Abbott’s instinct will be to support the Commissioner, and Heydon’s instinct will be to hang on. This is a mistake: it seems unlikely that he will survive past the end of this week, and he should resign as quickly as possible. His career is also unlikely to survive, whether he answers the questions raised about this issue or not.

There is a long history of urban communities and neighbourhoods fighting vested interests over competing visions of what the city might look like and how it provides access to housing, transport and other amenities. Cities are one of those important sites for contrasting ideas about how a society should be structured and organised. In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, the area around Alexandra Parade has been the location of struggle over the building and extension of the Eastern Freeway into inner northern suburbs.

We’ve been staying on a farm in the Usumbara Mountains above Lushoto for a few nights. For the past seven years, it’s been run by a Swede and a South African from the German Lutheran church. Over dinner last night, the inevitable question arose: Why doesn’t Tanzania work? It’s certainly something that this couple has […]