overheads for editing decent audio are even more exigent. 

Equally ironically, it’s the kind of media that I’m unquestionably most uncomfortable using that I’ll likely continue to produce the most prolifically for the foreseeable. I only downloaded Instagram for the first time in February, and was soon wielding short-form video content across a range of campaign platforms. In my experience, it’s not that hard to make it go viral. The difficult bit is dealing with the cost, which is feeling your spirit slowly leave your body through your forehead with every fresh edit. Scrolling is the inevitable corollary of posting, and I can’t honestly say I remember a single piece of short-form video content I think is worthwhile as an artistic, social or cultural artefact. But some of them are very funny. And watching the engagement metrics and follower counts tick upwards, or stay static, is possibly the purest form of addiction I’ve encountered, in that it’s entirely parasitic, artificial and pointless.

On Christmas Eve I completed my final edit for the year, posted it on Instagram and Tiktok, and deleted both apps and the editing software off my phone. For good measure, I also got rid of all my news apps. The relief was immediate. I finished my first book that day (The Remains of the Day, strong recommend) and another the next, so that between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day I’d probably read more books than in the entirety of some recent years. An actual excitement for reading was just a discrete expression of the very perceptible emergence from the fog of attention-sapping online content that had immersed me for much of the year.

In America, in November, the immediate experience was the excitement of political rallies like the one I wrote about here. As the trip went on though, I became aware of something stronger and darker. A black cloud of tech capital looms on the horizon and I will be focused much more on AI this year. You can talk about it many terms, but it strikes me that a literal alien invasion, emerging for millennia, is now taking its final form in front of us in a reckless, breathless escalation of novelty towards some insane singularity. I’m not sure for how long the algorithm will allow you to warn about its ends and impacts, but I expect to post about it extensively in the interim.

Is there anything worth saying from here about the apocalyptic Yeats poem unfolding a world away and right in front of us? 2026 has begun with a riptide of omens and fractures that surely won't let up now that the rules-based order appears to have finally been holed well below the waterline in Caracas. The water is rushing in. At the same time, Mamdani's inauguration and the ongoing rise of Zack Polanski's "eco-populism" in the UK will be tested in coming and months, and if One Nation hauling in the Coalition in national polls this week shows anything at this point in the election cycle, it's surely that the stage is set for some kind of progressive populism in Australia as well - if anyone can organise it.

I ended 2025 at the end of a long dirt track a few hills out the back of Mullumbimby with some friends I love dearly. They have three angelic children, no phone reception and no internet - not by design but just by virtue of moving from rolling farmland into dense rainforest with a couple of cabins cut out of it. I had to break the news about Maduro, and the kids were keen to catch up on the cricket when we went into town for lunch on my last day in NSW, but otherwise they’re finding it’s actually pretty great getting offline for good.

'The Last Place On Earth' has always meant many things to me, and I’ve always resisted articulating it out loud, but people keep asking. In Western Australia, we’re at the end of a long pipeline that can take years to bring us cultural and political developments from upstream. We’re also at the cutting edge of colonisation and its impacts, but equally have far greater exposure than most places to what a grounded connection to the real world could look like. As data centres drain the earth of our basic life force, that seems to me to be something worth exploring more. I will always be a campaigner first and foremost, and you can expect more pieces investigating key issues this year, but there’s space for reflection around the edges too, where time allows. I thought about dropping paid subscriptions entirely this year, but there’s no paywall, so if you’re paying currently and happy to keep doing so, it can't hurt.

I've been wishing everyone a happy new year for the past week, and it's probably time to stop now and just get on with it. I hope the summer has been restorative and replenishing for you like it has been for me, and I hope you’re ready for 2026 - it’s gonna be a bumpy ride. Enjoy!