Julian Linden reports in this morning’s Ozthe 41-year-old was left sobbing her heart out and needing urgent medical attention as she lay screaming on the course in agonising pain before a helicopter arrived to airlift her to the nearest Italian hospital.

US Ski and Snowboard Team issued a statement updating her condition, saying: Lindsey Vonn sustained an injury, but is in stable condition and in good hands with a team of American and Italian physicians".

It was a horrifying and deeply distressing end to Vonn’s inspiring comeback that had captured the attention of the sporting world but has now cast a dark pall over the Milano Cortina Games where she was one of the brightest stars.

Vonn’s American team mate Breezy Johnson won the gold while Emma Aicher of Germany claimed silver and the bronze went to Italy' Sofia Goggia, who lit the cauldron at Cortina at the opening ceremony.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports world record holder Sander Eitrem lived up to his billing as favourite, as the Norwegian stormed to gold in the 5,000 metres at the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics on Sunday.

Czech Republic’s Metodej Jilek claimed silver, while Italy’s Riccardo Lorello delighted the home crowd with bronze.

Eitrem stopped the clock in an Olympic-record time of 6 minutes 3.95 seconds, finishing 2.53 seconds ahead of Jilek.

Max Langenhan delivered an astonishing performance to strike gold in the men’s luge singles on Sunday, breaking the track record four times in a row to win by a mile and continue Germany’s domination of the event they have taken in four of the last five Olympics.

In a sport where positions are often decided by thousandths of a second, Austria’s Jonas Mueller was over half a second adrift for silver, with Italian Dominik Fischnaller, who won bronze four years ago, repeating his third place.

Sweden secured their place in the Olympic women’s ice hockey quarter-finals with a 4-0 win over France in Group B at Milano Rho arena on Sunday, condemning the French to their third defeat in as many games.

The Swedes have a maximum nine points after three matches to sit top of the group standings, with Germany, Italy and Japan all on three after two games.

France is bottom without a point and the top three will advance to the last eight.

U.S. interest in European-based hedge funds more than doubled, Barclays said. In the survey that took place over November and December, investors in Europe told the bank that they were 8% more willing to put money into European managers than last year.

Interest in hedge fund managers based in Asia grew around 10%.

Traditional hedge funds below 2% mgt and 20% performance fees but remain at historical highs

Hedge fund fees remain historically high, survey respondents told Barclays. Average management and performance fees peaked in 2025 for traditional hedge fund products, while the kind that pass through costs have decreased.

Since 2023, investors' share of gross returns has risen from around 47% to 56%, the bank said. Investors have also seen overall hedge fund returns grow by around 5% this year, it added.

Multi-manager assets under management have grown at rate of around 17% annually since 2017 to around $435 billion last year, the bank said.

They were not investors' top strategy pick, however. Hedge funds that base investment decisions on macroeconomic factors and those that trade stocks systematically garnered the highest levels of net allocators in 2025, Barclays said.

Overall, the hedge fund industry grew by just over a fifth between 2023 and 2025, its largest two-year jump since that between 2011 and 2013, the data showed.

Equity Market Neutral is the most favoured strategy for 2026, followed by Quant Multi-Strategy, which has been the most sought-after since 2020, according to the survey results.

An exclusive Newspoll conducted for The Australian reveals One Nation’s core support has risen by five points over the past three weeks, with the second Coalition divorce in nine months translating into a clear loss of voter support for the Liberals and Nationals and a collapse in the Opposition Leader’s personal standing.

A new Coalition deal on Sunday brought an end to the embarrassing 17-day split, with a remorseless Nationals leader David Littleproud declaring the soap opera had displayed his and Ms Ley’s maturity, courage, leadership, strength, character and principles.

One Nation’s primary vote is now closer to Labor’s than the Coalition’s, with the Albanese government’s core support increasing by one point since mid-January to 33%.

The last time the Coalition registered a primary vote as high as One Nation’s current support was October last year, with the latest survey reinforcing the potential of Pauline Hanson’s populist party to not only threaten but even eclipse one of the traditional major parties.

