opinion

Unfortunately, Australia is currently and correctly identified as a “climate laggard” – both in terms of our emissions reduction targets and in terms of our overall policy response to achieve those targets. This is most conspicuous in our absent...

Among the imprinted moments that followed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, one remains especially vivid. It came on a Sunday morning in a small-town stone church an hour north of New York City. I was among the Australian correspondents in...

Scott Morrison loves to keep a secret. It has become a trademark of his government and famously manifested itself long before he snatched the keys to The Lodge. It is serving him and the workings of our democracy poorly. As Immigration minister it...

One of the most frustrating features of what we pride as our democracy is how some issues that are crying out for solution, or at least government attention, are so easily left to drift. This unfortunately occurs even in the face of irrefutable and...

In late May, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Foreign Minister Marise Payne issued a joint press release announcing the imminent closure of the Australian embassy in Afghanistan due to the “increasingly uncertain security environment”. The closure...

Scott Morrison is flailing about as he struggles to get back on the “narrow path” he keeps talking about to deliver him another election victory. Nowhere is this more obvious than the desperate damage control he embarked on earlier this week, when...

One of the most compelling public policy initiatives globally over the past several decades, but unfortunately one of the most poorly implemented, has been privatisation. That is the concept of transferring business, industry or services from public...

It’s taken a long time but the concept of the “greater good” – the sense of a shared destiny, of shared interests, collective purpose, a common future – is finally returning to our politics. Largely this is the result of the need to build community...

The fictional Stone Age family of largely unremembered animated children’s film The Croods is the prime minister’s latest inspiration for a nation exhausted by lockdowns and living in fear of the Delta strain of Covid-19. Scott Morrison tried out...