October 25 – 31, 2025
News
Comment
Comment
Rick Morton
‘Absurdist leaps of logic’: Robodebt misused in FOI reforms
“I am furious. Angry, certainly, about the federal government’s proposed freedom of information laws, which mock the very idea of transparency, but seething especially about the justification for them, a continuation of the rhetorical trickery that allows grotesque and nasty policy like robodebt to be born and survive inquiry.”
Letters, Cartoon & Editorial
Culture
Film
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere limits itself to one crucial sliver of the Boss’s life to escape the clichés, but it’s a biopic through and through.
Fiction
The people of the movie
“When my son was small, I used to listen from the next room as he tried to draw the godlike eye of whatever movie he was watching away from the plight of its people. Hey, Movie, look at this, he would say, waggling a blue plush dog in front of the screen, while the people of the movie clung to one another in desperate terror as the ship’s hull was torn open by submerged sea junk or the de-extincted megalodon broke loose from the underwater laboratory or somebody sneezed and the bad guys discovered the secret hiding place.”
Books
Life
Puzzles
Quotes
Mike Bush
“We should have looked harder for a commercial flight.”
Victoria Police’s chief commissioner apologises after it emerged he used a police helicopter to get to a conference in Hobart. If that’s his definition of looking, it’s no wonder they haven’t found Dezi Freeman.
Politics
“An innocent man is being locked up.”
The former French president begins his jail sentence for conspiring to raise campaign funds from Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi. He will serve five years, which is a better deal than Gaddafi got.
Museums
“The glass resisted … so objects were crushed as they were being pulled out.”
The director of the Louvre explains the process through which $157 million worth of jewels were stolen from her museum. Some would say the glass did not resist enough.
Music
“You are the worst people and you know it and the best you can go is copy Americans and UK culture.”
The singer-songwriter says he will never again play in Australia. Adams himself is famously original: a musician who used his celebrity to abuse multiple women and whose most streamed song is an Oasis cover.
Diplomacy
“Kevin Rudd is the prime minister’s choice for ambassador. It’s a big job.”
The opposition leader steps back from her suggestion that Kevin Rudd’s position as ambassador had become “untenable”. The Liberal Party is still experimenting with its definition of tenable leadership.
America
“I don’t like you either. I don’t, and I probably never will.”
The US president to Kevin Rudd. He is not the first person to have this reaction to the former member for Griffith.
