Going Down: Australia's Dutch Auction of Its Humanity https://urbanwronski.com/2026/10/10/going-down-australias-dutch-auction-of-its-humanity/ #AngusTaylor, #AsylumSeekers, #AustralianPolitics, #Coalition, #HousingCrisis, #ImmigrationPolicy, #InternationalLaw, #LaborParty, #MurdochMedia, #Nauru, #NetOverseasMigration, #OneNation, #PaulineHanson, #PoliticalCommentary, #RefugeeRights, #Refugees, #UrbanWronski
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Sons of Toil, Part II: The Steward’s Son
Anthony Norman Albanese was born into a community that believed in the compact: endure, petition, defer, and trust that the institution would eventually deliver. He rose through that community, wore its colours, spoke its language, and built, with quiet purposefulness, an $8.8 million property portfolio. The compact, it turns out, was not a philosophy of mutual obligation but a ladder. You keep one foot on the rung below and one hand reaching for the one above. The theological term for this arrangement is the great chain of being, a medieval conception in which hierarchy was ordained by God and every link owed duty to the links beneath it. That reciprocal obligation was its social promise. Albanese retained the hierarchy and dissolved the obligation. The dockyard term for what remained, in the Mediterranean ports where his father’s ship once called, is sauve qui peut. Every man for himself. The steward’s son learned it early and practised it without interruption for the rest of his life.
Australia, 2022 onwards
Anthony Norman Albanese crossed Parramatta Road the way other people cross a street: with the calm and conviction of someone who has rehearsed the gesture for television. He came from Macmahon Street, a housing commission island ringed by depots and Rabbitohs fanaticism and the peculiar click-clack of Catholic rosary beads, black as anthracite and polished to a gloss by the unrelenting petitions of the poor but faithful, addressed to a Lord of infinite grace, mercy, and inscrutable wisdom. It was a community built on a compact: endure, petition, defer, and trust that the institution, whether divine or political, would eventually deliver. He was, as the campaign line put it, “a son of a single mum.” It was a neat, humanising truth. It was also an opening line with longer ambitions.
Maryanne Ellery knitted that opening line into a narrative because she had to. She named her boy Anthony after a dead cousin whose name already lived on a motel on the Pacific Highway; she gave him Norman for a brother of the dead child; she told him, for fourteen years, a story about a steward on a ship called the Fairsky and a tragic car wreck. The ship and the steward were true. The rest was not. The domestic fiction did its work: it made a life legible, respectable, electable.
Legibility is a political skill. So is invisibility. Albanese learned both. He joined Labor at fifteen, worked for Tom Uren, took Grayndler in 1996, waited, tried, failed, waited again, became unremarkable enough to be irresistible. He slimmed down, changed his spectacles, adopted “small target” as a governing aesthetic: say little, avoid detail, be a pliant surface for others to project steadiness upon. The tactic was surgical; it won an election.
It had been designed to win. After the 2019 loss, two architects of the neoliberal centre, Craig Emerson, former economic adviser to Bob Hawke, and Jay Weatherill, former South Australian Premier, reviewed the wreckage and produced their prescription: strip the agenda, minimise the surface area, commit explicitly to leaving negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions untouched. The Emerson-Weatherill review did not create the small target. It specified it, costed it, and handed it to a man who happened to own an $8.8 million property portfolio and had excellent personal reasons to find the prescription congenial. The minders dissolved the obligation. The candidate retained the hierarchy. Between them, they built the construction that crossed Parramatta Road and called itself Labor.
The victory speech was exactly the sort of line that journalists like to clip: “a son of a single mum who grew up in public housing can stand before you tonight as Australia’s prime minister.” The cameras drank it up. The man who spoke that sentence was also, by a conservative tally, the owner of an $8.8 million property portfolio.
There is a special kind of cognitive dissonance in being both origin story and accumulator. It is not dishonesty so much as therapeutic amnesia. You become the story you tell yourself until you can no longer hear the gap between sentence and life.
Here is what the boy from the housing estate acquired, set down in the order of acquisition.
