If the leader can't lead, who will show his followers the way? That awkward question has gripped the Coalition, and more particularly the Liberal Party, on too many issues since Malcolm Turnbull took over from Tony Abbott and then failed to triumph at the 2016 election.
After all the children and their teachers have left for the day, thousands of cleaners around the state get to work in vacant classrooms emptying bins, vacuuming carpets and bleaching toilets. For the first time in more than two decades, the state government is changing the way these hard-working cleaners are paid.
Australian voters will be looking askance at the remarkable effect an appearance before the High Court can have on our politicians. Where some have no qualms about being less than candid when the audience is only the voting public, in front of the judges of the highest court in the land they – or their legal representatives – raise their standards quite quickly.
By chumming up to President Duterte publicly, the head of ASIS appears to risk both negating the government's justified stance against Mr Duterte's domestic policies, and complicating the campaign against Islamist terrorism.
When Liberal politicians start talking up a major infrastructure project, which is not a new road, we should all take notice.
Afghanistan remains essentially unchanged: lawless, tribal, not a state in any useful sense.
History itself is written mostly by those who win the battles – but not always. And tension between different versions of the past fosters differences in the present.
The issue is not whether the internal combustion engine is set for extinction, but how fast and how well the transition to electricity happens.
The exorbitant price of property in Sydney has many ramifications for young and old. Perhaps more notably for the young.
Parliament rose on Thursday and won't sit again for two weeks. What a relief! Let us hope our politicians' performance improves when they return.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS, has itself been labouring under something of a disability of its own: lack of money.
What a surprise – another traffic jam.
At the White House on Monday, Donald Trump finally, and apparently reluctantly, addressed the racist cause of the violence that led to the deaths of three people during the so-called "Unite the Right" rally in the town of Charlottesville, Virginia.
MPs and citizenship: it's a question of common sense.
The debate over voluntary assisted dying has a renewed focus across the country.
The relief in cafes across Sydney will be palpable today: the avocado is innocent. The lumpy green fruit has not been stopping the millennial generation from buying a house. That is the conclusion from the figures we report today on the price and availability of avocado meals. Â
We can't bring back those hefty Saturday papers any more than we can turn back time, but we can move forward with the times, and that's what the media reform package is all about.
The least Mr Billson can do to make amends for his mistake is to donate the $75,000 to charity. And the least our Federal MPs can do is to get fair dinkum about establishing a National Integrity Commission.
Neither state nor federal governments are stepping up to provide the strong, enduring leadership the issue of homelessness demands
With scandal after scandal, the call for a banking royal commission gets stronger. The Commonwealth Bank's alleged failures hindered law enforcement and exposed the community to "serious and ongoing financial crime", Austrac says.
There is much to trouble Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten in the findings of focus groups conducted for Fairfax Media in recent days, but more for their dispirited constituency.
That loving gay couples should be able to declare a lifetime commitment to each other before the law with the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual couples do is now mainstream thinking. So when will it happen, and why not now?
The question troubling economic policymakers now is whether record low wages growth is cyclical, so likely to revert to past patterns, or structural, so here to stay.
Calls have been made to lower the age at which a child can obtain a minor's gun permit. The Sporting Shooters Association of Australia backed by the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party would like to see the age reduced to 10.
It is shocking indeed that in Australia, where we enjoy one of the best healthcare systems in the world, people with a serious mental illness die younger on average than the general population by between 14 and 23 years.
We trust it all comes out in the wash of reviews of investigations, but non-compliance should not become an excuse to abandon the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
The onus is on universities to change culture on campus and in residential colleges where unacceptable sexual behaviour has for too long been tolerated as part of university life, to be preferably ignored or if necessary covered up.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian needs to ensure for Sydney's sake, as well as her own, that her biggest strength over the next two years remains just that – a strength.
Every family involved with a school knows that up close there are brilliant success stories every day. At a system level, though, things aren't going so well.
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.
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