It is a familiar fact that some of the best educated in our midst also sometimes seem the most unwise. Take Melbourne barrister Julian Burnside QC, for example. He voted for the Liberal Party up to and including John Howard’s victory over Labor’s Paul Keating in March 1996. Burnside then gradually moved to the left [...]
One of the advantages of being a reporter, media presenter, commentator or academic is that you rarely, if ever, have to make decisions for which there are policy consequences. In short, critics say rather than do. On Thursday, Josh Frydenberg appeared on the ABC-TV News Breakfast program. Towards the end of the interview, the Treasurer [...]
On Wednesday, ABC Radio National Breakfast presenter Fran Kelly spoke to opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers, followed by Josh Frydenberg, about the Australian economy during the current Covid-19 lockdown in NSW. It came as no surprise that the former received a soft interview while the latter was consistently challenged and interrupted. What was surprising turned [...]
Executive Director of The Sydney Institute and columnist with The Australian, Dr Gerard Henderson was educated by the Jesuits at Melbourne’s Xavier College and raised a Catholic. Former Justice of the High Court of Australia, The Hon Michael Kirby AC GMC, grew up in a strong Anglican tradition – one that he has described as [...]
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Around two months ago I walked up a one-way street in the Sydney CBD. A young man, wearing a mask approached me and asked, firmly but courteously, if I would use the opposite footpath. I did so. On looking around, I noticed two parked police cars and a bus. After passing the bus I looked [...]
Contrary to the prevailing mythology advanced by some commentators, there is no meaningful comparison between the Kalgoorlie by-election of December 1920 and today’s by-election in the NSW seat of Eden-Monaro. Sure, the former took place at the time of the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919-20 and the latter is under way during the COVID-19 pandemic [...]
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’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 [...]
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 [...]
