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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 Problem is the tax on our super is too high_Fri 12 Feb 2021.pdf | [ ] | 106 Kb |
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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| Australia Day ‘invasion’ rhetoric perpetuates victimhood_Fri 5 Feb 2021.pdf | [ ] | 110 Kb |
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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| Honours without a shared sense of honour_Fri 29 Jan 2021.pdf | [ ] | 117 Kb |
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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| 150 years on, Germanys past shows fragility of freedom_Fri 22 Jan 2021.pdf | [ ] | 112 Kb |
Today in The Australian
The genius of democracy lies in converting adversaries into rivals, channelling their enmity into organised and orderly political competition. But because that competition relies on passions as much as on interests, there is always a risk that the antagonisms it mobilises will spiral out of control, unleashing the violence that democracy itself is intended to avoid.
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| Americas democracy designed to survive Trump crisis_Fri 14 Jan 2021.pdf | [ ] | 111 Kb |
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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| America’s democracy designed to survive Trump crisis.pdf | [ ] | 111 Kb |
Today in The Australian
“Anno bisesto, anno funesto” — leap year, fatal year — goes an ancient Italian saying, whose origins apparently lie in the devastating plague that hit the Italian city-states in the leap year of 1348.
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| 2021_The year of open societies_Fri 1 Jan 2021.pdf | [ ] | 117 Kb |
Today in The Australian
Christmas is for columnists: please give generously
It was three weeks before Christmas when the dreaded telegram arrived. I refer, dear readers, to 40 years ago, when I was not only young and gay (as we used to say in that more innocent age) but, best of all, in Paris.
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| Christmas is for columnists_please give generously_Thu 24 Dec 2020.pdf | [ ] | 519 Kb |
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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| Why casual bigotry of Obama’s 'Jew' slur about Sarkozy must be called out_Fri 18 | [ ] | 70 Kb |
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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| Calculated show of contempt by China_Fri 4 Dec 2020.pdf | [ ] | 97 Kb |
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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| Oxfords All Souls has shed its own by erasing Codrington name from library_Fri 2 | [ ] | 119 Kb |
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.
| ABC blames France when jihadis murder its innocents_Fri 20 Nov 2020.pdf | [ ] | 146 Kb |
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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| Public interest_ABC betrays its founding principles_Fri 13 Nov 2020.pdf | [ ] | 114 Kb |
Today in The Australian
As the West battles the corona virus, the terror attacks in France and Austria come as a stark remind er of the threat for which there is neither a cure nor a vaccine. And the terroristsʼ choice of targets — a schoolteacher, decapitated for displaying a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed; churchgoers in Nice, murdered for their Christian faith; innocent Viennese, shot as they enjoyed their evening close to the cityʼs central synagogue — highlights every bit as starkly that threatʼs horrific nature.
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| How the West can crack down on Islamist terror_Sat 7 Nov 2020.pdf | [ ] | 645 Kb |
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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| US election_Elusive virtues that would help nation heal these scars Fri 6 Nov 20 | [ ] | 379 Kb |
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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| As pillars of probity ASIC pair should know better_Fri 30 Oct 2020.pdf | [ ] | 116 Kb |
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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| Islam and the West_We must strike back or soon we’ll all be Samuel Paty_Fri 23 O | [ ] | 119 Kb |
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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| Berejiklian and Andrews_A tale of two crises_Fri 16 Oct 2020.pdf | [ ] | 160 Kb |
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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| And to think that we saw it on Spring Street_Fri 2 Oct 2020.pdf | [ ] | 46 Kb |
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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| Annastacia Palaszczuk and Daniel Andrews prove a match for cruel King Creon_Fri | [ ] | 75 Kb |
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 | [ ] | 86 Kb |
Today in The Australian
Whatever else it may do, the BBC’s decision first to drop the lyrics of Rule, Britannia from the last night of the Proms and then, faced with public outrage, reinstate them, should lay to rest any remaining doubts about the abject ignorance that underlies today’s cancel culture.
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| Cancel culture warriors try to silence a nation’s song of pride_Fri 4 Sep 2020.p | [ ] | 118 Kb |
Today in The Australian
Enshrined in article 13 (2) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and reaffirmed in article 12 (2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the principle that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own and to return to his country” has always been regarded as foundational to a free society.
