Comment

Firefighters are highly skilled, but we are not magicians. When fire danger hits catastrophic levels, if fires take hold, we can often do little to protect homes and businesses. We concentrate on our highest priority: saving lives ... the climate-driven threat continues to outpace us.

The escalating madness of the Trump administration and creaking AUKUS nuclear submarine deal add a whole extra layer to the challenges facing Australia. Those problems are now, not some time in the future.

Australia’s most significant military ally is now a rogue state. This fact should be more startling than it is. It should be cause for serious reconsideration of the country’s position.

The new year opens on an explosion of global uncertainty, with Donald Trump yet again at the epicentre. Why this extraordinary invasion of Venezuela, and where will it lead?

The demands for a royal commission to investigate the massacre of Jews at the annual Chabad Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on December 14 are an understandable response to the tragedy that killed 15 people and wounded 40 others.

An extraordinary opening week in Australian politics in 2026 has seen a full-court press of business, sporting, security and political figures force Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to embrace a federal royal commission into the Bondi terror attack.

This is not like other hatreds. It is ancient and particular. It is sly. It has its own tropes and symbols. For centuries it has contorted into different justifications, but it has always been the same.

This is not Australia. I say that over and over again, yet the images on my television screen are telling me it is. This is Bondi Beach. This is summer. This is music and surfing and food and laughter. This is a place of strangers in all our diversity who call ourselves a nation.

Australians often seem rather uneasy about attempting to examine the range and depth of their religious beliefs. Like most people, other than fundamentalists, I feel shifty and inconclusive, because of a deep uncertainty about what I believe.

Albanese is convinced Australians want the nation to come together at a time like this. He says we will not allow the country to be divided, because that is what the terrorists seek. Unlike in previous disasters … the opposition and its supporters broke ranks with the government and blamed the prime minister for the atrocity.