Voll played a masterful innings of 101 from 82 deliveries, highlighted by 13 fours and one towering six over long on.

The only streaky part of the innings came around her milestone as she reached three figures via a dropped catch and was out just two balls later.

Voll shared a match-defining 119-run partnership from 94 balls with slick southpaw Phoebe Litchfield.

Litchfield hit a highlight-heavy 80 off 62 balls but missed out on her first century on Aussie shores when she was bowled attempting a ramp shot.

The contributions of Voll, Litchfield and Beth Mooney (31) ensured Australia completed the series defining chase by five wickets.

Ash Gardner (19 not out) hit the winning runs having earlier swung the match with the ball in the absence of the injured Sophie Molineux.

Molineux ∼ the newly-appointed Aussie captain ∼ will be sidelined for the rest of the series with a back issue.

Indian openers Smriti Mandhana and Pratika Rawal made the most of their early chances before Gardner finally broke through.

Annabel Sutherland took the second wicket and then secured a run out but it was Gardner and Alana King who put the tourists under pressure.

Gardner had figures of 1-20 off her first seven overs (including 28 dot balls) while King claimed 2-41 off her 10 overs.

The leggie’s tidy figures still didn't do her spell justice after two chances were dropped and a tight LBW decision went India’s way.

Gardner followed King and carried on where she left off, finishing with 2-39 off her 10. Australia now leads ahead of the third ODI today in Hobart's Bellerive Oval before the one-off Test match in Perth next week.
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Macquarie University has been forced to release the findings of its review of Ms Abdel-Fattah’s unorthodox research techniques and expenditure, after the Australian Research Council froze her grant and raised serious concerns about alleged breaches of research rules.

She has since been cleared of wrongdoing and the grant has been reinstated.

The university now claims the ARC knew Ms Abdel-Fattah would spend some of the taxpayer-funded grant attending protests.

In her funding application to the ARC for the grant, it was made clear that investigating protests as part of this project first-hand, including attending them, was an integral part of her research, a spokesman said on Friday. Ms Abdel-Fattah also made clear in her application for funding that she was both a researcher and an activist.

However, the university has redacted six pages of the report that set out the organisations and places that Ms Abdel-Fattah told the ARC would be part of her research.

The Macquarie University report shows that federal Education Minister Jason Clare, who asked the ARC to review Ms Abdel-Fattah’s grant last year — wrote to her personally in 2022, telling her that her application for a grant to study Arab-Muslim social movements in Australia had been approved. After a series of scandals — including the children’s protest, an essay denying the Hamas mass rape of Israeli women and a declaration she would bend the rules in her academic work - Mr Clare asked the ARC to review the grant.

The ARC sent a letter of complaint to the university, which hired two international academics∼- whose identities it is refusing to reveal ∼ as well as accounting giant Ernst & Young to investigate the ARC allegations. The review cleared her of wrongdoing ∼ apart from suggesting she pay back money for a phone charger ∼ and the ARC reinstated her grant in December.

The report ∼ released to The Australian on Friday in response to a Right to Information application ∼ shows how Ms Abdel-Fattah justified her activism as squarely within my research ambit.

After she was filmed leading young children in chants of intifada at the University of Sydney in April 2024, the academic emailed her manager to say she had co-organised a kids' excursion to the Sydney Uni encampment.

I organised the kids' excursion as community outreach, she wrote. I absolutely will not be using the kids' excursion as data collection … however, my general reflections and theorising about these gestures and practices form part of my autoethnography and (are) within the parameters of my research practice and project.

When her manager raised questions about working with children, Ms Abdel-Fattah responded that she had a working with children check.

I wasn't working with children,L she wrote. I was not data gathering and not presenting research material. I was there as a standard academic outreach … in the same way we are invited to, for example, talk to kids about their HSC projects, or attend community meetings or address a feminist group. Alternatively and equally as legitimate, I was there in a personal capacity for the kids' excursion, as a mum with her kids. And my flexible working hours gives (sic) me scope to do that.

Intifada is an Arabic word meaning uprising, which has been banned as antisemitic hate speech in Queensland in the wake of the massacre of 15 people at a Jewish festival on Bondi Beach in December.

Macquarie University’s 99-page confidential report states that arranging a kids' excursion to a protest would not be considered academic outreach.

More likely, it was being conducted on behalf of the respondent because of her personal commitment to the community, and due to her personal reputation and the esteem with which she is held by the community, it states.

