The Saturday Paper

16/12/2025

The problem with having so much money, however, is that schools have to spend it because they are non-profit. As a result, their excess money is often ploughed into things of dubious educational benefit.

The government is yet to compel private schools to publish their principals’ salaries, despite concerns that taxpayers are supporting packages up to $1 million a year.

16/12/2025

"Any day now, the federal government will announce the outcome of the latest gas review," writes Ed Husic. "A lot is at stake. We need a complete rethink of the terms on which Australian resources serve the Australian national interest."

ANALYSIS: “We need better local gas pricing For Australia, that means doing something hitherto unthought of: telling multinationals that the cost of doing business here is to provide better prices for Australians. These firms can then make up the difference through their export price.”

16/12/2025

“The world-leading social media ban, now being emulated by a number of other countries, stands as a major achievement for Labor. Its readiness to lead and to set the global agenda is to its considerable credit, as is its securing a degree of bipartisanship.”

Before reflecting on the peaks and troughs of Australian politics in this tumultuous year, I want to emphasise the significantly more challenging environment, both globally and domestically. The challenges have largely arisen from Donald Trump finding his feet in his second term as United States pre...

16/12/2025

In an interview with Rick Morton, the Commonwealth ombudsman has slammed the government's 'robodebt'-style approach to welfare compliance.

In an interview with The Saturday Paper, the Commonwealth ombudsman says government departments still need to ‘unlearn’ the culture that produced robodebt.

15/12/2025

Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff, James Ashby tells The Saturday Paper that two "well-seasoned politicians” will join One Nation in the new year. “I genuinely believe that... the media will see us as a real, serious contender for all elections moving forward.”

As Barnaby Joyce announces he will run for One Nation, Liberals are preparing for further defections to the far-right party.

15/12/2025

One of the most fascinating parts of Margaret Atwood's memoir is her detailing of the Canadian literary community in the 1960s, writes Fiona Wright. Her detailing of this scrappy agitation and starting-up of publishers and guilds is valuable – and very funny to boot.

In the introduction to Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, Margaret Atwood writes that “every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives, and the one who writes” and claims that these two beings have “less idea than you’d think” about what the other “has been up to”. This, she argu...

15/12/2025

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15/12/2025

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15/12/2025

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15/12/2025

The last time authorities investigated FIFA it led to 50 arrests. A decade on, human rights researchers now say FIFA is more poorly governed and less accountable than before.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup draw was a stunning own goal of self-love and sycophancy with a Trumped-up ‘peace prize’ – all in the service of further monetising the world game.

15/12/2025

New short fiction from A.E. Macleod: ...all day we sit and watch rain go on falling like something is chasing it from the sky. We try to catch some but just as we do, it slips through our fingers as if now there are holes in us.

Fiction People like us SHARE Copy Link Bluesky Facebook X Email LinkedIn Under the rusty annexe that must once have belonged to something else, that is held together with cobwebs and ribbons, we don’t mean to mention dead mother but we do. Dead mother, who aren’t in heaven, we say in unison, in ...

15/12/2025

“I can resist!” Anne Enright declares as she walks through Dublin, determined not to dwell on the histories hidden in its most ordinary corners. This will be a hopeless endeavour.

“I can resist!” Anne Enright declares as she walks through Dublin, trying desperately not to think about the histories impressed upon the most innocuous corners of her city. When this proclamation appears in Enright’s collection of essays – Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World – t...