The backdown on local council mergers is a humiliating defeat for Premier Gladys Berejiklian and local government minister Gabrielle Upton, their predecessors Mike Baird and Paul Toole, and the NSW government as a whole.
Considering the controversies over definitions of photography and portraiture, an award for "photographic portraiture" is asking for trouble.
A four-year fixed parliamentary term will always look pretty good to the incumbents and pretty bad to the challengers. That's one reason this important constitutional reform for Australia has been so long talked about but never achieved.
It's high time the parliament took a reformist shine to the state's mining act.
"Follow the money" has become a celebrated motto since Deep Throat uttered his famous tip about where to look for clues in the film adaptation of the Watergate break-in, All the President's Men.
The revelations from an ancient campsite in Kakadu should deepen our nation's respect for Indigenous Australians. On the evidence, though, that respect is in short supply, so a discovery that should be a cause for national pride is instead another reminder of our national shame.
It's a simple message, but in a complicated world, the simple messages might be the more important.
Masked soldiers were in the frame to convey that there's a new normal, and it's not safe, and that's why we need the blitz on national security arrangements which the Prime Minister prosecuted with vigour this fourth week of the parliamentary winter break.
The healthcare failure suggests that the problems of the Republican Party and the Trump administration run far broader than the Russia scandal.
Despite what they may say, our politicians care a lot more for the feelings of the people who already own houses because they greatly outnumber the ones who don't.
Scott Ludlam has made an honest, though extremely careless and costly mistake.When governments rely on the narrowest of margins to get their legislation passed, we can expect the validity of every vote to be scrutinised.
The story of Liu Xiaobo gives the lie to the comforting platitude that democratic freedoms will inevitably follow China's economic liberalisation.
Anyone watching the nightly broadcasts of the Tour de France knows cycling takes courage.
Who knows for sure why anything goes viral on the internet. There's a bright future for the person who can figure that out. Surely, though, the reason ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann's assessment of Donald Trump's performance at the G20 meeting took off was that it showed Americans from the perspective of an informed outsider just how far and fast the reputation of not just the US Presidency but of the US itself is falling under Trump.
Proof of the health harms from tobacco smoking emerged decades after it became a common habit. E-cigarettes have been around for only 10 years.
A serious commitment to lessening the harm caused by the 95,000-odd poker machines in the state would be welcome.
With much of the city in ruins, thousands of lives lost and more than a million people displaced from their homes, there will be limits to celebrations of the liberation of the Iraqi city of Mosul. The situation remains complex and dangerous even in "peace".
With the focus on the power struggle between the US, Russia and China, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was always going to take a back seat at the G20 meeting.
Despite early dire predictions for a chaotic parliament after he failed to gain a decisive majority in the "own goal" double dissolution election last July, Mr Turnbull's government has avoided parliamentary disasters so far.
Nobody should have to pull an unconscious child out of a pool.
Cricket is a lucrative enterprise, but does the fight for a share of the spoils have to be so graceless, and so public?
The F6 freeway extension has been on the books for more than a decade. There is no excuse for sacrificing good process in a rush now.
A military strike to wipe out or at least set back North Korea's nuclear capabilities risks retaliation, escalation and carnage on a scale unseen since the last Korean war.
It is difficult to have faith in a World Cup culture that remains so toxic and corrupt.
After decades of false starts and dashed hopes, the Sydney Fish Market looks set for a bright and better future.
What the census has told us, every five years, is that Australia changes, and change is normal. Whether the changes are good or bad depends how we think about them and importantly, what we do about them.
Bujarri Gamurruwa … That's g'day (or perhaps something more formal) in the Gadigal language of the Eora nation. We greet our readers this way to mark NAIDOC week, the annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the referendum which was the first step in recognising the rights of Aboriginal Australians.
To his credit the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is pressing on with the real work of a positive policy agenda – "engineering and economics" – as opposed to Mr Abbott's slogans.
Arriving at a just outcome for the claimants and for Cardinal Pell depends on due process being respected assiduously.
We need a new regulatory regime to stamp out and punish unscrupulous and exploitative practices in the highly profitable retirement village industry.
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