Tyler Lewis writes in the Oz the second Test, at Great Barrier Reef Arena in Mackay, will start a short five days after the scheduled finish to the first Test on August 22.

It’s the first Test match in Darwin since July 2004 and the first Test of any kind at the venue in Queensland’s far north.

The twin Tests kick off a marathon year for the Aussies that include series against South Africa, New Zealand, India and England to follow.

There will also be the Anniversary Test in March 2027 and a likely World Test Championship Final.

Cricket Australia boss Todd Greenberg said using venues that weren't occupied by the football codes eased the growing schedule pressure.

We're delighted to bring Test cricket to northern Australia and look forward to a fantastic series against Bangladesh, Greenberg said.

It is no secret the international calendar is now crowded and we're fortunate to have world-class facilities available in August, ensuring we have another window for Test cricket outside summer.

Marrara Stadium and Great Barrier Reef Arena have been outstanding venues for international cricket in recent seasons and we're grateful to the Northern Territory and Queensland governments, Mackay Regional Council and our stadium partners for their strong support.
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Nvidia gained 2.2% ahead of earnings, due after markets close on Wednesday. AI investors will be looking out for evidence that the chipmaker’s profits are growing on the back of Big Tech’s $630 billion capital spending budget for 2026.

Nvidia options imply a move of about 5.6% in either direction a day after the company reports results, which is the lowest expected post-results swing ahead of any quarterly report in at least three years.

Chip stocks were broadly mixed and the Philadelphia SE Semiconductor Index climbed 1.4% to a record high.

The focus on AI will continue into Nvidia’s earnings announcement … overall, the lack of new news helped to stabilize markets globally, said Bob Savage, head of markets macro strategy at BNY.

At 11:44 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average 212.40 points, or 0.43%, to 49,385.92, the S&P 500 gained 46.01 points, or 0.67%, to 6,936.08 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 244.31 points, or 1.07%, to 23,107.99.

The S&P 500 information technology index rose 1.7%, while the communication services index added 0.7%. Financials also added 1.2%.

Technology stocks extended their gains from Tuesday, when the Nasdaq rose more than 1% as sentiment towards AI stocks improved.

U.S. President Donald Trump boasted of stock market advances in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday and said that almost all countries and corporations want to stick to tariff and investment agreements previously made with the United States.

Trump’s temporary global tariff of 10% came into effect on Tuesday after the Supreme Court last week voided most of the tariffs he had imposed last year, finding that the emergency law he relied on did not allow the imposition of tariffs.

He later said the levy would be 15% but it was unclear when and if it would apply.

February has been a choppy month for U.S. equities as investors questioned if massive AI spending by technology giants was actually paying off.

Concerns of industry-wide disruptions with the rise of AI hit several sectors earlier this year, ranging from software, commercial real estate to trucking and logistics.

The S&P 500 software and services index climbed 2.3% on Wednesday, though still down more than 21% for the year. Earnings from software firms Salesforce and Snowflake are due after close on Wednesday.

Among others, Axon Enterprise climbed 21.4% after the taser-maker beat fourth-quarter profit estimates, while Workday dropped 0.7% after the enterprise software maker forecast fiscal 2027 subscription revenue below estimates.

Lowe’s Companies fell 4.5% as the home improvement retailer forecast annual sales and profit below estimates, while GoDaddy tumbled 15.9% after the internet services provider forecast annual revenue below Wall Street expectations.

Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.23-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and by a 1.76-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.

The S&P 500 posted 43 new 52-week highs and 9 new lows, while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 102 new highs and 77 new lows.

The latest revelation comes as the group of 34 women and children inside the camp told The Australian they were shattered at being turned back and appealed to the Australian government to allow them to come home.

Roj camp director Hakamia Ibrahim said the overwhelming majority of Australian women detained in the Kurdish-controlled camp in northeast Syria had displayed no extremist behaviour.

But there were two women, housed separately from the main Australian cohort at Roj, who posed a potential security risk.

Their way of speaking was good, Ms Ibrahim told The Australian of the 11 women who tried and failed to reach Damascus with their children last week.

One of those 11 women has since been subjected to a two-year Temporary Exclusion Order by the federal government while the Australian Federal Police and other agencies investigate whether she can be charged with a crime, such as entering a declared terrorist area or terrorist recruitment.

