opinion
editorial
editorial August 13, 2022
It is fitting that Pauline Hanson has ended up a domain squatter. She never saw Black property she didn’t think worth taking. In recent weeks, her party has bought up a string of domain names that could be mistaken for those associated with the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
editorial August 6, 2022
The kindest thing that could be said about Matthew Guy is that he looks like a cartoon shrimp. It is not just the spinelessness and the bottom feeding: there is also the perpetual sense of him being pulled up in a net.
editorial July 30, 2022
When Bill Shorten intervened to end a pilot program using inclusive language on hospital forms, he was reacting to an anxiety confected by The Daily Telegraph. Perhaps giving in to Rupert Murdoch makes him feel as though he got to be prime minister after all.
editorial July 23, 2022
Election cycles have determined how governments approach the environment. The world has been broken up into three-year increments. Decisions with ramifications that will last centuries are made on the basis of interests that struggle to look past next week. That explains what Anthony Albanese means when he says Australian coal is good for the climate.
editorial July 16, 2022
What is most curious about John Barilaro is the honesty of his politics. Not in the conventional sense of integrity or commitment to the people he represents, but in the way that the truth sometimes bubbles up out of him. Accused of pork-barrelling, he says: yes, of course, that’s how we get elected.
editorial July 9, 2022
Labor’s recalibration of the relationship with China is not simple. It is not a question of appeasement. One side is not good and the other bad. What is clear is old logics no longer hold. America would not obviously win a war with China, nor would it necessarily defend Australia against Beijing. The balance then is between the two.
editorial July 2, 2022
The indictment against Julian Assange runs to 37 pages. It was signed on May 23, 2019. It details Assange’s interactions with Chelsea Manning, how he encouraged her to access secret files and helped her with password-breaking.
editorial June 25, 2022
According to protesters, the two men were armed and dressed in full camouflage. They did not identify themselves as police. When confronted near a camp in the Colo Valley outside Sydney, the only words they said were: ‘We’ve been compromised.’
editorial June 18, 2022
Angus Taylor knew what he was doing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he is a bright man. He understands accounting tricks. He knew there was a crisis and he preferred to wait for it.
editorial June 11, 2022
“If we want to consider 32 per cent of the primary vote a mandate, we might need to have to review what a mandate looks like,” says Hollie Hughes. The lack of talent and imagination in the right-wing parties has seen the Coalition ape the nativism of the Republican Party. They play mindless dress-ups, pretending that America’s politics are our politics.
editorial June 4, 2022
In the first days of a new government, the treatment of the public service is a useful indicator of the vision a prime minister might have for the country. John Howard immediately sacked several departmental secretaries. Scott Morrison told bureaucrats that it was not their job to guide policy. Anthony Albanese’s first moves have been entirely different.
