Comment

When British prime minister Rishi Sunak held a press conference in March this year from a podium emblazoned with ‘Stop the boats’, Australian audiences could have been forgiven for thinking we had regressed a decade to Tony Abbott’s 2013 federal election campaign.

The same year Peter Costello delivered the first intergenerational report, the Howard government decided not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is the story of Australian politics, of a country stepping on a rake, over and over again, forever.

The phenomenon of the Matildas clearly caught our political leaders off guard, leading to a series of attempts to clamber on, if not capitalise on, the bandwagon. Their ascendance in the competition launched an auction between the national leaders, with a flurry of offers of financial support for women’s sport.

When Tanya Plibersek was collared on the sidelines of last weekend’s conference, her assessment of how the government sees itself was particularly interesting. She fobbed off criticism that the old party of passionate firebrands from the left had become a conservative shadow of its former self.

What would we not know were it but for brave whistleblowers speaking up? And what do we not know right now because the cost of courage in Australia is too high? These are the questions that keep me awake at night, and they are the reasons the Human Rights Law Centre is this week launching the Whistleblower Project, a new initiative to protect and empower Australian whistleblowers.

Refugee policy is Labor’s quiet embarrassment. As much as possible, they would prefer not to talk about it. They know it is wrong but they don’t have the courage to fix it.

As someone who has long advocated for relying on market forces whenever possible, it pains me to recognise that market failure has been a major feature of the emerging housing crisis. The failure is apparent in the context of a long-term shift by both state and federal governments away from social housing.

Labor Party national conferences – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has seen a few. He’s been going to them all his life. His attendance at this week’s three-day conference in Brisbane, which concludes today, will be as familiar as putting on an old jumper.

Put crudely, Australia’s economic prosperity is dependent on having more people who do more stuff. Herein lies the conundrum: the more reproductive we are, the less productive we can afford to be.

The new lie is that there’s too much detail. The Murdoch press is claiming the existence of a secret Uluru Statement from the Heart, which runs to 26 pages. It is Pizzagate for constitutional recognition.