How do you think campaigning at a state level has changed that you've observed in that period, with more of it, say, happening online than in person?

Well, I think the way that we reach people as parliamentarians or candidates has really shifted even in the time that I've been in politics.

So, you know, when I first ran in 2022, we ran very much a face-to-face campaign and a lot of it went really heavily on door knocking.

Yeah.

We did that again in 2025.

So my campaign teams doorknocked 50,000 houses, but we still didn't win the election.

And I think that part of that is because, you know, you doorknock homes and no one's there because people are working more than one job to actually survive with the cost of living.

What is the temperature to you? Like try and articulate this rather nebulous concept to us.

They sound like scary interactions sometimes.

Yeah, I mean, I've heard the security services talking this week about sort of permissiveness that seeped into the environment, and I think that's one word to describe it.

I think there's also an enabling piece that's happened, you know, in the last few years.

And, you know, cause or effect, I think Trumpism is a factor, and it's not necessarily to do with the sort of... political spectrum positioning because I think it's across the spectrum and I've written in The Guardian that we shouldn't be thinking this is a left or right issue.

I think this is spectrum-wide.

But I think what's happened is that boundaries have really shifted.

Geopolitics has helped shift those boundaries.

What's that like? And if we could afford that to every politician, every sitting MP, which I don't know if we can, the Federal Police Commissioner has cast out on that, the practicality of that, how would that change our politics? I mean, it would limit your interactions with the community, I think.

Can you talk a bit to that, like why you think the laws rig the system?

Well, I think the fact that the government and the opposition colluded to put it through literally on the last day of the 47th Parliament says a lot.

I didn't see them co-operate on much during the time that I was in the Parliament, yet right at the back end, they didn't put it to a proper Senate inquiry.

I think after a lot of pressure, they enabled one day of hearings to consider the legislation and then forced it through because they had the numbers.

But basically what it does is tilt the playing field in favour of the major parties.

Each MP in the lower house, for example, would be capped at a spend of $800,000 per seat, but the major parties can spend up to $90 million nationally.

So that's just one element of it, but it's a simple example I think that people can understand where in an electorate like Goldstein where I was sitting, which is a hyper-marginal seat, the second most marginal seat in the country with a margin of 88 votes between myself and the sitting Liberal member, the Liberal Party could plaster the entire electorate with Vote Liberal, and also the member could spend up to $800,000 on name-based advertising for himself, whereas an independent candidate would be capped at $800,000 full stop.

Has your legal counsel given you any sense of your sort of prospects, your sense of, you know, how confident you are you might succeed or not?

How reminiscent

is this? Trump has done an extraordinary job of turning himself into the everyman as a person who grew up with immense wealth who was absolutely not the everyman.

Yet I spent four years running around the US trying to understand why people who were driven by disappointment in leadership, grievance, felt that their communities had been pulled backwards by things like migration and globalisation, why they were gravitating to Trump.

thinking that he was their person.

And at the end of the day, many of them were able to park their reservations about him for the sake of having someone who they felt would speak out for them without reservation, who would call it as he saw it.

exactly the same kind of persona that Pauline Hanson has managed to develop where she still harks back to and in many people's minds she's still the fish and chip shop owner from the mid-90s and she's in effect spent the intervening 30 years in politics and in some form of sort of celebrity orbit and has not been the average person running a fish and chip shop.

And I think Coz has written in his columns that people... view Pauline Hanson, those who support her, view her on a first-name basis as their friend.

Zoe, what's your assessment, what's your analysis of how the major parties have handled this, of what they could be doing or should be doing? And from what you've seen in America, is it going to make any difference?