The Policy Post

As America prepares for war with China, we’re in the crossfire. Strategic ambiguity is all but dead. The United States has left China and the world in no doubt that if Taiwan is attacked, America will go to war.

Is our unwritten constitution worth the paper it’s not written on?   When it finally became known that Scott Morrison, in darkest secrecy, had made himself the Lord High Everything Else, the solicitor-general said there wasn’t anything illegal about it. But was there?

Could the Greens (one day) govern Australia? Bob Brown is pretty sure about it. “It’s inevitable,” he told me. Bob, and many within the Greens, see environmental policies – on climate change particularly – as being the single decisive issue around which future politics will revolve.

‘It would be the end of Xi’: Andrew Wilkie on war over Taiwan, America’s decline and a new era in Canberra. It was an unruly conscience that first made Andrew Wilkie famous.

Meet Australia’s most overstretched hospital. Every major hospital in the nation is in trouble. Most were struggling to cope with ever-rising patient numbers even before the pandemic pushed them over the edge.

In denial: Defence’s giant carbon footprint.   In almost every country, armed forces are responsible for massive greenhouse gas pollution. But governments – including Australia’s – do not disclose that, and do not accurately include defence emissions in their carbon-reduction targets.

Survive or perish? Bob Brown on the greatest choice facing humanity. Bob Brown’s Eureka moment came in 1973, when he and a local dairy farmer went chasing thylacines in the Tarkine wilderness of north-west Tasmania.

How the GP crisis happened – and why it will get much worse. For most of the last 25 years, there has been a war of attrition against Medicare. Nowhere are the effects more crippling than in general practice.

Rednecks on the run: how Australia transformed itself. The bookies don’t think much of Peter Dutton’s chances of becoming Prime Minister. Shortly after the last election, Sportsbet put the chances of a coalition victory in 2025 at $3.10. That’s probably generous.

A new arms race and nuclear Armageddon: UN chief’s grim warning. “Humanity,” said António Guterres in Hiroshima, “is playing with a loaded gun.”