Marrickville, 1990: a two-bedroom semi for $146,000. In those days Marrickville was, as the local real estate commentary puts it, so rough you would not stop there for fuel. Albanese stayed the course. A second Marrickville property in 2006 for $960,000, renovated, now rented at $1,350 a week and worth $2.6 million, mortgage free. A Dulwich Hill townhouse bought in 2015 for $1.175 million, sold in late 2024 for $1.75 million, the $575,000 profit qualifying for the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount that Labor had described, in 2019, as a housing affordability problem requiring urgent reform. A Canberra apartment bought in 1996 for $162,000, sold in 2022 for $660,000. And finally, purchased with his fiancee Jodie Haydon in October 2024, a clifftop home at Copacabana on the New South Wales Central Coast: four bedrooms, three bathrooms, timber-lined cathedral ceilings, Commonwealth Bank mortgage, $4.3 million.
Timber-lined cathedral ceilings. Across Parramatta Road from the Housing Commission flat.
The small target, it turns out, had been quietly acquiring with the purposefulness of a man who loves an asset class.
He had also, on 9 April 2025, three weeks before the federal election, been asked by a journalist whether he could rule out changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions. “Yes,” he replied. “How hard is it? For the 50th time.”
In May 2026, the budget announced changes to both. Asked on ABC radio whether this constituted a broken promise, the Prime Minister said: “Government is about making the right decisions for the right reasons for the times that you are in.”
The young people of Camperdown, paying $650 a week to share a terrace two streets from his mother’s old flat, were left to draw their own conclusions about whose times, and whose right reasons, were under discussion.
The rentier class had conclusions of its own. When the May 2026 budget finally introduced changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax, the Real Estate Institute, the Housing Industry Association, the Property Council, and the Master Builders Association declared catastrophe. What they did not explain was why forty years of the existing arrangements had produced a housing market in which only fourteen per cent of median-income households can afford the median-priced home, rents have risen forty-three per cent in five years, a Sydney two-bedroom apartment costs $680 a week, and saving a twenty per cent deposit takes eleven years on an average wage. The arrangements had worked magnificently. They had worked for the people who already owned property.
The reforms themselves, when examined, were a masterpiece of prospective timidity. All existing investments: untouched. Every current negatively-geared property: protected. All capital gains accrued to date: still eligible for the fifty per cent discount. The changes applied only to new purchases of established housing after budget night, from July 2027. The $12.3 billion annual tax concession to landlords, larger than the combined federal spend on social housing, homelessness, and rent assistance, remained substantially intact. The screaming of the rentier class, in other words, was about the inconvenience of a slightly smaller future, not the loss of a present. It was, in that sense, entirely in keeping with the tradition of people who had confused their privileges with their rights and their windfalls with their deserts.
Now to the enigma at the centre of this biography, the relationship that makes the Iran decision not merely a policy contradiction but a specific, personal betrayal.
Tom Uren had been a Japanese prisoner of war. He had worked on the Burma-Thailand railway. He had stood outside Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb fell and watched what force actually did to human bodies when it was given sufficient resources and political permission. He came out of that experience with a bone-deep conviction that resorting to force was not a way to resolve differences between nations. This was not pacifism in the abstract. It was knowledge, carried in the body, of what the alternative looked like.
He was also one of the great urban reform voices in Australian Labor, Whitlam’s Minister for Urban and Regional Development, a man who believed that the shape of cities was a social justice question and that public housing was not a concession to the poor but an expression of what a decent society owed its members. Uren had described the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as crimes against humanity and spent the rest of his political life campaigning for nuclear disarmament. Albanese worked for him for five years and, at Uren’s state funeral in 2015, delivered the eulogy: “I grew up without a dad, but not without a father. Tom Uren was my father figure. He was my mentor. He was my friend.”
What did Uren see in the boy from Macmahon Street? Probably what every political mentor sees: his own younger self, arriving with the right origins and the right hunger and the right factional credentials. A Hard Left pedigree, links to People for Nuclear Disarmament, the ANC, the peace movement. An economics degree obtained on the free tuition that Whitlam had created and that Uren had helped to sustain. A talent for patience and the machinery of power.
The political mentor’s great occupational hazard is that he mistakes the resemblance for the substance.
In March 2026, with the US-Israeli strikes on Iran entering their third week, Prime Minister Albanese endorsed the campaign and dispatched a command warplane, missiles, and troops. He did so in a joint statement that spoke of standing with “the brave people of Iran in their struggle against oppression,” simultaneously supporting the campaign that was conducting that struggle on their behalf and from above. This is a formulation that requires not cynicism but something more disquieting: the genuine inability to notice the distance between one sentence and the next.
