Latest Articles
It's hard to believe the attention paid to Raygun's Paris absurdities, but there may be deeper lessons in that writhing and posing
Sep 10 2024
10 mins
From a perspective of some eighty years it is possible to misunderstand or underestimate the intensity of the fears—but also the hopes and aspirations—of the British people as they faced up to another colossal existential challenge, less than a full generation after what, it was now suddenly clear, had only been the first world war
Sep 10 2024
11 mins
The Republican presidential contender is an acquired taste. Given the alternative, it's a taste persnickety conservatives should make the effort to acquire
Sep 09 2024
4 mins
Victoria is Red: The Party Line
The Garden State’s Liberals are offering a rather narrow range of explanations for their party’s sweeping defeat. As the tallying pushes several Labor candidates closer to taking seats their party has seldom or never held before — Caulfield, Sandringham, even Range Rover-infested Brighton — the blame game is in full swing.
As counting continues it appears at this Sunday morning after the night before that the Liberals will be reduced to something like a 28-seat rump in the 88-member lower chamber.
Senator Jane Hume sees the recent change of prime ministers as having repulsed voters, attributing the loss to “the disruption that was caused by the loss of Malcolm Turnbull.”
Liberal member for Kew Tim Smith, hanging on in the count by his fingernails, also cited discord amongst his party’s Canberra colleagues.
“When you’ve got federal politicians talking about themselves and their various ambitions that hasn’t helped our party like it didn’t help Labor during the Rudd-Gillard years and that’s damage that we at the state level have to deal with,” he said.
Shadow Attorney-General John Pesutto, who learned on-air that he will likely be turfed from the formerly blue-ribbon seat of Hawthorn, assured his approving ABC hosts that the road to a Liberal revival veers to the left, also painting the Turnbull garroting as the reason Victorian voters have told him and so many others to launch new careers.
“It is just the disruption that was caused by the loss of Malcolm Turnbull,” he said while praising Liberal opposition leader Matthew Guy for being an inspirational team leader.
Then there was Upper House MP Mary Wooldridge, who also bemoaned a purportedly conservative party’s indulgence of members and functionaries on the right.
“There has been a takeover of the administrative side of the party — the membership side of the party — by a small but dominant group who are very right-wing,” Ms Wooldridge told ABC Radio Melbourne, while urging “genuine Liberals” to keep the faith.
Quadrant Online readers are invited to voice their opinions on why the Liberals lost and lost so badly, and what their party should stand for.
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
