Comment

Back in 1997, when Crown casino opened its massive Southbank ‘entertainment centre’, I was possibly its best-known public critic. It was a time for compulsory cheering after Crown’s lavish opening, but I was disturbed. I said it is too big and too powerful, with so much money flowing that politicians and media will not even know when they have been bought. This memory was triggered as I read the findings of the Finkelstein Royal Commission into the Casino Operator and Licence.

The Morrison government’s intention to institute identification checks at polling booths is an answer to a problem that doesn’t exist. There is no evidence of voter fraud affecting elections. It is hard to see it as anything other than voter suppression. Or worse: a chance to claim that vote rigging occurred, to borrow the great lie of contemporary politics.

How often have you heard that we are a very egalitarian nation, and heard politicians claim that we have one of the most effective and fair social welfare systems in the world – yet inequality remains a significant political issue?

When Scott Morrison flew out of Canberra in his VIP Airbus on Thursday night for the Glasgow climate summit, Labor’s Anthony Albanese wasn’t on board. He wasn’t even on the tarmac waving goodbye.

Focusing on the disease, what has been the nature of the journey so far? Once the SARS-CoV-2 gene sequence was released on January 15, 2020, innovators in Britain, Europe and the United States started immediately to make the vaccines that, within months, were in clinical trials and, at least in the northern hemisphere, going into the arms of large numbers of people by the beginning of 2021.

Clearly our universities found themselves in very precarious financial circumstances, but the government ruled out any form of direct financial assistance during the pandemic.

As the week dragged on without agreement the impression strengthened that Morrison was a hostage to the Nationals. His claimed strategy of patience looked increasingly like impotence.

Judges, like everyone else, use the internet ferociously, which makes their hostility to it a modern-day conundrum. Their application of ancient judicial precedents to an evolved and different world is cockeyed, let alone unhelpful.

The number on its own is terrible enough: in the past seven weeks, 100,000 Afghans have sought asylum from Australia.

The latest development in New South Wales politics – the ascension of a new premier, Dominic Perrottet – may soon see the increased influence of the Catholic Church in matters of NSW government administration.