Today in The Australian

The genius of democracy lies in converting adversaries into rivals, channelling their enmity into organised and orderly political competition. But because that competition relies on passions as much as on interests, there is always a risk that the antagonisms it mobilises will spiral out of control, unleashing the violence that democracy itself is intended to avoid.

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Today in The Australian

Coming at the end of a year in which Australians have been subject to restrictions that are unprecedented in peacetime, including widespread and persistent border closures, it may well have been appropriate for Scott Morrison to remind us that we are — or should be — “one and free”.

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Today in The Australian

“Anno bisesto, anno funesto” — leap year, fatal year — goes an ancient Italian saying, whose origins apparently lie in the devastating plague that hit the Italian city-states in the leap year of 1348.

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Today in The Australian

Christmas is for columnists: please give generously

It was three weeks before Christmas when the dreaded telegram arrived. I refer, dear readers, to 40 years ago, when I was not only young and gay (as we used to say in that more innocent age) but, best of all, in Paris.

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Today in The Australian

The silence that has greeted the former US president’s description of Nicolas Sarkozy in his book reflects the normalisation of casual anti-Semitism on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.

The words leap out and grab you. After all, in countless pages of prose, no other world leader is characterised by Barack Obama in anything like those terms.

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Today in The Australian

When the Black Death reached Europe and the Mediterranean in 1346-47, Egypt and England were roughly comparable economies, with similar populations and income levels.

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Today in The Australian

As so often happens with mass production, the quality of China’s lies has plummeted as their number has increased. However, the purpose of its latest outrage was not so much to deceive as to humiliate.

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Today in The Australian

Having held out for many months, All Souls capitulated last week, erasing the name “Codrington” from its world-famous library.

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Today in The Australian

Since the brutal assassination of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded on the street by an ­Islamist for showing his students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, the ABC has distinguished itself by publishing one piece after the other that pins the blame for the French terrorist attacks not on the fanatics and their murderous ideology but — you guessed it — on France.

 

Today in The Australian

Much like the BBC, the ABC was formed, and its mission framed, on the basis of two beliefs that emerged from the trauma of the First World War.

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Today in The Australian

As the West battles the corona virus, the terror attacks in France and Austria come as a stark remind er of the threat for which there is neither a cure nor a vaccine. And the terroristsʼ choice of targets — a schoolteacher, decapitated for displaying a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed; churchgoers in Nice, murdered for their Christian faith; innocent Viennese, shot as they enjoyed their evening close to the cityʼs central synagogue — highlights every bit as starkly that threatʼs horrific nature.

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Today in The Australian

Many decades ago, in that fleeting parenthesis between the ravages of Marxism and those of the assault on Dead White Males, there raged in academia something of a great debate about Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.

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Today in The Australian
As pillars of probity, ASIC pair should know better

Whether Christine Holgate, the CEO of Australia Post, acted properly in distributing designer watches to the senior executives who had secured a major contract will be determined by the inquiries that are now under way. But whether she acted wisely is another question.

 

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Today in The Australian

Islam and the West: We must strike back or soon we’ll all be Samuel Paty

Samuel Paty, the French schoolteacher decapitated last Friday for showing his students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, did not lose his life in a clash of civilisations; he lost it in a clash between civilisation and barbarism.

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Today in The Australian

The past week has hardly been kind on our political system’s image. In NSW, Gladys Berejik­lian’s previously untarnished reputation was battered by revelations of her relationship with Daryl Maguire, a disgraced former Liberal MP.

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Today in The Australian

Recent polls that show a majority of Australians support tough restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 may well reflect public perceptions of the risks associated with the disease.

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Today in The Australian

Eyes wide shut – Victoria’s debacle shows the public service sector remains steeped in political expediency

“When I leave home to walk to school / Dad always says to me / ‘Marco, keep your eyelids up / And see what you can see.” So begins the classic 1937 children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr Seuss.

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Today in The Australian

Sophocles’ legendary tyrant was supremely political, imbued with the casual ­ruthlessness of those whose craft is power. This cynicism is also on display in Queensland and Victoria.

Almost 2500 years after it was first performed, Sophocles’s Antigone has seemed more relevant — ever since Queensland refused Sarah Caisip, a 26-year-old Canberra-based graduate nurse, permission to attend her father’s funeral.

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Today in The Australian

The cruellest thing one can do to Daniel Andrews’s explanation of Victoria’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 is to read it a second time. After all, given the costs that are being inflicted on Victorians and on the country as a whole, one might assume, on a first reading, that a cogent justification for the strategy lay hidden in the explanatory material Andrews used last Sunday.

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Today in The Australian

Whatever else it may do, the BBC’s decision first to drop the lyrics of Rule, Britannia from the last night of the Proms and then, faced with public outrage, reinstate them, should lay to rest any remaining doubts about the abject ignorance that underlies today’s cancel culture.

