Not a Beijing emissary, Black Lives Matter protest organiser or union boss? Incapable of delivering the tunnel-phobic votes of inner-city greens? Well don't despair because it is still possible to get horizontal with Victoria's Premier, thanks to a range of comforters and bed linens bearing the Great Leader's image

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The Victorian government compounds ineptitude with lies, many dripping from the Premier's own lips, and grants its locked-down citizens less time outside their homes than prisoners in maximum security. And what does the PM do? He endorses the greatest violation of fundamental rights in this nation's history

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It is self-evident that money doesn’t grow on trees, but according to the national broadcaster's economics guru Alan Kohler that wisdom has been made obsolete by Modern Monetary Theory. Alas that Quadrant's late editor Paddy McGuinness is no longer about to remind him that magic puddings don't actually exist

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It is a malady of our age that the state is thought to be both wise and responsible for keeping us safe. We should know by now that government is generally run by, at best, incompetent do-gooders. At worst, as Victoria's travails reminds us, that faith is invested in knaves of the most slippery stripe

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We no longer hear much about 'flattening the curve', initially presented as the goal for which the economy had to be sacrificed. Despite Victoria's horror-show mismanagement and subsequent 'second wave', COVID casualties remain so relatively rare that fresh threats are needed to sustain the panic

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Saint Barbara might be simply a woman martyred for believing in Christ, like others in Baalbek whom we do not know and never will. Only the extraordinary story has kept her alive, offering a glimpse into the mysteries of existence, suffering and hope

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In the third part of Mervyn Bendle's 15-week reprising of Sir Kenneth Clark's magisterial examination of the West's journey from the intellectual rubble of post-Roman Europe to today's West, In this weekend's installment, 'Romance and Resality', we arrive at the High Gothic

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Detailed under the heading 'independence, integrity and responsibility' in the ABC's employee handbook is a warning not to make 'gratuitous references to a woman’s physical appearance'. So when a star radio compere does just that and worse in a newspaper column, what does the national broadcaster do? Shrugs, yawns, sneers and ignores its own code of conduct

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Could those final, locked-down months have been made less of a burden, reduced their erosive impact on a vulnerable mind? It seems to me they could. How hard would it have been for Andrews & Co., to have spared some thought and planning to sustain the belief in elderly, isolated Victorians that their lives were still worth living?

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Words are everything, the precursor to fierce ideas and therefore of sound politics. In an era when a misjudged word can and will end a career beneath a social media pile-on, ideas will lack vigour and politics be reduced to the predictably poor. Meanwhile, the town square becomes a bloody battleground, the pursuit of truth a casualty found wrapped in the dead arms of butchered civility

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