American Virginia-class submarines have sealed nuclear reactors and a life expectancy of 34 years service. We don’t know what the French attack class would be capable of were they not being reworked for domestic political purposes into a misbegotten diesel-electric configuration that will be extraordinarily expensive, extremely vulnerable and almost entirely useless

You met Chou, asked the president of the Chinese national federation? I was visiting Beijing many years later and replied that not only had I met him but he had shaken my hand, which I held up. The president took the honoured hand in her own and held it with the greatest reverence

Malcom Turnbull's memoir is a good read, but not because of the score-settling final chapters' account of how he lost the prime ministership. No, the good parts detail his adventures as the invincible young lawyer who won case after case, which rather suggests both he and Australia might have been better off had he remained at the bar

The rural crisis lingers, but what we hear from the government is the plight of small business in country towns, hard hit because the farmers the Country Party once cared for don’t have money to spend. Tellingly, the $17 billion fiscal package announced in March doesn’t mention the rural sector

It is a great pity that karate has become so […]

The prisoner who emerged to dismantle apartheid was far from the man consigned to almost three decades behind bars. But he was still there, forever the revolutionary, and the mere mention of Israel brought that former self into the open

Quadrant ran a series of articles arguing that the economic profession in government service would appear to have been hijacked by interventionist Keynesian economists. That’s an understatement.

John Anderson, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from […]

After its formal closure in 1988, Old Parliament House in […]