Several commentators have remarked that, while the mainstream media is locked in furious agreement with the government over AUKUS and the trillion dollar submarines (a guess at the final price tag), social and independent media are telling quite a different tale.
The whole scheme originates with Morrison, which should ring alarm bells (did he secretly install Hillsong cultists in the defence department?), and they ring louder when we consider that the USA doesn’t have the political stability to promise support through the next two or three decades. A president called Trump or DeSantis would likely disable the treaty with budget cuts or dismantle it outright. Similarly the UK government has no political strength, no social capital, and it has no economic stability either.
But somehow most members of the major parties, and mainstream journalists, with a few honourable exceptions, have swallowed whole ‘the colonial Anglosphere will save us from the Chinese’ bullshit, and tumbled over each other to affirm what a brilliant act of statesmanship Albanese has performed.
It is by no means sure that this is what the electorate believes, and notably two former prime ministers have criticised the scheme, but the difference between them and Albanese is that Keating and Turnbull don’t have to face the polls ever again, which leaves them a certain freedom to tell the truth as they see it. The current PM knows that if he had nixed AUKUS and the magic submarines, he would have had the whole of the Murdoch and Nine falsehood factories spitting lies and outrage from now until the 2025 election.
This is a sad truth, and it leads to another: for the same reason (a vicious corporate and media campaign aimed at preventing a Labor re-election) the government thinks it has to keep subsidising fossil fuels and to keep approving more and more mines, even though every bit of scientific evidence says, stop now or ruin the planet – and they all know this.
This is the political reality. The billionaires who have fought to the top of this particular money tree would rather see a thousand years of famine, war and plague happen to other people than suffer the slightest impediment to their pursuit of wealth.
In this sense it is already too late to save ourselves, no matter how many delusional submarines we buy with the money that should go to welfare, health and education. There may be a narrow scientific path to zero emissions and non-catastrophic warming, but in Australia at least there is no political path to this goal.
Given that we cannot do the right thing, we must invest in the means of doing the wrong thing. Hence the sinister growth of anti-protest legislation everywhere. The draconian laws are not so much for the current climate protesters; they are a munition set aside against future desperate activists. The government knows that as the climate dislocation grows, and more people are affected by fire, flood, cyclone and drought, it will need extreme coercive powers to keep order.
Having grovelled before a defence department packed with anti-Chinese Americanophiles, and granted the fossil-fuel lobby all the mines they could ever dream of, the Albanese government is now heading for a third submission to the greed industry. The issue is carbon credits as regulated by the Safeguard Mechanism (Crediting) bill, now struggling to get through parliament.
The Greens’ reaction to the bill is simple: ‘The evidence from this inquiry [into the bill] is clear. Under Labor’s Safeguard Mechanism, actual pollution from coal and gas goes up and the climate crisis gets worse.’
However, it is possible that Labor can spin this as the Greens’ intransigence and win yet more plaudits from Murdoch and Nine. In that case the former PM most disgusted should be Kevin Rudd, who signed the Kyoto Protocol for Australia.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
