Editorial

Of all the things Scott Morrison does not understand, and the list is long and often embarrassing, somewhat in the shape of his prime ministership, China would rate very close to the top.

This is what Sky News does. Occasionally, the network will apologise. Occasionally, there will be recognition that standards were breached, that there was an apparent failure of process. It doesn’t make it any less deliberate. It happens too often for it to be anything but.

Announcing his government’s 2035 climate target, Anthony Albanese said: “We think we’ve got the sweet spot.” … In sport, when the ball hits the sweet spot, it is only good for one side. The other loses. This is the reality of Albanese’s target, a compromise of expedience over evidence, of cowardice over vision, of today over a plan for tomorrow.

The Australian paused late this week in what has been a stream of doting coverage on Linda Reynolds’ successful defamation suit against the former staffer who was raped in her office, Brittany Higgins.

This week a Nazi stood on the steps of Parliament House in Melbourne and addressed a crowd of cheering supporters … We have heard timorous statements from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that this is not the Australian way. There were “good people” at those rallies, who mustn’t be pushed into a “rabbit hole”. But that’s where the debate appears to be, and Albanese willingly followed it.

A brief list of things that can be said about Linda Reynolds without defaming her…

Jakob Stausholm has one smile. It is made at the cost of his entire top lip. The smile is there in every photograph, in the pages of every annual report. It is the slyly thrilled smile of a man thinking about digging up someone else’s resources.

From the beach, you can see the flames burning on the oil and gas rigs that ring the northern part of Ningaloo Reef. Tim Winton calls them “sinister flares”. Like the bulk carriers shipping coal through the Great Barrier Reef, their foreboding is almost too crude, a clumsy symbolism for an outcome that is already obvious.

Anthony Albanese’s choice of imagery at the Northern Territory’s Garma Festival was apt: the culture wars are a dry gully. That parched earth epitomises much about the case he went on to make for Indigenous empowerment.

Barnaby Joyce was on a street in New York when he realised his trousers had split, an experience he described as “a new fresh breezy free feeling”. He was on a street in Canberra when he lay on his back like a recently poisoned cockroach and rambled drunkenly into his phone.