Editorial

In the video, the children are cowering into one another. They are locked together at the wrists with cable ties, wet from swimming, trying to find shade enough to stand in. A man in heavy boots paces in front of them. His shirt cuts into his arms.

You can hear the emptiness when he breathes. It comes out of his nostrils in little, whistling snorts. Like so much else, he mistakes this noise for gravitas.

Peter Dutton was elected to parliament in 2001. He was born inside one of John Howard’s worst lies. He benefited directly from the outrage of children overboard and the shame of the Tampa. This is how it began.

Sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday, Julian Assange will find out if he is to be extradited to the United States. It is likely a plane will be waiting for him. After this decision, there are no other options.

For as long as the camps were running, nothing else mattered. Regimes were propped up. Corrupt businessmen were paid. The rule of law was debased. Countries were left to teeter into bankruptcy.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not true. Even the ABC is pretending like it is. “Having proven willing to take the political risk of breaking that promise,” the national broadcaster noted this week, “the government has now faced questions on whether it will move against other policies deeply loathed within some corners of Labor, but which the party committed to keeping at the federal election.”

Finally, it happened. After months of equivocation, the government did what was obviously necessary but what it had for so long lacked the courage to do: it stood up to the News Corp papers and the opposition and redrafted the stage three tax cuts.

Looking at the Albanese government, it is not difficult to picture the figure at the end of the bed. It is the lumpen, wheezing outline of the stage three tax cuts. The prime minister lies in terrified inaction. The movements are obvious but remain somehow impossible.

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is required by February 2025 to set a target for emissions reduction over the following decade. This government is wrestling its way towards a number that won’t alarm anyone and it clearly won’t be pressured into anything radical by the opposition – the “climate inactivists and cookers”

The problem with this country is that Peter Dutton could credibly become its prime minister. If the myth of American politics is that anyone can be president, the sad truth of Australia is that no one is truly unelectable.