Pauline Hanson shows her hand

Good morning, early birds. Pauline Hanson has conditionally agreed to support Christian Porter’s union-busting bill, and the CEO of scandal-plagued Westpac is refusing to resign. It’s the news you need to know, with Rachel Withers.

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THE COMMENTARIAT

The white system gets in the way of our law – and now we are scared of our sons being shot – Theresa Alice and Amelia Turner (The Guardian): “We are two grandmothers who work as traditional healers at the Akeyulerre Healing Centre in Alice Springs. We can’t sit down; we all need to stand up and be united. This is not just one nation suffering. As Aboriginal people we are all suffering. We are giving the Yuendumu families our support. They took away a life that was so young. People want to know the truth. As a mother you feel hurt and as a grandmother. Our spirits are crying – it is affecting his family but it is affecting everyone. When you read it in the newspaper it is the police’s story, but talking to the families we hear a different story. Everyone has bad experiences of the police coming to our family homes, making people feel scared. Our young people are being stopped just walking down the street. They are harassed and are not safe. We are watching our families going into paddy wagons, courts and prison. We feel as if we are suffocating. The law is suffocating us. Our voices are being stopped.”

Morrison is right about one thing – we’re sick of the drama – Jessica Irvine (The Age/Sydney Morning Herald): “Overall, Morrison strikes a chord when he diagnoses that Australians are sick of the ‘drama’. But that doesn’t mean they don’t also want solutions to the more pressing challenges of our time, including climate change, a shifting taxation base and missing real wages growth. Forgive me if I read some deeper meaning in Morrison’s commentary that he is, indeed, serious about overseeing a return to a more rigorous policymaking environment, one in which policy problems are clearly identified and explained to the public, competing solutions are canvassed in consultation with interested parties, and an agreed solution is landed upon, clearly explained and implemented. Following such a process is no guarantee of ultimate policy success – just look at carbon pricing. But policymaking is almost guaranteed to fail if you don’t at least try it.”

Learning Mandarin would help Australians know the Chinese better ($) – Chinese embassy charge d’affaires Wang Xining (The Australian): “Over the past six months since I assumed my post in Canberra it has been shocking to learn that so much attention has been fixed on China by fellow Australians. It was equally shocking to find that so much distortion had occurred in the local portrait of my homeland. According to the descriptions by some Aussies and media reports, China seems to me an alien country, not the place where I grew up over the past half a century. One of the major reasons for this disparity in understanding China is that the Chinese perspective, the views of ordinary Chinese citizens, has seldom surfaced in this corner of the world. People indulge themselves in a self-righteous cognitive universe structured by ideologically censored or linguistically filtered information.”

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