Many reasons have been put forward for John Howard’s failure to win the 2007 election—negative reaction to WorkChoices, his refusal to abdicate in favour of Peter Costello, even a sense that he had just been in power too long—but there was another issue which suffused the Opposition campaign and which played a major part in persuading voters: climate change, in particular the recent drought.

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In the ancient fable, Chicken Little thought one acorn dropping on her head meant the entire sky was falling. Today’s Chicken Littles show similar insight.

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The hero of a Stephen Sewell play, and clearly his creator’s alter ego, says: “People change.

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Sometime after the Soviet Army had crushed the Dubcek regime in Prague in 1968, our great cold-war warrior, Frank Kopfelmacher, was described by his opponents in condescending and patronising tones as a “threat expert”.

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In ‘The Task of the Jews’, The American Interest, September-October 2008, Lévy writes.

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Damien Cash: “the massacre claim was revealed as a case study in the misuse of historical evidence, beginning with a series of errors made by Robinson in 1841-42, and then perpetuated through a series of unreasonable conclusions and other errors made by historians and consultants.”

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In this article, I want to show how the two postmodernist tactics of language games and character assassination have been deployed in this debate.

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Bain Attwood has spent a lot of time, and a good deal of university money, in an obsessive pursuit of my past. For this project, he had two research assistants and funding from the School of Historical Studies at Monash University.

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It took less than thirty minutes in the Law Library at the University of Tasmania to suggest that the definitions of terra nullius given by historian Henry Reynolds, which I had been trying to understand, did not make sense and were not supported by the references he gave.

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It did occur to me from time to time that attacking a score of the most renowned academics of the country may not be the smartest thing I have ever done. But whenever that thought struck me, I would re-read a Whitewash essay, and the pounding of another thought would start up again – if academics of such renown can get away with what they do in that book, then honest intellectual enquiry is finished in academia.

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