JENI O’DOWD: Why 2025 was year of the political shirker

January comes with an unspoken expectation that everyone should start again.

New habits. New budgets. New discipline. But while Australians are pushed to self-improve after a bruising year, those with the most power are doing the least, waiting out the noise and trusting that a brutal news cycle has buried what they would rather not explain.

For example, the revelations about MPs’ expenses surfaced late in 2025 but were swallowed up by the devastating Bondi Beach terror attacks.

Communications and Sport Minister Anika Wells was under intense scrutiny over her use of taxpayer-funded travel entitlements, including a $95,000 trip to New York in September for a United Nations event to promote the Government’s social media ban for under-16s.

Technically, it was within guidelines, but both her response and the Prime Minister’s showed a Government with no idea how brutally the cost-of-living crisis is affecting ordinary Aussies.

It also showed they either can’t read the public mood, or don’t give a toss about it.

Being told that flying spouses to sporting events, including Boxing Day Test matches, AFL grand finals, the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix and other big-ticket events, is “within the rules” is an insult.

Albanese’s defence of Anika Wells was just wrong.

He avoided calls for an inquiry into MPs’ expenses and travel perks, saying: “They’ve been in place for some time, and we haven’t changed the rules. We haven’t added to any entitlements.”

But the bigger problem is not the entitlement itself. It is the Government’s resistance to scrutiny, and what we are seeing now from the families of the Bondi Beach massacre victims goes to the heart of that failure of leadership.

Dozens of victims’ families have publicly demanded that the Prime Minister immediately establish a royal commission into what they describe as law enforcement, intelligence and policy failures that led to the attack.

These are not activists or political operatives. They are parents, spouses and children who lost loved ones in the deadliest terrorist attack on Australian soil.

They are asking one simple question: why is a national royal commission good enough for banks and aged care, but not for terrorism and public safety?

Why is the Prime Minister backing a limited State inquiry while resisting a Commonwealth investigation with real powers to examine intelligence failures, radicalisation and the rise of anti-Semitism nationwide?

Their statement is devastating in its clarity. “You owe us answers. You owe us accountability. And you owe Australians the truth.”

Next, we are still waiting to find out when the next group of so-called ISIS brides — women who chose to pledge allegiance to a brutal extremist movement — will return to Australia.

There was little public explanation of how or why decisions were made to allow those who already returned, with children born in Syria, into our country.

Others are expected to follow. But we don’t know when, or how many.

We are entitled to know this, as well as how they will be monitored and what the long-term plan is to stop further radicalisation of the women or their children.

After the Bondi Beach attack, a change.org petition calling for Albanese’s resignation was lodged and has already received more than 366,000 signatures.

I found out about it at a Boxing Day party where the Prime Minister’s ineptitude was the main talking point. The rapid spread of this petition shows how disconnected many of us feel from the Government.

Finally, can we have some actual cost-of-living relief rather than political promises? Energy prices, insurance premiums, supermarket costs and interest rates are all biting ordinary Aussies hard.

Then there is the Opposition, which has spent months talking about the importance of border control and immigration settings, while repeatedly promising to release a policy at some later date.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley first flagged a new immigration policy in November, promising it would be released “in the coming weeks” and before the end of the year.

She argued migration numbers were too high and said the Coalition would set out a clearer framework around intake levels and standards. But weeks passed, then months.

By December, the policy was still unreleased, with the Coalition citing timing and sensitivities after the Bondi attack.

But for voters demanding clarity, the message was familiar: strong rhetoric with the familiar deferred detail.

We don’t need lectures about resilience, discipline or “doing more with less”.

We don’t need to make New Year’s promises. We need leaders willing to reset themselves and show some transparency.