The madness of Green Kean
Eton mess
The Duke of Wellington, one of England’s most celebrated and honoured military figures responsible for defeating Napoleon at the Battle…
Sorry ScoMo, but this is tepid tinkering with IR laws, not real reform
When the Prime Minister announced his five-point industrial relations package in May a senior adviser told me “This is not…
Conservatism in Australia isn’t AWOL, but instead flourishing quietly
In a recent Flat White item, Where is Australia’s conservative intellectual movement?, Jonathan Cole and Simon Kennedy argued that Australia, in contrast to both…
Dear Elizabeth Farrelly, from what I know about both Jesus and the Diocese of Sydney, they aren’t really all that into control
Dear Dr Farrelly, Thank you for your opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald from last Saturday. You mention important issues…
If lefties want to talk capitalism in the 21st century, can they at least get an honest, fresh critique?
First there was the book, now there is the “documentary” film version of French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the…
We are shackling ourselves to the safe and mediocre with lazy talk of ‘the pub test’
“Not a good look.” “Bad optics.” “Doesn’t pass the pub test.” Such are the statements by which many controversial or complex ideas…
Crime before coal?
The chair of one of the nation’s largest restaurant chains, Mary Sum of the Plate Group, has announced that its…
Dear feminists: bore off with your language policing
We all know that the media has been hijacked by the left. As 2020 draws to a close, I’ll happily…
The age of the failson
It’s hard to be the son of a powerful man. Just ask Saadi and Hannibal Gaddafi, Pier Berlusconi and Saudi…
How to solve Brexit's ratchet clause problem
At the moment, the biggest single obstacle in the Brexit talks is the so-called ‘ratchet clause’. This is what Boris…
If Boris doesn’t blink over Brexit, Starmer becomes unelectable
If it’s No Deal, then it will usher in a crisis that will highlight the leader’s negative baggage and remind…
MIT’s China problem
Mike Pompeo delivered a speech at Georgia Tech on Wednesday about the Chinese Communist party’s undue influence on American higher education.…
Fighting back with conservative appointments
Why is it that left-wing political parties are so good at ruthlessly appointing like-minded fellow travellers to all the key…
It’s not over
From the moment he and Melania glided down the golden escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidature, the denizens…
Putting the ‘Panic!’ into pandemic
Remember the brilliant Clive Dunn as Lance-Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army? His default response to a crisis was to shout…
The end of the affair
China’s wolf warrior diplomats keep warning us to ‘reflect on our deeds’ or learn how it feels to ‘walk into…
Business/Robbery etc.
Wolfensohn’s success was Australia-based The glowing world-wide obituaries detailing the remarkable achievements of expatriate Australian James D. Wolfensohn who died…
Smashing an old China plate
With China’s ministers refusing to take the calls of their Australian counterparts, bilateral relations have been outsourced to the Global…
They are spitting in our face
Why are we so surprised and outraged by the recent behaviour of the Chinese government? A nation which can machine-gun…
Playing politics with mental health
As a psychiatrist working in the public sector, I was depressed to see that the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry Report into…
Ned Kelly
All the young millennials I know were raging in Melbourne the other Saturday night and so were some of their…
Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Time to look to the future; performing arts companies are encouraging us to do so through their subscription seasons now…
Gary Garrels
Let me take you down the strange rabbit hole of contemporary art museum culture. The senior curator of painting and…
Richard Tognetti
There’s no doubt about the Australian Chamber Orchestra; full of confidence it is sailing into 2021 with its most ambitious…
Office boy
For most of us, going to work means going to an office, to sit at a desk and perform bureaucratic…
The brutality of the Gulag was totally dehumanising
‘It was a gray mass of people in rags, lying motionless with bloodless, pale faces, cropped hair, with a shifty,…
Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure
Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so…
Joseph Ratzinger’s coat of many colours
A common but flawed assumption about Joseph Ratzinger is that he is simply an ardent conservative. That’s the figure we…
James Kelman’s ‘Memoirs’ are a misnomer
James Kelman doubtless remains best known for his 1994 Booker prize win for How Late It Was, How Late and…
The serious business of graphic novels
One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…
Transport to Australia was the saving of Carmen Callil’s family
If 2020 has given us something to talk about other than Covid, it’s been history — and, more precisely, to…
War was never Sir Edward Grey’s métier
This meaty but easily digested biography pivots around the events either side of that fateful evening of 4 August 1914…