Today in The Australian

“Extinction rebellion” is not a protest against governments — it is a protest against the voters who elected them. And its message to those voters is as simple as it is manifestly undemocratic: adopt our policies or we will make your life impossible.

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Judges may disagree, but history backs Boris Johnson

The legal question of whether the UK Supreme Court, in unanimously finding against the government of Boris Johnson, was correct will be debated for decades to come.

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Today in The Australian

As China’s leaders celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule on Tuesday, the fate of the Soviet ­empire hung like a ghost over the jackboots and missiles parading through the streets of Beijing.

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Today in The Australian

The Committee for the Economic Development of Australia last week released the results of a survey of the attitudes the general public and corporate leaders have to business.

Launched to great media fanfare, Company Pulse 2019 contributed to a torrent of commentary about the need for companies to act more ethically.

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Today in The Australian

Last Saturday, at a packed conference in Kyoto of the International Council of Museums, delegates voted overwhelmingly against an ill-conceived proposed change to the internationally accepted definition of the nature and functions of a museum.

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Today in The Australian

For the past few months Britain has been a nation busily engaged in building its own funeral pyre.

This week Britain leapt into the roaring flames.

Perhaps something will be saved from the conflagration but, regardless of how Brexit ends, it is becoming harder and harder to believe that Britain will ever be the same again.

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Today in The Australian:

Even were the situation in Hong Kong to deteriorate further, it is clear that the turmoil poses little immediate threat to the stability of Chinaʼs communist regime.

Today in The Australian:

It may be that the light at the end of the Brexit tunnel is a train coming the other way. But once the blood has been cleaned off the tracks, Britain’s political crisis is likely to be behind it, making it easier for the country to adjust to whatever economic shocks Brexit may bring.

Today in The Australian:

As the debate on the proposal to enshrine an indigenous voice in the Constitution gathers momentum, the proposalʼs supporters have advanced four arguments in response to its critics. The proposal, they say, simply addresses past injustices which, in the words of Murray Gleeson, a former chief justice of the High Court, create a “case for special treatment of indigenous people”.

Today in The Australian:

That indigenous Australians lived on this continent for thousands of years before European settlement is a fact whose recognition in the preamble to the Constitution is long overdue. And it is also a fact European settlement inflicted many miseries on indigenous people, not least through policies that excluded them from the free and prosperous society that was being built around them.

Today in The Australian: As Labor struggles to find its bearings, it would do well to consider what is happening in Europe.  Syriza, which was trounced by the conservatives in last Sundayʼs elections, was not merely a Greek phenomenon when it swept to office four years ago; rather, it was hailed as the flag-bearer for a much broader radicalisation of the global left.

Today in The Australian: According to Scott Morrison, the government will, by the end of this year, introduce legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, along the lines of the anti-discrimination provisions covering race, sex, gender preference, age, ethnic origin and disability. The fundamental question is whether that legislation will resolve or deepen the mess we’re in.

Today in The Australian

Scott Morrison is right: no one would gain were the trade conflict between the US and China to escalate. But he is also right that difficult issues must be addressed if an open trading system is to survive.

At their heart is China’s ongoing refusal to play by the rules.

 

Today in The Australian

The platitude du jour, repeated at every turn by the Treasurer and the governor of the Reserve Bank, is that no one wins a trade war. Pleasing as that homily may be, it reflects neither theory nor experience.

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Today in The Australian

Trump is living up to a long U.S. tradition

With the turmoil in Hong Kong, and now the apparent explosion of a Russian nuclear propulsion ­device, focusing attention on the threats Australia faces, there is a growing chorus of voices casting doubt on the stability and predictability of American foreign policy — and hence on the wisdom of continuing to rely so heavily on the alliance.

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Today in The Australian

Whatever one thinks of John Setka, this much is clear: expelling him from the ALP will do nothing to prevent the lawlessness that has become the hallmark of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union.

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Today in The Australian 

On June 4, 1989, as the tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement won a landslide victory over its communist rivals in the first democratic elections to be held in Poland — indeed, in Eastern ­Europe — since its forcible integration into the Soviet bloc.

