opinion
Paul Bongiorno
immigration February 16, 2019
Morrison doubles down on security
What a week for the Morrison minority government. It started with the prime minister promising to keep Australians safe and secure. It ended with him and his government looking less assured they will be around long enough to deliver. Tuesday’s...
politics February 9, 2019
Australia’s part-time federal parliament resumes next week, with just 10 sitting days scheduled before an election in May. To say the government is running scared would be an understatement. Equally, to say Labor is calmly in cruise control is wrong...
politics January 26, 2019
The Morrison government this week did its best to relive the shipwreck that Captain James Cook suffered almost 250 years ago. The prime minister spent much of the week in the run-up to Australia Day trying to reignite the culture wars and restart an...
politics February 2, 2019
Scott Morrison wants us to forget why he is prime minister. Instead, he assured a national TV audience he was “getting on with it”. The problem is his own MPs, party members and supporters – and the electorate – remain vividly aware of the turmoil...
politics December 22, 2018
Scott Morrison disappeared from view for most of the week. He was in the Middle East, visiting our remnant military still trying to mop up after the miscalculation 15 years ago of joining the invasion of Iraq. But in many ways the TV news pictures...
politics September 1, 2018
Aftershocks of Morrison’s victory
The aftershocks of last week’s political earthquake continue to be felt, not least by Scott Morrison. The new prime minister, who represented the least bad option for just over half the party room, has not escaped the bitter recriminations of the...
politics August 25, 2018
Last Tuesday, as he trudged through the biting cold of a Canberra winter morning to Parliament House, one Liberal politician summed up the mood of many of his colleagues. “It didn’t have to come to this,” he said. “I am dismayed at Turnbull’s...
environment July 7, 2018
Tony Abbott’s latest demolition job
Last Tuesday night, Tony Abbott was in his element. Surrounded by climate change sceptics and deniers he set about destroying Malcolm Turnbull’s signature energy policy. And he did so with panache, his opening line more a battle cry: “It takes...
politics June 30, 2018
Heartfelt efforts to persuade the government’s climate change deniers and coal champions to embrace the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) have failed spectacularly. But you may not have noticed because on the same day former Coalition leaders Tony...
politics June 23, 2018
Turnbull’s aspirational targets
It was John Howard’s favourite word and now Malcolm Turnbull has latched on to it like a drowning man lunging for a life raft. “We’re not mystified by [aspiration],” he said this week. “We recognise it, we embrace it.” Had the prime minister stuck...
politics June 16, 2018
Parliament fixes its focus on the election
All is fair in love and war, and the same is true in elections. Whatever it takes to win. That is the context for the next two sitting weeks of the federal parliament. There are strong indications this could be the last time the parliament meets...