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Today in The Australian

Enshrined in article 13 (2) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reaffirmed in article 12 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the principle that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own and to return to his country” has always been regarded as foundational to a free society.

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Today in The Australian

There is a great deal to dislike, and not much to like, in West Australia’s Iron Ore Processing (Mineralogy Pty Ltd) Agreement Amendment Act 2020, which overrides the outcomes of the state’s long-running dispute with Clive Palmer and extinguishes Palmer’s rights to damages.

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Today in The Australian

As our aged-care homes battle COVID-19, the sector’s longstanding problems have come dramatically to the fore.

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Today in The Australian

As the deficits being incurred by Australian governments continue to spiral, the claim that we are “borrowing from the future” has become increasingly widespread.

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Today in The Australian

“Are they any use?” Rambert, the journalist, asks in Camus’s The Plague when he is told to put on a mask of cottonwool enclosed in muslin before entering the hospital. No, not really, his guide replies, although they “inspire confidence in others”.

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Today in The Australian

A missed opportunity at best, an inconsistent and questionable judg­ment at worst, the decision of the full Federal Court in the dispute between Peter Ridd and James Cook University deserves to be reviewed by the High Court.

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Today in The Australian

When the Menzies government took office in December 1949, Australia’s public debt stood at 120 per cent of GDP. By the time Robert Menzies retired, on Australia Day, 1966, that proportion had dropped below 50 per cent. With the Treasurer on Thursday announcing “eye-watering” debt and deficits, the lessons of that achievement deserve to be at the forefront of public attention.

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Today in The Australian

This has been a hard year for the traditional virtues, not least that which used to be known as prudence.

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Today in The Australian

With families cowering in apartments surrounded by police, Victoriaʼs lockdown of its housing commission towers could only be described as barbaric.

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Today in The Australian

Seventy years ago today, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was born at a conference in Berlin that brought together intellectuals from across the non-communist world.

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Today in The Australian

Ten days from now, when the bulk of the Powerhouse Museum is closed down, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in Australian history will be committed not by the lunatic left but by a Liberal government. Twelve months later, the remaining parts of the museum will also be shuttered, bringing to an end a presence in the Sydney district of Ultimo that began in 1893.

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Today in The Australian

When Thomas Woolnerʼs statue of Captain James Cook was unveiled in Sydney on February 25, 1879, The Sydney Morning Herald described the event, which attracted 70,000 spectators, as the “grandest spectacle” in Australian history, while Henry Parkes, whose government had commissioned it in 1875, proclaimed that “the genius of the thing quite thrilled”.

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Today in The Australian
In the midst of the Weimar Republic’s disastrous hyperinflation of 1923, Eduard Koppenstatter, a prominent astrologer, correlated movements in the value of the German mark with those of the planets. Having concluded that there were “law-like relations” between monetary indicators and “the course of the stars”, he produced economic forecasts for the years ahead.

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Today in The Australian

If separatism is such misery, do we try integration?

That indigenous Australians, who make up 3 per cent of this country’s population, account for 30 per cent of its prisoners is a national disgrace. That by the time they reach the age of 23, 75 per cent of young indigenous people in NSW will have been cautioned by police, referred to a youth justice conference or convicted of an offence in a criminal court — compared with just 17 per cent of their non-indigenous counterparts — makes the disgrace all the more searing.

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Today in The Australian

With America’s cities descending into lawlessness, it would be easy to conclude that the country is on the verge of collapse. In reality, the problems gripping the US are both more enduring and less apocalyptic than that impression suggests.

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Today in The Australian

 

Fifty years ago this month, 200,000 people marched through Australia’s cities in the first ­Vietnam moratorium. The period leading up to the demonstrations had been tumultuous on campuses across the country, including at the University of Queensland. ­Already by 1967, opposition to conscription had merged there with protests against the state ­government’s restrictions on civil liberties, unleashing an escalating tide of agitation.

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Today in The Australian

With China’s trade war against Australia escalating, the scene seems distressingly contemporary: a fraying global order, riven by mounting tensions between states; an ascendant, brutally authoritarian power, determined to throw its weight around; and dependent economies which, though formally independent, find their room for manoeuvre increasingly compromised as the rising power uses its economic clout to punish them for stepping out of line.

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Today in The Australian

“No one could have foreseen five or 10 years ago the situation we face,” Emmanuel Macron declared in early March, as he sought to explain the shortages of personal protective equipment and respirators that had plunged France into a devastating crisis.

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Today in The Australian

In December 1919, as the Bolsheviks struggled with a typhus epidemic that killed more than five million people, Lenin famously declared “either socialism will defeat the louse or the louse will defeat socialism”.

