Amy Remeikis is known for her incisive political commentary and experience as a journalist at Fairfax and Guardian Australia. She is currently Chief Political Analyst at the Australia Institute.
It says a lot about who holds control in today’s world by how we talk about AI. The “inevitability” that surrounds the AI conversation – as in, there is no choice but to just adopt this technology, so get on board or get left behind – is, of course, a fallacy.
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Of all the stupidity Australians have accepted as “normal”, our relationship with house prices may be among the most ridiculous. This nation is in the grips of a media panic over a small blip in house prices. This blip apparently deserves wall-to-wall coverage and dire warnings of impending doom.
Labor finished the last parliamentary week on a high. There is a feeling within caucus that the party has a plan for dealing with One Nation, helped along by the fact the Coalition is completely without one.
If there is one thing all leaders should be focused on, it should be maintaining trust. In our institutions and our democracy, and all those foundations which underpin it. Which is why it is so strange that the federal press gallery continues to hold its Midwinter Ball.
You can almost trace the rise of political discontent across Western democracies to the increase of big dumb utes on our roads. This is not about class or the type of person attracted by the road rambos, but what their popularity says about us as societies.
Beyond the obvious joke that modest tax reform and slightly increased subsidies for privatised services is about as socialist as Milton Friedman’s underpants, O’Brien’s instinctual answer also points to just how out of depth most Australian politicians are when it comes to meeting this obvious inflection moment.
If Australia’s current political environment were a Bond film, we have reached the point where the villain feels comfortable enough to explain their entire dastardly plan to a restrained 007.
There will no doubt be endless factchecks of Hanson’s speech (if someone could check it for a fact, that would be a great start) but it won’t matter. We are in a post-fact world and Hanson, like Trump, like Nigel Farage, and like Joh Bjelke-Petersen before her, excels in that environment.
The tragedy in the tragedy of the commons was it always assumed the humans’ worst natures would come to the fore. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom was among those who proved the theory wrong. Assuming the worst of human nature always travels further than considering actual human nature, which is multifaceted and flawed and generous and, more often than not, surprisingly kind.
Why would the Liberal Party, which arguably has the most to lose, at least in the near term, from One Nation’s insurgency, make a deal to cement its demise? Well, for an explanation of why the Liberals want to be closer to Pauline Hanson, look no further than a still-ambitious Tony Abbott.
