For much of his adult life, the Prime Minister has been a hard left activist. And now that the once dominant Labor Right faction is all but dead, and the party itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of the hard left ∼ and all the socialist, Marxist madness that comes with that ∼ we were always going to get to a place where the Prime Minister would say all the right things about the defence of our nation and, in particular, Labor’s support for a nuclear-powered submarine fleet but it would eventually be exposed as yet another Albanese lie.

Because Albanese’s heart has never been in AUKUS, and it was obvious, it has always been obvious, that the longer Labor was left in charge, the more it would be watered down over time.

Enter former Labor cabinet minister Ed Husic this week, alongside a very telling group of fellow left-wing travellers, to demand that Australia must rethink its commitment to AUKUS, and to nuclear submarines in particular. And in a real challenge to Albanese’s authority, Husic is demanding a new caucus vote on the AUKUS agreement.

No accidental timing

This timing is not accidental. Next month, in late July, the ALP National Conference will be held in Melbourne. Out of this conference will come the next Labor platform, and what’s in it will be binding on all members and MPs.

Already there is disquiet about AUKUS, and with the Left faction now in control of the delegate numbers, Husic’s push is ominous.

There are two key drivers behind the push to dismantle AUKUS. The first is that modern Labor does not believe in a defence force where our military gets deployed to defend our values, where the legal use of lethal force is a primary purpose for its existence, and where alliances matter. On defence, Labor is weak. They think our defence force is a humanitarian aid body, a smarter-dressed version of the State Emergency Service, to be deployed to natural disasters but otherwise kept out of harm’s way lest the ADF’s chronic underfunding be exposed.

And the other thing behind Labor’s aversion to AUKUS is that hard heads know a nuclear-powered submarine program in this country will require a nuclear industry to sustain it. And the lack of homegrown nuclear competence has long been a key argument against the development of a nuclear power industry for Australia. Well, not anymore, once the first nuclear subs arrive — because the small modular reactors that could be the mainstay of a future nuclear power grid are virtually the same reactor type as that which powers a nuclear submarine.

Nuclear power a staller

Meaning, that once we have nuclear subs here, we have the ready potential for nuclear power in terms of local engineers and physicists regardless of whether or not we maintain the fiction of Australia’s nuclear power ban.

That’s the reality. And that is what’s driving the move by Husic and others; and it’s the others who demonstrate just how serious this anti-AUKUS revolt really is. Front and centre in Canberra was former minister (and Albanese mate) the Midnight Oil frontman, Peter Garrett — who cut his political teeth on nuclear disarmament in the '70s and '80s.

Alongside him was Fremantle MP, Josh Wilson, who represents the seat where one of these nuclear submarine bases will go and who almost lost his seat last year, as well as a key left-wing union boss. Garrett also has the support of former PM Paul Keating.

So, let’s pull this apart. Labor’s lack of seriousness about defence is self-evident in the recent budget. They have cooked the books by including in the headline defence spending figure more than $10bln in veterans' welfare payments and $2bln in funding for intelligence agencies.

Strategically, too, look at the lip service this government has paid to our allies. Look at how we rolled over on Palestine in the UN, and our repeated failure to provide any support into the Middle East, even where our interests in fossil fuels are at risk.

Albanese would never be the sort of leader prepared to deploy our troops even where our national interest is at stake because, essentially, the left regards the warfighting and killing that is at the core of what a defence force exists to do as somehow illegitimate, certainly uncomfortable.

Secretly changing definitions

They are embarrassed that this is the job of our soldiers and nothing shows that more than the way the Albanese government secretly changed the definition of a war crime before they went out and charged one of our most decorated war heroes.

Speaking alongside Husic in Canberra was former admiral Chris Barrie, who is set to front the independent community-led AUKUS inquiry. And on the rise of China, he basically conceded that Beijing will soon dominate the world so we all better adjust to that reality.

Since when has this nation built on Anzacs become surrender monkeys? We have an alliance called AUKUS because it is a two-way street and it ceases to be a two-way street if we expect the United States to hold up their end while we do not hold up ours.

Labor doesn't like defence and is terrified that nuclear subs will mean nuclear power. Because nuclear power means the end of the net-zero gravy train. Because it has always been about the billions in subsidies. It was never about saving the planet or lowering emissions; it’s just been a way to rebrand unpopular foreign aid and keep the grifting in place.

So, watch the PM very closely — that’s my tip. He will pretend he’s still backing AUKUS but he will let the sabotage continue. And it will all come to a head at Labor’s National Conference next month.

The big AUKUS dismount

It was always going to come to this. The big AUKUS dismount, led by the political left and allowed to happen by a Prime Minister who has been one of its most loyal foot-soldiers, even when he has tried to pretend otherwise so as not to spook voters in election campaigns.

For much of his adult life, the Prime Minister has been a hard left activist. And now that the once dominant Labor Right faction is all but dead, and the party itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of the hard left ∼ and all the socialist, Marxist madness that comes with that ∼ we were always going to get to a place where the Prime Minister would say all the right things about the defence of our nation and, in particular, Labor’s support for a nuclear-powered submarine fleet but it would eventually be exposed as yet another Albanese lie.

