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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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:
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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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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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Today in The Australian
The American people spoke on Tuesday, but quite what they said will remain contentious for years to come. What is certain, however, is that American politics will be as tumultuous in its next phase as it was in the last.
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As Bill Shorten noted in his address to the Lowy Institute on Monday, China is likely to remain Australia’s largest trading partner “for the foreseeable future”. However, that doesn’t mean our interests are necessarily aligned.
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Today in The Australian
It’s time liberals put away childish things
One of the beauties of democracy is that when things don’t work out, there is plenty of blame to spread around. What happened in Wentworth is no exception.
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Today in The Australian
Greed is a deadly sin perhaps, but it helps drive our economy
Anyone who has followed the evidence being given in the financial services royal commission will not be surprised that Kenneth Hayne refers to “greed” more than 50 times in the interim report.
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Today in The Australian
It is hard not to feel uneasy about the treatment being meted out to Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court.
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Today in The Australian
Perhaps the royal commission is the new form of the Last Judgment. As the wicked are exposed and the innocent — should there be any — exonerated, the commissioner, observing the proceedings from an elevated podium, impassably records their fate.
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Today in The Australian
After repeated rampages in Melbourne by African gangs, Australians are hardly likely to find the election results in Sweden surprising. With a sharp rise in violent crime, including a wave of attacks using hand grenades, since the country received an influx of refugees, the anti-immigration Sweden Democrats emerged this week as the kingmakers in what is certain to be a hung parliament.
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Today in The Australian
Exactly 50 years ago, I spent my birthday protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. At a co-ordinated time, I believe it was Prague’s midnight, a minute of silence was observed in places that circled the globe.
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Today in The Australian
Like a python that has swallowed a pig, we are struggling to digest the population bulge the resources boom left behind. Unless immigration levels are reduced, the costs of that adjustment will only continue to mount, undermining public support for the migration program and jeopardising our ability to continue reaping the large gains migration brings.
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Today in The Australian
Fuel-efficiency regulation impact draft is a fantasy
Just two good things can be said for the government’s draft regulation impact statement on “improving the efficiency of new light vehicles”.
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Today in The Australian: "NEG might be the answer but Turnbull needs to explain why"
Experts agree that a steady diet of fudge, cream pies and french fries is far healthier than consuming grains and vegetables. Or at least they do in 2173, according to Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper (1973).
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Today in The Australian
That genius of modern politics, Edmund Blackadder, could have had Labor in mind when he said “we in the Adder Party are going to fight this campaign on issues, not personalities … because our candidate doesn’t have a personality”.
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Were there a prize for the slogan that best captures the spirit of the age, it would surely go to the ACTU’s “Change the Rules!”
Stingy bosses? “Change the Rules!” Mean-minded bankers? “Change the Rules!” Spiking electricity prices? “Change the Rules!”
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With NATO and Putin, Trump’s cleaning up after Obama
In a widely acclaimed column in last weekend’s The New York Times, Bret Stephens argued that Donald Trump’s foreign policy aimed at one result and one result only: “The collapse of the liberal international order”, even at the cost of leaving America hated, feared and alone.
Today in The Australian
As the EU’s heads of government gather to discuss policies towards asylum-seekers, migration is causing political turmoil throughout the developed world.
In an age where the default approach is for people to yell at each other, Leith van Onselen prefers to bellow, as he did last week on the Macrobusiness blog with me as the target (https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2017/11/henry-ergas-jukes-stats-falling-workers-share-2/). I don’t know van Onselen, but he describes himself as ‘unconventional.’ Never was a truer word said.
Today in The Australian
It is a truth universally acknowledged that we live in a post-truth age.
That Sally McManus’s speech on the 110th anniversary of the Harvester decision last week is replete with claims whose only relationship to reality is that they contradict it may therefore be par for the course.