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 Egregious Failures of Victoria Police
Victoria Police, the Catholic Diocese of Ballarat and the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse
The Catholic Church and its bishops have been subjected to a lot of deserved criticism by the Royal Commission, the media, abuse victims and others for their failures to deal with the sexual abuse of children by many of their priests, particularly over the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s. Victoria Police has largely escaped criticism, though it made similar failures during this same period. At the first public session of the commission in August 2015, it said that, as well as religious institutions, the police force was one of the types of institution it would be investigating.
In its Final Report in Case Study 28, the Royal Commission said:
The scope and purpose of Part Two of that case study involving the Ballarat Diocese was to inquire into:
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- the response of the Diocese and of other Catholic Church authorities in Ballarat to allegations of child sexual abuse…
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
