Today in The Australian
That the 20th century was an age of tyrants who were all the more murderous for being ideologically driven hardly needs to be said.
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Today in The Australian
Wars, history shows, rarely end before the net costs to each of the warring parties of continuing the hostilities manifestly exceed those they can expect to bear by settling. Unfortunately, that condition still seems far from being met in Ukraine.
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Today in The Australian
As the Russian army grinds ahead in its efforts to make a desert and call it peace, the invasion of Ukraine has proven to be anything but the smoothly executed “special operation” Vladimir Putin announced three weeks ago.
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Today in The Australian
In September 1968, just weeks after Soviet tanks had crushed the Prague Spring, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, reported to cabinet that the invasion had given NATO “a new lease of life”.
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Today in The Australian
It was all too predictable: Russia’s tanks had scarcely begun to roll into Ukraine before claims appeared in the Twittersphere that the invasion was the West’s own fault.
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Today in The Australian
“It is a fact,” Vladimir Putin claimed in his address to the Russian people seeking to justify Russia’s attack on Ukraine, “that modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, communist Russia.”
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Today in The Australian
Had Jeremy Bentham observed the shenanigans in federal parliament when the religious freedom legislation was scuttled by amendments that purported to protect the “right” of transgender children to attend religious schools, he would have cracked a wry smile.
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Today in The Australian
Putin takes a leaf from the historical playbook
It is one of the many ironies of Vladimir Putin’s brinkmanship in Ukraine that while he demonises the West as the greatest threat Russia faces, his actions have served only to highlight the divisions within the Western alliance.
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Today in The Australian
The objective of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s attack on the Sydney Festival is simple: to stifle the freedom of artistic expression.
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Today in The Australian
Sixty years ago, when John F. Kennedy took up the plight of the wretched of the earth – I refer, of course, to opinion columnists – the recently inaugurated president went straight to the top.
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Today in The Australian
In a country virtually drowning with rights, it is ironic that religious freedom should be the last cab off the rank – and the one that seems to be facing the greatest legislative opposition.
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Today in The Australian
With longstanding liberties under serious challenge, not least by emergency powers legislation that lacks adequate safeguards, today’s anniversary of the Eureka Stockade seems more relevant than ever.
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Today in The Australian
Good thing the phones are smart; many of the people who use them clearly aren’t. But whether the boorishness involved in sending lewd photos by text message justifies Cricket Australia’s treatment of Tim Paine is an open question.
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Today in The Australian
It was the past, not the future, that changed at last week’s plenary session of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee.
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Today in The Australian
If nothing is more precious than the gift of life, we are not only richer but also more equal than ever before.
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Today in The Australian
“He who decides on the exception is sovereign”, the German polymath Carl Schmitt famously wrote, in what remains the most frequently cited sentence from his vast body of work.
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Today in The Australian
It may well be that the “National Indigenous Visual Arts Action Plan, 2021-2025”, which the government released late last week, contains some worthwhile initiatives. But it was hard not to be struck by a statement tucked away among the indicators of “what success looks like”.
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Today in The Australian
Although the High Court has dismissed Peter Ridd’s appeal against the termination of his appointment by James Cook University, its unanimous decision is an important step forward in the defence of intellectual freedom.
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Today in The Australian
ICAC … even the Star Chamber did better
It would be a mistake to call the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption a new Star Chamber. After all, despite the injustices that marred its later years, the Star Chamber was, by the standards of its time, a model of procedural fairness.
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Today in The Australian
Once upon a time, schoolchildren were taught that the coming of Federation in 1901 was the work of providence, whose bounteous hand was guided by an omniscient and benevolent deity.
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Today in The Australian
It is one thing to say, as I did on these pages last week, that Covid-19 should ultimately be managed like the flu, and quite another to imply that there is little difference between Covid and the flu. Let’s be clear: Covid is not the Black Death. But neither is it merely the flu with some punch added.
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Today in The Australian
As other countries prepare to live with Covid, Australia and lockdowns remain joined in a fatal embrace. The problem is not just the harm wreaked by the unpredictable disruptions to daily life, the drastic restrictions on domestic and international travel and the myriad other erosions of basic freedoms; it is that the elimination strategy has degenerated into a policy at war with itself.
