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.

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.

SMH · Mike Foley

Three Weeks of Fuel and a Government Credit Card: Australia Goes Shopping

The federal government will subsidise private fuel companies to source emergency supplies globally, tacitly admitting decades of strategic petroleum reserve neglect.

Three weeks of reserves and the solution is a global scavenger hunt underwritten by the taxpayer. We spent decades privatising fuel security on the theory that the market would provide, and now we're providing the market with government money to do what a strategic reserve would have done for free. 'Ready for what may come' is a strange slogan for a country that's been told what's coming since 1973.

AFR · Ryan Cropp

Nation that refused to stock the pantry now panic-buying at surge prices

The federal government will use taxpayer funds to underwrite purchases of critical imported fuel as Middle East conflict threatens Australia's notoriously thin supply reserves.

Fifty years of strategic fuel policy and the big idea is the government going to Costco with your credit card. We wouldn't need to underwrite emergency shiploads if any government since Whitlam had built a reserve worth more than a long weekend's driving. This isn't energy security — it's a nation that refused to fill the pantry now paying surge pricing at the corner shop and calling it leadership.