Comment

Payman believes the Albanese government has turned its back on the recognition of Palestine committed to at two ALP national conferences. She says it is a matter of conscience and humanity that she continues to advocate for this cause.

In March, Trump lent his name and likeness to the God Bless the USA Bible. The book was a large-print Bible with the US Constitution inserted. If hypocrisy were an Olympic event, Trump would be a certainty for gold.

Australian political leaders require the courage to think in transformative and tangible ways about what it will take to secure a safer future for children and young people. The status quo is unacceptable for the current generation, and the next generation deserves better.

In the popular imagination, Vladimir Putin is too readily demonised, simplified or caricatured. He becomes a cartoonish character. The truth is far more complex, fascinating and ultimately chilling.

The prime minister managed three significant surprises this week, which variously caught his opponents off guard or demonstrated that when it comes to dealing with our most significant ally, the United States, he has considerable cachet.

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.

I have seen the worst our world can do. I have covered war and misery in more than 50 countries. I have seen the Hobbesian world: a war of all against all. Sometimes killers praised God – sometimes God was at the head of the armies. But that wasn’t God … Suffering did not drive me from God, it drew me to God.

Without fanfare, the prime minister attended early mass at St Christopher’s Cathedral in Canberra last Sunday, where he joined other worshippers in praying for the victims and survivors of the Bondi Junction shopping centre knife attack. The prayers were also for the nation and its leaders in times that had suddenly become dramatically less certain.