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| Public health is one thing — basic freedoms another_Fri 28 Aug 2020.pdf | [ ] | 370 Kb |
Today in The Australian
There is a great deal to dislike, and not much to like, in West Australia’s Iron Ore Processing (Mineralogy Pty Ltd) Agreement Amendment Act 2020, which overrides the outcomes of the state’s long-running dispute with Clive Palmer and extinguishes Palmer’s rights to damages.
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| WA government has shifted the sands beneath Clive Palmer’s feet_Fri 21 Aug 2020. | [ ] | 113 Kb |
Today in The Australian
As our aged-care homes battle COVID-19, the sector’s longstanding problems have come dramatically to the fore.
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| Waves of boomers will test aged-care foundations_Fri 14 Aug 2020.pdf | [ ] | 130 Kb |
Today in The Australian
As the deficits being incurred by Australian governments continue to spiral, the claim that we are “borrowing from the future” has become increasingly widespread.
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| Problem is we’re not borrowing from the future, but taking from it_Mon 10 Aug 20 | [ ] | 79 Kb |
Today in The Australian
“Are they any use?” Rambert, the journalist, asks in Camus’s The Plague when he is told to put on a mask of cottonwool enclosed in muslin before entering the hospital. No, not really, his guide replies, although they “inspire confidence in others”.
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| Our face work diminished, we cannot mask the cost_Fri 7 Aug 2020.pdf | [ ] | 117 Kb |
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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| Ridd decision abandons the point of universities_Fri 31 Jul 2020.pdf | [ ] | 304 Kb |
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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| Prudence seems a lost virtue in coronavirus pandemic response_Fri 17 Jul 2020.pd | [ ] | 551 Kb |
Today in The Australian
With families cowering in apartments surrounded by police, Victoriaʼs lockdown of its housing commission towers could only be described as barbaric.
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| Coronavirus_Daniel Andrews treads historic path to segregation shame_Fri 10 Jul | [ ] | 3198 Kb |
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| The pens of reason wrote their way to our future_Fri 26 Jun 2020.pdf | [ ] | 109 Kb |
Ten days from now, when the bulk of the Powerhouse Museum is closed down, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in Australian history will be committed not by the lunatic left but by a Liberal government. Twelve months later, the remaining parts of the museum will also be shuttered, bringing to an end a presence in the Sydney district of Ultimo that began in 1893.
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| Unusual suspect behind act of cultural vandalism_Sat 20 June 2020.pdf | [ ] | 1066 Kb |
Today in The Australian
When Thomas Woolnerʼs statue of Captain James Cook was unveiled in Sydney on February 25, 1879, The Sydney Morning Herald described the event, which attracted 70,000 spectators, as the “grandest spectacle” in Australian history, while Henry Parkes, whose government had commissioned it in 1875, proclaimed that “the genius of the thing quite thrilled”.
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| James Cook spoke to us then, and speaks to us now_Fri 19 June 2020.pdf | [ ] | 395 Kb |
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 | [ ] | 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 | [ ] | 637 Kb |
Today in The Australian
With America’s cities descending into lawlessness, it would be easy to conclude that the country is on the verge of collapse. In reality, the problems gripping the US are both more enduring and less apocalyptic than that impression suggests.
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| Racial politics — it has always been a riot in the US_Fri 5 June 2020.pdf | [ ] | 435 Kb |
Fifty years ago this month, 200,000 people marched through Australia’s cities in the first Vietnam moratorium. The period leading up to the demonstrations had been tumultuous on campuses across the country, including at the University of Queensland. Already by 1967, opposition to conscription had merged there with protests against the state government’s restrictions on civil liberties, unleashing an escalating tide of agitation.
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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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| China ties_History shows trade can lead to servitude_Fri 22 May 2020.pdf | [ ] | 110 Kb |
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__Australia’s tough fight to defeat ‘the louse’_Fri 1 May 2020.pdf | [ ] | 272 Kb |
Today in The Australian
On April 25, 1920, as he prepared to return to Britain, Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, governor-general of Australia, attended the Anzac Day service in the NSW town of Inverell, before spending the afternoon with more than 20 returned soldiers from the shire who had lost their legs in the war.
