It took not one but two, moments of sheer Origin desperation for NSW to claim back-to-back series wins after overcoming Queensland 14-10 at Suncorp Stadium, Fatima Kdouh reviews in this morning’s The Australian.

Maroons winger Jasmine Peters looked to have won the game for the Maroons on two separate occasions, only to be denied by the Blues' steely goal line defence.

The first clutch defensive effort came from playmaker Jesse Southwell after she made a brilliant cover tackle on Peters mid-way through the second half with the Maroons trailing by four points.

It was a remarkable effort from Southwell, who only minutes before looked like her night was over after going down with what appeared to be a neck injury.

Not to be outdone, Blues utility Teagan Berry came-up with the match winning play in the final minute of the nail-biting clash.

Just when Peters looked like she had won the game, again, for the Maroons, Berry produced a match winning tackle at the death.

Jasmine Peters scooped up that ball and looked like she was going to cross in the corner and she’s a strong girl as well, Blues coach John Strange said.

Jesse just picked her up and threw her over the sideline right at the death there.

They passed the ball out and Teagan Berry threw her body on the line and did everything possible to stop them getting the try that was going to level the game. Lauren Brown’s such a great competitor and she would have loved that moment as a goal kicker to win the game for a state.

The Maroons rued their lack of discipline in game one but hardly fared any better at Suncorp Stadium.

Three errors and two penalties in the opening 10 minutes of Thursday night’s clash had the Queenslanders on the back foot early on.

By the break, the Maroons had made seven errors and four penalties.

All three major U.S. stock indexes gained ground, with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq setting their latest in a series of record closing highs.

The blue-chip Dow closed just 0.3% shy of its all-time closing high reached on February 10.

Everybody’s asking the same question: how much longer does this (rally) go on There’s a lot of people that are loving this rally, but they're also antsy at the same time, said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut. You have to be in it to win it, not just sitting on the sidelines watching the market go to all-time highs.

Trump attended the summit along with an entourage that included Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Jensen Huang, chief executive of artificial-intelligence chipmaker Nvidia.

Nvidia’s shares closed 4.4% higher after the U.S. cleared the sales of the company’s H200 chips to Chinese firms.

The summit between Trump and Xi is intended to hash out a broad array of issues, including trade, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz. The waterway, through which Asia gets much of its crude, has been effectively shut down during the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

Obviously, these are very high stakes meetings, said Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager at Founder ETFs in Dallas. It is certainly great power competition, but I think that these two economies will be better off working together.

I'm happy to see the two leaders collaborating, a tone of collaboration, and hopefully we'll see that follow through in long-term agreements, Monaghan added.

On the economic front, retail sales were in line with expectations, but propped up by rising gasoline prices resulting from the Iran war. Gasoline was largely responsible for the biggest jump in import prices since October 2022.

A series of inflation reports this week showed the risk of spiking energy costs metastasizing to other goods and services, extinguishing hopes for near-term rate cuts from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid called inflation the most pressing risk to the U.S. economy, which he characterized as resilient. While Schmid is not a voter on monetary policy this year, his remarks reflect the view of the Fed’s hawkish wing.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 370.26 points, or 0.75%, to 50,063.46, the S&P 500 gained 56.99 points, or 0.77%, to 7,501.24 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 232.88 points, or 0.88%, to 26,635.22.

Among the 11 major sectors in the S&P 500, tech shares led the percentage gainers, while materials suffered the steepest loss.

Semiconductor stocks were lifted by Nvidia, while other artificial intelligence-related firms, including Qualcomm, Intel, Sandisk and Micron slid between 3.4% and 6.1%.

Sectors that have suffered amid continued AI fervor, and the ongoing strife in the Middle East, were among the session’s best performers, including software & services, transports and regional banks.

Cisco surged 13.4% to touch an all-time high after the computer networking giant announced almost 4,000 job cuts as part of a restructuring scheme, and raised its annual revenue forecast.

U.S.-listed shares of tech infrastructure firm Nebius Group rose 6.7% after Northland Capital raised its target price by 15.3% to $248 per share.

