Tag: neoliberalism

A dark editorial cartoon showing a self-satisfied bureaucrat at a desk marked “Sustainability Taskforce” signing documents while a exhausted woman with an NDIS appeal folder sits in a waiting room behind him, and through the window a nuclear submarine sits in dry dock with a $425 billion price tag.

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.

Editorial illustration showing split screen of US military helicopters bombing Caracas at night on left, with oil infrastructure and corporate symbols on right, representing imperial resource extraction in Venezuela

The Venezuela Playbook: How Australian Media Sold Us Another War

Venezuelan strongman Maduro seized in daring US operation.” That’s how our ABC led the coverage. But what we witnessed was an illegal military invasion of a sovereign nation dressed up as law enforcement. This is the anatomy of an imperial project: demonisation, sanctions, crisis, military intervention. We’ve seen it in Iraq, Libya, Syria. Now Venezuela. The pattern is identical. The oil is the prize. The “narcoterrorism” is just marketing. And Australian media are selling it with a straight face while we’re complicit through intelligence sharing and lockstep UN votes. Part One of an investigation into how empires manufacture consent—and why we keep falling for it.

Trump Bombs Venezuela: How a Neoliberal Resource War Became America’s New Frontier

In the early hours of January 3, 2026, the United States bombed Venezuela. Seven explosions tore through Caracas as American aircraft targeted military installations, a suspected cocaine refinery, and reportedly captured Nicolás Maduro himself. This report sketches the attack’s anatomy: the midnight chaos, the neoliberal machinery driving it, and the human fallout from what looks disturbingly like the Iraq template transplanted to South America.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS MUM’S LOGIN: How Labor’s Social Media Ban Became a Masterclass in Government Theatre

Christmas 2025, and Australia’s teenagers are unwrapping their presents: new VPNs, borrowed parental logins, and AI-generated profile photos. Two weeks into Labor’s world-first social media ban, and it’s already a monument to performative governance. Meanwhile, the minister who should be celebrating is in hiding over travel rorts, and the policy architect has vanished into an expenses scandal. Welcome to government theatre at its finest.

Standing Together (a joint Palestinian‑Jewish project advocating for equality and peace in Israel‑Palestine)

Who’s Got Religion? Part One: The Myth of the Religious Nation

Australia is a post-religious nation whose institutions remain structured for religious privilege. We have declining religious participation but expanding religious institutional power. We have fewer believers but stronger legal protections for discrimination. We have marginal religious practice but media that treats religious institutions as deserving special deference. Most Australians don’t have religion. But religious institutions—operating through legal privilege, institutional networks, lobbying capacity, and media deference—hold a powerful grip on Australian public policy, education, and employment law. They retain structural power precisely because they no longer need mass participation.