The Unreality Principle: News, Political Fiction and the Theatre of The Absurd

So here’s how Wednesday 10 December unfolded in the shallow-deep, darkly comic, parallel universe where Australian politics happens, that strange dimension where things that don’t exist get treated as if they matter, CCS, and things that actually matter, pensions, teeth, get filed under “too hard, check back later.”

First up, we are banning teens from social media. Promising. Or Brave, Minister? Bans have a patchy track record. But if Mum and Dad are talking to the kids, it’s already succeeded, bullshits Albo. Kudos, though for timing and a catchy name “Online Safety Amendment(Social Media Minimum Age)Bill 2024″, thoughfully long enough ago to give the kids plenty of time to work out an evasion strategy,

So Labor’s bipartisan Social Media Soup Nazi law finally kicks in. No Tik Tok for you! (if you’re under sixteen.) But, there’s more: YouTube, X, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, Threads, and Kick.

Picture it: millions of teenagers across the nation simultaneously discovering VPNs, fake IDs, and their parents’ login details.

Meanwhile, Anika Wells, yet another rising star of Labor’s Right is yet to be eclipsed by some synchronised expense account mud-slinging, our national sport. Just to be on the safe side, however, her diary has been cleared by the minders that run the show. Only to know nothing at the Royal Commission.

Challenging spell-checkers everywhere, Anika was to front cameras. Explain the ban. No-one can. But she spins it beautifully. The medium is the masseuse, as McLuhan almost put it. All soothing gestures, no actual substance. Like being gently strangled by someone who really cares about your wellbeing.

But she’s nowhere to be seen. An incommunicado communications minister? Anika Bin Hid? Perfect political theatre. All gesture, no grip. Minders play a blinder of a game, though. Five stars.

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The Submarine That Wasn’t

Meanwhile, over in Britain – you know, that place we’re buying nuclear submarines from – Rear Admiral Philip Mathias has just stood up in front of God and the Telegraph to declare the UK is “no longer capable of managing a nuclear submarine programme.”

Picture this. A Rear Admiral. British. Nuclear submarines. He says “catastrophic failures.” It’s like watching someone announce that Rolls-Royce has forgotten how to make cars, or that the Swiss have misplaced the recipe for chocolate. Or fondue. Except instead of luxury vehicles, confectionery, or clag, we’re talking about the $368 billion worth of underwater stealth technology we’ve already paid a deposit on.

The superbly named HMS Ambush has been sitting in port for three years. Not ambushing anything. Just… sitting there. Like a very expensive paperweight that costs billions to maintain and can’t actually hold down any paper because it’s underwater. Except it’s not underwater. It’s in port. Not moving.

Nobody panic. I’m sure it’s fine. So far. Five Stars for the whistle-blow. You’d be locked up here.

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Left on Read by America

Just to complete the trifecta of unreality, America releases its latest foreign policy paper and Australia gets the diplomatic equivalent of being left on read. You know that feeling when you text someone “We still on for Saturday?” and you can see they’ve read it but they don’t reply? That. But with aircraft carriers.

But here’s where it gets properly interesting – where the fiction collides with reality so hard you can hear the screech of metal on bitumen.

National treasure, Richard Denniss stands up at the Press Club, all six foot something of him, (great hair and teeth, too) radiating that particular brand of economist’s exasperation that comes from watching people ignore arithmetic, and bells the cat. Which country in the world, he asked, could commit to spending $368 billion on nuclear submarines without troubling Treasury, let alone bothering Cabinet or – God forbid – debating it in parliament?

Only a country that’s fabulously, obscenely, ridiculously rich. Us. Five stars for courage.

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The Invisible Submarine Problem

And there it is. The truth hiding in plain sight. We’re not a battling nation of larrikins struggling to make ends meet. We’re loaded. Stinking rich. Rolling in it.

We can afford to piss $368 billion up against a wall on submarines we’ll never see, can’t crew, can’t service, and which, here’s the kicker, are already obsolete.

Because while the HMS Ambush has been sitting in Portsmouth gathering barnacles, the world has moved on. Drone technology. AI-powered surveillance. Quantum magnetic sensors mounted on drones that can detect a submarine’s magnetic signature with picotesla precision.