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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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| Coronavirus_Grim reaper will kill off our words first_Mon 13 Apr 2020.pdf | [ ] | 97 Kb |
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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| Coronavirus_Grim reaper will kill off our words first_Mon 13 Apr 2020.pdf | [ ] | 97 Kb |
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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| COVID’s covert impact will alter the face of politics_Fri 20 Mar 2020.pdf | [ ] | 148 Kb |
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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| Cosmic catastrophe always there if you look for it_Fri 13 Mar 2020.pdf | [ ] | 146 Kb |
Ironically, the virus firms up Xiʼs position – for now
As governments and central banks scramble to restore confidence and support economic activity, the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic remain clouded in uncertainty.
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| Ironically, the virus firms up Xi’s position – for now_Fri 6 Mar 2020.pdf | [ ] | 71 Kb |
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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| China’s flawed reaction to the coronavirus_Mon 10 Feb 2020.pdf | [ ] | 112 Kb |
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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| Roger Scruton, heroic champion of art and truth_Mon 20 Jan 2020.pdf | [ ] | 740 Kb |
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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| Bushfires_Pennies on prevention could save the states millions_Mon 13 Jan 2020.p | [ ] | 128 Kb |
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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| Bushfires a chance to restore our national character_Mon 6 Jan 2020.pdf | [ ] | 87 Kb |
This Cold War is more messy, complex and dangerous If the decade that is about to end saw Chinaʼs emergence as a global power, it also witnessed an extraordinary resurgence of the US. With the EU sinking into insignificance, the world is once again bipolar, but in a more complex and uncertain way than it was during the lengthy era of the Cold War.
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| This Cold War is more messy, complex and dangerous_Fri 27 Dec 2019.pdf | [ ] | 112 Kb |
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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| ‘Exhausted majority’ can rejoice over a year of averted catastrophes_Fri 20 Dec | [ ] | 723 Kb |
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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| Adjusting to climate risks is only prudent_Fri 13 Dec 2019.pdf | [ ] | 352 Kb |
Today in The Australian
It is ironic that just as President Emmanuel Macron, along with the UN Secretary-General and a bevy of “world leaders” at the UN Climate Change Summit, calls for a dramatic acceleration in the transition to low-emissions sources of energy, France’s nuclear power industry faces a future that is more uncertain than ever.
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| The French nuclear revolution is rusting away_Fri 6 Dec 2019.pdf | [ ] | 172 Kb |
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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| Why Australia’s Jews also hope that it’s not time for Jeremy Corbyn_Fri 29 Nov 2 | [ ] | 90 Kb |
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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| A tunnel, a light … but Brexit express a mystery train_Fri 1 Nov 2019.pdf | [ ] | 146 Kb |
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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| There’s need for secrecy — it’s a question of balance_Fri 25 Oct 2019.pdf | [ ] | 131 Kb |
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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| These minnows would besmirch the names of giants_Fri 11 Oct 19.pdf | [ ] | 109 Kb |
Judges may disagree, but history backs Boris Johnson
The legal question of whether the UK Supreme Court, in unanimously finding against the government of Boris Johnson, was correct will be debated for decades to come.
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| Judges may disagree, but history backs Boris Johnson_Fri 27 Sep 2019.pdf | [ ] | 66 Kb |
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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| China celebrates — but history is certain to catch up_Fri 4 Oct 2019.pdf | [ ] | 117 Kb |
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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| Acting in the interests of shareholders matters_Fri 20 Sep 2019.pdf | [ ] | 63 Kb |
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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| Trying to redefine museums_a disease of our times_Fri 13 Sep 2019.pdf | [ ] | 102 Kb |
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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| Brexit reveals what parliament thinks of the people_Fri 6 Sep 2019.pdf | [ ] | 101 Kb |
Today in The Australian:
Even were the situation in Hong Kong to deteriorate further, it is clear that the turmoil poses little immediate threat to the stability of Chinaʼs communist regime.
| Trotsky to Xi_no need to throw everything at them_Fri 9 Aug 2019.pdf | [ ] | 112 Kb |
Today in The Australian:
It may be that the light at the end of the Brexit tunnel is a train coming the other way. But once the blood has been cleaned off the tracks, Britain’s political crisis is likely to be behind it, making it easier for the country to adjust to whatever economic shocks Brexit may bring.