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Today in The Australian
If there is one thing we have learned it is that if a conclusion doesn’t make much sense, it is wise to treat it with caution, no matter how carefully it has been derived.
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Today in The Australian
As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates its centenary, the goals at the heart of Marxism – of achieving a world in which private property and commodity exchange have been abolished, the state has “withered away” and resources are allocated on the basis of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” – scarcely figure in its program.
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Today in The Australian
If only Australians had been told the truth, claimed Bruce Pascoe, they would have known that Indigenous societies, as they existed before European settlement, were anything but primitive communities of “mere hunter-gatherers” whose “simple lot” was to “wander haplessly” across the continent’s length and breadth.
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Today in The Australian
On May 27, 1971, as the second attempt to ban Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint failed miserably in the NSW Court of Quarter Sessions, literary censorship in Australia effectively came to an end.
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Today in The Australian
This Sunday, on Anzac Day, we will remember those who gave their lives for this country, most recently in Afghanistan, and honour their bravery and devotion. Yet in a culture that places victimhood on a pedestal, the future of the values which shape that tradition of service seems increasingly uncertain.
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Today in The Australian
On December 22, 1988, Ralph Willis, who had recently become minister for communications in the third Hawke government, met with George Maltby, the managing director of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission, and demanded his resignation.
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Today in The Australian
The Liberal staffers who videoed themselves masturbating in Parliament House are morons, not monsters. And if we gasp at Andrew Laming’s conduct, it is less because it was manifestly unethical than because it shows, all too clearly, that while you are only young once, you can be immature forever.
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Today in The Australian
As extremely serious accusations proliferate about behaviour by senior politicians that is claimed to have occurred years or even decades ago, the greatest damage is likely to be to the cause of justice itself.
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Today in The Australian
With the outcome of the High Court appeal in Peter Ridd’s case highly uncertain, the government seems to have an almost touching faith in the capacity of its model code of conduct to protect academic freedom.
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Today in The Australian
As COVID-19 hit these shores, the country’s medical bureaucrats must have felt like the members of a small and rapidly diminishing cargo cult when they finally glimpsed ships on the horizon.
Click here to read the oped at The Australian's website (login required) or check back here next week to download a pdf.Today in The Australian
Released by the Treasurer in the midst of the pandemic, the report of the Retirement Income Review has received far less attention than it deserves. While the report covers a great deal of ground, it is disappointing and dangerous in important respects.
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Today in The Australian
It was predictable, but nonetheless a pity, that the row over Australia Day would prove to be all heat, no light.
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Today in The Australian
It is one of the paradoxes of the modern world that while the concept of honour has about as much influence on daily life as that of chastity, honours abound, and — as this week’s polemics showed — so does the controversy that surrounds their award.
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Today in The Australian
150 years on, Germany’s past shows fragility of freedom
One hundred and fifty years ago this week, on January 18, 1871, the German empire was proclaimed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, which the troops of the German states had just captured in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
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Today in The Australian
Coming at the end of a year in which Australians have been subject to restrictions that are unprecedented in peacetime, including widespread and persistent border closures, it may well have been appropriate for Scott Morrison to remind us that we are — or should be — “one and free”.
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Today in The Australian
The silence that has greeted the former US president’s description of Nicolas Sarkozy in his book reflects the normalisation of casual anti-Semitism on the ‘progressive’ side of politics.
The words leap out and grab you. After all, in countless pages of prose, no other world leader is characterised by Barack Obama in anything like those terms.
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Today in The Australian
When the Black Death reached Europe and the Mediterranean in 1346-47, Egypt and England were roughly comparable economies, with similar populations and income levels.
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Today in The Australian
As so often happens with mass production, the quality of China’s lies has plummeted as their number has increased. However, the purpose of its latest outrage was not so much to deceive as to humiliate.
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Today in The Australian
Having held out for many months, All Souls capitulated last week, erasing the name “Codrington” from its world-famous library.
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Today in The Australian
Since the brutal assassination of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded on the street by an Islamist for showing his students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, the ABC has distinguished itself by publishing one piece after the other that pins the blame for the French terrorist attacks not on the fanatics and their murderous ideology but — you guessed it — on France.
Today in The Australian
Much like the BBC, the ABC was formed, and its mission framed, on the basis of two beliefs that emerged from the trauma of the First World War.