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Today in The Australian

Like Aldous Huxley, I am capable of being very stoical about other people’s misfortunes — and never more so than when they afflict Labor and the disastrous policies it took to the election.

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Today in The Australian (with Jonathan Pincus)

Labor’s tax attack on savings counter-productive

Australia may find ­itself next week on the path to the largest peacetime tax increases since Federation. It is not simply the magnitude of the tax rises that makes Labor’s plans exceptional — both in historical terms and relative to global trends — it is that they are so heavily focused on penalising saving.

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Today in The Australian

According to Labor and the Greens, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue. That, they say, means there is no need to cost their policies, which must simply be accepted as the right thing to do.

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Today in The Australian

It is, as Gibbons said about Corsica, easier to deplore the fate, than to describe the actual condition, of the National Broadband Network.

And with the campaign now under way, Labor’s announcement that, if elected, it will launch yet another review of the NBN only makes the network’s future all the more uncertain.

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Today in The Australian

Having proven herself to be a phoenix rather than a cooked goose, Gladys Berejiklian should move as quickly as she reasonably can to contain the effects of a recent decision by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.

Legal reasons preclude a ­detailed discussion of the substance of that decision. Briefly stated, it quashes the convictions of a former senior politician in the ­Keneally Labor government, and of his close political ally, to whom that politician granted a lucrative licence. After a lengthy investigation, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption concluded that the grant of the ­licence involved the misuse of public office. It also found the politician’s ally complicit in the ­offence, with those conclusions being confirmed by a trial that sent both men to jail for lengthy terms.

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Today in The Australian

Jihadis, neo-Nazis — they have always been brothers

How often in recent years have we thought, as Hannah Arendt did on learning of the death camps, “many things are possible, but this ought not to have happened”? Now, after another week of terrorism, and yet more innocent blood, we also think: this will not end.

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Today in The Australian

With the opinion polls showing no improvement in its prospects, any remaining optimists in the Coalition look increasingly like wishful sinkers.

The end, when it comes, will leave plenty of scope for recriminations; as ministers and members pack up their offices, blame is the one thing that will not be in short supply. The question, however, is to understand the broader forces at work.

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Today in The Australian

Last month, the NSW Land and Environment Court ruled against a proposed coalmine at Rocky Hill in a decision I criticised in these pages. Since then, public debate about that decision, which is likely to have far-reaching effects, has been astonishingly muted.

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Today in The Australian

According to Tim Anderson, who was sacked from the University of Sydney last month, academic freedom entitles him to display, as teaching material, the flag of the state of Israel with a swastika ­superimposed on it.

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Today in The Australian

While the Queensland government’s review of the Adani project is a farce, the decision of the NSW Land and Environment Court to block the proposed coalmine at Rocky Hill is a tragedy.

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Today in The Australian

Now that we are almost as abundantly endowed with ex-prime ministers as we are with coal, it is perhaps unsurprising that emissions from the former have grown to rival those from the latter. But even in a crowded field, Kevin Rudd’s claim that “it was never ­envisaged that the NBN generate a commercial rate of return” merits a special place in the greatest moral challenge facing mankind.

Today in The Australian

Even those who delight in life’s ­little ironies will have been troubled to see the major culprits, in this case the banks, emerge from the ­financial services royal commission with what so far is barely a scolding, while the mortgage brokers and financial advisers, who were bit players in the drama, are hauled to the guillotine.

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Today in The Australian

As US and Chinese negotiators struggle to reach agreement ­before higher American tariffs on Chinese goods come into effect on March 2, it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration has two distinct, and potentially inconsistent, goals.

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Today in The Australian

We came, we saw, we made the very best of it
As long ago as January 26, 1817, only a few years after the colony of NSW had come into existence, some 40 guests celebrated its founding at the Sydney home of Isaac Nichols, a former convict who was the settlement’s postmaster.

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Today in The Australian

In 1923, as the Weimar Republic struggled with chaos, the German polymath Carl Schmitt wrote a short but enormously influential book, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Schmitt later destroyed his reputation through his collaboration with the Hitler regime. But if his work is increasingly cited, it is because its contemporary resonance is undeniable.

