BRYAN DAWE: John, the government has announced a state funeral for Graham Richardson.
JOHN CLARKE: That is correct, Bryan. Full ceremonial arrangements, high attendance, very dignified.
BRYAN DAWE: Despite his record.
BRYAN DAWE: John, the government has announced a state funeral for Graham Richardson.
JOHN CLARKE: That is correct, Bryan. Full ceremonial arrangements, high attendance, very dignified.
BRYAN DAWE: Despite his record.
By canonising Graham Richardson, the Labor Party has handed its enemies – the Murdoch press, the Coalition, the Advance machine – the perfect weapon to use until the election.
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.
Imagine inheriting a media empire after spending $1.1 billion per sibling just to buy off your siblings. Then discovering you’ve just spent billions to secure control of something that looks glorious on the surface but is, underneath, a paper tiger gasping for oxygen. That’s Lachlan Murdoch in 2025. The real story of Lachlan’s consolidation isn’t that he won. It’s that he inherited a media empire at precisely the moment when media empires stopped being empires. A forensic examination of how News Corp became a hollowed-out dynasty, why Lachlan can consolidate control but can’t actually run the thing, and what it means for democracy when the last large-scale independent news organization enters managed decline.
The Melbourne Cup bills itself as “the race that stops a nation.” But what stops: a celebration of sport and equality, or a yearly demonstration of who holds real power in Australia? This forensic examination reveals a dying spectacle built on inequality, corruption, and animal cruelty, now facing its greatest threat: a generation rewired for instant dopamine hits.
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.
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.
Australia has a tragic genius for repeating its strategic mistakes. Part 2 of Urban Wronski’s AUKUS series traces how bipartisan cowardice; from Morrison’s photo-ops to Albanese’s deference; turned dependence into doctrine and loyalty into lunacy.
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