Because Albanese’s heart has never been in AUKUS and it was obvious, it has always been obvious, that the longer Labor was left in charge, the more it would be watered down over time.

Enter former Labor cabinet minister Ed Husic this week, alongside a very telling group of fellow left-wing travellers, to demand that Australia must rethink its commitment to AUKUS, and to nuclear submarines in particular. And in a real challenge to Albanese’s authority, Husic is demanding a new caucus vote on the AUKUS agreement.

Nothing accidental in this

This timing is not accidental. Next month, in late July, the ALP National Conference will be held in Melbourne. Out of this conference will come the next Labor platform, and what’s in it will be binding on all members and MPs.

Already there is disquiet about AUKUS and with the Left faction now in control of the delegate numbers, Husic’s push is ominous.

There are two key drivers behind the push to dismantle AUKUS. The first is that modern Labor does not believe in a defence force where our military gets deployed to defend our values, where the legal use of lethal force is a primary purpose for its existence and where alliances matter.

On defence, Labor is weak. They think our defence force is a humanitarian aid body, a smarter-dressed version of the State Emergency Service, to be deployed to natural disasters but otherwise kept out of harm’s way lest the ADF’s chronic underfunding be exposed.

And the other thing behind Labor’s aversion to AUKUS is that hard heads know a nuclear-powered submarine program in this country will require a nuclear industry to sustain it. And the lack of homegrown nuclear competence has long been a key argument against the development of a nuclear power industry for Australia.

Well, not anymore, once the first nuclear subs arrive — because the small modular reactors that could be the mainstay of a future nuclear power grid are virtually the same reactor type as that which powers a nuclear -submarine.

The reality is nuclear power

Meaning that once we have nuclear subs here, we have the ready potential for nuclear power in terms of local engineers and physicists regardless of whether or not we maintain the fiction of Australia’s nuclear power ban.

That’s the reality. And that is what’s driving the move by Husic and others; and it’s the others who demonstrate just how serious this anti-AUKUS revolt really is. Front and centre in Canberra was former minister (and Albanese mate) the Midnight Oil frontman, Peter Garrett - who cut his political teeth on nuclear disarmament in the '70s and '80s.

Alongside him was Fremantle MP, Josh Wilson, who represents the seat where one of these nuclear submarine bases will go, and who almost lost his seat last year, as well as a key left-wing union boss. Garrett also has the support of former PM Paul Keating.

So, let’s pull this apart. Labor’s lack of seriousness about defence is self-evident in the recent budget. They have cooked the books by including in the headline defence spending figure more than $10bn in veterans' welfare payments and $2bn in funding for intelligence agencies.

No support for Middle East

Strategically, too, look at the lip service this government has paid to our allies. Look at how we rolled over on Palestine in the UN and our repeated failure to provide any support into the Middle East, even where our interests in fossil fuels are at risk.

Albanese would never be the sort of leader prepared to deploy our troops even where our national interest is at stake because, essentially, the left regards the warfighting and killing that is at the core of what a defence force exists to do as somehow illegitimate, certainly uncomfortable.

They are embarrassed that this is the job of our soldiers, and nothing shows that more than the way the Albanese government secretly changed the definition of a war crime before they went out and charged one of our most decorated war heroes.

Speaking alongside Husic in Canberra was former admiral Chris Barrie, who is set to front the independent community-led AUKUS inquiry. And on the rise of China, he basically conceded that Beijing will soon dominate the world so we all better adjust to that reality.

Surrender monkeys

Since when has this nation built on Anzacs become surrender monkeys? We have an alliance called AUKUS because it is a two-way street and it ceases to be a two-way street if we expect the United States to hold up their end while we do not hold up ours.

Labor doesn't like defence and is terrified that nuclear subs will mean nuclear power. Because nuclear power means the end of the net-zero gravy train. Because it has always been about the billions in subsidies. It was never about saving the planet or lowering emissions; it’s just been a way to rebrand unpopular foreign aid and keep the grifting in place.

So, watch the PM very closely ⏼ that’s my tip. He will pretend he’s still backing AUKUS but he will let the sabotage continue. And it will all come to a head at Labor’s National Conference next month. p class="texthang">

Remarkably uncontroversial then, that decision now produces titanic courtroom battles, the most recent being Tickle v Giggle for Girls. Despite the case’s name, there is nothing in the decision to laugh about, and it is worth asking where this strange idea came from.

Gender theory has many precursors but no individual did more to build its intellectual architecture than American philosopher Judith Butler.

Jargon and assumptions

Butler’s arguments are wrapped in jargon that conceals layers of unstated assumptions and conceptual shortcuts. But that hasn't stopped progressives treating them not as theories to be tested but as moral truths to be enforced. Yet descend into the machinery and the theory looks far less coherent and far more dependent on misrepresentations, than its influence would suggest.

