January 13 – 19, 2024 | The Saturday Paper

News

The hidden risks in the NDIS restructure

Rick Morton The NDIS is on the brink of its biggest-ever restructure, and people in the disability community are concerned that the earliest reforms in a sweeping agenda may leave many who rely on the service unsupported.

News

Diplomacy failing in expanding Israel–Hamas war

Gregg Carlstrom As America and allies, with Australian support, launch strikes against targets in Yemen, it is clear the Israel–Hamas war is spilling over despite a series of diplomatic efforts to avert an expanded and protracted conflict.

Two EV charging stations beside parking spaces.

News

Charging stations are the next hurdle in EV progress

Mike Seccombe Just as Australia begins to catch up with the rest of the world in its uptake of electric cars – a step crucial to reducing the transport sector’s significant greenhouse gas emissions – a lack of reliable charging stations is getting in the way of further progress.

World

Inside the US Republican primaries: the Trump avalanche

Bruce Wolpe The United States presidential election is just 10 months away, Joe Biden is taking a battering in the polls and Donald Trump looks set to sweep the first four Republican primaries.

Comment

Anne Twomey
Unlawful government spending must stop

“Politicians have become so accustomed to this soft corruption that they genuinely think it is what election campaigns are about – a competition of promises for car parks, sporting fields and a new microwave for the senior citizens’ club.”

Comment

Chris Wallace
Albanese no longer a one-man band

“For Labor to build real political momentum in an incredibly tough year, the prime minister needs to be with his treasurer the way Bob Hawke was with the younger Paul Keating in the 1980s.”

Comment

John Hewson
Smart policy v dumb politics

“Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has often spoken in terms of football analogies when referring to his electoral opportunities, strategies and chances. Recently his focus has been on ‘coming home in the second half with a strong wind at his back’.”

Letters, Cartoon & Editorial

Cartoon

Read

Editorial
The pathetic and the fallacious

Under the Paris Agreement, Australia is required by February 2025 to set a target for emissions reduction over the following decade. This government is wrestling its way towards a number that won’t alarm anyone and it clearly won’t be pressured into anything radical by the opposition – the “climate inactivists and cookers”

Letters

Public money misspent

“We’re talking about public money propping up Catholic health assets so NSW Health can buy services from them” (Rick Morton, “St Vincent’s Hospital to be insolvent by April”, …

Dutton’s negative charge

It was disheartening to read both the editorial (“The poverty of fear”, December 23–January 12) and the article by Paul Bongiorno (“In search of lost mojo”) on the …

Culture

Profile

Writer-director Alexander Payne

Chris Cotonou Alexander Payne realised one of his ambitions as a film director when he embraced 1970s, New Hollywood cinema for The Holdovers.

Image for article: The Museum of Contemporary Art’s <em>Tacita Dean</em> exhibition

Visual Art

The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Tacita Dean exhibition

Bella Li The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Tacita Dean exhibition reveals an artist whose work movingly explores the processes of mortality.

Fiction

The Planet of Lost Things

“When it’s clear the marriage is finally over, Maggie goes in numbly to look on her sleeping daughter, now five, and finds herself staring at all the things she has somehow accumulated that she will now have to move – the toys and picture books, the pillows and clothes. It’s exhausting, thinking about the inventories she will have to write, the new house she will have to make into a home. She climbs into her daughter’s bed and dreams she is not here, in this bed, but in fact walking on the surface of the Planet of Lost Things.”

Cate Kennedy

Life

Food

Barbecue tiger prawns with peach and chilli dressing

Annie Smithers

Naomi Osaka smiling on court with a racquet in her hand.

Sport

How Naomi got her groove back

Ben Rothenberg Her drive to become a tennis champion related to family – first she wanted to beat her sister, then to help her parents. Now, after a crisis of motivation, Naomi Osaka is determined to win for her daughter.

Puzzles

The Cryptic

$link to this week\'s crossword$

Crossword No. 482

The Quiz

1. After the sun, the star closest to Earth is Proxima (what)?

2. Name Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, starring Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo. (Bonus point for naming the Australian screenwriter.)

3. Which Australian businessman and former physician was married to Leanne Nesbitt, Brynne Gordon and Gabi Grecko?

4. What does the German word Luft mean in English?

5. In the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter tells Clarice Starling he ate a census taker’s liver “with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”. What are fava beans known as in Australia?

6. Roundleaf, pygmy fruit and mouse-tailed are all types of what mammal?

7. In the human body, where does the majority of digestion occur: (a) small intestine; (b) stomach; or (c) large intestine?

8. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” begins a speech in which Shakespeare play?

9. Which yacht took line honours in a thrilling finish to the 2023 Sydney Hobart Yacht Race?

10. What is the perimeter of a circle called?

Click through for answers.

Quotes

Emissions

“Labor has always demonised gas.”

Sussan LeyThe deputy opposition leader responds to a question about whether her party’s lack of an emissions reduction policy will make it less popular in teal electorates. It’s frustrating for the Coalition, when gas is so critical for lighting.

Consumerism

“… we’re doing more every day to help customers spend less with us.”

WoolworthsA spokesperson for the supermarket giant explains its discount offers ahead of an inquiry into its record profits. It’s a fine piece of marketing, but arguably the price gouging was already doing that.

Parenting

“We need to hear more parents tell their children that the schools they attend, and the cities they live in, are only possible because of the mining sector.”

Peter DuttonIn a speech at a party he was flown in to attend at Gina Rinehart’s Pilbara mine, the opposition leader offers advice to Australia’s parents. And if the little upstarts still won’t get back to the coalface, you lock them up.