By canonising Graham Richardson, the Labor Party has handed its enemies – the Murdoch press, the Coalition, the Advance machine – the perfect weapon to use until the election.
By canonising Graham Richardson, the Labor Party has handed its enemies – the Murdoch press, the Coalition, the Advance machine – the perfect weapon to use until the election.
The President called a female reporter a pig on Air Force One. It took four days for anyone to notice. That’s not an accident—it’s the machinery of forgetting at work. Part One of a three-part investigation into how democracies die through strategic flooding and algorithmic distraction.
The shutdown’s over, signed away in a late-night ceremony where Trump lambasted Democrats while signing their bill. But for Trump, the real shutdown, the one where American voters close the door on his political future, has only just begun. Turns out the art of the deal doesn’t cover foreclosure.
Australia’s democracy is under siege—not by obvious force, but through dark money and corporate capture. While the Coalition squabbles in party rooms, mining magnates write the real script, turning policy into performance and parliament into purchased theatre.
Imagine inheriting a media empire after spending $1.1 billion per sibling just to buy off your siblings. Then discovering you’ve just spent billions to secure control of something that looks glorious on the surface but is, underneath, a paper tiger gasping for oxygen. That’s Lachlan Murdoch in 2025. The real story of Lachlan’s consolidation isn’t that he won. It’s that he inherited a media empire at precisely the moment when media empires stopped being empires. A forensic examination of how News Corp became a hollowed-out dynasty, why Lachlan can consolidate control but can’t actually run the thing, and what it means for democracy when the last large-scale independent news organization enters managed decline.
Clarke & Dawe would have slaughtered the Liberals’ “Net Zero position”.
So here it is — as if they’ve just walked back into the ABC newsroom.
A goon show. That’s what Paul Keating called it. ASIO chief Mike Burgess, a Marina Abramović in drag, runs political theatre dressed as national security, kneecapping the Albanese government’s China diplomacy with strategically timed intelligence bombshells. The pattern repeats, the press reports dutifully, and Australian foreign policy shifts without anyone deciding anything.
This is not just a policy backflip. This is an abdication of elected responsibility—a betrayal of trust that puts mining profits ahead of Australia’s climate future. The elders are watching, and we will not be silent.
They gave him 94 seats and a mandate like no other. But barely five months after his landslide re-election, Anthony Albanese’s government is already disappointing voters. From FOI requests plunging to just 25% approval, to $1 million in climate travel in two months, to a housing policy that makes homes less affordable—the second-term complacency is real. As independent MPs note: “We couldn’t go any lower than Morrison, but we have.”
Australia has a tragic genius for repeating its strategic mistakes. Part 2 of Urban Wronski’s AUKUS series traces how bipartisan cowardice; from Morrison’s photo-ops to Albanese’s deference; turned dependence into doctrine and loyalty into lunacy.
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