Spectator Australia · Tom Knowles
The Spectator Australia runs a speculative piece on whether AI can achieve godlike understanding of physics, sandwiched between book reviews and cultural essays about cormorants and Nuremberg.
The Spectator asking whether artificial intelligence can become godlike — mate, most of the magazines in that building can't become relevant. A publication that runs its science coverage between book reviews and a piece about cormorants wants to know if machines can crack the infinite mysteries of the universe. Hawking used a speech synthesiser to explain black holes. The Spectator's using a London postcode to explain everything else.
Spectator Australia · David Shipley
The Spectator Australia runs a UK story about law firms coaching asylum seekers on sexuality-based claims, treating a British domestic policy debate as content for Australian outrage.
The Spectator Australia running a story about British asylum law is like a bloke in Wagga reading the Cheltenham form guide — technically literate, practically useless, and entirely designed to make you angry about a race you can't bet on. David Shipley's discovered that lawyers exploit loopholes, which is roughly as newsworthy as discovering that water runs downhill.
Michael West Media · AAP
A fire at one of Australia's two remaining oil refineries has renewed concerns about fuel import dependency, after decades of refinery closures reduced domestic capacity to a bare minimum.
Two refineries. We had seven. Now one's on fire and the other's carrying the country like a bloke with a piano on his back. Thirty years of privatisation, closure, and crossed fingers, and the national fuel security plan amounts to 'hope the other one doesn't go up too.' Menzies built Snowy Hydro for sovereignty. We can't keep a fuel depot lit without importing the fuel to put the fire out.
Spectator Australia · Will Bennett
The Spectator Australia covers OpenAI's white paper on AI industrial policy, presenting its five-point framework as a blueprint for Australian AI strategy.
OpenAI publishes a white paper saying governments should build infrastructure for OpenAI, and the Spectator runs it up the flagpole like it's Bismarck's telegram. Five points, none of them 'fund public universities doing the research these companies commercialise for free.' The intelligence age arrives and the first thing it does is lobby.
SMH · Shane Wright, Natassia Chrysanthos
Paul Keating has launched a blistering attack on Angus Taylor and the Coalition's migration policy, calling it cowardly and racist — a throwback to the politics the Liberal Party once claimed to have outgrown.
The old man's come off the long run again, and fair enough — when Taylor's mob started dog-whistling on migration, they weren't just abandoning Menzies's broad church, they were burning it down for the insurance money. Keating at eighty-two still throws harder than the entire shadow cabinet combined. The Liberals keep handing him the bat and then complaining about the bruises.
Michael West Media · AAP
A dozen finance ministers, Australia's included, have issued a joint statement urging the US, Israel and Iran to uphold a ceasefire as global economic instability deepens.
Twelve finance ministers have signed a letter asking three countries currently lobbing ordnance at each other to please consider the global economy. Metternich sent armies. Bismarck sent ultimatums. We send a joint statement with a dozen signatures, like a strata committee complaining about noise from the unit that's on fire.
SMH · Shane Wright
Australia's unemployment held at 4.1% with a jump in full-time jobs, but the participation rate fell as fewer people looked for work. Economist Saul Eslake warns a rate rise could tip the economy into recession.
Unemployment steady at 4.1% and the financial press has written 'resilient' in the headline again, the way a coroner might write 'stable' about a patient who's stopped breathing. The participation rate dropped because people left the labour force, mate. You can't be unemployed if you've given up — that's not resilience, that's accounting.
Guardian Australia · Benita Kolovos and Nino Bucci
An explosive fire at the Viva Energy refinery in Geelong — one of only two oil refineries left in Australia — has halted petrol production, raising fuel supply fears across Victoria and nationally.
Two refineries. We have two refineries in a country the size of a continent, and one of them's on fire. Every defence white paper for twenty years has flagged fuel security as a strategic vulnerability, and every government has responded by commissioning another report and hoping the tankers keep coming from Singapore. Corio isn't an accident — it's the sound a country makes when it outsources sovereignty and the invoice finally arrives.
Michael West Media · AAP
Harry and Meghan reunite in Melbourne on day two of their Australian tour, with plans to engage with Indigenous culture and communities.
Two people who left the monarchy to escape the institution are back to soak up someone else's culture for the cameras. The Windsors have been doing that since 1788.
Michael West Media · AAP
March unemployment figures expected to show early economic fallout from the Middle East conflict, with analysts watching for signs of labour market softening amid rising fuel costs and supply disruptions.
March jobs data as the 'first glimpse' of war impact — mate, the petrol price told you three weeks ago and the Reserve Bank's been staring at the ceiling pretending it can't hear. We don't need the ABS to confirm what every trucking company from Wodonga to Wollongong already knows. The data will arrive, the economists will act surprised, and the policy response will arrive sometime around never.
Michael West Media · AAP
Australia commits an additional $53 billion in defence spending over the next decade under a renewed ADF strategy, marking the largest peacetime military investment in the nation's history.
Fifty-three billion more for defence and nobody can tell you what we're defending against that we weren't defending against last year. Menzies armed the country to face an empire. This mob's arming it to face a spreadsheet from AUKUS. Record peacetime spend — peacetime being the word that does all the heavy lifting in that sentence, because it assumes the peace holds long enough to finish the procurement.