Comment

The federal government is on the cusp of two significant moments regarding Australia’s climate ambition. If this nation is to chart a course to becoming a clean energy and green exports superpower over the coming decade and beyond, it must be prepared to seize both opportunities.

Occasionally something happens that turns our collective minds to history. That happened this week when Nazis dominated Australian headlines for possibly the first time since the end of World War II. Australia’s Nazis are rattling the cage, trying to transform themselves from a secretive, mask-wearing sect into a political movement that influences our political ideas and controls the streets through violence.

Australia’s multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, has no doubt the March for Australia rallies that dominated much of the political debate during the week were organised by Nazis with the main purpose of protesting ‘immigration from countries that have brown people’ … The politics of race and immigration is a dangerously combustible commodity, which helps to explain not only the tenor of the prime minister’s response but also the government’s handling of the announcement of a $400 million deal to deport former migrant detainees to Nauru.

A brief list of things that can be said about Linda Reynolds without defaming her…

One of the soft indulgences of my life is to spend time browsing in a bookstore, preferably one with a healthy second-hand section, better if it has timber shelves and a ladder, with jazz or classical music playing quietly. One such store is Henry Pordes Books on Charing Cross Road in London.

The Home Guarantee Scheme was created by the previous Coalition government and was continued and this week dramatically expanded by the Albanese government. It has several cunning design features, none of which include relieving upward pressure on home prices. The guarantee helps first-home buyers by cutting the usual 20 per cent deposit of the sale price that banks require to consider a loan application to just 5 per cent, slashing the time needed to save the deposit.

Before I decided to run for parliament, like many Australians I was frustrated and angry about the many decisions the government made that clearly weren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of Australians. Over the years I’ve served as the first independent member for the ACT, I’ve come to see why: a lack of transparency and broken lobbying rules.

Drama, often confected, is never far from the theatre of democratic politics, but there was nothing synthetic about the sombre mood that gripped the suddenly called news conference in the prime minister’s courtyard on Tuesday.

Jakob Stausholm has one smile. It is made at the cost of his entire top lip. The smile is there in every photograph, in the pages of every annual report. It is the slyly thrilled smile of a man thinking about digging up someone else’s resources.

Perhaps the fairest way to describe this week’s Economic Reform Roundtable – initially billed the productivity round table – is awkward, in a couple of respects. First, it’s difficult to know just how it might result in genuine reform. The necessary depth of detail for an idea to become policy wasn’t going to be delivered by the two dozen invitees sitting around the cabinet table.