Bill and Penny’s excellent (Korean) adventure
Bill and Penny are going to Korea! What fun ! Even better – they didn’t have to pay for their…
Would it have happened to a Muslim?
Well, as it happened, it happened in the ACT, that fiefdom of Green-Labor political power where the deluded are led…
A dressing down over citizenship
Last Sunday there was a concert in the main reception area of the High Court of Australia. A local Canberra…
Hillary happened
The failed Democratic candidate for the highest political office in the free world, Democrat Hillary Clinton has just launched her…
Brexit’s warning
Brexit didn’t just happen even though the British were increasingly aggrieved at the thousands slipping across from Europe to claim…
The real Macquarie
Lachlan Macquarie. The name of New South Wales fifth governor is now the subject of controversy, its owner branded a symbol…
Does China have a claim on Penny Wong?
The dual citizenship issues that have now entangled so many of our Parliamentarians have thrown up many issues, and one…
Behind Bill
David Marr appropriately titled his Quarterly Essay on Bill Shorten, ‘Faction Man’, for the Labor leader was shaped by the…
Pat Dodson’s sense and sensitivity
A refreshing note of practicality, even sanity, was injected into the sound and fury of the same-sex marriage debate this…
Somewhere in Sri Lanka, someone is making something.
Researching history with the hope that your research will eventually turn itself into a book can take you places. It’s…
Class war breaks outs
Bill Shorten has declared to the Melbourne Institute and later, on Insiders that Australia had a ‘two class’ tax system…
Ordure in the House
We’re about to be gifted, courtesy of ‘Our ABC’ a new series hosted by Annabel Crabbe, she of the ‘take…
The new Home Affairs Department should be welcomed
The Prime Minister has today unveiled a national security ‘mega-department’, to be called, as guessed by the commentariat, the Department…
Game of Greens
“Woeful news my lord Richard, of Ser Scott of the Greenwald, well, it turns out he’s not one of us,…
Vive le caliphate
Dystopian scenarios – scary, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it films and fiction – are on the rise. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission is about what goes…
The gloating season
This is Labor’s gloating season. The time when the latest Newspoll tells us the Coalition’s primary vote has slipped from…
“Guten tag! Welcome to Hamburg!”
“Really Lucy, it’s quite frustrating. I was hoping to get away … get away from we-know-who and his rants, I…
When electricity becomes a luxury
“Where do you go?” They are all older women, retirees from the federal and Territory public services, the ASO5 and…
Labor’s education dreams: all Gonski
Sometime around 2.00 am Friday morning sleep-bleary parliamentarians gave a Gonski and allowed the government’s Gonski 2.0 education bill to…
Pauline Hanson and the boy in the cage
Pauline Hanson set several cats among flocks of pigeons with her recent comment on autistic children in classrooms. Canberrans were…
The ultimate sin
Vientiane, the capital of Laos, Communist in government, Buddhist in culture has somehow managed to retain layers of pre-Buddhist animism,…
The hangover after the ball
It was Paul Keating who said that if you needed a friend in Canberra you should get a dog. Malcolm…
Why just tinker with refugee rorts?
This week Canberra is buzzing. It’s the last sitting fortnight before the long winter break, the week when important bits…
Australia through Waleed Aly’s distorted lens
Just how many careers can Melbourne academic and media celebrity Waleed Aly cram into his day? Waleed, we now know, because his tag…
The first Brexit
In coming days the world will watch the UK elections and ponder the result. And following on, inevitably, people will think…
