How the Labor Party sold out to vampiric oligarchs and authoritarian Zionist dickheads

This week, the Albanese government, in goose-stepping sync with the Liberals and One Nation, will push into law the “ASIO number 2” bill. This gives our secret police increased powers to pull ordinary Australians off the streets, question and detain us secretly without reasonable cause, and deny us the right to speak about this state-sanctioned harassment with our families and lawyers. Refusing to answer a question from ASIO or later telling someone about your ordeal could send you to prison for up to 5 years. Debate in parliament has been guillotined to just one hour, a fittingly grotesque abuse of democratic norms for such a draconian law. We are ruled by ghouls and darkness draws near.

This comes in the same week that the same government, with the same collaborators on the political far-right, allowed gambling companies continued free reign over the minds of our television-watching youth, and kicked more than 241,000 disabled people off NDIS support services. Have no doubt about what that really means: people will die. This is social murder, operating under a eugenicist selection criteria, sanitised by spreadsheets, all so we can afford nonexistent fascist submarines and to not tax our planet-destroying oligarchal creeps.   

There is an age-old maxim in Australian political circles, as accepted a truism as we have in the land downunder, of the Labor Party being “shit light”. That is: the “lesser evil” compared to the Liberal Party’s more overt comic-book villainy. I once subscribed to this view…. 

Today, I believe the comparison is utterly pointless, missing the bigger picture, and, if anything, a distraction from the real fight. In short: the likelihood of one half of our depraved, corrupt, pathetic, blockheaded ruling class saving us from the other half is so implausible even Polymarket wouldn’t take that bet. 

After years studying the gulf between political rhetoric and outcomes, analysing how propaganda works on minds and societies, reading through the fucken Epstein files to understand how global capitalist power realllllly operates, and interviewing a decent chunk of this country’s most demonised, disadvantaged folks – First Nations people, refugees, Muslims, Palestinians, etc. – I have come to a different conclusion. 

The Labor Party is not the lesser evil. It is the more competent evil. 

And that is an entirely different equation. Because ultimately we don’t want our evil wearing slick suits and commanding massive parliamentary majorities, slaughtering a humane, livable future, and gaslighting us into numb submission on behalf of a cadre of genocidal pedophiles. We want our evil buffoonlike, ostracised, slipping on banana peels, shooting itself in the foot over and over. That would be true damage mitigation. 

Our friends, the legends at Deepcut News, recently collated popular opinion on the existential issues of our age. They definitively quantified the canyonesque gulf between the widely held views of a mega-majority of Australians and the Labor Party’s positions while in power. 

“More than three-in-five Australians support a gas tax, 83% say the supermarkets deserve some blame for the cost-of-living crisis, three-in-four Australians want a ban on gambling ads, and 79% hold a negative view of Israel. On these big issues, the vast majority – from left to right – are in agreement,” Royce Kurmelovs writes. 

And yet, in all of these battlegrounds – and you can add new fossil fuel projects, free speech issues, Zio-fascist education overhauls, and protest rights – the Labor Party has stood against the overwhelming popular will. All while posing as a progressive party of the people, a truly absurd position at this point; a fairytale for the enfeebled and propagandised, more establishment psy-op than reality. 

Or, to put it another way: why the fuck were we ever settling for lesser evil voting, anyway? After selling explosives and military components to a livestreamed mass-massacre of children and gaslighting an entire nation about it; after a Labor Premier tried to expel a Palestinian author from a writers festival; after giving Issac Herzog a royal tour and having Australians who didn’t like it beaten up by fascist cops; after appointing a Special Envoy to quash resistance to genocide and gifting her a $131million royal commission to posture as a victim while stomping on everyone else’s rights; after selling out our sovereignty with the AUKUS boondogle to the US-Israeli military, even as it merges into one depraved entity; after approving the North West Shelf gas terminal, and after opening the door to the oligarch’s AI datacentres – literally the nervous system of the techno-fascist dystopia every piece of decent speculative sci-fi has warned us about since forever – what’s the material difference meant to be at this fucking point?!? How much “lesser” is this evil, really? 

And why, despite this unending list of horrors, does fucken Dave Hughes feel the need to make up fictional reasons to despise the Labor Party? It just illustrates how divorced from material reality the conversation in Australia is!

These aren’t small, disconnected issues to be viewed in isolation. It’s in the throughlines, the cui bono and the recurring patterns, that we see what’s really happening here. The Labor Party’s position 100% of the time is aligned with the will of the Epstein class, with vampiric corporations, techno-fascists, militarists, Zionists, and American imperial extraction. In short: humanity’s depraved, stupid, evil ruling class. Supremacist psychopathic personality types that wield capitalism as a weapon of mass destruction. Rapidly building a militarised AI surveillance state with the intention of riding out the climate collapse they have caused in underground bunkers in the South Island of Aotera, eating quails and working class children, tweeting out their insipid, moronic thoughts through their miserable, pathetic evenings. 

Outside Pine Gap, a CIA spy base near Alice Springs that helps slaughter kids in Gaza, I interviewed Greens Senator David Shoebridge. We discussed the ALP’s “selling-out humanity” problem. “They want to double down on the US military alliance. They want to protect and defend and resource the Israeli military. It’s like they’re in a death cult,” says Shoebridge. 

