Comment

It is March of 2019, and the prime minister refuses to talk about publicly funding access to abortion services for women. He says it would not be ‘good for the country’ to speak of such things. Labor promises to link public hospital funding to abortion access, only to baulk at the first sign of disquiet from Catholic health providers. ‘

What is journalism? It’s a question hacks throughout the dry and cracked land ask themselves not infrequently – hoping an answer will arrive. Fortunately, Gaven Morris, the director of Aunty ABC’s news, analysis and investigations department, gave us a clue in his Tuesday memo to the troops.

The perception surrounding the Coalition’s late announcers is that they have waited until the eleventh hour in the hope the Morrison government’s fortunes would start looking up. More worrying for the government, though, is that its highest-profile female MP, Julie Bishop, is clearly not going to leave politics without taking the opportunity to hold accountable the men in the party who cruelled her leadership aspirations.

Much has been said in recent weeks about the operation of suppression orders in high-profile cases. A common element in these discussions has been vigorous debate over whether the use of suppression orders impermissibly jeopardises the long-held principle of open courts and open justice. At its core, this issue involves striking the right balance between open justice including the public interest in court reportage, and an individual’s right to a fair trial.

When The Saturday Paper launched, we promised a newspaper for a country more serious than it is sometimes credited as being. Australia’s seriousness has never wavered, despite the farce of the people who stand at its top. Five years after printing that first issue, our job has never been clearer: to keep writing what others will not.

The nation’s chief electrician, Gus Taylor, has had a frightful time trying to get his hard-baked socialist policies up and running. It was late last year that the free enterprise Greens blocked his bright plan to subsidise coal-fired power plants. For the Greens, steeped in the wealth-creating force of free markets, smaller government and lower spending, handing over taxpayers’ money to underwrite power from coal was anathema to their Ayn Rand-based philosophy. Undeterred, Red Gus is now bludgeoning electricity suppliers with price controls.

The 2019 election campaign began in earnest last Sunday. There is a feeling among government politicians that Morrison will go to the polls on May 11. If he does, that’s an 11-week campaign. Liberal MPs need no persuading they are in the fight of their lives. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, facing a challenge from independent Liberal climate change advocate Oliver Yates, already has his posters up in prominent places around his electorate, Kooyong.

The lives of the 1000 are being destroyed not as a means to an end but for no reason. If the offshore processing and turnback policies are retained, both John Howard’s settlement policy and the Turnbull–Obama deal have revealed that the people sent to Nauru and Manus Island can be brought to Australia without any prospect of a new wave of asylum seeker boats.

The world’s Catholic bishops in a remarkably uniform pattern engaged in a psychological process called ‘special moral disengagement’ in which they laid aside their moral compasses, seeing the abuse as a sin and not a crime, and not prioritising the rights of the child over the priest perpetrator, who was recycled to yet another parish or another diocese or even overseas.

Perhaps once the Paladin contract story could have toppled a minister. This week, it was almost overshadowed by a parade of other scandals – the 2000 Centrelink robocall deaths; the Helloworld travel scandal; the revelation both Michael Keenan and Michaelia Cash refused to give witness statements to the Australian Federal Police over the Australian Workers’ Union raid tipoffs; the apparent leaking of security advice to The Australian, which was then misrepresented.