With conservative Liberal MPs arguing the outcome of the latest Newspoll could be a factor over whether a spill is pushed for in Canberra this parliamentary sitting week, Ms Ley’s personal numbers have sharply deteriorated and are the worst for a major party leader since Labor’s Simon Crean in May 2003.

Of the 1234 people surveyed between Thursday and Sunday, just 23% were satisfied with Ms Ley’s leadership compared to 28% three weeks ago.

Sixty-two per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with her performance, up from 56% in January, bringing her net satisfaction rating to minus 39.

Mr Albanese’s net satisfaction rating has improved by one point to minus 10, while he holds a 19-point lead over Ms Ley as preferred prime minister.

With the survey being conducted while the Coalition parties were split, the Liberals' primary support was 15% while the Nationals' was 3%.

As the Coalition’s primary vote is at a record low and One Nation’s support historically concentrated in a smaller number of seats, Newspoll has not generated a two-party-preferred calculation.

After Ms Ley’s allies on Friday declared the Nationals' offer to reform the Coalition was not serious and top moderates described it as a joke, the Opposition Leader the following day struck an in-principle agreement with Mr Littleproud to restore the union.

The deal came amid an internal rumour Mr Taylor was planning on quitting the frontbench early this week to protest the failure to strike a deal with the Coalition, which would have been a trigger for him to challenge.

Mr Taylor’s supporters yesterday said there was still a chance of a move against Ms Ley by the end of the parliamentary week if Newspoll showed the Coalition’s support had declined further.

But some conservative MPs are not convinced he has enough support to win a spill, while Ms Ley’s backers claim she retains the support of the majority of the partyroom.

The latest data by Impact Economics for Homelessness NSW, which surveyed 12 services across the state, estimates 80,000 people are homeless in NSW — up from 35,011 recorded in the 2021 Census.

The scathing report also shows that NSW’s funding for homelessness services is the lowest in the country, at $37 per person, compared to $75 in Victoria and $91 in Tasmania.

Shockingly, the data showed a further 700,000 people were also at risk of homelessness.

Housing affordability and rental stress was found to be a key factor pushing young people and even families, including full-time and part-time working parents, to the brink of homelessness.

The revelations have prompted frontline workers to call for urgent funding increases, fearing that vulnerable people could be left without support.

Meanwhile, half of the organisations surveyed in November revealed they had at least one occasion when the front entrance had to be closed, with an average closing time of two hours.

A staggering 75% of services had at least one occasion where they were unable to answer the phone.

Two organisations needed to close their doors for seven to eight hours and three organisations were forced to close the front doors on every day they reported.

Equity Economics found mortgage repayments had skyrocketed by 80 per cent between June 2021 and September 2025, due to increased house prices and massive fluctuations in interest rates.

Rental stress had also intensified, with the median rent in NSW surging by 38% between June 2021 and April 2025.

Support services were facing overwhelming demand in suburban and regional areas across the state, Homelessness NSW chief executive Dominique Rowe said.

Frontline workers are doing everything they can, but the system has stretched so far it is now breaking, Ms Rowe said.

The private rental market is really tight at the moment, so people are finding it difficult to make ends meet and pay their rent and are being forced out into a range of very unsuitable situations.

Ms Rowe said behind every missed call could be a woman trying to escape domestic violence or a teenager in desperate need of a hot shower or a meal.

When services have to shut their doors for hours at a time, people fall through the cracks and the human cost is devastating.

Salvation Army State Manager Homelessness NSW/ACT Kristie Clifton said every time the phone rang out or the front door had to be shut, staff were heartbroken.

We know someone is reaching out at the most difficult time of their lives, and we simply don't have the capacity to help, she said.

People are coming to us exhausted, frightened and out of options.

Frontline teams are doing everything humanly possible, but the reality is we cannot keep the doors open without urgent investment.

It’s more than a win for one hardware giant; it sets a precedent that puts major players like Woolworths, Coles, JB Hi Fi and Harvey Norman on notice to accelerate their own rollouts, reshaping how shopping centres and high streets operate.

