Editorial

This is a government of secrets. It is worse even than Scott Morrison’s on the record of complying with Senate orders to produce documents. Worse even than a government run on Henry VIII clauses and hidden ministries. It meets this obligation for disclosure less than a third of the time.

Probably it is worth remembering a little about Scott Morrison, the man who conceived AUKUS. He is the single worst leader the country has ever had, unique in his venality and unseriousness. He is a man without ambition for anything but himself, a man as useful as a briefing paper is to a chimp.

In the Shemot Rabbah, a midrash of the Book of Exodus, it is Miriam who intercedes in her parents’ despair and encourages them to have another child.

Occasionally a sentence will arrive and through its gentle, balanced clauses, through the patience of its metre, it will suggest a fresh reality. The words will not be new but their force will be. It is in language, often, that a country finds its soul.

At the opening of the last Conference of the Parties, the president of Azerbaijan criticised the West for its hypocrisy over fossil fuels. There was, the conference host said, “double standards, a habit to lecture other countries”.

Donald Trump creates opportunities. Not in the conventional sense of genuine policymaking but through sheer chaos and destruction. His shameless, ricocheting presidency is likely the best opportunity Australia has to get out of the shameful folly of AUKUS.

Linda Reynolds is as bitter as an unripe quince. She is forever disappointed. She says “I am bitterly disappointed…” She says her “primary concern has always been how the Commonwealth could possibly settle unsubstantiated and statute barred claims made against me, alleging egregious conduct on my part without taking a single statement from me or speaking to me at all”.

Last Sunday, a few hours before dawn, a group of men in black masks arrived at Northland in Melbourne with a banner that read “Ban n-----s not machetes”. They posed for a photograph in front of the shopping centre, their hands balled in impotent fists.

Murray Watt didn’t need to consider climate change. The law didn’t ask him to, because for three years Labor has been stalling on laws that would. In a triumph of his own party’s inaction, his first decision as environment minister has been to extend the life of Australia’s largest gas project by almost half a century.

The thing about Ben Roberts-Smith is that he knows he did it. That’s what makes each appeal so brazen. He sits in court in the full knowledge that he is a murderer and a war criminal.