Comment

Democracy is fragile, just as truth is. Donald Trump has no respect for either. He has set about dismantling both. Scott Morrison surely must value at least the former, although he utterly failed to defend it this week.

It’s always better to let Republican lawyers and judges decide election outcomes. It’s so much cleaner and less fussy than trusting an untrustworthy electorate. Surely the Supreme Court of the United States, stacked with “illegitimate judges” and sex pests, will show us the way. Why should a plurality of voters decide the outcome when there are all sorts of fixes and filters to be applied?

There’s no doubt the prime minister had picked up on the enormous hurt suffered by businesses during the pandemic, particularly in the tourism sector, but what he had missed was people’s concerns about their health. To that end, older voters gave big swings in hitherto safe non-Labor seats on the Sunshine and Gold coasts.

When even the bankers of the ultra-rich, along with the bailiffs working diligently on their behalf, are panicking about excessive inequality, it becomes hard to say our world is morally defensible. UBS recently reported that, between April and July 2020, as the pandemic’s first wave was surging, the collective stash of the world’s billionaires grew by 28 per cent and many millionaires joined their ranks. Surely the Swiss megabank is happy to see them laughing all the way to its doors, but it is also genuinely worried.

“We need to be proud today,” Premier Daniel Andrews told Victorians as he announced an end to 111 days of lockdown. But there were no celebrations at the Djab Wurrung Heritage Protection Embassy, where for more than two years, those camped at the site have peacefully guarded hundreds of sacred trees and protested their planned destruction. On Monday, as the premier spoke, one of these trees was felled to make way for the expansion of the Western Highway.

The battle of the Kerr–palace correspondence is surging ahead. Historian Jenny Hocking’s book The Palace Letters was out of the stocks on Tuesday. By Tuesday next week the bookshops will also be selling the rival book, The Truth of the Palace Letters, by Monsignor Paul Kelly and Troy-Boy Bramston of The Catholic Boys Daily. We can only hope the Melbourne Cup doesn’t steal some of the limelight.

During senate estimates in the past fortnight, Labor has not squandered any chance to call the government to account. Its senators have seized on the forensic work carried out by the auditor-general and indeed their own ferreting to reveal disturbing extravagance, misguided entitlement and incompetence, if not corruption.

Australia cannot afford to simply meander through to the other side of this Covid-19 crisis … If the government had the capacity to see this moment for what it is, it would find a vast majority of the country, across the political spectrum, supportive of real progress towards a green economy.

The Australians had seven prisoners. Afghans, captured during a drug raid in the country’s war-torn Helmand province; hogtied, hands bound behind their backs. Their mission complete, the soldiers were awaiting a United States aircraft to pick them up. What happened next remains unproved, but the recollection of one US soldier is chilling.

Our Gladys this week played a crowd-pleasing game of Twister. With one hand on the square called “love”, a foot on “insubstantial relationship”, and another on “not really a boyfriend”. With all her might she tried to keep off the tile called “tickle from the top”. The contortion was painful to behold. Yet, there she is – still Our Glad, sort of.