Scott Morrison has dragged out this term of his inept, reactionary mess of a government until the last possible moment. But next month we finally have the chance to boot him and his band of billionaire-loving, climate-change-denying Neanderthals out of office.

After a rout of Russian forces in the first week of its Ukraine invasion, Vladimir Putin abandoned his initial strategy of overthrowing the Zelensky government with minimum casualties. He ordered the Russian military to revert to what it knows best— imposing its will through the slaughter of thousands of civilians.

Today, for the first time since the USSR developed its own atomic arsenal to challenge US nuclear hegemony, the world faces the realistic possibility of a war between great powers that might not immediately end in the mutual destruction of both sides and the end of all human civilisation. If anything, that makes the war more likely. We have to do whatever we can to stop it from happening.

I was cleaning up after breakfast in an Airbnb in Hawaii, about 30 kilometres from Honolulu, when my phone started beeping. It was 13 January 2018. My then 2-year-old daughter was playing with her mum. It was our second day there but the first sunny one, so we were off to the beach. I ignored my phone for a bit, but it kept beeping. So I picked it up and had a look.