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.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's vaunted US 'solution' to resettle hundreds of refugees from Manus Island and Nauru faces collapse as the freshly minted US President Donald Trump eyes new bans on immigration.
Malcolm Turnbull has unleashed a ferocious attack on Bill Shorten, branding him "the greatest example of opposition gutlessness in generations".
The Wire's arch drug lord Avon Barksdale was philosophical in the face of a long jail sentence: "You only serve two days, the day you go in, and the day you get out". You'd think this mentality could work best for parties consigned to the opposition benches. But no. These days, its governments that feel most hemmed in, constrained at every turn by the crushing weight of febrile politics, internal divisions, anaemic growth, and inevitable disappointment.For Malcolm Turnbull, and indeed most governments recently, Barksdale's advice seems most apposite. Although in Turnbull's case, even the day he won was pretty terrible, marred as it was by something of a hissy-fit.
Everything seemed to close in on Julia Gillard in August 2012, when the country's first female prime minister faced a personal crisis over a past relationship and an AWU slush fund set up in the early 1990s.
It is an unfortunate reality that the march of security measures tends to move in one direction only.
Protesters have returned to Parliament House for the second day in a row, this time scaling the building's front wall and unfurling a banner which reads "close the bloody camps now".
Morale within the Turnbull government spiked on Wednesday following the successful passage of its long-denied building unions watchdog legislation, but any smiles were shortlived when a crossbench deal on its 15 per cent backpacker tax collapsed just half an hour later, delivering a humiliating defeat in the Senate.
It was a rare glimpse of the huge forces within the black hole of the current Senate, and a tutorial in the revived art of governing for results by Malcolm Turnbull.
The responsibility for integrity assurance now moves to the Prime Minister.
An imminent tightening of security arrangements at Parliament House threatens to deny public access to the iconic building's signature sloping lawns.
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