ScoMo's said 'no' - but this is why we need a 'Freedom Day'
Continuous disclosure obligations: now with less activist tail wagging the corporate dog
It was 2012 and I found myself walking into the High Court in Canberra: shiny red soles on my stilettos,…
A lockdown opponent’s wish: may I be courageous like Soviet dissidents I knew
At 58, I have for the first time become a dissident. I am in active opposition to Covid-19 related policies…
Australia, we’ve got you cowered
If you didn’t already think so, the news that police have received thousands of calls from Aussies dobbing in other…
ScoMo’s said ‘no’ – but this is why we need a ‘Freedom Day’
The great semanticist and one-time Republican senator from California, Samuel I. Hayakawa once remarked that language is thought in action.…
Just what is the Reserve Bank up to?
The conduct of monetary and fiscal policy since the pandemic began has no parallel in Australia’s economic history, certainly not compared to what happened during the more severe Spanish Flu a century ago. Back then in the…
Governments, get real. Eliminating Covid from the community with fines is fantasy
The unacceptable violence at Melbourne’s ‘freedom’ rally, the quieter Sydney and Adelaide rallies and the New South Wales/Queensland border ‘invasion’…
The Taliban take over The Age Green Guide
At a time when the world is going to hell and some perspective is desperately needed, thank God for the…
Scott Morrison and our Afghan allies: as shameful as Whitlam with South Vietnam
On August 18, 1971 then prime minister William McMahon announced the final withdrawal of Australian combat troops from Vietnam. It…
Central Asia’s geography after America’s defeat
However much it is denied, we still live in an imperial age, at least metaphorically. Just as the withdrawal from…
Is Afghanistan to blame for Biden’s sinking popularity — or is COVID?
‘How many more generations of America’s daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan’s civil war when…
CRT is the dialectic of suicide
Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon…
Is Japan about to enter a 'London-style lockdown'?
Just like the Olympics, which ended a fortnight ago, the Paralympics is set to commence amid a drumbeat of doom.…
New Zealand’s zero Covid strategy is becoming unsustainable
New Zealand has done remarkably well over the past 18 months at protecting its citizens from the worst of the…
Jacinda Ardern asks the Taliban to be ‘nice’ to women
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has come out and asked the Taliban to be ‘nice’ to women during this…
Kiwi notes
Freedom after speech? I recall a very fine lawyer, New Zealand’s most highly regarded QC, once saying that no law…
New Zealand’s energy emergency
Regardless of the spin Jacinda Ardern’s government is putting on the fact that parts of our North Island cities have…
Covid in the age of unreason
Some governments and parliaments seem to suffer from the fatal conceit that they can create new reality simply by declaring…
Covid statistics tell a different story
It is with head-shaking disbelief that New South Welshmen (in particular at the present) awake each new day to find…
Business/Robbery, etc.
The Financial Review headline restored reality to a week of ‘red alert’ IPCC report-induced catastrophic climate hyperbole: ‘Europe May Clean…
Mummy Juanita, your sacrifice is needed
I read lots of random stuff, no doubt like many Speccie readers. I recently learnt about a mummified body of…
Moral busybodies, monstrous certainty
It was C.S. Lewis who observed that there is no tyranny more oppressive or insulting than that of ‘omnipotent moral…
China must cough up for Covid
On and on and on it goes, 17 months now and no end in sight. As the losses mount up…
Big sister
Australians would once proudly boast theirs was a nation under the rule of law. Sadly, we now live under the…
The donkey that went to Mecca
In Afghanistan it is said if a donkey goes to Mecca, when it returns, it is still a donkey. Despite…
Ernest Hemingway
Entertainment in a public place shrivels as the lockdowns continue. The Australian Ballet has cancelled its Melbourne season, Anna Karenina…
Aden Young
No one has any guarantee of seeing Sigrid Thornton in Lifespan of a Fact with the Sydney Theatre Company now…
Rose Byrne
‘Unemployed at last!’ That wonderful bit of national self-mockery that opens the classic Australian novel Such is Life takes on…
John Mortimer & Leo McKern
What earthly guarantee do we have that live performance is going to be a viable option for Sydney or Melbourne…
Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed
If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter.…
Should the Duke of Windsor have been tried for treason?
In Traitor King, Andrew Lownie shows how the Duke of Windsor — the former Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936…
Bad sports, from the ancient Greeks to the present
Sports history, writes Wray Vamplew, is sometimes ‘sentimental, reactionary and built on the implicit assumption that the sporting past was…
Why did the Allies dismiss the idea of a German resistance movement?
In 1928, a modest young lecturer from Wilwaukee, Mildred Harnack, née Fish, arrived in Berlin to begin her PhD in…
Fascist, anti-Semite and dupe: the dark side of G.K. Chesterton
The Sins of G.K. Chesterton demands our attention because, as Richard Ingrams notes in his introduction, the literature on this…
Are the English exceptionally gullible?
The word ‘hoax’ did not catch on till the early 19th century. Before that one spoke of a hum, a…
The history of transplants had many false starts
On watching transplant surgery, I can give prosaic but essential advice: have a good breakfast. Each operation can last 12…
Margaret Thatcher vs everyone else: the making of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement
Diplomatic negotiations are rarely fully described by their participants in books, for two reasons. They are usually secret until much…
