Australia expected to miss Paris targets

“Morrison and his team have crafted a global vision for local people, and in so doing renewed centre-right politics with a new mediation between populism and establishment liberal-conservatism which is right on the money. The only tiny problem is that it’s all a national pseudo-consensus based on our hugely leveraged and highly-sectionalised prosperity, which demands relentless growth. The whole thing will come apart very quickly if there’s any sort of serious faltering, and “the promise to/of Australia” will be a broken one. I’d take some political hope from that, if Labor weren’t tucking into the slipstream behind the Coalition hoping to glide to a narrow victory, and thus be even less likely to see the bump in the unquestioned ‘road ahead’, or the gap where it falls away entirely.”

“Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley argued that the US had to continue to, in effect, guarantee Kurdish security because of their contribution to the defeat of IS. But think that logic through: IS was created as a direct result of the illegal Western attack on Iraq by George W. Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard and other miscreants. IS then became the pretext for another military venture in the Middle East in 2014. Now we’re told that, as a consequence of that secondary venture, Western forces must remain there. These are literally ‘Endless Wars’, with each one creating the pretext for another venture justified by neoconservatives and the foreign policy establishment as crucial to security, stability and that precious commodity of ‘credibility’. For Trump’s critics there will never be a point at which the US, and other Western countries, should end their interventionism.”

“It’s rare that entrepreneurs implore governments to put them out of business by flooding the market — but that’s exactly what the duo behind a black market medicinal cannabis company want. A new Australian documentary, Green Light, follows two men running an underground medicinal marijuana ring as they prescribe and administer cannabinoids to patients who struggle to access it legally. Treating everything from a face tumour the size of a saucer, to a bump on a horse’s nose, the duo have tens of thousands of patients across the country.”