Comment

Sources close to the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) say its lawyers were surprised to learn neither the Department of Justice nor the Territory’s chief judge had received a formal complaint from the agency about Alice Springs Local Court judge Greg Borchers. That news came via media reports last month, which publicised the bewildering comments Borchers has made in court regarding Aboriginal defendants.

The sociopolitical climate of being transgender in this country is a mess. It feels like no matter what transgender activists, advocates and allies do, we are taking one step forward as a nation and then turning and sprinting in the opposite direction. Every single day, I have to convince myself that it is worth getting out of bed and fighting to simply live my life.

Hypocrisy is claiming a plan to end suicide while scores of people self-harm in offshore detention. It is doing so while you ignore advice that says your own policies have caused this harm – that the men on Manus Island have one of the highest rates of mental illness in the world, and that most of these men were asymptomatic when they arrived.

Little wonder Nick “Goosebumps” Cater very quickly lost the plot on Monday’s Q&A. The poor fellow from the Menzies “Research” Centre had just stepped off his Pollie Pedal bicycle, after he and a bunch of other ageing, angry, white reactionaries in Lycra and dyed hair roared into towns in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, sweatily inspecting war memorials and other remnants of past glories.

Scott Morrison, who famously shrank the Liberal Party to near-invisibility to win the May election, was this week confronted by his party’s reappearance, and he doesn’t much like it. In just the second government party room meeting since polling day, Morrison read the riot act to backbenchers for unhelpfully freelancing in the media. In parliament, he sat frustrated as Labor mostly ignored him in question time.

This year, seven Australian universities made it into the top 100 in the QS World University Rankings. Their vice-chancellors cheered. But on staff-student ratio Australian universities scored dismally. Of those top seven Australian universities, the Australian National University had the highest score for teaching. It was ranked 417th in the world. Three of Australia’s ‘top’ universities were ranked outside the world’s top 600 for their student-staff ratios.

No dessert has entered the Australian public consciousness more aggressively than the towering croquembouche. George Calombaris called it one of the hardest challenges ever put to MasterChef contestants. Built on little more than air and sleight of hand, it foiled many an aspiring chef and seems to have inspired the Melbourne business operations of the celebrity chef’s sprawling restaurant empire.

Remember this quiet week. It is the origin moment of the biggest test of national character Australia has faced in 50 years. Some may have sensed it, others deduced it. But before 2020 arrives, anyone with contemporary historical perspective will know, understand and have had to take a position on the United States and its president. The choices are appeasement or action, with little scope to hover in between.

The Australian moved in for the kill last week. Back-to-back front pages, on Monday and Tuesday, after I sounded the alarm about the impact on endangered birds if the Robbins Island wind farm in Tasmania’s north-west goes ahead. Backed up by the usual cronies at Sky News, the boilover raised a question about the impending extinction of measured public debate.

Many of the most dangerous coercive controllers use physical violence sparingly, or not at all. Their system of fear and control requires only the believable threat of violence – to the victim or her loved ones. Savvy perpetrators know to avoid physical violence because while “incidents” of domestic violence are a crime, the system of coercive control is not.