The real threat to Australia’s economic resilience is not a fleet of Chinese-made parliamentary vehicles but decades of industrial decline. The failure to confront that reality is creating political space for One Nation to occupy.

There is a sentence I never expected to write. But here we are.

On the question of what Australia should do about its economic vulnerabilities and industrial dependencies, Pauline Hanson is currently asking more substantive questions than the official opposition.

That is not a compliment to Hanson. Instead, it’s a diagnosis of our official Opposition.

Last week, The Age reported that more than 30 per cent of taxpayer-funded parliamentary vehicles are Chinese-made EVs. Opposition special minister of state James McGrath promptly called for a security review, warning that these vehicles were “effectively rolling Chinese data centres” and should “set off alarm bells across the parliament.”

The alarm bells duly rang. The press releases duly followed.

There was, however, a small problem with the narrative: the security agency whose testimony had been recruited to power it said nothing of the sort.

According to the same report by The Age, ASIO deputy director-general Lisa Alonso Love told Senate estimates that parliamentarians should not have sensitive conversations in any vehicle, connected or otherwise.

She named no brands. She identified no country-specific threat. The principle – classified conversations belong in secure environments, not in cars – applies to every connected vehicle regardless of manufacturer. Greens senator David Shoebridge made exactly this point during the same hearing. It did not make the headline.

When intelligence professionals........

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