Paul J. Berating

Today's Top Stories

⚡ Top Story

Guardian Australia · Dan Jervis-Bardy and Sarah Basford Canales

Can the second coming of Tony Abbott resurrect the Liberal party? Or is it another step toward ‘self-destruction’?

Angus Taylor believes the former PM is uniquely placed to help the party as its new president, but some fear he will render it even more unelectable

Talleyrand said of the restored Bourbons that they'd learned nothing and forgotten nothing — and here's the Liberals dragging back the man their own party knifed in '15. A president rattles the tin and rallies the faithful; he doesn't win the middle. Taylor reckons Abbott's uniquely placed. He is — uniquely placed to remind everyone who left exactly why they did.

SMH · Shane Wright

How more than 1 million landlords will escape negative gearing changes

Overhauling property taxes was key to Jim Chalmers’ federal budget. But grandfathering and carve-outs will leave millions untouched.

Chalmers announces the great property overhaul, then grandfathers a million landlords out of it — reform with the bite pulled in the dental chair. Hawke and Keating quarantined negative gearing in '85 and folded by '87 when the howling started. Chalmers has skipped the howling and gone straight to the fold.

SMH · Michael Bachelard

‘Dynamite’ speech sets one High Court judge against another

A judge has taken aim at people he says want to import “US-style court stacking” to Australia.

Two of the country's seven highest judges feuding in public lectures about whether we'll start stacking the bench American-style — and the beauty of it is we haven't even got the disease yet, we've just imported the anxiety, flat-packed and ready to assemble. The High Court used to settle the argument. Now it's having one at the lectern.

Michael West Media · AAP

'Spiritual malaise': Tony Abbott's Liberal rallying cry

Tony Abbott has been installed as federal Liberal Party president, returning to prominence with a warning that the nation is drifting backwards into a 'spiritual malaise.'

'Spiritual malaise' — Abbott's reached for the exact word that sank Jimmy Carter and dressed it up as a rallying cry. The party presidency is backroom work: counting numbers, keeping the lights on. He'll treat it like a pulpit. Warringah already ran the diagnosis in 2019, mate, and the prescription was Zali Steggall.

SMH · Rob Harris

Who watches the watchdog? The NACC discovers it likes the dark

Two years in, the National Anti-Corruption Commission is engulfed in a controversy of its own making — accused of the very secrecy it was built to expose.

Twenty years of campaigning for a corruption watchdog and the one we got conducts its business in the dark like the thing it was built to hunt. Juvenal asked who watches the watchmen two thousand years ago, and Canberra's answer is: nobody, and don't you dare ask. The body built to drag secrecy into the daylight has decided daylight's for everyone but itself.

SMH · Matthew Knott

Government confirms bid to hide counter-terror details from royal commission

The opposition has accused the government of using confidentiality protections “as a shield from political embarrassment” over counter-terrorism funding.

Confidentiality as a shield — the oldest trick in the dispatch box drawer. The royal commission was meant to find out what the government knew before a bloke walked into Bondi with a knife, and the government's answer is to hand the commissioners a folder with the interesting bits redacted. Menzies hid Cabinet papers for thirty years. This mob wants to hide them from the inquiry they called.