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
A ‘Gay Book Ban’ Own Goal
A plague on both your houses. Shakespeare’s famous line about two equally intransigent sides in a dispute could have been written about the imbroglio surrounding Cumberland Council’s recent decision to ban, through its library department, books intended for children about same-sex relationships and practices. Requiring that a title such as This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson, which features an explanation of ‘scat’ (being sexually aroused by faeces), to be physically moved from the Junior Non-Fiction or Young Adult sections to the Adult Non-Fiction section makes perfect sense. Censoring same-sex books intended for adults, though, is discrimination. Gay people are everyday people with a different sexuality. Let them be. And, unlike, transgender ideologues, gay rights campaigners do not ask society to reject biology while advocating the surgical mutilation of kids.
Need it be said that we live in a liberal democracy, where free speech is the foundation of every good we enjoy….
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