“It is not possible to conclusively establish the purpose of the respondent’s attendance at the protest as either personal or professional (for research).

This is because the respondent is performing insider research, and her research is intricately related to her personal involvement in activism.

The Macquarie University report indicates Ms Abdel-Fattah linked her research grant with writing her latest novel ∼ Discipline, published by the University of Queensland ∼ as well as her rape-denial essay about the weaponisation of rape in service of Israeli propaganda, which she boasted was the most-read article on the Institute for Palestine Studies website in 2024.

Both publications are listed under the heading: Records of activities being conducted for, or in association with, the grant. However, the Macquarie University spokesman denied on Friday that the essay had been written using research grant funding.

This essay is not part of the ARC research project, he said.

The work has been noted as work produced by Ms Abdel-Fattah as a researcher and published by a third-party.

The university does not necessarily agree with or endorse the views expressed by the author in the essay.
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The Saturday Telegraph reveals 12 current and former Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) workers affirmed harrowing accounts of child abuse, alongside widespread burnout and chronic understaffing inside the troubled agency.

The revelations come after a report from NSW Ombudsman Paul Miller earlier this month, which found that two-thirds of tip-offs to DCJ about children at significant risk of harm were not being investigated.

The latest state government data shows 410 children aged from birth to 17 years died in NSW in 2024, with 89 of these children known to DCJ.

In one example in the report, a NSW Coroner criticised the premature closure of reports by DCJ during an inquest into the 2018 death of a 9-month-old killed by their father during a psychotic episode.

In another example, the Deputy Coroner examined the case of a 15-year-old First Nations student who died by suicide in 2020 after DCJ, NSW Health and the Department of Education each closed their files, largely assuming another agency was providing support.

The Ombudsman’s report identified common themes of child deaths of those known to DCJ including premature or inappropriate closure of reports screened as Risk of Significant Harm (ROSH) without comprehensive assessment or face-to-face contact.

A DCJ worker said staffing was severely lacking, leaving frontline teams stretched beyond capacity.

There are so many vulnerable children suffering ongoing abuse *#133; or they are in environments where their parents are neglecting them so badly that they are not being fed, the worker said.

Sadly, we don't have enough staff to protect them … myself and others feel like we are failing these children, it’s heartbreaking.
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Bad ideas, the royal family has a real knack for them, like whoever decided to let Richard III babysit the princes in the Tower.

This week Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex continued to show their dedication to this proud tradition by taking themselves off to Jordan to visit refugees during the biggest palace crisis in centuries.

(Edward VIII giving up the throne to moon over Wallis? Positively cutesy by comparison.)

The Sussexes flew to Amman at the invitation of Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organisation (WHO) to focus on humanitarian aid, mental health and the millions of people displaced by the wars in Gaza and Syria.

All you need to know is Meghan appeared to have moodboarded 90s Diana-does-landmines and Harry was unusually stiff at moments.

Still. Highlighting the plight of the 3.7 million refugees in Jordan?

This is exactly what the Sussexes should be doing all day, not trying to make lite infotainment about the joys of handdipping candles or trying to shift crates of overpriced jam.

The issue with the Sussexes' spot of DIY royalling isn't what they did, but when they did it.

If ever there was a moment for the duke and duchess to not to remind King Charles (currently worrying his way through his third stress ball and having exhausted a years-worth of homoeopathic tinctures in weeks) they are indeed still a duke and duchess and off doing some DIY royalling, it is now.

The images of Harry and Meghan in Jordan are a clear reminder of the need to draw clear lines between the crown and the people who just happen to be related to the King.

Timing is everything and staging this particular trip at this particular moment was as sensible as sending Princess Anne off to host a Divine Feminine full moon workshop in Frisby-on-Mare.

In Britain, His Majesty and Crown Inc are still reeling from the arrest earlier this month of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the first royal to end up behind bars in 379 years, and even then, Charles I was done for starting an entire civil war.

This scandal has ballooned from being about Andrew to a full blown existential crisis threatening the monarchy, the likes of which we have never seen before.

Crown Inc is unravelling in real time.

This crisis has careened and multiplied, like rapidly dividing cancerous cells, to be about a royal system which has allowed those further down the succession rungs to enjoy the spoils that come with their titles without doing anything to benefit Britain.

