Opinion

As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s new ministers settle in to their portfolios, efforts are already under way by the Murdoch media to undermine the government. Take, for example, their complete beat-up about Tanya Plibersek being “sidelined” …

While it is still early days, it is becoming clear that the Coalition and their media sycophants didn’t believe they would lose the election. They seem unprepared to move on. Beyond the immediate disappointment – both individually, for those who …

There is something almost comical about the Liberals and Nationals throwing the forlorn spectre of nuclear power back into national energy debates, right after their loss in the 2022 “climate election”. The incoming Energy minister, Chris Bowen, …

Thirty-four is the number and it has turned federal parliamentary politics on its head. After an agonising month of counting and distributing preferences for both houses of the parliament, the Australian Electoral Commission has tabulated the biggest …

This week, the need for the new Albanese government to fix the mess it has inherited became personal for millions of Australians at the mercy of a failed energy market. The threat of blackouts and of freezing in their homes in the middle of one of the …

Visual stunts – or picture opportunities, as they are called in the trade – are nothing new in contemporary politics. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo is just as addicted as any of the practitioners. On Tuesday, he provided the visual metaphor …

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.’

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.

“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.

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. 

There has always been pushback when traditional owners exercise their rights to Country and Culture but, after so many generations of this experience, it should no longer be such a point of conflict (Kath Wilson, “Wombat forest fight”, June 18-24). …

Rick Morton’s “‘Negligent in the extreme’: Labor inherits crises across portfolios” (June 11-17) had me contemplating an unlikely possibility – the coming national integrity commission policing election promises. The example of there being …

Peter Dutton is the most dangerous of leaders – one who seeks to divide. There is nothing remotely threatening about officially recognising Indigenous languages through naming (Karen Middleton, “Exclusive: Dutton blocked Indigenous names at bases”, …