Comment

Peter Dutton is first and always a cop. He sees the world in terms of threats and he sees all threats as opportunities. Despite appearances, he is always looking for an angle.

Anthony Albanese could end up being a one-term prime minister if he can’t keep the faith with the young people who helped him to last year’s decisive election victory. Recent surveys suggest a cocktail of pandemic-related stresses is forging a generation of financially aware, politically engaged and resilient young people.

Albanese has never been prone to theory or regarded as particularly bookish, which isn’t to say he is not clever or canny. His dogged, prosaic government perhaps reflects the desire of Australians to draw a line under a long era of hyper-partisan Canberra conflict.

The legislation that follows is always thin and a little scabby. It’s always a suture. Over time the whole Migration Act has become like this, patched up and half-healed.

Several developments recently have made it obvious that politics has become a most unedifying race to the bottom. Facts and evidence are usually ignored in favour of emotive, baseless assertions, and truth and morality are clear casualties.

As this term of government rapidly nears its halfway mark, the Coalition is convinced it has a greater chance of victory at the next election than it dared imagine over the past 18 months.

Why does so much feel like it’s going wrong, all at the same time? Why do so many of us feel this sense of impending doom? According to experts, we are living through a ‘polycrisis’, a tangled mess of multiple crises, all happening at once.

This week, one of the great pretendings of Australian life came to an end. The made-up logic of Al-Kateb v Godwin was finally undone. The High Court confronted the spurious logic of indefinite detention and found it to be unlawful.

I still get social media pile-ons over my failure, in the lead-up to the 1993 election, to explain the likely price effects of the then proposed GST on a birthday cake … I fell into the ‘No’ case strategy – ‘If you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it.’

Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong got the fruits for Australia from 18 months of serious, grown-up diplomatic work together on the critically important Australia–China relationship. This is a credit to Albanese and Wong personally and a reassuring reflection on the capabilities of DFAT.