Guardian Australia · Australian Associated Press
A Mornington Peninsula byelection being framed as a state-election bellwether, with One Nation claiming it's close in a seat the Liberals have held forever.
One Nation reckons it's competitive in Nepean — on the Mornington Peninsula, where the median house clears two million and the closest thing to a working-class hero is the bloke who details the boats. The Liberals are favoured because the Liberals have always been favoured here. The whole byelection is a focus group with a tally room.
Spectator Australia · Stephen Fyson
Stephen Fyson argues that leaders who can't define a woman can't be trusted to run the NDIS, yoking culture war and welfare policy into a single column.
Spectator op-ed yokes the woman question to the NDIS like it's a syllogism. Mate, one's a culture war bumper sticker, the other's a thirty-billion-dollar scheme bleeding rorts because nobody costed it properly. Conflating the two isn't analysis — it's a bloke at the bar who's read one Quadrant article and reckons he's cracked the code.
SMH · Mike Foley, Nick Toscano
Petrol prices have eased briefly, but global oil markets will push them back up in the coming weeks.
Bowser relief with a use-by date stamped on it. Brent goes up, the pumps go up; Brent goes down, the pumps take a sabbatical on the way. The whole Australian energy debate is a bloke checking the weather forecast to decide whether to fix the roof.
Sky News Australia
Karl Stefanovic is being courted by a rival as his podcast numbers climb and Nine signals fresh job cuts across the network.
Stefanovic's podcast booms while Nine swings the axe at the people who actually make the news. The talent gets the offers, the producers get the redundancy letter, and somewhere a consultant's calling it 'rightsizing'. Television's not dying — it's just feeding itself, organ by organ, to the bloke at the desk.
Sky News Australia
Sky News Australia turns a royal goodbye to the Trumps into front-page diplomacy, because the actual diplomacy is too boring to cover.
Sky News Australia has rolled out the chyron for Camilla's farewell wave to Melania like it's the Treaty of Westphalia. A handbag, a smile, and three hundred words of breathless inference — the diplomatic correspondents have been replaced by a bloke who used to do bridal magazines.
Sky News Australia
Reza Adib, partner of former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, has been charged with three counts of rape following a police raid on a Burleigh Heads unit.
Charges have been laid and a court will hear them — that's how courts work. Sky's headline leads with a former premier who hasn't been accused of anything, because her name sells the click. The presumption of innocence is alive and well; it just doesn't fit in a chyron.
SMH · Peter Hartcher
Energy demand is up and prices are down. How does that work? And why is the Coalition still not on board?
Demand up, prices down, emissions falling — and the Coalition's still rummaging through the cupboard for a nuclear costing they wrote on the back of a beer coaster. Menzies built the Snowy. This mob can't tell the difference between a rooftop and a relic.
SMH · James Massola
Anthony Albanese marks a rough first year of his second term by declaring he wants a third, framing absorption of public anger as the substance of the role.
A bloke one year into a tough second term announcing he 'absolutely' wants a third — like a publican who's burnt the last three roasts asking if you'd like to book Christmas. Absorbing the nation's grief is the job, mate. Doing something about it was meant to be too.
Guardian Australia · Presented by Tom McIlroy. Produced by Daniel Semo. The executive producer is Allison Chan
Former Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk reflects on resilience, personal loss and watching the Crisafulli government reverse her renewable energy policies.
Palaszczuk watches Crisafulli unpick her renewables the way every outgoing premier watches the next mob — Beattie copped it, Bligh copped it, now it's her turn at the lectern. The ex-premier memoir circuit is the only renewable energy in Queensland politics. Spins forever, generates nothing.
Spectator Australia · Laurie Wastell
Two Jewish men stabbed in Golders Green and the Green party leader's response is a study in equivocation. The moral compass is spinning.
Polanski's response to a stabbing in Golders Green has all the moral clarity of a man trying to read a compass through fogged-up glasses. The Greens used to count whales. Now they're counting which victims qualify for sympathy and discovering the maths is harder than they thought.
Spectator Australia · Andy Twelves
Green MP Hannah Spencer has said Parliament’s drinking culture makes her feel ‘really uneasy’. Her comments, in an interview with PoliticsJOE,…
The post Hannah Spencer is not the first MP to campaign against alcohol appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: Why the Greens have a problem with alcohol | How to stop rising Jew hate in Britain | Why is Polanski downplaying anti-Semitism in the Green party? | The High Court has undermined freedom of speech in universities
A Green MP discovers Parliament drinks too much — next week's bulletin: water is wet. Every wave of new MPs arrives convinced they've found the original sin, and every one of them watches the bar tab survive their term. The drinking culture isn't the problem, mate — it's the symptom of a building where the work could be done sober in half the time and nobody wants to admit it.
Michael West Media · Rex Patrick
The Albanese Government claims the Freedom of Information system costs too much, but Rex Patrick argues it's the secrecy that's bleeding the public.
Every government discovers FOI is too expensive the moment they have something to hide. Whitlam wanted sunlight, Hawke legislated it, and now Albanese reckons the bulb's costing too much to leave on. Mate, the cost isn't the searching — it's what you find when you stop.
SBS News
Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei has flagged 'legal rules and new management' of the Strait of Hormuz, framing tighter Iranian control as a regional benefit. The strait carries roughly forty per cent of seaborne crude.
'New management' and 'legal rules' for the world's busiest oil chokepoint — the same vocabulary every protection racket has used since the Borgias hired their first accountant.
SMH · Rob Harris
Gina Rinehart's plane gift to One Nation is treated as a scandal, but cultivating political influence has been the family business since Lang Hancock was running the Pilbara.
Hancock's daughter bankrolling Hanson is the most natural transaction in Australian politics — old money buying noisy populism the way you'd buy a sheepdog. The shock isn't the jet. The shock is anyone pretending the iron ore set ever did politics any other way.
Spectator Australia · Nikhil Krishnan
A history of academic life stands and falls by the number and quality of its anecdotes. On this count, Colin…
The post Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun? appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: With no coherent strategy, Britain seems perpetually adrift in the world | Haunting images: The Shadow of the Object, by Chloe Aridjis, reviewed | A portrait of the fin de siècle in all its morbid decadence | The potentially catastrophic consequences of reading Kafka
A book review about postwar Oxford dons having too much fun, in a magazine that's run four Starmer hit-pieces this fortnight. The Spectator's discovered nostalgia is cheaper than analysis. Menzies read books too — he just didn't mistake the reading list for a worldview.
Spectator Australia · Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray attends the White House correspondents' dinner, gets shouted at by protesters, and mistakes the experience for journalism.
Douglas Murray went to the correspondents' dinner and came back with a thousand words about how mean the protesters were. The American press spent the evening toasting itself in a Hilton ballroom while the country it covers comes apart at the seams, and the Spectator's takeaway is that someone shouted at Douglas on the footpath. Mencken would have been inside throwing the bread rolls.
Spectator Australia · Tim Shipman
When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior…
The post Is the country ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband? appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: ‘I don’t want this state that I love to become the country I left’: Steve Hilton on why he’s running to be California governor | ‘It’s worse than during the worst of Boris’: how the civil service turned against Starmer | The new AI system causing panic over cybersecurity | Lena Dunham’s memoir is everything wrong with feminism today
The Spectator's now floating Miliband as Chancellor while the same magazine spent last week explaining Starmer can't run a chook raffle. Pick a lane, mate. You can't run hit-pieces on the captain on Tuesday and speculative cabinet reshuffles on Friday — that's not commentary, that's a man rearranging the deckchairs and selling tickets to both ends of the boat.
