The woman who defied the Mullahs has vanished
In old time newspaper jargon, the gutter is the strip between the two pages – the gutter press means something…
Australians all let us rejoice, we’ve got the TTP
Hungry young foreigners who crowd around the lavish food samples waiting to be eaten in Tokyo department store food halls…
It’s marvellous the difference Milo makes
People who wondered what the fuss was about when Milo Yiannopoulos visited here should read Dangerous, in which he shreds…
Call the Kiwis!
Some decades ago in Canberra, your column writer toiled in what was then termed the Ministerial Correspondence Unit, a team…
Ambitions closer to home?
There used to be rules about diplomatic postings, rules ancient, arcane and complicated. Fluency in the language of the host…
Not another postal ballot?
Barely had the last flutes of champagne been emptied, the last fireworks burst over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but a…
The Week Before Christmas
T’was the week before Christmas And all through the House No person was stirring, not even a mouse. The files…
Dasher is only the iceberg’s tip
A Labor parliamentarian who, it is revealed, has links to a foreign power that attempts to retrieve information on Australia’s…
Bill Shorten finds religion(s)
An indication of Labor’s concern that in the same-sex marriage vote, the ‘No’s’ were concentrated in mainly migrant-populated suburbs, was…
What Katy didn’t
What Katy Did is the heart-warming story in the Louisa May Alcott Little Women genre of a plucky and spirited Mid-Western girl who overcomes…
Don’t dismiss John Barilaro
The ancient Greeks had a saying, “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad’. Political madness seemed…
Was Bennelong Kristina Keneally’s second choice?
Voters in Bennelong who need to front up to the polls once again may be surprised – and perhaps unimpressed…
Farewell speeches
The Zimbabweans spoke and that old tyrant Mugabe was forced to listen. His resignation speech stated that his decision to…
The cakes of wrath
Well, the results are out. It’s ‘yes’ – so have a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Preferably…
Rotten Greens
Watching a riot when a crowd turns into a mindless, maddened beast screaming for blood is a frightening experience. To…
Another ATSIC will also fail
Malcolm Turnbull has firmly, definitely, declared there would be no Referendum on the plans to establish a constitutionally enshrined indigenous…
Shattered – inside Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign
Only the most rabid fans of US politics will have the time or energy to wade through this doorstopper by…
“Please don’t take too long with your photographs…”
Canberra – particularly the Australian National University – has always been strong for Kevin Rudd. ANU was where he studied…
“My gynaecologist found…”
Michelle Barrow is an American who studied at Yale in the same years as Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton. Barrow’s…
Meanwhile, across the ditch…
“Jacinda, you can get up off the floor now, you’ll ladder your stockings and you know, if you’re going to…
Don’t cry for Hillary, Australia
The ABC Four Corners is supposed to be a gutsy, fact-finding expose-type television program. Most of the time it is.…
What do taxpayers get from UNESCO?
Last week the United States withdrew from UNESCO, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, citing politicisation, after UNESCO designated…
Some die, others appear on The Drum
Working as a journalist has always had its hazards. Follow the story and you may find yourself in some uncomfortable…
What’s Greek for ‘chutzpah’?
Cockiness to the point of crazy-brave has been a Hellene characteristic down the ages (the Greeks were Hellenes before they…
Teaching at Maechaem
For some weeks now in Thailand I’ve been teaching English to teenagers with a disability, many of them in wheelchairs…