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Today in The Australian
Many decades ago, in that fleeting parenthesis between the ravages of Marxism and those of the assault on Dead White Males, there raged in academia something of a great debate about Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.
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Today in The Australian
As pillars of probity, ASIC pair should know better
Whether Christine Holgate, the CEO of Australia Post, acted properly in distributing designer watches to the senior executives who had secured a major contract will be determined by the inquiries that are now under way. But whether she acted wisely is another question.
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Today in The Australian
Islam and the West: We must strike back or soon we’ll all be Samuel Paty
Samuel Paty, the French schoolteacher decapitated last Friday for showing his students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, did not lose his life in a clash of civilisations; he lost it in a clash between civilisation and barbarism.
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Today in The Australian
The past week has hardly been kind on our political system’s image. In NSW, Gladys Berejiklian’s previously untarnished reputation was battered by revelations of her relationship with Daryl Maguire, a disgraced former Liberal MP.
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Today in The Australian
Recent polls that show a majority of Australians support tough restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 may well reflect public perceptions of the risks associated with the disease.
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Today in The Australian
Eyes wide shut – Victoria’s debacle shows the public service sector remains steeped in political expediency
“When I leave home to walk to school / Dad always says to me / ‘Marco, keep your eyelids up / And see what you can see.” So begins the classic 1937 children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr Seuss.
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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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Today in The Australian
With China’s trade war against Australia escalating, the scene seems distressingly contemporary: a fraying global order, riven by mounting tensions between states; an ascendant, brutally authoritarian power, determined to throw its weight around; and dependent economies which, though formally independent, find their room for manoeuvre increasingly compromised as the rising power uses its economic clout to punish them for stepping out of line.
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Today in The Australian
“No one could have foreseen five or 10 years ago the situation we face,” Emmanuel Macron declared in early March, as he sought to explain the shortages of personal protective equipment and respirators that had plunged France into a devastating crisis.
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Today in The Australian
In December 1919, as the Bolsheviks struggled with a typhus epidemic that killed more than five million people, Lenin famously declared “either socialism will defeat the louse or the louse will defeat socialism”.
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Coronavirus: Return to sender — economists’ letter is gibberish
HENRY ERGAS and JONATHAN PINCUS
Like some books, there are petitions that deserve to be forgotten, not for the sake of their potential readers but to protect the reputation of their authors. The open letter by a bevy of economists urging Scott Morrison to keep the COVID-19 restrictions in place is a case in point.
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Today in The Australian
When Albert Camus set out to write The Plague, the novel that more than any other work earned him the Nobel prize for literature in 1957, words almost failed him.
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Today in The Australian
While the response of federal and state governments to the spread of COVID-19 is understandable, there must be a danger of going too far.
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Today in The Australian
On March 24, 1976, as the US prepared to celebrate its bicentenary, president Gerald Ford faced a decision which could only damage his chances of winning the election that was to be held that November.
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Today in The Australian
Cosmic catastrophe always there if you look for it
In one of his last works, written a decade after he had defined enlightenment as “daring to know”, Immanuel Kant identified what he regarded as one of the greatest threats to reason: the human tendency to seek, in ever-changing realities, a sign of the End of Days.
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Today in The Australian
Whatever its intentions, the High Court’s decision in Love and Thoms does indigenous Australians no favours.
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Today in The Australian
When the great cholera epidemics of the 19th century began in 1820, no one had any idea what had struck. Here was a disease of astonishing ferocity, as terrifying as the plague and seemingly as unstoppable, that was rapidly making its way from the Far East towards Europe.
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Today in The Australian
Seventy-five years ago, as the war raged with unrelenting ferocity, Australia’s daily papers reported, typically in a snippet at the bottom of page 4, that on what is now Australia Day a “terrible concentration camp” had been captured at Oswiecim, in southwestern Poland.
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Today in The Australian
It may be the fate of most public intellectuals to become more and more public and less and less intellectual; it was never that of the late Roger Scruton.
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Today in The Australian
With the flames still raging, it is too early to tell how great the losses from this season’s bushfires will be. Already now, however, the commonwealth government has pledged $2bn for a National Bushfire Recovery Agency, while the NSW government has announced an additional $1bn in recovery funding.
