Dan is back
Don’t burn the budget. Bring back the firesticks
New South Wales Treasurer Dominic Perrottet has announced the latest fix for our bushfire problems. Unsurprisingly it involves big spending.…
Getting Ridd of junk science
As the High Court judges retire to consider the Science Case of the Year, Peter Ridd v James Cook University,…
Why don’t we hear about the $40,000 per household cost of decarbonisation?
The Irish Times reports that an IMF study of Ireland estimates that the nation will need to spend 20 billion euros a…
When can conservatives disobey the law?
The great English novelist Charles Dickens, based on his experiences, had a very dark view of lawyers and the legal…
It’s time to put power lines underground
In the Irish stronghold of south-west Victoria, St Patrick’s Day is a notable date on the celebration calendar. Danny Boy…
An abundance of dread as Daniel Andrews’ comeback looms
In just days, the architect of one of the worst chapters in the life of Victoria (outside of war and…
It’s time outrage at sexual exploitation extended to prostitution
A story has surfaced about a prostitute in Adelaide who alleged she was raped after a male client removed his condom…
Time for a sports revolution: let’s have Gender of Origin
The SpecOz has already registered disgust at New Zealand male-born Laurel – formerly Gavin – Hubbard’s selection in the Kiwi…
How cable news will inevitably politicize the Surfside building tragedy
Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature…
Does Derek Chauvin deserve a 22-year sentence?
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday…
Hancock has made a mockery of his own rules
How much trouble is Matt Hancock in? The Sun splashes this morning on the Health Secretary’s affair with aide Gina…
Did the SNP cover up a cancer crisis?
The news that a Scottish woman died from cancer after being among more than 400 wrongly told they did not…
Maorification of smiling zombies
In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, the late author and journalist Gordon McLauchlan characterised his fellow New Zealanders…
Miss New Zealand
Male-born Laurel Hubbard’s admission to the women’s Olympic weightlifting competition as a representative of New Zealand is, of course, absurd. …
Laurel Hubbard is the beginning of the end of women’s sports
When women’s professional soccer was deemed good enough for our TV screens a couple of years ago, I was watching…
A great badness is abroad
I was recently contacted by a highly intelligent woman whose granddaughter came home from school very upset about things she…
Business/Robbery, etc.
Thanks, Premier Xi. Had it not been for your bellicose behaviour, including your economic bullying of Australia, as evidenced by…
False gods of public health
Even before Covid, it was impossible to hold public health research and the small band of professionals who make a…
Misjudging our Constitution
After so many mediocre (I was raised to be polite) High Court of Australia appointments from eight years of Coalition…
WHO’s behind Facebook?
This week, the World Health Organisation surprised everyone, critics and cheer squad alike, by advising parents to hold off on…
Maorification of smiling zombies
In his best-selling 1976 book The Passionless People, the late author and journalist Gordon McLauchlan characterised his fellow New Zealanders…
Dan is back
The main thing about the whole ‘Dan is back’ caper is that Dan Andrews is back. Not quite yet but…
ABC of boutique quality
If you listen to two of the ABC ‘s Sydney radio stations, national and local, they regularly report a 1°C…
Fables of the Dark Emu
With the power of the ABC’s propaganda unit behind it, Dark Emu, by the self-proclaimed Aboriginal historian Bruce Pascoe sold…
Anya Taylor Joy stars in the new Mad Max
It’s funny to reflect how the performing arts, theatre in particular, are a lot stronger when they have a literary…
Spring Waters
Recent decades have seen the opening or upgrading of numerous performing arts centres throughout regional Australia enabling the development of…
Andrea Riseborough
National Treasure is a remarkable piece of TV drama, and it looks for a long, bewildering moment like a masterpiece.…
Divine Vinyl Survives
Two weeks ago, a fire broke out at the Universal Studios in Hollywood, 13 years to the day after another…
Justice betrayed
It was always an inherently implausible accusation: that Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate had sexually assaulted choir boys after Mass…
In search of Great-Aunt Pearl’s will: a black comedy of familial strife
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Blood on the tracks: the unsolved murder of the Japanese railway chief
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Singing to the gods: a millennium’s span of ancient Greek hymns, gloriously portrayed
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
The sexploits of Mariella Novotny
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
Doctor Butcher: crank, genius or son of Frankenstein?
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
A tender portrait of Leonora Carrington, painter, writer — and a mother who was not always there
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
How William Hogarth made Britain
Has any artist ever had a wider impact on the world than Hogarth? He was the motivator behind the most…
