Tag: Albanese government

CAUGHT IN THE CRUNCH: The Surveillance State Comes to Your Local Supermarket

· 2 Comments ·

Walk into any Coles outlet today and you’re not just buying milk. You’re feeding a surveillance machine processing 10 billion rows of data through Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. In early 2024, Coles signed a deal to deploy Palantir’s “Foundry” platform across more than 840 stores, analysing every transaction, every worker’s movement, every shift allocation. Workers across Victoria are monitored, with one shelf-stacker in Ballarat saying: “The computer knows where I am before my manager does.”

A symbolic political cartoon showing a giant set of unbalanced scales: a huge lump of coal pushed down by disembodied suit-sleeved hands labelled “Influence”, “Access”, “Stakeholders”, and “Donors”, outweighing a group of anxious cartoon koalas on the other tray. A faceless bureaucratic figure at a podium marked “Department of Balanced Outcomes” gestures proudly toward the clearly tilted scales.

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.

Labor’s Climate Mirage: Five Facts That Expose the Greenwash

·

You cannot reach net zero in 2050 while approving fossil fuel projects that operate until 2070. That’s a 20-year gap. That’s not nuance. That’s not balancing interests. That’s fraud.
Labor approved the Northwest Shelf extension until 2070. Among 30 other projects. All while claiming to take net zero seriously.
The math doesn’t lie. Labor does.

The Precariat Grows: Labor’s Toothless Reforms Can’t Stop the Casualisation Juggernaut

· 3 Comments ·

By 2021, a bare 50.5% of Australian jobs qualified as permanent full-time positions with leave entitlements, meaning half of all employed Australians now face one or more dimensions of insecurity in their work says The Australian Council of Trade Unions. This isn’t some unfortunate accident of market forces. It’s the deliberate result of a business model, embraced across both private and public sectors, that systematically shifts the risks of employment from employer to employee while minimising labour costs at the expense of job quality

The Great Gas Con

· 1 Comment ·

While the rest of the world races toward genuine emissions reduction, Australia’s gas giants are running a protection racket dressed up as climate policy. Santos, Woodside, Origin—the whole rotten crew have looked at net zero by 2050, nodded thoughtfully, then quietly opened the chequebook to expand the very projects that make the target impossible. This isn’t incompetence. It’s strategy.

The Goon Show Goes On

· 5 Comments ·

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.

Don Farrell: The Godfather of Business as Usual

· 5 Comments ·

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.