We stand with the brave people of Iran. We are helping to bomb them. In the contemporary Labor formulation these are not contradictions. They are sequential sentences in the same press release.
The man who had worked for the former prisoner who had stood outside Nagasaki endorsed the bombing. The man whose mentor had seen what force cost, in his own body, on a railway built by men worked to death in a tropical jungle, announced that he was standing with the brave people of a country he was helping to attack.
In 1914, the Labor leader Andrew Fisher pledged support for Britain to the “last man and last shilling.” The carnage that followed produced, eventually, a counter-tradition: a Labor movement that periodically asked whether the last man and the last shilling might be better spent. That tradition was not murdered. It simply became unavailable, the way a word becomes unavailable when enough people stop using it.
The Shoppies completed the picture. The SDA, the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, is the most conservative organised force in Australian Labor: Catholic, historically opposed to same-sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, and abortion rights, aligned with management against workers on the retail floor. Its members are the grandchildren of Macmahon Street. They still make the compact. They still petition the institution. The institution still dispenses its grace on its own inscrutable terms, which in recent budgets have included the fifty per cent capital gains tax discount. Albanese had come up through the Hard Left. By the time he was governing, the Shoppies were part of the coalition he needed. The man who had worked for the former POW who stood outside Nagasaki was making his arrangements with a union whose primary political function has been to keep the ALP’s social conservatism carefully tended.
This is not hypocrisy as vice. It is hypocrisy as technique. It licenses a peculiar public psychology: voters may continue to cherish the origin story while the origin story, the suburb, the public housing, the disability pension, becomes a brand to be curated. The brand is not the same thing as the cause. But it does the work that causes once did: it comforts, it sells, it persuades.
Peter Sarstedt once asked: where do you go to, my lovely, when you are alone in your bed?
In Albanese’s case the answer is probably: the same place he always went. The small target is not a political strategy adopted for the duration of a campaign. It is what a man becomes when he has spent twenty-five years wanting the job more than he wants anything the job is for. By the time you get there, the want has consumed the purpose. What remains is the want, wearing the vocabulary of the purpose, and unable, in the timber-lined cathedral ceilings at Copacabana, to tell the difference.
The small target, finally unobserved, reveals not a monster and not a fraud but something sadder: the absence of anything behind the display. A man who learned to want the position so efficiently that he forgot, somewhere on the long climb from Macmahon Street, to want anything it was for.
The TSS Fairsky was scrapped in Taiwan in 1988. Names, and ships, and people decompose in their own time. On the Pacific Highway at Halfway Creek, Anthony’s Motel endures as a roadside reliquary for a four-year-old boy who rounded a bend in 1959 and did not come back. In Camperdown, the children who played on Macmahon Street cannot afford the suburb they grew up in.
According to the Foodbank Hunger Report 2025, one in three Australian households, 3.5 million of them, experienced food insecurity in the past twelve months. Forty-eight per cent of renting households could not reliably put food on the table. Nearly seven in ten single-parent households are now food insecure. Behind those numbers are families skipping meals so children can eat, and workers going hungry to pay the rent. The rent that flows, in many cases, to portfolios held by people who have confused their windfalls with their deserts.
He is still called Albo. His friends still say “Alban-eez,” like bolognese. His mother, who stretched a disability pension across the gap between survival and not, who sat a boy down at the kitchen table at fourteen and rewrote the story of his life, would have been proud. Whether she would have understood the cathedral ceilings, the asset class, the warplanes over the Strait of Hormuz: that is a question this narrator does not answer, because this narrator already knows, and the knowing is the grief, and the grief is the point.
That, in the end, is the political art he practised: to seat the landlord and the tenant at the same table, and to look up from the getting and spending long enough to assure the tenant that the plate on the other side is merely temporarily empty.
