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An Indigenous Voice to Parliament: not as simple as some would have you believe

Advocates for an Indigenous Voice to parliament see the proposal for a legislated option merely as a stepping stone to radical constitutional…

3 Feb 2021

Mothers of Sons fights for fair treatment of men and boys

Two years ago, a Canberra woman Sarah Jane Parkinson was sent to prison for making over 30 false rape and violence accusations against…

2 Feb 2021

Daniel Andrews’ conversion laws: swimming against the tide

As the Victorian government stands poised to pass new laws based on LGBTI ideology, our global community is telling us…

2 Feb 2021

Eddie McGuire tried to smoke an exploding cigar. Why is he surprised at what happened?

The Collingwood Football Club is like the man who ordered an exploding cigar and then smoked the exploding cigar only…

2 Feb 2021

WA’s corona clampdown: all bluff – and blunder

If 2020 illustrated anything, it’s that there are far worse places than Western Australia to be trapped in. Sure, WA isn’t as fancy pants as places in the east but our beaches, food and weather are magnificent and you can…

2 Feb 2021

The Greenhouse Effect vs. The Ultimo Effect

One of the most intelligent and insightful humans to have ever walked the face of the earth is American economist…

2 Feb 2021

Whatever happened to the free speech party?

The communication revolution birthed by Big Tech began with the best of intentions – to provide anyone, even the most…

2 Feb 2021

Kevin Andrews deserved better

Kevin Andrews didn’t deserve the vilification he received after losing yesterday’s Menzies preselection, especially from journalists who appear to have…

1 Feb 2021

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Putin's poisonous prisoner

Alexei Navalny, the man Putin tried to poison, has been sent to prison for two years and eight months — conveniently…

3 Feb 2021

Kamala Harris’s Orwellian future

Do you suppose that Kamala Harris is a student of Jane Austen? The contingency, as Jeeves was wont to observe,…

3 Feb 2021

Can ‘surge testing’ get new variants under control?

A year on, in one sense we’re pretty well back to where we started — with the government attempting to…

3 Feb 2021

AOC’s body politics

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no stranger to attention. The second-term congresswoman was the second most talked-about politician in 2019, just…

2 Feb 2021

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Dreaming of a White Paper

Honouring Malcom Turnbull by making him a Companion of the Order of Australia gave our 29th Prime Minister an opportunity…

30 Jan 2021

Twiggy’s Green steal?

There was a time when the ABC’s Boyer Lectures made sense. Based on the Reith Lectures sponsored by the BBC,…

30 Jan 2021

Biden’s brave new transgender world

That Joe Biden, on the first day of his presidency, signed an Executive Order advancing the transgender movement sends an…

30 Jan 2021

Stranded

In 2019, America recorded the world’s largest decline in energy-related carbon dioxide. But to credit President Trump, would discredit other…

30 Jan 2021

Humourless moral imbeciles

A century ago one of the best-selling authors in the world was the son of a Scottish Free Church Presbyterian…

30 Jan 2021

Court short

Reserved for ‘eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in service to Australia’, no more than 35 people in…

30 Jan 2021

Divided We Fall

In the middle of the 15th century, Italian philosopher, bishop, and humanist Francesco Patrizi of Siena wrote a number of…

30 Jan 2021

A great president

The United States has led the free world for the best part of a century, producing a record number of…

30 Jan 2021

On The Beach

The aftermath of Australia Day seems like an appropriate time to watch On the Beach, for a belated first time,…

30 Jan 2021

Elijah Moshinsky

Earlier this month, the opera world sadly absorbed the news of the death of Elijah Moshinsky. Born in Shanghai in…

30 Jan 2021

The Investigation

Slowly, after what seemed like infinite, malingering delays, virus-driven, the world of arts and entertainment is starting to open again…

23 Jan 2021

Masked opera

We were all excited to be there.  You would have thought that we hadn’t been to an opera performance.  Well,…

23 Jan 2021

Aussie Life

Has any speech by an American politician ever received more attention in the Australian media than Joe Biden’s inauguration speech?…

30 Jan 2021

Aussie Lingo

Every other day some minor celebrity complains of being ‘trolled’ on social media. The answer is to get off social…

30 Jan 2021

The fakery of Martha Gellhorn

Gstaad Martha Gellhorn was a long-legged blonde American writer and journalist who became Papa Hemingway’s third and penultimate wife. She…

30 Jan 2021

What should you put at the end of an email?

Suzanne Moore, the Telegraphcolumnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at…

30 Jan 2021

Queer Teen Craze

It is remarkable how quickly the cause of transgenderism has moved from being a strange object at the back of…

30 Jan 2021

Lives unlived: Light Perpetual, by Francis Spufford, reviewed

Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in…

30 Jan 2021

A bored business administrator in Leicester puts the intelligence services to shame

In the summer of 2012, a man was walking near Jabal Shashabo, a Syrian rebel enclave, when he spotted a…

30 Jan 2021

Memory – and the stuff of dreams

Can you remember when you heard about 9/11? Chances are you’ll be flooded instantly with memories — not only where…

30 Jan 2021

One of the last men-only jobs left — offshore in the North Sea

As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman,…

30 Jan 2021

A beastly cold country: Britain in 1962

Like this author, I was happily snowbound at a beloved grandparent’s house during the big freeze that began on Boxing…

30 Jan 2021

Holding the Empire responsible for the state of modern Britain is becoming commonplace

It seems to have become a virtual orthodoxy of the academic and publishing worlds that history and fiction now have…

30 Jan 2021

Rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Browning from her wax-doll image

‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’ asks the speaker in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Memorabilia’ — a line which recognises…