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Today in The Australian

Lost in the shouting match over the partial shutdown of the US government were the striking findings of a study released late last year. The study, carried out by demographers from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concludes that the number of illegal migrants in the country has been greatly ­underestimated.

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Today in The Australian

As 2018 draws to a close, it is hard to find a Western leader whose auth­ority has survived the year intact. Donald Trump’s presidency may not be derailed by the chaos in Washington but it compounds the sense of a drama veering towards a grim conclusion. Theresa May’s prime ministership hangs by a frayed thread as Brexit edges towards a hard landing. After a string of electoral routs, Angela Merkel has been forced to step down as party leader and announce her departure from the chancellorship. As for Emmanuel Macron, his standing and credibility have been shattered, and his reform agenda with them.

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Today in The Australian

As the global economy sputters and stockmarkets sag, a mere $140,000 will buy the pick-me-up to which every family aspires: the full kit of the Twelve Days of Christmas, from the first partridge to the last drummer, with all the doves, hens, geese, swans, maids, ladies, lords and pipers in between.

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Today in The Australian

In a year best characterised as “plot by Dostoevsky, script by Groucho Marx”, it was perhaps fitting that the Senate celebrated Christmas by considering legislation that would have prevented Christian schools from teaching the doctrines of Jesus Christ.

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Today in The Australian

Watching Malcolm Turnbull’s recent conduct, it was hard not to think of Enoch Powell’s famous conclusion to his biography of ­Joseph Chamberlain. “All political lives,” Powell wrote, “unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs.”

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Today in The Australian

“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared on Armistice Day, before adding, in a thinly disguised swipe at US President Donald Trump, “those who say ‘my interests first, regardless of others!’ rob a country of what gives it greatness: its moral value”.

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Today in The Australian

The American people spoke on Tuesday, but quite what they said will remain contentious for years to come. What is certain, however, is that American politics will be as tumultuous in its next phase as it was in the last.

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Today in The Australian

As Bill Shorten noted in his address to the Lowy Institute on Monday, China is likely to remain Australia’s largest trading partner “for the foreseeable future”. However, that doesn’t mean our interests are necessarily aligned.

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Today in The Australian
It’s time liberals put away childish things

One of the beauties of democracy is that when things don’t work out, there is plenty of blame to spread around. What happened in Wentworth is no exception.

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Today in The Australian

Greed is a deadly sin perhaps, but it helps drive our economy

Anyone who has followed the evidence being given in the financial services royal commission will not be surprised that Kenneth Hayne refers to “greed” more than 50 times in the interim report.

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Today in The Australian

It is hard not to feel uneasy about the treatment being meted out to Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the US ­Supreme Court.

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Today in The Australian

Perhaps the royal commission is the new form of the Last Judgment. As the wicked are exposed and the innocent — should there be any — exonerated, the commissioner, observing the proceedings from an elevated podium, impassably records their fate.

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Today in The Australian

After repeated rampages in Melbourne by African gangs, Australians are hardly likely to find the election results in Sweden surprising. With a sharp rise in violent crime, including a wave of attacks using hand grenades, since the country received an influx of refugees, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats emerged this week as the kingmakers in what is certain to be a hung parliament.

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Today in The Australian

With Australians scratching their heads and wondering what that was all about, Shakespeare’s dictum, “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” has received a solid workout in the public debate. 

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Today in The Australian

Exactly 50 years ago, I spent my birthday protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. At a co-ordinated time, I believe it was Prague’s midnight, a minute of silence was observed in places that circled the globe.

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Today in The Australian

Like a python that has swallowed a pig, we are struggling to digest the population bulge the resources boom left behind. Unless immigration levels are reduced, the costs of that adjustment will only continue to mount, undermining public support for the migration program and jeopardising our ability to continue reaping the large gains migration brings.

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Today in The Australian

Fuel-efficiency regulation impact draft is a fantasy

Just two good things can be said for the government’s draft regulation impact statement on “improving the efficiency of new light vehicles”.