The Tribunal accepted Bunnings' case that its 2018-2021 trial was a necessary measure to protect staff and inventory amid rising crime and abuse, acknowledging a very real and serious problem of violence and theft.

The Privacy Commissioner had initially found Bunnings breached privacy laws by scanning customers without explicit consent.

Now, with the reversal, retailers have a clearer legal runway to deploy sophisticated systems that track customer behaviour in real time.

For commercial property owners and retail tenants, the implications are immediate.

This decision effectively normalises AI surveillance as part of store infrastructure, pushing outlets towards continuous, data driven observation.

Expect security strategies, building specifications and lease agreements to change - designing for camera coverage, analytics integration and operational transparency.

Over time, consistent incident reduction and higher asset protection could influence property values and investment appetite.

And retail chains are already gearing up.

This type of technology will become commonplace, Professor Gary Mortimer, a retail and consumer behaviour expert at Queensland University of Technology told the ABC.

It also has broader impacts outside of just retail. I think about government workers in service positions that encounter aggressive behaviour all the time. I think about a tram, train and bus drivers that encounter abuse.

A little over a year ago, Bonnie’s hair started falling out. The then 30-year-old went to see a dermatologist, who asked if something stressful had happened in her life recently. Bonnie knew instantly what it was.

The Australian government had passed new legislation related to the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) and she was terrified it would strip her sister Claire* of the essential supports that enabled her to live a beautiful and rich life.

Without those supports, Bonnie feared Claire would be left to rot in a group home.

Claire, also in her 30s, has a degenerative condition. She uses a wheelchair, is blind and needs assistance with many tasks, including toileting, dressing, moving in and out of her chair, and with some communication.

Claire also runs a small business, consults on disability issues, regularly socialises with friends and competes in para-sports - much of which is made possible through the one-to-one support she receives from a carer, funded via the NDIS.

We often say she should be a poster girl for the NDIS, says Claire’s mother, Alice*.

But when legislative changes to the scheme were introduced in October 2024, the family became terrified that this one-to-one support, and all it enables, would be taken away.

In the months since, as they've seen reports of NDIS participants having their plans cut, or in some cases being reassessed and removed from the NDIS entirely, their anxiety has grown.

Bonnie’s hair started falling out, Alice stopped being able to talk about the future without crying, and Claire’s 70-year-old father went back to work full-time, because we don't know what’s going to happen and we just can't trust that the support will be there any more, Bonnie says.

It’s a fear shared by many NDIS participants who have been left reeling from a suite of legislative changes designed to curb the cost to the budget of the NDIS — which has been projected to rise from $44.3bln in 2024 to more than $90bln by the end of the decade.

And it’s just the beginning. The most significant changes in the history of the NDIS are set to be introduced over the next 12 months. Participants, their families, allied health professionals, disability advocates, and lawyers have told Guardian Australia that the NDIS is on a precipice, facing dramatic changes to its entire setup that could threaten its very purpose.

We're just completely terrified about how this is all going to go, Bonnie says. It’s just this overwhelming sense of doom.

Participants have been experiencing changes to the NDIS at breakneck speed since the legislation, titled the Getting the NDIS Back on Track bill, commenced in October 2024.

Many of these changes are, on the face of it, small and undramatic: new definitions of the supports that can be funded, funding caps for certain therapies and limits on travel costs for allied health workers, the implementation of funding periods which mean funding can only be spent in a particular time period, among other things.

Basically, we have really complex changes in the legislation … that has enabled the NDIA to clamp down on people’s access to funding in a lot of ways that all add up to one big cut, Sarah Langston, the president of the Australian Neurodivergent Parents Association, told the Guardian late last year.

A government spokesperson says the changes are necessary to preserve the NDIS for future generations, telling Guardian Australia in a statement that after a decade of neglect under the former government costs ballooned out of control.

Since October 2022, the NDIS Actuary projected that without Labor’s action, scheme expenses would have increased by $45bln, they say.

