Happy New Year?
Anyone saying 2025 was a great year has holes in their head. Will the next one be any better?
The year couldn’t be ending soon enough—although these days, the year that follows has not been any better for a while. The Albanese government has been treading water on what it considers rough political seas, but Australians have juggled work, family, bills, and the poverty line, while the world turns in a decline featuring unending major war and a multi-year genocide, capped off with a mass shooting in Bondi that has ended the year in tragedy.
After an election year that saw a result giving Labor hold a Chifley era amount of seats and the Liberal-Nationals coalition divorce and reluctantly rejoin, public enthusiasm rapidly ceded to the same old feeling of semi-dread that grips the average Australian floundering in the post-pandemic economic landscape—one that has allowed one of the biggest transfers of wealth from the masses to the rich in history. Labor backed out of its super tax plan, it couldn’t even hold the line on gambling reform, its National Anti-Corruption Commission is an opaque paper weight, and the inspiration one could hope to expect from a second term Labor government with wind in its sails has never arrived.
While the unbearable status quo is rammed into the holiday period before its flopped out again for another parliamentary year in 2026, Labor has played a version of its small target into government as it did in opposition—despite a withered and irrelevant opposition and a brand damaged media—continuing this strategy into the second term. To a public crying out for innovation and change, Labor looks overly cautious and politically meek as it continues to jumps through hoops for the dwindling legacy media who would see it gone in a heartbeat, it appears beholden to the powerful transnational business class that hold court over the bipartisan cohort in Canberra, and weak as it checks its huge 94 seats in the House of Representatives to make policy considerations for the minor player 42 seat Coalition.
A government adrift
The Albanese government seems entirely bamboozled when it comes to articulating the challenges Australia faces in a rapidly shifting environment. Jim Chalmers looks frazzled when touting his micromanaging of the reform-less late-stage neoliberal jalopy of an economy that he pretends to drive while it’s being dragged along by transnational tax-dodging mega-corporations, powerful oligarchs, and the Productivity Commission. Richard Marles seems desperate as he tries to get a gig with his AUKUS partners, nudges up our defence budget, and catches a whiff of something that smells like a real nuclear submarine. Penny Wong looks beleaguered standing on a soapbox to repudiate Vladimir Putin or condemn the behaviour of a government in a developing nation, while her government maintains military, economic, and diplomatic normalcy with Israel while it commits genocide in Gaza.
After Bondi, the press that Labor has spent so much time parlaying with, at the expense of looking their people in the eye and hearing from them what they need, turn on them again as his government tries to deal with this national tragedy. You could almost feel sorry for Albanese being booed by crowds at Bondi, if his party’s solution weren’t to push for the Australian population to take the brunt of the stronger laws that curb freedom of speech expense of a rogue ISIS psychopath duo who sit entirely out of the Australian political spectrum.
On the nights before Christmas—on the days after a national tragedy—NSW Premier Chris Minns was lurching ahead into curbing more public freedoms. People were still reckoning with the aftermath of an uncharacteristic mass shooting, and state and federal governments were banning public assembly, outlawing phrases and tattoos, while the government approved the invitation of the President of Israel Isaac Herzog to calm the farm after a tragic shooting massacre of Australia Jewish community.
The neoliberal weights that act as standard units of measure in the modern Labor party, may have those in the echo-chamber thinking that their party is walking the line as best it can, but to those who still use the old units of measure of the Australian left, Albanese’s Labor party are the best major party option by far, but still so far from what is needed, and entirely incapable of steering the country in its national interest at such an important time in history. Labor says it is honouring election promises and sticking to its plan when it honours Scott Morrison policies, barges ahead into the unknown with AUKUS, or refuses to announce any significant economic or social policy, but one year into a second term—apart from waving his medicare card around and talking about good employment figures—he government is looking like it lacks real creativity and courage at a time when it is in dire need.
Outside this ideological Terra Nullius, where innovation is chopped like tall poppies, and low altitude flyers are given top positions for preserving the underwhelming norms that define this country, the world is in tectonic flux. The international order—along with its rules and norms—are being dismantled by the very nations that once championed and enforced them, a process only accelerated by the collective complicity of the West supporting Israels rolling genocide against Palestinians. In the chaos, where rules are now bent, and conventions are ignored, the thin global order cracks like porcelain under the custodianship of the current personality types who plague Western global decision making.
The Crumbling Global Order
The United States steers the outcome of the war in Ukraine, it has enabled Israels brutal destruction of Gaza and its violent incursions into neighbouring countries, it pushes for war against Venezuela, threatens to dispossess Greenland from Denmark, it supports colour revolutions and coups from Latin America to Africa—and has changed from a steward of the post war global order, to a cherry picking disruptor demanding tribute or offering piracy and pillaging as the only alternative. Our government, seeing all of these developments, toots that it is “full steam ahead with AUKUS” while fastracking the fusion of the sovereign military capability with the United States, just at the time when Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy speaks of the return of the Monroe Doctrine and ‘peace through strength’ as it corrals its core vassals into helping it control the Western Hemisphere (whatever that entails).