China has agreed to buy 200 jets from Boeing, President Trump told Fox News. Even so, the planemaker’s stock slid 4.7%.

Chipmaker Cerebras jumped 68.2% in its U.S. market debut.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.6-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. There were 500 new highs and 95 new lows on the NYSE.

On the Nasdaq, 2,755 stocks rose and 1,980 fell as advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.39-to-1 ratio.

The S&P 500 posted 30 new 52-week highs and 11 new lows while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 113 new highs and 130 new lows.

Volume on U.S. exchanges was 18.77 billion shares, compared with the 18.17 billion average for the full session over the last 20 trading days.

It’s all very well welcoming people to Gadigal country in Sydney but how about we talk about the reality of life for so many Aboriginal people living outside our big cities.

Because it is the life lived in town camps ∼ best described as hellholes by Alice Springs local Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price ∼ that’s far more urgent today than who arrived 250 years ago.

We're not supposed to talk about Sharon Granites any more ∼ the sweet little five-year-old abducted last weekend ∼ because she’s dead. Her family want her described as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons.

Modern day aboriginal culture

But it’s modern-day Aboriginal culture ∼ the unemployment, family dysfunction, and substance abuse that characterises remote Australia ∼ that’s led to her tragic, premature death.

The bed that this little girl was abducted from was a grotty mattress on a filthy floor, in a room full of empty Jim Beam bottles. Her father was in jail and there'd been a bit of a party before she disappeared. The DNA of two persons has been found on her underwear. Her accused killer was a frequent prison inmate too, not long released.

We talk a lot about reconciliation for the wrongs of the past. But what about rectifying the wrongs of the present? We argue incessantly about the failures of government to end Indigenous disadvantage but what about the failures of Aboriginal people too?

Town camps natorious

The town camps around Alice Springs have been notorious for years. Very few residents have real jobs, very few of the children go to school regularly, the police often feel powerless to enforce the law because they won't be supported by woke magistrates and weak governments and child protection officers feel they can't do what they otherwise would, for fear of creating another stolen generation.

Just because people happen to be Aboriginal doesn't mean that different standards apply.

The government says that this is not the time to talk about policy change. But if it’s not done now, everyone will move on until the next child dies.

Ask yourself this, would the outrage be different if this little girl and her alleged killer were from a nice suburb in the city? Where are the activists?

The Prime Minister’s defence for repudiating assurances he had insistently reiterated ∼ indeed, for the 50th time ∼ is that Australia faces a crisis of intergenerational equity. But as Jonathan Pincus and I demonstrated on these pages, the claim is analytically incoherent and empirically threadbare. Nor, even if there were such inequities, would that justify the abrupt abandonment of repeatedly affirmed undertakings.

Serious governments seek democratic consent for contentious measures they had previously assured voters they would not introduce. John Howard did so with the GST: having ruled it out, he reversed openly, took it to the 1998 election, and proceeded only on the mandate he won there.

Greatest tax take in commonwealth history

The reason the Albanese government has not followed suit is neither urgency nor necessity. It is fear: fear that despite the opposition’s parlous state, voters would punish a government that has spent freely, governed carelessly and is now poised to extract the greatest tax take in commonwealth history.

The budget’s own numbers make the reality plain. Even accepting Treasury’s assumptions, the budget measures will increase housing supply over the next decade by less than one-third of 1%, while housing demand is likely to rise more than 15 times as quickly. This is not serious economic reform. It is a revenue grab wrapped in the language of moral urgency.

Corroding public trust

The inevitable result of that gap between political rhetoric and political practice is to corrode public trust. Trust, after all, is not a natural disposition; it is a social achievement, slowly accumulated and quickly squandered.

The word itself reveals the point. The Old English treow lies behind both truth and trust; since at least the 15th century, to trust someone has meant to believe that when he says what he will do, he speaks truthfully. Governments can sustain trust only by being truthful and trustworthy — and the institutional form through which those virtues manifest themselves is the promise.

A promise is what binds words to conduct, declarations to action, and electoral consent to subsequent government. Governments owe fidelity to their promises not merely for their own political advantage; they owe it because a healthy democratic life depends upon citizens being able to assume and assess fidelity to public commitments.

