Flat White

In-depth analysis of the day’s news, plus stories and gossip from Australian politics.

Piking on the Piketty show

11 October 2016 1:59 pm

  Le economiste fashioniste, Thomas Piketty, is in town and my generous wife thought tickets to his talk would be…

Fresh news from the inner-city…

11 October 2016 11:20 am

Why hasn’t The Age been all over this? It’s the ultimate Melbourne inner-city accommodation experience, surely? Either that or a…

James Paterson’s welcome lateral thinking

11 October 2016 7:33 am

Good on Victorian Liberal Senator James Paterson for his media campaign to sell Jackson Pollock’s drunken daub, Blue Poles, to…

The Trump and Judy show

10 October 2016 6:52 pm

Clinton: ‘It’s a good thing that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law…

Naplan obesity tests? A fat lot of good that will do

10 October 2016 4:43 pm

NAPLAN FAT TESTS—Students as young as nine would [sic] take fitness exams so schools across the country can be ranked…

Pauline Hanson: back, but for how long?

10 October 2016 1:15 pm

‘I’m back’, and with these two words, Pauline Hanson stated the bleeding obvious as she delivered her maiden speech in…

A conservative Bill for marriage equality

10 October 2016 7:24 am

Edmund Burke seems to have gone out of fashion a bit, and as a man who still listens to Oasis…

The terrible truth about staffers

7 October 2016 2:04 pm

Poor Jack Walker, probably soon to be an ex-adviser to Christopher Pyne. Not only has he and his eight Sydney…

Milo Yiannopoulos and the @Nero fallacy

7 October 2016 7:26 am

Milo Yiannopoulos, the social media agent provocateur banned from Twitter for mocking the star of the oh-so-PC, all-female Ghostbusters remake,…

What was that about swaggering sophomoric staffers?

6 October 2016 3:07 pm

Long hours, bad coffee, average hotels and Virgin Lounge popcorn instead of a home cooked meal. It ain’t glamorous. It…

Good luck manning the polling booths, Mr Baird

6 October 2016 7:11 am

You all know the lines from Brecht: After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union…

Budgie smugglers and the rise of the staffer brat

5 October 2016 1:27 pm

Once again politics and budgie smugglers have divided a nation and provided days of rather unusual commentary. The familiarity is…

Who’s your nanny?

5 October 2016 7:25 am

There once was a time when we, Australians and Americans, used to have a good laugh at the countries of…

John Howard: no villain, no racist but instead one of our best

4 October 2016 4:13 pm

John Howard, for the very reason that he was one of our best and longest serving prime ministers, remains the bête noire of…

Trolling with Clementine Ford

4 October 2016 7:18 am

Fairfax columnist and ABC Drum presenter Julia Baird is drawn to forceful, opinionated public women.  Baird is writing a biography of Queen Victoria, and in a column this week…

Calumnies from the clickbait farm

3 October 2016 1:00 pm

“This is what would happen if Australian halted immigration”, the introduction to ditzy Fairfax economics correspondent Jessica Irvine’s latest bleatings…

David Van Gend and the Rainbow Jihadists

3 October 2016 7:38 am

Traditional marriage campaigner David Van Gend recently did that most rare of things – he defended the freedom of his…

The sickness at the soul of Generation Ink

1 October 2016 9:36 am

The presence of body art is more prominent today than it has ever been before. What explains this new desire…

The campus left and definitions of morality

30 September 2016 4:40 pm

The University of Melbourne Student Union is an oh-so-democratic body that left-aligned student groups vie to control so they can…

John Howard upsets Sydney’s sandstone soviet

30 September 2016 9:15 am

Sydney University staff already skip off to Syria to help Bashar al-Assad with his propaganda ploys and get involved in…

Time to talk frankly on immigration

29 September 2016 1:46 pm

Last week The Australian editorialised on Australia’s immigration policies, noting that the Prime Minister’s “reception this week at an invitation-only UN summit on…

Israel and the slippery slope of anti-Semitism

29 September 2016 7:35 am

In a screening interview for a government job I was once asked about my religion. I said I was Jewish but not very religious;…

So, South Australia, how’s that move to renewables working out for you?

28 September 2016 5:38 pm

Oh. From the Adelaide Advertiser, this afternoon: The entire state has lost all power in the midst of today’s big…

First they came for the racists

28 September 2016 5:13 pm

Look at the comments on any article on Free Speech, in particular Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, and…

On the upside, Prime Minister…

28 September 2016 7:27 am

Yesterday’s Newspoll wasn’t exactly the best of news for the Prime Minister, but it shouldn’t have come as any surprise.…