Tag: Climate Policy

A federal budget that delivers $250 a year to workers while handing $16.3 billion to fossil fuel companies.

The Budget That Will Not Save You

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The 2026-27 federal budget breaks two election promises, grows fossil fuel subsidies faster than the NDIS, hands $250 a year to workers, and approves gas drilling until 2080. Jim Chalmers was right that the can had been kicked far enough. He has been less forthcoming about who was doing the kicking.

Stand By Your Ban: A Post-Truth Reflection

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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

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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

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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

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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.