Opinion

Controversial English historian Arnold Toynbee, having reviewed and analysed the rise and fall of more than 20 civilisations, concluded that “civilisations are not murdered, they commit suicide by not meeting their challenges”.  This raises some …

The greatest challenge facing the defeated federal Liberal Party is not whether to move to the right or the left, nor whether to court voters in the outer suburbs or try to win back its once blue-ribbon seats. It is how to stay relevant and it’s a challenge …

The de-ScoMofication of Australia on the world stage took a leap forward this week as the Albanese government consolidated its international relations edge over an enfeebled opposition in a series of high-level meetings in Europe. In just over a month, …

Thirty-four is the number and it has turned federal parliamentary politics on its head. After an agonising month of counting and distributing preferences for both houses of the parliament, the Australian Electoral Commission has tabulated the biggest …

This week, the need for the new Albanese government to fix the mess it has inherited became personal for millions of Australians at the mercy of a failed energy market. The threat of blackouts and of freezing in their homes in the middle of one of the …

Visual stunts – or picture opportunities, as they are called in the trade – are nothing new in contemporary politics. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo is just as addicted as any of the practitioners. On Tuesday, he provided the visual metaphor …

The indictment against Julian Assange runs to 37 pages. It was signed on May 23, 2019. It details Assange’s interactions with Chelsea Manning, how he encouraged her to access secret files and helped her with password-breaking.

According to protesters, the two men were armed and dressed in full camouflage. They did not identify themselves as police. When confronted near a camp in the Colo Valley outside Sydney, the only words they said were: ‘We’ve been compromised.’

Angus Taylor knew what he was doing. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he is a bright man. He understands accounting tricks. He knew there was a crisis and he preferred to wait for it.

It seems there’s very little that humanity cannot achieve when we put our mind to it. In the past 100 years we’ve landed on the moon, created a global information superhighway, and crossbred poodles with every animal we could get our hands on. Our greatest achievement yet, however, may be the dedication we have shown to destroying our planet.

It’s remarkably hard to get banned from YouTube. The platform hosts more than 500 hours of fresh videos a minute. That’s more content than even the most dedicated teenager in Sydney fighting lockdown boredom can watch in a lifetime. Almost all of that video – 720,000 hours’ worth a day – is of children unboxing toys or biting each other. The remainder is video of Alan Jones being sceptical about vaccines on Sky News.

We in Australia love gold more than a Saudi prince’s interior decorator. We’re the gold standard in botched vaccine rollouts and the gold standard in failing to suppress the Delta variant. Fortunately, we’re also the gold standard in women’s swimming at the Olympics, and the gold standard in enthusiastic coaches humping barrier walls. 

Mike Seccombe’s excellent article (“Energy crisis: The truth behind the price surge”, June 25–July 1) exposes the complete failure of successive governments through what most of us would call corruption rather than Mike’s more restrained “political …

There has always been pushback when traditional owners exercise their rights to Country and Culture but, after so many generations of this experience, it should no longer be such a point of conflict (Kath Wilson, “Wombat forest fight”, June 18-24). …

Rick Morton’s “‘Negligent in the extreme’: Labor inherits crises across portfolios” (June 11-17) had me contemplating an unlikely possibility – the coming national integrity commission policing election promises. The example of there being …