Comment

Joe Hockey infamously divided the nation into “lifters and leaners”. There’s little doubt which side of that line Prime Minister Scott Morrison now finds himself on. Morrison is a political leaner, just ask the states, who are frustrated with the federal government’s failures on the critical vaccine rollout and on climate change.

Australia faces a reality where porn has become young people’s choice for sex education – not because it’s a good educator, but because it’s better than what else is on offer. The federal government’s new consent education campaign is exemplary of why this is the case. The campaign is, at best, bizarre, heteronormative and ill informed. At worst it is alienating, infantilising and risks disseminating harmful messaging about sexual violence.

The end of John Pat’s life was not captured on film. There was only the testimony of the horrified witnesses, which contrasted so starkly with the pleas of self-defence made by the police who beat the 16-year-old to death. But description of the officers’ brutality catalysed growing unrest about Indigenous deaths in custody into a national movement.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton occupies a hallowed place in the culture wars. This is the man who once valiantly decried “cancel culture” and criticised Netflix for removing shows that had racially offensive content by saying “I just don’t think makes any sense”. But it seems the Defence minister has changed his tune on free speech, allegedly issuing defamation threats to some Twitter users.

Revenge, so the expression goes, is a dish best served cold. Six months after her ‘humiliation’ by the prime minister and ‘bullying’ by Australia Post’s chairman, Christine Holgate gave ice-cold vent to her fury. And while the former chief executive of the nation’s mail service came to the senate inquiry into her demise attired in the white livery of a suffragette, gender discrimination was far from the whole story.

When Malcolm Turnbull was dumped last week from New South Wales’ Net Zero Emissions and Clean Economy advisory board as quickly as he was appointed, the move shocked many people. Turnbull was dropped by his own protégé, the state’s Environment minister, Matt Kean, and by a government in NSW that had previously seemed receptive to his brand of liberalism.

Scott Morrison says the issue is one of supply. If only the Europeans supplied our vaccines on time, the rollout would be on track. If only the states stopped hoarding vaccines. If only GPs administered the doses delivered to them. If only.

Sometimes, finding a job requires overcoming biases you didn’t even know stood in the way of your gainful employment. Having a non-Anglo name has been shown in repeated studies to hurt one’s chances. Sometimes it can be as simple as being the wrong skin colour. But nothing is more damning, it seems, than being a former prime minister.

The prime minister ends the quarter still well ahead of Labor’s Anthony Albanese … but he has been steadily losing ground. This echoes Labor’s research that finds the PM’s support is ‘a kilometre wide and a millimetre deep’.

I spent 10 years as a police officer, working in Queensland. My book, Black and Blue, recounts my time in the police as an Aboriginal woman, and my life as a single parent of three brilliant and amazing children. It also documents the racism I was subjected to throughout my career but also everything that led up to that point.