Maugean skates need oxygen to survive and breed. Untreated sewage flowing from salmon feedlots into Tasmania\u2019s remote Macquarie Harbour equals that of a city of a million people. All that shit eats so much oxygen that large areas become marine death zones. The ALP is similarly suffocating in a deluge of corporate shit that eats the values and purpose it needs to survive.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n And yet, under Anthony Albanese, Labor gives the ever stronger impression that it has never seen a corporation that it won\u2019t prostrate itself to. Each knee-step taken in his bizarre pilgrimage of national humiliation, from his log cabin origins to his house on the hill, is loudly tolled by the sound of the corporate cash registers jubilantly ringing with growing profits.<\/span><\/p>\n Qantas and the promised legislation to make it pay customers compensation for late or cancelled flights? No action \u2013 ka-ching!<\/span><\/p>\n The gambling industry and the ads more than 70 per cent of Australians want gone? No action \u2013 ka-ching!<\/span><\/p>\n More coal mine approvals, new gas fields approvals, $1 billion for a Gina Rinehart-backed mine? No problem! Ka-ching!<\/span><\/p>\n Even a spineless environmental measure like Tanya Plibersek\u2019s \u201cnature positive\u201d bill is axed by Albanese at the behest of the West Australian mining industry. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!<\/span><\/p>\n The word extinction was first paired with species in the 1880s as a result of a Cambridge don\u2019s search for the last great auk, a penguin-like bird hunted to extinction by humans. \u201cA healthy population existed until close to the time of the species\u2019 extinction,\u201d Tim Flannery wrote in a recent piece in New York Review of Books. \u201cWhen it came, however, the decline of the great auk was swift and relentless.\u201d While \u201cthe great auk was difficult to hunt at sea\u201d, Flannery continued, \u201cwhen it came ashore to breed it was uniquely vulnerable.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n And so too Albo. His much-remarked gifts of backroom dealing and party wrangling that worked in the darkness of factional intrigue serve him less well on the naked, exposed rock of government. In 2022, Labor secured just 32.58 per cent of the national primary vote, its lowest vote since 1934. Labor\u2019s electoral fortunes give every appearance of spiralling only further downwards at the next election, with the party falling, according to the latest poll, to 31 per cent.<\/span><\/p>\n Great auks were not difficult to tame. There was one in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, perhaps a little lost, like Albo at the Murdochs\u2019 recent Christmas bash. A Danish savant kept another on a leash, not unlike the salmon barons who seem to have Albo on speed dial, with the prime minister seemingly ever ready to fly to Tasmania solely to endorse salmon companies with a record of environmental destruction, one so bad their actions led to the banning of salmon farming in Washington state (Cooke Aquaculture, owners of Tassal). According to Hilary Franz, the state commissioner of public lands there, \u201cCooke\u2019s disregard … recklessly put our state\u2019s aquatic ecosystem at risk.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Then there are the owners of Huon Aquaculture, JBS, a global byword for criminality. In 2017, its owner brothers Joesley and Wesley Batista admitted to bribing over 1800 politicians and public officials in Brazil. Corruption was, according to an interview Joesley gave in 2017 before going to jail with Wesley, \u201cthe rule of the game. And what\u2019s most important, corruption was on the upper floors, with the authorities.\u201d Today Wesley\u2019s son Henry Batista, described in The Australian Financial Review as \u201cthe Kendall Roy of salmon\u201d, works in Hobart as CEO of Huon Aquaculture. (Henry was not implicated in the senior Batistas\u2019 corruption.)<\/span><\/p>\n According to the Australia Institute, the three 100 per cent foreign-owned Tasmanian salmon companies have paid no corporate tax for the past five years. For Albo \u2013 who has extraordinarily floated plans to exempt Macquarie Harbour from all federal environmental law under a national-interest provision typically reserved for emergencies \u2013 that\u2019s seemingly more reason to ensure the rule of law doesn\u2019t apply to the salmon mafia.