“Were they promises?” “They were statements.” “Promises?” “Statements.” “Is there a difference?”
The Prime Minister explains housing policy, the Australian dream, and why he’ll be at the Mid-Winter Ball.
Anthony Norman Albanese crossed Parramatta Road the way other people cross a street: with the calm and conviction of someone who has rehearsed the gesture for television. He came from a housing commission island ringed by depots and the click-clack of Catholic rosary beads, black as anthracite and polished to a gloss by the unrelenting petitions of the poor but faithful. He was, as the campaign line put it, a son of a single mum. It was also an opening line with longer ambitions.
Sons of Toil, Part I: The Toolmaker’s Bequest
Keir Rodney Starmer came into the world named after the great Scottish agitator who opposed a popular war and was expelled from Parliament for it. The naming was the most radical act the Starmer family would perform for the next six decades. After that, everything moved in precisely the opposite direction.
Catch 22
Heller’s Catch-22 was the trap no rational mind could escape. Trump has built it in reverse, proving his unfitness 122 doctors at a time.
Canossa on the South Lawn
In 1077 a king knelt three days in the snow at Canossa, and it worked. Nine and a half centuries on, the pope-king turns eighty behind a cage on the South Lawn while the pretenders queue: a trillionaire, a Crown Prince, and a deputy sheriff paying by direct debit. Urban Wronski on the new Investiture Controversy.
Donald John “Two-Weeks” Trump: The Work-Experience Boy from Hell
He’s always a mate of a mate and he’s never paying you back. So it is with the deal-maker president, whose “two weeks” has become the most transparent stall in modern diplomacy. Part Three of the Iran war series: the farce, the spoiler in Tel Aviv, the donors and enforcers, and the West Australian gas giant cashing in on the carnage.
One Careful Owner
The interview never happened. It should have. John Clarke died in 2017, and the genre died with him: the po-faced minister, the patient interrogator, the absurdity delivered in the flat tones of a man explaining a routine procurement. So here is the sketch he might have written, had he lived to watch us buy three used submarines and call it a defence strategy.
The set is two chairs and a desk. We join them mid-interview.
DAWE: Minister, under the original deal Australia was to receive three submarines. Two second-hand, one brand new.
CLARKE: The new one was the exciting one.
DAWE: And now?
CLARKE: Three submarines, Bryan. The number remains unchanged.
DAWE: But the new one has gone.
CLARKE: The new one has been streamlined.
DAWE: Into what?
CLARKE: Into an older one.
DAWE: So all three are now second-hand.
CLARKE: All three are proven. We’ve placed a premium on simplicity. The brand-new one had never been to sea. We didn’t know it. These, we know everything about. We even know how old they are.
DAWE: How old are they?
CLARKE: Between six and fifteen years.
DAWE: The design life is thirty-three.
CLARKE: So someone’s taken care of the difficult early years. We’ve outsourced the running-in. The Americans have very kindly absorbed the depreciation.
DAWE: The country is paying an extraordinary amount of money.
CLARKE: You could buy a great many doughnuts, Bryan.
DAWE: We’re not buying doughnuts.
CLARKE: No, but it gives you a sense of scale. Warehouses of them. Fresh daily.
DAWE: For three used submarines.
CLARKE: One careful owner. Full service history.
DAWE: When do they arrive?
CLARKE: The first in 2032. And in the meantime, the jobs. That’s what nobody mentions.
DAWE: What jobs?
CLARKE: We have two hundred Australian tradespeople at Pearl Harbor. Skilled people. Working on the submarines.
DAWE: Our submarines.
CLARKE: The American ones.
DAWE: We’ve sent Australian workers to fix the US Navy’s submarines.
CLARKE: To increase their sea days. They’re behind, the poor beggars. Can’t build them fast enough. So we’re helping out.
DAWE: While we wait for ours.
CLARKE: While we wait. It’s the alliance, Bryan. You give a little.
DAWE: We’re paying an enormous sum and supplying labour to build the boats the seller hasn’t finished.
CLARKE: When you put it like that it sounds transactional. This is a friendship. You don’t keep score.
DAWE: Minister, are we any safer?
CLARKE: They’re perfectly safe, Bryan.
DAWE: Safe from what?
CLARKE: From the threat.
DAWE: Which threat?
CLARKE: The one we don’t name. You don’t name it. That’s the whole point of it.
DAWE: But you’ve costed it. You’ve sent two hundred tradesmen to Hawaii over it.
CLARKE: We’ve had to be prudent.
DAWE: About a country you won’t name.
CLARKE: Our largest trading partner, Bryan. You don’t insult a customer.
DAWE: So we’re defending ourselves against the people we sell the iron ore to.
CLARKE: We sell them the iron ore. They sell us the anxiety. It’s a very balanced relationship.
DAWE: And the submarines arrive when?
CLARKE: The first in 2032. The Australian-built ones in the 2040s.
DAWE: Until then?
CLARKE: You’ll always know where they are.
DAWE: Thank you for your time.
A note to readers: this, invented interview is a tribute to the comic genius of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, their remarkable craft and timing and an act of homage to a tradition of satire that is razor-sharp and yet utterly minimalist. Pared to the essentials. Two chairs, a desk, rather than any set and the truth said plainly enough to be unbearable. There is no greater compliment.
A very close cousin to this text also currently appears in The AIMN under, “Underwater Matters: AUKUS and the Art of the Used Submarine.”
The Art of the Steal
Trump killed Truth, Justice and the American Way. The same announcement-as-product racket just sold Australia three second-hand submarines and called it a triumph.
The Invisible Press, Part 3: The Deniability Machine
Hannah Arendt sat in a converted theatre in Jerusalem in 1961 and watched a gaunt, bespectacled man in a glass booth follow history through headphones. She called it the banality of evil. She was not writing about Australia. She did not need to. The third and final part of The Great Digital Enclosure.
The Invisible Press, Part 2
The Australian Harrow does not use needles. It uses bail conditions, suppression orders, national security legislation, and pre-trial process that can run for years before a single day in open court. David McBride got six years in gaol for telling the truth. Bernard Collaery was prosecuted for defending his client. The penal colony never really ended. It merely changed its dress code.
Urban Wronski Writes 