Comment

Every year in February, it’s like clockwork. The prime minister of the day gets up in parliament to make a solemn speech about how the Closing the Gap targets are not on track … A few measly crumbs are again thrown on the table. Then it’s back to business as usual.

Increasing calls for the truth to be upheld and protected in Australian politics have led to greater interest in truth-in-advertising legislation, to accompany the reform of campaign funding. Under existing legislation, it is legal to lie during an election campaign. There are simply no safeguards.

Donald Trump’s siege mentality has him leading the US as if the world has been out to get it … This schoolyard bully – this paragon of bad taste and appalling behaviour – is taking to the world with a very big stick.

Another decade of dribbling out small increases in schools funding leaves every public school, especially the 30 per cent serving the children with the highest needs, vulnerable to the biases and vested interests of successive governments.

Dutton accuses Albanese of pandering to Greens and Islamic or Palestinian voters in urban electorates. The assertion could just as well be aimed at the opposition’s response, with an eye to winning back three seats from the teal independents.

Subtlety does not interest Peter Dutton. He is bald in everything he does. When he appointed Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the new role of shadow minister for government efficiency, the message was very plain: whatever cuts he plans to make to government services, they will be made in aid of a greater culture war.

I asked my father once – a Wiradjuri man whose body bore the scars of history – a question about the past. He shook his head. ‘Don’t go there, boy,’ he said. ‘It will only drive you mad.’ Like individuals, nations are driven mad by history. If we can’t forget, we will torture ourselves with that which we cannot change.

Anthony Albanese faces the first parliamentary sitting of the election year with the scene set for the first interest rate cut in almost three years – a bigger political boost than any government could possibly hope for. The argument over economic management can now be turned more easily on its head. After 12 interest rate rises on Labor’s watch that exacerbated the cost-of-living crisis, the pain will begin to ease.

In the past few decades, where there has been bipartisan support for free-market economics and a managerial approach to running governments, parties have become risk-averse and serious policy debates are avoided … Now there is a thorough rejection of evidence. Testable propositions are often displaced by tribalism, harvesting fear and rage and the domination of opinion.

It’s disturbing surveying the front pages of so many Australian papers since the re-election of Donald Trump in the United States, given how many headlines seem to be attempting to normalise the MAGA ethos … Consistent with the global business reaction to Trump, reflected in last month’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, the fascination is with his announcements, not with their deliverability or consequences.