As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.
The Mushroom Treatment: A Government That Treats You With Contempt Cannot Be Trusted
The Albanese government gives us the mushroom treatment. Keeps us in the dark and feeds us BS. This week, while a US-Israeli war of questionable legality engulfs the Middle East and Pine Gap hums away in the desert night, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong delivered a bravura homage to John Cage: all performance, all silence, no content whatsoever.
Trump’s Iran Blunder
Robert Reich knows Trump has no endgame for his Iran war. What he doesn’t see from inside the American story: the munitions arithmetic is catastrophic, the legal basis non-existent, and Canberra has made us part of it without asking a single question in Parliament.
The Tail That Wags the Dog: Israel’s War, America’s Blood
Three American soldiers are dead. A girls’ primary school in Minab is rubble. The Strait of Hormuz is under threat. Regional war has arrived — exactly as every credible analyst, diplomat and international lawyer predicted. Urban Wronski on how Israel wagged the most powerful dog in the world into the most dangerous Middle Eastern conflagration since Iraq 2003.
He Was Warned. He Knew. He Did It Anyway.
Trump was warned by Iran, by his own intelligence services, by international mediators and by members of his own Congress. The warnings were not vague — they were specific, on the record, and entirely accurate. Iran had agreed to a nuclear breakthrough the day before. Netanyahu lobbied for the strike. MBS made private phone calls urging it. US intelligence said there was no imminent threat. Trump attacked anyway. Now the region burns.
We Bombed a School Full of Children. Call It What It Is.
Sara Shariatmadar was six years old. She went to school on Saturday morning and did not come home. At least 108 girls died — the governor says 148— when US and Israeli munitions struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran. International humanitarian law is unambiguous. This is a war crime. The perpetrators should be indicted.
The Ghost in the Kill-Chain: The Invisible Cost of “Surgical” War
Fresh from incinerating Venezuelan fishermen, Team Trump moves another carrier strike group into the Persian Gulf. We’re sold the antiseptic fantasy of “surgical strikes” delivered by Artificial Intelligence. But someone taught those machines to see. And they’re paying for it in ways the Pentagon will never announce.
The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power
For thirty years, Australia’s most powerful construction union has served as a moral punching bag for the nation’s political and media establishment. Every few years another “reckoning” arrives: a Royal Commission, a regulator’s dawn raid, a media exposé discovering organised crime in high-vis. Each time, … Continue reading The Perennial Persecution of the CFMEU: Demonisation as a Defence of Power
The CFMEU Setup: How Workers Get Mugged in an Election Year
Imagine Sarah, nurse at St Vincents, on the Number 96 tram, Melbournedusk bruising purple outside the windows. Twelve hours done. Her navyscrubs are faded and soft, worn to the shape of her, the way asoldier’s fatigues eventually become a second skin. She doesn’t looklike someone … Continue reading The CFMEU Setup: How Workers Get Mugged in an Election Year
America’s Wag-the-Dog Moment
A flailing administration, a nuclear pretext recycled from the WMD workshop of 2003, and an Israel that appears to be setting the tempo of a potential world war. Before the missiles fly, Urban Wronski asks the question Washington’s press won’t: is this about Iran — or about saving Trump from himself?
Urban Wronski Writes 