Category: Captured state

Laptop with a fake “Net Zero 2050” slide sitting on a cracked boardroom table with a dying plant beside it.

The Liberals’ Death Rattle: Net Zero

The Liberal Party is not in recovery. It is in entropy. Its long devotion to neoliberal fantasy has hollowed out its own voter base, surrendered its autonomy to Murdoch, and trapped it inside Sky News performance art. The Teals did not defeat the Liberals. Reality did. Labor now inherits a broken ecosystem. The only question is whether it preserves the ruins or builds the replacement civilisation waiting on the other side.

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.

Captured State: How Corporate Australia Wrote Labor’s Climate Surrender

The real tragedy isn’t just pissweak climate policy—it’s the systematic corruption of democratic governance itself. We’ve cultivated a political class more eager to curry favour with the titans of industry than to tackle the programs that might actually drag our collective arses out of the fire. Cabinet ministers book more face-time with fossil fuel executives than climate scientists. Policy frameworks emerge from industry “working groups,” not public consultation.