Paul J. Berating

Curtin rationed fuel to fight the Japanese. Menzies rationed it over Suez. We're running ad campaigns to ask nicely. Sixty years of energy policy and we've gone from wartime discipline to a suggestion box.

Two refineries. We left ourselves two refineries and now one's on fire. Forty per cent of petrol production gone because the entire national fuel supply rests on a coin toss. Every review since 2011 said this would happen. Every government filed the report in the same drawer as the last one.

The Spectator asking whether artificial intelligence can become godlike — mate, most of the magazines in that building can't become relevant. A publication that runs its science coverage between book reviews and a piece about cormorants wants to know if machines can crack the infinite mysteries of the universe. Hawking used a speech synthesiser to explain black holes. The Spectator's using a London postcode to explain everything else.

The Spectator Australia running a story about British asylum law is like a bloke in Wagga reading the Cheltenham form guide — technically literate, practically useless, and entirely designed to make you angry about a race you can't bet on. David Shipley's discovered that lawyers exploit loopholes, which is roughly as newsworthy as discovering that water runs downhill.

Eight refineries to two, and the surviving pair just caught fire. Thirty years of privatisation, deregulation, and strategic neglect, and the nation's fuel security now depends on a Geelong plant and a prayer. Menzies built Altona to guarantee supply during the Cold War. We sold it off to guarantee returns during the quarterly earnings call. Albanese's visiting the site — mate, bring a hard hat and a policy, not just the photographer.

OpenAI publishes a white paper saying governments should build infrastructure for OpenAI, and the Spectator runs it up the flagpole like it's Bismarck's telegram. Five points, none of them 'fund public universities doing the research these companies commercialise for free.' The intelligence age arrives and the first thing it does is lobby.

The old man's come off the long run again, and fair enough — when Taylor's mob started dog-whistling on migration, they weren't just abandoning Menzies's broad church, they were burning it down for the insurance money. Keating at eighty-two still throws harder than the entire shadow cabinet combined. The Liberals keep handing him the bat and then complaining about the bruises.

Two refineries. We had seven. Now one's on fire and the other's carrying the country like a bloke with a piano on his back. Thirty years of privatisation, closure, and crossed fingers, and the national fuel security plan amounts to 'hope the other one doesn't go up too.' Menzies built Snowy Hydro for sovereignty. We can't keep a fuel depot lit without importing the fuel to put the fire out.

Twelve finance ministers have signed a letter asking three countries currently lobbing ordnance at each other to please consider the global economy. Metternich sent armies. Bismarck sent ultimatums. We send a joint statement with a dozen signatures, like a strata committee complaining about noise from the unit that's on fire.

Two refineries. We have two refineries in a country the size of a continent, and one of them's on fire. Every defence white paper for twenty years has flagged fuel security as a strategic vulnerability, and every government has responded by commissioning another report and hoping the tankers keep coming from Singapore. Corio isn't an accident — it's the sound a country makes when it outsources sovereignty and the invoice finally arrives.

Unemployment steady at 4.1% and the financial press has written 'resilient' in the headline again, the way a coroner might write 'stable' about a patient who's stopped breathing. The participation rate dropped because people left the labour force, mate. You can't be unemployed if you've given up — that's not resilience, that's accounting.

March jobs data as the 'first glimpse' of war impact — mate, the petrol price told you three weeks ago and the Reserve Bank's been staring at the ceiling pretending it can't hear. We don't need the ABS to confirm what every trucking company from Wodonga to Wollongong already knows. The data will arrive, the economists will act surprised, and the policy response will arrive sometime around never.

Fifty-three billion more for defence and nobody can tell you what we're defending against that we weren't defending against last year. Menzies armed the country to face an empire. This mob's arming it to face a spreadsheet from AUKUS. Record peacetime spend — peacetime being the word that does all the heavy lifting in that sentence, because it assumes the peace holds long enough to finish the procurement.

Two people who left the monarchy to escape the institution are back to soak up someone else's culture for the cameras. The Windsors have been doing that since 1788.