In Britain, His Majesty and Crown Inc are still reeling from the arrest earlier this month of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the first royal to end up behind bars in 379 years, and even then, Charles I was done for starting an entire civil war.

This scandal has ballooned from being about Andrew to a full blown existential crisis threatening the monarchy, the likes of which we have never seen before.

Crown Inc is unravelling in real time.

This crisis has careened and multiplied, like rapidly dividing cancerous cells, to be about a royal system which has allowed those further down the succession rungs to enjoy the spoils that come with their titles without doing anything to benefit Britain.

In Britain, His Majesty and Crown Inc are still reeling from the arrest earlier this month of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the first royal to end up behind bars in 379 years, and even then, Charles I was done for starting an entire civil war.

This scandal has ballooned from being about Andrew to a full blown existential crisis threatening the monarchy, the likes of which we have never seen before.

Crown Inc is unravelling in real time.

This crisis has careened and multiplied, like rapidly dividing cancerous cells, to be about a royal system which has allowed those further down the succession rungs to enjoy the spoils that come with their titles without doing anything to benefit Britain.

Andrew trampled all over the unspoken bargain of royalty, which is the great unwashed continue to let the royal family have the palaces and the Vermeers and the ownership of every dolphin in UK territorial waters (really) and in return they devote themselves to the nation and touring cancer wards.

The former Duke of York has made a foul mockery of that and his decades of sordid and shifty behaviour will likely trigger the biggest royal restructure since Oliver Cromwell was getting ideas above his station and inviting Charles I to meet the rusty side of an axe.

Right now, there is extreme public sensitivity about members of the King’s family doing anything that looks like trading off royal status conferred by the accident of birth rather than a devotion to duty.

So what better moment for the Sussexes to pop their heads above the parapet and to remind Charles and the world they exist and continue to trade off their royal titles despite having spent the last six years energetically rubbishing the royal family?

A year ago, Harry and Meghan in Amman would have been a slam dunk of a hole in one from the 50 yard line but the timing of it is a terrible miscalculation.

Change is coming for the royal family and it’s a matter of when, not if; the centre cannot hold.

The days of spares and nieces and nephews and cousins being able to grandly deploy their royal titles without doing anything so taxing and snoozy like public service or trudging off to do dreadfully dull away-days in Devon are numbered.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

The countdown is on to what will be a massive, once-in-a-century re-arrangement of the royal furniture and there is no scenario where the Sussexes walk away untouched.

The extremely well-sourced Tom Sykes of The Daily Beast and The Royalist has been consistently reporting for months that King William plans to get a big stick and will draw a line in the sand.

Those willing to enlist and commit to do bread and butter royalling can have a nice shiny title, an HRH, and a freebie palace apartment the size of a Liechtenstein.

So what better moment for the Sussexes to pop their heads above the parapet and to remind Charles and the world they exist and continue to trade off their royal titles despite having spent the last six years energetically rubbishing the royal family?

A year ago, Harry and Meghan in Amman would have been a slam dunk of a hole in one from the 50 yard line but the timing of it is a terrible miscalculation.

Change is coming for the royal family and it’s a matter of when, not if; the centre cannot hold.

The days of spares and nieces and nephews and cousins being able to grandly deploy their royal titles without doing anything so taxing and snoozy like public service or trudging off to do dreadfully dull away-days in Devon are numbered.

Tick tock. Tick tock.

The countdown is on to what will be a massive, once-in-a-century re-arrangement of the royal furniture and there is no scenario where the Sussexes walk away untouched.

The extremely well-sourced Tom Sykes of The Daily Beast and The Royalist has been consistently reporting for months that King William plans to get a big stick and will draw a line in the sand.

Those willing to enlist and commit to do bread and butter royalling can have a nice shiny title, an HRH, and a freebie palace apartment the size of a Liechtenstein.

Everyone else - everyone who is not keen on signing up for a lifetime of opening the Sudbury Agricultural show and smizing at knobbly courgettes or would prefer to merrily chase after lovely mammon - well, no royal perks for you.

On the reported chopping block: Not only the Sussexes' titles and HRHs but those of Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie too.
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Tonight the Newcastle Art Gallery is throwing open its doors and filling the road and park with giant fluffy doughnuts, live music, dancing and art in a free-for-all street party ∼ themed industrial disco ∼ that has been 16 years in the making.

