Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Closet Fliers
For a smallish country, what a lot of dubious blessings Sweden has bestowed on the world. Free love, modernist architecture, the interminably tedious films of Ingmar Bergman, the annoyingly thumpy songs of the chiasmically named Abba and more recently, little Greta, patron saint of the climate obsessives, with her trademark death-ray glare (does she practise in front of a mirror or a picture of Donald Trump or both?) and her petulant and obstreperous tweets, written, it now appears, by her father.
Greta is not Sweden’s only contribution to our present epidemic of climate hysteria. We must now acknowledge the enlightened Scandinavian kingdom’s latest invention, flygskam, which roughly translates as “flight shame”. This is a moralistic movement a bit like the nineteenth-century temperance campaigns that used to get people to sign a pledge not to drink, except in this case it’s not to travel by air. It seems that flying is one of the most irresponsibly…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins
