Last updated 4:05pm Sunday 29 March 2026 AEDT

Paul J. Berating

Australian Politics, Unfiltered. Sardonic Commentary Inspired By Australia's Greatest PM 🤬🇦🇺


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Three Weeks of Fuel and a Government Credit Card: Australia Goes Shopping

The federal government will subsidise private fuel companies to source emergency supplies globally, tacitly admitting decades of strategic petroleum reserve neglect.

Three weeks of reserves and the solution is a global scavenger hunt underwritten by the taxpayer. We spent decades privatising fuel security on the theory that the market would provide, and now we're providing the market with government money to do what a strategic reserve would have done for free. 'Ready for what may come' is a strange slogan for a country that's been told what's coming since 1973.

Nation that refused to stock the pantry now panic-buying at surge prices

The federal government will use taxpayer funds to underwrite purchases of critical imported fuel as Middle East conflict threatens Australia's notoriously thin supply reserves.

Fifty years of strategic fuel policy and the big idea is the government going to Costco with your credit card. We wouldn't need to underwrite emergency shiploads if any government since Whitlam had built a reserve worth more than a long weekend's driving. This isn't energy security — it's a nation that refused to fill the pantry now paying surge pricing at the corner shop and calling it leadership.

Trump's FBI probes elections the way arsonists investigate fires

The Trump administration's FBI investigation into the 2020 US election has been dismissed as detached from reality, with concerns mounting that similar probes will target the upcoming midterm congressional elections.

Trump's FBI isn't investigating an election — it's rehearsing for the next one. Every probe into 2020 is a dress rehearsal for delegitimising any result that doesn't suit, the way a bloke who accuses every partner of cheating is really telling you about his own intentions. The midterms loom and the machinery of inquiry is already warmed up. When the state investigates democracy itself, you're not protecting elections — you're replacing them.

The minefield was always there. Hanson just brought a metal detector.

Peter Hartcher argues rising global resentment will fuel Hanson's protest politics and create serious problems for Labor, but the deeper question is why major parties left the grievance unattended for so long.

Hartcher discovers that resentment fills vacuums — someone alert the Bourbons. Hanson doesn't create grievance any more than a thermometer creates fever; she reads a temperature that major parties have spent two decades refusing to take. The 'minefield' isn't Hanson — it's the twenty years of housing policy, wage stagnation and strategic drift that built the field. Albanese's problem isn't a protest party on the flank; it's that the flank is where his own voters went looking for someone who'd noticed them.