The Reserve Bank cut rates. Jim Chalmers was pleased. He was, if anything, a little too pleased, the controlled smile of a man who has been waiting a long time for something to go right.
The Reserve Bank cut rates. Jim Chalmers was pleased. He was, if anything, a little too pleased, the controlled smile of a man who has been waiting a long time for something to go right.
Tony Abbott, they whisper, is the answer. One pauses to consider the question. The man who stopped the boats is looking for votes — and the portfolio he has quietly assembled since Warringah showed him the door is not a gaffe reel. It is an ideology rendered as a CV. Fox Corp is the mothership. The GWPF handles the science. Quadrant handles the culture. The Ramsay Centre handles the universities. The Danube Institute handles the international networking. And the Australian Liberal Party, should Abbott have his way, handles the politics. It turns out he was the repository all along.
The RBA has raised the cash rate for the third time in a row. The board voted 8-1. The dissenting member cannot be identified. Someone had a conscience. We just can’t send them a fruit basket. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe.
In 1969, Kenneth Tynan named a nude revue after a French pun about a woman’s backside. In 2026, the forty-seventh president of the United States provided the perfect sequel. The gesture lasted less than a second. The politics behind it have been building for decades.
One Nation calls itself the battler’s friend. Gina Rinehart’s plane, the NRA’s phone calls and Big Coal’s Senate votes tell a different story. Howard sowed the tares.
On 28 April 2026, King Charles III stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered twenty minutes of perfectly calibrated diplomatic napalm. He spoke of Magna Carta, judicial independence, NATO and the rule of law. Donald Trump stood there smiling and felt the warmth of the room. He missed everything else.
Shell’s Australian chair fronted a Senate inquiry into gas taxation and couldn’t say how much revenue Shell makes from selling Australian gas. She was, however, very clear on the ill-advised part. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe to interview the Prime Minister about the gas we own, the tax we don’t collect, and the modelling that takes time.
Donald Trump threatens Iran the way he once threatened a recalcitrant steak: same wounded, flinty, infant-king fury. A working homage to Martin Amis — on the Epstein flights, the six-billion-dollar goon squad, the taunting of a proud civilisation, and a nine-year-old girl in Minab waiting for the water that is her birthright. The infant-king has other plans.
When Donald Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself as a divine healer — haloed, beatific, hovering over the sick like a Sistine saviour — the cult of self had finally annexed the cult of Christ. A satirical dispatch, written in homage to Martin Amis, from the gilded ballroom-temple of the Trumpian court: where the joke is on all of us.
JD Vance has just returned from negotiations with Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. Two C-130s are still on a dirt strip outside Isfahan. And the Vice President would like to explain, in his own words, why this is going tremendously. Urban Wronski channels Clarke and Dawe. Stand by.
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