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
The Journalist as Victim
At the end of November, the 2020 Walkley Awards for journalism gave their highest accolades to two of the most derogatory products of the decade-long witch hunt against Cardinal George Pell. The ABC program Revelation by Sarah Ferguson and Tony Jones won the Walkley Documentary Award and Lucie Morris-Marr’s Fallen won the Walkley Book Award.
Yet in all the praise the Walkley judges heaped on both products—“broke new ground”, “the sheer quality of the writing”—none of them mentioned the embarrassing fact that, according to the High Court judgment that unanimously acquitted Pell, the award winners got their big story wrong. Nor was there any mention that the winners helped create a public environment that put an innocent man in jail.
Most tellingly, there was no recognition that the biggest dupes in the whole affair were the winners themselves. As Chapter Seven of my new book The Persecution of George Pell argues in detail, the reality was that, in order to trash…
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
