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   Welcome along to Independent Australia’s annual Christmas Party, here at the Rose of Australia Hotel in Sydney. 

   Every month there is more evidence that Australia’s local economy is deteriorating — this month it's wage rises, as Alan Austin reports.

   Sydney lord mayor Clover Moore has announced that an extreme weather plan has been activated for the city’s rough sleepers.

Following a staggering blowout to $2.9 billion and close to a year of delays, Sydney’s new light rail is finally here.

  In the aftermath of these disasters, politicians often talk about how you can’t put one event down to climate change. But the fires that are still burning across NSW and Queensland have brought this link into sharp focus.

On a hot Saturday afternoon in Darwin, James Poppleton is mopping the sweat from his brow. 

It hasn't rained for 160 days.

Naomi Wolf has reignited her row with Australia’s energy minister, Angus Taylor, publishing a recording of a heated phone call with his office.

France is enduring severe disruption as millions of workers threaten to strike in protest at being forced to retire later or face reduced pensions.

   I don’t need the Turner Prize to remind me to make my bed… As the Turner Prize claims relevancy in this modern world, it simply means the modern world is either crooked, pissy or it stinks or both. And to tell the Gus-truth, does the art in Turner Prize represent anything else but the frustrations of annoying deluded artists trying to push old crap forward in squared-wheel new wheelbarrows? Is Gus blind? 

Labor and the Greens have accused crossbench senator Jacqui Lambie and the Government of having struck a secret deal to end the medevac laws that allow refugees to come to Australia for medical treatment.

   An award-winning American political cartoonist has made a habit of deploying bigoted tropes as a political weapon against Russians.

  What American constitutional government most urgently needs at present is for our Madisonian institutions—the presidency, the Congress, and the courts—to wrest back control of national security policy from an unelected and increasingly rogue national security establishment. 

  Australia's foreign minister Marise Payne said on Monday said the treatment of an Australian writer detained in China was "unacceptable", and called for more details on his case in a move likely to increase tensions with the government in Beijing.