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Australia persists in the comforting, albeit increasingly threadbare, delusion of its own good global citizenship. It is a self-image built on the hollow liturgy of human rights and the occasional, safe rebuke of distant, convenient bullies. Yet, as Donald Trump’s ICE machine accelerates into a full-scale domestic rampage, greased by an eye-watering 85 billion dollars in funding and driven by arrest quotas that treat human beings as disposable ballast, the Anthony Albanese government has retreated into a silence that is as profound as it is pathetic. This is not the calculated restraint of a middle power. It is a form of moral abasement.

We are witnessing the clinical removal of the other from the American tapestry, a state-sponsored campaign of atavistic cruelty. For Canberra to remain mute is not diplomacy. It is a type of complicity begging for transactional therapy. We are being bought off by the promise of AUKUS hulls, traded for our silence while our great and powerful friend performs a cruel parody of the free-world leadership it once proudly, if hypocritically, claimed.

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The Heart of Darkness

In his journey into the Congo, Joseph Conrad wrote of an amoral, colonial darkness that was not merely the absence of light but a positive, living presence. Today, that darkness has found a new home in the Trump Empire’s American interior. It is found in the fluorescent glare of detention facilities where the American Dream has been systematically dismantled and replaced by a nightmare of random arrests and state-sanctioned abduction.

We are no longer talking about policy disagreements or border management. We are talking about a flagrant disregard for human rights and a total denial of basic human decency.

The horror is specific and visceral. In early 2026, the world watched as a five-year-old boy in a Spider-Man backpack was led away by federal agents in Minneapolis, a defining image of a regime that has lost its moral compass. More haunting still are the reports documented by the likes of Senator Jon Ossoff, whose recent investigation uncovered over one thousand credible reports of human rights abuses. These are not statistics. They are stories of breastfeeding babies being torn from their mothers, of postpartum women shackled and denied medical care, and of infants left in the care of strangers while their primary caregivers are disappeared into a vast, opaque network of private prisons. This is the new Heart of Darkness, a clinical, bureaucratic cruelty that operates with the efficiency of a factory and the soul of a gulag.

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The Economics of the Abyss

The 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act represents more than a budget hike; it is a fundamental betrayal of the American soul. Historically rooted in Revolutionary dreams of justice, equality, and liberty, that soul is being stifled by a fiscal obscenity that should chill any observer of democratic governance. From a pre-Trump 10 billion dollars, the agency has exploded to a staggering 85 billion dollars. This supplemental-driven blow-out has birthed a federal law enforcement behemoth that now dwarfs the FBI and the entire Department of Justice combined.

The mechanics are as clinical as they are ghoulish. Twenty-two thousand agents, spurred by 50,000 dollar bounty bonuses, are tasked with meeting Stephen Miller’s grim KPIs. To fund this 45-billion-dollar expansion of the American Gulag, the 2026 skinny budget has effectively declared war on the American interior. It guts 163 billion dollars from non-defence discretionary spending, the very sinews of a civilised society. Cures for the sick are being traded for cages for the innocent. The NIH is stripped of 18 billion dollars and the CDC of 3.6 billion dollars so that ICE can meet its daily quota of 3,000 human renditions. Hospitals and schools are being cannibalised to fuel a machinery of dread.

This is a nation caging its working poor while retreating from the frontiers of science, health and education. It is a betrayal of the concept of a just society, a regression into a form of state-sponsored thuggery that would make the despots of the 20th century nod in grim approval.

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Raids and the Architecture of Dread

The targets of this 85 billion dollar terror are not merely the bad hombres of campaign trail fever dreams, in itself, a puerile and dangerous scapegoating. Much as Trump would deny it, the “real bad guys” wear suits and work for him. The dragnet is indiscriminate, sweeping up visa overstays, parents at school drop-offs, and those whose Temporary Protected Status was vanished by a vengeful stroke of a pen. The check-in, once a banal act of legal compliance, has been weaponised into a trapdoor to detention.

