Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's chief political correspondent. A director of the National Press Club, he regularly appears on the ABC's Insiders, Sky News Agenda, and Ten's Meet the Press. He has reported from Canberra under three prime ministers and several opposition leaders.
To my mates and me, the acrid fumes from the automotive paint and subsequent baking booths merely provided enough cover for our most daring stunt yet – smoking cigarettes right under the nose of one of our most reviled and authoritarian teachers.
Trump's arrival presages possibly the biggest and most traumatic upheaval to the global power balance since the Second World War.
An increasingly sure-footed Malcolm Turnbull spent last week in New York and Washington jawboning legislators about two complicated challenges nipping at the sovereignty of the modern nation state and its collective conscience: protectionism and irregular migration.
Politicians worldwide are beating up resentment, adopting strong positions that make major parties look weak and half-committed.
A tough-talking libertarian, born into the most advantaged cohort in western society, being a highly educated white middle-class male, and a member of the governing class no less, has scurried to the apron strings of the state because he has had his feelings hurt.
All the signs are that an enlarged right-wing cross bench will create new tensions, dragging Turnbull's party in unhelpful directions, and emboldening hardline conservatives to re-litigate the case to scrap section 18c, and argue about climate change science.
The unforeseen Northern Territory royal commission notwithstanding, Malcolm Turnbull's reform dance card is hardly full.
And so, after a tremulous, difficult birth, the Turnbull government begins anew, for the first time under its own electoral steam.
On same-sex marriage, a potentially weakened Malcolm Turnbull is sitting on a powder keg.
The polls point to a narrow Coalition victory but either side could yet crash and burn.
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