⚡ Top Story
SMH · Mike Foley, Brittany Busch
Energy Minister Chris Bowen says fuel imports remain stable and rationing is not being contemplated, responding to concerns about Australia's fuel supply resilience.
'A long way from fuel rationing' is the kind of reassurance you only need to offer when someone's already smelled smoke. Bowen's answering a question nobody asked six months ago, which tells you more than the answer does.
news.com.au
Former PM Tony Abbott has urged Anthony Albanese to contact Donald Trump and offer Australian support in the conflict with Iran.
Abbott's never met a foreign conflict he didn't want to volunteer someone else's kids for. The bloke who couldn't keep his own cabinet together reckons he should be advising on Iran — like a man who burned down the kitchen offering to cater your wedding.
news.com.au
Australia is copping extreme weather from every direction simultaneously — cyclonic winds, heatwave conditions and snow, all in the same week across different states.
Four seasons in a weekend and the Bureau still has to beg for funding like a busker outside Treasury. We built a continent-sized country on the assumption the climate would sit still, and now it's moving in every direction at once while the national conversation is about gas prices.
ABC News · Tom Lowrey
Australia's chief of defence says the ADF could deploy a warship to the Strait of Hormuz if the government requested it, amid rising tensions over Iran and US pressure on allies to contribute to regional security operations.
The defence chief says we could absolutely send a warship to the Hormuz if asked, which has the same energy as a bloke at the pub announcing he could absolutely fight the bouncer if provoked. Nobody doubted the ship floats, mate. The question is who decides where it sails, and the answer — as always — is whoever rings from Washington.
SMH · Clay Lucas
Former SAS captain and Coalition MP Andrew Hastie may testify in the Ben Roberts-Smith murder trial, calling the arrest a 'sobering day' while cautioning against prejudicing proceedings.
Hastie calls it a 'sobering day' — mate, the Brereton report landed in 2020. Six years to get from 'credible information' to criminal charges while the regiment closed ranks, the decorated walked free, and the political class discovered its concern for due process at exactly the pace required to avoid doing anything uncomfortable. The sobriety was always available. Nobody ordered it.
Michael West Media · AAP
The High Court has refused Bruce Lehrmann's application for special leave to appeal Justice Lee's finding that Network Ten's report of his rape of Brittany Higgins was substantially true, exhausting his final legal avenue.
Lehrmann took his defamation case through every court in the country like a bloke appealing a parking fine all the way to The Hague. Three judges said no, and he kept knocking. The High Court's refusal isn't news — it's a full stop that should have been a full stop two courts ago. The only institution that came out of this worse than he did is the one that employed him.
Spectator Australia · Ian Plimer
Ian Plimer argues in the Spectator Australia that decades of 'demonising' fossil fuels have left Australia energy-vulnerable, dismissing human-induced climate change as fraudulent and calling for expanded fracking.
Ian Plimer calling climate science fraudulent in the Spectator is like a bloke selling asbestos insulation at a fire safety conference — the venue's doing more damage than the speaker. Plimer's been dining out on the same contrarian geology lecture since 2009. The Spectator keeps publishing it because controversy fills the subscription bucket, and nobody in the building has to live downwind of the fracking site.
Spectator Australia · Jacob Heilbrunn
After weeks of escalating threats to destroy Iran, Trump has pivoted to ceasefire talks, raising questions about what concessions he's made and whether the Spectator can keep up with the mood changes.
Trump spent three weeks promising to obliterate Iran, then sat down for talks — the strongman equivalent of revving the engine in a car park and calling it a road trip. The Spectator ran four breathless pieces charting the arc from annihilation to diplomacy like war correspondents embedded in a man's mood swings. Bismarck made peace through calculation. This lot stumbled into it through exhaustion and declared it statecraft.
Spectator Australia · Neil Clark
The Spectator Australia publishes a British political history essay rehabilitating James Callaghan as an underrated PM, while contemporary Australian politics goes uncommentaried.
The Spectator Australia running a Callaghan rehabilitation piece is the editorial equivalent of rearranging the good china while the roof's leaking. Neil Clark's polishing a forty-year-old British PM nobody asked about while the masthead's own backyard burns through prime ministers like kindling. Callaghan lost to Thatcher and history moved on. Some of us live in countries with problems that haven't been dead since 1979.
