Blatantly Partisan Party Review XIV (federal 2025): Jacqui Lambie Network
Running where: NSW, QLD, SA, TAS for the Senate
Prior reviews: federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022
What I said before: “I disagree with Lambie regularly, but she does seem genuinely responsive to community concerns, personal testimonies, and informed advice” (federal 2022)
What I think this year: What to make of Jacqui Lambie and her Network! She was originally elected for the Palmer United Party in 2013 but soon made a reputation for herself separate from Clive Palmer. She began her political career clearly on the right, but as time has gone on, she has become harder to pin down, embracing policies and ideas from both the left and the right. As a generalisation, I would say she now lands on the centre-right rather than the far-right, and her form of centre-right agenda is the type found among the working classes rather than Turnbull-esque business execs or Xenophon/teal middle classes. Lambie is a loud and sustained voice for a constituency in Tasmania big enough to provide electoral success for over a decade.
But she is also not very good at playing with other children. At the 2022 federal election, at which Lambie was not up for re-election, Tammy Tyrrell won a seat for JLN. Two years later, JLN candidates won 3 seats in Tasmania’s 35-seat state parliament and formed part of the balance of power. But the state count had not even been finalised when Tyrrell resigned from JLN for reasons that have never been aired fully in public, sitting as an independent at first and then registering the party Tammy Tyrrell for Tasmania (which is not contesting this election, as her term does not expire until 2028). As for the three little Lambies in the state parliament, it took merely five months for the flock to be dispersed: Lambie sacked two of them before they could resign. It was farcical and Kevin Bonham has summarised the proceedings in suitably condemnatory language.
So, what’s Jacqui doing this year, given that three of the four other people elected under her name have in the past 13 months ceased to represent the JLN? Why, endorse Senate tickets in three states beyond Tasmania, of course! She does not seem to have lost faith in her ability to work with others, even if the evidence suggests that we be wary. She is also recontesting her own Tasmanian seat, stating that if successful this will be her final term. I guess it’s now or never to build an interstate movement, then. But the previous time she attempted this, the 2016 double dissolution, her party couldn’t crack even 0.5% of the vote in any of the mainland states where she fielded candidates (her lead candidate in Victoria from 2016, amusingly enough, cropped up in WA this year at the top of the ticket for Stop Pedophiles! Protect kiddies!, and if you didn’t follow the WA state election you should read my three-parter in which I tried to deduce what the hell was going on).
One difference between 2016 and 2025 is that Lambie’s put a bit more effort into finding lead candidates for her interstate tickets. I don’t think they have any realistic chance of competing for a seat, but the b_auspol review of the NSW candidate suggests decent vetting, and in SA the lead JLN candidate is Rex Patrick, a former Senator who originally represented the Nick Xenophon Team before founding his own party. On reflection, my review of Patrick’s party in 2022 was unfair and I clearly wrote it in a hurry. I depicted him simply as belonging to a long line of parochial SA-focused candidates who can be bought with a few baubles. I remain lukewarm about some of Patrick’s politics, but he has been an energetic promoter of transparency in government. He promotes himself as the “Transparency Warrior” and the folks who handle Freedom of Information requests would be very familiar with him by now. The afore-linked page bills him as Australia’s “most experienced” FOI applicant/appellant, having lodged 297 requests.
Lambie’s website promises that she—and presumably anyone else elected for JLN—will “keep the bastards honest”, making her just the latest in a line of independent and minor-party candidates to appropriate the famous slogan of the Australian Democrats. The party’s election policies are really just a list of priorities and they don’t inspire me. We’ve got boring right-wing anxiety about foreign property ownership and frankly unimaginative energy policies focused on making gas cheaper (although at least there’s also a policy to install solar and battery power in social housing). JLN wants “fair” resource royalties without specifying what those would be, and somebody needed to proofread the list of priorities because it includes “multinational tax avoidance” as if that’s their policy, rather than that they want to stop it.
Much of Lambie's pitch is simply based on her personality, but a few policies get more detailed pages. Unsurprisingly, given Rex Patrick’s candidature, one is on government corruption. Another on foreign interference is classic Australian Sinophobia of the sort we’ve all seen before. This is not say that China does not seek to assert political hegemony in a multipolar world where the US’s status is crumbling by the day, just to state that JLN’s foreign policy has a narrow focus, reflective of an Australian anxiety that has often exaggerated the risk from China and too often deployed language of national security to excuse simple racism.
Speaking of the US, another signature Lambie policy is “Make Australia Make Again”, which looks nostalgically to Australia’s manufacturing sector of the post-WWII era. That time has passed; we are one of the world’s wealthiest countries and we have a post-industrial knowledge and services economy (over 62% of GDP). We don't have a large manufacturing sector because we can afford to buy goods from other people and pursue more lucrative forms of wealth creation. Lambie proclaims the failure of free trade, but some voters might look more warily at Lambie’s pro-tariffs position than they would have a couple of months ago before Trump imposed some of the most ill-conceived tariffs in history. For all their prominence, mining and manufacturing each contribute less than 6% of GDP; the days of manufacturing contributing 30% of GDP are dead and gone because we can do other things more efficiently with our labour and resources. Sorry Jacqui, this is a policy for the past, not for the future.
Recommendation: Give the Jacqui Lambie Network a weak preference. I would suggest placing the JLN directly above the Liberals but I would struggle to justify much higher unless you’re in SA and like Rex Patrick. JLN is, though, superior to extreme-right outfits like Family First.
Website: https://lambienetwork.com.au/
