Comment

It has been very rare for the Albanese cabinet to leak, but that changed this week. On Monday, December 9, a story emerged saying the prime minister had warned his senior colleagues that the Murdoch media was openly working to install Peter Dutton as prime minister.

Ten days before Christmas and the usual carols, jolly Santas and decorated trees colour my local Balaclava shopping strip in inner Melbourne. But this year they coincide with the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the nearby Adass Israel Synagogue in Ripponlea, a ‘fuck Israel’ sign on the gazebo in my local park, ‘fuck jews’ on a lamppost and, further afield, cars set alight and messages of hate scrawled on fences in Jewish areas of Sydney. Welcome to Australia in 2024.

It’s likely that financial markets will be the final arbiter of the Trump presidency. As the reality of unfolding economic numbers fails to match his promises, amid the constant disruption and uncertainty of his administration, financial markets will react, most likely with significant pressure on stocks, interest rates and exchange rates.

Whoever wins next week, America loses. One candidate is grotesque and the other insipid. Donald Trump’s television-inflated personality and proto-fascist flirtations divert focus from the inadequacy of Kamala Harris, who until recently was a near-invisible vice-president. She is a calculated, accidental candidate, who was resoundingly rejected by the Democrats the only time she sought the nomination.

You know a government has a problem when every time a minister or even one of the backbenchers puts their head up for an interview, they are asked to defend their prime minister.

I remember when they moved in. It was shortly after I’d given up my workspace in State Library Victoria and had relocated indefinitely to writing from my home. These were the first days of the pandemic and perhaps the isolation facilitated the listening. This can’t be real, I remember thinking. What do they want?

Dutton’s refusal to back Albanese’s comprehensive condolence motion, acknowledging the pain of the Jewish community and extending sympathy to the Palestinian and Muslim communities, was a calculated and divisive play.

The problem with the Productivity Commission’s latest report on early childhood education is that a fundamental misjudgement has been made, and then compounded with layers and layers of analysis.

I owe the ALP a great deal, but I am increasingly edgy about where the two major parties are heading, their increasing factionalism and secretive oligarchies … I put the planet first, then Homo sapiens, then other species, and place national interest, my own or anyone else’s nation, some distance down the list. I have no sense of the tribal…

Noel Gallagher trades in memories as much as music. It is some trick to take the past and make it better. In the hands of politicians, the past is a weapon. In our toxic age, history is a poisoned well. Noel makes the past a place I want to visit again.