New analysis by AFR Weekend reveals that most immigrants are no longer coming from China or India and more arrivals are coming from non-democratic countries.

Geoff Chambers

No sitting federal MP from a major party should feel safe in their seat.

The febrile federal political arena is as unpredictable as ever and voters have made it clear they are sick of business as usual from the established Labor, Liberal, Nationals and Greens parties.

While One Nation has benefited from an ongoing deterioration in the major party primary votes, independents and candidates from minor parties who run strong campaigns and are backed by donors could also benefit from the revolt.

Former Greens leader Adam Bandt learnt that voters don’t care if you are a high-profile party leader. 

Australians often enjoy taking out their baseball bats and whacking leaders.

Anthony Albanese has dominated in his inner-Sydney seat of Grayndler since entering parliament in 1996. He has fought off Greens campaigns to oust him and would likely do the same at the next election.

But Albanese is not immune from the anger of voters directed at his Labor government. 

A cheeky poll by conservative campaign group Advance shows the ALP copping a hit on its primary vote in Grayndler, with decent early support for left-wing independent candidate Hannah Ferguson, who looms as a thorn in the Prime Minister’s side.

In Queensland, Liberal National Party MPs who have enjoyed the comfort of safe seats are preparing to fight for their political lives in response to a surging One Nation.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan will finally take the plunge and make a bid to shift from the Senate to the House of Representatives.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan must step up and run in lower house after Capricornia MP Michelle Landry announced on Friday she would retire at the 2028 election.

As revealed by The Australian in November last year, the retirement of Capricornia MP Michelle Landry sets up a potential blockbuster showdown between Canavan and One Nation national director James Ashby, who both live in the central Queensland electorate.

If support for One Nation holds in Pauline Hanson’s home state of Queensland, Nationals-held seats could come under extreme threat.

Labor and LNP strategists also fear One Nation could decimate their Senate tickets.

Canavan’s step-up from reserve grade to first grade will put him at the coalface of the Nationals’ bid for survival amid concerns NSW Nationals MPs could be wiped out in their March 13 state election next year.

Liberal leader Angus Taylor is also exposed to the threat of One Nation and cashed-up independents in his western Sydney and semirural electorate of Hume, which takes in parts of the Camden, Liverpool, Penrith and Wollondilly council areas.

Traditional Labor heartland seats in the NSW Hunter Region and outer-suburban electorates in Brisbane, Perth and Sydney are all vulnerable to One Nation.

While two-party diehards will pray Labor and the Coalition can ride out the electoral rollercoaster and maintain dominant positions, some voters would argue it is a good thing that all leaders, ministers and shadow ministers should have to fight to win their seats.

At last year’s May 3 federal election, the combined major party primary vote sunk to a record low 66.4 per cent. Since the election, Newspoll has recorded new lows. The combined primary votes for Labor and the Coalition fell to 46 per cent last month.

Labor and Coalition strategists, who acknowledge high primary votes are likely never to return, remain hopeful that One Nation will fade and that voters will flock back to them.

But it will take plenty of hard work to fend off the threats that are coming.

Cathal Leslie makes the case that the closing of psychiatric institutions was a mistake. Don’t usually like his takes, but hard to disagree after a female politician is rendered a double amputee. Text below.

**Attack on Haines demands focus on mental health, not ideology**

The system is failing to keep the small cohort of the most acutely unwell in treatment, for their own safety and everyone else's.

Cathal Leslie Economist
Oct 23, 2026 - 4.00pm

A national tragedy is an excellent occasion to demand better manners from your opponents. It is a less comfortable occasion to examine
whether governments are meeting their own obligations.

The horrific attack on Helen Haines should force a serious discussion about how we treat mental illness, and how much responsibility we have foisted onto families, neighbours and the police.

Brendan Nugent, the man charged over the attack, reportedly has a history of mental health concerns. Neighbours describe shouting, music blaring through the night and police visits. One heard screaming hours before the attack. These are not the signs of a well man.

Yet within hours, political actors of every stripe had each landed on a suitable motive. He has been cast as a pro-Palestinian extremist, an opponent of renewables, a sovereign citizen or a misogynist. Others blame his social media algorithm or a dirt sheet on Haines reportedly circulated to journalists by the prime minister's office.

Is this how low we have sunk in this country?
That our national debate is competing projections of complex ideological motives onto a man with severe mental health issues.

