Comment

The National Party seems uninterested in the merits of more effective delivery of government support. The recent history of the Coalition ... is a graveyard of proposals for various community or disaster-related schemes.

The news that Washington is reviewing the AUKUS submarine deal puts a bombshell under Australia’s defence policy and sharpens the debate of recent weeks about defence spending.

Days before the prime minister departed for the G7 summit in Canada this weekend he delivered a speech drawing a powerful contrast between his government and that of United States President Donald Trump.

Reconciliation invites reliving the trauma. It expects the traumatised to perform the rupture of time for the good of the nation. This is a cruel imposition.

Without extending the operating life of the North West Shelf gas processing facility, Woodside’s plan to plunder the Browse gas field can’t proceed. And they know it. That’s why they’re pushing this project through, door by door, approval by approval.

Two decades ago, I warned that factions created the danger of making the Labor Party look like a transactional organisation in which power is regarded as factional property. I pushed for an urgent expansion of party membership, which never happened.

The Liberal and National parties have agreed to give the relationship another go but at a worrying cost. Disunity is now a significant challenge for the new Coalition, both within each party and between them, compounded by the recent allocation of portfolios.

It has taken the second coming of the wildly erratic Donald Trump and a landslide election win to do it, but Anthony Albanese is finally manifesting a new-found confidence in standing up for Australia with his responses to the whims of our key strategic partner.

Murray Watt didn’t need to consider climate change. The law didn’t ask him to, because for three years Labor has been stalling on laws that would. In a triumph of his own party’s inaction, his first decision as environment minister has been to extend the life of Australia’s largest gas project by almost half a century.

Now the election is finally over and the parties and candidates have settled down to their new realities, national priorities must be afforded their proper place.