Comment

This was not just negative campaigning as it is usually understood – attacking your opponent rather than focusing on your own strengths. Instead, each side put its case in terms of what couldn’t be done if the other side got its way. On company tax cuts, a Liberal source told Tillett, ‘If you don’t have a strong economy, you can’t afford to fund hospitals.’ On the same topic, a Labor source said: ‘When you tell people you can’t give any more money to health care because it is going to the banks, that goes down badly.’ This campaign is literally twice as negative as usual.

Anti-association laws, similar to those proposed by Victoria, were adopted by the NSW government in 2012. During a review of these laws in 2016, the NSW ombudsman found that 7 per cent of “consorting warnings” were directed at children. Indigenous Australians were subject to 40 per cent of such warnings, more than half of them directed at Aboriginal women. Two thirds of the 83 children aged between 13 and 17 years old who received consorting warnings were Aboriginal. In 2011, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprised 2.9 per cent of the total NSW population.

The people running the Twitter account at Australia House in London produced a marvellous photograph of the new high commissioner addressing his minions in a marbled reception hall. The staff looked as though they were having a perfectly miserable time as His Excellency Bookshelves Brandis droned on. They’d only just got rid of Fishnets Downer; now they were rolling their eyes, wondering what this new turkey from the Nasty Party would be like.

Voters are being asked to buy a pig in a poke. Morrison wants them to take him on trust. This is despite the fact he is a treasurer whose budget last year did not foresee the massive revenue increase that materialised over the past four months, a revenue lift that Treasury has baked into its forecasts for the forward estimates and projections out to 2025. In all budgets, assumptions are contestable, but some of the key ones in this budget are close to unbelievable.

The LNP have been brazen about their commitment to what they call ‘independent’ schools, including those that charge high and ever-mounting fees. They have claimed their partiality towards these palaces of privilege is ‘part of their DNA’. Under Turnbull’s mutated (and mutilated) Gonski, 87 per cent of public schools will still not be funded to the agreed minimum school resource standard by 2023. Sixty-five per cent of fee-charging schools, however, will be funded above it.

Kings of War is a four-and-a-half hour Shakespearean onslaught in Dutch at the Adelaide Festival, under the direction of Ivo van Hove and scenographer Jan Versweyveld. To keep us in the picture there were surtitles, but only our leading Hollander, Dr Andreas Blot, had he been there, could have wrung all the subtleties from the performance.

Bill Shorten seized the political agenda in a dramatic way on Tuesday, overshadowing practically everything in domestic politics. He did it by homing in on a tax concession that is costing the budget billions but is a sacred cow for the Liberals. Donning his Sherwood Forest finest, the Opposition leader vowed to fight the government’s scare campaign ‘because I’m going to choose the battler over the top end of town’.

The old boys’ network will zealously shield their progeny from adverse consequences – not simply out of a filial loyalty, but to protect the institutions from which they drew their own power. While researching The Red Zone Report we heard from several former college students who had either self-harmed or become suicidal in response to the hazing they experienced at college. But we also discovered that the most vociferous defenders of hazing and initiation rituals were alumni groups themselves.

’Tis the season of “killer toys” that allow obscure ministers for consumer affairs to show their magnificent plumage. The New South Wales minister for fair trading is someone named Matt Kean and he had all his feathers fully fluffed with an announcement that “the annual yuletide safety blitz continues to sweep through retail stores”.

Joyce’s ham-fistedness, if not vindictiveness, in also sacking Queenslander Keith Pitt from the frontbench has precipitated a new threat to the government’s majority. An angry Pitt has told colleagues he is seriously considering moving to the crossbench. Those who know him say that, unlike his colleague George Christensen, Pitt is not a person of idle threats.