December’s Quadrant is now in the stores. For a sample of this month’s offerings, the following essays have been released to non-subscribers: How the Muslim Brotherhood Lost Egypt by Daryl McCann Imagining the Great War by Mervyn F. Bendle The Misguided Case for Indigenous Recognition by Frank Salter, and The Marriage Wars by Geoffrey Luck […]

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Don’t think the national broadcaster should be depicting one of its critics having sex with a dog (and then refusing to apologise)? Wonder why foul-mouthed, unfunny comedians keeping bagging nice contracts to produce shows that neither rate nor amuse? Intrigued by the number of spouses, partners and mates on the ABC’s payroll? Baffled by Mark […]

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The Sydney Morning Herald and Age have just published two articles on Kinchela, the former welfare home for Aboriginal boys. There is much that is wrong and silly in the reports — and even more astray at Australia’s fastest-fading publisher

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In the Fairfax press, opinion columnist Gareth Hutchens explains why Tony Abbott is leading Australia down a “boulevard of broken promises“. No surprise there, as this is Fairfax, where newsrooms have come to be populated by those who dare not express a view that might preclude being picked up by the ABC when their current […]

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Thomas Sowell on the epidemic of righteous ignorance and those responsible: If education provides anything, it should be an ability to think — that is, to weigh one idea against an opposing idea, and to use evidence and logic to try to determine what is true and what is false. That is precisely what our […]

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At her Transverse City blog,  Quadrant contributor Philippa Martyr posts a little cartoon that rather neatly lays out how Pope Francis’ utterances are so often presented as much more than the sum of their parts. Who knew, for example, that the Pontiff’s dismay at finding anchovies on his pizza inspired a ban on Catholics eating […]

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Writing of China’s latest escalation in the confrontation with Japan over the Senkaku Islands, Richard Fernandez wonders at the conspicuous absence of another player, the United States: “Washington may surprise us, but it has been unable to push back anywhere lately, a situation so obvious it provoked Hillary Clinton to warn that if the US […]

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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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