Butler’s starting point is French historian Michel Foucault, whose central claim was that power does not primarily forbid; it produces. It does not repress a pre-existing nature; it manufactures the very categories ∼ the madman, the delinquent, the homosexual ∼ that it then appears merely to describe. On this view, there is no stable essence beneath social forms, no self that precedes the systems that classify it.

Butler radicalises this: just as there is no stable nature beneath identity, so there is no fixed sex beneath gender.

Problem unresolved

But Foucault left a problem unresolved. He claimed that discourse produces subjects yet could never explain quite how. Butler fills that gap by appropriating three vastly influential thinkers: Oxford philosopher JL Austin, French philosopher Jacques Derrida and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. On closer examination, the work of each turns out to have been seriously distorted in the process.

From Austin, Butler takes the performative: an utterance that brings something into being rather than merely describing it. Gender, she argues, is performative in just this sense — not the expression of an underlying reality but an identity produced through repeated acts and assertions.

But Austin’s whole point was that a performative is not magic. I now pronounce you man and wife can effect a marriage; it only works, however, because an institutional reality stands behind the words: an authorised celebrant, a legal framework, two eligible parties. Remove those conditions, Austin said, and the utterance misfires

No co-operation

That word is the crucial bit. For Austin a performative can fail, and it fails when the world declines to co-operate. The misfire is reality’s veto: the mechanism by which the world says no to impostures. And that is precisely the part Butler cannot afford to keep: her project requires performatives that work miracles, altering reality rather than accepting its dictates.

The misfire must therefore go. But she cannot crudely declare that performatives never fail, and in any case she wants a certain kind of failure — the instability that enables a norm to change spontaneously, much as nature randomly mutates.

So she quietly substitutes one failure for another: she keeps the soft kind, the drift by which innovations emerge, and discards the hard Austinian kind, the misfire, the possibility that they get knocked back. Excise that, and no re-performance can ever be vetoed; gender becomes endlessly revisable.

Mistranslation

Next, Derrida: difficult in French, incomprehensible in translation (and Butler mistranslates him). But the core insight is simple. A word carries no fixed meaning sealed inside it; it means something only because it can be repeated in contexts others understand, including ones its first speaker never imagined: words are words because they can be used in an infinite number of sentences.

Derrida’s name for this property is iterability, and from it Butler takes her opening for subversion: because norms, including gender talk, must be repeated, they can be changed.

But, said Derrida, repeatability cuts both ways. Yes, it lets a hostile term be lifted from its old setting and recharged — that is how queer became a banner rather than an insult. But by the same mechanism anything one says can slip free of one’s control. The instability that permits subversion permits the neutralisation and silencing of aberrant mutations.

Encouragement and suppression

That doesn't suit Butler. She therefore seizes the encouraging half of this argument and suppresses the other. She thereby converts Derrida’s explicitly double-edged account into a one-way mechanism that invariably yields liberation. Mutations always arrive at her preferred destination - which is another initial added to the seemingly endless LGBTQI++.

Finally, Lacan: even more aphoristic, in translation like wrestling in mud. From him Butler takes the idea that the self is constituted from outside, by means of language, symbols and the demands of others, not from an autonomous inner essence.

However, for Lacan, that process is never free self-invention. It occurs through what he calls a cut or bar: a prohibition, a founding no imposed by social norms (or, as he terms it, the symbolic order). One becomes a subject by being constrained —the self acquires shape through limitation, much as a fence defines a territory by what it shuts out. Constitution and constraint are inseparable; the subject is barred all the way down, and the limits give the self its continuity, durability and substance.

Identity fabricates

Here too Butler retains one half, the self constituted from outside, and erases the Lacanian constraint: the prohibition, the constitutive limit. Identity becomes a self that can fabricate itself without ever hitting a fence. And a self reduced to pure fabrication is, by definition, endlessly refashionable.

Seen together, these are not three separate misreadings but the same trick performed three times. Each predecessor, read properly, placed a point of resistance at his account’s centre, a place where something says no: which is, after all, how personal and social life work. For Austin, institutions can withhold ratification; for Derrida, language can both allow and suppress mutations; for Lacan, individuals are shaped by prohibitions that cannot be undone.

Butler’s conclusion ∼ endlessly remakeable identity ∼ requires precisely the opposite: a world in which nothing pushes back, as all barriers dissolve in the acid bath of self-identified gender. To reach that conclusion she distorts each of those authorities beyond recognition: she then pretends the splendid intellectual penthouse they built remains standing, even though she has demolished its foundations.

Theory, no common sense

The result is a theory with no veto left anywhere inside it — and a theory that can refuse nothing can license anything: except, of course, common sense.

Little wonder her Australian acolytes love it, even if they are scarcely capable of understanding its conceptual underpinnings, much less of working through the mind-numbingly dense and difficult scholarly commentary on her work. And little wonder, given the power they now wield, that a fatally flawed theory has become a part of Australian law. Tickle v Giggle is, unfortunately, not its last word. It is its first.