Comment

One of Australia’s most frustrating failures as a nation has been a limited capacity to value-add. This country has the world’s third-largest population of sheep – behind China and India – but much of the Australian wool-clothing we wear is imported, such as men's suits from Italy.

Angus Taylor clearly did not want to be there. The nervous laugh, the rapidly evaporating expressions showed his discomfort. How must it feel to stand before a roomful of your colleagues and journalists and know you have nothing to say?

Dutton’s superficial focus on immigration, as part of his call to move ‘back to basics’, can be taken as a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to past debates advocating bans on Asian immigration, and the rhetoric of Pauline Hanson...

It is clear Dutton sees talk of a ‘better Australia’, not a ‘bigger Australia’, as a powerful campaign tool. He is utilising immigration and its history of stirring prejudice and xenophobic sentiment, emulating John Howard’s success in the 2001 election when he tied threats to national security to Middle Eastern asylum seekers.

Australia’s attempts to keep China out of the Pacific region have put my people in the middle of a fight we don’t want and didn’t ask for. The irony of Australia’s efforts to create ‘security’ is that so many of Australia’s actions actively undermine it, in my country and through the region.

This is a country in which you cannot tell the truth. There are no meaningful protections for the people who do. The punishments that await them are extravagant and deliberately cruel. David McBride should not be in prison.

Before he died, novelist Cormac McCarthy told physicist Lawrence Krauss there was no poetry today. McCarthy believed science had obliterated poetry. How could poetry compete with the beauty and brutality of mathematics? Science has bent the horizon.

Another week, another federal budget, another housing announcement or three. Another several billion dollars promised for social housing on top of last year’s clutch of announcements and billions. Yet for all this, the federal government is not really trying to solve the crisis. All it is doing is managing perceptions.

At first blush, this third budget under the Albanese government is a very clever political document. Its focus is on two main challenges: first, the immediate one of providing cost-of-living relief, and second, a visionary direction for our economy. The Future Made in Australia strategy is intended to launch this country into the global competition to bring about an effective transition to net zero emissions by 2050. This clean energy campaign promises to be the biggest industrial transition since the Industrial Revolution.

Two months ago, Steve Christou was lifted onto the shoulders of two men outside Cumberland City Council. Holding a loudhailer, he led a group in chanting “Hands off our kids.” Others in the crowd shouted about “poofs” and “trannies”. A man beside him accused the mayor of satanism.