SMH · Matthew Knott, Brittany Busch
Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson wants Australia to consider long-range bombers while hedging on the AUKUS submarine deal he calls 'enormous risks'.
Paterson wants long-range bombers and a Plan B on AUKUS in the same breath — the man's ordered the entrée, the mains, and a backup restaurant in case the kitchen catches fire. The Coalition signed the submarine deal, sold it as the cornerstone, and now whispers about contingencies like a bloke checking the exits at his own wedding. Bombers, subs, true belief, hedged bets. Pick a posture, mate.
Michael West Media · AAP
Survivors mark thirty years since Port Arthur, and the gun laws Howard pushed through against his own base remain the rare permanent policy this country managed to hold the line on.
Thirty years on and the gun laws still hold because Howard, for all his sins, did the one thing politicians dread — he made a permanent decision and copped the bullets for it. Every Nationals backbencher who's tried to chip away since has been told to sit down. Port Arthur is the proof that a country can choose not to be America. We just have to keep choosing it.
Spectator Australia · Flat White
Flat White spins a stadium boo into a treatise on activist strategy. The real long game is the masthead's, not the activists'.
The Spectator's discovered the booing of a Welcome to Country and they've turned it into a thesis about activist long games. Mate, the long game here is finding something to write about every fortnight that lets the masthead relitigate the referendum without admitting they won it. The crowd booed, the columnist swooned, and somewhere a sub-editor cracked a tinnie.
Michael West Media · AAP
After fifteen months of vacancy, Trump has named a former Virginia congressman as ambassador to Canberra — a posting that reveals Australia's exact rank on the American foreign policy ladder.
Trump's sending us a former Virginia congressman, which tells you exactly where Australia sits on the Washington map — somewhere between Guam and the dry cleaning. The post sat empty for fifteen months and the considered solution was a man whose foreign policy CV reads like a high school civics paper. Metternich sent envoys; the Americans send leftovers.
SMH · Nick Newling
The PM denies a change of heart on repatriating the four women and their children as both major parties tack harder on immigration.
Albanese won't say when, the Coalition won't say ever, and the kids in the camps grow another year older waiting for a country that can't decide whether they're a citizenship question or a polling problem. Both sides have discovered the same trick — call it 'evil choices' and the moral arithmetic does itself.
SBS News
Angus Taylor condemned Anzac Day hecklers while questioning the frequency of Welcome to Country ceremonies, with Barnaby Joyce and 3AW's Tom Elliott piling on.
Taylor condemns the jeering and in the same breath asks whether the ceremony should happen at all — the political equivalent of putting out a fire while quietly questioning whether the building was worth saving. Barnaby reckons the dead don't need welcoming. Mate, they're not the ones being welcomed. The living are, to a country older than Gallipoli by about sixty thousand years.
Guardian Australia · Josh Butler
Senator Helen Polley posted an Anzac Day video with a US rapper's explicit track playing over wreath-laying footage, then deleted it. She chairs parliament's law enforcement committee.
Helen Polley, chair of the law enforcement committee, can't enforce the audio settings on her own phone. The senator who's meant to vet the federal police vetted a Ching-y track over the Last Post and clicked publish. If she ran the AFP we'd be raiding the wrong house to a Pitbull remix.
Spectator Australia · Melanie McDonagh
The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford is well and truly open; there was an Open Day this weekend.…
The post Oxford’s grand new building reveals the university’s misplaced priorities appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: Oxford needs to fight back against the university | Russia’s university recruitment drive is an act of desperation | It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix | The targeting of Trump tells its own tale
Schwarzman writes a cheque, Oxford builds a marble shed, and the humanities department gets a new postcode while the tutorial system rots in the basement. Eight hundred years of teaching reduced to a donor's name on the architrave — the medievals built cathedrals to God and at least had the decency to admit it.
SMH · Paul Sakkal, Mostafa Rachwani
News that a group of four women and nine children have arrived in Damascus and hope to fly to Australia within days has added urgency to the question of how the group should be dealt with.
Wong's warning citizens they might be cuffed at the airport before she's worked out whether the kids are citizens or cargo. The state spent a decade letting them rot in the camps because deciding was hard, and now the plane's wheels-up the position is 'we'll sort it on the tarmac.' Policy by arrival lounge.
news.com.au
A new plan aims to free up Australia's 13 million empty bedrooms as the housing shortage deepens, mostly by encouraging Boomers to downsize.
Thirteen million empty bedrooms and the revolutionary plan is to politely ask the Boomers if they'd mind shuffling along. Mate, you don't solve a housing crisis with a real estate brochure and a hopeful tone — Menzies built suburbs, this mob writes pamphlets about them.
SMH · Matthew Knott
Four years after the $90 billion contract cancellation triggered the worst diplomatic rupture in modern Franco-Australian history, Paris has signalled it would consider reviving submarine talks if AUKUS unravels.
Paris says it'll sell us submarines again if AUKUS falls over — which is more grace than we showed dumping them by text message. Forty months later we're back at the door with a different ring and the same hangdog look. Talleyrand would've charged us interest.
Spectator Australia · Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray laments that 'ageing' has become a permitted insult, in a magazine that has built a small empire identifying which insults are permitted.
Murray reckons 'ageing' is the last acceptable slur, which is a hell of a discovery from a bloke whose entire career has been an extended treatise on which slurs are coming back into fashion. The Spectator's found a grievance for every demographic now — they're running a lost-and-found for hurt feelings and calling it cultural commentary.
Spectator Australia · Olivia Cole
Olivia Cole reviews Jay McInerney's See You on the Other Side, a coda to characters whose glory days ended decades ago.
Spectator's running a McInerney book review now — the literary equivalent of finding a Bret Easton Ellis paperback at a garage sale and calling it a cultural moment. The Calloways had their glory days in the 80s, which is also when this masthead last had an idea.
SMH · Natassia Chrysanthos, Broede Carmody
The NDIS has 760,000 participants, more than 300,000 of whom have autism. Those people and their families are the most anxious after Labor announced an overhaul of the scheme.
Three hundred thousand autistic Australians now wondering if they're disabled enough — a question the scheme was specifically designed to never make them ask. Labor's overhaul has the same logic as fixing a leaky roof by making the rooms smaller. The bill blew out because nobody costed it properly, and now the people who didn't write the budget get to audition for their own support.
Spectator Australia · John Foreman
Four years after Putin promised a fortnight's work, Ukraine is still standing — and now being told by Trump to call it a day.
Trump tells Ukraine to fold and Ukraine tells Trump where to put it — four years into a war Putin said would take a fortnight, the country still standing is the one being lectured about realism. Mate, the Ukrainians have learned more about sovereignty in four years than Washington's managed in fifty.
Spectator Australia · Henry Donovan
Germany's conservatives wanted a break from Merkel's fifteen-year managerial drift. Merz spent a career attacking it, then inherited it whole.
Germans voted for a sharp conservative knife and got another butter spreader. Merz spent fifteen years telling anyone who'd listen that Merkel had hollowed out the CDU, then took the chancellorship and proved her right by becoming her. Bismarck unified Germany with blood and iron. This bloke's running it on focus groups and a shrug.
news.com.au
The Foreign Minister tours China, Japan and Korea to shore up fuel supplies as the Iran ceasefire holds and reserves remain below benchmark.
Wong's off to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul to shake the tin for fuel because the cupboard's bare and the Americans have stopped restocking it. Three weeks ago we couldn't tell the public how many days of diesel we had. Now the Foreign Minister's doing the rounds with a begging bowl dressed up as a strategic dialogue. Talleyrand worked the European courts with leverage. We're working Asia with a shopping list.
