Uncanny similarities between the testimony of George Pell’s accuser in Melbourne and claims made about another alleged incident in Philadelphia four years before cannot be explained by mere coincidence. They raise serious doubts about the witness’s veracity

Read More

Watching the daily stand-up comedy that passes for government in Canberra, one notices there is little difference between the major political parties. They trade insults and barbs, make florid accusations and insist to the public they are different as night and day. Night and dusk would be more accurate

Read More

You can almost hear the cogs ticking over, slowly, in the Liberal party room: If we make too much of a fuss about Labor's electric vehicles policies and how impractical they are, why we'll never win over a single Greens voter! Meanwhile, the issues that might win back a disenchanted base go unrecognised

Read More

Welcomes to Country are now part and parcel of Australian life, even serving as overtures for symphony orchestras. Strangely, the more authentic Aboriginal culture vanishes, the more vigorous becomes our modern-day promotion of contrived rituals -- for a fee, of course

Read More

For three years, a former ABC senior producer oversaw a lavishly underwritten 'gotcha' on Pauline Hanson, complete with an agent provocateur, his bogus gun-rights lobby group, faux website and numerous undercover international jaunts, all funded by Al Jazeera and the government of Qatar. If this journalism, every con artist is a journalist

Read More

'The Last Intellectuals: Essays on Writers & Politics' remains an outstanding book that illuminates when Coleman and others like him stepped forward to hold the line before one of the most sinister threats in the history of the world. A battle far from over, it was one he never shirked from fighting

Read More

Casual and often subtle, the post-massacre draping of political agendas in mourning's weeds now begins almost before the bodies are cold. The Christchurch slaughter was Trump's fault ... or Abbott's ... or a consequence of endemic white racism. Just fill in the desired enemy and get ready for Twitter fame and photo ops

Read More

As with the ideologies that spawned so many genocides and massacres through the twentieth century and into this one, Brenton Tarrant’s weighing of individuals' lives as of no account against tribal fealty and group identity challenges us to promote something better. To achieve this we must first take our heads out of the sand

Read More

My ABC pen pal Reena Rihan handles complaints about the national broadcaster's deviations from fact and truth, so she must be a rather busy lady. Still, while my gripe about the omission of the word 'allegedly' didn't get much traction, a gross and green-tinted error proved just too big to rationalise

Read More

That society need banks goes without saying, unfettered inquiries from time to time as well. But the various taxpayer-funded watchdogs whose shortcomings were exposed by the recent inquiry into financial institutions, the case for them is harder to make on the strength of their record

Read More