Politics

Tapping into the historical racism that began with the British invasion has proved easier for the race-baiters than even I could imagine. Building on their success in opposing the Voice referendum, the ‘No’ campaign apparatchiks have manipulated the meaning of the Welcome to Country ceremony to portray it as an assault on the nation’s sovereignty.

On Saturday, we will find out if it is possible for a major party to run a very poor campaign and still win an election. The likelihood of Peter Dutton pulling off this feat seems remote. He would need a bigger miracle than his predecessor Scott Morrison managed in 2019.

The likeliest result on May 3 will be a small majority for Labor, but it will almost certainly be the last victory for a hegemonic party … All future parliaments will have a three-way split in the House of Representatives, as is the case already in the Senate, except where Labor and the Coalition gang up to pursue their own party interests.

Not only do we need to reinvent the wheel but we need to move beyond having two alternating drivers and also change the literal source of fuel. We want representatives in parliament who reflect the many and diverse values of our communities, not narrow commercial interests. We want transparency, integrity and independence.

A trifecta of unmissable interruptions has made Peter Dutton’s task of winning the election in just seven days’ time a seemingly impossible mission.

We don’t have a presidential election system in Australia and yet so much of this campaign and its media coverage has focused on the contest between the two major party leaders. It doesn’t need to be this way, nor should it be.

Labor has entered the Easter holiday period with the wind in its sails, although insiders worry that the break may allow the Coalition to right its flailing campaign. These concerns are based more on memories of shock losses in the recent past than on any evidence that the Dutton opposition can lift its game dramatically in the final two weeks before the election.

As United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs unleash chaos and turmoil across global markets, financial authorities around the world are forced into the unenviable role of working out how to protect their economies.At such an unpredictable juncture, with the leader of the world’s largest economy going rogue, who would want to be a central banker?

Transparency and integrity are ideals imbued with symbolism, but they have very real practical meaning in our democracy … Together, they mean a government free from corruption and wrongdoing – or at least, a government where wrongdoers are held to account.

A lot of nonsense is peddled about balance of power. Top of the list is the idea that members of the cross bench can sail comfortably through the next period of minority government without a formal agreement with Labor or the Coalition.