Comment

Matt Keogh, the minister for Defence Personnel, says Australia must remain “vigilant”. He doesn’t see the problem with America basing nuclear-capable bombers outside Darwin. He doesn’t believe the decision will worsen tensions with China.

It’s a disturbing feature of our leadership over the past several years that major policy challenges have been allowed to drift, despite all evidence of their magnitude and urgency. This drift has been an important factor in the loss of trust in government, and in the dominance of issues such as integrity, transparency and accountability in the most recent federal election. In practical policy terms, these unaddressed problems have become so big that they will require dramatic policy responses, which may prove difficult to deliver.

The Albanese government spent the past week coming to grips with theory versus reality in government. The vast gap between the budget handed down by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the media’s reporting of it is still being processed by government MPs. Labor’s first budget was a restrained affair: fiscally responsible while fulfilling some specific election promises, and squarely directed at fixing the mess left by the Morrison government. What could possibly go wrong?

These have been an extraordinary five years. In that time, we have seen a new wave of discussion and debate about women’s safety, equity and right to respect in the workplace, the family and at large. We need to celebrate the big wins – the adoption of so many of Kate Jenkins’ key Respect@Work recommendations, for example, with better support for childcare and longer paid parental leave. But there is still work to do to bridge the gender pay gap, and to make women safer outside work, particularly in the domestic setting.

Occasionally an image will so trouble the people looking at it – so appal them with its curdled familiarity, its stolen innocence, its senselessness – that it will bring with it Rankine’s “new kind of logic”. Irrespective of what happens in court, the last picture of Cassius Turvey should do this. No country should be able to look at his unmoving face and not call into question all the structures and prejudices and privileges that went into his death.

It is accepted in some circles that you can’t boil cabbage twice. Yet apparently this thinking doesn’t apply to recycling political leaders – or rehashing their worst ideas – irrespective of how hopeless they have been in government and of the damage they have done to the national interest. Two cases in point are the threatened resurgence of Donald Trump in the United States, and Boris Johnson’s soggy pitch to reclaim Britain’s prime ministership. And they have lessons for us here.

Jim Chalmers is no stranger to the dynamics and pitfalls of federal budgets. He has worked on 16 of them in and out of government – as a staffer, adviser, shadow minister and finally, this week, at the helm himself. On Tuesday, in delivering the first Labor budget in almost a decade, he turned convention on its head. Most obviously, he presented his fiscal reckoning just five months into the government’s term and well ahead of the traditional May scheduling. The treasurer was firmly of the view he couldn’t wait another seven months to tell Australians the true state of the economy.

It took Liz Truss just 45 days to destroy Margaret Thatcher’s life’s work. For 40 years the idea that tax cuts for the rich would trickle down to help the poor has not just dominated the rhetoric of Western politicians but aligned the ambitions of those who already have the most and those who wish they did. Truss’s tax cuts, however, were so excessive and so poorly timed she actually forced London’s bankers to admit they were bad for the economy and the British middle class to admit they were bad for society.

Reports this week alleging that doctors had made false claims totalling as much as one third of Medicare’s annual budget has pointed to more than just potentially significant weaknesses in the Medicare system. It has again highlighted the impact of the profit motive among medical clinics run by private corporations that are not necessarily Australian owned.

The admiration for Anthony Albanese’s political smarts was palpable down the line from one of his senior colleagues. ‘Albo,’ he says, ‘has 360-degree vision.’ The prime minister is not just looking at the next few weeks, his colleague says: he knows where he wants to be by the time of the next election.