Karen Middleton

Middleton On the first day of parliament in February this year, independent MP Allegra Spender pleaded with her colleagues to more fully criminalise hate speech in Australia. “In recent weeks and months, my community of Wentworth has witnessed a horrifyin... See more

The public storm around parliamentary expenses sparked by the cost of Anika Wells’ September trip to New York has now been raging for three times as long as she was there. There’s a reason the government’s initial attempts to justify an astronomical trave... See more

Voters hate hypocrisy. They can forgive mistakes, omissions and oversights. But those who seem like hypocrites, they punish. Since before winning office in 2022, federal Labor frontbenchers have talked a lot about integrity. Now in their fourth year of go... See more

Nobody gets to relax over summer any more. We spend those weeks fearing fires and floods, forced to take side-hustles and staycations to ease the pinch. And because we can’t relax, our elected representatives can’t either. Anthony Albanese has known for s... See more

When Anthony Albanese is looking to do a political deal, he always has more than one objective in mind. In securing Senate majority support to overhaul environment law, the prime minister and his environment minister, Murray Watt, have been working to a m... See more