Opinion

Now that election day has finally arrived, it’s reasonable to ask: How much better informed are voters to make their choice? The campaign has certainly been neither a contest of policy ideas, nor of visions for our country’s path ahead. Despite the …

Whoever wins this election, Australia’s next government will face enormous challenges across the full spectrum of foreign and domestic policy. But the arsenal of policy tools available to the incoming government will have been undermined after nearly …

The former British prime minister Harold Macmillan may never have said, “Events, my dear boy, events”, in response to the question of what made the job of prime minister difficult or pushed governments off course. Nonetheless, it expresses a truism. …

Expectations of a Labor victory today have been trimmed dramatically. Far from the landslide many were increasingly confident of just a week ago, forming a minority government is now widely seen as the best they can expect. The possibility of Scott Morrison …

Scott Morrison is desperately looking to generate a last-minute momentum shift in this election, but Anthony Albanese believes it is already occurring around the kitchen tables of the nation. The Labor leader’s cautious optimism can be summed up in …

This week, the Reserve Bank of Australia played itself into the federal election campaign in a way we haven’t seen for 15 years. Whatever the impact of its 0.25 percentage point rate rise on Tuesday – the first in more than 10 years – it is certainly …

The government Scott Morrison leads has achieved less in three terms than perhaps any other in Australian history. What it has accomplished has largely made the country worse.

The remarkable fact about Anthony Albanese is that until about six years ago he never thought he would be prime minister. This may not seem surprising, but it marks him as different to his predecessors. Possibly, it makes him more normal.

By now it is obvious that people in detention are props to Scott Morrison. They are not human to him. They represent only voters’ fears.

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. 

When I migrated here in the late 1970s from a failed democracy, Australia was about to enter a time of great optimism. During the past nine years, however, the rise of self-interest, mean-spiritedness, inequality and corruption has seen the retreat of …

Two weeks out from the last election it was difficult to put money on the Coalition to win. However, combative fear-based arguments targeted at the working class saying life was all about the economy and you couldn’t trust Labor to manage it turned …

So Anthony Albanese says “we’re going to get on with winning an election based on Labor principles about jobs, industrial relations and climate change” (Mike Seccombe, “The inside story of Labor’s election promises”, April 30–May 6). The …