The Palm Sunday attacks by the so-called Islamic State or Daesh on Coptic churches in Egypt is the latest manifestation of the unrelenting war against Christianity in the Middle East. The Islamist terrorists attacked a Coptic church in the town of Tanta and St Mark’s Cathedral in the city of Alexandria. The Coptic Church’s leader, [...]
The Palm Sunday attacks by the so-called Islamic State or Daesh on Coptic churches in Egypt is the latest manifestation of the unrelenting war against Christianity in the Middle East. The Islamist terrorists attacked a Coptic church in the town of Tanta and St Mark’s Cathedral in the city of Alexandria. The Coptic Church’s leader, [...]
Only four Liberal Party leaders have taken the Coalition into government by defeating Labor from opposition. In order of their years of tenure in office, they were Robert Menzies (1949), John Howard (1996), Malcolm Fraser (1975) and Tony Abbott (2013). Viewed in this light, it’s easy to see why so many contemporary Liberals associate themselves [...]
I opposed John Howard’s decision in 2006, when he was prime minister, to provide an endowment of $25 million to the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The USSC received additional support from the NSW government and the taxpayer-subsidised University of Sydney. Certainly there were financial contributions from business and individuals, channelled [...]
I, for one, am not mourning the death of Martin McGuinness, the former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland. Sure, in the last two decades of his life the leader of the essentially Catholic Sinn Fein party played an important role in implementing the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement in co-operation with Ian Paisley and [...]
Growing up in Melbourne in the 1950s and early 60s, I could never have anticipated that, a half-century later, Australia would have an energy crisis. Throughout the 20th century, Victoria’s relative economic prosperity was sustained by cheap brown coal from the Latrobe Valley area. Coal extraction led to job creation and increasing living standards. Other [...]
Last Wednesday the ABC celebrated International Women’s Day by replacing all male presenters with females. Some found this gesture condescending while others thought it uplifting. But what’s certain is that the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster’s line-up on March 8 did not do what it claimed to do. According to ABC Publicity, the whole of the exercise [...]
In the wake of Brexit and Donald J. Trump’s victory in the US presidential election last November, the term fascist is heard increasingly within Western democratic societies. However, as the historian Robert O. Paxton writes in The Anatomy of Fascism (Allen Lane, 2004), the word has been predominantly associated with Italy under the dictator Benito [...]
Pardon me. But I do not recall ever having heard of a certain David Zyngier. Yet the senior lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne was described by the ABC News as one of “a group of 60 prominent people” opposed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Australia. Both the taxpayer-funded public broadcaster and [...]
In his Closing the Gap speech to the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Malcolm Turnbull said that “acknowledging past wrongs” concerning indigenous Australians “enables healing to begin”. The Prime Minister added: “It is that acknowledgment that, 50 years ago, saw the Australian people vote overwhelmingly to change our Constitution so that the commonwealth could assume [...]