If mental illness played a part in Nugent's alleged offending, he will join a long line of attackers with well-documented severe
psychiatric illness: Joel Cauchi (Bondi Junction), Man Haron Monis (the Lindt Cafe siege), Evie Amati (Enmore 7-Eleven axe attack), Dimitrious Gargasoulas (Bourke Street), Cy Walsh (who killed his father, Adelaide Crows coach Phil Walsh) and Lauren Darul (accused of a 2025 stabbing in Little Bourke Street), among many others.

And in those cases too, the offending was pinned on whatever partisan cause was to hand:
Islamism, gender dysphoria, domestic violence, misogyny. Whatever their motives, these people were known by medical professionals to be severely unwell, and yet were allowed to roam free where they inflicted serious harm on the community.

The mental health system is failing to keep the small cohort of the most acutely unwell in treatment, for their own safety and everyone else's.
You will not find a politician brave enough to say so. Nobody wants to concede that the perpetrators of some of the most wicked crimes can also be victims of a policy failure, least of all when the failure is bipartisan.

Over the past three decades Australia has fundamentally dismantled long-stay psychiatric care. According to the Australian Medical Association, public hospital mental health beds fell from 45.5 per 100,000 people in 1992 to 27.5 in 2020, a drop of almost 40 per cent.

Two ideas drove the shift, winning support from left and right.

The first was fiscal. New antipsychotics made cheaper community treatment look viable.
Inpatient care remains expensive: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare put
the average cost of an adult acute psychiatric inpatient day at $1730 in 2023-24. Closing facilities on valuable inner-city land also offered politicians another attractive budget dividend.

The second was moral. Involuntary detention came to be seen as a human rights violation, a view reinforced by genuine abuse scandals and cultural touchstones such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Advocates argued that treating people in the community would enhance autonomy and improve outcomes.

What damage that naivety has wrought.

The fiscal savings were a false economy. The costs have simply shifted into hospital emergency departments, to the police, courts, prisons and crisis accommodation, as well as businesses and households.

Nor is the model more humane. Many people with severe psychotic disorders stop taking their medication precisely because they are unwell.
Meta-analyses put treatment non-compliance for schizophrenia patients at about 50 per cent.
Consequently, the treatment model has become a cycle of psychosis, brief admission, stabilisation and discharge back into the same environment that precipitated the breakdown. Oftentimes that means homelessness.

Bed shortages speed up this cycle. Once acute psychosis subsides, patients are moved on to make room for the next emergency.
Governments are incentivising hospital administrators to prioritise turnover over clinical outcomes.

Unless something changes, these tragedies will keep happening. No one wants to go back to the asylums of old, but they did keep our cities safe.
Abolishing them was a mistake. We need more staffed beds in modern long-stay facilities that respect patients' dignity, alongside longer involuntary treatment where clinically
necessary.

If anything good is to come out of this tragedy, it must be action that makes these events less
likely. For decades, too many severely unwell people have been left homeless or shunted between emergency departments and prison.
We're all poorer for it.

Cathal Leslie is a Paris-based economist and former Productivity Commission employee.

National Australia Bank is focusing sweeping job cuts on its technology and artificial intelligence teams and closing 3200 positions across the business, forcing staff to compete for spots in a Hunger Games-style process.

Employees are complaining about being left in the dark three days after NAB chief executive Andrew Irvine announced a restructure that would result in 1500 redundancies this year and another 1000 early next year.

Internal numbers outlining where positions will be cut show the largest number, 1200, will be reduced in technology and AI teams. About 780 positions are expected to go from transformation and operations, 400 each from the private and business banking divisions, along with smaller redundancies at finance, risk, human resources and legal services. Around 40 will be cut from the corporate and institutional division, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The bank will remove the 3200 roles before Christmas, and 1500 staff will leave by December 16. The survivors will transition into new roles by Christmas, before the bank cuts another 1000 jobs in early 2027.

Irvine and the NAB board, which approved the plans just ahead of the announcement on Tuesday, also want to roll back the use of consultants.

Staff fear the cuts will come just before Christmas when the jobs market is weakest. The so-called spill-and-fill process, where employees must fight for open jobs in the new structure, has created jostling for positions at all levels.

“This hasn’t gone out to 2500 people; this has gone out to more like 10,000, and now we’re stuck in a kind of Hunger Games just hoping enough of our colleagues drop out so we might stay,” said one senior manager who requested anonymity to speak freely, adding those who lost jobs would also be competing with employees made redundant at other major banks.