But the deeper question is what sort of a Liberal Party, and what sort of a Coalition, will it be, because for the first time in over a hundred years there’s the makings of a viable alternative to what’s always been the mainstream centre-right party. The Liberal Party isn't just down. This time, if it’s not careful, it could be down and out.

For at least a generation, Australian politics has been becoming less tribal. As John Howard used to say, when he was young, 45% of the population always voted for the Coalition, 45% for the Labor Party and it was the 10% in the middle that determined the result.

More recently, the public has normally divided a third for the Coalition, a third for the ALP and a third for others. Initially that disruption didn't matter so much for either big party, because the others tended to split pretty evenly between the Greens on the left and minor parties on the right, although the Greens' more disciplined preferences gave Labor a slight advantage.

But that simplified split has become more complicated for the LNP over the past two federal elections, with the rise in its former heartland of the teals.

This vote displacement reflects a tendency, across the Anglosphere, for richer people to vote more left, while poorer people vote more right; yet because voters with bread and butter concerns will nearly always outnumber those with luxury beliefs, this could ultimately be to the Coalition’s advantage, provided it can avoid mixed messaging and policy indecision; and can meet this new constituency with credible candidates that reflect their community rather than parachuted-in apparatchiks, as is the current failing model.

At the 2025 election, under Peter Dutton’s leadership, the Coalition’s primary vote crashed to just 32%. Labor’s primary vote only increased from 33 to 35% but with Greens preferences, and with the teals consolidating their hold on once safe Liberal seats, Labor surged to its biggest majority in the parliament since the disintegration of the United Australia Party in 1943.

If the polls are right, since then there’s been a further seismic shift. Due to a roughly 10% slump in the Coalition primary vote since May last year, between them, the main parties now have barely 50% support.

Only this time, the votes that have been haemorrhaging away from the Coalition haven't migrated more or less evenly to other parties across the political spectrum; instead, they've largely coalesced behind One Nation.

Last May, One Nation received just 6% of the vote, a similar result to previous elections since 2016. Since then, One Nation has risen sharply from 15% in the December Newspoll, to 22% a fortnight ago, when it was in front of the Coalition for the first time in Newspoll history.

Unsurprisingly, in the wake of the Coalition split, One Nation’s rise has continued, with this week’s Redbridge poll putting One Nation on 26%, with the former Coalition parties on a paltry 19% combined primary vote.

So, here’s the Liberals' dilemma, and here’s the challenge for the commentators who until recently were so certain that the Liberals had to swing left in response to the teals: what should happen now, when it’s no longer the teals who are cannibalising Liberal votes but the hardline conservative outfit One Nation?

Perhaps the real problem for the Liberals all along has been less that they have been insufficiently left wing, or insufficiently right wing but that they've been nothing much at all.

The last time the Coalition won big, in 2013 with a 46% primary vote under Tony Abbott, the LNP was a clear contrast to a Labor government that had lost control of our borders, lost control of the budget, and was climate obsessed. Not only did Abbott, an unapologetic conservative, have a laser focus on the problems that even Labor partisans had to admit were being mishandled but he had a clear way forward: scrapping the mining and carbon taxes to revitalise the economy; Operation Sovereign Borders to stop the boats; and budget rules such as no new spending without cuts to existing spending to restore fiscal discipline.

The Liberals' subsequent malaise, under Malcolm Turnbull, was that a centre-right party was being led from the centre-left; and then, under Scott Morrison, that the party of smaller government and greater freedom presided over health authoritarianism and pandemic spending on an unprecedented scale. And Morrison’s embrace of net zero removed another key point of difference.

At last year’s election, despite being well placed six months out, Peter Dutton (and his team) failed to fight for his energy policy, or to campaign against Labor’s unrealised capital gains wealth tax, or even to drive home the collapse in living standards that Labor’s policies had made worse.

