Tag: Climate Policy

Stand By Your Ban: A Post-Truth Reflection

Welcome to Post-Truth Australia, where the lies have become so brazen they’ve stopped pretending to be anything else. The Coalition’s “Net Zero Heroes” want to dig up every tonne of coal in the country. Tasmania’s preparing a modern potlatch ceremony – ceremonially bankrupting itself with a stadium that’ll cost billions while the AFL chips in $15 million. And our Communications Minister stands firm on a social media ban that wouldn’t work in an iron lung. It’s mythomania at industrial scale, and as Hemingway knew: we go broke gradually, then suddenly.

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.

How Australia’s “Landmark” Environmental Reform Got Captured

Five years after the Samuel Review exposed catastrophic failures in Australia’s environmental laws, Labor has delivered reforms that every major independent environmental organisation says fall dangerously short. Part One examines what Samuel actually recommended versus what we got, featuring damning assessments from the Environmental Defenders Office, Climate Council, ACF, Greenpeace, and WWF-Australia. When every credible environmental voice in Australia identifies the same fundamental flaws, that’s not ideology. That’s evidence.

The Midas Curse: How Mining Interests Own Australia’s Democracy

Scott Morrison waves coal in Parliament. The Minerals Council supplied it. He thought he was conducting. He was the instrument.
That moment wasn’t an aberration. It was testimony.
For decades, the mining lobby has achieved what every industry dreams of: complete bipartisan capture. Not just influence. Not just access. Ownership.
Today’s analysis maps the complete system; from dark money pipelines to media amplification, and asks whether we’re willing to build a movement powerful enough to break it.

The $9 Trillion Net Zero Lie: How the Coalition Turned Investment Into a Scare Campaign

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.

THE FISH BOWL: HOW MURDOCH MEDIA AND MINING BILLIONS STRANGLED AUSTRALIA’S CLIMATE FUTURE

Malcolm Turnbull knows the Coalition is trapped in a “fact-free, reality-free culture war” over climate, dictated by Sky News and Murdoch media. He’s right—but what he won’t admit is that state capture extends to Labor too. While Turnbull points fingers at Coalition climate denialism, Labor quietly approves fossil fuel projects that dwarf the Coalition’s rhetoric. Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of fossil fuel CO₂ emissions, and both major parties are drowning in mining money.

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.