Not Stupid

After a troubled gestation, Australia has a plan for net zero emissions by 2050, in time for Scott Morrison to take to the Glasgow climate summit. But criticism has been quick and sharp, and other leaders want more from Australia. What is the plan, and why has it failed to impress?

Australia’s climate policy is still not settled and observers say the obsession over a 2050 climate target is “other worldly” and a fraud, if it allows fossil fuels to flourish. But with the UN Climate conference imminent, what are other nations bringing to the table?

Lockdowns start lifting in Australia's southeast. But thousands of cases are still circulating. Victorians are warned everyone will eventually get the virus, though vaccines are making it a mild disease. But what next for states that have had little and are still behind closed borders?

The Prime Minister, his deputy and other senior Coalition figures criticised NSW ICAC this week, over the Berejiklian resignation, claiming the state’s anti-corruption model is broken. It seemed to deal a new blow to the prospects of a long promised federal integrity body. So is there a credible plan all sides of politics can agree on?

In a political shock, Gladys Berejiklian resigns as Premier of NSW and from Parliament, after a corruption body announces she faces a conflict of interest investigation. Asserting her integrity, she has slammed the timing of the inquiry, coming as her state’s strategy to emerge from a gruelling COVID outbreak is at a critical point.

There have been protests on Melbourne’s streets this week, but who is organising them? And are there really links with far right groups? And Scott Morrison has been in the US this week, selling the benefits of the new submarine deal. But can he end the diplomatic stoush over the AUKUS defence deal?

The Morrison government has deepened Australia's dependence on the US for its defence, signing up for an increased US military presence in Australia and a fleet of nuclear powered submarines using US technology. How could they be used to defend Australia? Also, a call to give no COVID boosters this year in Australia, and for a strategic approach to future booster allocation.

20 years after 9/11, we look at how the attacks fuelled American xenophobia and blinded the US to grave issues beyond terrorism. A view from a Pulitzer Prize winning foreign policy writer, Fred Kaplan, a witness to the Twin Towers catastrophe. Also why national debate about “opening up” must include wider use of rapid testing.

Australia is borrowing Pfizer jabs, while it waits for purchases to arrive. But when might mRNA vaccines be made onshore? And Indigenous communities are being targeted with anti-vaccination propaganda. We look at what went wrong with the rollout in Indigenous communities.

As NSW charts a path to schools opening, experts say measuring and filtering classroom air is essential, alongside masks and vaccines, as we “learn to live with COVID". And from a mythically resistant valley, Afghanistan’s Taliban resistance assembles, who are they and what is the plan?