Picture this: a Chinese drone the size of a Toyota Corolla, hovering over the South China Sea, equipped with quantum sensors that can detect the magnetic ripple of a submarine’s hull from kilometres away. It’s like trying to play hide-and-seek when the seeker has x-ray vision and you’re wearing a bell. The stealth submarine; that technological marvel that’s supposed to lurk undetected in the ocean depths like some aquatic ninja, is being tracked by what amounts to a very smart flying metal detector.

The oceans are becoming transparent. No. Not metaphorically. Actually transparent. IEEE Spectrum reports that advances in AI, drones, and sensing technologies are “rapidly changing the dynamics of undersea warfare.”

Which is military-speak for “your $368 billion investment is about as stealthy as a fart in a sleeping bag.”

But nobody mentions this. Not in Parliament. Not in Cabinet. Not when we’re signing away $368 billion. Not when Defence Minister Richard Marles stands in front of the cameras, clearly having practised his “this is definitely a good idea” face in his shaving mirror, to explain why we urgently need submarines that won’t arrive until 2042, by which time they’ll be detectable by an iPhone app.

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The Falsifiability Problem

Now, Karl Popper and ex Popperian, Paul Feyerabend, two philosophers who agree on bugger-all else, both insisted that at base, at the metaphysical depths, there has to be the possibility of disproof. Falsifiability, they called it. For a proposition to mean anything, there has to be some conceivable observation or experiment that could prove it wrong.

Or as your mate at the pub would say: if you can’t prove it’s bollocks, it probably is.

And that’s the genius of modern Australian politics; it’s evolved to make itself unfalsifiable. Like a snake that’s swallowed its own tail and convinced itself it’s a balanced breakfast.

How do you disprove “preferred PM”? Picture the scene: some poor sod at Newspoll ringing random Australians at dinnertime. “Who would you prefer as Prime Minister?” As if Australians at 6:30pm on a Tuesday, halfway through their chicken parmigiana, are conducting rigorous comparative analyses of leadership competence. “Well, I prefer Albo because of his nuanced approach to fiscal policy and his ability to build consensus… nah, just kidding, I prefer the other bloke because this one’s on telly too much.”

It’s a feeling. A vibe. Tomorrow’s poll might say something different, but that doesn’t make today’s wrong – it just makes it “then” rather than “now.” Like asking someone which flavour of air they prefer.

How do you disprove AUKUS will work? Picture the scene in 2042: Minister for Defence (probably a person not yet born) stands in front of a submarine (possibly made of papier-mâché at this point, who’s checking?) and announces… what exactly? That it works? That it floats? That it successfully completed a voyage from Adelaide to Adelaide without being detected by the eighteen different Chinese drone swarms tracking it the entire way?

The submarines won’t arrive until the 2040s. By then, everyone who signed the deal will be retired, dead, or running a consultancy that advises other countries on how not to buy submarines. Now renamed The ScoMo gambit. There’s no empirical test. No moment of reckoning. Just an ever-receding horizon of promises, like one of those dreams where you’re running towards something that keeps getting further away, except instead of running you’re signing cheques for $368 billion.

How do you disprove the social media ban will protect kids? Warning: Appearance comment alert.

Picture Anika Wells, russet tresses gleaming under the press conference lights, explaining that success means absence. We’ll know it worked because of all the bad things that didn’t happen. It’s like proving your tiger-repelling rock works because there are no tigers in your town. The policy exists in a realm beyond verification, immune to the grubby business of evidence, protected by the impenetrable forcefield of good intentions.

It’s political theory as theology. Faith-based policy-making. Government by vibes and good intentions, with no nasty empirical reality to muck things up.

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Popper’s Nightmare

Popper would have a field day. Picture him; Austrian, bespectacled, terminally serious, watching Question Time. The stammering. The non-answers. The horizon-gazing. He’d be furiously scribbling notes:

“Exhibit A in my thesis on how democracies develop pseudoscientific epistemologies to avoid accountability.”

Popper spent half his life arguing that this is precisely how pseudoscience operates; making claims that sound scientific but are structured so they can never be proven wrong. Astrology. Psychoanalysis. Marxist historical determinism. And now, apparently, Australian defence procurement.

The beauty of it, the truly diabolical beauty, is that being unfalsifiable makes you immune to reality. You can’t be contradicted by events because there are no events that could contradict you.

Picture it as a game of cricket where nobody keeps score, the boundaries keep moving, and when someone hits the ball it might count as a six or it might count as a wicket depending on who’s commentating and what day it is. The HMS Ambush doesn’t have to leave port. The submarines don’t have to arrive. The kids don’t have to be protected. America doesn’t have to remain committed. The UK doesn’t have to be capable of building anything.