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Today in The Australian
As the children, “running and running, running to a standstill”, brought news to the volunteer firefighters in Patrick White’s The Tree of Man of yet another outbreak in the terrifying fire at Durilgai, “passionate volumes of smoke towered above the bush, and in that smoke (writhed) dark, indistinguishable bodies, as if something were being translated forcibly into space”.
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Today in The Australian
How fortunate is the true love in the Twelve Days of Christmas! From the first partridge in a pear tree to the last drummer drumming she receives exactly 364 gifts: a present for each and every day of the year to come, excluding Christmas Day.
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Today in The Australian
According to Kenneth Hayne, former High Court judge and commissioner of last year’s financial services royal commission, Australian company directors need to spend more time worrying about climate change.
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Today in The Australian
According to Ephraim Mirvis, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, “the overwhelming majority of British Jews” are “gripped by anxiety” at the possibility of a Labour victory.
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Today in The Australian
With the House of Commons finally agreeing to an early election, the polls point to a substantial Conservative victory.
That is partly because Boris Johnson — who was widely dismissed as a clown when he took over the party’s leadership at the end of July — has raised support for the Tories from the catastrophic low of 20-25 per cent it had reached before he became Prime Minister to 35-40 per cent today.
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Today in The Australian
There’s need for secrecy — it’s a question of balance
As the blacked-out front pages of Monday’s newspapers reminded us, a free press is the foundation of liberty. In a world in which the abuse of power comes as no surprise, its vigilance helps to expose injustice, deter those who would perpetrate it and ensure governments are held to account.
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Today in The Australian
“Extinction rebellion” is not a protest against governments — it is a protest against the voters who elected them. And its message to those voters is as simple as it is manifestly undemocratic: adopt our policies or we will make your life impossible.
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Today in The Australian
As China’s leaders celebrated 70 years of Communist Party rule on Tuesday, the fate of the Soviet empire hung like a ghost over the jackboots and missiles parading through the streets of Beijing.
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Today in The Australian
The Committee for the Economic Development of Australia last week released the results of a survey of the attitudes the general public and corporate leaders have to business.
Launched to great media fanfare, Company Pulse 2019 contributed to a torrent of commentary about the need for companies to act more ethically.
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Today in The Australian
Last Saturday, at a packed conference in Kyoto of the International Council of Museums, delegates voted overwhelmingly against an ill-conceived proposed change to the internationally accepted definition of the nature and functions of a museum.
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Today in The Australian
For the past few months Britain has been a nation busily engaged in building its own funeral pyre.
This week Britain leapt into the roaring flames.
Perhaps something will be saved from the conflagration but, regardless of how Brexit ends, it is becoming harder and harder to believe that Britain will ever be the same again.
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Today in The Australian
The platitude du jour, repeated at every turn by the Treasurer and the governor of the Reserve Bank, is that no one wins a trade war. Pleasing as that homily may be, it reflects neither theory nor experience.
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Today in The Australian
Trump is living up to a long U.S. tradition
With the turmoil in Hong Kong, and now the apparent explosion of a Russian nuclear propulsion device, focusing attention on the threats Australia faces, there is a growing chorus of voices casting doubt on the stability and predictability of American foreign policy — and hence on the wisdom of continuing to rely so heavily on the alliance.
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Today in The Australian
Whatever one thinks of John Setka, this much is clear: expelling him from the ALP will do nothing to prevent the lawlessness that has become the hallmark of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining and Energy Union.
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On June 4, 1989, as the tanks rolled into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement won a landslide victory over its communist rivals in the first democratic elections to be held in Poland — indeed, in Eastern Europe — since its forcible integration into the Soviet bloc.
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Today in The Australian
Like Aldous Huxley, I am capable of being very stoical about other people’s misfortunes — and never more so than when they afflict Labor and the disastrous policies it took to the election.
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Today in The Australian (with Jonathan Pincus)
Labor’s tax attack on savings counter-productive
Australia may find itself next week on the path to the largest peacetime tax increases since Federation. It is not simply the magnitude of the tax rises that makes Labor’s plans exceptional — both in historical terms and relative to global trends — it is that they are so heavily focused on penalising saving.
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Today in The Australian
According to Labor and the Greens, climate change is fundamentally a moral issue. That, they say, means there is no need to cost their policies, which must simply be accepted as the right thing to do.
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Today in The Australian
It is, as Gibbons said about Corsica, easier to deplore the fate, than to describe the actual condition, of the National Broadband Network.
