The Mushroom Treatment: A Government That Treats You With Contempt Cannot Be Trusted
The Albanese government gives us the mushroom treatment. Keeps us all in the dark and feeds us BS.
This week, our small target federal government gave a bravura homage to John Cage. While a US-Israeli war of no legality engulfs the Middle East, while Australia’s top-secret spy facility hums away in the desert night providing targeting data for strikes that have already killed hundreds of civilians, while US surveillance aircraft slip into RAAF Base Pearce from Diego Garcia without so much as a public flight plan, Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong polish their performance art, the blank face, the rehearsed non-answer, a version of Cage’s 4′ 33″ -and the inane repetition of lines that insult the intelligence of every Australian watching.
Asked about Pine Gap’s role? We got “we don’t comment on that facility.”
The litany of lies becomes a bad parody of accountability. Asked, “is the US-Israel attack on Iran legal under international law? We got: “that is a matter for Israel and the United States.” So the rules-based order they are in love with turns out to be Rafferty’s Rules, after all. And Wong is becoming a human bot before our eyes.
Asked whether we were briefed in advance. We got “this was a unilateral action by the United States.”
It is a performance not of statesmanship but of studied evasion. And it has been noticed. It’s top shelf-fobbing off. Wong and Albanese could fob-off and rebuff for Australia, when it becomes an Olympic event.
On international law being broken, the government’s hypocrisy is gob-smacking
Albanese and Wong have invoked “international law” and the “rules-based order” more than a hundred times since returning to government. They have called out Russia over Ukraine. They have criticised China. As recently as last year, Wong’s department was demanding China comply with international law, and the year before that, complaining that Chinese domestic legislation allowed Beijing to ignore it.
But when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a guest on Australian soil, stated plainly that the US-Israeli strikes on Iran appear “prima facie inconsistent with international law,” Wong’s response was to handball the question back to Washington and Tel Aviv.
“The legal basis of these strikes is ultimately a matter for the United States and Israel,” she repeated, for perhaps the twentieth time, to a press circus that grew visibly more frustrated with each non-answer.
This is not a position. It is a void in a vacuum in a vortex of entropy dressed up as a position.
The “rules-based order” mantra that Australia endlessly chants, a type of incantation to ward off witches, warlocks and bad faith actors, turns out to be a franchise. The rules apply to adversaries. Allies get a different menu. When Russia bombs civilian infrastructure it is an outrage; when the US does it, the legal basis is “a matter for those two countries.” When China ignores international law, Canberra clucks as volubly as any hen-house. When Israel and the Trump administration launch pre-emptive strikes without UN authorisation, without consulting allies, without even informing Albanese in advance, the government goes mute.
It’s not just hypocritical. It’s a double standard with added craven sycophancy, toadying and fawning over the US latest brain-fart that does lasting damage to Australia’s credibility as an honest broker in the region.
Surreal? Pine Gap, which is where the mushroom treatment gets especially dangerous.
Pine Gap is not some quiet public library in the red centre. It is the eyes and ears of the American eagle. Or as Peter Cronau documents, the listening post for a swarm of US satellites that provide the intelligence feed for major US and Israeli military operations in the Middle East and now the Indian Ocean. It geolocates targets. It intercepts military communications. It detects missile launches and supports targeting. It cannot, as Cronau noted before the first strikes last year, not have been already involved.
When a US submarine sinks an Iranian ship in the Indian Ocean, an area directly within Pine Gap’s signals collection coverage, Australians have a right to know whether their facility, on their soil, provided the intelligence that killed those sailors. Wong’s answer: “We don’t comment on that facility.”
Wong assures us there is “a high degree of transparency in relation to the United States presence in Australia.”
You just can’t see it.
Or credit it. Or forgive her duplicity, The lie here is mind-boggling.
Yet now we learn that two US P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft flew directly from Diego Garcia, the staging base for US operations across the Indian Ocean, to RAAF Base Pearce in Western Australia without prior public announcement, with flight plans lodged only once they were airborne. These are not joy rides. P-8A aircraft have been integral to Washington’s operations at the Strait of Hormuz. Their visit to Australian soil in the days following the bombing of Iran is not a coincidence. It is a data point.
Defence Minister Doughboy Richard Marles a US War Department dogsbody, doggedly declines to comment.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge nails it: “The Albanese Government needs to be clear about what support it is offering the US in its war on Iran. Labor’s claim that we are not offering support is plainly not true.”
The government does not want us to think about their epic credibility fail. That is the whole point.
The contempt is not limited to matters of war and peace. It runs through the entire fabric of how this government deals with Australians who have the temerity to ask questions. And to expect answers.
Albanese entered office in 2022 declaring that “the Australian people deserve accountability and transparency, not secrecy.” He criticised the Morrison government’s “cult of secrecy” and its “culture of cover-up.” Like a specialist performing a colonoscopy, he was going to shine a bright light into dark entrails. Instead he handed the patient a blindfold.
Not even under “Morrison Un-hosed” has freedom of information been so much of a running gag in a government which not only runs on the most expensive misinformation money can buy from its stable of top-end corporate consultancies but one which is very reluctant to share anything with anyone. Especially anything that might reveal its inner workings or help voters to hold it to account.
The Centre for Public Integrity finds that under Albanese, Freedom of Information requests granted in full have collapsed from 59 percent in 2011-12 to just 25 percent today. Outright refusals have nearly doubled to 23 percent. Almost half of initial decisions are found to be flawed on internal review. The Albanese government complies with Senate orders to produce documents only one-third of the time, a record worse than the Morrison government. The Centre’s Research Director, Catherine Williams, calls it a “deliberate effort to avoid scrutiny.” The government’s own record gives her no grounds to be contradicted.
This is not administrative slippage. This is policy.
What emerges from all of this is a government that has made a fundamental calculation: that Australian citizens do not need to know what is done in their name, with their money, on their soil, or at their risk.
They do not need to know whether their intelligence facilities are helping to kill sailors in the Indian Ocean.
They do not need to know whether US surveillance craft are operating out of Australian bases as part of a widening Middle Eastern war.
They do not need to know whether the strikes their government endorses are legal under the international law their government claims to champion.
They do not need to know what is in government documents that the Senate orders to be produced.
They do not need to ask. They just need to trust.
But trust, like international law, turns out to be something the Albanese government only demands of others.
There is a word for a government that maintains one set of rules for its allies and another for its adversaries, that invokes transparency as a slogan while systematically dismantling it in practice, that keeps citizens uninformed about activities on their own soil that may be drawing them into someone else’s war.
The word is untrustworthy.
Not dishonest in the flamboyant, self-destructive way of some politicians. This government is too careful for that. It is dishonest by omission, by evasion, by the rehearsed non-answer, by the careful deployment of “we don’t comment on that facility” as a substitute for democratic accountability.
Mark Carney, standing on Australian soil, said what Albanese and Wong won’t: the strikes appear inconsistent with international law, hegemons are acting without constraint, and the old world order is fraying. It took a visiting foreign leader to say plainly what our own government refuses to acknowledge.
That tells you something about how far we’ve travelled since Albanese promised us sunlight.
We got the mushrooms.
Urban Wronski Writes 