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 [...]
As with so many contemporary discussions, what is missing from the debate about the impact of climate change on drought and fire in Australia is a historical perspective. Along with a willingness by some to understand the principle of causality. On December 6, commentator Jane Caro forwarded a tweet to Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon, the member [...]
What was worrying about the self-proclaimed world exclusive story China’s Spy Secrets on the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes was the absence of doubt. Nine journalist Nick McKenzie introduced the program with evident certitude when he declared: “It’s probably a safe bet that the all-powerful Chinese President Xi Jinping is not a regular viewer of 60 [...]
Along with 45 per cent of fellow Australians, I voted “Yes” on November 6, 1999 in the referendum as to whether Australia should become a republic. I would do so again – provided the question was similar. It has been claimed by some republicans that the (then) constitutional monarchist prime minister John Howard rigged the [...]
It is said that loss of high public office in a democracy can bring about a psychological condition akin to grief. This is understandable when men and women of substantial ego and ambition are voted out of office by their peers. Some Australian prime ministers handle the distress better than others. In recent times, the [...]
The increasing blur between the journalist as reporter and the journalist as activist was never more evident than before and after the High Court’s decision on Wednesday in George Pell v The Queen. The High Court rejected 21 out of 22 applications for leave to appeal on that day. However, in Pell’s case, Justices Gordon [...]