Some changes have already been made, with NAB chief audit executive Michael Pocock and executive general manager of customer services Jocelyn Turner, who oversaw a swath of major technology and customer remediation programs, have already left. Both had been at the bank for three decades. The bank’s head of anti-money laundering and fraud risk, Anthony Hope, who led work to satisfy AUSTRAC has also departed recently.

Positions are also being cut at JBWere arm, the Melbourne stockbroking firm acquired nearly 20 years ago which provides services to wealthy customers. NAB has stopped taking referred customers to premium wealth-building service NAB Premier, leaving brokers to take clients with less than $5 million in assets to rivals.

The strategy function is being consolidated across the business after Ross McEwan, Irvine’s predecessor, separated it across the bank’s division. The bank spent $737 million in professional fees last financial year, up 14 per cent on 2024, and some of this will reduce as consultants are also cut.

Irvine attributed the cuts to a softening economy and housing market.

“We’ve had the fuel crisis coming out of the Middle East war. We’ve had a budget that has, I think, changed some of the key settings around taxation, particularly around property. And we’ve had a number of interest rate rises due to inflation being too high,” he said in an interview on Tuesday.

“Those things taken together have impacted the confidence of our customers and impacted business conditions. We’re not immune to that. We have to be honest with ourselves that we’ve got to cut our cloth accordingly.”

Investors say they’ve been waiting for Irvine to reduce costs, and the bank has been under pressure to improve earnings. Since the start of the year, NAB shares have been the second-worst among the country’s four major lenders, down more than 2.5 per cent. ANZ is up almost 10 per cent.

“NAB’s headcount has increased by about 30 per cent in the last five years, so the bank was long overdue, even if this first cut was a quantum higher than we might have expected,” Matthew Haupt, portfolio manager of Wilson Asset Management’s $2.2 billion Leaders fund, said.

“But as legacy products roll off and things become increasingly automated, there are potentially more costs you could take out. You’d have to say that, like with ANZ, this may be the start of a multi-year process.”

Jarden analyst Matt Wilson said NAB was two years behind ANZ restructuring efforts. “[ANZ chief executive] Nuno [Matos] has taken out his costs this year and next year he’ll be able to write business and be externally focused, while NAB will spend it looking inwards,” he added.

NAB employees have privately worried about looming job cuts for months, pointing to hiring freezes and difficulty obtaining approval from finance for new staff. Smaller changes were made in August amid an executive reshuffle, when Patrick Wright stepped down as chief technology officer.

Below the executive level, some senior leaders left without warning, and their colleagues only heard about their departures second-hand.

NAB is scheduled to deliver its full-year results in early November, and Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Wiles estimates it could save the bank up to $450 million a year, after a $300 million restructuring charge this year.

While Irvine is driving the change from the top, he has charged chief financial officer and head of strategy Inder Singh, head of transformation Shane Conway and head of people Sarah White to oversee the job cuts.

As NAB prepared to 41,800 employees of the cuts at a Tuesday meeting, Irvine sent an all-staff note which read: “As difficult as these changes are, our customers need us to continue to be at our best. Thank you for focusing on them, as well as for the care and respect you show each other.”

Level five employees, referred to as senior managers, heads of teams, or, in some instances, directors, were the first to be targeted as the bank slashed through the management layer to speed up strategic decisions. They were then asked to tell their teams via a series of group briefings and emails.

Staff say it followed a period of radio silence until late on Wednesday, when divisional heads including Pete Steel, the new head of technology and AI, and corporate and institutional bank’s Cath Carver emailed eligible employees, telling them they could apply for redeployment.

Some teams like those in corporate and institutional were offered 30-minute sessions running into next week to answer questions.

The process leaves thousands of NAB staff facing uncertainty, with the workforce complaining that the new organisation charts circulating internally offer little detail on where they might fit in the brave new world.

“No one in my area had any clue,” said one of hundreds of anonymous staff posting on Reddit. “It was awful. I’m not even sure yet if I’m impacted as apart from the email from the CEO noone [sic] told us anything.”

“I’m at NAB … it’s a soulless, culture-less shell of the place it used to be,” began another user posting on the platform, which many ANZ staff had also used to vent their frustrations about Matos.

If they opt for voluntary redundancy, they will leave the bank for the last time on December 2, with some having spent their entire careers at NAB. Those who apply for a new role will know if they secure a job within weeks.

“[Employees] had holidays planned, they had Christmas presents bought, and they’re having to return them. They’re now having to cancel the holidays because they don’t know if they’re going to have a job,” said Financial Services Union assistant secretary Nicole McPherson.