Anthony Albanese has perfected the political sleight-of-hand that turns protection into permission. Bob Brown’s forensic analysis reveals Labor’s environmental legislation as corporate capitulation.
Category: Environmental Policy
Part Four: “When ‘Historic Reform’ Means Managed Decline”
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 Climate Silence. And What Actual Environmental Commitment Looks Like
Australia’s new environment law makes it illegal to consider climate change when approving coal and gas projects. Not an oversight. Not a gap to fix later. Explicit prohibition. This is what corporate capture looks like—and what genuine environmental commitment would require instead.
CLARKE & DAWE do Koalas and Coal
A deadpan Clarke & Dawe dialogue exposing the absurd machinery behind Australia’s love affair with coal, the bureaucratic disappearance of koalas, and a political system that “does not evolve, it thickens.” Dark, sharp, and painfully recognisable.
The Greens’ Genuine Wins, And The Corporate Capture Revealed
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.
How Australia’s “Landmark” Environmental Reform Got Captured
Five years after the Samuel Review exposed catastrophic failures in Australia’s environmental laws, Labor has delivered reforms that every major independent environmental organisation says fall dangerously short. Part One examines what Samuel actually recommended versus what we got, featuring damning assessments from the Environmental Defenders Office, Climate Council, ACF, Greenpeace, and WWF-Australia. When every credible environmental voice in Australia identifies the same fundamental flaws, that’s not ideology. That’s evidence.
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.
Net Zero, poor thing, never stood a chance
Net Zero began as a technical phrase in climate science and ended up as a punchline in Australian politics — mangled by MPs who wouldn’t know a carbon cycle from a spin cycle. Here’s what it really means, and how fossil fuel money turned it into a permission slip to keep burning.
Don Farrell: The Godfather of Business as Usual
Jason Koutsoukis’ fawning Saturday Paper profile glosses over the hard truth: Don Farrell represents everything Labor has become. He’s the living fossil record of the Labor Right, the factional godfather who ensures the party never threatens capital’s fundamentals. He rose through the SDA—the union that collaborated with supermarket chains rather than fighting them. He helped orchestrate Kevin Rudd’s removal when the PM threatened mining profits. Now he controls trade policy, ministerial appointments, and the invisible machinery that keeps Labor compliant. The Saturday Paper presents this as diplomatic skill. It’s systematic capture of a workers’ party by those who’ve abandoned workers.
The Worst Deal in History: Why Mining Has Ransacked Australia While the Press Looked Away
How Australia became the world’s cautionary tale in resource management. The mining industry didn’t steal our wealth. We handed it over. The press, owned by the same mining interests since 1923, made sure we never asked why.
Urban Wronski Writes 