Tag: neoliberalism

The Billion-Dollar Balcony: ASIO’s Sovereignty Failure

When another nation’s intelligence operatives are called in to assist with a domestic security catastrophe, the admission is plain: our billion-dollar spymasters cannot clean up their own mess. The Bondi massacre exposes not just intelligence failure, but the hollowing out of Australian sovereignty itself. ASIO’s budget exceeds $700 million annually, yet perpetrators “known to authorities” strike with impunity while the surveillance state watches from elsewhere.

CAUGHT IN THE CRUNCH: The Surveillance State Comes to Your Local Supermarket

Walk into any Coles outlet today and you’re not just buying milk. You’re feeding a surveillance machine processing 10 billion rows of data through Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. In early 2024, Coles signed a deal to deploy Palantir’s “Foundry” platform across more than 840 stores, analysing every transaction, every worker’s movement, every shift allocation. Workers across Victoria are monitored, with one shelf-stacker in Ballarat saying: “The computer knows where I am before my manager does.”

The Precariat Grows: Labor’s Toothless Reforms Can’t Stop the Casualisation Juggernaut

By 2021, a bare 50.5% of Australian jobs qualified as permanent full-time positions with leave entitlements, meaning half of all employed Australians now face one or more dimensions of insecurity in their work says The Australian Council of Trade Unions. This isn’t some unfortunate accident of market forces. It’s the deliberate result of a business model, embraced across both private and public sectors, that systematically shifts the risks of employment from employer to employee while minimising labour costs at the expense of job quality

Laptop with a fake “Net Zero 2050” slide sitting on a cracked boardroom table with a dying plant beside it.

The Liberals’ Death Rattle: Net Zero

The Liberal Party is not in recovery. It is in entropy. Its long devotion to neoliberal fantasy has hollowed out its own voter base, surrendered its autonomy to Murdoch, and trapped it inside Sky News performance art. The Teals did not defeat the Liberals. Reality did. Labor now inherits a broken ecosystem. The only question is whether it preserves the ruins or builds the replacement civilisation waiting on the other side.