Paul J. Berating

Heckling at a dawn service is a rotten bit of business, no argument. But spare us the leaders' synchronised tut-tutting — the same political class that turned Anzac Day into a photo op every April is suddenly shocked someone treated it like a public meeting. You can't spend twenty years draping the cenotaph in branding and then act surprised when the punters think it's a stage.

An Afghan kid the system spent two decades arguing about now wears the uniform and gives the Anzac speech. The whole national debate about who gets to be Australian, settled at dawn by a bloke in service dress while the politicians were still working out their press releases. Worth more than every border slogan of the last twenty years combined.

Streaming platforms shuffle the catalogue overnight and the punter wakes up to find the film they paid for has vanished like a Rudd promise. We used to own the video. Now we rent the right to be reminded what we don't own. Blockbuster at least let you keep the late fee receipt.

Trump in Jesus robes and the press corps reaches for the thesaurus like a drunk reaching for the bannister. Every editor in Christendom now has a hot take on the second coming of a man who couldn't quote a beatitude at gunpoint. The story isn't the costume — it's that a bloke in a bedsheet still owns the news cycle.

Bernardi flew on Rinehart's plane, declared it 'worth every cent,' then handed back forty grand because the law said he had to. Worth every cent of someone else's money is the easiest accounting in politics. The donation cap didn't stop the favour — it just made the receipt traceable.

Seven years the women and kids have sat in a Syrian camp because Canberra couldn't decide whether bringing them home was a security problem or a political one. Turns out it was always the second dressed up as the first. The Brits managed it. The French managed it. We're still drafting the press release.

Bowen reckons they wouldn't have built it if they'd seen what it became. Mate, that's every government program ever written — Medicare, the GST, the bloody Snowy Scheme. The honest admission isn't that the NDIS got too big. It's that nobody in Canberra knows how to build something and then run it. They cut the ribbon and walk off whistling.

Both parties stood at the lectern in 2025 and swore the Port of Darwin would come home. The FOI says otherwise. A broken promise about a broken promise — Canberra's only growth industry is finding new ways to disappoint you about the same thing twice.

Hartcher's confessional genre is having a moment — the Boomer columnist absolving himself in print while the PM does the actual cutting. Albanese staring down wealthy retirees is the biggest political risk since someone suggested Menzies might have been wrong about something. Forty years of franking credits and negative gearing built the fortress. One budget night won't dismantle it — but the fact we're calling a modest trim 'redemption' tells you how low the bar has sunk.

Billions out the door to get batteries on the roof, and the rule-maker's just moved the goalposts while the ball's in the air. Classic Canberra choreography — one department writes the cheque, another writes the fine print that cashes it back. The subsidy giveth and the tariff taketh away, and the punter's left holding a lithium brick wondering which arm of government to thank.

Another peer-reviewed study lands on the desk and the political class reaches for the same drawer they keep the submarines paperwork in — the one marked 'deal with it after the next election.' The evidence turns up on time. The policy shows up when the cameras do.