Comment

If the seven One Nation members elected in South Australia last month follow party tradition, two thirds of them will have left the party before the next election.

Relations between Australia and its principal strategic ally, the United States, went on a wild ride over Easter. US President Donald Trump lumped Australia in with America’s post-World War II allies for ungratefully failing to help him secure the critical Strait of Hormuz.

This is how Anthony Albanese works: he takes too long to make a decision and when he finally does the decision he makes is too weak.

Another world oil crisis, another period of stagflation – the combination of sluggish economic growth and rising unemployment with accelerating inflation. The current crisis, the direct result of the divisive and controversial war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, is likely to be the worst yet.

Pauline Hanson is dangerous not because she remains a grotesque nativist from 1990s Queensland but rather because her rhetoric has been absorbed into the ordinary calculations of Australian politics. That is the real story, not the tedious recitation of the polling data. For three decades, she has converted racial grievance into durable electoral power.

As fate would have it, the Albanese government’s key measures offering fuel price relief to motorists and crucial heavy transport operators coincided with April Fool’s Day. This was no prank, however; it was an intervention born of desperation, turbocharged by uncertainty over how long the global energy crisis driven by the Iran war will last.

You might think, when a company’s work is so slipshod that it is known in government circles by the nickname “Accidenture”, when behind that company is a trail of blowouts and extensions, millions and millions of taxpayer dollars jemmied out in so-called variations, that it would at some point become hard for it to win competitive tenders. For Accenture, this is not the case.

Populists like Hanson are devastatingly effective at tribal warfare. Her followers want to take us back to the future. It is an irrational response to an irrational world. It is also political dynamite.

Many is the time, looking around the chamber, I ask myself the same question: When will we ever learn? This time, it is the government’s contemplation of removing incentives to encourage motorists to switch to electric vehicles…

You do not face a crisis of democracy unless the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability has failed.