In the camp, they (Australians) did not cause problems — except for two people, of course, Ms Ibrahim said. They are still among the extremists, from the extremist women.

The Australian understands the two women may not be Australian citizens but instead married Australian ISIS fighters.

While Kurdish authorities have announced they are escalating the closure of the Roj camp, which still houses 788 families ∼ mostly Western nation wives of suspected ISIS fighters and their children ∼ Ms Ibrahim said she did not know when it would shut. But she warned the security situation around the camp was deteriorating and ISIS has returned stronger than before ever before.

That means everything is expected from this organisation.

Inside the camp on Tuesday, Australian children turned back by Syrian authorities last week expressed their frustration at their situation and a deep desire to go home to Australia, a country some have never seen, and others can barely remember.

In her bright pink parka, with a baby doll tucked under her arm and a fluffy pink Hello Kitty bag around her wrist, six-year-old Layla described her excitement at leaving the camp for the first time in her short life.

I saw a donkey, I saw a horse, I saw a pony (for the first time) and I saw a baby cow, she said in response to questions from her mother, Zeinab Ahmed who told The Australian she would prefer her daughter answer questions to humanise their plight.

Chatting happily on her mother’s lap, discussing how she hoped to meet Bluey and Bingo and go to toy school in Australia, Layla looks and sounds like any other Australian kid. But when queried about being forced to return to Roj camp, she told The Australian she believed they took me back because they wanted to ask me questions and they couldn't.

I was born in here, which I hate. I hate it here, she added.

Asked by her mother what she wanted to say to the Australian government, she said: Please bring me home and I'll buy an Avenger Kinder (Surprise). I want to go to a city in Australia, Sydney and Melbourne to visit my friend.
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The Sun reports due to the public parkland neighbouring the Windsor estate, photographers have a clear shot of the area where he would go for a trot.

Photos of Mr Mountbatten-Windsor grinning while on horseback appeared frequently in the media as he was in the process of vacating his previous home at Royal Lodge after it emerged he hadn't paid rent in two decades.

A royal source told the outlet Mr Mountbatten-Windsor is now holed up in his interim address, known as Wood Farm, all alone except for two of the queen’s old corgis.

He is living at Wood Farm until his new permanent address, nearby Marsh Farm, has been renovated.

Since his arrest last week he has been ordered not to go horse riding. It’s considered a bad look, the source said.

They don't think he should be seen grinning and smiling on his horse like he was in Windsor.

But it was one of the few things he actually enjoyed doing so what on earth is he going to do with his time?

Police have completed their search of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s former home over his ties to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

In a statement on Wednesday, Thames Valley Police confirmed the searches in Berkshire in connection to its investigation into the offence of misconduct in public office have now ended.

Officers have now left the location we have been searching in Berkshire. This concludes the search activity that commenced following our arrest of a man in his sixties from Norfolk on Thursday (19/2), assistant chief constable Oliver Wright said.

“We understand the significant public interest in this case and our investigation remains ongoing.

It is important that our investigators are given the time and space to progress their work. We will provide updates when it is appropriate to do so, but this is unlikely to be for some time.

Britain’s government has committed to releasing documents on ex-prince Andrew’s past role as a trade envoy, after the Jeffrey Epstein scandal widened with the arrest of a veteran UK politician.

The fallout from the publication last month by US authorities of millions of files related to late sex offender Epstein is reverberating around the British monarchy and political circles.

It has piled pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour government to release documents on Andrew and former minister Peter Mandelson, who are both now the subject of high-profile police investigations.
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NSW Transport’s 10 transportable Mobile Phone and Seatbelt Detection Cameras will operate to their full capability on single lane roads from this Sunday, March 1 — capturing traffic from both directions. Until now, the cameras only checked up to two lanes of traffic travelling one way.

Though no new cameras will be added, NSW Transport Secretary Josh Murray said that extending the capabilities of the existing ones will help match the increase in the number of cars on the roads since the program began in 2019.

When we switched on mobile phone detection cameras almost seven years ago, the target was to be able to check each registered vehicle in NSW an average of at least 20 times a year, Mr Murray said.

Since then, the number of registered vehicles in NSW has jumped almost 12%, from 6.7 million to 7.5 million.

Mr Murray said the state government’s mobile detection program had had a significant impact on road safety in NSW, bolstered by the addition of seatbelt offences in 2024.

