Category: Political Comment

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.

Labor’s Climate Mirage: Five Facts That Expose the Greenwash

You cannot reach net zero in 2050 while approving fossil fuel projects that operate until 2070. That’s a 20-year gap. That’s not nuance. That’s not balancing interests. That’s fraud.
Labor approved the Northwest Shelf extension until 2070. Among 30 other projects. All while claiming to take net zero seriously.
The math doesn’t lie. Labor does.

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.

Uday and the Rotting Throne: Lachlan Murdoch in 2025

Imagine inheriting a media empire after spending $1.1 billion per sibling just to buy off your siblings. Then discovering you’ve just spent billions to secure control of something that looks glorious on the surface but is, underneath, a paper tiger gasping for oxygen. That’s Lachlan Murdoch in 2025. The real story of Lachlan’s consolidation isn’t that he won. It’s that he inherited a media empire at precisely the moment when media empires stopped being empires. A forensic examination of how News Corp became a hollowed-out dynasty, why Lachlan can consolidate control but can’t actually run the thing, and what it means for democracy when the last large-scale independent news organization enters managed decline.

The Precariat Grows: Labor’s Toothless Reforms Can’t Stop the Casualisation Juggernaut

By 2021, a bare 50.5% of Australian jobs qualified as permanent full-time positions with leave entitlements, meaning half of all employed Australians now face one or more dimensions of insecurity in their work says The Australian Council of Trade Unions. This isn’t some unfortunate accident of market forces. It’s the deliberate result of a business model, embraced across both private and public sectors, that systematically shifts the risks of employment from employer to employee while minimising labour costs at the expense of job quality