Category: Politics and Society

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS MUM’S LOGIN: How Labor’s Social Media Ban Became a Masterclass in Government Theatre

Christmas 2025, and Australia’s teenagers are unwrapping their presents: new VPNs, borrowed parental logins, and AI-generated profile photos. Two weeks into Labor’s world-first social media ban, and it’s already a monument to performative governance. Meanwhile, the minister who should be celebrating is in hiding over travel rorts, and the policy architect has vanished into an expenses scandal. Welcome to government theatre at its finest.

Standing Together (a joint Palestinian‑Jewish project advocating for equality and peace in Israel‑Palestine)

Who’s Got Religion? Part One: The Myth of the Religious Nation

Australia is a post-religious nation whose institutions remain structured for religious privilege. We have declining religious participation but expanding religious institutional power. We have fewer believers but stronger legal protections for discrimination. We have marginal religious practice but media that treats religious institutions as deserving special deference. Most Australians don’t have religion. But religious institutions—operating through legal privilege, institutional networks, lobbying capacity, and media deference—hold a powerful grip on Australian public policy, education, and employment law. They retain structural power precisely because they no longer need mass participation.

The Billion-Dollar Balcony: ASIO’s Sovereignty Failure

When another nation’s intelligence operatives are called in to assist with a domestic security catastrophe, the admission is plain: our billion-dollar spymasters cannot clean up their own mess. The Bondi massacre exposes not just intelligence failure, but the hollowing out of Australian sovereignty itself. ASIO’s budget exceeds $700 million annually, yet perpetrators “known to authorities” strike with impunity while the surveillance state watches from elsewhere.

AUKUS Caucus

Australia has built a $368 billion cargo cult and called it strategy. The AUKUS Caucus offers money, bases and sovereignty in exchange for submarines that do not exist, built by shipyards that cannot deliver, on timelines that belong to fantasy. The only thing arriving on schedule is the bill.

Wronski’s News on Wednesday

Tuesday 10 December revealed Australian politics at its finest: banning teenagers from social media while spending $368 billion on submarines the UK admits it can’t build, from a country that’s already moved on diplomatically. Welcome to the Kingdom of the Unfalsifiable, where policy exists beyond verification, protected by the impenetrable forcefield of good intentions. As Richard Denniss observed, only a fabulously rich country could commit such sums without troubling Treasury or Parliament. We’re not battlers – we’re loaded enough to operate entirely in the realm of political fan fiction.