Comment

The launch of the campaign for the May 3 federal election brings back many memories, laughs and cautionary tales of my experiences on the trail in the 1990s. As opposition leader, I had embarked on a big-picture strategy. I released the Fightback policy package designed to deliver the kind of country and economy we would want in 2000. The pressure was really on – what I had to do was to sell it.

As a scientist, I’ve watched climate change be kicked around Australia’s parliament like a political football for decades, with mounting frustration. It’s a history marked by denial, distraction and delay – and Australians are already paying dearly for the failure of former governments to take climate change seriously.

There is not a politician in the country who isn’t nervous about May 3, but there are growing concerns in the Coalition in particular about its disheartening start to the campaign. Peter Dutton, who has mostly managed not to make the opposition the issue, has been caught wanting as the spotlight turns on him as the alternative prime minister.

So this is it: a choice between a few dollars a week in tax cuts or a couple of cents off petrol for a year, an election fought in a change purse by two men with the charisma of loose coins.

It would be comforting to think Donald Trump is an outlier, that this, too, will pass. Alas, while Trump is abhorrent, he is not an aberration. His administration is the fulfilment of conservative America’s drift further and further right into populist nationalism and isolationism.

ANALYSIS: Victoria’s bail reforms are a performative display of an embattled government pandering to law-and-order concerns – ultimately the new laws will make the community less safe.

We can’t grasp the complexity of China without reading its most supple thinkers, without being immersed in its history. We cannot know China unless we know China’s humiliation.

There is a powerful irony in Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to change the Constitution to enable the government, not the courts, to strip dual Australian citizens of their citizenship.

Jim Chalmers insisted in the budget lock-up news conference that his fourth effort was primarily about economics and not politics, a claim that didn’t really convince his audience.

One of the most disturbing recent global trends has been the attempts by governments to attack the independence of the judiciary. United States President Donald Trump has become almost obsessed with undermining the Department of Justice and weaponising its processes.