Other Politics

Shortly after Barack Obama’s second inauguration in early 2013, then Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal delivered a speech suggesting that unless the Republican party recalibrated its message and approach, the party would remain all but unelectable. Republicans, he said, should stop looking backwards, compete for every vote and – famously – ‘stop being the stupid party’. It’s a speech partially remembered for its brutal honesty, but more noted in retrospect because instead the Republican party chose to do the precise opposite….

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Radio crackled before dawn. Orders they’d been waiting for. Time to go, time to get that massive machine to motion, all the guns and the bullets, the bombs, grenades, the armoured vehicles and tanks. And all those young men in uniform, drawn from distant provinces and the poorest neighbourhoods of Moscow, all nerve and sinew, hoping to make mum proud. To find a way through this life. Some perhaps harbouring some misplaced sense of patriotism, long since betrayed by the…

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As parliament closes out 2021, Scott Morrison’s government is taking steps to set the agenda for next year’s federal election. Morrison will be hoping for no major bushfires this summer and a return to pre-Covid normality, so the battle can be fought around perceived LNP strengths such as the economy, national security and culture war issues like social media trolling. To that end, Morrison continues to champion the reopening of international borders and an end to lockdowns and travel restrictions…

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This cannot stand. Even by the catastrophically low standards set by the current government, the announcement that Australia is to spend $90 billion on a fleet of nuclear submarines plumbs, if you will excuse me, new depths. France, which immediately recalled its ambassadors to the US and Australia, has every right to feel furiously aggrieved and humiliated. Just a few months ago, Scott Morrison visited Emmanuel Macron in Paris and was warmly embraced by France’s President. Yet we now know…

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And just like that it was gone. With little fanfare, and late at night, America’s Supreme Court this week declined a request to block a Texas law drastically restricting access to abortion services, effectively striking down 1973’s Roe v Wade ruling that legalised abortion in America. A day later the court formally voted 5-4 not to block the law. Texas’ new legislation, known as SB8, makes it illegal for a woman to get an abortion after the sixth week of…

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