One in just under every 1300 vehicles checked by these cameras in 2025 had someone breaking seatbelt laws while around 1 in every 1200 were caught using their mobile phone illegally, he said.

“Compared to as many as 1 in every 400 cars when we first started camera enforcement of mobile phone offences.

“We know lives have been saved as people change their behaviours in response to awareness and education with seatbelt use and distractions through phone use featuring as key contributors to the road toll.

“We need to ensure our program continues to check the appropriate number of vehicles, and we use our technology to its full effect.

The expansion of the transportable cameras begins in March and will take six months to roll out. Fixed mobile phone and seatbelt cameras will not change. As is the case with all camera infringements, all fines go towards funding more road safety programs.

To date, 52 people have lost their lives on NSW roads so far this year. The state’s total road toll in 2025 was 314.

Australia has directed the departure of all dependants of Australian officials posted in Israel and Lebanon as a precautionary measure due to regional tensions.

The government has also offered voluntary departures to dependants of Australian officials posted in Jordan, Qatar and the UAE and continues to advise exercise a high degree of caution in these destinations.

Australia’s embassies in Tel Aviv and Beirut remained open but the situation in the Middle East was unpredictable and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said people should reconsider travel to Lebanon and Israel.

If you're in [these two countries], we continue to advise you consider leaving while commercial options to depart are still available, Dfat said on its Smartraveller website.

The site warned last night the security situation in the Middle East is unpredictable. Regional tensions remain high and there continues to be a risk of military conflict.

The situation could deteriorate with no warning.

It said Australians should monitor events, follow the advice of local authorities and follow the latest updates at here
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While good leaders don't shy away from a fight, the greater the difference between voters' views and a political party’s perception of the national interest, the harder the challenge of leadership and the greater the likelihood of political failure.

The argument used against the Liberal Party, most notably by its former leader Malcolm Turnbull, is that by moving to the right the party is leaving the electorate behind and dooming itself to fail.

There is some evidence that the electorate has moved marginally left, especially on issues where the Liberals have failed to make a contest like climate; but on many hot-button issues it has actually become more conservative.

In two papers published early last year, The Australian Population Research Institute argued that large electoral majorities did not favour the political class’s orthodoxy that high immigration and cultural diversity were unambiguously good for Australia.

While there are dangers here with clumsy language, sensitively and intelligently handled, big change here is exactly what the electorate is looking for. Perhaps it’s new Liberal leader Angus Taylor’s focus on the cultural issue of protecting the Australian way of life, as well as the economic one of restoring Australians' standard of living, that explains the early positive reaction to his elevation.

The TAPRI study, published last February, showed 80% support for reducing migration numbers, 67% support for dealing with skills shortages by raising wages and improving skills training for locals, 67% opposition to increasing ethnic and other forms of diversity, and 58% support for selection policy that takes into account a migrant’s ability to fit into the Australian community.

A further study published in March 2025 found that while 66% of all voters wanted a sharp reduction in the migrant intake, especially of temporary migrants, this was also the view of 58% of Labor and Greens voters. These figures are almost certain to have increased in the wake of the Bondi massacre.

It’s worth noting that while people born overseas are just over 30% of the population, they're only 20% of voters.

Even so, the TAPRI study shows that 77% of Asian-born migrants want lower immigration while English-speaking and European migrants are even likelier than the Australian-born to want lower migration and likelier to want fitting into Australia to be part of migrant selection policy.

And while Asian migrants are more pro-diversity than other Australians, even among them there’s still 50% opposition to using migration to increase diversity.

The most reliable and comprehensive guide to voters' attitudes over time is the Australian National University’s Australian Election Study, which has been asking much the same questions of a representative sample of voters since 1987. On migration issues, the AES reinforces TAPRI’s findings.

The most recent AES report, released in November, showed that 53% of 2025 voters wanted immigration reduced, with only 14% wanting it increased; whereas at the 2022 election the percentage wanting it increased was actually slightly higher than that wanting it reduced. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage thinking migrants were good for the economy dropped by 10 points and the percentage thinking migrants increased crime rose by 10 points. In 2025, at 50%, voter support for turning back asylum-seeker boats was actually stronger than in 2013.

On other issues, too, the electorate is becoming more conservative. Between 2022 and 2025, the percentage wanting less tax rose from 39 to 42 while the percentage wanting more social spending fell from 31 to 30. As well, the percentage thinking that climate change was a serious threat dropped from 66 to 57, while those thinking it was not increased from 34 to 43.

