Albanese grins in his USS Vermont cap. Hammond smiles in his Chief of Navy lid. The submariners have taken the wheel of Australian defence — $368 billion, phantom crews, obsolete technology, and a slow bicycle ride to yesterday’s wars. Urban Wronski on how Labor completed its capture by Uncle Sam. With a little help from Clarke and Dawe.
Defence Minister Richard Marles announces Australia’s largest peacetime defence spending hike while the Geelong refinery burns and fuel reserves hit five weeks. A deadpan account of spending better, NATO accounting, and submarines arriving in the 2040s.
Pete Hegseth is the Peter Principle applied to the largest weapons arsenal in human history. Pine Gap guides the missiles. Australian-made F-35 parts are in the payload. And our media calls it a partnership. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s investigation into what Australia’s press is not reporting, and what our silence is costing.
Operation Epic Fury” sounds like it was coined by a fourteen-year-old playing too much Call of Duty. In many ways, it’s a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon. Urban Wronski on the War of Donald’s Ear — how two homicidal maniacs borrowed one very willing ear, and launched a war.
Australia has signed up to another war without debate and without clarity. The costs are already visible, in rising prices, strained supply chains and a deepening entanglement that blurs the line between ally and participant.
Bernard Keane called Trump a toddler or vandal. After his April 1 speech, even that feels too kind. A sharp dissection of improvised theatre, ally humiliation, and the accelerating reordering of global power.
You do not need a conspiracy theory when you have a balance sheet. The Iran war has eliminated America’s two main rivals in the global LNG market. Senator Lindsey Graham told us it was a good investment. He was not wrong.
Trump’s April 6 deadline is not diplomacy. It is a ten-day window. The Marines are not sailing toward the Persian Gulf for a holiday.
TAGS: Operation Epic Fury, Iran war, Trump, Pete Hegseth, Rupert Murdoch, Strait of Hormuz, ground invasion, Kharg Island, US Marines, 82nd Airborne, Michael Wolff, Netanyahu, doublespeak, Australian complicity
INTERVIEWER: Are we at war with Iran?
ALBANESE: No.
INTERVIEWER: Then why did they bomb our base?
ALBANESE: Because they’re Iran.
One interviewer. One Prime Minister. Forty-five satellite dishes, three submariners, one Wedgetail aircraft, a peace negotiation bombed flat, a hundred and seventy schoolgirls, and a pocket square without a mark on it. A political interview in the tradition of Clarke and Dawe.
Australia granted asylum to six Iranian footballers this week and the ministerial photographs were impeccable. Behind them sits a detention archipelago that cost taxpayers four million dollars per person per year to maintain, a Witness K prosecution that criminalised truth-telling, and legislation introduced the same week to ban entry to entire nationalities without individual assessment. Urban Wronski looks behind the photo opportunity.
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