Month: September 2025

The Gilded Turd: America’s Vegas Bordello Presidency

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The current American presidency, likened to a gaudy display, symbolizes a degradation of democracy driven by narcissism and poor governance. Promises remain unfulfilled, with policies causing harm rather than progress. The manipulation of truth and ethics fosters an environment of chaos, raising concerns about the future of democracy beyond this administration.

Captured State: How Corporate Australia Wrote Labor’s Climate Surrender

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The real tragedy isn’t just pissweak climate policy—it’s the systematic corruption of democratic governance itself. We’ve cultivated a political class more eager to curry favour with the titans of industry than to tackle the programs that might actually drag our collective arses out of the fire. Cabinet ministers book more face-time with fossil fuel executives than climate scientists. Policy frameworks emerge from industry “working groups,” not public consultation.

No Laughing Matter: Why a Tyrant Fears a Joke

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The power of laughter is emphasized as a formidable weapon against authority, particularly exemplified by Donald Trump, whose fear of mockery reveals his vulnerabilities. Comedians and humor serve as democratic safeguards, illustrating that tyrants cannot withstand ridicule. Ultimately, laughter transforms leaders into clowns, undermining their power more effectively than force.

Abbott, Suppository of All Wisdom turns into Dispensary of MAGA Madness

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Tony Abbott once promised to be the nation’s “suppository of wisdom.” Now he’s Murdoch’s courier of toxins, importing America’s rage politics like duty-free bourbon — cheap, corrosive, and guaranteed to rot the liver of democracy.

“Abbott hasn’t mellowed into elder statesman; he’s calcified into Murdoch’s choirboy, piping Trumpist grievance into Australia.”

Tony Abbott: From Onion-Eating Buffoon to MAGA’s Choirboy in Australia

Tony Abbott is not a sage elder of Australian politics. He is the ghost of our national misadventures, still clanking around the Liberal Party like a poltergeist in budgie smugglers, bellowing slogans through Murdoch’s megaphone.

This is the man who ate a raw onion on camera, who blurted out that climate science was “absolute crap,” who sanctified offshore detention with scripture: “Jesus knew that there was a place for everything, and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.” Abbott hasn’t grown wiser. He has merely grown more dangerous, now less parliamentarian than permanent wrecking ball.

Theology wrapped in razor wire

Abbott’s gift has never been governance. It has been weaponised nonsense. “Shit happens,” he muttered after a soldier’s death — less a gaffe than a governing creed. He was the self-anointed “suppository of all wisdom,” a line that would have been funny if it weren’t so accidentally true: his political style has always been less light than laxative, purging complexity and leaving only slogans behind.

From Murdoch’s boardroom to MAGA’s hymnbook

Today, Abbott lounges in the Murdoch empire’s choir stalls, listed as a director at Fox. This isn’t retirement; it’s redeployment. He pipes America’s culture-war hymns straight into Australia, teaching our conservatives to sing the MAGA songbook — grievance, paranoia, endless enemies. He’s not a guardian of tradition; he’s an importer of toxins.

The recent assassination of U.S. hard-right activist Charlie Kirk shows just how lethal this script can be. In America, grief was immediately repackaged as grievance: vigils morphed into rallies, Kirk canonised as a martyr. The playbook is familiar — sanctify the dead, demonise the enemy, demand permanent mobilisation. Abbott’s network knows the tune and is ready to belt it across the Pacific.

The Australian sty of MAGA-curious

Here at home, the echoes are unmistakable. Attacks on Welcome to Country, pandemic “health despotism” tirades, the weaponisation of the Voice referendum — all follow the MAGA template: crisis without end, institutions cast as villains, rage professionalised into a business model. Abbott’s protégé Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been swept into that orbit, her prominence part Australian phenomenon, part American franchise.

Perpetual student politician

Abbott himself remains the eternal campus brawler. Barbara Ramjan’s allegation that he punched the wall beside her head after losing a university election — denied but never forgotten — sticks because it feels true to type: intimidation as theatre, combat as creed. As Health Minister he was infamous for walking into meetings unbriefed; as Prime Minister, he governed by three-word slogan. Always the prefect with clenched fists, never the leader with open hands.

Poison, not statesmanship

Abbott normalised a style of politics at war with its own country: suspicion of institutions, contempt for science, reduction of public life to slogans, spectacle and spite. The risk now is that this Americanised culture-war model metastasises fully here, mistaking noise for nation and grievance for government.

And now, with the death of Charlie Kirk, Abbott and his ilk are rehearsing the oldest trick in the demagogue’s manual: canonising scoundrels as martyrs. A political grifter is rebadged as a fallen saint, his legacy lacquered with holy grievance, his death weaponised as proof that the movement is righteous and under siege. The danger is obvious: if Abbott can sanctify Kirk, what won’t he sanctify? Which scoundrel is next for the shrine?

