Opinion

It’s January already. Here I am, writing yet another opinion piece about the 26th day of this month, the day on which the nation celebrates the invasion and genocide imposed on my people and my sacred Noongar Country and all other Aboriginal people …

At the start of a new year, especially after such a tumultuous year as 2021, and in what will be an election year, it seems reasonable to take a look in the “too-hard basket” to see what policy issues were missed, or deliberately ignored, or simply …

The Morrison government’s “let them eat cake” approach to running Australia took a hit this week when Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg tested positive to Covid-19. Frydenberg’s Twitter presence dimmed. Missives paused from the man many see as …

Wishful thinking and an incompetent handling of the pandemic over the summer have shattered the chances of Scott Morrison pulling off another improbable election win. What I would call the “Ellis factor” may yet save him, but it is a long shot. By …

This week Scott Morrison was given a lesson in the sort of diplomacy needed to deal with China, the bully that also happens to be our biggest trading partner. It was a jarring reminder, on the cusp of an election year, that the almost decade-old Coalition …

Three years after winning the leadership, the reality is setting in about Scott Morrison. The chance of him winning again are slimmer than before. The idea that he is a government unifier and a change from Malcolm Turnbull has shifted. The photo opportunities …

Last weekend, Scott Morrison gave one of his pre-election interviews to Nine newspapers. He spent some time with the journalist. He aped for photographs with his dog. He talked about God but not too much.

There is an argument that says prime ministers, whatever their qualities, tell the story of the country that elected them. Australia was brash like Bob Hawke and confident like Paul Keating and boring and self-interested like John Howard.

Scott Morrison’s smile is like a measuring tape. It lengthens as he decides what it is he can get away with. The calibration is sometimes off but this does not affect his confidence. Before he speaks, he sucks air hard through his nose: one last assessment, as if to smell the credulity of the room.

It seems there’s very little that humanity cannot achieve when we put our mind to it. In the past 100 years we’ve landed on the moon, created a global information superhighway, and crossbred poodles with every animal we could get our hands on. Our greatest achievement yet, however, may be the dedication we have shown to destroying our planet.

It’s remarkably hard to get banned from YouTube. The platform hosts more than 500 hours of fresh videos a minute. That’s more content than even the most dedicated teenager in Sydney fighting lockdown boredom can watch in a lifetime. Almost all of that video – 720,000 hours’ worth a day – is of children unboxing toys or biting each other. The remainder is video of Alan Jones being sceptical about vaccines on Sky News.

We in Australia love gold more than a Saudi prince’s interior decorator. We’re the gold standard in botched vaccine rollouts and the gold standard in failing to suppress the Delta variant. Fortunately, we’re also the gold standard in women’s swimming at the Olympics, and the gold standard in enthusiastic coaches humping barrier walls. 

I’d like to thank Professor Raina MacIntyre for her comprehensive demolition of the argument that there is no alternative to this Omicron outbreak (“A pandemic of denial”, January 15-21). What should have been a quiet and peaceful summer has been …

Geoff Kitney offers an excellent summation of Scott Morrison’s many leadership failures, which have imperilled our lives, widened inequality, normalised corruption, favouritism and extreme libertarian ideology, and diminished our country’s reputation …

Rick Morton’s piece on Covid-19 vaccines (“Part two: How Covid-19 began an ‘mRNA revolution’ ”, December 18, 2021–January 7, 2022) asked if governments would “continue to fund and co-ordinate science, to accept failure as a key element …