Dante's Circle of Hell

 


With great power comes great responsibility, they repeated over and over again. He was clear now, the deal. He wanted none of them, their treachery, their outright deceit, their blatant lies, their manipulations, their craven attempts to please their idiot bosses. None of it.

Why would anyone surrender to their web? Why would anyone surrender their own humanity, if that was what it was called. He had rarely been human, but at least he did not lie. This litter on the forest floor. These debased excuses for sentience. These craven, ape-like forms. 

Descended from monkeys, he heard them say; as the giant passage, the swirl of millions of entities, the city that moved across time and space, the geospatial, other-worldly phenomen.

On the outskirts of the village the gallows were being hung.

He knew, exactly, what had happened to them all, those who betrayed him, those who kissed the garment's trim and then turned and betrayed him to their own masters. He knew how shallow, how deceitful, how truly pathetic these people were. 

You could hardly call them human, they were so treacherous. They lied for a living. They thought it all a great joke. Their pranks. Their monstrous dishonesty; all in a days work. Sack them all. Kill them all.

The ancients, displeased by the deceit they found at their every enveloping turn, shone a light into the dark; and caught them scurrying back into the leaf litter, there to live whatever remained of their short lives.

NEWS

One Nation is no longer a fringe protest vehicle. After taking about 6.5 per cent of the House vote at Labor’s May 2025 federal win, Pauline Hanson’s party has spent 2026 polling in the mid-20s — sometimes first on primary votes, sometimes just behind Labor — while the Coalition has slumped toward the high teens. That is not a rounding error. It is a realignment. 

eastasiaforum.org

The proof is now on the ground, not just in surveys. In May One Nation won Farrer, its first contested House seat. In March it outpolled the Liberals in South Australia and took four lower-house seats. Last weekend it unseated Labor in the outer-Perth seat of Secret Harbour, its first Western Australian lower-house win and a result that ended any Labor hope that Hanson was only a Coalition problem. Barnaby Joyce, Nationals figures and Liberal state leaders are now arguing in public about preferences, distance and blame. 

theconversation.com

The surge is not a blank cheque for Hanson’s platform. Polls after her National Press Club speech found most voters still reject shutting SBS, ending multiculturalism or leaving the UN, and many doubt the party could run the country. Immigration and housing sit near the top of voter worry, but they are not the only drivers: energy, crime, cultural fatigue and a sense that both major parties talk past outer-suburban and regional Australia all feature. Support has plateaued in some surveys even as the Secret Harbour result suggested the vote is sticky where people feel ignored. 

heguardian.com

What this says about the country is blunt. Australia has not suddenly become a One Nation nation; it has become a three-bloc country in which Labor holds government, the Coalition no longer owns the conservative vote, and a large minority will back a party that treats migration, coal and cultural grievance as first-order issues. Preference flows, not first-preference theatre, will decide most seats. The major parties can treat that as a warning to govern better, or as a cue to copy Hanson. Either way, the old two-party map is broken.

A few stories this week actually have teeth.

Sydney’s gang war is spilling onto bystanders. NSW police and the government are talking about crushing organised crime after innocent people — including a student and an electrician in a driveway — were shot in what look like mistaken-identity hits. That is not a press-release problem. It is a city that has let a tobacco-and-drug underworld shoot in public. 

abc.net.au

ICAC’s Nassif inquiry is the closest thing NSW has to a soap opera. Fugitive developer Jean Nassif, calling from Lebanon after skipping the country, is on secretly recorded phones calling the then-premier his “best friend” and “my boy.” Dominic Perrottet’s brother is in the witness box saying he lied to the developer to keep the money flowing. Nassif pulled out of giving evidence this week with a medical certificate. If you want a story about how property, factions and donations actually work in this country, this is it. 

theguardian.com

Bathla is a $3.4 billion housing crater. The developer’s creditors meeting put the known debt at about $3.08 billion to secured lenders alone, with work threatening to stop on sites. ASIC says it has “an enormous amount of work” ahead. Housing was already the national ulcer; a collapse that size is the ulcer bursting. 

abc.net.au

Two survival stories cut through the sludge. German backpacker Carolina Wilga lasted 12 days in the outback with no food or water and has now told the story. In Nepal, the number of missing Australians after the floods has been revised down as more people are found, and rescuers pulled workers alive from a tunnel more than a week on. Separately: first confirmed H5 bird-flu detection in a Sydney bird, at Warriewood. Not a human outbreak — yet — but it is on the northern beaches, not a remote farm. 

smh.com.au

If you want something merely odd rather than grim: Aboriginal land councils have lodged Crown-land claims that could touch iconic Sydney ocean pools from Bondi to Maroubra. And it is twenty years since Steve Irwin died, which the bulletins are treating as a national soft landing after a week of shootings and inquiries. 

news.com.au

The dull stuff — tobacco excise arguments, “anti-boy” curriculum rows, aged-care bed targets — is the background hum. The stories above are the ones that tell you what kind of week Australia actually had.

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