Rex Patrick

4 weeks ago | michaelwest.com.au | Rex Patrick |Michael West

Taxpayers will pay Pauline Hanson’s One Nation $2.98M for her not to win a single seat in the House of Representatives election. Rex Patrick reports on some fun and not so fun vote payment facts from the 2025 election. Any party or independent that gets more that 4% of the primary votes in any of the 150 electorates in the House of Representatives (House) will receive $3.39 per vote from taxpayers to offset the cost of their election campaign.

1 month ago | michaelwest.com.au | Rex Patrick |Michael West

A new FOI reveals Kevin Rudd has been talking the AUKUS talk, with success. Yet no amount of talk will help the US walk the AUKUS walk. Rex Patrick on the project status. A Freedom of Information request looking into what Ambassador Kevin Rudd and his Washington staffers had been doing on AUKUS since he took up his post in March 2023 shows that he was pretty busy. When he arrived at his Embassy post, the US Congress had already passed the Australia-United States Submarine Officer Pipeline Act.

1 month ago | michaelwest.com.au | Rex Patrick |Michael West

The location of Australia’s nuclear submarine bases on the East Coast is so sensitive that the Defence Department withheld an FOI response until 24 hours after the polls closed. Rex Patrick reports. Documents released to me last Sunday, based on an FOI request, were due on March 15, just before the election campaign was about to start in earnest. Was the delay coincidental? I think not.

2 months ago | michaelwest.com.au | Rex Patrick |Michael West

The AUKUS submarine project faces huge risks, and Cabinet knows. But as the Government ships $2B of taxpayers’ money to the US this year, with much more to follow, the taxpayer is not being told. Rex Patrick reports. On 26 February this year, Vice Admiral Jonathan Mead, the man in charge of AUKUS, advised the Senate that the AUKUS submarine program was “very high risk”. He said, “We’ve made that clear to government, and the government has made that clear to the public.”However, it has not.

2 months ago | michaelwest.com.au | Michael West |Duncan Graham |Rex Patrick |Michael Pascoe

Hostilities in the battle for the prime ministership have been briefly paused as leaders struck a more subdued tone on the campaign trail on Good Friday. With most of the country putting thoughts of an election on the backburner during the Easter break, Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton also adopted a more laidback approach. The prime minister joined Bennelong MP Jerome Laxale for a casual stroll with their dogs Toto and Toby at a park in the marginal seat.