Peter Hartcher is the political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. He is a Gold Walkley award winner, a former foreign correspondent in Tokyo and Washington, and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. His latest book is The Sweet Spot: How Australia Made its Own Luck and Could Now Throw it All Away. His 2005 book, Bubble Man: Alan Greenspan and the Missing Seven Trillion Dollars, foresaw the collapse of the US housing market and the economic slump that followed.
The governor of the Reserve Bank, Phil Lowe, has sometimes found himself sitting next to Scott Morrison at lunch and dinner functions over the past couple of years. The head of the central bank has used the opportunity to try to persuade Australia's treasurer of the need to take big, bold action.
The lesson of the fall of Singapore must surely be that Australia can not trust its survival wholly to a foreign power. Even a close ally. Yesterday Britain, today America.
It would give the barbarians of Daesh the greatest satisfaction if Australia were to become so degraded that it couldn't maintain a stable power supply to keep its airconditioners running.
So what on earth was the point of all that? Over the past four days, Donald Trump has meekly abandoned two of his grandest and most earth-shattering threats to reshape the world order.
Turnbull grabbed the slapsticks and got busy on Shorten to show the Libs he can prevail against Labor.
It's the remark that tells you all you need to know about Donald Trump's world view.
Malcolm Turnbull might find that the alliance is not dead but, at 65 years old, it could be ready for a bit of a rest.
Expressing vicarious outrage through the medium of the Prime Minister might be emotionally satisfying but it's fated to be futile.
It was a British reporter who dubbed Canberra "the coup capital of the Western world" as one prime minister after another was brought down not by the voters but by their colleagues.
After losing 14 seats at the election and with serial blunders since, Turnbull is fast losing the confidence of his colleagues.
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