opinion
Comment
diary February 27, 2021
Gadfly: Kelly rocks the boat then jumps ship
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has a complicated relationship with boats. We all know he loves stopping them. He even has a trophy on his desk shaped like a boat with “I stopped these” written on it, lest he ever forgets how much he loves stopping...
law & crime February 27, 2021
Children’s rights suffer in Queensland
As Queensland reels from the deaths of a number of innocent people as a result of car theft by teenagers in recent weeks, community members are, understandably, desperately seeking answers to how such needless deaths can be prevented. But the...
law & crime February 20, 2021
‘I was a staffer, and so was my perpetrator’
Warning: This piece contains a graphic first person account of sexual violence. A woman is lying on a bed. I am watching her. She tries to sit up. Stop, please stop… A man is masturbating, and he is trying to remove her pants. He is groping her...
diary February 20, 2021
Gadfly: Jenny will save us all
Being a politician means learning to carefully deliver sentences that have been crafted by experts who know that everything you say will be parsed and dissected. This is why prime ministers employ speechwriters – people adept at reading the warp and...
diary February 13, 2021
Gadfly: Kick in the Ed for systemic racism
First they came for Eddie McGuire , and I did not speak out… because I was too busy drinking champagne and laughing. Stunning everyone and overturning centuries of tradition, Eddie McGuire has now become the first white Australian ever forced from...
environment July 20, 2019
The Robbins Island wind farm debate
The Australian moved in for the kill last week. Back-to-back front pages, on Monday and Tuesday, after I sounded the alarm about the impact on endangered birds if the Robbins Island wind farm in Tasmania’s north-west goes ahead. Backed up by the...
religion July 13, 2019
What Scott Morrison’s faith means
On Tuesday night, Australia’s prime minister was praying for some “very important things”. He began to pray “for all of those veterans in our country who are doing it tough”, asking for protection and “peace over them”. His prayer continued: “We...
diary July 13, 2019
Gadfly: Gus’s power play defused
Fantastic Angus has been so busy with explanations about the poisoning of endangered grasslands on a family spread that he’s taken his eye off the ball. Both carbon emissions and power prices have gone in the opposite direction to that promised by Schmo Morrison’s junta. Emissions are up, up, up, and so too are power prices. Fantastic. Great move. Well done, Angus.
diary July 6, 2019
How good is Australia? Gadfly returns home after three weeks on a global escapade and finds nothing whatsoever has changed. Schmo Morrison, Fantastic Angus and Benito Dutton are still strutting their half-baked stuff, and on we stagger. The only noticeable excitement on the horizon is that Schmo has his ears back for a good old beano with Iran.
politics July 6, 2019
Money, votes and the ‘pendulum’
What if money didn’t matter much in Australian politics? Clive Palmer just spent $53 million on ads for his United Australia Party and had zero candidates elected. The Greens spent about $320,000 and elected six senators and Adam Bandt in the lower...
immigration June 29, 2019
John Howard once called himself the Liberal Party’s most conservative leader. His successors, however, have outdone him. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott are easily more conservative than Howard, who has now slipped to bronze on the ranking of most...
- Show More