Governments need to mean what they say

The credibility of promises is also more broadly crucial to the viability of a free society, whose very essence is that people must order their lives amid continual uncertainty. Promises, including the promise that laws will not be changed capriciously, are what give individuals, families and businesses stable ground on which to plan. As Hannah Arendt wisely observed, they build islands of predictability in the ocean of uncertainty — islands that matter most to those with the fewest resources to absorb sudden policy shocks.

A young couple relying on an investment property to finance homeownership, a retiree dependent on hard-earned savings, a small business weighing expansion: all rely on governments meaning what they say.

But promises can only fulfil that stabilising role because they belong to the grammar of commitment: to the forms of obligation whose value lies in their relative insulation from changing convenience. A promise abandoned the moment it becomes burdensome is worth no more than the loyalty that melts away at the first sign of difficulty.

The preservation of credible public commitments is especially vital in Australia, where suspicion of the political process long predates contemporary disenchantment. Distrust of politicians was, as John Hirst emphasised, constitutive of the colonial polity itself. The men who entered politics were not thought fit to be trusted - and despite outstanding exceptions, many weren't.

Pioneering scholars of mass behaviour

The endless Australian debate over the accountability of parliamentarians reflected that suspicion. Both the Burkean trustee ∼ who is guided only by the light of his own judgment ∼ and the instructed delegate had their advocates. But it was the latter conception, entrenched by the emerging Labor Party, that ultimately prevailed. Labor parliamentarians were to be mere instruments: controlled by the ALP’s extra-parliamentary wing, bound by a pledge to uphold the platform and required to submit to caucus discipline on pain of political excommunication.

The Australian mass party thus emerged, from the beginning, as an institutional response to distrust: a mechanism designed less to cultivate confidence in politicians than to contain the risks they posed once elected. And Australian voters learned to scrutinise the distance between promise and performance with an intensity rare in comparable democracies. When that gap widened too far, confidence collapsed.

It is against this background that the events of the past three years must be seen. The Albanese government’s record on the central tax promises of two successive elections ∼ stage three, superannuation, and now negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount ∼ does not just constitute a litany of broken commitments; it constitutes the accelerated dismantling of an already tarnished public asset.

The predictable effect is an even more accelerated crisis of political representation. The four-decade arc from 1975’s 4% third-party vote to 2025’s 34% highlights its seemingly inexorable progression.

Withdrawing faithfulness

Those voters who have spurned the major parties are not ideological partisans of any third force; they are observant citizens who, having grasped what the parties no longer deliver, exercise the only sanction the system leaves them. Unable to meaningfully demand or expect faithfulness to a program from parties whose programs have ceased to bind, they withdraw their own faithfulness from those parties altogether.

The alternatives may not be especially attractive nor particularly unifying — but negative coalitions, aimed at punishing a detested foe, form more easily than positive ones precisely because they require only shared aversion rather than common aspiration. In these conditions, anti-system parties flourish, their capacity to aggregate voters a symptom not of democratic renewal but of democratic exhaustion.

To make things worse, governments confronted by a perpetually seething electorate are naturally tempted to govern through stealth and administrative manoeuvre, further impairing the trust whose disappearance produced the crisis of representation in the first place. And when a real, rather than confected, emergency arrives, they discover they can no longer summon the loyalties and willingness to sacrifice on which the survival of free societies ultimately depends.

Public language becomes tactical

No society can govern itself for long on the assumption that public language is merely tactical. Governments that repeatedly break faith with the electorate may secure temporary advantages. But they do so by undermining the confidence that policies announced today will survive long enough to shape behaviour tomorrow. As that confidence erodes, both the effectiveness of public policy and force of democratic authority unravel.

That is the deeper significance of the Albanese government’s conduct. It is not merely bad policy. It is the depletion of a civic inheritance that free societies squander far more easily than they rebuild. Yes, promises can be cracked like pie crusts. But in the end, public trust cracks with them. Lenin, sheltered by brutal authoritarianism, never had to learn that lesson. With the fabric of our democracy rapidly fraying, it is high time Anthony Albanese did.