The Palace knew about Kerr’s plan to dismiss Whitlam. Whitlam did not. Fifty-one years later, the same Crown is phoning the American president to sell AUKUS. Urban Wronski on the loyalty that never changed.
The Palace knew about Kerr’s plan to dismiss Whitlam. Whitlam did not. Fifty-one years later, the same Crown is phoning the American president to sell AUKUS. Urban Wronski on the loyalty that never changed.
Albanese grins in his USS Vermont cap. Hammond smiles in his Chief of Navy lid. The submariners have taken the wheel of Australian defence — $368 billion, phantom crews, obsolete technology, and a slow bicycle ride to yesterday’s wars. Urban Wronski on how Labor completed its capture by Uncle Sam. With a little help from Clarke and Dawe.
On a pepper‑sprayed night in Sydney, Palestinian grief is kettled while Iranian protests are feted as “democratic awakening.” This article traces how Australia’s selective compassion, media framing and think‑tank spin conscript us into the US military‑industrial script for Iran and the region.
Every January 26, Australia throws itself a birthday party. Tens of thousands of First Nations people turn up with a message: this house was never yours.
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.
Australia’s intelligence agencies had the data, the powers and the warnings. What they lacked was the capacity, or the incentive, to act. Part 2 examines how lawful firearms, foreign travel to militant regions and prior extremist scrutiny failed to trigger intervention before fifteen people were killed at Bondi. Surveillance was abundant. Prevention was absent.
Australia has built a $368 billion cargo cult and called it strategy. The AUKUS Caucus offers money, bases and sovereignty in exchange for submarines that do not exist, built by shipyards that cannot deliver, on timelines that belong to fantasy. The only thing arriving on schedule is the bill.
Australian officials watched as US missiles struck Venezuelan fishermen. Eleven died. It was legal, Washington insists. But Australia is not just an observer—we have ADF personnel embedded in US commands, we host Pine Gap targeting facilities, and we help aim weapons we never authorised and cannot refuse. AUKUS binds us more tightly than any alliance since 1945. The question is whether we’ve traded sovereignty for security theatre. And whether a second strike on drowning men will finally be the line we refuse to cross.
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.
AUKUS is the culmination of our imperial hangover. It combines obsolete technology in an age of drones with geography that defeats its purpose, industrial bottlenecks that guarantee delay, and a strategic rationale contradicted by its authors. Political cowardice is dressed as resolve. We are spending a generation’s wealth on submarines we probably will not get, cannot crew, cannot fuel, to fight wars Washington has already priced out of its plans.
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