opinion

Martin McKenzie-Murray’s front-page story about the national apology to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse was masterful – complex, compassionate, critical where necessary, and very moving (“Julia Gillard was our hero”, October 27–...

Onto the aircraft strides one of Lord Moloch’s former pashas, the silver-haired John Hartigan, viceroy of all he surveyed on the media landscape. Passengers were amazed and delighted that the mighty Harto lowered himself into an economy-class seat. It was only a matter of moments later that the ABC’s taxation affairs correspondent Emma Alberici appeared and was ushered into a business-class seat surrounded by fluttering ladies-in-waiting.

There is a sense that Scott Morrison’s government has reached the point of no return as the realisation dawns that Bill Shorten’s Opposition is now the government-in-waiting. The near 20 per cent shift against the Liberals in Wentworth is the...

When this story was published in 1973, it was as a thought experiment. The idea of perpetual suffering, forced on a child for the benefit of an otherwise benign society, of endless detention and terrible deprivation, was science fiction. And yet here we are. Even as the children are slowly pulled from Nauru, Peter Dutton defends the Omelas he has built. He refuses to accept there are humanitarian reasons for closing the camps.

For much of human history, economic growth puttered along slowly – so slowly, in fact, that shops would sometimes carve prices into their stone walls. Then, in the late 1700s, one of the most dramatic transformations in world economic history took...

From February 1948, the Australia government started transferring the last war criminals held since 1945 to Manus Island. There they were to languish until pressure from the United States led to them facing trial in 1950, many for crimes against...