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Today in The Australian: "NEG might be the answer but Turnbull needs to explain why"

 Experts agree that a steady diet of fudge, cream pies and french fries is far healthier than consuming grains and vegetables. Or at least they do in 2173, according to Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973).

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Today in The Australian

That genius of modern politics, Edmund Blackadder, could have had Labor in mind when he said “we in the Adder Party are going to fight this campaign on issues, not personalities … because our candidate doesn’t have a personality”.

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Today in The Australian

Were there a prize for the slogan that best captures the spirit of the age, it would surely go to the ACTU’s “Change the Rules!”

Stingy bosses? “Change the Rules!” Mean-minded bankers? “Change the Rules!” Spiking electricity prices? “Change the Rules!”

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Today in The Australian

With NATO and Putin, Trump’s cleaning up after Obama

In a widely acclaimed column in last weekend’s The New York Times, Bret Stephens argued that Donald Trump’s foreign policy aimed at one result and one result only: “The collapse of the liberal international order”, even at the cost of leaving America hated, feared and alone.

Today in The Australian

As the EU’s heads of government gather to discuss policies towards asylum-seekers, migration is causing political turmoil throughout the developed world.

With Pauline Hanson deciding to support the government’s proposed tax changes, Australians now face a stark choice between competing visions of our fiscal ­future.

Well, that will teach senator ­Fraser Anning a lesson. And it should be a warning to us all. If you thought the ABC’s Fact Check was about checking facts, think again.

Today in The Australian

With the government having received the report of the religious freedom review, both Labor and the Coalition have promised at least to retain the protections that are now in place.

Today in The Australian
With planeloads of tourists descending on London for the royal wedding, and an expected television audience in the hundreds of millions, Britain’s royalty remains the greatest show on earth.

Today in The Australian
Even the innocent are lost to this virtual lynch mob

Eric Schneiderman, the attorney-general of New York who resigned on Monday just hours after being accused of sexual misconduct, apparently suffers from Portnoy’s Complaint, which Philip Roth defined, on the first page of his novel by that name, as “a disorder in which strongly felt ­altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse ­nature”.

Today in The Australian

Karl Marx, who was born on May 5, 1818, has not had much luck with centenaries.
When his first centenary was celebrated in 1918, the international socialist movement he had fought so tirelessly to create had been torn apart by World War I, with the revolutionary turmoil in Russia inducing further convulsions.

Today in The Australian


If there is a lesson to be drawn from the trail of horrors uncovered by the banking and financial ser­vices royal commission, it is the folly of forcing ever greater financial risk on to people who lack the skills to manage it.

Today in The Australian

It is true that Melbourne, with just half London’s population, covers six times London’s area, as Shaping a Nation, the research paper on migration released earlier this week by the Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs, claims. But it hardly follows that Melbourne should, or sensibly could, aim to achieve London’s population density.

Today in The Australian

Listening, on the eve of its 10th anniversary, to recordings of the Rudd government’s 2020 Summit, it was hard not to be reminded of Rossini’s quip about Wagner. “One cannot judge Wagner’s ­Lohengrin from a first hearing,” said the maestro, “and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.”

Today in The Australian

For all his bellicose rhetoric, ­Donald Trump’s trade policy is not a major departure from the traditional American stance. But with China mounting an aggressive response, the world trading system is under greater threat than it has been for decades.

Today in The Australian

After a week of taxation claim and counterclaim, 10 propositions are essentially uncontested.

First, Labor’s elimination of the full reimbursement of imputation credits will replace a system where dividends received by Australian residents are taxed at their personal income tax rates by one in which all dividends are taxed at no less than 30 per cent, even if that rate is well above the rate which would apply to any other taxable income that taxpayer might receive.

Today in The Australian

When imputation credits were made fully reimbursable, Labor wasn’t merely supportive — it was positively gushing.

Calling attention to the benefits full reimbursement would provide to a “low-income person who earns a little investment income”, Peter Cook, Labor’s then deputy leader in the Senate, claimed paternity for the policy, which Labor had taken to the previous election.