The human cost is a flagrant breach of every democratic norm we pretend to cherish. By early 2026, over 200 documented cases have emerged of US citizens snared for the crime of looking foreign, a violation facilitated by the suspension of warrant requirements under the crushing pressure of arrest quotas. Perhaps most damning is the outsourcing of American justice to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison. This windowless black hole, where Venezuelans are shipped on unproven gang claims with zero US oversight, marks the final abdication of the Enlightenment. It is an authoritarian playbook disguised as border security, fuelled by narco-myths already debunked by the UN, yet used to justify oil-grab sanctions that create the very migration crisis the state now seeks to crush.

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Australia’s Moral Responsibility

As this nightmare unfolds, Australia faces a choice. We can continue to cling to the clapped-out rhetoric of the rules-based order, a phrase that has become little more than a sedative for a complacent public, or we can find the courage to blow the whistle. True friendship does not consist of silent acquiescence to a friend’s self-destruction. If we see our primary ally engaging in the systematic abuse of power, in the kidnapping of children and the torment of nursing mothers, we have a moral responsibility to speak.

Canberra’s silence is fuelled by the twin anxieties of AUKUS and Pine Gap. We remain convinced, in that uniquely Australian, cultural cringe sort of way, that if we keep making our instalments on the Virginia-class lay-by and keep our mouths shut about US intel operations on our soil, we will be spared the volatility of the Trumpian whim. This bipartisan deference, a lineage of all the way sycophancy stretching from Vietnam to Iraq, looks increasingly dim and dangerous. Trump does not respect yes-men. He respects realpolitik. Our silence does not buy security. It signals a profound weakness to our neighbours. Jakarta and the Pacific watch in dismay as we tether our national interest to a partner that is rapidly trashing its own democratic guardrails. We are not just buying boats. We are buying a front-row seat to the collapse of the very rules we claim to cherish.

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A Transactional Reckoning

It is time to stop the moralising and start the invoicing. If the relationship is to be purely transactional, let us play by the new rules of the Art of the Deal. We must wield the worth of our dirt and our strategic geography to demand a relationship based on mutual respect, not quiet desperation.

We should start by demanding market rent for Pine Gap. If the US requires our geography for its global panopticon, it is time to charge a market rent, hundreds of millions annually, to be diverted into our own neglected social infrastructure. Furthermore, the AUKUS audit must be rigorous. The billions we are funnelling into US shipyards must be conditional. We are customers, not subjects. We demand strict audits, guaranteed Australian content, and an exit ramp for when the great and powerful friend inevitably shifts its focus. Finally, our diplomats must find the spine to state the obvious: an 85 billion dollar machinery of warrantless raids and arbitrary rendition is incompatible with the shared values that supposedly underpin this alliance.

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Coda: A Cruel Parody of Greatness

To watch the current Australian front bench perform its kowtow to a Washington in the throes of a nativist fever dream is to witness the final failure of our national imagination. For decades, we have substituted a security blanket for a foreign policy, clinging to the coat-tails of a Great and Powerful Friend as if the 20th century were an eternal afternoon.

But this is no longer the America of the Marshall Plan or the soaring rhetoric of the New Frontier. Trump’s America is a cruel parody, a nation with a forked tongue: that speaks of freedom while building the world’s most expensive prison system. If Australia lacks the intellectual grit to distinguish between a strategic partner and a power-crazed tyrant, then we have truly lost our way in the Asian century. We are participating in the wholesale abandonment of the very rules we say we cherish, while effectively subsidising an ethos where might makes right.

It is time for us to stop playing the submissive junior partner in a dysfunctional and abusive relationship: start acting like a sovereign nation that recalls what humanity looks like. If our critique of human rights abuses is enough to kill the alliance, then it was never a partnership of shared values. It was a type of servitude, or worse, a complicity based on submission and silence.

It is high time we spoke up and broke free.

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David Tyler writes as Urban Wronski on Australian politics, US-Australia relations, and the persistent threats to democratic governance.

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