“And the reason it’s like this is now, for decades, the parliamentary wing of the Labor Party has been self-selecting. You only get to join it if you share these values, if you actually believe in this shit. They’re not doing this reluctantly! They’re doing this because they believe in the alliance, they believe in our big role in US-led corporate, military, and financial domination of the planet, and they think we get enough crumbs off the table to give us an economic and security future. That’s their plan. That’s actually their plan.”

Yeah, well, shit….

Was it always like this? 

Minds incubated inside settler-colonial systems have cultivated blindspots. I know this because I own one such mind, and have spent much time and energy unlearning much bullshit. In my experience, both First Nations truth-tellers and revolutionary socialists don’t have these same blindspots. So I went to Professor Gary Foley, who is both these things, to ask him what the fuck is going on.

“In my lifetime, the governments that have done more damage to the interests of Aboriginal people have not been the parties of the right, the conservatives, but rather the Australian Labor Party. Now, it’s still my contention that by far the best Prime Minister we’ve ever had was Gough Whitlam. But even Gough.… he came to power in 1972 loudly proclaiming his government would deliver land rights for Aboriginal people. It took him less than 12 months after getting into power to back off on that promise. 

“Not only that, probably the three worst Ministers of Aboriginal Affairs in Australian history were the three ministers who Gough Whitlam gave us. So the best Prime Minister, in my mind, proved to be such a disaster, and then 10 years later we get an even bigger criminal in Bob Hawke, who did even more damage to Aboriginal people. The Hawke-Keating government created the Native Title Act, which is one of the greatest setbacks for Aboriginal people in history.… they made Malcom Fraser look like a good guy.”

“We have very little hope of achieving our real aims, economic and political independence, while we’ve got a racist Labor Party and a racist Liberal Party. It perplexes me that the Labor Party masquerades as a progressive party when their actual track record is completely the opposite. It’s been like this for at least 50 years. It doesn’t seem to be getting better.” 

“They’re beholden to the Zionist lobby. I mean, Bob Hawke even gave us Zionist Ministers for Aboriginal Affairs, like Clyde Holding! It’s a joke.”

Kon Karapanagiotidis, the head of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, doesn’t make me feel any better about the prospect of the ALP discovering some humanity. In fact, he essentially says the exact same thing as Foley: that their rhetoric is softer, but their policies crueler. And for a heavily propagandised and distracted population such as ours, that can be enough to create armies of deluded dipshit acolytes.

“It’s some of the most breathtaking moral hypocrisy,” Kon says of the party’s asylum seeker platform. “It’s quite despicable and vile to see a government engaging in performative humanity.

“If I’m frank with you, David, the most draconian anti-immigration laws have come under Labor governments. Four of the worst we’ve ever seen in the last two years alone. And significant humanitarian intakes in the last two decades have only come under Liberal governments, not under Labor. So you have, on the surface, a party that is pretending to be progressive. At the heart of this, Labor is buying into a move to the right, not wanting to alienate One Nation supporters, and, along with the Liberal Party, is in a race to the bottom. Multicultural communities are feeling this…. we’re being gaslit.”   

Now, if I’ve worked you into a pit of despair, please understand that there is hope. But it requires something of you and every decent person you know. Democracy is not passive. It is not just voting.

Just as our actual rulers are transnational, so too is our resistance. There is more global discontent, protest, and opposition to the West’s barbaric, increasingly fascistic order than there has ever been. Everywhere, activists put their bodies and souls on the line to disrupt this creepy perverted surveillance, exploitation, and death machine. Genocidally complicit corporations like McDonald’s and Zara are seeing substantial revenue drops. Boycotts do work. They are how South African apartheid fell. They are also a minor, easy sacrifice for the payoff of a planet less on fire and filled with fewer fucking fascists. Socialism is more acceptable and popular in the United States than ever. Zionism is despised by the vast majority of the world’s working class. 

Collectively, we need to work out which civic institutions we can seize back, and which ones need to be burnt to the ground. As I’ve made clear, I’d argue the ALP fits this latter category, and that people like Ed Husic are in fact a form of controlled opposition: bait to convince nostalgic, intellectually lazy Gen-X and Boomers that there is still a soul inside and the party can be saved. It cannot.

Similarly, capitalist stooges and Zionist plants need to be expelled from our unions, which, with very few exceptions, have traded their social consciences for plum AUKUS jobs manufacturing infanticide. Protests need to turn into sustained strikes. Left-wing politicians need to step up and reject the entire narrative frame presented by the corporate press, by the Liberal Party, by One Nation, and by the Labor Party. We must cling onto the understanding that a disabled child thrown off the NDIS is just as human as my child, your child, and all the children Australian explosives have been eviscerating in Gaza. None of us are free until all of us are free.

Measured on the longer timeline that history demands of us, once the votes are in, once the grifters have cashed out, once the real resistance has been contained, once the weak have been culled and the boot has been sufficiently polished, there is no “lesser evil”. Just evil.