The political trap behind the Indigenous Voice to Parliament
The biggest obstacle facing the campaign for Indigenous constitutional recognition remains the lack of detail concerning the role and operation…
CSR and the tyranny of smugness
The trend for business to get involved in controversial political debates in the name of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) is…
Health care ‘apartheid’
The proposal to launch Australia’s first Indigenous-only hospital raises a number of questions and is problematic on a number of…
A memo to the Morrison Government: we need more democracy, not less
Public policy is a field where you soon learn that no matter the soundness of your evidence, the perceptiveness of…
Who won what why: now for the battle for the election narrative
The election victory was clearly a triumph for both the style and substance of Prime Minister Scott Morrison. But the…
Stand and fight for your ideas
A certain school of thought claims that what ails the centre-right of Australian politics is the failure to embrace a…
Selling virtue
Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto have become the first major companies to publicly support the Uluru Statement from the…
Theatre of the absurd
The controversial University of Melbourne dance performance, Where We Stand, is an insight into the kind of divided society we…
Universities need charters of intellectual freedom
The latest politically correct madness at the University of Sydney — gender, race, sexuality, and class background quotas at the nation’s…
Minding the gap
Once again the start of the federal parliamentary year has been marked by what has become an annual ritual. The…
Why the history wars matter
In a widely-publicised incident, two attention-seekers from the far-right Patriot Blue group harassed Senator Sam Dastyari in a Melbourne pub…
Why the history wars matter
Before I became what I half-jokingly describe as a fact-grubber and barrow pusher — a think tanker — I was…
Claims the Paterson bill will licence homophobic hate are hype
The bill unveiled yesterday by Liberal Senator James Paterson to include comprehensive religious protections in the legalisation legalising same-sex marriage…
What’s happened to the university?
Many people are likely to have had a lightbulb moment that made them realise our universities are in trouble. Over…
The roaring ‘silence’
The notion of a ‘Great Australian Silence’ about Australian history and the treatment of indigenous people might have been accurate…
Getting Indigenous history right
Before we start tearing down statues of Captain Cook and Governor Macquarie in a misguided attempt to atone for Australia’s…
Budget 2017: Medicare – not even Labor lite
So the economic narrative of the Turnbull Government has come to this. A ‘tax and spend’ Budget that is more…
18c: they just don’t get it
The failure by the Coalition-dominated parliamentary review to recommend changes to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act is another sign…
Indigenous kids failed again
The Family Matters report released by SNAICC, the peak Indigenous child welfare services lobby group, is a recipe for perpetuating…
18c. I would like to say more on indigenous disadvantage, but…
Kerryn Pholi’s outstanding opinion piece in today’s Australian examines the way the Australian Human Rights Commission has exclusively singled out Bill Leak for persecution under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act for drawing ‘offensive’ things…
Lindt II: Death by multiculturalism
Ideas about nations matter – especially when those ideas shape the attitudes and actions of those in positions of authority.…
Bill Leak’s cartoon is tragically true
Bill Leak’s cartoon in this morning’s edition of The Australian has attracted predictable outrage from both indigenous organisations and from…
What matters more? Identity politics or closing the gap?
The scope of the Royal Commission called in the wake of the Don Dale scandal has thankfully been widened to…
Never a more exciting time to be an Australian conservative
Centre-right social progressives might not like social conservatism. But there has never been a more exciting time to be an…
Untying democracy’s knot
The marriage equality debate can only be resolved with a plebiscite
