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
Sixty years ago, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon – yet after staring into the abyss, an essentially stable global order was restored. Today, as Vladimir Putin moves to crush Ukrainian independence, the prospects for a return to global order are far dimmer, imposing choices the West is poorly placed to face.
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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
It has been England’s great good fortune that three times in its history, as the country’s circumstances and trajectory underwent seismic change, it was ruled by queens whose exceptional longevity, devotion to duty and judgment helped smooth the transition, preserve national unity and create a sense of continuity between the past, the present and the future.
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Today in The Australian
Oh for Shakespeare’s skill with insults, with their hyphenated adjectives! Dog-hearted, milk-livered, hell-black, shrill-gorged, lust-dieted, all within a few pages of King Lear.
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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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In truth, little of merit in the Greens’ politics of gestures
Australia was built on “violence and dispossession”, claimed Greens leader Adam Bandt immediately before Australia Day, in releasing the Greens’ proposal for a truth and reconciliation commission that would investigate human rights abuses against Aboriginal Australians.
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Today in The Australian
National day worth commemorating, flawed past and all
National days have always been a mixed bag. Invented, at least in their modern form, by the French Revolution, which sought to define a secular counterpart to the religious feasts honouring the king, national days soon became an integral part of nationhood’s symbolic repertoire, along with a flag, an anthem and an oath of allegiance.
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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
A non-event if ever there was one, Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy came and went last weekend without leaving a trace.
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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
There will, no doubt, be more than a touch of theatre to COP26. It is true that with Xi Jinping and possibly Narendra Modi too busy rearranging their stamp collections to attend, the organisers might as well stage Waiting for Godot. But while Vladimir’s weary admission in Godot that “I get used to the muck as I go along” perfectly encapsulates the numbness BoJo’s big show elicits, it would be wrong to dismiss the event as just another display of performance art.
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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
That the climate of lawlessness that the CFMEU has done so much to instil in Victoria’s building industry contributed to this week’s ugly scenes in Melbourne is beyond doubt. But no matter how richly John Setka deserves to reap what he has sown, the police clearly had a duty to protect the union’s headquarters, as well as to arrest and charge the thugs who participated in the violence then and in the following days.
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It is undoubtedly true that preventing people who choose not to be vaccinated from engaging in activities that are open to the vaccinated involves a degree of coercion. But that hardly means any such restrictions ought to be opposed by those who place a high value on liberty.
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Today in The Australian
When Australians woke up on September 12, 2001, to the images of the twin towers collapsing, it seemed, to use Marx’s famous phrase, that suddenly all that was solid had melted into air. Unmistakably, in that terrible moment, everything had changed, with the horrifying photos of a man leaping from a crumbling skyscraper epitomising the terror that had been unleashed on the world.
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Today in The Australian
With the last American soldiers having left Afghanistan, the pall that hangs over this week’s celebration of the ANZUS Treaty’s 70th anniversary is as thick as it is unmistakeable. Perhaps the only, however feeble, ray of sunshine is the claim made by several highly respected commentators – including Paul Kelly and Greg Sheridan on these pages – that the US’s international standing recovered quickly from its humiliating defeat in Vietnam.
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As unending lockdowns fuel an increasingly widespread sense of war-weariness, a great deal of ugliness is coming to the surface. Few incidents are as troubling, however, as the reaction to an engagement party that was held at a private house in Melbourne on August 14,
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Today in The Australian
The fall of Kabul will resonate every bit as loudly among the Islamists and their supporters as the collapse of the twin towers. Next month, as Americans commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the fall of Kabul will resonate every bit as loudly among the Islamists and their supporters as the collapse of the twin towers.
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Long before the many accounts of the last days of humanity were committed to writing, tribal lays had recorded disasters that would presage the demise of life on earth.
The end of the world, it seems, is here to stay. No doubt, today’s climate scientists, armed with computer models that spit out mountains of projections, are a far cry from the doomsaying prophets of old.
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Today in The Australian
That Australia’s athletes put in a splendid performance at the Tokyo Olympics is beyond doubt. Yet the pattern of results is almost as striking as the overall performance itself.
There is, in effect, a substantial difference between that pattern and both Australia’s results in previous Olympics and the results at Tokyo of the countries we usually view as peers. What stands out is not only the very high ratio of gold to silver medals but also of bronze medals to fourth places.
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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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Last Sunday Helge Braun, the head of Germany’s powerful federal chancellery and a close ally of Angela Merkel, suggested it was only a matter of time before restrictions were imposed on access to public venues by “people who are not vaccinated, even if they have been tested for Covid, because the risks of infection are too high”.
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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
In 1920-21, as the influenza pandemic that had cost 15,000 Australian lives drew to an end, the nation turned inwards. Compared with the rest of the world, Australia had been spared, with a death rate barely half Britain’s. But coming after a war that had reduced much of Europe to rubble, that made the blessings of isolation seem only so much greater.
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Today in The Australian
On Monday, as Hamas launched hundreds of missiles against Israel’s population centres, prompting Israeli strikes at Hamas’ war-waging capabilities, Jews celebrated Shavuot, the “Feast of Weeks”, which commemorates both the first wheat the Israelites harvested in the Land of Israel and the anniversary of the giving of the Torah (the Hebrew Bible) and its law by God to the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai in 1312 BCE. Coming 50 days after Passover, which marks the Israelites’ flight from Egypt to the promised land, the coincidence of the events celebrated at Shavuot is anything but accidental.
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Today in The Australian
In July 1993, when The New Yorker presciently captioned Peter Steiner’s iconic cartoon with “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”, the implication was obvious: to be online is to be anonymous.
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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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Operation Vest: Anonymity courts malicious intent, blights rule of law
The rule of law suffered yet another blow late last month when the NSW police launched Operation Vest, encouraging the public to register anonymous complaints against alleged offenders on the Sexual Assault Reporting online platform.
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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
Coming after a year of unprecedented restrictions on basic freedoms, Zachary Gorman’s new book on Magna Carta, which is now available from the Institute for Public Affairs, could not be more timely.
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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.
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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
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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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
“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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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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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
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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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