Bryan Dawe is seated. John Clarke enters in a suit, slightly harried, carrying a reusable shopping bag with “ALBO” written on it in texta.
Australia sent troops to a war it hasn’t declared, through a base it won’t discuss, after a school massacre it can’t explain, while the Prime Minister assures us that transparency is everything. Clarke and Dawe, imagined for the age of Operation Epic Fury.
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.
In a satirical dialogue, Prime Minister Clarke discusses the appointment of Greg Moriarty as Australia’s ambassador in Washington. Clarke defends the promotion as a form of accountability and claims that survival in politics defines success. The conversation highlights the perceived continuity and unchanging culture within the government, despite promises of reform.
We excised Brenton Tarrant from our consciousness because examining him would require examining the political culture that helped produce him. Meanwhile, elite networks use “combating antisemitism” to advance right-wing agendas funded by the same corporate interests that profit from inequality. Part 2 reveals how institutional power operates through selective attention to religious violence.
When a political party starts throwing around numbers with more zeros than Peter Dutton had votes left in Dickson, you know you’re not getting economic analysis, you’re getting a con job. The Coalition’s $9 trillion net zero scare campaign is the latest instalment in a decades-long franchise of climate hysteria, from Whyalla’s promised obliteration to the $100 lamb roast that never arrived. But this time, the real cost is the one they never mention: the price Australians are already paying for a lost decade of delay, obstruction and weaponised ignorance.
Australia’s democracy is under siege—not by obvious force, but through dark money and corporate capture. While the Coalition squabbles in party rooms, mining magnates write the real script, turning policy into performance and parliament into purchased theatre.
A goon show. That’s what Paul Keating called it. ASIO chief Mike Burgess, a Marina Abramović in drag, runs political theatre dressed as national security, kneecapping the Albanese government’s China diplomacy with strategically timed intelligence bombshells. The pattern repeats, the press reports dutifully, and Australian foreign policy shifts without anyone deciding anything.
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.
They gave him 94 seats and a mandate like no other. But barely five months after his landslide re-election, Anthony Albanese’s government is already disappointing voters. From FOI requests plunging to just 25% approval, to $1 million in climate travel in two months, to a housing policy that makes homes less affordable—the second-term complacency is real. As independent MPs note: “We couldn’t go any lower than Morrison, but we have.”
AUKUS is the culmination of our imperial hangover. It combines obsolete technology in an age of drones with geography that defeats its purpose, industrial bottlenecks that guarantee delay, and a strategic rationale contradicted by its authors. Political cowardice is dressed as resolve. We are spending a generation’s wealth on submarines we probably will not get, cannot crew, cannot fuel, to fight wars Washington has already priced out of its plans.
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