Annual Dinner 2024
The Sydney Institute's 2024 Annual DinnerWednesday 13 November, 2024 TIME: 6.30 for 7pmThe Star Event Centre, 80 Pyrmont St, Pyrmont NSW 2009DRESS: Black TieTo book return this form Booking form
Trump’s no saint but he deserves objective reporting
This is shaping up as one of the most newsworthy years in recent decades. What with the attempted assassination of Donald J. Trump leading up to the US presidential election in November, the general election in Britain, the elections in India and France, the forthcoming Australian election and more besides. Including the Ukraine-Russia war and [...]
Religious politics to stay on fringes
To understand the present it helps to have sound knowledge of the past. The suggestion that an entity termed The Muslim Vote will run candidates against the Labor Party in some seats it holds in western Sydney and northwest Melbourne has raised the issue of religious or sectarian parties in Australia. This has led to [...]
Fatima Payman, ‘Muslim vote’ unlikely to have much effect
There has been so much media discussion of late about such entities in Australia as “the Muslim community” and “the Muslim vote”. Which raises the question: Do such entities exist? For starters, there are so many varieties of Muslim believers – primarily focused on the majority Sunnis and the minority Shiites. And then there are Muslim [...]
Issue 685
GERARD HENDERSON’S MEDIA WATCH DOG ISSUE – NO. 685 14 June 2024 * * * * Stop Press – Paul Barry to leave Media Watch, again; Bridget Brennan excited to interview American psychic John Edward on News Breakfast; Nine’s David Crowe returns to the prediction business Can You Bear It? – Turnbull rocks up for yet another Trump-bashing [...]
Were it not for those who fought, there’d be no freedom to protest
It is a little-known fact that Anzac Day has a special meaning for the Australian Army. On this day it commemorates – along with others – the landing of the First Australian Imperial Force in Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. And also the final day of the Battle of Kapyong in the Korean War – April 25, [...]
Abusive left can’t cop the idea of an electable Dutton
What’s frequently missing from the Australian political debate is a sense of historical perspective. Look at it this way. No federal government in Australia has been defeated after serving only one term in office in nearly a century. And that was at a most unusual time. In December 1928, James Scullin led the Australian Labor [...]
Faith schools stoush a solution looking for a problem
Once upon a time, the term sectarianism was used in Australia to describe hostility to the Catholic Church in general and Catholics in particular. Anti-Catholic sectarianism has never gone away, but it has diminished dramatically from around half a century ago. It has been replaced by a more general form of sectarianism directed at religion [...]
It is anti-Semitism that is soaring, not Islamophobia
The prevalence of moral equivalence in the debate over the Israel-Hamas war was evident on the ABC Radio National Breakfast program on Wednesday. Presenter Patricia Karvelas interviewed opposition Senate leader Simon Birmingham on a range of issues. Karvelas put this proposition to Birmingham: “Anti-Semitism is on the rise, Islamophobia is on the rise, in the [...]
7.30 pushes usual buttons in all-out nuclear attack
It’s a tale of two interviews. On Tuesday, Sarah Ferguson interviewed opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien on ABC TV’s 7.30. The following morning former Liberal Party prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on ABC Radio National Breakfast by Patricia Karvelas. Turnbull seems to have a particular relationship with RN Breakfast. It is [...]