Leading article Australia
18Charlie
Even as we were putting the finishing touches to our editorial last week, in which we ‘joined the dots’ between…
Year of living dangerously
With the nightmare of the Sydney siege still fresh in Australian minds comes the not entirely unexpected heightened terrorist alerts…
Rebooting the government
Among the many dubious gifts the digital age has endowed us with is an abundance of new ways of expressing…
Morality tales
‘And so this is Christmas, and what have you done?’ A question, originally set to an agreeably festive tune by…
The art of persuasion
‘Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product…
Advising Abbott
All of a sudden the world and his pet poodle purport to have crucial advice for Tony Abbott, as the…
An avalanche of achievements
Under what strange law of nature is it that the more successful a political party is, the further it slumps…
G’day G20
Where the United Nation’s tends to wallow in popstar navel-gazing, climate change self-flagellation and tedious bouts of Israel-bashing, it is…
Farming carbon
And so the great farming nation that rode to prosperity on the sheep’s back and through harvesting wheat now looks…
FPEFPM
The title of Australia’s First Popularly Elected Female Prime Minister is still up for grabs, and the obvious two contenders…
Whitewashing Whitlam
The tears flowed in time for the seven o’clock news, a bizarre long march all the way from new parliament…
Getting shirty
Several recent events highlight the fragile faultlines between jingoism, patriotism and national security; a fissure that the Left are desperate…
Redeeming Joe
There is a grain of truth (for once) in Julia Gillard’s assertion that for Peter Costello ‘it was easy to…
We are all Israelis now
‘ISIS and Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree,’ asserted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week in a…
Silver fern leaf
The extraordinary victory of John Key and his National party in New Zealand’s recent election came as a relief to…
Burkean activism
‘For those who are political advocates within Palestine itself, I will never know the bravery that comes with putting your…
Death cults and dole bludgers
Twelve months ago, it all seemed a little too easy. Fix up Labor’s mess, stop the boats, scrap the pointless…
Cloning Scott
Ultimately, prime ministers can only ever be as good as the front bench talent they have selected permits them to…
Mathias on message
As is now widely accepted, and was pointed out in this magazine shortly after Budget night (‘The budget isn’t the…
Back to Iraq
It’s twelve years and eleven months since a single graphic image punched us in the guts with such force. Then,…
Two worlds colliding
The imagery was faintly disturbing. A powerful whitefella sits in the middle of a group of Aboriginal elders, themselves surrounded…
Ukrainian quagmire
‘We will not be deterred in our efforts to get on to that site and retrieve the bodies of Australians…
Qualities of a leader
Decisiveness. Perseverance. Effectiveness. These are the three key words being bandied around by the world’s top diplomats to describe Australian…
You read it here first
In the digital age, weekly print magazines are not supposed to break stories, especially before the actual events have taken…
Hip, hip hooray for Tony Abbott’s carbon tax repeal
Barring any more sudden Ricky Muir-like surprises, it looks as if the Senate will repeal the carbon tax; so allow…
