In The Australian today:
"Bill Clinton famously called the US "the indispensable nation"'. With the shutdown grinding on, America seems more incomprehensible than indispensable. And further crises lie ahead, as showdowns on the debt ceiling and the automatic sequester loom."

From today's The Australian

"From 1980 on, country after country moved to greater economic and political freedom. A report released last week by Canada's Fraser Institute shows that since the global financial crisis, that wave of liberalisation has come to an end, and in some cases, reversed."

In The Australian today:

"It is in the nature of events that their consequences seem clearer than their causes. Five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the global financial crisis is no exception. Yet just as the causes of the crisis remain intensely controversial, so uncertainty pervades its long-run effects and the dangers of recurrence."

In The Australian today:

"According to Anthony Albanese, the sacking of three department heads and the announcement that a fourth would step down amounts to treating the public service as "political playthings".

In The Australian today:

"Elections should be the storm before the calm. But 2007 and 2010 broke that pattern. Now, pundits say, Tony Abbott's hopes of orderly government will be spoiled by a fractious Senate. And though the final result remains uncertain, there is a clamour for changes that would make it more difficult for small parties to win Senate seats through preference deals."

In The Australian today:
"History, it is often claimed, is written by the victors. Yet from Thucydides on it is the defeated who have most readily sought its solace. "As their overwhelming experience is that everything occurred other than as planned," explained the great German intellectual Reinhart Koselleck, himself a veteran of Paulus's army at Stalingrad, "it is the losers who feel the most desperate need to understand how that could have happened."