Sophocles’ legendary tyrant was supremely political, imbued with the casual ­ruthlessness of those whose craft is power. This cynicism is also on display in Queensland and Victoria.

Almost 2500 years after it was first performed, Sophocles’s Antigone has seemed more relevant — ever since Queensland refused Sarah Caisip, a 26-year-old Canberra-based graduate nurse, permission to attend her father’s funeral.

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Today in The Australian

The cruellest thing one can do to Daniel Andrews’s explanation of Victoria’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 is to read it a second time. After all, given the costs that are being inflicted on Victorians and on the country as a whole, one might assume, on a first reading, that a cogent justification for the strategy lay hidden in the explanatory material Andrews used last Sunday.

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Force Daniel Andrews to bear the costs of the damage he wreaks.pdf

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Today in The Australian

A missed opportunity at best, an inconsistent and questionable judg­ment at worst, the decision of the full Federal Court in the dispute between Peter Ridd and James Cook University deserves to be reviewed by the High Court.

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Today in The Australian

This has been a hard year for the traditional virtues, not least that which used to be known as prudence.

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Today in The Australian
In the midst of the Weimar Republic’s disastrous hyperinflation of 1923, Eduard Koppenstatter, a prominent astrologer, correlated movements in the value of the German mark with those of the planets. Having concluded that there were “law-like relations” between monetary indicators and “the course of the stars”, he produced economic forecasts for the years ahead.

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Do we understand the debt burden behind COVID-19_Fri 3 Jul 2020.pdf

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437 Kb

Today in The Australian

If separatism is such misery, do we try integration?

That indigenous Australians, who make up 3 per cent of this country’s population, account for 30 per cent of its prisoners is a national disgrace. That by the time they reach the age of 23, 75 per cent of young indigenous people in NSW will have been cautioned by police, referred to a youth justice conference or convicted of an offence in a criminal court — compared with just 17 per cent of their non-indigenous counterparts — makes the disgrace all the more searing.

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If separatism is such misery, do we try integration_Fri 12 June 2020.pdf

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637 Kb