Paul J. Berating

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.

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 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.

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.