The murder and attempted murder in Bourke Street, Melbourne, last month by the Somali-born terrorist Hassan Khalif Shire Ali produced one positive outcome. It prompted Prime Minister Scott Morrison to break the mould of over-cautious political statements that has so far determined responses to acts of this kind. Morrison declared radical Islam a threat to […]

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Dr Anne Aly was quick to downplay the Bourke Street rampage as somehow less worthy of attention and action than domestic violence. To this specious argument add a possible breach of Section 44(iv) of the Constitution prohibiting MPs from holding offices of profit under the Crown. Keith Windschuttle reports

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Morrison should reference the best recent formulation of Australian identity and history, courtesy of Noel Pearson, who argues the nation embodies three traditions: the first Australians, who roamed this continent for 65,000 years, long before the ages of Babylon, Athens and Rome; the British inheritance dating from the voyages of James Cook, the initial colony […]

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Within the long, honourable and peculiarly Australian tradition of hard-edged newspaper cartooning, John Spooner has marked out his own distinct ground. His new book, like his decades of published work, is a testament to wit, courage and the integrity of an independent mind

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The divisive myth that the Australian nation is composed of three population waves – Aboriginal, British, and post-war immigrant – has seduced many, most recently Paul Kelly, who believes it ‘true and inclusive’. We should acknowledge the nation we inhabit today is the product of only one of these social assemblages

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Margaret Cameron-Ash’s ‘Lying for the Admiralty’ demonstrates how Cook discovered Bass Strait and drew deliberately misleading maps, presenting Van Diemen’s Land as a peninsula and disguising his discovery of Sydney Harbour. His goal and that of the Admiralty was to mislead the French

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ANU’s rejection of the Ramsay Centre confirms the academic situation in Australia is even worse than Britain and America, most particularly that the humanities faculties at our major public universities are quite simply unfit for the task

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One thing young people are very unlikely to learn—not from our education system anyway—is that no simple concept can ever hope to explain all of human history, or even most of it. Denied this insight, the notion that history has been determined by class struggles is an easy sell

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When the likes of Noam Chomsky set the agenda, anyone who imagines the ‘progressive’ Left of today’s intellectual class is morally worthier or intellectually loftier than the lunatic prophets of medieval Europe needs to think again

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Like all zealots, those who peddle the notion of group identity as the paramount measure of the individual’s worth are determined to make everyone else talk and think as they do. As with communism, for which it is a posthumous surrogate, identity politics is underscored by the authoritarian urge

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