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n And once one industry can exist outside the law, why not others? Why not Woodside, which plans to keep its gas fields pumping until 2070 and open new ones, making a mockery of net zero by 2050? Why not Hancock Prospecting? And while at it, criminalise those who protest such things as the fossil fuel industry\u2019s responsibility for the climate crisis.<\/span><\/p>\n If you talk to extinction experts, they will point out that a sighting of a large flock of birds can mean little as to their future prospects. A flock of, say, 78 birds may give a misleading view of the birds\u2019 prospects as a species, when perhaps only 16 of the birds are capable of reproducing. With Labor\u2019s primary vote steadily collapsing, Albo may be remembered not as a nickname, but as a byword for a mass extinction event.<\/span><\/p>\n The ordinary person who has lived through the extraordinary, frequently heavy-handed state interventions of recent years with COVID, knows exactly just how powerful the state is. So too does Peter Dutton, a former Queensland walloper who in other circumstances might be thought to have the electoral appeal of a venomous axolotl. What the new right gets right though is that people are angry, that life gets harder, and people want change. People want the state to act \u2013 for the people.<\/span><\/p>\n What the right offers them is its newly found intent to use the state to achieve change. From Weimar Germany on, the cry of state action, no matter how mindless and destructive, has always appealed to societies where the established polity has grown incapable of acting.<\/span><\/p>\n Dutton\u2019s call for nuclear reactors built by the state may be a shroud to help the fossil fuel industry continue to profit. But at a deeper level it appeals as Donald Trump\u2019s equally spurious calls for a wall appealed \u2013 it speaks of politicians willing to use the state to address problems. If hypocritical posturing, it nevertheless suggests a will to action.<\/span><\/p>\n Yet for Labor, still mired in its 1990s romance with the Hawke-Keating legacy, it too often is the market and only the market that has power. The best the state can do is kneel before it. And if Qantas or Tabcorp or News or Woodside or Tassal don\u2019t wish to alter their ways, Labor simply agrees, rewarding and further enabling them.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The problem is that what is at stake is much greater than the Labor Party, but democracy itself. A society that no longer can use the state to address its problems \u2013 from the environment to housing to rapidly escalating inequality to the increasingly unfettered power of corporations \u2013 looks more and more like the US, where Luigi Mangione became a folk hero for allegedly murdering a health insurance company CEO.<\/span><\/p>\n Historically, assassinations only become celebrated as political protest when political systems have grown sclerotic and violent change is often imminent\u2014 from Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 to the Romanovs in 1917 to the Rwandan dictator Habyarimana in 1994.<\/span><\/p>\n Delay, deny, defend: a version of the words found on Mangione\u2019s shell casings refers to the immoral practices used by American insurance corporations in refusing to honour legitimate health claims. But they also can sound uncomfortably close to the strategy and rhetoric of the Albanese government in regard to so much of its failure to act on the many problems besetting our country.<\/span><\/p>\n For democracy does not die in darkness. It grows terminally ill in the Chairman\u2019s Lounge. What Labor gets wrong is thinking that people respect it for grovelling to greed. For being photographed with Alan Joyce or in proximity of a Murdoch. For backing the Batistas. They don\u2019t. They are enraged.<\/span><\/p>\n Labor\u2019s diminishing flock of lesser auks will be hunted down by the corporate raiders feasting on all the plumage and flesh that the state can offer in perks, breaks, subsidies, exemptions \u2013 what are, incidentally, our taxes, our heritage, our way of life \u2013 until all that is left is a bare, ever hotter rock and beneath it a dark seething sea covered in salmon feedlots, shit-flecked foam devoid of life.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/dingo.news\/voice\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Albo-Great-Auk-Letch.webp?resize=740%2C492&ssl=1\")
Illustration by Simon Letch<\/span><\/p>\n“People want the state to act \u2013 for the people.”<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/h2>\n
“… democracy does not die in darkness. It grows terminally ill in the Chairman\u2019s Lounge”<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n