Category: The captured state

Satirical editorial cartoon showing a dancing monkey in a gold tie on a Middle East map, flanked by two organ grinder figures – one in a Western suit, one in Gulf robes holding a bone-saw. A burning oil tanker sits on dark water behind them. A dragon watches from above. A small applauding figure stands in the corner. Illustration in the style of George Grosz and Gerald Scarfe.

Don’t blame the organ-grinder; the monkey had a choice.

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Trump didn’t stumble into the Iran disaster alone. Every catastrophe has its infrastructure – the courtiers, the flatterers, the transactionalists, the true believers, and the merely opportunistic who supplied the scaffolding. Bibi and MBS worked the organ grinders’ handles with professional dedication. But the monkey chose to dance. And in the corner, a daggy bloke from Cronulla was clapping.

A Dead Parrot

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The Liberal Party isn’t just dying—it’s a corpse on life support, clinging to 18 seats as One Nation surges and the Teal wave reshapes Australian politics forever. In this forensic analysis, David Tyler dissects the party’s collapse through the lens of Goldstein’s razor-thin 2025 election—a pyrrhic victory for Tim Wilson that exposed the Liberals’ systemic irrelevance on climate, inequality, and governance. With Roy Morgan polling at 24% and the Nationals in open revolt, is this the end of the road for a party that’s lost the cities, abandoned the margins, and alienated the future?

Part Four: “When ‘Historic Reform’ Means Managed Decline”

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The final instalment: Did Labor’s environmental reform stop the degradation, or just slow it down enough to look serious while keeping the machinery of destruction functional? We measure the bill against Samuel’s recommendations, synthesise what every independent expert told us, and reveal the four-step pattern of how to manage environmental decline while calling it protection. This is policy capture in a democracy, not through corruption or conspiracy, but through the mundane mechanics of political calculation where industry interests outweigh both scientific advice and majority voter preference.

A symbolic political cartoon showing a giant set of unbalanced scales: a huge lump of coal pushed down by disembodied suit-sleeved hands labelled “Influence”, “Access”, “Stakeholders”, and “Donors”, outweighing a group of anxious cartoon koalas on the other tray. A faceless bureaucratic figure at a podium marked “Department of Balanced Outcomes” gestures proudly toward the clearly tilted scales.

CLARKE & DAWE do Koalas and Coal

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A deadpan Clarke & Dawe dialogue exposing the absurd machinery behind Australia’s love affair with coal, the bureaucratic disappearance of koalas, and a political system that “does not evolve, it thickens.” Dark, sharp, and painfully recognisable.