I wrote about the contract for the Australia Network in Quadrant in March, 2013, noting that the Commonwealth auditor-general and even the ABC Lateline program found the deal “shonky”. I would say in addition: The ABC’s $233 million contract from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to make overseas broadcasts through the Australia Network […]

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Fresh from helping The Guardian bare details of Australian intelligence-gathering in Indonesian, the national broadcaster’s editor-in-chief next set about uncovering the “leaker” of his favourite talking heads’ salary details. He found out, alright, which is what you would expect of someone earning $700,000-plus per year Turns out the ABC leaked those pay figures itself.  

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At Daily Life, Fairfax’s online chronicle of appropriate thought, the freakish and the semi-coherent, Sarah Macdonald writes of storytime in her thoroughly modern household: “…most young girls want Barbie dolls and young boys still want guns, but many mothers and fathers of my generation are attempting to not give them such toys ….  My kids […]

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It was getting late in Canberra when two-time PM Kevin Rudd announced his departure from Parliament, but the rigours of a tempestuous day could not crimp the effusive praise for a man few of his purported admirers will be glad to see gone. Others have been somewhat more candid.

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Michael Kile comments: Quadrant‘s Tony Thomas is right to emphasise Sir John Houghton’s role in driving Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change policy during the 1990s (“The Serpents Egg,” May, 2012). Some readers may be unaware the late environmental scientist, Stephen Schneider (1945-2010), had a crucial influence on him. Schneider, a researcher at Stanford University’s Woods […]

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Comedian Charles Firth explains how he picked up a total of $30,000 for a “museum” featuring the names of well-known people, each matched with a single key word: ‘‘So we thought, OK, how can we scam an arts grant by creating a program? A museum of words was the cheapest thing in the world.’’ To […]

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More than a year after his coverqage of the Gillard/AWU affair prompred an acrimonious parting with Fairfax’s 2UE, Michael Smith will be returning to the airwaves as Ben Fordham’s summer replacement. He has kept busy in the meantime.

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Greg Sheridan mourns the passing of novelist Christopher Koch: “The novel had become a minor art form, he thought, and much literary fiction was rubbish, crass and vulgar, often experimental for the sake of experiment…”

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Bill Whittle on ‘Silent Saturdays’ and the notion that parents shouldn’t clap, cheer or shout advice at their little ones’ sporting events, lest the defeated team suffer diminished self-esteem: ‘Dear league officials: I know your hearts are in the right place, but if you really love these kids, then let these boys lose, and let […]

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…why he embraced climate-change hysteria and what he thinks now

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