opinion

In his excellent portrait of Scott Morrison, titled The Game, Sean Kelly writes about a theory of literary characters suggested by E. M. Forster in a series of lectures delivered just before the Great Depression. Forster argued that there were two sorts of characters, either flat characters or round characters. Persuasively and in sharp detail, Kelly makes the case that Morrison is a flat character. Such a character could be “captured in a sentence or two”. They might have a catchphrase. Their advantage to the novelist is “that they never needed to be reintroduced, because they were so easily recognised”.

The request itself is obscene. It is the kind of tinpot thinking you might expect in a failing dictatorship, maybe for a show trial after the coup. The attorney-general, Michaelia Cash, wishes to introduce evidence in the prosecution of Bernard Collaery that could not be known to Collaery or his lawyers and would instead be assessed by a special counsel engaged by the Commonwealth. It would form the secret basis for a secret trial, the premise of which has already been rejected by a court.

Omid Masoumali was 22 when he arrived on Christmas Island. Days later he was taken to Nauru. When interviewed, he said he had no existing mental health issues. He was found to be a refugee but was not offered settlement in Australia. The Queensland coroner heard that he was warm and funny. His partner described him as optimistic, confident and cheeky. His mother described the death of her only son as an “eternal, unbearable grief”. The coroner said: “Her son had died in a foreign country, lonely and innocent.”