November 15 – 21, 2025
News
Comment
News
Marcia Langton
Melbourne’s historic native title claim
“The Statewide Treaty with the First Peoples of Victoria is law. The truth of colonisation has been revealed. Now the Wurundjeri people, Traditional Owners of the land on which Australia’s second-largest city stands, have embarked on the nation’s most ambitious urban native title claim…”
Comment
Paul Bongiorno
The political cost of keeping the lights on
“On Thursday, Liberal shadow ministers, in a fraught four-hour meeting, decided to have their cake and eat it too. Gone: a formal goal to achieve net zero. Kept: a ‘welcome outcome’ if somehow their new stance, more favourable to fossil fuels, achieves carbon neutrality by 2050.”
Letters, Cartoon & Editorial
Culture
Profile
Zamrock band WITCH
In the 1970s, WITCH was one of Africa’s biggest bands before fading into obscurity. Now touring Australia’s east coast, they are enjoying the global acclaim they deserve.
Fiction
The flood goats
“The man who wanted to eat a flood goat came from a faraway country where goats were eaten on feast days, roasted for hours over a fire, with only the legs cut off. The head was threaded onto a long metal pole along with the rest of the body – the length of it – even though no one in the man’s country had ever heard of head-to-toe cuisine. The man had never heard of the flood town either before he came to live in it, nor of any place where the rain never stopped. For months it did not cease, until the earth was sodden, the very air the townspeople breathed saturated with moisture.”
Books
Life
Puzzles
Quotes
Media
“To say that we platform climate deniers, I would need more detail, but we need to be able to have a debate in this country and that is what we do.”
The executive chair of News Corp denies his company is part of a “climate denial machine”. Ironically, more detail is what climate deniers are always asking for.
Aviation
“If you can’t take their money and then screw them over, then you don’t deserve to be in this job.”
The Nationals MP defends her membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge. There are bigger potential disqualifiers, but she’s already overcome most of them.
Climate
“Welcome to Liberal country.”
The Liberal MP posts about his party’s scrapping of its net zero commitment. There’s something impressive about cribbing a Marlboro commercial to cloak a fossil fuels agenda.
America
“Would you like photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?”
The paedophile financier offers a New York Times reporter photographs of the then presidential candidate, according to just-released documents from 2015. To be fair, no one wants a picture of Trump in a bikini.
Police
“They’re very tricky these neo-Nazis, they skirt around the edge of the law.”
The New South Wales police minister explains why police could not stop a Nazi rally outside Parliament House. It might have something to do with the fact they formally authorised it.
Defamation
“It cost her an enormous amount to prove that dishonest lies had been said about her and not a cent has been recovered.”
A lawyer for former senator Linda Reynolds continues to pursue an application to bankrupt Brittany Higgins. Presumably you pay twice for the tautologies.