Based on the totality of voters' responses, the AES judges that voters at the 2025 election leaned slightly to the left with an averaged score of 4.93 out of 10 (where 10 is right and 0 is left). Yet at the previous 2022 election, despite the electorate leaning ever so slightly to the right with a score of 5.05, Anthony Albanese still had a strong win. What’s more, the Coalition still won elections (just) in 2016 and 2019 with an electorate that leaned slightly left. Interestingly, the study shows that voters thought the Coalition was no more right-wing under Peter Dutton in 2025 than it had been under Scott Morrison in 2022; indeed, the Coalition was perceived by voters to have been just as right-wing under Turnbull in 2016 as in the two most recent elections.

When the 2025 Election Study results were released last November, the media focused on the finding that, for the first time, voters felt that Labor (on 32%) was better placed to manage the economy than the Coalition (with just 28%). Yet management of the economy was cited by only 12% of voters as the most important election issue, down from 28% in 2013.

In fact, by far the most significant result was that only 34% of voters in the 2025 study said they always voted for the same party, compared with 63% in 1987. But even this volatility is not especially recent, with more than 50% of voters rusted on at only one of the past seven federal elections. The study reveals about 20% of Coalition voters and about 30% of Labor voters have considered changing their votes during the campaign in every election since 1987.

What this tells me is that election results have more to do with how people view leaders and leadership; it’s leadership after all that most shapes most people’s views on most issues. For the Liberals, in other words, the problem is less that voters have moved away from them but that they have not provided much leadership on the issues voters care about.

Quite apart from the fact that the Liberals in 2025 inexplicably failed to campaign for their energy policy or against Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax policy, plus failed to hammer the fact that government policy had exacerbated the worst fall in living standards in the developed world, the key factors in their humiliation were the collapse of TV in shaping people’s political perceptions, the rise of social media (in which the Coalition was largely MIA) and antipathy towards Dutton who, however unfairly, the study showed had the least voter appeal in its history.

Far from needing to persuade the Australian public that migration numbers are too high and that all migrants must accept Australian values, what this says to me is that on immigration, Taylor is pushing on an open door. Based on the best available data, promising to protect the Australian way of life is exactly what voters want — as well as what our country needs, as the Bondi massacre has put up in flashing neon lights.

Meaning that far from being too right-wing for the electorate, for the first time in years the Liberals are actually taking voters where they want to go.

Like many of our current pathologies, its roots lie in the heady days of the 1960s. And if the crisis has proved so hard to contain, it is because the ideas and attitudes forged in that period have continued to command allegiance long after the conditions that gave them plausibility fell away — turning inherited reflexes into instruments of chaos and disorder.

At the heart of the changes that shook Australia towards the close of the Menzies era was the emergence of protest movements incubated within rapidly expanding universities. Although multiple influences were at work, developments overseas were especially important.

That influence was reinforced through several channels. For the first time, youth travel occurred on a mass scale: in the 1960s, cheaper fares and rising incomes lifted overseas departure rates among those aged 20-24 more than six-fold.

Meanwhile, television became a primary source of nightly news, transforming political events ∼ including those overseas ∼ into vivid, broadly shared spectacles. Complementing both developments was the diffusion of a distinct youth culture that celebrated oppositional attitudes.

It is consequently unsurprising that the earliest stirrings echoed the US civil rights movement: the Freedom Rides of early 1965 captured the nascent mood.

But it was, of course, the Vietnam War that transformed scattered nuclei of activism into a national phenomenon.

As in the US, the campaign against the war entrenched a new radicalism within Australian universities, marked by revolutionary rhetoric sharply at odds with the tone and posture of the peace movement of the 1950s.

Dominated by communist fronts, that earlier movement had concentrated on attracting fellow travellers from the unions, the ALP and the churches.

It was therefore shaped by a persistent quest for respectability that ∼ although continually undermined by slavish adherence to the Soviet line ∼ left a clear imprint on its leadership style. Consistent with that orientation, its rhetoric during the Vietnam era focused on securing the withdrawal of Australian troops and a negotiated settlement to the war.