| Sensible Boris can lift Tories back to ‘dizzy’ heights_Fri 2 Aug 2019.pdf | [ ] | 109 Kb |
Today in The Australian:
As the debate on the proposal to enshrine an indigenous voice in the Constitution gathers momentum, the proposalʼs supporters have advanced four arguments in response to its critics. The proposal, they say, simply addresses past injustices which, in the words of Murray Gleeson, a former chief justice of the High Court, create a “case for special treatment of indigenous people”.
| This voice would have us shouting over the walls_Fri 26 Jul 2019.pdf | [ ] | 64 Kb |
That indigenous Australians lived on this continent for thousands of years before European settlement is a fact whose recognition in the preamble to the Constitution is long overdue. And it is also a fact European settlement inflicted many miseries on indigenous people, not least through policies that excluded them from the free and prosperous society that was being built around them.
| It is best we all sing from the same sheet of music_Fri 19 July 2019.pdf | [ ] | 87 Kb |
Today in The Australian: As Labor struggles to find its bearings, it would do well to consider what is happening in Europe. Syriza, which was trounced by the conservatives in last Sundayʼs elections, was not merely a Greek phenomenon when it swept to office four years ago; rather, it was hailed as the flag-bearer for a much broader radicalisation of the global left.
| Lessons for ALP in demise of European left populism_Fri 12 Jul 2019.pdf | [ ] | 67 Kb |
Today in The Australian: According to Scott Morrison, the government will, by the end of this year, introduce legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, along the lines of the anti-discrimination provisions covering race, sex, gender preference, age, ethnic origin and disability. The fundamental question is whether that legislation will resolve or deepen the mess we’re in.
| With rights can come a complex tangle of burdens_Fri 5 Jul 2019.pdf | [ ] | 106 Kb |
Scott Morrison is right: no one would gain were the trade conflict between the US and China to escalate. But he is also right that difficult issues must be addressed if an open trading system is to survive.
At their heart is China’s ongoing refusal to play by the rules.
| International trade_China must be pushed to play by the rules_Fri 28 Jun 2019.pd | [ ] | 139 Kb |
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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| Some trade wars have been a win for the world_Fri 30 Aug 2019.pdf | [ ] | 122 Kb |
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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| China’s future clouded by the road not taken in 1989_Fri 14 June 2019.pdf | [ ] | 118 Kb |
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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| Albanese cannot just be Labor’s new contortionist_Fri 24 May 2019.pdf | [ ] | 81 Kb |
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.
Click here to read the oped at the Australian's website or check back here in a week to download a pdf.
| Labor’s tax attack on savings counter-productive_Mon 13 May 2019.pdf | [ ] | 150 Kb |
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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| NBN remote from ground control_Fri 12 Apr 2019.pdf | [ ] | 197 Kb |
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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| China might dance to Trump’s tune – for a while_Fri 1 Feb 2019.pdf | [ ] | 87 Kb |
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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| We came, we saw, we made the very best of it_Fri 25 Jan 2018.pdf | [ ] | 93 Kb |
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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| Are we headed towards high noon for democracy_Fri 18 Jan 2019.pdf | [ ] | 88 Kb |
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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| Donald Trump wall is a tall order, but migrant issue is heating up_Fri 4 Jan 201 | [ ] | 119 Kb |
Today in The Australian
As 2018 draws to a close, it is hard to find a Western leader whose authority has survived the year intact. Donald Trump’s presidency may not be derailed by the chaos in Washington but it compounds the sense of a drama veering towards a grim conclusion. Theresa May’s prime ministership hangs by a frayed thread as Brexit edges towards a hard landing. After a string of electoral routs, Angela Merkel has been forced to step down as party leader and announce her departure from the chancellorship. As for Emmanuel Macron, his standing and credibility have been shattered, and his reform agenda with them.
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| Yellow vests’ anger sums up our spreading Western malaise_Fri 28 Dec 2018.pdf | [ ] | 94 Kb |
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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| Less time for the present even as cost of giving declines_Fri 21 Dec 2018.pdf | [ ] | 270 Kb |