AFR · The AFR View · Friday 27 March 2026
The AFR argues Australia's fuel vulnerability demands fiscal discipline and an end to spending on uncompetitive industries — while offering no coherent account of how sovereignty gets built without public investment.
The AFR discovers sovereign capability the way a man discovers exercise after a heart attack — with great urgency and no memory of the decades spent on the couch. 'Rein in profligate spending,' they say, having cheerled every tax cut that hollowed out the fiscal capacity to build anything strategic in the first place. The editorial page wants a muscular state that costs nothing — which is not sovereignty, it's a wish upon a star wearing a green eyeshade.