Australia doesn’t need another importer of outrage. We don’t need Abbott’s theatre of resentment, nor MAGA politics in an Akubra, lycra and bike shorts, nor the canonisation of hucksters as heroes. What we need is civic stubbornness: parliaments with spine, media that refuses the dopamine hit of rage, and citizens prepared to laugh off imported hysteria rather than applaud it.

Abbott may fancy himself an elder statesman. History will remember him differently: as a courier of poison, the canoniser of scoundrels, a man who mistook noise for wisdom and spectacle for statesmanship.

It will be hard, Tony, given your Peter Pan character, but it would be best for all parties if you accept your epic fail as a clueless PM. Stop the press drops; do a Peter Dutton. Hit the mute button.

Charlie Kirk’s death is America’s tragedy but it rings warning bells for Australia.

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By David Tyler

A single gunshot on a campus quad in Utah echoed around the globe last week. Charlie Kirk – founder of Turning Point USA, a close ally of Donald Trump, a man who made outrage his stock-in-trade – dropped where he stood. Within minutes, his death was not simply news but raw spectacle. Graphic videos ricocheted across social media. Commentators hailed him as a martyr. Others cheered that one of the loudest voices of America’s right had finally been silenced.

That is how democracies decay: not in silence, but in noise. And if Australians think this is just another grisly American export – best observed from a safe distance, like a Hollywood shoot-out – we are kidding ourselves.

A career built on division

Kirk’s life’s work was to turn the lecture hall into a battlefield. His campus rallies were staged like prize fights: the conservative pugilist against a caricatured “woke mob”. He built a brand on attacking LGBTQ+ rights, rubbishing climate science, and amplifying election and COVID conspiracies.

In the process he proved something chilling: that politics as spectacle sells. The bigger the outrage, the bigger the audience. And that lesson has already leached across the Pacific.

Media firestorm, misinformation cyclone

The coverage of his killing revealed a second truth. In the digital age, there is no pause button. Within hours, conspiracy theories bloomed online: that Kirk was silenced by deep-state assassins; that leftists had declared open season; that his death was proof of a looming civil war.

Meanwhile, serious reporting fought for oxygen. The PBS NewsHour called it a “graphic wildfire” of misinformation. The New York Times noted the rush of macho memes and performative grief. On the far right, Kirk was sainted as a fallen hero. On the left, warnings rang out: deify this man and you embolden every would-be culture-war demagogue waiting in the wings.

If you think Australia’s immune, look at our own social feeds. We import not only Marvel movies and Starbucks but also American memes, hashtags, and talking points. Disinformation on Indigenous recognition, vaccines, and immigration has already taken root here. Kirk’s playbook is being photocopied in real time.

Political violence as the new normal

The most frightening takeaway from Kirk’s assassination is not the man himself but the climate it reflects. In today’s United States, nearly a quarter of citizens say political violence can be justified. Think about that: one in four ready to swap ballots for bullets.

The language of war – “enemies”, “traitors”, “take our country back” – no longer lives on the fringes. It is mainstream cable chatter, viral TikTok fodder, stump-speech boilerplate. And once violence is normalised, democracy is on borrowed time.

The Australian mirror

Here at home, we flatter ourselves that we are more pragmatic, less combustible. And yes, our politics lacks America’s guns-and-God theatrics. But the warning lights are flashing.

Universities are now battlegrounds over “cancel culture” and free speech. Talkback and Sky After Dark hum with American-style grievance. Online echo chambers have trained a generation to see political opponents not as neighbours to argue with, but as existential threats to be crushed.

We are not yet at the point of gunfire in the quad. But the slope is there, and it is slippery.

Choosing a different path

Australia still has time to step back. That means resisting the temptation to import American tropes wholesale. It means politicians refusing the easy sugar hit of division. It means media – public, commercial and independent – putting accuracy and context ahead of clicks.

Our schools and universities should be places where disagreement sharpens minds, not weapons. Our civic culture should reward listening as much as shouting. And when demagogues try to monetise outrage, we must starve them of attention. Every time we share their clips, we become unwitting extras in their show.

A lesson written in blood

Kirk’s last stage was a university designed for debate. His final act was silence imposed by a gun. What followed – the rush of misinformation, the instant partisanship, the hollow posturing – shows just how thin the line is between rhetoric and reality.

We need not mourn Kirk’s ideas to mourn what was lost: the fragile space in democracy where argument can happen without fear, where disagreement does not end in blood.

The brutal lesson is this: democracies don’t collapse only under tanks or tyrants. They also rot from within – when trust erodes, when truth is optional, when violence becomes just another language of politics.

Australia can still choose differently. But only if we stop treating America’s crisis as an exotic import, and start treating it as the cautionary tale it is.

Because once the spiral tightens, it may be too late to pull back.