Category: Social Policy

A Victorian workshop scene with machinist’s tools on a worn bench, an empty ceremonial chair bearing a knight’s sash, and a faded Labour banner reading “The Moral Case For Socialism” on the wall behind.

Sons of Toil, Part I: The Toolmaker’s Bequest

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Keir Rodney Starmer came into the world named after the great Scottish agitator who opposed a popular war and was expelled from Parliament for it. The naming was the most radical act the Starmer family would perform for the next six decades. After that, everything moved in precisely the opposite direction.

A dark editorial cartoon showing a self-satisfied bureaucrat at a desk marked “Sustainability Taskforce” signing documents while a exhausted woman with an NDIS appeal folder sits in a waiting room behind him, and through the window a nuclear submarine sits in dry dock with a $425 billion price tag.

Governments Just Get On With the Job: Mark Butler’s Razor Gang and the NDIS They Want You to Forget

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Lisa Goodwin’s twins are autistic. She applied three times, fought for years,
and when Labor announced its latest cuts she called it “a betrayal.” Urban
Wronski on Mark Butler’s razor gang, the $425 billion submarine program eating
the fiscal space disabled children once occupied, the algorithm that replaces
human judgment, and the shearing sheds that would not recognise the party
that grew from them.