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Guardian Australia · Guardian Staff
Israel's ambassador tells the National Press Club he's unaware the investigation into the drone strike killing of Australian aid worker Zomi Frankcom has been shelved with no prosecutions, while former defence chief Mark Binskin was denied access to drone audio during his inquiry.
An ambassador who isn't aware his own government shelved the investigation is either lying or proving the investigation was never serious enough to brief him on. Seven aid workers killed by drone strikes and the inquiry couldn't access the drone audio — that's not an investigation, it's a pantomime performed for an audience too polite to heckle. Binskin's report lands on Albanese's desk, where it joins the growing pile of things this government will describe as 'deeply concerning' before doing absolutely nothing about.
SMH · Paul Sakkal
Labor and the Coalition united behind a push to add roughly 40 MPs to parliament, with critics arguing both parties are motivated by self-interest rather than improved representation.
Both sides of the aisle finally found common ground — turns out the one thing that unites Labor and Liberal is the prospect of more seats for their own. Forty extra MPs in a building that can't pass a housing bill or fix the submarines. Metternich expanded his bureaucracy to manage an empire; we're expanding ours to manage the car park. The only growth industry in Canberra is Canberra.
Michael West Media · AAP
Israel's ambassador to Australia has declined to apologise for peacekeeper deaths and defended his country's actions in Lebanon, while the Albanese government calls for an investigation it has no mechanism to enforce.
Australia 'urges a probe' the way a bystander urges someone to call an ambulance — loudly, publicly, and without reaching for the phone themselves. The ambassador declines to apologise and Canberra responds with the diplomatic equivalent of a strongly-worded fridge magnet. When your foreign policy consists entirely of expressing concern at people who've made clear they don't care, you haven't got a policy — you've got a coping mechanism.
Michael West Media · AAP
Australian shares crept higher on a tech rally, cheerfully ignoring geopolitical instability in what passes for market confidence.
The market edging higher despite geopolitical chaos isn't resilience — it's amnesia with a Bloomberg terminal. Tech stocks rally because the algorithm doesn't read the foreign desk, and the fund managers stopped pretending they do. We don't defy tensions; we price them in, which is the financial sector's way of saying we've decided not to care until the invoice arrives.
SBS News
Economists warn that cutting fuel excise could push inflation higher and trigger RBA rate hikes, meaning the cost-of-living relief may cost households more than it saves.
Cutting fuel excise to ease the cost of living while the Reserve Bank watches inflation like a hawk with a migraine — it's the policy equivalent of taking a painkiller with a glass of whiskey. You feel better for twenty minutes, then the headache's worse and now you've got a new problem. Bowen's defending it because the hip pocket is the only organ this government knows how to scan. The mortgage holders paying for this relief won't find it very relieving.
news.com.au
Cop killer Dezi Freeman found dead after seven months on the run, leaving questions over who claims the $1 million reward and whether the massive manhunt delivered anything resembling justice.
Seven months, a million-dollar reward, and the largest manhunt in recent memory — and the system's final product is a body in the bush and a cheque nobody knows who to write. Freeman didn't escape justice; he rendered it moot, which is worse. The state spent seven months proving it could find a man, only to discover that finding him was never the point.
SMH
SMH and The Age run their daily cartoon roundup, packaging political illustrations as standalone news content — raising the question of what the rest of the pages are for.
When a masthead runs a cartoon roundup as a standalone story, it's not curating — it's admitting the drawings carry the editorial line the opinion pages won't. The cartoonists aren't illustrating the news; they're doing the journalism the building around them has outsourced to access and adjacency. A newspaper that leads with its artists isn't celebrating them — it's confessing it has nothing left to say in prose.
Guardian Australia · Josh Butler
Diesel and petrol prices surged 10% and 8% in a week across major cities as the government reassured the public on supply levels and dismissed the Coalition's call to halve fuel excise.
The government says supply is fine while prices climb ten percent in a week — the rhetorical equivalent of a dentist saying 'you won't feel a thing' while reaching for the drill. The Coalition's answer is to halve the excise, which is cutting the price tag off a problem you built over fifty years of refusing to diversify. Both sides are arguing about the receipt while the house runs on a single fuel line through the Strait of Hormuz.
The Conversation · Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
The Albanese government will halve fuel excise for three months, cutting petrol costs by 26.3 cents per litre at a cost of $2.55 billion to the budget.
Two and a half billion dollars to shave twenty-six cents off a litre for three months — the fiscal equivalent of holding an umbrella over a sandcastle. Halving the excise doesn't halve the dependence; it subsidises it. Every temporary fuel cut since Howard's day has bought ninety days of relief and another decade of avoiding the structural question. The cheapest petrol policy in Australia is the one no government will build: an alternative to needing it.
The Conversation · Terry Goldsworthy, Associate Professor in Criminal Justice and Criminology, Bond University
After 216 days on the run, fugitive Dezi Freeman was shot dead by police — months after they publicly declared they believed he was already dead, in what may have been a deliberate tactical deception.
Police told the public their man was dead, then shot him alive — the operational equivalent of a magician revealing the trick by performing it twice. Two hundred and sixteen days of manhunt resolved not by the machinery of modern policing but by the oldest bluff in the handbook: tell the quarry the hunt's over and wait for him to surface. That it worked says less about tactical brilliance than about how long you can run in a country with three million square kilometres of nothing much.
