Paul J. Berating

Today's Top Stories

⚡ Top Story

SMH · Brittany Busch, Shane Wright

Four in five cigarettes are now illegal — and the sewers prove it

Wastewater analysis shows Australians never stopped smoking — up to four in five cigarettes are now illicit, suggesting tobacco excise has built a black market rather than a quit rate.

Tax a packet to forty bucks and act stunned when it's selling out the back of the servo for fifteen. Sales dropped, so Canberra declared the nation cured — meanwhile the sewers are full of nicotine and the tobacconists are burning across Melbourne. America priced vice out of existence in 1920 and handed the trade to Al Capone. We've done it with excise and called it public health.

SMH · Mike Foley, Shane Wright

The Gulf delivers the climate target Canberra couldn't

Surging petrol prices from the Iran war are pushing motorists into EVs faster than any government policy managed, putting the 2035 climate target back within reach.

A decade of climate policy couldn't shift the fleet. Three weeks of war in the Gulf did it for them. Bowen will stand at the lectern and claim the credit for a petrol price the Ayatollah set.

Guardian Australia · Connor Graham

Honiara gets a new PM and Canberra can only see Beijing

Australia's habit of reading every Pacific change of government as a round in the contest with China risks insulting the very neighbours it claims to court.

Wale wins a vote in Honiara and the first thing out of Canberra is when he'll tear up the Beijing pact — as if a sovereign country exists to referee our blue with China. We notice the Pacific the way you notice the back fence: only when someone else is leaning on it. Talleyrand could read a small power's interests in a glance; we can't see past the scoreboard.

Michael West Media · AAP

Australia rediscovers the Solomons the moment Beijing knocks

Solomon Islands PM Matthew Wale meets Albanese as Canberra pushes for a security treaty, with the visit framed entirely through the contest with China.

Thirty years we treated the Solomons like a spare room we never bothered to visit. Beijing puts a deposit down and suddenly Canberra's at the front door with flowers and a treaty already drafted. Wale's first trip abroad and we're measuring him for an alliance. He's worked out what the whole Pacific knows now — the fastest way to get Australia's attention is to take Beijing's call.