Hannah Arendt sat in a converted theatre in Jerusalem in 1961 and watched a gaunt, bespectacled man in a glass booth follow history through headphones. She called it the banality of evil. She was not writing about Australia. She did not need to. The third and final part of The Great Digital Enclosure.
The Australian Harrow does not use needles. It uses bail conditions, suppression orders, national security legislation, and pre-trial process that can run for years before a single day in open court. David McBride got six years in gaol for telling the truth. Bernard Collaery was prosecuted for defending his client. The penal colony never really ended. It merely changed its dress code.
Google’s AI Overviews are strip-mining independent online writing. It’s institutionalised theft. And the regulatory framework is standing in the rubble, blinking.
The Reserve Bank cut rates. Jim Chalmers was pleased. He was, if anything, a little too pleased, the controlled smile of a man who has been waiting a long time for something to go right.
This sketch is written in the tradition of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, whose work set the standard for Australian political satire. It is offered as homage, not impersonation. John Clarke died in April 2017. Bryan Dawe continues to work as a writer and performer. … Continue reading Uninvestable, A Clarke and Dawe sketch
The receipt from the Ararat servo gets longer. Palantir Technologies is watching every movement of every Coles shelf-stacker. The AI bubble is burning gas to produce, so far, almost nothing of measurable value. And thirty-five thousand Victorian teachers walked off the job to tell us what this is all costing. Urban Wronski tallies the full tab.
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.
Australia’s mainstream press hasn’t just failed the Iran war test. It has “Ajax-ed” the crime, scrubbing blood and guts from the ledger of history. When 170 girls are obliterated in a classroom in Minab and the ABC calls it “more than 100 children dead in a strike,” the anaesthetic is working. By Urban Wronski.
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.
On the eve of a diplomatic breakthrough, the bombs fell. What followed was not a war of necessity but a war of choice, lobbied into existence, launched in bad faith, and paid for in civilian lives.
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