Today in The Australian


Bill Shorten has a plan for dealing with union thuggery: he will make it legal. Addressing members of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union last October at Queensland’s Oaky North coalmine, where CFMEU protesters allegedly threatened to rape the children of non-striking workers, the Opposition Leader promised to tear up Australia’s industrial relations law.

Today in The Australian
 
Like Casablanca’s Captain Renault, who was “shocked, shocked” to discover gambling was taking place at Rick’s nightclub, the Democrats on the US House of Representatives’ intelligence committee have barely been able to contain their outrage at evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Today in The Australian

Not content with proposing the largest tax hike in Australia’s peacetime history, Bill Shorten is edging ever closer to endorsing the ACTU’s call for an increase in the minimum wage that rivals the Whitlam government’s disastrous 27 per cent increase in 1973

Today in The Australian

The god of long reports makes sure no one reads them. Having released its 600-page draft report on competition in the Australian financial system, the Productivity Commission would do well to keep the candles at that god’s shrine burning

Today in The Australian

With Australians settling back into work after the summer break, last week’s release of the latest estimates of productivity growth suggests we are still struggling to increase the efficiency with which we use the nation’s resources.

Today in The Australian

With Donald Trump’s first year as 45th President of the United States drawing to a close, America’s economy is growing strongly, the unemployment rate is at an 18-year low (and that for black Americans is lower than at any time since data began to be collected in 1972), consumer and business confidence are high, and the stockmarket has reached new peaks.

Today in The Australian

With the politics of envy in full swing, it is worth remembering that the millions who came to these shores since the First Fleet arrived 230 years ago were driven not by the prospect of living at other people’s expense but by the aspiration to forge a better life for themselves and their children.

Today in The Australian

Shorn of its bombast, the argument for becoming a republic is that it would complete the “Australianisation” of the office of head of state without altering the ­substance of our constitutional ­arrangements.

Today in The Australian

Arriving in Australia many decades ago, the first thing I learned was that real Australians never complain. In this country, outrageous fortune seemed to be wasting her time: the cruellest slings and arrows were met with a stoicism that made Seneca look like a whingeing Pom.

Today in The Australian

 Paul Keating’s attack on Robert Menzies is merely the latest episode in the politicisation of Australian history. Lost in that attack, which seeks to portray Menzies as an appeaser who would have left Australia undefended in World War II, is even the slightest pretence of historical accuracy.

Today in The Australian

Not long ago, Andrew Leigh, the opposition assistant Treasury spokesman and spokesman on competition, told us that “Australia’s markets are more concentrated than those in comparable countries” — and, brace yourself, “the problem is getting worse”.

Today in The Australian


When the voters of Bennelong turfed John Howard out exactly 10 years ago, “Kevin 07” seemed to offer a fresh alternative to a government that was scarred and wearied after four terms in office.

Today in The Australian
Dual citizenship: this parliament of ‘foreigners’ is listing

As braces of bloodhounds scour Parliament House for dual nationals, section 44(i) of the Constitution has crippled the gov­ernment and, depending on the outcome in the seat of Bennelong, may make Bill Shorten prime minister.

In an age where the default approach is for people to yell at each other, Leith van Onselen prefers to bellow, as he did last week on the Macrobusiness blog with me as the target (https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/11/henry-ergas-jukes-stats-falling-workers-share-2/). I don’t know van Onselen, but he describes himself as ‘unconventional.’ Never was a truer word said. 

Today in The Australian

It is a truth universally acknow­ledged that we live in a post-truth age.

That Sally McManus’s speech on the 110th anniversary of the Harvester decision last week is ­replete with claims whose only ­relationship to reality is that they contradict it may therefore be par for the course.

Today in The Australian
 
“Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” proclaimed the banners in the Moscow mausoleum as Lenin’s embalmed body was laid to rest; but 100 years after the storming of the Winter Palace, all that remains of the communist utopia the Bolsheviks promised when they seized power on November 7, 1917, is the dust and ashes of its victims.

Today in The Australian


Scott Morrison’s proposed Banking Executive Accountability ­Regime (BEAR) seems designed to neutralise Bill Shorten’s call for a royal commission into banking.

