Category: australian-politics

THE FISH BOWL: HOW MURDOCH MEDIA AND MINING BILLIONS STRANGLED AUSTRALIA’S CLIMATE FUTURE

Malcolm Turnbull knows the Coalition is trapped in a “fact-free, reality-free culture war” over climate, dictated by Sky News and Murdoch media. He’s right—but what he won’t admit is that state capture extends to Labor too. While Turnbull points fingers at Coalition climate denialism, Labor quietly approves fossil fuel projects that dwarf the Coalition’s rhetoric. Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions, and both major parties are drowning in mining money.

The Calculus of Power: Labor’s Dreyfus Case.

After a 94-seat landslide, Labor demoted constitutional lawyer Mark Dreyfus and promoted Michelle Rowland to Attorney-General. It wasn’t about merit. It was about moving the right components into the right places. An investigation into how the machine matters more than the Constitution.

The Goon Show Goes On

A goon show. That’s what Paul Keating called it. ASIO chief Mike Burgess, a Marina Abramović in drag, runs political theatre dressed as national security, kneecapping the Albanese government’s China diplomacy with strategically timed intelligence bombshells. The pattern repeats, the press reports dutifully, and Australian foreign policy shifts without anyone deciding anything.

Editorial cartoon showing puppet strings controlling MPs inside Parliament House, with coal and gas company logos below.

Net Zero, poor thing, never stood a chance

Net Zero began as a technical phrase in climate science and ended up as a punchline in Australian politics — mangled by MPs who wouldn’t know a carbon cycle from a spin cycle. Here’s what it really means, and how fossil fuel money turned it into a permission slip to keep burning.

Don Farrell: The Godfather of Business as Usual

Jason Koutsoukis’ fawning Saturday Paper profile glosses over the hard truth: Don Farrell represents everything Labor has become. He’s the living fossil record of the Labor Right, the factional godfather who ensures the party never threatens capital’s fundamentals. He rose through the SDA—the union that collaborated with supermarket chains rather than fighting them. He helped orchestrate Kevin Rudd’s removal when the PM threatened mining profits. Now he controls trade policy, ministerial appointments, and the invisible machinery that keeps Labor compliant. The Saturday Paper presents this as diplomatic skill. It’s systematic capture of a workers’ party by those who’ve abandoned workers.