From Tyrie’s scaffold to Riyadh’s bone saw: the World Cup, the FIFA Peace Prize, and the audit that removed the crimes before it began. Urban Wronski looks.
Category: Politics and Society
Reaching Out
The Chief Wellbeing Officer of Bastards Incorporated joins Bryan Dawe to discuss six hundred and one redundancies, Wellness Wednesday, and why resilient employees rarely escalate. A tribute to John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, the finest political satire this country has produced.
The Art of the Steal
Trump killed Truth, Justice and the American Way. The same announcement-as-product racket just sold Australia three second-hand submarines and called it a triumph.
The Invisible Press, Part 2
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.
The Monster They Made (Part 1)
The coup did not sow the seeds for the Islamic Revolution. It constructed the machinery. SAVAK liquidated every secular democrat who might have led a modern Iran. The mosque was left standing because it was the one institution the secret police found too difficult to penetrate. Every morning the Australian media tells us the bombing is regrettable but the regime is monstrous. It does not explain who built the regime.
The Front Fell Off The Coalition
Written in tribute to the late great John Clarke and his long-suffering straight man Bryan Dawe, whose two chairs and a clipboard remain the gold standard of Australian political satire. The occasion: One Nation’s historic first win in the House of Representatives, the Coalition’s nine-point-eight per cent primary vote in a seat held since 1949, and an exit strategy that turns out to be no exit at all. Going forward.
That Was The Week That Was, No. 1 — Part Two: The RBA Show
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.
That Was The Week That Was No. 1, Part One: The Repository of All Wisdom
Tony Abbott, they whisper, is the answer. One pauses to consider the question. The man who stopped the boats is looking for votes — and the portfolio he has quietly assembled since Warringah showed him the door is not a gaffe reel. It is an ideology rendered as a CV. Fox Corp is the mothership. The GWPF handles the science. Quadrant handles the culture. The Ramsay Centre handles the universities. The Danube Institute handles the international networking. And the Australian Liberal Party, should Abbott have his way, handles the politics. It turns out he was the repository all along.
O Quel Cul T’as: The Pat, The Politics and The Perfectly Fake Marriage
In 1969, Kenneth Tynan named a nude revue after a French pun about a woman’s backside. In 2026, the forty-seventh president of the United States provided the perfect sequel. The gesture lasted less than a second. The politics behind it have been building for decades.
THE RECEIPT: the tab
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.
Urban Wronski Writes 