Editorial

This is a country in which you cannot tell the truth. There are no meaningful protections for the people who do. The punishments that await them are extravagant and deliberately cruel. David McBride should not be in prison.

Two months ago, Steve Christou was lifted onto the shoulders of two men outside Cumberland City Council. Holding a loudhailer, he led a group in chanting “Hands off our kids.” Others in the crowd shouted about “poofs” and “trannies”. A man beside him accused the mayor of satanism.

One of the problems with Anthony Albanese is that he thinks people know who he is. He thinks they look at him and see his decency, that they see the story of his upbringing, of the boy in a commission house raised by a mother to whom he ultimately became carer.

This is a grim list. It is complete, but it will inevitably grow. It tells the story of a country in crisis.

Twenty-two years ago, Janet Albrechtsen was especially concerned about the survivors of rape. This should be unremarkable, except for the writing that followed.

Glue traps were first patented in America in 1980, apparently by pest controller J. T. Eaton, although they were almost certainly used at an earlier date. In this way, they are like cocaine lunches in the Sydney media.

There are more billionaires today than at any other point in history. Their combined wealth is greater than the gross domestic product of every country except China and the United States. That wealth has more than doubled in the past decade.

This is what happens when you take the law out of law. It is politics that has fixed its teeth but not its spine. It smiles and hunches, a kind of moral pariah, aware of its own evil but also relishing in it.

When Australia cancelled the visas of Palestinians fleeing Gaza, it did so with no special advice. Nothing had changed in the applications and no new information had been gathered.

At the start of this year, just as another tranche of cabinet documents was released, John Howard was asked if the Iraq War was about removing Saddam Hussein or furthering the United States alliance.