Christmas 2025, and Australia’s teenagers are unwrapping their presents: new VPNs, borrowed parental logins, and AI-generated profile photos. Two weeks into Labor’s world-first social media ban, and it’s already a monument to performative governance. Meanwhile, the minister who should be celebrating is in hiding over travel rorts, and the policy architect has vanished into an expenses scandal. Welcome to government theatre at its finest.
We excised Brenton Tarrant from our consciousness because examining him would require examining the political culture that helped produce him. Meanwhile, elite networks use “combating antisemitism” to advance right-wing agendas funded by the same corporate interests that profit from inequality. Part 2 reveals how institutional power operates through selective attention to religious violence.
Fifteen people were killed at Bondi. Grief must come before politics. This op‑ed argues for facts over fury, rejects opportunistic narratives, and centres solidarity.
Tuesday 10 December revealed Australian politics at its finest: banning teenagers from social media while spending $368 billion on submarines the UK admits it can’t build, from a country that’s already moved on diplomatically. Welcome to the Kingdom of the Unfalsifiable, where policy exists beyond verification, protected by the impenetrable forcefield of good intentions. As Richard Denniss observed, only a fabulously rich country could commit such sums without troubling Treasury or Parliament. We’re not battlers – we’re loaded enough to operate entirely in the realm of political fan fiction.
Welcome to Post-Truth Australia, where the lies have become so brazen they’ve stopped pretending to be anything else. The Coalition’s “Net Zero Heroes” want to dig up every tonne of coal in the country. Tasmania’s preparing a modern potlatch ceremony – ceremonially bankrupting itself with a stadium that’ll cost billions while the AFL chips in $15 million. And our Communications Minister stands firm on a social media ban that wouldn’t work in an iron lung. It’s mythomania at industrial scale, and as Hemingway knew: we go broke gradually, then suddenly.
While Finland invests twenty years teaching its children to think critically about media, Australia reaches for symbolic gestures and declares them progress. Within days, a new law regulating social media will take effect; one already destined to fail in its stated aim of protecting young … Continue reading Ban It and They’ll Thank Us Later: Labor’s Teen Social Media Panic
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.
The Greens won real concessions on forests. But Labor still won’t consider whether new coal and gas should exist at all. This is how you manage environmental decline while calling it conservation.
Thirty billion dollars a year buys server farms instead of hospitals. Urban Wronski on how AI infrastructure spending is eating Australian democracy and why the machinery can’t be stopped—unless we choose to stop it.
BRYAN DAWE: John, the government has announced a state funeral for Graham Richardson.
JOHN CLARKE: That is correct, Bryan. Full ceremonial arrangements, high attendance, very dignified.
BRYAN DAWE: Despite his record.
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