Comment

We are in a time of division. Information is selective and conditional. There are few agreed facts, few shared ideas. Silos are everywhere and for the cynical and opportunistic they are particularly useful. An essential starting point is to engage but not condescend.

Finally, it happened. After months of equivocation, the government did what was obviously necessary but what it had for so long lacked the courage to do: it stood up to the News Corp papers and the opposition and redrafted the stage three tax cuts.

The possibility of Donald Trump being re-elected as president of the United States later this year is surely the most significant geopolitical risk faced by the world, both directly and as a possible ignition of other risks.

Just when everyone had pretty much given up on Albanese being willing to do something big, he did, transforming a regressive $21 billion tax handout into progressive economic and social policy.

Refusing to be defeated by the relentless racism, however, Indigenous entrepreneurs and community leaders running non-profit corporations have succeeded in establishing businesses with positive outcomes that far exceed those of the many failed bureaucratic experiments.

Looking at the Albanese government, it is not difficult to picture the figure at the end of the bed. It is the lumpen, wheezing outline of the stage three tax cuts. The prime minister lies in terrified inaction. The movements are obvious but remain somehow impossible.

I am concerned we have lost sight of the real purpose of education, and specifically university education. It has been an increasing weakness that a university degree is mostly looked at as an alternative in the spectrum of vocational training. It is much more.

Dutton is testing, and pushing out, the boundaries of acceptable public discourse as part of a new configuration in Australian politics, of which the ‘No’ campaign was the harbinger. There’ll be more of it. Much more.

In 2008, as a member of the independent committee reviewing the Australian citizenship test, I asked if the committee could recommend all people resident in Australia be required to pass the citizenship test.

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is required by February 2025 to set a target for emissions reduction over the following decade. This government is wrestling its way towards a number that won’t alarm anyone and it clearly won’t be pressured into anything radical by the opposition – the “climate inactivists and cookers”