While Australia’s parliamentarians were frocking up for the Midwinter Ball last week, representatives of the nation’s authors, musicians and artists were in Canberra pleading for assurances that the government would not water down copyright laws, as part of a deal with giant tech firms to build $50bn worth of new data centres across the country.

In the kind of move that Labor once derided in their opponents, the government used the cover of the federal budget – while most journalists were literally locked up – to deliver its response to the late Peta Murphy's report into online gambling, 'You Win Some, You Lose More'.

After a politically challenging year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese married Jodie Haydon in a lovely, private ceremony at the Lodge on Saturday.

Anthony Albanese's government has no functional opposition, but an Australian socialist utopia seems as remote as ever. Would Ben Chifley recognise Labor in the 21st century? What happened to the 'betterment of mankind'? The party which once existed to serve the interests of the working class now seems utterly beholden to the military industrial complex, big miners and the gambling industry.

2024 is now officially the hottest year ever recorded on our planet, easily beating the previous record year of 2023 as we collectively travel up the exponential curve towards catastrophe.

With the Australian federal parliament in recess, and in the wake of an American election won with a campaign of lies amplified by social media, a Senate committee spent a day last week publicly discussing the Albanese government's (probably doomed) bill to combat misinformation and disinformation.

After multiple postponements, independent ACT Senator David Pocock was finally able to introduce his bill seeking to bring intergenerational duty of care into the 2022 Climate Change Act yesterday.