When inquiry becomes ritual, and outrage becomes virtue, democracy forgets how to tell the difference between justice and punishment.
The witch‑hunt is back; not in pointed hats, but in press cycles, vox-pops and panel shows. What we see, in the harrying of Prime Minister Albanese and his government, is something larger, darker, and more revealing than a political pile-on.
It is a morality play staged in headlines and hashtags, in which guilt is presupposed and penitence demanded daily. A campaign waged in such a way as to trap its victim, and with him, a nation that still imagines this is scrutiny rather than spectacle.
Behind the chorus baying for Albanese’s blood are deeper engines: anger as performance, outrage as credential, purity as political currency. And as ever, the human cost of that theatre is borne not just by the accused but by a public taught to see democracy as an ongoing trial.
Elastic Time and Manufactured Urgency
Albo has been “dragged kicking and screaming” into a Royal Commission easily wins best repeated Opposition talking point. “Dragged kicking … “is now the Opposition’s earworm, a pantomime-show trial with a Sky News soundtrack: boos on cue, outrage on tap, and guilt confetti-cannoned over the facts
Still minding the shop for one of the Liberal Party’s stack of meritorious male candidates, a probationary Ms Sussan Ley wins best in show hypocrisy in the name and shame class. Her sermonising sits so well against the LNP abysmal record: years of delay, denial, and “not the right model” deflections whenever a Royal Commission threatened. Banking, Aged Care, Veteran and Defence Suicides, Robodebt and Disability. There’s at least three parliamentary terms of delay in those opportunities foregone, alone.
But time is relative. Much of the “dragging, kicking and screaming” finger-wagging narrative depends on time’s elasticity. Picture a Dali clock. But accuracy matters. The Royal Commission is not “two years away.” It reports by 14 December 2026, with an interim report due in April, according to Reuters and AP.
To call that “delay” requires a peculiar arithmetic. It’s a bullet train compared with the Coalition slow-coach. But arithmetic is beside the point when the drama demands elongation; the longer the imagined delay, the greater the outrage, the purer the indignation.
The Politics of Self‑Righteous Anger
There is another fuel here, hotter than partisanship and more contagious than scandal: self‑righteous anger. Not ordinary anger, which can be clarifying, even noble, but the kind that calcifies into identity, a badge, the last clean possession many people feel they still have.
In a country atomised by rents, mortgages, dead‑end work; by algorithmic loneliness, ambient anxiety, low‑grade crisis; righteous fury becomes the only emotion that still feels intact. A community in pain clings to populism’s moral outrage as if it were the only life-preserver in their size.
But that moral certainty has a brutal political use: it creates the appetite not for understanding, but for punishment.
The Witch‑Hunt Logic
This is the barbaric logic of the witch‑hunt: the inquiry as ordeal, not as search for truth.
The Prime Minister is thrown into the water. If he floats: he is in league with the devil; he called the inquiry only because he was caught. If he drowns: his guilt is punished; he delayed, he hid, he failed; therefore, he deserves it.
Within that logic, procedure is irrelevant. Outcomes are pre‑written. The Royal Commission becomes less a tool of governance than a theatre of purification; a stage upon which the crowd can watch one man be made to answer for their hoarding of victimhood and accumulated disgust with politics itself.
That is why Labor has so little to gain. The loudest calls for a commission were never just calls for transparency; they were already structured as accusation: What have you got to hide? Compliance cannot wash away suspicion; it becomes “confirmation” that the PM was dragged, shamed, cornered.
When the State Declares a Sinner
When a state declares an enemy category — “witch,” “cartel,” “narco‑terrorist,” “fast boat”; the next step is not evidence but permission.
We have just watched a version of that logic unfold in reporting on U.S. strikes against alleged drug‑running boats: more than a hundred people reportedly burnt alive since September 2025, with families arguing many were civilians, including innocent fishermen. That campaign raises Trump’s justice; when suspicion itself becomes sufficient, killing becomes just another administrative detail.
You needn’t accept every detail of that debate to recognise its pattern. Once moral panic is authorised, proof becomes a luxury. The crowd feels clean, uplifted, vindicated while violence is done in its name.