By contrast, beginning with the Sydney University ALP Club in 1966, student activists cast the Vietcong as model revolutionaries and replaced the traditional peace movement’s imagery ∼ designed to elicit sympathy through photographs of napalmed children and burning villages ∼ with stylised portrayals of heroic guerillas. Rejecting calls for negotiation as talk into thin air, they embraced a Manichean worldview in which Australians confronted a stark choice between remaining an outpost of imperialism and supporting the forces of progress — that is, between their own soldiers and those they were fighting.

Nor were these radicals especially committed to nonviolence at home. On the contrary, Maoist factions treated violence as revolutionary, particularly when directed at the police and even more so at rival radical groups — producing brawls that culminated in 1978, when Maoists hurled an alleged Trotskyite through a plate-glass window.

Yet these groups remained numerically insignificant. In the tussles for control of the 1970 Moratorium, they were readily outplayed by the traditional peace organisations' battle-hardened Communist cadres, whose overriding objective was to garner support within the labour movement and across the electorate.

At a time when the ALP Right remained a formidable force ∼ particularly in the pivotal states of NSW and Victoria ∼ and when institutions, including the police, still commanded broad respect on the left, assembling wide-ranging support required that demonstrations remain orderly.

The prominence of the give peace a chance motif reinforced the insistence on nonviolence. The result was that the extremists were marginalised and restrained ∼ physically so in Brisbane ∼ allowing the massive nationwide demonstrations of May 8, 1970 to proceed almost entirely peacefully. That was less true of the subsequent Vietnam protests and of the highly confrontational attempts to impede the Springboks' tour in 1971. Yet despite those blemishes, the May 1970 marches conferred on mass demonstrations an enduring legitimacy they had never previously possessed.

A momentous consequence of that legitimacy ∼ and of the subsequent rise to power of the baby boomers, whose worldview had been shaped by the Moratorium ∼ was a far-reaching transformation of the legal framework.

Until then, regulations governing street protests had been squarely directed at maintaining public order: statutory offences legislation and municipal by-laws treated permission to occupy public spaces for rallies and marches as a privilege, granted subject to clear duties and constraints.

The report of the South Australian Royal Commission chaired by Justice Charles Hart Bright and the Public Assemblies Act 1972 (SA) that followed, marked the advent of a different era, in which the authorities had to stringently justify any restrictions.

Entrenching that shift was the High Court’s controversial decision in Brown v Tasmania (2017), which ∼ drawing a very long bow from the already contentious implied freedom of political communication ∼ appeared to elevate even highly disruptive protest into a constitutional entitlement.

However, as the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Age of Rage, the conditions that had once kept mass demonstrations peaceful ebbed away.

Respect for Australian institutions, including the police, curdled into hostility towards a settler colonial state; in an era of political fragmentation and rival echo chambers, the search for a broad base yielded to the imperative of seizing attention; the collapse of the ALP Right and the capture of taxpayer-funded institutions by the far left relaxed the normative and organisational constraints on extremism; and as an apocalyptic mindset ∼ typified by the green left ∼ eclipsed the hopeful, often utopian, spirit of the Vietnam years, violence came to seem not merely permissible but necessary, given the perceived enormity and urgency of the stakes.

As a result, the unrestrained aggressiveness of social media spilled from the screen into the street, its rhetorical assaults readily hardening, once enacted in the public square, into the real thing.

Already evident in Extinction Rebellion’s massively disruptive protests, those currents have, in the recent demonstrations, metastasised.

Supercharging their force ∼ and the threat they pose ∼ is the alliance between the far left and radical Muslims whose virulent antisemitism, contempt for liberal democracy and repudiation of Australian institutions imports a jihadist logic that prizes confrontation over coexistence.

Caught between that reality, a commitment to an ill-defined, entirely ahistorical right to protest and the High Court’s ever-changing jurisprudence, governments have struggled to respond.

Although circumstances are nowhere near as dire, historian Detlev Peukert’s judgment of the Weimar Republic’s failure to master street violence rings shockingly true: The republic oscillated between impotence and over-reaction: either constitutional scruples paralysed it, or emergency powers hollowed out its legitimacy.

That is precisely where we now stand — for here too, as with the shibboleths of multiculturalism and of Indigenous self-determination, we remain in thrall to the spent inheritance of a vanished age.

In the end, every liberal democracy, if it is to endure, must give its enemies enough rope to hang themselves — but not enough to hang others. Striking that balance demands a cold, hard view of the world as it is. We have adamantly refused to take it. Unless we open our eyes, it is only a matter of time before we are swinging in the wind.