None of it has to be true because none of it can be tested.

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The Luxury of Unfalsifiability

And here’s the thing about being fabulously rich: it means you can afford to operate entirely in the realm of the unfalsifiable. You can commit $368 billion to a proposition that won’t be tested for twenty years. It’s like buying a lottery ticket that doesn’t have a draw date. Or a gym membership that never expires and you never have to use. Or – and this is closer to the truth – like paying for a very expensive imaginary friend.

Because that’s the pattern, isn’t it? That’s how the whole show works now.

Picture the Cabinet meeting. Long table. Ministers arranged like chess pieces. Someone – probably Jim Chalmers, doing his best impression of a man who understands the spreadsheet in front of him – says “So, about these submarines that the UK can’t build and that will be obsolete when they arrive and that we can’t crew or service…”

And someone else – probably Marles, who’s perfected the art of looking decisive while saying nothing – replies “But the optics are good. We look strong on defence.”

And everyone nods. Because in the Kingdom of the Unfalsifiable, looking strong is the same as being strong. Announcing policy is the same as implementing it. Committing $368 billion is the same as getting value for money.

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Cargo Cult Politics

It’s what anthropologists studying cargo cults in Melanesia documented: communities going through elaborate rituals – building fake airstrips, carving wooden headphones, marshalling imaginary air traffic – in hopes the gods would deliver cargo planes full of goods.

Picture it: villagers carefully constructing a control tower from bamboo, one person wearing wooden headphones and speaking into a carved microphone, everyone waiting for the planes to arrive. Except the planes never came because the rituals weren’t connected to any causal mechanism. They were theatre. Performance. Faith. Hope cosplaying as methodology.

We’re doing the same thing in Canberra. Going through the motions of democratic governance – the announcements, the press conferences, the committee hearings, the budget allocations – hoping that if we perform the rituals correctly, actual submarines might magically materialise from the HMS Ambush, which is still sitting in Portsmouth, not moving, accumulating barnacles and budget overruns at roughly the same rate.

It’s politics as pure simulacrum – Baudrillard’s nightmare made flesh and given a press conference. The representation without the thing being represented. The signifier with no signified. The Cheshire Cat’s grin floating in mid-air after the cat has buggered off entirely. Leaving only an appearance spoiler alert.

Or picture it this way: Anika Wells standing at a lectern, russet tresses perfectly coiffed, spell-checkers nationwide having nervous breakdowns, explaining with great earnestness how the social media ban will work while behind her, on a giant screen, a million teenagers simultaneously log into TikTok using their dad’s account details. The medium is the masseuse. Everyone feels better. Nothing changes.

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The Exhausting Theatre of It All

And the genius of it – the truly diabolic genius – is that it keeps everyone busy. Journalists file stories about the social media ban that can’t be evaluated. Defence analysts write papers about submarines that won’t be built or will be obsolete if they are, occasionally glancing at photos of the HMS Ambush sitting motionless in port like an expensive lawn ornament. Political commentators analyse poll numbers gathered from people halfway through their dinner who would quite like to get back to their chicken parmigiana. Foreign policy experts debate our place in a relationship with a country that’s already moved on but forgot to mention it.

It’s exhausting, frankly. Trying to keep track of what’s real and what’s just political fan fiction. Trying to apply Popper’s falsifiability principle to a system that’s evolved specifically to evade it, like trying to nail jelly to a wall while the wall insists the jelly represents strategic national interests.

Maybe Denniss is right. Maybe being fabulously rich is the whole problem. Because when you can afford anything, you stop bothering to check if what you’re buying actually exists. You stop demanding evidence. You stop structuring propositions to be testable.

You just… believe. And keep writing cheques. And wait for submarines that may or may not arrive, built by countries that may or may not be capable of building them, to defend against threats that may or may not exist, using stealth technology that may or may not still work by the time they’re deployed.

And somewhere, in a Newspoll office, someone’s having lunch and thinking: “What if we asked people who their preferred Defence Minister is? Not because it predicts anything. Not because it can be tested. Not because it means anything. Just because we can make it up and nobody can prove it’s wrong. Also, do you reckon Marles or Wells has better hair? Let’s poll that too.”

Why not? Everything else is unfalsifiable.

Might as well make up some more.

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