Paul J. Berating

Today's Top Stories

⚡ Top Story

One Nation tops the national poll as the major parties keep racing each other to the middle

A Redbridge/Accent Research poll has One Nation as the most popular party in the country, edging out Labor — the dividend of two major parties that have spent decades converging on the same managerial centre.

The majors spent thirty years sanding the edges off everything until you couldn't tell Labor from Liberal with a torch and a road map. Hanson never moved. She's flogged the same grievance since the fish and chip shop, and with the centrists gone to ground she's the last stall at the market still doing trade. The DLP took the Catholics. One Nation's collecting whoever Canberra mislaid.

Guardian Australia · Joe Hinchliffe

English Greens leader flies in to tell Australian counterparts: 'connect with anger' to beat One Nation

UK Greens leader Zack Polanski told the Victorian Greens conference they should 'connect with anger' and take on Pauline Hanson's One Nation, the way he says he took on Farage's Reform UK.

Polanski's flown in from London to tell the Greens the way to stop Hanson is to get angrier than she is. Good luck. She's been at it thirty years, and anger's the one thing this country's never had to import.

SMH · Matthew Knott, Lisa Visentin

Marles points to savings after US downgrades AUKUS sub to second-hand version

Australia was expected to buy a mix of new and used submarines from the US, but now the vessels will all be used boats.

We ordered new boats, Washington's decided we'll take the trade-ins, and Marles is on the wharf spruiking the savings. There's a word for a buyer who lets the seller pick the goods, set the price, and still walks away grateful — and it isn't 'customer'. Talleyrand fleeced the great powers from a position of weakness. We can't even fleece the bloke we're paying.

Guardian Australia · Ben Doherty

Marles warns the seabed's a battlefield — then reveals we're buying America's secondhand subs

At the Shangri-La Dialogue, Marles unveiled new AUKUS drone tech to protect undersea cables and declared the seabed a battlefield — while confirming Australia will only receive secondhand US submarines under the deal.

Marles told the Singapore summit the seabed's a battlefield — very Mahan, very stirring — then buried the bit that matters: we're buying America's secondhand submarines. Three hundred-odd billion for boats with the previous owner's coffee rings still on the chart table. Drones to guard the cables, hand-me-downs to guard the continent. We talk like a naval power and shop like it's a wrecker's yard.

SMH · Parnell Palme McGuinness

Labor wants to change the channel. Nobody's holding the remote

A column on the collapse of narrative control: the major parties no longer set the agenda, and Labor's attempt to move past the budget runs into a fragmented media landscape that takes orders from no one.

Time was a Treasurer dropped a budget and owned the week — Hawke could set the agenda over breakfast and have it hold till the evening news. Now it buys you an afternoon before the algorithm wanders off to something shinier. Labor wants to move the conversation along, but nobody handed them the remote. There's a million of them now, and every hand holding one's got a grievance.