For a decade now, the Coalition has consistently let down its voters, who are typically economically liberal and socially conservative, so it’s no wonder they're angry. And as for this idea that the Liberals have to return to the centre therr&squo;s nothing that the Liberals have done over the past decade that’s remotely right wing: the AUKUS nuclear submarines decision was promptly me-too-ed by Labor; and even the belated repudiation of net zero reflects a general move against energy self-harm even in Europe.

Given that 34% of voters currently think that the party best placed to handle immigration is actually One Nation, on this issue, at least, perhaps a tougher Liberal Party is exactly what voters want.

The commentators are right to point out that a high One Nation vote ultimately helps Labor because its preferences don't reliably return to the Coalition. Where they're very wrong is to suggest that the Coalition’s political task is to differentiate itself from One Nation, rather than to reinvigorate its fight with Labor. One Nation is surging to fill the vacuum left by the LNP; and those former Coalition voters now parked with the insurgency are less interested in political theology and an argument over the nature of conservatism, than they are in having a politically clear, consistent and effective opposition to a Labor government that’s taking our country backwards.

What they see in Hanson is less about a viable alternative PM than someone who has at least been consistent in her opposition to net zero, mass migration and the nonsense of three flags and welcoming people to their own country.

In the 1998 Queensland state election, One Nation won 23% of the primary vote, and 11 seats in parliament, mostly from the Coalition, thus installing a Labor government. In the run-up to the subsequent federal election three months later, Howard’s focus was not on fighting One Nation but on emphasising the Coalition’s economic credentials against Labor.

Howard didn't see off the One Nation challenge by moving to the centre or by vitriolic attacks on the hard right but by being a strong and consistent leader in the orthodox centre-right tradition.

And heading a party of government, he could address One -Nation voters' grievances more effectively than any protest party leader.

Right now in this country, people are crying out for leadership and they are sick of the insider games of politics as usual. They want policies to stop Australia’s slide and that’s what the Liberals must address.

Put simply, the best response to a fractured voter base is not to chase voters in two directions at once but to offer Australians the changes (and the hope) that our country so desperately needs.

There are, after all, few more potent images in the left’s imaginary than that of Joseph McCarthy ∼ the Republican senator from Wisconsin ∼ sweating profusely as he and his henchmen torment their idealistic victims, who erred only by dreaming of a better world. To tolerate, much less endorse, anything likened to that assault on democratic values is no more acceptable than professing admiration for fascism, inviting immediate moral excommunication.

Yet historical reality is not so easily dismissed. Whenever its complexity is reduced to a slur, it grabs us, like some monumental bore and insists on a reckoning. And when that reality is properly understood, it becomes clear that Adler has resorted to a compound of falsity and deliberate obfuscation that grotesquely distorts the lessons of a long-gone era.

The key facts are not in dispute. The democracies' wartime alliance with the USSR, together with the Red Army’s decisive role in defeating Nazism, greatly enhanced communism’s standing in the West. That enabled communists to acquire influential positions across a wide range of institutions, including some vital to national security. What followed was to lay the foundations for devastatingly effective Soviet espionage and to expose major industries to the risk of severe disruption.

But with the Soviet war effort still vivid in Western minds, the democracies were slow to address the dangers. The complacency started to unravel only after a series of defections by Soviet intelligence officials, beginning with that of Igor Gouzenko in Canada, supplied documentary proof of far-reaching Soviet espionage networks.

Additionally, by 1947, the American Venona Project had succeeded in decrypting Soviet cables, confirming the defectors' accounts and revealing the central role communists played in those networks. Although the Truman administration kept Venona cloaked in secrecy, its key findings were disclosed to the most senior decision-makers in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

The rapidly deteriorating international situation then brought matters to a head. Not only was the Soviet noose tightening in the territories under Stalin’s control; the formation of the Cominform in September 1947 marked a decisive hardening of the Soviet position.

In particular, Andrei Zhdanov ∼ responsible for Soviet relations with foreign Communist parties ∼ articulated the doctrine that the post-war world had divided into two irreconcilable camps: the warmongering imperialist and anti-democratic camp led by the United States, and the peace-loving anti-imperialist and democratic camp led by the Soviet Union.

