Month: October 2026

A weathered timber door in a corrugated-iron wall, shut with a brass padlock, with three brass keys hanging from a single nail beside it.

One Nation, Three Shareholders

October 21, 2026October 22, 2026 · 6 Comments ·

The fraud charge against One Nation’s founders was quashed. The real offence was perfectly legal: a party built so that the people who paid for it would never own it.

A ticked ballot paper lies half-buried in a ploughed red-earth paddock at sunset, a green seedling sprouting from it, while a small private plane flies overhead.

Nobody Planted Pauline

October 20, 2026October 20, 2026 · 3 Comments ·

The ballot paper that put Pauline Hanson in Parliament was an accident. What grew around her was not.

A bleak industrial auction hall. A huge auction clock with a red hand counts down above an empty podium with three chairs and three gavels. On the floor below, tagged as auction lots: a food delivery backpack, a chair with a nurse's lanyard, a worn student backpack, a battered suitcase and a pair of small children's shoes. Through a tall window, a walled island compound with a watchtower sits in a grey sea. A wilting red tulip lies on the concrete in the foreground.

Going Down: Australia’s Dutch Auction of Its Humanity

October 10, 2026October 10, 2026 · 2 Comments ·

Labor, the Coalition and One Nation are calling the migrant intake down like lots on a falling clock. Nobody at the podium will ask what we owe the people on the block.

A vintage television studio camera with a bayonet fixed beneath its lens, aimed at an empty chair under a spotlight beside a small table holding a box of tissues and a glass of water, in the style of a 1914 propaganda poster.

Putting the boot into a new leader: the monstering of David Shoebridge

October 4, 2026October 4, 2026 · 6 Comments ·

Four days as Greens leader: choked up on 7.30, tagged an ecopopulist, accused of prejudice, charged with snobbery. That’s not a gaffe cycle. It’s a method.

A 1940s-style black-and-white racing photograph. Two horses gallop right to left past a white finishing post, the leader about a length clear, watched by a packed wooden grandstand of men in hats, many holding cameras and binoculars.

Eighty to One: The Greens, the Press Gallery and the Wrong Race

October 2, 2026 · 6 Comments ·

The press gallery has already called the Greens a roughie. In 1948 a camera at Flemington had something to say about that.

Urban Wronski Writes

New, fearless, fresh and original Australian political comment, satire and more.