Comment

Noel Gallagher trades in memories as much as music. It is some trick to take the past and make it better. In the hands of politicians, the past is a weapon. In our toxic age, history is a poisoned well. Noel makes the past a place I want to visit again.

Canberra is a small city. Forget six degrees of separation. If you’re not actually living across the road from the prime minister, you could well be next door to his chief of staff, married to his press sec, playing golf with his departmental head, sitting next to his driver at the footy, passing him and his partner walking up and down Red Hill at the weekend.

While equity remains a vague buzzword in education reform, governments continue to avoid accountability for improving it in schools. The lack of a clear definition can lead to misdirection of taxpayer funds … This has been the case in Australia for decades.

The Albanese government’s signature, visionary policy for the next election is shaping up to be the Future Made in Australia. So far, the prime minister has faced criticism for his government’s reliance on subsidies in its support for high-priority projects and sectors under that framework, which the Coalition is calling ‘billions for billionaires’.

On the playground, it is the final and most pathetic offer. It is the bargain of the uninvited schoolboy, the boy who gets carsick and smells of mandarin skins, made when there is nothing really to give: I’ll be your best friend.

We can think for ourselves. We should be the masters of our own destiny, not just a vague echo of what is worst in America. Our sovereignty is important to us. So is our unique character.

American hedge fund Starboard Value rallied fellow News Corp shareholders on Monday to ‘collapse the Company’s dual-class share structure’, which gives the Murdoch family 41 per cent of the voting rights despite owning only 14 per cent of the shares. … If the campaign succeeds in ending the Murdoch stranglehold this year, it will be more than a victory for corporate democracy. It promises a lift in the standard of democratic discourse in Australia and the world.

If there’s any silver lining at all to be found in the Labor Party’s confusing position ... it’s that the rather niche question of the importance of accurate population-level information about sexuality, gender identity and intersex status has made it squarely into the national political conversation.

The night Bill Shorten lost, the room where he was standing tasted of cigarette smoke and sour cheesecake. The lights burnt the wrong colour. At the podium, he said he was “proud we argued for what was right, not what was easy”.

Trump is an American grotesque. He is such a théâtre de l’absurde that it is too easy to miss that Harris, too, lacks meaning or purpose. Like an absurdist play, her utterances end in baffled silence.