For the 20th anniversary of Crikey‘s prestigious end-of-year awards, we put the call out for nominations for our most sought-after award: Arsehat of the Year. The Crikey readership, as it always does, came through.
Below are the people who managed to look at the state of the world at the start of the year and thought, “Yeah, but how can I make things worse?”
We’ve generally tried to keep our list of nominees short in years past, but in honour of the free-flowing lists of our heritage, we’re giving you lots of options this time. It’s a testament to the state of things a quarter of a century into the 2000s that we still had to leave a few write-in nominations out. And even with the extended list, we’re still looking at one of the most competitive fields we’ve ever assembled.
Presented in alphabetical order:
Anthony Albanese: We always have to think extra hard about including a prime minister in this list — it’s a hard and unforgiving gig. And yet, like his predecessor, Scott Morrison, Albanese easily qualifies. Even though we could have included so many other — say, special envoy to combat antisemitism Jillian Segal for massive overreach, or Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and his ever-worse management of Defence and further intertwining of Australia with an increasingly out of control US — we ultimately come back to Albanese and the cynical way he has approached his time in the top job. On transparency, gambling reform and integrity, his government could easily have been mistaken for the rabble he has now soundly defeated.
Professor Warren Bebbington: It’s a measure of the strength of the field this year that Professor Bebbington may have missed out on a well deserved nomination, had a reader not reminded us that Bebbington, as chair of the board of Melbourne University Press (MUP), carried the can for the death of “the 85-year-old literary institution Meanjin, and appearing to block any opportunities to save it. For bloodless managerialism and cultural desecration”.
The Bureau of Meteorology: For its new website, obviously.
Andrew Hastie: Say what you want about Tony Abbott or Kevin Rudd, at least their attempts at wrecking their own parties’ leadership had a bit of conviction. Hastie, on the other hand, gave his leader Sussan Ley several headaches (in a year when she would already have single-handedly kept Panadol in business) and further wounded the opposition’s lamentable state as a policy generator, without ever actually pulling the trigger and trying to take the party leadership. He also got a number of write-ins for his tone-deaf video, advocating, as Bernard Keane put it, a “let’s go back to the 1970s and drive deathtrap muscle cars” nostalgia.
Justin Hemmes: The Merivale hospo don, having added to the litany of cataclysms befalling former opposition leader Peter Dutton by hosting a Liberal fundraiser at his Vaucluse mansion before the May election, makes his Arsehat of the Year debut for a few reasons. After taking over half of Sydney and making it virtually impossible to go out for dinner or a drink in the CBD without lining his pockets, he now plans to — as one reader put it — “ruin Melbourne’s hospitality/nightlife too”. This is all while Merivale is accused of exploiting staff, ignoring sexual harassment claims and putting VIP customers ahead of worker safety.
Pauline Hanson: Hanson has somehow avoided winning this coveted award over the course of Crikey’s lifetime, but if the number of nominations she received from our readers this year is anything to go by, she’s an early favourite in 2025. Hanson appears to have entered her “going door to door trying to shock people” era, culminating in and best exemplified by her reheated stunt of wearing a burqa in Parliament. “There’s nothing beneath that burqa,” wrote Bernard Keane the first time around in August 2017, and it’s a measure of Hanson’s unchangingly poisonous politics that you could run that exact argument again nearly a decade later. Added to this rancid salad is the fact that, if the polls are anything to go by, it’s working.
Barnaby Joyce: Another reason for Hanson’s number of nominations was her year-long courting of former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, which started, as we noted, “shortly after Joyce was filmed prostrate in a Canberra gutter, gurgling obscenities into his phone”. Joyce received a flurry of nominations this year, managing to turn his near-pathological need for the spotlight — and associated dumping of his former party — into what we’d call a media storm if it wasn’t so slow-moving and dull. A media drizzly day, let’s call it.
Linda Reynolds: Former government minister Linda Reynolds, like Barnaby, gets into this list for making personal grievances the nation’s problem. Apparently not sufficiently vindicated by her attempt to bankrupt a rape victim via her successful defamation action against former staffer Brittany Higgins, Reynolds has continued — aided and abetted by her friends in the media — a dispiriting and unedifying public relitigation of an already sorry affair.
Meg O’Neill: The Woodside CEO gets a nod for a single interview — that’s how bad it was. “It’s been a fascinating journey to watch the discussion, particularly amongst young people who have this very ideological, almost zealous view of, you know, fossil fuels bad, renewables good, that are happily plugging in their devices, ordering things from Shein and Temu — having, you know, one little thing shipped to their house without any sort of recognition of the energy and carbon impact of their actions,” she noted in May. And it’s true, young people should be doing more to restructure global supply chains and how the energy system works. I guess we just need a completely dispassionate fossil fuel CEO to show them the way.
Tim Nicholls: A reader nominated the Queensland health minister for a multitude of reasons: “Not only did he decide to undermine transgender youth healthcare, but he also blundered basic legislative requirements to do so, losing court battles over it. Meanwhile, Health is an ongoing cancer on the QLD Government agenda with bad metrics and news just pouring out all the time.”
Dan Tehan: Tehan really put the “shadow” in “shadow energy and emissions reduction minister”, overseeing a climate change policy that even Coalition denialists thought might be a bit much and “making a string of recent LNP leaders look like Mensa graduates” in the process, in the words of a reader.
Murray Watt: Then there’s Labor’s work on the environment. Minister Murray Watt ended the year with a win, getting Labor’s long-delayed environmental laws through parliament by making some very necessary, if not sufficient, improvements to get the Greens’ backing. But boy oh boy, it’s from a low bar. There were the attempts to remove independent approval processes under the legislation, and the defining failure that kicked off his time as environment minister: approving Woodside’s proposed life extension to its West Australian gas facility beyond 2030.
Tim Wilson: Tim Wilson, of course, delivered pretty much the only good news the Liberal Party got in May 2025, scraping home against teal independent Zoe Daniels. Wilson has not added to the overflowing horn o’plenty that is his list of public embarrassments since his return to his office, but if anyone wants a sense of how important it is to get those moderate Liberals back into office, look at the extremely effective work Wilson and co been doing influencing Coalition climate policy.
Honourable mentions
US President Donald Trump got a lot of mentions from readers, but is disqualified as a non-Australian under the Section 44 approach we took to the Arsehats this year. Huge shoutout for the reader who put forward Peter Dutton, despite Dutton’s retirement from contention a few years back, because, having approached the 2025 election with the care and skill of the Hindenburg designer, “he has to win something”.
Further, I’m devastated to report that more than one reader took the time to put forward “Charlie Lewis” as their nominee.
