Comment

Medevac works, medevac is saving lives, limbs and hope. It is a clinical process, led by doctors – robust, orderly – wherein 86 per cent of all successful applications are in fact approved by Peter Dutton himself. Before medevac was enacted, 12 people died in Australia’s care in offshore processing. Since medevac, there have been no deaths.

Here we are six months after the federal election and upon swaths of citizens it has dawned that they have bought tickets to a flop. If it’s cringeworthy now, imagine another two-and-a-half years of this clapped-out music-hall routine.

Never has it been more obvious: getting elected is one task, governing is another. While Labor tries to move on from its election loss review, delivered to the executive on Thursday, Scott Morrison is finding that running the country is harder than winning the unwinnable election.

For those who have watched the evolution of public-order policing in Victoria over recent years, the sort of police violence we saw at the International Mining and Resources Conference (IMARC) protests in Melbourne would’ve come as no real surprise.

A citizen’s right to know should be a motherhood statement in our liberal democracy, but too much vested interest gets in the way. Most essentially, the pursuit of power – and the holding on to it – is the primal force distorting the way our Commonwealth operates. Ideally those in power are there to serve the public interest; however, the nation’s largest mainstream media companies are accusing governments – particularly the federal government – of treating voters with contempt by hiding what they are really up to most of the time.

My beautiful daughter had many plans in her life, many dreams like young people everywhere. One of her dreams was to see peace between Israel and Palestine in her lifetime. Although that is no longer possible for Aiia, I can honour her dream in a different way. One of my duties in returning to Australia is to be present at the launch of the Aiia Maasarwe Memorial Medical Fellowship program.

When I heard there was going to be another family law inquiry, I couldn’t believe it. After so much loss, so many hearings and so many experts warning, again and again, that the family law system is not safe for children. Instead of urgent action, we have yet another inquiry.

The Morrison government is scrambling to persuade the nation it really knows what it is on about and how it will achieve it. The drought and a stubbornly sluggish economy aren’t helping. Nor is Morrison’s new best mate, Donald Trump.

White Ribbon was the most visible organisation in Australia dedicated to ending men’s violence against women. Yet its actions repeatedly frustrated the domestic violence sector, survivors and their supporters. Those actions demonstrated a fundamental failure to understand the problem that White Ribbon was meant to be fixing.

The IPCC report is no easy reading. Criticisms are couched, references extensive. What it did not say was that meat is the only culprit. In fact, it says that farming – the way we’ve done it for the past 100 years in particular – is unsustainable.