Nobody planted Pauline Hanson. The miners wrote her song a decade before she sang it. Thirty years on, they have bought her a plane.
Author: urbanwronski
Urban Wronski is an Australian free-lance writer whose work appears regularly in The Independent Australia, The Tasmanian Times and also in The Australian Independent Media Network. He has also been published in Guardian Australia.
An acute observer and analyst Urban continues to advocate for a just, tolerant and compassionate society. The Urban Wronski voice is one of the most distinctive in Australian political writing: sardonic, erudite, morally engaged but never preachy, and animated by a barely suppressed outrage that is kept in check — and made far more effective — by wit, irony and a very precise control of tone. The persona is that of a man who has seen through the machinery of power and chooses to describe it with forensic clarity rather than mere fury. The anger is always there, but it does the work of fuel rather than exhaust.
One Nation, Three Shareholders
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.
Nobody Planted Pauline
The ballot paper that put Pauline Hanson in Parliament was an accident. What grew around her was not.
Going Down: Australia’s Dutch Auction of Its Humanity
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.
Putting the boot into a new leader: the monstering of David Shoebridge
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.
Eighty to One: The Greens, the Press Gallery and the Wrong Race
The press gallery has already called the Greens a roughie. In 1948 a camera at Flemington had something to say about that.
Australia’s West Bank Abdication: The Comfort of Complicity
Twelve nations put a price on Israel’s illegal settlements. Canberra sat at the table for months, then remembered it had a Security Council seat to win.
The Appropriate Time
Twelve countries signed a statement on trade with Israeli settlements. Australia was very much part of the process. The early part.
The Island That Never Burned
Thomas Hobbes said a frightened people will hand a strongman the right to end their arguments about the truth. Trump worked out he doesn’t need to end the argument. He just needs to own the facts in it, and the forty years of dying that made the offer irresistible.
Labor’s National Conference: A Triumph of Unity
Bryan Dawe interviews a senior Labor figure about the smoothest national conference in decades — three days, one open debate, and not a face in the room. A tribute in the spirit of Clarke and Dawe.
