Comment

Jewish leaders warned about this anti-Semitism before the cars were burnt and the houses daubed with paint. They talked about children being afraid on trains and of being refused service in stores. They reminded politicians that it had all happened before. This week, the world’s richest man gave a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the United States president. He was cheered by the crowd and so did it again. The old and warned-of hatred was ascendant.

One of the main dangers of the pointscoring game that has come to define politics today is how easily it allows important policy benchmarks such as fiscal responsibility to be redefined or even jettisoned.

Albanese is a transactional politician who is good at planes, trains and automobiles – not unimportant things – and he won an election and will perhaps win another. However, he is unable to satisfy Australia’s yearning for better government…

Housing is a wickedly complex policy area made even more challenging by the division of relevant powers across the federal and state divide … That said, however, it is a sad fact that few federal administrations since the 1990s have even attempted to address Australia’s housing policy challenges in any comprehensive way.

It’s January in Australia and so the annual Australia Day political circus has rolled into town. It started much earlier this year, with Peter Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price working to grab some headlines before the upcoming election. Their followers have declared January is now ‘Australia Month’ and have washed through social media with absurd lies and conspiracy theories about Aboriginal people.

All cities are cruel, but New York’s cruelty is in proportion to its temptations, which are immense. At home, greeted with misfortune, I might quicken my step or avert my eyes. Here I must make a more dramatic calculation.

As he banged on about culture war issues this week, Dutton was speaking to the converted. Neither at his soft launch nor since has he given a concrete reason for anyone who didn’t vote for the Coalition last election to vote for it this time.

We need to stop the NDIS rejecting autistic people. It strikes me as hypocritical that the NDIS is flaunted in the strategy when the application process and eligibility criteria are increasingly prohibitive.

The weather events considered an extreme outlier in today’s climate will pale in comparison with what the future will bring ... One day we will look back at 2024 as one of the coldest years this century.

Leading up to Australia Day, which is understandably known to many as Invasion Day, should we not at least be asking more questions? What model would be better? What do Australians as a people want to celebrate?