For the NAG team, and Novocastrians more broadly, this is a significant moment, marking the long-awaited completion of the $48m gallery expansion project, which went from being very divisive in the community to something that’s generating a remarkable buzz and excitement, according to Jeremy Bath, the CEO of Newcastle city council.

Now the largest public gallery in NSW outside of Sydney, it opens with the major exhibition Iconic Loved Unexpected, displaying 500 artworks from its 7000-strong collection.

Displayed over the 13 gallery spaces (eight of which are new, in a floor space that’s more than double that of the 1997 building), it’s a star-studded showcase of the gallery’s $145m collection, including Australian greats Emily Kam Kngwarray, John Olsen, Margaret Preston, Brett Whiteley, Daniel Boyd and Margaret Olley.

It’s the headliners who will draw the crowds, but the gallery ∼ led by the NAG director, Lauretta Morton ∼ has been intentional in championing lesser-known local artists, too.

The intention is set by the first artwork that greets visitors: an ambitious new commission made by Awabakal artist and seventh-generation Novocastrian Shellie Smith in collaboration with sculptor Julie Squires, who co-founded Newcastle makerspace The Soap Factory.

Titled Watawan (Mullet), it is a 3.5-metre aluminium spiral of 29 mullet fish that swirls down from the ceiling: a large undertaking that Smith was initially nervous about, she says, but being part of such a significant collection is so exciting.

While viewing the work, visitors will experience another new commission: Sonic Acknowledgment of Country, a soundscape by local musician, composer, researcher and Kamilaroi man Adam Manning.

The local emphasis continues into the expansion’s construction, which seamlessly integrates the old and new buildings.

The timber benches throughout the galleries were made by local woodworker Jonathan Everett; the street-fronting cafe was designed by local firm EJE Architecture; and the shop by the entrance is stocked with goods from more than 30 local makers selected through an open call.

It’s really important that we are helping our local arts ecology to thrive, says Morton.
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While good leaders don't shy away from a fight, the greater the difference between voters' views and a political party’s perception of the national interest, the harder the challenge of leadership and the greater the likelihood of political failure.

The argument used against the Liberal Party, most notably by its former leader Malcolm Turnbull, is that by moving to the right the party is leaving the electorate behind and dooming itself to fail.

There is some evidence that the electorate has moved marginally left, especially on issues where the Liberals have failed to make a contest like climate; but on many hot-button issues it has actually become more conservative.

In two papers published early last year, The Australian Population Research Institute argued that large electoral majorities did not favour the political class’s orthodoxy that high immigration and cultural diversity were unambiguously good for Australia.

While there are dangers here with clumsy language, sensitively and intelligently handled, big change here is exactly what the electorate is looking for. Perhaps it’s new Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s focus on the cultural issue of protecting the Australian way of life, as well as the economic one of restoring Australians' standard of living, that explains the early positive reaction to his elevation.

The TAPRI study, published last February, showed 80% support for reducing migration numbers, 67% support for dealing with skills shortages by raising wages and improving skills training for locals, 67% opposition to increasing ethnic and other forms of diversity, and 58% support for selection policy that takes into account a migrant’s ability to fit into the Australian community.

A further study published in March 2025 found that while 66% of all voters wanted a sharp reduction in the migrant intake, especially of temporary migrants, this was also the view of 58% of Labor and Greens voters. These figures are almost certain to have increased in the wake of the Bondi massacre.

It’s worth noting that while people born overseas are just over 30% of the population, they're only 20% of voters.

Even so, the TAPRI study shows that 77% of Asian-born migrants want lower immigration while English-speaking and European migrants are even likelier than the Australian-born to want lower migration and likelier to want fitting into Australia to be part of migrant selection policy.

And while Asian migrants are more pro-diversity than other Australians, even among them there’s still 50% opposition to using migration to increase diversity.

The most reliable and comprehensive guide to voters' attitudes over time is the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study, which has been asking much the same questions of a representative sample of voters since 1987. On migration issues, the AES reinforces TAPRI’s findings.

The most recent AES report, released in November, showed that 53% of 2025 voters wanted immigration reduced, with only 14% wanting it increased; whereas at the 2022 election the percentage wanting it increased was actually slightly higher than that wanting it reduced. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage thinking migrants were good for the economy dropped by 10 points and the percentage thinking migrants increased crime rose by 10 points. In 2025, at 50%, voter support for turning back asylum-seeker boats was actually stronger than in 2013.