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The Art of the No Deal
Xi played the long game. Trump mistook the banquet for the bargain. A comprehensive reckoning with the most consequential diplomatic failure of the Trump presidency so far. -
O Quel Cul T’as: The Pat, The Politics and The Perfectly Fake Marriage
In 1969, Kenneth Tynan named a nude revue after a French pun about a woman's backside. In 2026, the forty-seventh president of the United States provided the perfect sequel. The gesture lasted less than a second. The politics behind it have been building for decades. -
The King’s Speech: A Royal Masterclass in Diplomatic Evisceration
On 28 April 2026, King Charles III stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered twenty minutes of perfectly calibrated diplomatic napalm. He spoke of Magna Carta, judicial independence, NATO and the rule of law. Donald Trump stood there smiling and felt the warmth of the room. He missed everything else.https://urbanwronski.com/2026/04/30/the-kings-speech-a-royal-masterclass-in-diplomatic-evisceration/
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The Touska Gambit: Piracy, Power, and the Theatre of Broken Promises
The USS Spruance blew a hole in the engine room of the Touska and Marines rappelled onto the deck. Trump crowed on Truth Social. Iran called it piracy and cancelled the peace talks. Urban Wronski on why the seizure of an Iranian cargo ship was never about a ship — and what is actually being prepared while the cameras watch the theatre. -
The Lovely War
Donald Trump threatens Iran the way he once threatened a recalcitrant steak: same wounded, flinty, infant-king fury. A working homage to Martin Amis -- on the Epstein flights, the six-billion-dollar goon squad, the taunting of a proud civilisation, and a nine-year-old girl in Minab waiting for the water that is her birthright. The infant-king has other plans. -
A profile of Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Defence, and Geelong’s enduring gift to Australian satirists
Meet Richard Donald Marles. Deputy Prime Minister. Minister for Defence. Member for Corangamite. Product of the Victorian Labor Right, that curious faction where union roots somehow sprout hawkish foreign policy, big-ticket defence contracts, and a preselection culture that makes branch stacking look like a minor administrative irregularity.
He is, in the most precise political sense available, a Liberal in drag. Same tough talk on alliances and deterrence. Same fondness for American hardware and AUKUS largesse. Same instinct to defer to Washington on questions that might benefit from an independent Australian view. Wrapped, however, in just enough factional red to keep the true believers satisfied. All suit, no spark, and a remarkable talent for making national security sound like a mildly confusing numbers meeting that ran somewhat overtime.
Richard Marles is Geelong’s enduring gift to Australian satirists. The question is whether Geelong intended it as a gift or an apology.
The Walking Capability Gap
There is a phrase in defence circles for the gap between what a military is supposed to have and what it actually has. They call it a capability gap. Richard Marles is, in his own person, a walking capability gap: the announced function and the delivered result separated by a distance that no procurement budget has yet been able to close.
The man who fronts up as the steady hand on the tiller is the same man under whose watch the Navy wonders where the hulls went, the budget bleeds billions into procurement black holes, and the ANAO produces findings of ethical and competence failures with the regularity of a quarterly report. He is the stumblebum with the plum in his mouth, projecting authority while the institution he manages projects something considerably more ambiguous.
He inherited the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal and turned it into a rolling saga of delays, cost reassessments, and nervous hand-wringing that would be impressive in its consistency if consistency were the quality being tested. Critics, including people in uniform, people in the audit office, and old Labor warhorses who remember when the party had a clearer relationship with its own principles, point to the endless reviews, the production bottlenecks, and the twenty-year capability hole while Australia waits for American goodwill and Virginia class boats that may or may not materialise on schedule.
Marles’s signature response to any question about whether the Americans will actually deliver is that periodic reviews are “perfectly natural.” Plan B questions he dodges with the practised ease of a man who has decided that the question itself is the problem. Billions committed. Timelines slipping. The public left staring at a price tag somewhere between two hundred billion and three hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars, depending on which estimate one consults and on which day one consults it, for submarines that remain considerably more promise than propeller.
The Procurement Masterclass
Procurement under Marles has been a sustained masterclass in what might charitably be called bureaucratic swamp-dwelling.
The armoured vehicle deals have produced headlines about billions wasted. The ANAO has produced findings of ethical and competence failures with sufficient regularity that they no longer surprise anyone, which is itself a finding worth examining. The response to each procurement disaster has been a reorganisation, and the response to each reorganisation’s failure has been another reorganisation. The most recent iteration produced something called a Defence Delivery Agency, created to fix the procurement problems generated by the previous structural reform, which had been created to fix the problems generated by the one before that.
