Politics

Pinned on some office walls around the parliament is a list of cut-off dates for calling the election, allowing for the statutory 33 days of any campaign. The current favoured view among the self-appointed pundits is that the prime minister will call the poll in the second week of March for an election on April 12. The latest the election can be held is May 17. You can’t blame politicians and their staffers for playing this guessing game. All their necks are on the line.

Donald Trump is not one of a kind. Along with Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping, he is just the latest in a long line of ruthless egotists who have risen to power. To varying degrees, the world’s four most powerful men lack empathy. That’s a clue not only to their ascent to power but to the fact that all four are obscenely rich.

Increasing calls for the truth to be upheld and protected in Australian politics have led to greater interest in truth-in-advertising legislation, to accompany the reform of campaign funding. Under existing legislation, it is legal to lie during an election campaign. There are simply no safeguards.

Donald Trump’s siege mentality has him leading the US as if the world has been out to get it … This schoolyard bully – this paragon of bad taste and appalling behaviour – is taking to the world with a very big stick.

Dutton accuses Albanese of pandering to Greens and Islamic or Palestinian voters in urban electorates. The assertion could just as well be aimed at the opposition’s response, with an eye to winning back three seats from the teal independents.

Anthony Albanese faces the first parliamentary sitting of the election year with the scene set for the first interest rate cut in almost three years – a bigger political boost than any government could possibly hope for. The argument over economic management can now be turned more easily on its head. After 12 interest rate rises on Labor’s watch that exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis, the pain will begin to ease.

In the past few decades, where there has been bipartisan support for free-market economics and a managerial approach to running governments, parties have become risk-averse and serious policy debates are avoided … Now there is a thorough rejection of evidence. Testable propositions are often displaced by tribalism, harvesting fear and rage and the domination of opinion.

One of the main dangers of the pointscoring game that has come to define politics today is how easily it allows important policy benchmarks such as fiscal responsibility to be redefined or even jettisoned.

Albanese is a transactional politician who is good at planes, trains and automobiles – not unimportant things – and he won an election and will perhaps win another. However, he is unable to satisfy Australia’s yearning for better government…

As he banged on about culture war issues this week, Dutton was speaking to the converted. Neither at his soft launch nor since has he given a concrete reason for anyone who didn’t vote for the Coalition last election to vote for it this time.