Today in The Australian
Eyes wide shut – Victoria’s debacle shows the public service sector remains steeped in political expediency
“When I leave home to walk to school / Dad always says to me / ‘Marco, keep your eyelids up / And see what you can see.” So begins the classic 1937 children’s book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr Seuss.
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Sophocles’ legendary tyrant was supremely political, imbued with the casual ruthlessness of those whose craft is power. This cynicism is also on display in Queensland and Victoria.
Almost 2500 years after it was first performed, Sophocles’s Antigone has seemed more relevant — ever since Queensland refused Sarah Caisip, a 26-year-old Canberra-based graduate nurse, permission to attend her father’s funeral.
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Today in The Australian
The cruellest thing one can do to Daniel Andrews’s explanation of Victoria’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 is to read it a second time. After all, given the costs that are being inflicted on Victorians and on the country as a whole, one might assume, on a first reading, that a cogent justification for the strategy lay hidden in the explanatory material Andrews used last Sunday.
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Today in The Australian
With China’s trade war against Australia escalating, the scene seems distressingly contemporary: a fraying global order, riven by mounting tensions between states; an ascendant, brutally authoritarian power, determined to throw its weight around; and dependent economies which, though formally independent, find their room for manoeuvre increasingly compromised as the rising power uses its economic clout to punish them for stepping out of line.
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Today in The Australian
“No one could have foreseen five or 10 years ago the situation we face,” Emmanuel Macron declared in early March, as he sought to explain the shortages of personal protective equipment and respirators that had plunged France into a devastating crisis.
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Today in The Australian
In December 1919, as the Bolsheviks struggled with a typhus epidemic that killed more than five million people, Lenin famously declared “either socialism will defeat the louse or the louse will defeat socialism”.
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