Annabel Crabb

Far from Rome, the sky is thick with portent as Australia's political parties decide who has power in the current parliament. 

For a campaign that was widely derided as dull and uninspiring, the aftermath of the federal election has a kick like a seriously shirty mule.

For 102 years now (apart from a brief and steamy affair with Joh Bjelke Peterson in 1987) the country-based National Party has been married to the urbanite Liberal Party.

It's not all that long since Labor had its own dragging, painful, exhausting split over an issue on which its opponents were jubilantly united.

Assuming Liberal leader Sussan Ley takes a COMCAR to Parliament House, the rest of the Liberal women can get there in a Corolla.

We need people to be good, or to be evil. We need a cause to be unimpeachable, or reprehensible. How else to explain the unscratchable itch that the trial of Erin Patterson has become for humans all over the world?

Maybe the best way to comprehend just how genuinely chaotic these intersecting systems have become is to stop trying to think about them at a country-by-country level, and just pick a product: lobsters. 

Both Anthony Albanese and Sussan Ley are past convenors of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group when they were backbenchers, more than two decades ago.

Productivity is an economic concept, but it should be fired by the universal human experience of being driven mad by unnecessary stuff that makes life harder. 

From his humble early days as a child reading Hansard in the regional Sunshine State pocket of Eumundi, Kevin Rudd has been preparing for this martyrdom. But the Passion Of The Kevin, when it came, was a million miles from home.