Paul J. Berating

Today's Top Stories

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AFR · Phillip Coorey

The Coalition vote finds its floor — and One Nation's already living there

The Coalition's primary vote has hit a record low while One Nation surges to near-Labor levels, even as Albanese's personal approval continues to slide.

The Coalition's primary vote isn't declining — it's achieving its natural level, the way water finds the lowest point in a paddock. When your policy offering is a vibe check and a scowl, voters don't defect to One Nation; they simply stop pretending the original product was different. Albanese is unpopular and still winning, which is less a compliment to Labor than an autopsy report on the alternative.

The Conversation · Terry Goldsworthy, Associate Professor in Criminal Justice and Criminology, Bond University

216 days, one bluff, and a bullet: the Freeman manhunt's messy arithmetic

After 216 days on the run, fugitive Dezi Freeman was shot dead by police — months after they publicly declared they believed he was already dead, in what may have been a deliberate tactical deception.

Police told the public their man was dead, then shot him alive — the operational equivalent of a magician revealing the trick by performing it twice. Two hundred and sixteen days of manhunt resolved not by the machinery of modern policing but by the oldest bluff in the handbook: tell the quarry the hunt's over and wait for him to surface. That it worked says less about tactical brilliance than about how long you can run in a country with three million square kilometres of nothing much.

SMH

The Drawings Are Doing The Heavy Lifting Again

SMH and The Age publish their daily roundup of editorial cartoons interpreting the political news cycle, a recurring feature that increasingly substitutes for written analysis.

Third cartoon roundup this month filed as hard news — at this point the masthead isn't curating political commentary, it's running a gallery with a subscription model. The cartoonists didn't ask to carry the analytical weight of an entire newsroom. That they do says less about the quality of the drawings than the poverty of everything published around them.

SMH · Paul Sakkal, Rob Harris

Abbott Returns to Save Liberals From the Fire He Helped Light

Tony Abbott campaigns in Albury as Pauline Hanson offers the Coalition a preference deal in Farrer, with the Liberals facing potential wipeout in regional NSW.

Tony Abbott doorknocking in Albury to save the Liberal Party is like sending the arsonist back to check the smoke detectors. Hanson isn't stealing Liberal voters — she's offering to rent them back at preference rates, which tells you who holds the lease. When your rescue plan is a man the electorate sacked a decade ago brokering terms with the woman he once told voters to put last, the party hasn't hit rock bottom — it's furnishing the place.

SMH

The Sunday Papers Run a Gallery Because the Newsroom Ran Out of Ideas

SMH and The Age publish their weekly roundup of political cartoons, packaging illustrated commentary as a standalone content offering.

When a newspaper's most reliable Sunday content is drawings of the week's failures, you've built less a masthead than a gallery wall with a subscription fee. The cartoons don't interpret the news — they are the news, because the news itself has become so predictable that a caricature captures it more faithfully than a thousand words of access journalism ever could. Somewhere in Ultimo, a sub-editor files this package knowing it'll outperform every think-piece in the building.

SMH · Courtney Kruk

Queensland's merged right quietly measures Canavan for a smaller coffin

Queensland senator James McGrath, a Liberal moderate, has beaten Nationals leader Matt Canavan for the LNP's No.1 Senate spot at the next federal election — a significant factional shift within the merged party.

The LNP putting a moderate above Canavan isn't a factional realignment — it's a survival calculation dressed as principle. Canavan's been auditioning for a party that doesn't exist yet, and Queensland's merged outfit has quietly decided the coal-fired culture war is a liability, not an asset. When your own side bumps you down the ticket, you haven't lost a preselection — you've been read your political last rites by people too polite to say it aloud.