Anne Summers is a Fairfax Media columnist.
When a Prime Minister goes on television and promises he will provide "leadership", as Malcolm Turnbull did on Wednesday over the supposed crisis in gas and other energy supplies, you have to wonder what he thinks his job is if not to lead. All the time.
It really is scarcely believable that pay inequality between women and men is still an issue in 2017.
The attacks on some of our most vulnerable people are hard to fathom.
It has the potential to become as potent an international symbol of protest and resistance as the iconic 1960 Alberto Korda photograph of Che Guevara that has for decades adorned millions of t-shirts, or the early emblem of the women's liberation movement: the clenched fist inside the symbol for women.
As we all wait in fear and trepidation to see what the new US President Donald Trump will do, to his country and to the world, including our region, it is utterly dispiriting to realise how ill-equipped our own political leaders are.
Many Australians like to think of the British as stuffy, toffy and class-bound by their centuries of royal and aristocratic hierarchy and privilege. This view was reinforced by the parliamentarians' expenses scandal a few years back, when we chortled over the British MP claiming for the maintenance of his moat.
I get at least one a week. An email from a dissatisfied customer wanting a refund, or to exchange a product, from the Ann Summers sex shop chain.
I am seriously thinking of moving to Melbourne. Not for the coffee, or the food, both arguably better than Sydney's, and certainly not for the weather.
The NSW government was prepared to shut down Sydney nightlife because of the shocking and tragic death of two boys but seems unwilling to step up on anything like a similar scale when it comes to the far higher toll of domestic violence.
The dream of a woman finally reaching the Oval Office and becoming President of the United States has had to be deferred, heaven knows for how long.
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