In my working life I will have lived through four recessions: the mid-1970s, early 80s, early 90s and the likely forthcoming recession. I barely noticed the severe economic downturn on the first two occasions. Between 1973 and 1975 I was a contracted academic at a university. In the early 80s I was a permanent employee [...]
Scott Morrison responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by announcing the creation of a national cabinet composed of the leaders of commonwealth, state and territory governments. It’s not a national cabinet of the kind that was presided over by Neville Chamberlain and later Winston Churchill in Britain during World War II, which consisted of Conservative, Liberal [...]
It’s just a week since the video of three women yelling and fighting over toilet rolls in a supermarket in the Sydney suburb of Chullora went viral. Last Sunday evening, the day after the Chullora incident, about 87,000 people attended the Melbourne Cricket Ground to watch the final of the women’s T20 cricket World Cup [...]
It was no surprise to see Paul Keating on ABC television last Tuesday accusing the Coalition government of “ideological contempt”. The former Labor Party prime minister makes occasional entrances into the public debate and when he does, the language is invariably lively and memorable. What was surprising turned on the fact Keating was defending the [...]
The media’s response to Monday’s speech by director-general of security Mike Burgess tended to focus on his comments about right-wing extremism as terrorism. However, as the ASIO head pointed out, “right-wing extremism has been in ASIO’s sights for some time”. Burgess added: “Obviously this threat came into sharp, terrible focus last year in New Zealand.” [...]
In a public forum at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre late last month, speaker Kim Hoggard declared that observing President Donald J. Trump in action was “like watching Rome burn”. The reference was to what she perceived as declining standards across the US under the Trump administration. The taxpayer-funded USSC tends to [...]
The media believes its principal role is to inform citizens about what is going on. A noble cause, to be sure. It’s just that journalists, as a rule, do not like it when the torch of inquiry is turned on them. Partly because, as a group, they are very sensitive to criticism. Last Monday, two [...]
Nationals’ senator Matt Canavan is one of Australia’s most impressive younger parliamentarians. Born on the Queensland Gold Coast in December 1980, he grew up in the low socio-economic Brisbane suburb of Logan. After a career in the Productivity Commission, Canavan worked as Barnaby Joyce’s chief of staff and was elected to the Senate in 2013, [...]
It is just four months since the ABC’s mission to Bankstown in southwest Sydney. Led by ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson, dozens of the ABC family headed to the outer suburbs for a planning workshop aimed at making content that was more relevant to average Australians than what had previously been [...]
It is a rare occasion when comments made by two former Australian prime ministers make news on the same day, especially when both are former Liberal Party leaders. The circumstance provides a case study on how the media reports politics. On Thursday Imogen Crump, editor of the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit research news publication, was [...]