Comment

If news is what the media reports, the dominant issue gripping the nation in the past seven days is something that hasn’t yet happened: namely Anthony Albanese’s first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump.

As opinions about our defence posture gather force, the case for complete transparency of the process has become overwhelming. The Australian people have a right to know what discussions are being undertaken, and what deals, commitments and understandings are being entered into.

The treasurer’s recent speech to the National Press Club seems to have caught many in the conservative media off guard. So much for the constant chant about a dangerous, mad, left-wing government. On the contrary, Jim Chalmers has outlined a reform agenda that may well be the envy of the Coalition. He has filled the vacuum that their policy inactivity has left.

While Trump’s own supporters fear he may be dragging the US into another ‘forever war’, many Australians will be consoled by the fact that Albanese gives every indication he has no appetite to join any American ‘unilateral action’ down the track.

Anthony Albanese has chosen corporate welfare over environmental wellbeing for Australia. His appointment of Murray Watt as minister for the environment highlights his determination to grant corporate demands for more environmental sacrifice in this age of ecological crisis.

In 1979, I was entering my last years of school and The Clash released their landmark album London Calling. It became the soundtrack of my emerging political awareness. Its startling array of jazz, blues, rockabilly, ska, reggae, funk and disco, with a punk attitude and energy, was a cry of anguish from a generation who had lived with the Cold War fear of nuclear war.

As I write, I’m listening to the sound of repairs to my home following the impacts of Tropical Cyclone Alfred, a rare category 2 system that tracked as far south as the Gold Coast in March, and left a trail of destruction throughout northern New South Wales and south-east Queensland.

High expectations had been set for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s meeting with United States President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit. Opposition Leader Sussan Ley sent him off with the relatively constructive comment that, ‘The Coalition wants the government to succeed here because that is in our national interest.’

Donald Trump’s cavalier treatment of his supposed friends should have come as no surprise to Australia’s prime minister, left sitting on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada without so much as a phone call cancelling a much-heralded meeting.

Linda Reynolds is as bitter as an unripe quince. She is forever disappointed. She says “I am bitterly disappointed…” She says her “primary concern has always been how the Commonwealth could possibly settle unsubstantiated and statute barred claims made against me, alleging egregious conduct on my part without taking a single statement from me or speaking to me at all”.