“Were they promises?” “They were statements.” “Promises?” “Statements.” “Is there a difference?”
The Prime Minister explains housing policy, the Australian dream, and why he’ll be at the Mid-Winter Ball.
Tag: Albanese
Clarke and Dawe tribute: The PM Explains Gas
Shell’s Australian chair fronted a Senate inquiry into gas taxation and couldn’t say how much revenue Shell makes from selling Australian gas. She was, however, very clear on the ill-advised part. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe to interview the Prime Minister about the gas we own, the tax we don’t collect, and the modelling that takes time.
Governments Just Get On With the Job: Mark Butler’s Razor Gang and the NDIS They Want You to Forget
Lisa Goodwin’s twins are autistic. She applied three times, fought for years,
and when Labor announced its latest cuts she called it “a betrayal.” Urban
Wronski on Mark Butler’s razor gang, the $425 billion submarine program eating
the fiscal space disabled children once occupied, the algorithm that replaces
human judgment, and the shearing sheds that would not recognise the party
that grew from them.
Caps Off: How Mark Hammond’s Appointment Completes Labor’s Capture by Uncle Sam and the AUKUS Boondoggle
Albanese grins in his USS Vermont cap. Hammond smiles in his Chief of Navy lid. The submariners have taken the wheel of Australian defence — $368 billion, phantom crews, obsolete technology, and a slow bicycle ride to yesterday’s wars. Urban Wronski on how Labor completed its capture by Uncle Sam. With a little help from Clarke and Dawe.
Mission Impossible
Trump’s Hormuz blockade is live. Oil is at $102. China’s Defence Minister says the strait is open for Chinese ships and dares the US to stop them. A forty-nation coalition is forming against the blockade. And one of the last two tankers carrying pre-war oil on earth is heading to Australia. Urban Wronski on the war Trump cannot win.
Hormuz Dateline
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide. Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with … Continue reading Hormuz Dateline
NOT REPORTING A WAR: HOW AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA LAUNDERS A CRIME (PART 1)
Australia’s mainstream press hasn’t just failed the Iran war test. It has “Ajax-ed” the crime, scrubbing blood and guts from the ledger of history. When 170 girls are obliterated in a classroom in Minab and the ABC calls it “more than 100 children dead in a strike,” the anaesthetic is working. By Urban Wronski.
A Man of His Word
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.
The Photo-Op Refugee: Australia’s Selective Compassion
Australia granted asylum to six Iranian footballers this week and the ministerial photographs were impeccable. Behind them sits a detention archipelago that cost taxpayers four million dollars per person per year to maintain, a Witness K prosecution that criminalised truth-telling, and legislation introduced the same week to ban entry to entire nationalities without individual assessment. Urban Wronski looks behind the photo opportunity.
Double Tap? Double Depravity
As US and Israeli forces use double-tap airstrikes to kill survivors and first responders in Iran, Australia’s silence makes us complicit. Pine Gap is in the kill chain. Anthony Albanese had three hours to decide. He chose wrong.
Urban Wronski Writes 