It is invariably a sad occasion when employees lose jobs through no fault of their own. This applies to the 250 job losses at the ABC that were announced by its managing director, David Anderson, on Wednesday. As it does to the forthcoming 6000 job cuts at Qantas, as well as to those recently announced [...]
Police guard the Lachlan Macquarie and Captain Cook statues in Sydney’s Hyde park after both were the target of vandals. Picture: Steve Tyson On Wednesday, ABC News and on television and the influential ABC AM radio program made much of an incident where a member of the NSW Police Force tactical operations unit [...]
It was just a matter of time before the contemporary left started turning on itself. After all, this had been the practice of communist and other radical left-wing movements in the 20th century. Splitting is what ideologues do to proclaim the truth of their particular ideologies. On any analysis, The New York Times is a [...]
Today will see what are presented as Black Lives Matter protests in Australian cities and elsewhere. Protesters will be remembering the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer who has been charged with murder. His three associates face somewhat lesser charges. A driving factor in some of these marches [...]
Perhaps the only acceptable factor of the coronavirus pandemic is the outlawing of the hug, including the group hug — which apparently has been replaced by the virtual hug. This was evident when Scott Morrison addressed the National Press Club in Canberra on Tuesday. The focus of the talk was the development of skills and reforming [...]
In one of his final poems before dying at 59, Australian poet James McAuley wrote: “Winter will grow dark and cold / Before the wattle turns to gold. McAuley (born 1917), a Christian, apparently had in mind eternal life. But he well understood his immediate future on this earth, which was dark indeed. Treasury secretary [...]
The ignorance of some journalists never seems to surprise. Take, for example, the release last week of the non-redacted report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse covering its case studies in the Catholic diocese of Ballarat and archdiocese of Melbourne. Sections of both reports had been delayed pending the result [...]
It’s only a few months ago that green-left types, including quite a few journalists, took delight in sneering at Scott Morrison as “Scotty from marketing”. Now, however, a more appropriate term would be “ScoMo for the workers”. It was around the turn of the 20th century that the Australian Labor Party was created out of [...]
In the current debate on the Australia-China relationship that has been fuelled by China’s role in the COVID-19 pandemic, one opinion deserves special attention. It is that proffered by former prime minister John Howard as reported in The Australian on Monday. Howard said that Australia should take a pragmatic approach in its relationship with China. [...]
As readers of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story Silver Blaze will recall, Sherlock Holmes solves a crime by focusing on a dog that did not bark. It was, in Holmes’s terminology, another “elementary, my dear Watson” moment. It’s much the same with political biographies. Sometimes a former politician’s memoirs reveal more about the author when [...]