Comment

The Home Guarantee Scheme was created by the previous Coalition government and was continued and this week dramatically expanded by the Albanese government. It has several cunning design features, none of which include relieving upward pressure on home prices. The guarantee helps first-home buyers by cutting the usual 20 per cent deposit of the sale price that banks require to consider a loan application to just 5 per cent, slashing the time needed to save the deposit.

Before I decided to run for parliament, like many Australians I was frustrated and angry about the many decisions the government made that clearly weren’t evidence-based or in the best interests of Australians. Over the years I’ve served as the first independent member for the ACT, I’ve come to see why: a lack of transparency and broken lobbying rules.

Drama, often confected, is never far from the theatre of democratic politics, but there was nothing synthetic about the sombre mood that gripped the suddenly called news conference in the prime minister’s courtyard on Tuesday.

Recognising the extent to which the NACC has failed to live up to the expectations and assurances of the first-term Albanese government, it is time for parliament to refocus its operations and assess its leadership and staff.

Whitlam’s claim to ‘a mandate from the people to carry out all its programs’ is both a statement of political intent and a pointer to the role of ‘the people’ in the notion of the mandate. Seen in this way, the mandate is much more than simply an expression of electoral algebra.

The cockney rhyming slang, traditionally beloved of Australians, would have it that our old china plates in America are causing us more anxiety than our newer ones in North Asia.

I have just returned from a writers’ festival in Auckland and I am still processing the experience. I was humbled to be among several writers to deliver the opening night address. Each of us was tasked with riffing on the theme ‘The moment I knew’.

Australia has the resources, the talent and now a government with enough political capital to build better and fairer education systems, if we’re brave enough to act.

Fresh from the papal inauguration in Rome, and after Leo XIV blessed the prime minister’s late mother’s rosary beads at his request, Anthony Albanese could be excused for thinking God is on his side.

As United States President Donald Trump’s tariffs unleash chaos and turmoil across global markets, financial authorities around the world are forced into the unenviable role of working out how to protect their economies.At such an unpredictable juncture, with the leader of the world’s largest economy going rogue, who would want to be a central banker?