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Today in The Australian

On April 25, 1920, as he prepared to return to Britain, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, governor-general of Australia, attended the Anzac Day service in the NSW town of Inverell, before spending the afternoon with more than 20 returned soldiers from the shire who had lost their legs in the war.

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Coronavirus: Return to sender — economists’ letter is gibberish
HENRY ERGAS and JONATHAN PINCUS

Like some books, there are petitions that deserve to be forgotten, not for the sake of their potential readers but to protect the reput­ation of their authors. The open letter by a bevy of economists urging­ Scott Morrison to keep the COVID-19 restrictions in place is a case in point.

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Today in The Australian:

With the toll from the coronavirus declining to very low levels, Australians need some clarity about the path back towards normality.

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Today in The Australian

When Albert Camus set out to write The Plague, the novel that more than any other work earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1957, words almost failed him.

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Today in The Australian

While the response of federal and state governments to the spread of COVID-19 is understandable, there must be a danger of going too far.

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Today in The Australian

 

On March 24, 1976, as the US prepared to celebrate its ­bicentenary, president Gerald Ford faced a decision­ which could only damage his chances of winning the ­election that was to be held that ­November.

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Today in The Australian
Cosmic catastrophe always there if you look for it

In one of his last works, written a decade after he had defined ­enlightenment as “daring to know”, Immanuel Kant identified what he regarded as one of the greatest threats to reason: the human tendency to seek, in ever-changing realitie­s, a sign of the End of Days.

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Ironically, the virus firms up Xiʼs position – for now

As governments and central banks scramble to restore confidence and support economic activity, the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic remain clouded in uncertainty.

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Today in The Australian

Whatever its intentions, the High Court’s decision in Love and Thoms does indigenous Australians no favours.

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Today in The Australian

When the great cholera epidemics of the 19th century began in 1820, no one had any idea what had struck. Here was a disease of astonishing ferocity, as terrifying as the plague and seemingly as unstoppable, that was rapidly making its way from the Far East towards Europe.

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Today in The Australian

Seventy-five years ago, as the war raged with unrelenting ferocity, Australia’s daily papers reported, typically in a snippet at the bottom of page 4, that on what is now Australia Day a “terrible concentration camp” had been captured at Oswiecim, in southwestern Poland.

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Today in The Australian

It may be the fate of most public intellectuals to become more and more public and less and less intellectual; it was never that of the late Roger Scruton.

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Today in The Australian

With the flames still raging, it is too early to tell how great the losses from this season’s bushfires will be. Already now, however, the ­commonwealth government has pledged $2bn for a National Bushfire Recovery Agency, while the NSW government has announced an additional $1bn in recovery funding.

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Today in The Australian

As the children, “running and running, running to a standstill”, brought news to the volunteer firefighters in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man of yet another outbreak in the terrifying fire at Durilgai, “passionate volumes of smoke towered above the bush, and in that smoke (writhed) dark, indistinguishable bodies, as if something were being translated forcibly into space”.

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Today in The Australian

This Cold War is more messy, complex and dangerous If the decade that is about to end saw Chinaʼs emergence as a global power, it also witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of the US. With the EU sinking into insignificance, the world is once again bipolar, but in a more complex and uncertain way than it was during the lengthy era of the Cold War.
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Today in The Australian

How fortunate is the true love in the Twelve Days of Christmas! From the first partridge in a pear tree to the last drummer drumming she receives exactly 364 gifts: a present for each and every day of the year to come, excluding Christmas Day.

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Today in The Australian

According to Kenneth Hayne, former High Court judge and commissioner of last year’s financial services royal commission, Australian company directors need to spend more time worrying about climate change.

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Today in The Australian

It is ironic that just as President Emmanuel Macron, along with the UN Secretary-General and a bevy of “world leaders” at the UN Climate Change Summit, calls for a dramatic acceleration in the transition to low-emissions ­sources of energy, France’s nuclear power industry faces a future that is more uncertain than ever.

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Today in The Australian

According to Ephraim Mirvis, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “the overwhelming majority of British Jews” are “gripped by anxiety” at the possibility of a Labour victory.

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Today in The Australian

With the House of Commons finally­ agreeing to an early election, the polls point to a substantial Conservative victory.

That is partly because Boris Johnson — who was widely dismissed as a clown when he took over the party’s leadership at the end of July — has raised support for the Tories from the catas­trophic low of 20-25 per cent it had reached before he became Prime Minister to 35-40 per cent today.

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Today in The Australian

There’s need for secrecy — it’s a question of balance

As the blacked-out front pages of Monday’s newspapers reminded us, a free press is the foundation of liberty. In a world in which the abuse of power comes as no surprise, its vigilance helps to expose injustice, deter those who would perpetrate it and ensure governments are held to account.

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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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