One is supposed to begin the new year imbued with optimism, so accept my apologies for the long face and grim tidings. I hear very little debate about about the most pressing issues but many war cries from the new tribalists. Folly, I fear, isn’t marching, it’s galloping

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While some folks talk a big game about principles, what they really prefer is someone socking it to their enemies. Donald Trump won in 2016 because he could be relied on to punch every conceited political moraliser and mediocre pseudo-intellectual who attempted to stand in his way

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Perhaps the polls are wrong, perhaps the remaining few months will see the Coalition’s stocks revive. If not, aided and abetted by a Labor government, the national broadcaster will have free rein and an even bigger budget to further indulge its worst instincts and inclinations. Prime Minister Scott Morrison could do something about that before the ballot boxes cast their verdict

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From the country which did nothing to stop and much to ignore Rotherham’s grooming gangs of Subcontinental predators comes a slanderous TV ad intended to combat sexual harassment on public transport. The villain with the roving hands and thrusting crotch? A middle-class white male of course

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It is, or should be, beyond dispute that pill-testing at music festivals condones the use of illicit substances. To claim otherwise, as advocates always swear, makes as little sense as insisting that vetting for brucellosis does not condone and enable the consumption of meat

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Australia sits on the world’s most valuable natural resources, yet those immense blessings aren’t matched by income levels — a failure which must be seen as an indictment of successive governments’ stewardship. More worrying, the pressures and follies that have inflicted below-par economic development are growing more pronounced

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In spite of imperfections, the story A Child in the Dark shows Lawson briefly displaying the strengths of storytelling that made him famous. And the depiction of the central relationship evokes a tenderness and delicacy of feeling that is unusual in his work, sympathetic to his creations as he often is

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Its urban plain dotted with what might be termed mono-multicultural enclaves, its roads choked, trains stalled and skyline scored by high-rises of increasingly dubious worth, the metropolis blessed by the world’s most picturesque harbour suffers the ongoing vandalism of planners and politicians unworthy of its vistas

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Engineer and polymath Peter Fenwick built a great company by marching to his own drummer, always with integrity to the fore. His thoughts on topics diverse as economics, leadership, ethics and liberty have produced two books and a fascinating conversation with Quadrant’s Edward Cranswick

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Quadrant Online has been blessed by the curious mind, astute eye and gifted pen of Tony Thomas, who has just published the second volume of his collected essays, investigations and memoirs. When one looks at the sad state of the news business, it can only further darken the mood to realise the unfulfilled need for more like him

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A news editor of Quadrant Online’s acquaintance once told a callow and incompetent cadet how ‘a chimp could write a better story’, the standard formula doing all the work. In 1968, when Tony Thomas visited touring Soviet circus stars, he didn’t monkey around with stock cliches. Fifty years after it was written, his piece remains as vibrant and idiosyncratic as ever

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Would it be open to Shylock, apart from all else, to complain of the masquerading Portia’s rank hypocrisy when, early on in Shakespeare’s travesty of a trial, she exhorted him to be merciful yet proved so vindictively incapable herself of summoning that virtue when the balance tilted against him?

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Quadrant‘s Literary Editor editor is stepping down after 28 years. As Clive James puts it, ‘One of the several reasons for admiring Les Murray so greatly was his range of tolerance for other poets who were not like him.’ But that is Les — one of a kind

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Churchill confided how he ‘felt like’, but didn’t, tell Stalin, ‘I fight tyranny whatever uniform it wears.’ Clearly the moral compromises of the Soviet alliance weighed on his conscience, as is evident in his memoirs’ bleak final volume. He grasped that one vile despotism had been replaced by another

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If you train the brain to ignore consequences then it seems to me, admittedly as a non-neurologist, that you will perforce become increasingly stupid as the lessons of repeated failure are ignored. And thus, the progressive Left must be treated as a race apart when IQ testing is conducted

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Here is an idea for Education Minister Dan Tehan: veto grants to all fields in the humanities where the research can all be done from an academic’s office and campus library, and where the only effort required is to read books and look at computer screens. That is, after all, what academics are already paid to do

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What sets Jane Harper apart, beyond from her deft plots and turn of phrase, is a complete lack of political correctness. Not that she is politically incorrect, but simply that she manages to avoid completely the fashionable display of virtuous opinion that drags down contemporary Australian writing of all kinds

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Critic Sheridan Morley watched an old movie and saw a winking endorsement of child sex abuse. Well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a film no more than innocent entertainment. Alas that modernity’s eye for the sordid subtext so often distorts a blameless past

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Abortion, nasty business. Best for a man not to think too much about it. Their bodies themselves etc., and leave the girls to it. Isn’t that what the equality commissioners always say? The comfort of evasion. The false refuge of choosing not to settle on a moral position, especially about what she had just told me…

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It takes two to be deluded about alternative medicine. Like the buyer, the sufferer should beware. But which of us can face life wholly without illusions and even, on occasion, of delusions? Were I to suffer a disease incurable by orthodox methods, I’m not entirely sure I would reject elixir of hedgehog or decoction of sea-slug. Idiocy is annoying only in others

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Proud ‘moderate’ Paul Everingham recently shared his marked distaste for Liberal conservatives, accusing unenlightened folk such as Senator Amanda Stoker of ‘marching backwards to oblivion’. When congregation and choir no longer share the same hymn book, how long before the pews are entirely empty?

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The woke and the dumb, the self-interested and the careerists, those who know better but go along — taken together they form a loose but the powerful alliance that stands athwart attempts to begin the long, slow reversal of climate insanity’s grip on public policy

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The news from Washington is that 85-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the lionised liberal so often depicted as the Supreme Court’s heroic bulwark against Trumpism, has lung cancer. When the time comes, will it be possible to find a replacement prepared to face the Jacobin accusations and evidence-free slanders heaped on a blameless man?

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A mere two weeks after Stalin’s puppets took control of Czechoslovakia, foreign minister and national hero Jan Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard below his apartment. There was no suicide note nor hint of explanation beyond an enigmatic Bible verse. Today, seven decades on, the who, why and how remain a riddle that grows ever more intriguing

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