In-depth analysis of the day’s news, plus stories and gossip from Australian politics.
Will we be paying to keep GetUp! going?
Here’s a little something that the Prime Minister should be urgently seeking advice on – or backbenchers with any steel…
Coronavirus: a threat to lives. The government response? A threat to fundamental liberties
One of the few positive aspects of this present crisis is that some politicians are finally revealing their true authoritarian…
Will we survive coronavirus financial fever?
It is truly staggering how quickly fortunes can change. At the beginning of this year, the economy was ticking along…
Beijing Bob’s job application?
Heaven knows why a respectable family newspaper such as The Australian continues to publish the pronouncements of the thinking man’s…
Globalism is dead, long live the new nation state
We all know the supposed ancient Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. As the first quarter of 2020…
Panic, parochialism, pissantery and pigheadedness: pandemics in Australian history
An incurable disease … highly contagious… those struck down by it shunned by neighbours and friends… its cause unknown ……
Dodgy Dan’s short sainthoood
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has been getting a lot of brownie points, first for his role in coordinating responses to…
A note under the door to hotel quarantine whingers
We are seeing a tale of two types of human right now. On the one hand, we have “influencers”, social…
Who’s woke this pandemic?
I have one nagging question in the midst of this pandemic: Who died and made the(ir) ABC’s ‘medical expert’ Dr…
Are you happy now, Greta?
Apparently, the current coronavirus pandemic is not linked to the exotic eating habits of the Chinese, but instead is due to “the…
Welcome to the new health system autocracy
Under the guise of the ‘precautionary principle’, Australia’s health system has overnight transformed from a bureaucracy into an autocracy. This is no surprise…
ScoMo’s gone as crazy as Kev, but we can still save the economy
When the Prime Minister and Treasurer appointed Stephen Kennedy as the Treasury Secretary, they opted for a bureaucrat who had…
Shut up there, Cazaly
They don’t know what they will do, when they will go back to work or how their families will survive…
The Ruby Princess fiasco: our leaders’ latest great failure not only over coronavirus, but China as a whole
Our political leaders have significantly failed to protect Australians from the Wuhan virus. On the principle enunciated by President Truman…
ScoMo has built an economic time bomb. It detonates in six months
Since it became clear to the Morrison government that the coronavirus outbreak could lead to a potential depression for Australia,…
No, you can’t judge a book by its colour
One of the tell-tale signs of the onset of Coronavirus Cabin Fever is that you start noticing the home office…
Palaszczuk’s pork for public servants: sleaze supreme, even by Queensland standards
My sister is an economist for the Ontario government in Canada. She’s a public servant. Until last year the pay…
Among all this oddness, we’ve been given the gift of time. Let’s not waste it
I’m beginning to wonder: when I stagger back out into the sunlight in six months, blinking blearily against the glare, my beard-hair…
History flips as walls rise in the West
On one frosty Autumn’s night in 1989, thousands of communist evacuees swelled over a fallen Berlin Wall to the embrace…
A story stranger than any coronavirus conspiracy…
Never mind a boring terrestrial virus – what would happen to our planet if aliens from another planet ever make…
EXCLUSIVE: Why is the RACV putting asylum seekers ahead of its pensioner members?
Every state has its own motoring organisation and roadside assistance service. New South Wales has the NRMA, Queensland the RACQ,…
We need strength to survive, not a shutdown of our economy
Australia needs strength to survive the coronavirus, but many policies designed to manage the spread may be counterproductively weakening our…
Forget coronavirus. Think of the bright future we can build learning from the lessons
Finally, as the curve begins to flatten, the global panicdemodium (new word) dies down and media get bored with ringing…
Italy as the model? That a brave call, even for the(ir) ABC
The health situation in Italy is dire. Tragically, over 11,000 people have died in excess of 100,000 people have caught…
Coronavirus will create zombie borrowers: still walking, but dead from debt
Plague and pestilence have always ushered in social and economic dislocation. The Antonine Plague of the second century AD marked…
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Trump punctures India’s hype
But risks significant harm to their strategic partnership as an Indo-Pacific counterweight to China