Wars do not wait for the next reorganisation. Marles’s briefings, apparently, do.
He has poured extra billions into the portfolio. The department continues to be slammed for shortfalls and blowouts. These two facts coexist without apparent embarrassment on anyone’s part, which is perhaps the most remarkable procurement achievement of the period.
The Washington Incident
Then there is the diplomacy, or the performance of it.
Mr Marles flew to Washington at a moment when AUKUS was genuinely uncertain and American goodwill genuinely required active cultivation. The visit produced a clarification from the Pentagon that the encounter with the US Defence Secretary was, in the Pentagon’s own careful formulation, a “happenstance encounter” rather than a formal meeting.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence had flown to Washington and bumped into his counterpart in a corridor. This is the diplomatic equivalent of running into your bank manager at the supermarket and counting it as a financial planning session. The image that lodged in the public mind was of Australia’s most senior defence official as the uninvited guest at the cool table, the one who shows up at the party and discovers from the expressions of the other guests that the invitation was more theoretical than practical.
Mr Marles said it went very well.
The Verbal Vapourware Special
In television studios, Mr Marles has developed a signature style that deserves its own name. Call it the Verbal Vapourware Special.
Classic footage shows him in conversation with Karl Stefanovic on the Today Show, a programme not renowned for its forensic rigour, in which Marles produces word salads of sufficient density that Stefanovic, a man not given to extended silences, fills them by playing Trump clips over the minister’s ongoing remarks. The furrowed brow arrives first. Then the careful pause before the answer that does not quite materialise. Then the vague platitude delivered with the gravity of a man who believes that gravity is itself the substance of the answer.
One moment he is warning of the most complex strategic circumstances since World War Two. The next he is “very close, but we’re not saying how close” on flare incidents, or deflecting capability questions with the expression of a man encountering the question for the first time despite having been Defence Minister for three years.
This is not statesmanlike gravitas. This is the performance of a factional numbers man who is considerably more comfortable in a preselection meeting than a television studio, and who has not, in eleven years of public life, fully resolved the tension between those two environments.
The Liberal in Labor Clothing
Here is the thing about Richard Marles that his factional allies would prefer not to discuss in public. On the questions that actually matter in defence policy, he is more hawkish than many in the Coalition. Pro-American to a degree that occasionally makes Liberal defence spokespeople look like peaceniks by comparison. An enthusiast for American hardware whose enthusiasm is not noticeably tempered by the evidence that the hardware in question is, in the case of the F-35, “predominantly unusable” in the year we are being asked to buy more of it.
He waves the progressive flag with the conviction of a man who remembers 1995 very fondly and has not updated the gesture since. The union pedigree produced a defence hawk. The Labor branding covers a set of instincts that would be entirely at home in the moderate wing of the Liberal Party, which is perhaps why the moderate wing of the Liberal Party has largely ceased to exist. Marles ate its lunch.
Consider what this means for Australian defence policy. The minister responsible for the nation’s strategic posture is, on alliance management, hardware procurement, and the fundamental question of Australian strategic autonomy, considerably to the right of the position the Labor Party took to every election between 1972 and 2001. He is more committed to the American alliance than the Americans are currently committed to him, as the happenstance encounter in Washington demonstrated. He is ordering more F-35s in the year the Iran war revealed their limitations, because the procurement cycle does not wait for strategic reality to update it. He is the defence hawk that the Labor Right produces when it decides that appearing tough matters more than thinking clearly. The consequence is a defence policy that satisfies the Americans just enough to avoid a diplomatic incident and satisfies the electorate just enough to avoid a political one, while satisfying neither the strategic logic of Australia’s actual position nor the budget discipline that fifty-three billion dollars over a decade might reasonably demand.
He has, to his genuine credit, stripped medals from Afghanistan-era officers pursuant to the Brereton Report, which required political courage of a kind not always visible in his portfolio management. He has criticised Chinese live-fire drills in the Tasman Sea, correctly. He has appointed Lieutenant General Susan Coyle as the first female chief of army, which is a genuinely historic moment. These are real achievements. They coexist, in the same ministerial career, with the AUKUS cost blowouts, the armoured vehicle disasters, the happenstance Washington encounter, and the word salads on morning television. A man capable of these decisions is also responsible for those failures. That coexistence is a more interesting and more damning claim than simple incompetence.