In Europe, this year has looked like its leaders irresponsibly hinting of a continental war involving NATO and Russia, urging readiness in its population suffering from a high cost of living and energy crisis. Unelected leaders like European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen speak in dark and harrowing terms about the inevitability of avoidable conflict and the need to control digital information. Leaders don’t bother concealing this message of imposed hardship. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni frankly told her nation that although this year has been hard, “next year will be much worse”.
In West Asia, a self declared regional power, Israel, wages a multi pronged war on its neighbours and a multi-barbed genocide on the Palestinian people, backed by the full compliment of the West. Aiding in the unconscionable carnage of Gaza has been the integration of high-tech AI driven software and next generation weaponry acting as a form of ‘laboratory’ that tests the authoritarian weapons systems of the future.
Rise of the Tech Pharaohs
2025 has also seen the rise of the outward facing tech Pharaohs, who have increasingly inched out of their gilded palaces in Silicon Valley for years, finally revealing the total extent of their power-monger penchants and the goals of techno-social-engineering. We now see the open musings of people like Palantir duo CEO Alex Karp and founder Peter Thiel—talking about their desires to strike their adversaries, some of them with drone strikes, others with “light fentanyl-laced urine“—while presenting strange fixations on the ‘Antichrist’ and lacking the ability to empathise with the common human spirit.
While Palantir tests its software in places like Gaza, Ukraine, and your local Coles supermarket, Elon Musk doomtweets about the fall of Western civilisation, amplifying divisive subjects into potential societal flash-points about gender, religion and race, and Jeff Bezos has one of the biggest budget weddings available while completing the biggest mass sacking in the history of Amazon. Billionaire bunker-era philosophy now becomes canon, and their words become increasingly prismatic as the consequences of their actions become increasingly unimpeded, and the job markets in the service industry heavy economies of the West face cataclysmic AI powered ‘solutions’ set to render swathes of the population unemployable, and millions of people ‘controllable’.
No Vision, No Courage
The world is in a period of disruption as the global order turns on its head. At a historical juncture like this—where countries must decide their fate in a sea of uncertainty—Australia languishes among an international community adapting to the uncertain changes ahead with their own national characteristics. Voices around the world are challenging the empty promises of a global order that hasn’t been delivering for some time, and Australia seems cumbersome and apathetic in response, as the systems its leaders claim to champion are crumbling underneath them.
Albanese won a record victory with his seats, but maintained a low primary vote, and underneath the analysis that saw his big majority, moves the shifting sands of the Australian electorate, converging with the fault-lines of global upheaval. The economic status quo has remained the same, record corporate profits buffet continued household stress, and the people are aware of this more than ever. Apart from some economic flotsam, and the shitty result in the Boxing Day test, all Australians are getting over the holiday period is the knowledge that they will be subject to the controversial recommendations of the Antisemitism Envoy in the wake of a national tragedy, hammered home by a government that has bent to foreign and domestic Zionist demands for over two years.
There are no grand strategies no generational reforms, no significant public housing for a nation with a lower welfare rate than Poland, no innovative national programs to address violence against women, no willpower to take on the big corporations who pay no tax, or to benefit from the miners who pollute our world- no ethical courage to call out the crimes of Israel and place blame on their actions – no morality to stop the lunge towards militarisation that can see no other result but the death of a generation of youth to the war that results from that type of thinking-- no courage to be a rational voice of reason at a time when the world needs it. That doesn’t seem to be changing next year.
Happy New Year?
It is almost 2026, Isaac Herzog will be setting the tone for the year when he visits, and the Labor government putting along like its the Howard Coalition in 1998, while 10,000 a month go homeless and one-in six children live in poverty in a world under threat of a third world war and a total breakdown of global cohesion, beset by the spectre of AI driven techno feudalism. It gets harder to go off to the caravan park to relax knowing all of that.
Western elites speak in terms of ‘societal immunity’ and thumb their noses at lack of enshrined freedoms when they remark on the initiatives they are using to control the narrative that is slipping from their hands, using war and the treat of conflict as a distraction from the mess they create as a cohort of kleptocratic western politicians strip the pipes and fittings from the grand halls of the public institutions built by their predecessors. 2025 has been a bad year, and 2026 feels like it will be worse. As the elected elites, unelected cyber-monarch billionaires and transnational committee chairs openly speak of commodifying, militarising or augmenting public and global systems to bend populations under their arms of control, the people increasingly notice this activity and continually withdraw from the social contract, destined for a clash, as the reality of the public and the fantasies of the powerful jolt further apart.
“After an election year that saw a result giving Labor hold a Chifley era mandate.”
Hmm probably not, that 35% primary vote is extremely fragile in a world with powerful right wing forces. Given their toxic policies and weirdo personalities, a COALition government would be a catastrophe. If Albanese is good at anything it is electoral politics so maybe give him credit for seeing the risks more clearly than most of us. Yeh it is disappointing that they are so cautious but the consequences of losing the next election are terrifying in the present political climate.