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SMH · Mike Foley
Middle East gas shipments to Asia face imminent disruption, giving the Albanese government unexpected leverage over LNG exports to China and Japan — and raising the prospect of price caps or export restrictions on resources Australia never secured for domestic benefit.
Australia discovers it has leverage the way a bloke finds a tenner in last winter's coat — not through planning, but through neglecting to check the pockets for a decade. We've spent twenty years flogging our gas at mates' rates to multinational exporters who pay less tax than a backpacker, and now a Middle Eastern supply shock hands us a bargaining chip we never thought to carve ourselves. Price caps aren't strategy — they're the emergency brake on a car that should've had steering.
Michael West Media · AAP
Australia fast-tracks support for truck drivers as the Middle East conflict sends fuel prices surging and petrol stations run dry, exposing the country's chronic dependence on imported fuel.
Fast-tracking support for truckies is like handing out umbrellas in a flood — decent of you, but it concedes you never built the levee. The fuel crisis isn't a trucking problem; it's a sovereignty problem wearing high-vis. Every dollar spent cushioning the impact of a supply chain we don't control is a dollar confirming we chose not to control it. The government isn't managing a crisis — it's managing the optics of one.
SMH
SMH and The Age run their daily roundup of political cartoons as a standalone news article — a format that says more about the state of political journalism than any of the cartoons inside it.
When a masthead runs a daily cartoon roundup as a news article, it's not curation — it's a newspaper publishing its own X-ray. The images are doing the diagnostic work the prose abandoned somewhere between the paywall and the fifteenth sponsored content partnership. You don't file 'best of cartoons' when the rest of the paper is landing punches. You file it when the cartoons are the only section that isn't pulling them.
The Conversation · Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
Security expert Rory Medcalf discusses survey findings showing a sharp rise in Australians' national security anxiety, with a majority now expecting foreign conflict in the near term.
Australians are more anxious about national security, and the security establishment calls this 'disturbing' — as though the public arrived at fear independently, without a decade of threat briefings leaked to friendly journalists and defence white papers written like horror novels. The spooks set the house on fire, then commissioned a survey on smoke inhalation. What's disturbing isn't that people are frightened — it's that the fear is doing exactly what it was designed to do: build consent for budgets nobody's allowed to question.
Michael West Media · Stephanie Tran
The Albanese government refuses to act against charities funding illegal Israeli settlements, with Senator Faruqi accusing it of subsidising violence through inaction on tax-deductible status.
Tax-deductible charity status is supposed to be a privilege the government actively bestows — which means every day it doesn't revoke it is a day it actively chooses to extend it. Labor isn't looking the other way; looking the other way requires turning your head. This is staring directly at the receipt and stamping it approved. When your charity regime subsidises settlements that your own foreign minister calls illegal, you haven't got a policy gap — you've got a policy.
Michael West Media · AAP
Thousands of ABC staff have voted to strike after rejecting an enterprise bargaining offer featuring a below-inflation pay rise and unresolved concerns about AI replacing editorial work.
The national broadcaster's staff are striking because management offered them a pay rise that doesn't keep up with the cost of bread, then threw in an AI clause that essentially says 'we'd like the right to replace you with something cheaper and less argumentative.' The ABC has spent a decade being starved by governments who call it bloated, and now it can't feed its own workforce. Every side of politics claims to love the ABC the way a man loves a dog he won't take to the vet.
SMH · Nick Newling
The House of Representatives returns for question time with the Albanese government facing opposition pressure over Australia's fuel supply crisis, though neither side has addressed the structural vulnerabilities at the heart of the problem.
Parliament returns and the government faces 'pressure' — the same pressure a football faces when it's kicked between two sets of posts and everybody claims a goal. Question Time exists so both sides can perform outrage about a fuel crisis neither side built the infrastructure to prevent. The Opposition will demand answers it doesn't want, the government will provide reassurance it can't guarantee, and the fuel reserves will remain at three weeks regardless of who's asking the questions.
SMH · Nick Newling
The Business Council of Australia concedes remote work may be needed to conserve fuel but warns against COVID-scale office shutdowns that could damage small businesses.
The Business Council spent three years dragging workers back to the office like a dog retrieving a stick nobody threw, and now discovers the office itself runs on imported diesel. They'll concede working from home might save fuel, but only if you promise not to enjoy it or let it become a habit. The BCA doesn't oppose remote work — it opposes any disruption it didn't get to invoice for.
SMH · Rob Harris
Rob Harris argues SA Premier Malinauskas has become Australia's most formidable politician by reframing populism around inclusive patriotism, following his landslide state election victory.
The press gallery loves a coronation — it saves them the trouble of covering policy. Malinauskas won a state election against an opposition that couldn't fog a mirror, and suddenly he's reframed populism itself. Inclusive patriotism is a fine phrase, but phrases aren't platforms — Hawke had both, and knew the difference. Call him formidable when he's spent the political capital, not while he's still counting it.