On other issues, too, the electorate is becoming more conservative. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage wanting less tax rose from 39 to 42 while the percentage wanting more social spending fell from 31 to 30. As well, the percentage thinking that climate change was a serious threat dropped from 66 to 57, while those thinking it was not increased from 34 to 43.

Based on the totality of voters' responses, the AES judges that voters at the 2025 election leaned slightly to the left with an averaged score of 4.93 out of 10 (where 10 is right and 0 is left). Yet at the previous 2022 election, despite the electorate leaning ever so slightly to the right with a score of 5.05, Anthony Albanese still had a strong win. What’s more, the Coalition still won elections (just) in 2016 and 2019 with an electorate that leaned slightly left. Interestingly, the study shows that voters thought the Coalition was no more right-wing under Peter Dutton in 2025 than it had been under Scott Morrison in 2022; indeed, the Coalition was perceived by voters to have been just as right-wing under Turnbull in 2016 as in the two most recent elections.

When the 2025 Election Study results were released last November, the media focused on the finding that, for the first time, voters felt that Labor (on 32%) was better placed to manage the economy than the Coalition (with just 28%). Yet management of the economy was cited by only 12% of voters as the most important election issue, down from 28% in 2013.

In fact, by far the most significant result was that only 34% of voters in the 2025 study said they always voted for the same party, compared with 63% in 1987. But even this volatility is not especially recent, with more than 50% of voters rusted on at only one of the past seven federal elections. The study reveals about 20% of Coalition voters and about 30% of Labor voters have considered changing their votes during the campaign in every election since 1987.

What this tells me is that election results have more to do with how people view leaders and leadership; it’s leadership after all that most shapes most people’s views on most issues. For the Liberals, in other words, the problem is less that voters have moved away from them but that they have not provided much leadership on the issues voters care about.

Quite apart from the fact that the Liberals in 2025 inexplicably failed to campaign for their energy policy or against Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax policy, plus failed to hammer the fact that government policy had exacerbated the worst fall in living standards in the developed world, the key factors in their humiliation were the collapse of TV in shaping people’s political perceptions, the rise of social media (in which the Coalition was largely MIA) and antipathy towards Dutton who, however unfairly, the study showed had the least voter appeal in its history.

Far from needing to persuade the Australian public that migration numbers are too high and that all migrants must accept Australian values, what this says to me is that on immigration, Taylor is pushing on an open door. Based on the best available data, promising to protect the Australian way of life is exactly what voters want — as well as what our country needs, as the Bondi massacre has put up in flashing neon lights.

Meaning that far from being too right-wing for the electorate, for the first time in years the Liberals are actually taking voters where they want to go.

That is not to suggest imminent collapse. As Alan Ware demonstrated in his The Dynamics of Two-Party Politics (2009), it is rare in two-party systems for once-dominant major parties simply to disappear.

But while major parties seldom die, they can, like old soldiers, fade away — gradually forfeiting the organisational cohesion and electoral reach required to function as an effective opposition, let alone as a credible alternative to an entrenched governing party.

If the history of democratic politics teaches anything, it is that the danger peaks when three conditions coincide: a party’s core constituencies are threatened from both flanks of the left/right divide, making it hard to protect one flank without aggravating losses to the other; political conflict centres on high-profile issues that cut across its own ranks and cannot be indefinitely fudged; and social and demographic change erodes the electoral foundations on which it once relied.

That pattern was evident in the disintegration of the American Whigs, torn apart by slavery in 1856. It reappeared in the marginalisation of the British Liberal Party after the First World War. The Liberals had been the beating heart of Victorian politics; by the early 1930s, they were a spent force.

The immediate pressure was a two-sided squeeze: Conservatives to the right, Labour to the left. The deeper cause was structural. As elite cohesion weakened and politics became more polarised, Liberal indecision proved unsustainable.

Electoral reform accelerated the decline. The Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Equal Franchise Act 1928 transformed the electorate, enlarging the working-class vote and enfranchising women (who by 1929 formed an electoral majority), with neither group having natural Liberal attachments.

Boundary redistribution magnified the impact, eliminating smaller county seats that were predominantly Liberal while multiplying the industrial constituencies that became Labour strongholds and the suburban constituencies that underpinned a resurgent Conservatism.

The consequence was not merely electoral setback but organisational fracture: rival leaderships and searing divisions that could be patched over but never resolved. That fragmentation emboldened the challengers on both flanks, reinforcing a vicious cycle of mutual recriminations, internal discord and electoral decline. The 1924 election, in Labour minister Sidney Webb’s phrase, marked the funeral of a great party; by 1929, any prospect of resurrection had evaporated.

