It’s not familiarity that breeds contempt. It’s alienation. I first learned of Tim Minchin’s song I Still Call Australia Homophobic, supporting a yes vote in the same-sex marriage postal survey, when it was posted on the ABC’s website late last week. Not long after Mark Maley (ABC News’ editorial policy manager) had felt the need to [...]
The concept of the need to know is familiar in government and organisations, entailing that information will not be provided unless a recipient should be aware of it. However, the need not to know seems to be a more recent development born out of a gratuitous stance that citizens should be protected from facts lest [...]
Just imagine the world today if the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had achieved its ambitions within the Western democracies. For starters, North Korea’s communist dictator Kim Jong-un would be able to achieve his aim of uniting all of Korea by eliminating South Korea and would prove a deadly threat to Japan and, in time, the [...]
The increasing number of sneering secularists in our midst focus primarily on believers of the Christian faith — with particular emphasis on socially conservative Catholics. The voice of the sneering secularist can be heard regularly on the ABC and in Fairfax Media publications. However, The Saturday Paper provides a boutique outlet for attacks on Christianity and especially [...]
Malcolm Turnbull is correct. Greens senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters were careless in not checking their citizenship status before nominating for election to the Senate. Moreover, as the Prime Minister said on Radio 5AA in Adelaide on Wednesday, Australians are “entitled to expect that, as the Constitution says, their parliamentary representatives have allegiance to [...]
Two recent speeches to the Sydney Institute, one by a current and the other by a former key figure in the labour movement, have drawn attention to the low-profile but economically important issue of industrial relations reform. On August 3, opposition employment and workplace relations spokesman Brendan O’Connor delivered a considered address in which he [...]
It seems that the season for providing gratuitous advice to the Australian government is upon us. How else to explain Lowy Institute executive director Michael Fullilove’s address to the National Press Club on Wednesday and the recent publication by United States Studies Centre research fellow Dougal Robinson? The assumption behind the message of both is [...]
If Malcolm Turnbull had led the Coalition to a convincing victory in the July 2016 election, it is unlikely his address to the Policy Exchange think tank in London would have caused such controversy back home. It’s just that the Prime Minister’s majority of one in the House of Representatives, along with the fact that [...]
ABC television Media Watch presenter Paul Barry declared last Monday that “there’s long been talk of the Foxification of Sky News”. He did not say who has been engaged in such talk. However, viewing Media Watch, there is a case for the “Foxification” of the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster when it comes to media analysis. Since [...]
It’s a tale of two Tuesdays, in two hemispheres, which demonstrates that left-liberals (in the American sense of the term) are out of touch with the electorate. On Tuesday morning The Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was interviewed on the ABC’s News Breakfast program. He is in Australia as a guest of the taxpayer-subsidised US [...]