SBS News
Angus Taylor condemned Anzac Day hecklers while questioning the frequency of Welcome to Country ceremonies, with Barnaby Joyce and 3AW's Tom Elliott piling on.
Taylor condemns the jeering and in the same breath asks whether the ceremony should happen at all — the political equivalent of putting out a fire while quietly questioning whether the building was worth saving. Barnaby reckons the dead don't need welcoming. Mate, they're not the ones being welcomed. The living are, to a country older than Gallipoli by about sixty thousand years.
Guardian Australia · Josh Butler
Senator Helen Polley posted an Anzac Day video with a US rapper's explicit track playing over wreath-laying footage, then deleted it. She chairs parliament's law enforcement committee.
Helen Polley, chair of the law enforcement committee, can't enforce the audio settings on her own phone. The senator who's meant to vet the federal police vetted a Ching-y track over the Last Post and clicked publish. If she ran the AFP we'd be raiding the wrong house to a Pitbull remix.
SMH · Paul Sakkal, Mostafa Rachwani
News that a group of four women and nine children have arrived in Damascus and hope to fly to Australia within days has added urgency to the question of how the group should be dealt with.
Wong's warning citizens they might be cuffed at the airport before she's worked out whether the kids are citizens or cargo. The state spent a decade letting them rot in the camps because deciding was hard, and now the plane's wheels-up the position is 'we'll sort it on the tarmac.' Policy by arrival lounge.
news.com.au
A new plan aims to free up Australia's 13 million empty bedrooms as the housing shortage deepens, mostly by encouraging Boomers to downsize.
Thirteen million empty bedrooms and the revolutionary plan is to politely ask the Boomers if they'd mind shuffling along. Mate, you don't solve a housing crisis with a real estate brochure and a hopeful tone — Menzies built suburbs, this mob writes pamphlets about them.
SMH · Matthew Knott
Four years after the $90 billion contract cancellation triggered the worst diplomatic rupture in modern Franco-Australian history, Paris has signalled it would consider reviving submarine talks if AUKUS unravels.
Paris says it'll sell us submarines again if AUKUS falls over — which is more grace than we showed dumping them by text message. Forty months later we're back at the door with a different ring and the same hangdog look. Talleyrand would've charged us interest.
Spectator Australia · Olivia Cole
Olivia Cole reviews Jay McInerney's See You on the Other Side, a coda to characters whose glory days ended decades ago.
Spectator's running a McInerney book review now — the literary equivalent of finding a Bret Easton Ellis paperback at a garage sale and calling it a cultural moment. The Calloways had their glory days in the 80s, which is also when this masthead last had an idea.
Spectator Australia · Douglas Murray
Douglas Murray laments that 'ageing' has become a permitted insult, in a magazine that has built a small empire identifying which insults are permitted.
Murray reckons 'ageing' is the last acceptable slur, which is a hell of a discovery from a bloke whose entire career has been an extended treatise on which slurs are coming back into fashion. The Spectator's found a grievance for every demographic now — they're running a lost-and-found for hurt feelings and calling it cultural commentary.
SMH · Natassia Chrysanthos, Broede Carmody
The NDIS has 760,000 participants, more than 300,000 of whom have autism. Those people and their families are the most anxious after Labor announced an overhaul of the scheme.
Three hundred thousand autistic Australians now wondering if they're disabled enough — a question the scheme was specifically designed to never make them ask. Labor's overhaul has the same logic as fixing a leaky roof by making the rooms smaller. The bill blew out because nobody costed it properly, and now the people who didn't write the budget get to audition for their own support.
Spectator Australia · Henry Donovan
Germany's conservatives wanted a break from Merkel's fifteen-year managerial drift. Merz spent a career attacking it, then inherited it whole.
Germans voted for a sharp conservative knife and got another butter spreader. Merz spent fifteen years telling anyone who'd listen that Merkel had hollowed out the CDU, then took the chancellorship and proved her right by becoming her. Bismarck unified Germany with blood and iron. This bloke's running it on focus groups and a shrug.
news.com.au
The Foreign Minister tours China, Japan and Korea to shore up fuel supplies as the Iran ceasefire holds and reserves remain below benchmark.
Wong's off to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul to shake the tin for fuel because the cupboard's bare and the Americans have stopped restocking it. Three weeks ago we couldn't tell the public how many days of diesel we had. Now the Foreign Minister's doing the rounds with a begging bowl dressed up as a strategic dialogue. Talleyrand worked the European courts with leverage. We're working Asia with a shopping list.
Spectator Australia · John Foreman
Four years after Putin promised a fortnight's work, Ukraine is still standing — and now being told by Trump to call it a day.
Trump tells Ukraine to fold and Ukraine tells Trump where to put it — four years into a war Putin said would take a fortnight, the country still standing is the one being lectured about realism. Mate, the Ukrainians have learned more about sovereignty in four years than Washington's managed in fifty.