From that premise followed an operational directive. Communist parties were charged not only with advancing the Soviet cause directly but with impeding the alleged preparations for an imperialist war. The result was a wave of bitterly contested strikes that paralysed critical industries in virtually every Western democracy, including Australia, where Ben Chifley denounced a Communist-inspired attempt to destroy the democratic way of life.

Taken together, those events forced a Western response. The most notorious was, for sure, that in the US, where president Harry Truman, although initiating the measures later derided as a witch-hunt, sought to manage the New Deal coalition’s liberal base by keeping the crackdown low-key.

With public anxiety mounting into panic, Truman’s hesitation created the space that was soon filled by the demagogy of McCarthy’s Permanent Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. It is beyond doubt that those hearings involved abuses of process. But it is equally beyond doubt that, as McCarthy’s stern critic, Sidney Hook, observed: What contributed to McCarthy’s influence was the spectacle of scores of Communist witnesses remaining silent, or invoking the Fifth Amendment, as the picture of Communist penetration in American life unfolded.

However, it is less the excesses than the correction that matters. The American courts intervened, with increasing vigour, to restrain abuses; and for all the widespread fear provoked by the intensification of the Cold War, McCarthy was speedily brought to heel, his career abruptly terminated.

That outcome was not accidental. It reflected the presence of institutional counterweights capable of reasserting legal limits even under acute pressure — something wholly absent in the Soviet empire, where inquiry slid seamlessly into terror and correction was structurally impossible.

The system, in other words, worked. And it worked even more clearly in Australia. Thus, the Victorian Royal Commission on Communism (1949-50) was scrupulous in its procedures and findings, notwithstanding the fact that communist witnesses were, as Stuart Macintyre acknowledged in his largely sympathetic history of Australian communism, all economical with the truth.

The Commonwealth Royal Commission on Espionage (1954-55), established following the defection of Vladimir Petrov, was scrupulous too - despite the havoc wreaked by the growing mental instability of HV Evatt, acting as counsel for two of those named in the Petrov documents and by the communist witnesses' strenuous efforts to discredit both the evidence and the commission itself. No less importantly, the release decades later of the decrypted Venona cables, together with the opening of Soviet bloc archives, ultimately validated each and every one of the commission’s findings.

Of course, none of that had any impact whatsoever on the left’s portrayal of the period; symbolic allegiances are impervious to refutation and the belief that the left can never be wrong is as strong a pledge of allegiance as any can be.

McCarthyism therefore became the slur the left hurls when it has nothing intelligent to say. The tactic was an old one and well-established in the communist movement. If you are struggling, Dmitry Manouďlsky (1883-1959), a leader of the Cominform’s predecessor, the Comintern, had advised agitators, accuse your adversaries of being fascists. By the time they respond, you will have regained the initiative.

Soon enough, fascist was complemented by McCarthyite and McCarthyism as the Communists' insult of choice. In fact, it took barely a week after Robert Menzies announced that Petrov had defected for the Communist Party to declare the American millionaires from whom Menzies takes his orders want him to launch a McCarthyite terror against Communists and all progressive people.

Claiming that the royal commission was intended to turn loose pimps, liars and perjurers, the party ∼ which repeatedly affirmed that complete freedom of expression exists in the Soviet Union-∼ warned that if spy scares begin with attacks on Communists, they end in McCarthyite attacks on all who dare to think for themselves.

It is that contention Adler slavishly parrots. But the lesson to be drawn from our experience runs exactly counter to that which her slur is intended to convey.

Australia’s democratic record is not one of paranoia unchecked. It is one of institutions capable of firmness without unfairness and scrutiny without injustice. Our processes of public inquiry have managed to expose and restrain conduct that seeks to intimidate, harass, silence or coerce, while remaining fully answerable to law and evidence.

To label such processes McCarthyism is not merely inaccurate but an attempt to disarm democratic accountability itself. It arms fantasy against scrutiny — and, if allowed to prevail, it would make Adler’s personal hallucinations the nation’s living nightmare.