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Benjamin Clark urges Albo to read the room: “The Labor leader took a rare opportunity to share his moving personal history and articulate the values it imparted. ‘I know the difference that governments can make on people’s lives because I lived it,’ he wrote. ‘Mum lived it.’ Alas, the advisers who vet Albo’s social media posts could not let an articulation of working-class pride slide without appending some cynical triangulation. ‘She taught me how to save,’ he wrote. ‘And how to spend wisely — because every dollar had to count.’ The line echoed a speech Albanese delivered on Thursday, in which he invoked Kevin Rudd’s famous ‘economic conservative’ slogan, reiterating a promise to keep government spending tight if he is elected PM. ‘Money was always tight at our place,’ he said. ‘That’s why, when it comes to thinking about government spending, I am cautious.’ The speech was dropped to The Australian, in an apparent effort to signal Labor’s fiscal discipline. It comes after Albanese asked shadow cabinet members in February to attempt to offset all new spending proposals with cuts. This fiscal frugality sees Albo sounding even more hawkish than Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who has … declar[ed] it is no time for an austerity budget so soon after the coronavirus recession. … Polling also suggests the Australian public agree deficit reduction is a low priority. Why, then, is the ALP still projecting a ‘miserly bean-counter’ image?” Not a good sign.

Sean Kelly: “I was shocked, initially, by the announcement of the India flight ban. But once the government announced the accompanying prison terms, the shock, for me, wore off. What had seemed odd was made suddenly familiar. Banning citizens from returning to Australia sounded new – but imprisoning desperate people for years at a time for the supposed crime of fleeing desperate circumstances? That is the oldest trick in the Australian political playbook. … The task Morrison’s government too often appears engaged in is … deciding who counts as ‘Australian’, and the circumstances in which our government will accept them as such. Thus Australian citizens in India can be treated as non-citizens. Chinese Australians can be treated as potentially disloyal citizens. Indigenous Australians can be treated as citizens whose lives are worth not quite as much as those of white Australians. In two recent speeches, Scott Morrison has attacked identity politics. … If there is a form of identity politics dividing this country, it is this: the idea that a white suburban bloke is a typical Australian, while the ‘Australianness’ of every other Australian is always doubtful, on the brink of being undermined. For many Australians, most of the time, such fears will seem abstract. The disregard our government showed this week for citizenship itself makes that danger concrete. Concern about it should unite us all.”

Eric Hobsbawm: “My present subject is perhaps the only unquestionable dent made by a secular movement in the Christian or any other official calendar, a holiday established not in one or two countries, but in 1990 officially in 107 states. What is more, it is an occasion established not by the power of governments or conquerors, but by an entirely unofficial movement of poor men and women. I am speaking of May Day, or more precisely of the First of May, the international festival of the working-class movement… [R]efraining from work on a working day was both an assertion of working-class power — in fact, the quintessential assertion of this power — and the essence of freedom, namely not being forced to labour in the sweat of one’s brow, but choosing what to do in the company of family and friends. It was thus both a gesture of class assertion and class struggle and a holiday… It is, in fact, more universally taken off work than any other days except 25 December and 1 January, having far outdistanced its other religious rivals. But it came from below. It was shaped by anonymous working people themselves who, through it, recognised themselves, across lines of occupation, language, even nationality as a single class by deciding, once a year, deliberately not to work: to flout the moral, political and economic compulsion to labour.”