In-depth analysis of the day’s news, plus stories and gossip from Australian politics.
Yassmin confirms she’s a narcissist
There is pretentious, and then there is Yassmin Abdel-Magied. Writing for The Guardian, she proudly escalates narcissism to a whole…
The good girl lie
Society likes to package female sexuality in a conservative and sanitized way. Women are portrayed as demure creatures incapable of…
White flight: it’s real
New South Wales Labor leader Luke Foley does not deserve to be publicly executed for speaking truthfully. The criticism against…
How safe is your house from confiscation?
People regularly talk about things being “as safe as houses” and the great Australian dream of owning your own home…
Block, unblock
A fascinating court decision regarding The Donald and the First Amendment. The Verge reports: It is unconstitutional for public officials, including…
Want to lower power costs? Sell the whole damned lot off
Electricity networks have recently come under fire from the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) for allegedly passing on unnecessary costs to…
Young, restless and right-wing
My millennial generation is a strange machine. Some years ago, the New York Times described us as having “a sense…
It’s not just tax and spend but tax and lie
If Scott Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull were corporate CEOs, they’d be done for misleading and deceptive conduct. They claim that…
Senator Sea Patrol’s spectacular
God bless her. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young must still be feeling the effects of the celebrations after she (just) retained the…
Our sheepish Liberal little lambs
You may have noticed an outpouring of profound grief for the thousands of sheep that died while on their way…
Don’t ban donations, ban donations from crooks
“It’s the Bjelke-Petersen era again,” is the meme every time a centre-right party moots a policy on just about anything…
Love in the time of austerity
It’s usually the stranger, the foreigner, who see a nation’s flaws, fears and foibles more clearly than the natives. Think…
Liddell is just part of a bigger battle
Like a border skirmish that develops into a global conflagration, John Howard’s policy to require “two per cent additional energy”…
Stacking all decks
At a very early age in a budding politician’s career, they learn how to stack; not as children with a…
The Spec Oz has been Zucked by Facebook
If you’re wondering where we are on Facebook today, we’ve been told to get Zucked. We used a cropped version…
Who’s going to call out the reverse sexism deniers?
Round and round in lopsided circles they twirl. The loopy, loony left have absolutely no idea what true equality looks…
Christmas, no – but happy, happy Ramadan
The Australian Greens like to troll the conservatives around the time of religious holidays. It’s all good and harmless fun,…
Energy policy as shameful as the Soviet’s
“I told myself it was beneath my dignity to arrest a man for pilfering firewood. But nothing ordered by the…
Time to drain the China lobby swamp
“Where have all the grown-ups gone when it comes to China policy?” exclaimed Geoff Raby last year, in a newspaper…
The Arrogant Broadcasting Corporation
It seems that Emma Alberici, the ABC’s chief economic correspondent, has just been schooled. According to The Australian, Alberici proceeded…
Gaza’s slide into violence, poverty and despair
Sustained violence in protests along a series of staging points on the Gazan border with Israel has been deliberately orchestrated…
The Grievance Olympics: trans vs Muslim
Across the fetid Detroit River, in Windsor, Ontario, the Grievance Olympics is underway. Who will win? In one corner: The owner of…
The Climate Inquisition burns a heretic
Back in 2016, when I asked Peter Ridd if he would write a chapter for the book I was editing…
What does the church stand for?
Last week’s Met Gala in New York raised some eyebrows, focusing, as it did, on the connection between high fashion…
When’s the ABC going to sic the #metoo mob onto Paul McCartney
With the western world awash with #metoo movements, and men’s attempts at intimate relationships with women stalling under feminist pressure,…
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