The Local Mirror
Back home, substitute “RC” for “strike” and “shifty PM” for “fast boat.” The mechanism is identical.
The press can run the backdown headline today and the what were you hiding? headline tomorrow and both will land, because the public has been conditioned to experience politics as theatre of villains. Not deliberation, damnation.
Within a decade of the Christchurch massacre; a moral catastrophe born of online rage, conspiracist grievance, and algorithmic echo, it is chilling to see parts of that circuitry rewired into domestic politics. The emotional economy is continuous: suspicion, sanctimony, sacrifice. And once again, the power elite finds ways to weaponise communal anger not to heal the nation, but to wound an adversary.
Recent polling places public trust in media and politics at historic lows; under 30%. Yet outrage engagement metrics on social platforms spike after every scandal. The market rewards heat, not light. That profit motive disguises itself as moral conscience. And thus, the same economy that sells noise as news now peddles outrage as ethics.
The Cult of “Cohesion”
Now we reach the supposedly benign word doing so much quiet damage: cohesion.
If “social cohesion” means quiet, agreement, don’t inflame, lower your voice; then it isn’t cohesion. It’s a gag. The goddess Araldite: bonding by gluing your jaws closed.
A pluralist democracy, as John Rawls conceived it, doesn’t flourish through enforced conformity but through lawful dissent; the civic maturity to endure disagreement without summoning the state as cultural sedative. Healthy cohesion arises not despite friction, but because fair institutions tolerate it
Coda: The Ordeal Still to Come
The grim political truth is this: Labor has called a commission that will not, and cannot, exonerate it from the narrative; because the narrative is not about the commission.
It is about the demolition of a Prime Minister in a media economy that demands a daily victim. And in yielding to that demand, Albanese has done more than misjudge the theatre; he has joined the cast.
By calling the commission, he has implicated not only his government but the country in an act of bad faith. His concession may be born of political necessity; it will not save him. What it costs is integrity- and integrity, once surrendered to expedience, never returns at full strength.
There was courage, once, in holding the line against the mob, in believing that leadership meant tempering appetite rather than feeding it. That was the Keating instinct: to refuse to govern by focus group, to call the mob what it was; not democracy, but demand without discipline.
Albanese and his advisers are clever enough to see it; the ulterior motive behind Susan Ley and her Murdoch tag‑team chorus, underwritten by Advance and the dark money of billionaires, baying for “justice” when what they want is spectacle; not inquiry, but humiliation; not truth, but ritual bloodletting.
It’s Kill Bill 2.0: the same choreography that bull‑rushed Bill Shorten off the political stage, stage‑managed again for a fresh protagonist, but directed by the same tabloids, the same talk‑radio hangmen, the same theatre of vengeance dressed as virtue.
According to Reuters and AP, the Royal Commission will hand down its findings by 14 December 2026, with an interim in April; dates that place the finale barely eleven months ahead.
The report may deliver clarity, even a modicum of justice, but it cannot redeem the bad faith of its birth. Because it was never simply a search for truth; it was an ordeal; a test of the Prime Minister’s soul, conducted in public, under lights, with verdicts delivered in advance.
Chifley would have recognised the moral failure instantly: Labor’s task is the betterment of lives; the “greater happiness” and security of ordinary people; not feeding a machine that confuses public punishment for public policy. Whitlam, who spoke of widening liberty and defending dissent, would have seen the danger in a politics that treats disagreement as contamination and “cohesion” as enforced quiet. And Keating; who understood how the line between reporting and prosecution can blur when power wants a scalp; would have recognised the commercial logic at work: conflict must be manufactured, a villain must be maintained, and the gallery kept hungry.
It will not quench the appetite it was meant to feed. The show must go on; another villain will be cast, another crowd assembled. Unless someone of fibre finds the nerve to call the mob by its name, the country will keep mistaking vengeance for virtue; applauding each new purification while democracy herself shivers on the steps, lips blue from exposure, as the mob demands another sacrifice.
Urban Wronski Writes 