It’s still warm enough to wear skimpy swimming trunks. After asking ChatGPT about the hottest time of the day, I’m standing at the end of a 50-meter open-air swimming pool between a beautiful harbor that hosts large gray naval ships and a tree-lined park lined with what Australians cheekily call “grain smugglers.” I never wore them in the UK; almost everyone does here. I inhale deeply and drink in the sight. It’s the last day the Andrew (Boy) Charlton Public Outdoor Pool is open before it closes for the Southern Hemisphere Fall/Winter season.
There is a common joke around this time of year about the “last good day”. “Quick, let’s go swimming, I think this will be the last good day before autumn bites.” The joke is that, on this island, the “last good day” never comes. Australians are used to living in the sun. Their country is relatively rich with world-class public services, wonderful weather and a high quality of life. Its major cities top global life expectancy tables. It is not without problems, but for a very long time, the country has been #blessed. It has lived up to its nickname: The Lucky Place. From 1991 to 2020, Australia enjoyed one of the longest streaks of uninterrupted growth in the developed world in recent human history, stalled only by Covid. The Great Financial Crash hurt Australia, but not as much as it hurt other developed countries. Almost three decades of glorious growth after almost every other country struggled with various recessions and crises.
The voting system – mandatory, ranked-choice voting – is widely regarded as superior to first-past-the-post and ensuress politics is won and lost mostly at the center while punishing extremism. Australia has also enjoyed a number of progressive victories in recent years: a female prime minister, Julia Gillard, whose parliamentary stance against misogyny went viral in 2012 and inspired a whole new generation of Australian feminists; a landslide “yes” result in a national postal vote on same-sex marriage equality in late 2017; now a Labor prime minister with a large majority is in his second term and aiming for a third.
In the previous year’s election, Anthony Albanese didn’t just beat his opponent, Peter Dutton. The Australian public rejected the right-wing opposition leader of his conservative party so harshly that he lost the seat he had held for 24 years. He was the first opposition leader in Australian history to lose his seat. Things looked so rosy that UK Labor invited the Albanian to its party conference in Liverpool in September 2025 to give a speech on defending democracy from right-wing populists.
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But half a year is a very long time in politics. In Australia today, the color red may evoke less of Labor’s proud progressivism than a traffic stop, an alarming warning, or even bloodshed, previously unthinkable in a country where mass-murdering gun crime was thought of as a horrific incident in living memory, virtually unheard of. December’s Bondi Beach massacre, the deadliest terrorist attack on Australian soil, put to bed the quiet belief that Australia’s remote geography insulates it from global grievances “out there”. Other clouds, too, look set to darken Australia’s long summer. Complaints “out there” are breaking the bank.
Key Tory MPs are defecting to the far-right populist One Nation party, led by Pauline Hanson. Not just any MP. In December, Australia’s former deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, left his party to join One Nation. Hanson remains the leader. She first entered parliament in 1996, warning that Australia was in danger of being “suffocated by Asians”, who, she argued, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Since then, her targets have included Indigenous Australians, African migrants, asylum seekers and Muslims. Famously, when asked by a TV reporter if she was xenophobic in 1996, her two-word response became a catchphrase with which people mocked her: “Please explain.” It was used as evidence of her lack of intellect, poor vocabulary, and a racism so ignorant that she didn’t even know the official word for it. Since then Hanson has survived a prison spell for electoral fraud (later overturned on appeal), a parody of the drag queen “Pauline Pantsdown”, and dismissal from political power.
What started out as mockery of someone seen as unrefined and uneducated has now been reclaimed and weaponized against the very people who used it to laugh at it. “Please Explain” is now the name of Hanson’s YouTube channel, and the perfect catchphrase to challenge the perceived excess of political correctness that she parodies through cartoons. When Trump was first elected in 2016, she open cracked champagne outside the Australian parliament. In the same year, Hanson returned to the lower house for the first time since losing her seat in 1998.
Now, the erstwhile Hanson has returned from the political wilderness and sits in Australia’s upper house as a senator. Encouraged by Trump and Farage, her political stunts have become wilder. She has twice worn the burqa in parliament as part of her campaign to ban it. In March, the far-right party won its first seat in the lower house in a state parliament outside notoriously conservative Queensland. In April, Australia’s richest person, mining magnate and notorious conservative Gina Rinehart, donated a $1 million plane to One Nation. As Hanson posed next to the private jet, describing it as “sexy”.
All these currents played out on May 9, in a by-election triggered by the resignation of Australia’s first female opposition leader, Sussan Ley. The seat of Ley, Farrer, had been held by the Conservative Liberal-National Coalition party for 77 years. One Nation won with a majority, the first ever victory for a country in the lower house of the federal parliament. The nature of the protest vote was clear. Experts described a “political earthquake”. An Australian political commentator observed: “The Liberals are being humiliated. For the second time in two months, One Nation is relegating the party that ruled Australia for two-thirds of the post-war era to third place.” He concluded: “Australia is on the brink of a populist insurgency led by a long overdue racist.” Other long-standing positive conditions are somewhat evaporating. Australians are not only feeling the brunt of the twin cost of living and fuel crises, but they now also have the highest inflation in the developed world (4.6 percent).
Thinking this, I wonder, as I swim, if Australia has really seen its last good day. As I finish my 15-lap swim in the Olympic Pool, hours before it closes for four months, a white autumn cloud has obscured part of the sun. I fear this is not the last time I will shiver as the sun slowly fades.
(Further reading: Paging Prime Minister Farage)
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