In-depth analysis of the day’s news, plus stories and gossip from Australian politics.
Too many causes, not enough care
Compare the pair: This day is call’d the feast of Crispian. He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,…
Free speech: just who is a reasonable person anyway?
What limited protection we have in Australia for free speech, is based on the concept of the ‘reasonable person’. In…
Nailing it with prize tool Waleed Aly
According to Buzzf… I mean News.com.au – sorry, for some reason I often make that mistake lately – The Project…
ACT Election: if Labor won’t stop the rot, taxpayers must
While it hasn’t garnered a lot of attention outside of Canberra, this weekend is the ACT Election and the choice…
Why it (still) has to be Trump
The only important question in the American election is this: who will make the better president, Hillary Clinton or Donald…
Andrew Jaspan triumphs again
Andrew Jaspan – the malevolent Mancunian media marvel – has done it again. He’s set to be booted from The…
Piking on the Piketty show
Le economiste fashioniste, Thomas Piketty, is in town and my generous wife thought tickets to his talk would be…
Fresh news from the inner-city…
Why hasn’t The Age been all over this? It’s the ultimate Melbourne inner-city accommodation experience, surely? Either that or a…
James Paterson’s welcome lateral thinking
Good on Victorian Liberal Senator James Paterson for his media campaign to sell Jackson Pollock’s drunken daub, Blue Poles, to…
The Trump and Judy show
Clinton: ‘It’s a good thing that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law…
Naplan obesity tests? A fat lot of good that will do
NAPLAN FAT TESTS—Students as young as nine would [sic] take fitness exams so schools across the country can be ranked…
Pauline Hanson: back, but for how long?
‘I’m back’, and with these two words, Pauline Hanson stated the bleeding obvious as she delivered her maiden speech in…
A conservative Bill for marriage equality
Edmund Burke seems to have gone out of fashion a bit, and as a man who still listens to Oasis…
The terrible truth about staffers
Poor Jack Walker, probably soon to be an ex-adviser to Christopher Pyne. Not only has he and his eight Sydney…
Milo Yiannopoulos and the @Nero fallacy
Milo Yiannopoulos, the social media agent provocateur banned from Twitter for mocking the star of the oh-so-PC, all-female Ghostbusters remake,…
What was that about swaggering sophomoric staffers?
Long hours, bad coffee, average hotels and Virgin Lounge popcorn instead of a home cooked meal. It ain’t glamorous. It…
Good luck manning the polling booths, Mr Baird
You all know the lines from Brecht: After the uprising of the 17th June The Secretary of the Writers Union…
Budgie smugglers and the rise of the staffer brat
Once again politics and budgie smugglers have divided a nation and provided days of rather unusual commentary. The familiarity is…
Who’s your nanny?
There once was a time when we, Australians and Americans, used to have a good laugh at the countries of…
John Howard: no villain, no racist but instead one of our best
John Howard, for the very reason that he was one of our best and longest serving prime ministers, remains the bête noire of…
Trolling with Clementine Ford
Fairfax columnist and ABC Drum presenter Julia Baird is drawn to forceful, opinionated public women. Baird is writing a biography of Queen Victoria, and in a column this week…
Calumnies from the clickbait farm
“This is what would happen if Australian halted immigration”, the introduction to ditzy Fairfax economics correspondent Jessica Irvine’s latest bleatings…
David Van Gend and the Rainbow Jihadists
Traditional marriage campaigner David Van Gend recently did that most rare of things – he defended the freedom of his…
The sickness at the soul of Generation Ink
The presence of body art is more prominent today than it has ever been before. What explains this new desire…
The campus left and definitions of morality
The University of Melbourne Student Union is an oh-so-democratic body that left-aligned student groups vie to control so they can…