The same dynamics operated with even greater violence in Canada. For much of the 20th century, the Progressive Conservatives could win federally only by forging an uneasy coalition of western conservatives and disgruntled Quebecois. However, by the time of Brian Mulroney’s prime ministership (1984-1993), sustaining that coalition required concessions that satisfied neither while antagonising both.

The coalition splintered, spawning two effective rivals: the Reform Party on the right in the west and the left-leaning sovereigntist Bloc Québécois in Quebec. Caught between them, the Progressive Conservatives were annihilated in 1993, collapsing from 156 seats to two.

But neither in the UK nor in Canada were these outcomes preordained. Parties fail or succeed not only because of the structural forces they face, but because of how they respond.

Thus, before 1914 it was entirely plausible that the Conservatives ∼ not the Liberals ∼ would fracture on Britain’s centre-right. They appeared close to disintegration, divided between diehards and pragmatists, traditionalists and advocates of adaptation. Without the political genius of Stanley Baldwin, the outcome might well have been different.

Baldwin did more than restore discipline. He strengthened the party’s organisation, rebuilt its supporting networks and decisively curbed the diehardism of the Edwardian and post-Edwardian years. In its place he articulated a New Conservatism aimed at the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word.

He therefore repositioned the party to appeal to the suburban middle class and the aspirational working class, aligning rhetoric and policy ∼ including sweeping social reforms ∼ with that broadened base.

The Liberals, by contrast, remained mired in internal conflict. Personal animosities and strategic divergences paralysed the party’s machinery and squandered its intellectual advantages. A movement rich in ideas proved incapable of converting insight into votes.

Leadership proved equally decisive in Canada, where the Reform Party absorbed the remnants of the Progressive Conservatives and reconstituted itself as the Conservative Party. Its leader, Stephen Harper, built a disciplined, highly centralised electoral apparatus, replacing Canada’s long tradition of regional brokerage ∼ which had contributed to the previous collapse ∼ with coalitions formed by micro-targeting key constituencies.

Just as importantly, he recalibrated the party’s ideological stance, softening some of Reform’s polarising commitments while stripping away the Progressive Conservatives' lingering ambiguities. As Harper put it, there were two things you have to do. The first is to pull conservatives, to pull the party, to the centre of the political spectrum. But if you're really serious about making transformation, you also have to pull the centre of the political spectrum toward conservatism.

Executing that dual movement is exceptionally difficult. Without strategic clarity Harper could not have succeeded. And that same clarity is evident in the other movements that have travelled from the right’s fringes to the centre of power.

Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d'Italia and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National are cases in point. Both Meloni and Le Pen were determined to be more than rabble rousers. Much as Nigel Farage is trying to do in the UK, each spent years normalising and institutionalising her party — subduing internal diehards, consolidating leadership authority and methodically expanding and professionalising grassroots organisation. That allowed them to compete effectively with the previously dominant centre-right parties they then squeezed to near extinction.

It is precisely those ambitions ∼ and the skill to realise them ∼ that Pauline Hanson has yet to demonstrate. That is not to denigrate her resilience. The heroine in Pearl White’s The Perils of Pauline weathered fires, kidnappings and sabotage; our Pauline has weathered expulsions, bankruptcy, imprisonment and repeated anathemas.

But confident that protest votes will guarantee One Nation a Senate foothold, she has opted to ride periodic waves of discontent instead of undertaking the exacting task of building a conventional political party.

That choice heightens rather than mitigates the risks confronting the centre-right. Because One Nation poses no credible claim to office ∼ and because the electoral system partially insulates the Liberals from the forces eroding their base ∼ complacency becomes seductively easy. Internal fractures are tolerated, strategic decisions postponed and structural frailties left to compound.

If that complacency endures, incremental losses ∼ to the teals on one flank and One Nation on the other ∼ will steadily accumulate, reducing the Liberals to a diminished remnant of what was once Australia’s most electorally successful political party.

That, unless Angus Taylor can arrest the drift, is what lies ahead: an ageing party, sustained by a narrowing cohort of older voters, locked in a two-front contest it cannot win. At a time that cries out for clear direction, it would continue to falter —a fading presence of glories past, too strong to die, too weak to thrive.