A country for old men
When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington…
Look out, Lidia’s parading to parliament
In case you’re under the illusion that 2020 cannot possibly get any worse, I’m afraid I bring bad news. Lidia…
Have Arab nations forgotten about Palestine by accepting Israel?
The Palestinians are entering one of the most precarious periods in their nation’s history. The normalisation of relations between Israel…
The stock market isn’t the success story Trump thinks it is
COVID-19 is still raging, with little sign of coming under control. The economy is already a tenth smaller than it…
The case for mass testing
This morning, Matt Hancock claimed on the Today programme that the government is now working as fast as it can…
Farewell, Public Health England
Farewell, Public Health England. Hello, National Institute for Health Protection. As expected, the hammer has fallen on the agency that…
Why weren’t we wearing masks at the start of the crisis?
The rise of the face mask has been one of the remarkable features of the later period of the Covid-19…
Why Trump won’t stop at Huawei
Cash is no longer king in China. Much like Sweden, the country’s young and old opt for digital payments, made…
A coronavirus vaccine? Great – but make it safe, effective and reliable, please
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen governments, universities and pharmaceutical companies in a mad scramble for a cure and a vaccine.…
An assassination verdict divides Lebanon
Almost a decade ago, I went to Lebanon to investigate who had killed its Prime Minister Rafic Hariri. It was…
Forget coronavirus. The ABC wants to know if you’re suffering from “climate grief”
“Climate grief” is overwhelming many Australians who now suffer from “eco-despair” because of global warming, the ABC has warned. The…
How white was my tele
Racism is a diverse creature. It survives as a pilot-fish ideology that attaches itself to human civilisation, suckled at the…
The Democrats have learned nothing in four years
On night two of the Democratic National Convention, Jack Schlossberg, son of Carolyn Kennedy and grandson of President John F.…
Clive Palmer: the unlikely canary in the coalmine
In 2002, Geoff Gallop’s Labor government in Western Australia entered into a state agreement with Mineralogy, Clive Palmer’s company, for…
Bill Clinton: from boomer to Zoomer
It’s no fun to see Bill Clinton in a virtual vacuum. He’s a people person, a glad-hander, a back-rubber, a…
What’s a hammer and sickle on a campaign office wall among friends?
Be careful what you put on your office walls – or at least where you take your photographs: A small icon…
It’s on: we’ve triggered an official OHS investigation of Victoria’s hotel quarantine farce
Yesterday, on behalf of Self Employed Australia, I wrote to the Victorian WorkCover Authority requesting them to investigate the Covid-19…
Public administration in New South Wales and Victoria has failed us
Between them nearly three-quarters of a million people earn their living from the public purse in Australia’s two largest States.…
Four moments from the cutting room floor of Monday’s DNC coverage
Rather than the initially planned four-day knees-up in Wisconsin, the 2020 Democratic National Convention began with a two-hour virtual broadcast…
The rise of Scotland’s Covid nationalism
Whenever some London celebrity with a hamster’s grasp of Scottish politics simpers about moving north to escape the flaxen-fringed Franco…
In many ways, Andrew Cuomo is just a metaphor
With the United States lurching from crisis to crisis, the Democrats want their convention to present them as the tough,…
Will generation lockdown write good history?
Twenty-first century history is being made each day. The news is full of statue-toppling anarchists and clueless looters, politicians making…
What’s woke this week (or racist)?
Another week, more rounds of ‘Ring a ring a racist’. Pick a subject, any subject and it’s probably made an…
Michelle Obama goes low on the first night of the virtual DNC
What was that? That was the question the internet was asking as the disjointed first night of the Democratic National…
Going postal: the USPS conspiracy theory is the new Russiagate
For the past three years, our national media has been fired up by the urge to fact-check. They fact-checked Donald…