The Satirist’s Accounting
In a dangerous neighbourhood, with real capability needs and a fuel crisis that has exposed the fragility of everything the defence budget is supposed to protect, Richard Marles is what happens when you take a moderately ambitious right-leaning machine politician, hand him Defence for factional balance, and hope that nobody notices the spark shortage before the next election.
The procurement disasters generate the reorganisations that generate the next procurement disasters. The submarines remain in the future. The F-35 software remains predominantly unusable. The Geelong refinery burned on Wednesday night while the minister responsible for the nation’s strategic circumstances was preparing his remarks for the National Press Club.
Mr Marles said it was not only about investing more. It was about spending better.
Richard Donald Marles, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence, remains magnificently, unmistakably, and at considerable public expense, wooden.
All faction, no fire.
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Mission Impossible
Trump’s Hormuz blockade is live. Oil is at $102. China’s Defence Minister says the strait is open for Chinese ships and dares the US to stop them. A forty-nation coalition is forming against the blockade. And one of the last two tankers carrying pre-war oil on earth is heading to Australia. Urban Wronski on the war Trump cannot win. -
Hormuz Dateline
The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide. Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with a median strip of Iranian territorial water between them. Through those lanes passes approximately 21 million barrels of oil every single day. That is one barrel in every five consumed anywhere on earth. Add the liquefied natural gas, and you have […] -
Not Reporting A War Part 2
Pete Hegseth is the Peter Principle applied to the largest weapons arsenal in human history. Pine Gap guides the missiles. Australian-made F-35 parts are in the payload. And our media calls it a partnership. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s investigation into what Australia’s press is not reporting, and what our silence is costing.https://urbanwronski.com/2026/04/12/not-reporting-a-war-part-2/
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NOT REPORTING A WAR: HOW AUSTRALIA’S MEDIA LAUNDERS A CRIME (PART 1)
Australia's mainstream press hasn't just failed the Iran war test. It has "Ajax-ed" the crime, scrubbing blood and guts from the ledger of history. When 170 girls are obliterated in a classroom in Minab and the ABC calls it "more than 100 children dead in a strike," the anaesthetic is working. By Urban Wronski. -
The Erasure of a Civilisation Part 2 of Donald Trump, the War on Iran, and the Rules Nobody’s Enforcing
On the morning of April 7, Donald Trump posted that a whole civilisation would die that night. He was not bluffing. Part Two of Urban Wronski’s Operation Epic Fury series examines the systematic destruction of Iranian universities, libraries and cultural institutions, the weapons tested on children, and what it means that none of the rules are being enforced. -
“Because They’re Animals”: Donald Trump, the War on Iran, and the Rules Nobody’s Enforcing
Operation Epic Fury" sounds like it was coined by a fourteen-year-old playing too much Call of Duty. In many ways, it's a perfect fit for the Peter Pan that Donald Trump has running the Pentagon. Urban Wronski on the War of Donald's Ear — how two homicidal maniacs borrowed one very willing ear, and launched a war. -
Trump’s Invisible Airstrip Show
Trump burned two C-130s on an Iranian runway, declared total victory, and is now threatening to demolish the power grid of 92 million people. Tonight is the deadline. Urban Wronski on the Easter debacle built on assumption, sustained by bluster, and ending in wreckage that no quantity of “WE GOT HIM!” can unbog.https://urbanwronski.com/2026/04/07/trumps-invisible-airstrip-show/
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The First Casualty
They told you Iran's missiles were being swatted from the sky. They told you the Iron Dome was holding, the Patriot batteries were working, US and Israeli air power was surgical and winning. They told you this on the ABC. They told you this on Sky. They were telling you nonsense. MIT Professor Ted Postol — the man who proved the Patriot missile failed in the Gulf War while presidents were claiming a 97 percent success rate — has now established that current intercept rates against Iranian missiles run at a few percent at most. The systems are depleting. The decoys are multiplying. The official story is, in his own carefully chosen word, a fraud. The first casualty of war is truth. But the deeper insight, the one Phillip Knightley identified fifty years ago, is that the lies are not random. They serve purposes. And right now, they are serving purposes that Australians have every right to examine.