Today in The Australian

If there is a lesson from Australian energy policy, it is that it is far easier to make a fish soup out of an aquarium than vice-versa. But even though Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have not worked a miracle, their National Energy Guarantee could be a first step to reversing the harm caused to what was once a relatively well-functioning electricity market.

Today in The Australian


Faced with legitimate questions about the future submarine program, Christopher Pyne’s approach has been to mimic the great name-calling scene in Waiting for Godot: “Ceremonious ape!”, “Punctilious pig!”, “Moron!”, “Vermin!”, “Sewer-rat!”, “Curate!”, “Cretin!” — culminating in Estragon’s most devastating of insults to Vladimir: “Crritic!”

Today in The Australian


The continuing crisis in Catalonia highlights once again the dangers plebiscites pose to social coherence and stability. By reducing complex problems to simple questions, they can exacerbate divisions rather than build agreement, while worsening the tyranny of the majority.

Today in The Australian
Having won a fourth term, Angela Merkel has secured a place in the pantheon of German chancellors alongside her fellow conservatives Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl. But there is no denying that the coalition she leads of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union has emerged battered and bruised from last Sunday’s election.

Today in The Australian

 Tomorrow “Jacindamania” could propel Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Labour Party’s 37-year-old leader, into the prime ministership. No doubt local factors will play a role: having been in gov­ernment almost a decade, the ­National Party, despite a solid ­record, has struggled to convince voters it has much to offer.

Today in The Australian

Australian citizenship is qualification enough to serve in parliament

If so many parliamentarians risk being disqualified under section 44(1) of the Constitution, it is ­because parliament’s composition broadly reflects that of Australian society. With 49 per cent of Australia’s population either born overseas or having a parent who was, dual nationality, or at least the entitlement to dual nationality, has become widespread.

Today in The Australian

On August 9, 2007, France’s biggest listed bank, BNP Paribas, froze €1.6 billion worth of funds backed by subprime mortgages, signalling the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Today in The Australian

  The problem with the National Broadband Network was always very simple. The project’s goals were worthy: to provide a new, albeit extremely costly, high-speed network, earn a reasonable return on taxpayers’ investment and charge readily affordable prices.

Today in The Australian

 When Bill Shorten says “tax reform” what he means is the largest peacetime increase in tax rates since federation.

Today in The Australian

A dogma, Groucho Marx might have said, is a man’s best friend. After all, no one could deny that a fixed set of beliefs can sustain good combat, soothe defeat and simplify hard choices.

Today in The Australian

It’s those wretched Catholics again. If you believe the press, they are spending substantially less than they should on Catholic schools in low-income areas, while using taxpayer dollars to subsidise the ones that compete with independent schools at the top end. Yet there they go, howling about the new school funding package.

Today in The Australian

French election: Macron’s huge majority a misleading guide to France

In Britain, voters split on left-right lines; in France, they moved to the centre. Little wonder the commentary has been all over the place, with some pundits claiming the swing to Jeremy Corbyn heralds a revival of the clash between left and right, while others have hailed Emmanuel Macron’s triumph as signalling a move away from the politics of division.

Today in The Australian

Let’s be clear: increasing taxes is not necessarily bad. After all, if we are genuinely unwilling to curb public spending, then we ought to pay for it rather than passing the bill to future generations.

Today in The Australian

If Macron beats Le Pen, he will still face a divided France

Like all populists, Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate in France’s presidential election, gives bad answers to good questions. And like so many of their opponents, Emmanuel Macron, her leading rival, would rather avoid those questions altogether.

Today in The Australian

It is easy to imagine what people thought as they heard the news from London: this will never end. But they will also have thought: this cannot be allowed to continue.

Today in The Australian

With the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decisively rejecting the Trump administration’s application for its executive order on immigration to be reinstated, the question of whether the checks and balances America’s system of government imposes on the new administration will remain effective has moved to the centre of the political debate.

Today in The Australian

Released just before Australia Day, the British Supreme Court’s decision on Brexit reminds us of a fundamental truth: the British system of government, which was Britain’s greatest gift to its former colonies, rests on the supremacy of parliament.