And with the campaign now under way, Labor’s announcement that, if elected, it will launch yet another review of the NBN only makes the network’s future all the more uncertain.
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Today in The Australian
Having proven herself to be a phoenix rather than a cooked goose, Gladys Berejiklian should move as quickly as she reasonably can to contain the effects of a recent decision by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal.
Legal reasons preclude a detailed discussion of the substance of that decision. Briefly stated, it quashes the convictions of a former senior politician in the Keneally Labor government, and of his close political ally, to whom that politician granted a lucrative licence. After a lengthy investigation, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption concluded that the grant of the licence involved the misuse of public office. It also found the politician’s ally complicit in the offence, with those conclusions being confirmed by a trial that sent both men to jail for lengthy terms.
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Today in The Australian
Jihadis, neo-Nazis — they have always been brothers
How often in recent years have we thought, as Hannah Arendt did on learning of the death camps, “many things are possible, but this ought not to have happened”? Now, after another week of terrorism, and yet more innocent blood, we also think: this will not end.
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Today in The Australian
With the opinion polls showing no improvement in its prospects, any remaining optimists in the Coalition look increasingly like wishful sinkers.
The end, when it comes, will leave plenty of scope for recriminations; as ministers and members pack up their offices, blame is the one thing that will not be in short supply. The question, however, is to understand the broader forces at work.
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Today in The Australian
Last month, the NSW Land and Environment Court ruled against a proposed coalmine at Rocky Hill in a decision I criticised in these pages. Since then, public debate about that decision, which is likely to have far-reaching effects, has been astonishingly muted.
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Today in The Australian
According to Tim Anderson, who was sacked from the University of Sydney last month, academic freedom entitles him to display, as teaching material, the flag of the state of Israel with a swastika superimposed on it.
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Today in The Australian
While the Queensland government’s review of the Adani project is a farce, the decision of the NSW Land and Environment Court to block the proposed coalmine at Rocky Hill is a tragedy.
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Today in The Australian
Even those who delight in life’s little ironies will have been troubled to see the major culprits, in this case the banks, emerge from the financial services royal commission with what so far is barely a scolding, while the mortgage brokers and financial advisers, who were bit players in the drama, are hauled to the guillotine.
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Today in The Australian
As US and Chinese negotiators struggle to reach agreement before higher American tariffs on Chinese goods come into effect on March 2, it is increasingly clear that the Trump administration has two distinct, and potentially inconsistent, goals.
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Today in The Australian
We came, we saw, we made the very best of it
As long ago as January 26, 1817, only a few years after the colony of NSW had come into existence, some 40 guests celebrated its founding at the Sydney home of Isaac Nichols, a former convict who was the settlement’s postmaster.
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Today in The Australian
In 1923, as the Weimar Republic struggled with chaos, the German polymath Carl Schmitt wrote a short but enormously influential book, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Schmitt later destroyed his reputation through his collaboration with the Hitler regime. But if his work is increasingly cited, it is because its contemporary resonance is undeniable.
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Today in The Australian
Lost in the shouting match over the partial shutdown of the US government were the striking findings of a study released late last year. The study, carried out by demographers from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, concludes that the number of illegal migrants in the country has been greatly underestimated.
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Today in The Australian
As the global economy sputters and stockmarkets sag, a mere $140,000 will buy the pick-me-up to which every family aspires: the full kit of the Twelve Days of Christmas, from the first partridge to the last drummer, with all the doves, hens, geese, swans, maids, ladies, lords and pipers in between.
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Today in The Australian
In a year best characterised as “plot by Dostoevsky, script by Groucho Marx”, it was perhaps fitting that the Senate celebrated Christmas by considering legislation that would have prevented Christian schools from teaching the doctrines of Jesus Christ.
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Today in The Australian
Watching Malcolm Turnbull’s recent conduct, it was hard not to think of Enoch Powell’s famous conclusion to his biography of Joseph Chamberlain. “All political lives,” Powell wrote, “unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and human affairs.”
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Today in The Australian
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,” France’s President Emmanuel Macron declared on Armistice Day, before adding, in a thinly disguised swipe at US President Donald Trump, “those who say ‘my interests first, regardless of others!’ rob a country of what gives it greatness: its moral value”.
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