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media November 4, 2023
Assange is a test of US friendship
The relationship between Australia and the United States has long been cordial and productive. Founded in the same era, both post-colonial democracies and now partners in a 70-year military alliance, we share both our language and our cultural...
indigenous affairs October 28, 2023
Truth and the threats to liberal democracy
“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” – John Milton, Areopagitica (1644) The Voice referendum was the first constitutional referendum to be held since 1999. No Australian under the age...
indigenous affairs October 21, 2023
Writing this, in the sorrowful days after the referendum, I am concerned the things that make me feel regretful about our politics and public policy are not so much in the past but in the future. As disappointed as I am about the outcome, and as...
law & crime August 26, 2023
What would we not know were it but for brave whistleblowers speaking up? And what do we not know right now because the cost of courage in Australia is too high? These are the questions that keep me awake at night, and they are the reasons the Human...
indigenous affairs May 27, 2023
Stan Grant and the anti-Voice trolls
Late last week the seemingly impossible happened. Stan Grant, a veteran Wiradjuri journalist, with a 40-year career spanning commercial news outlets at home and abroad before his arrival at the ABC, announced he was taking a break. During his time...
media February 25, 2023
Mark Dreyfus’s media roundtable
On Monday, February 27, media executives, editors and assorted interested parties will descend on Canberra for a journalists’ jamboree, otherwise known as a media roundtable, hosted by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. Oddly enough, for a discussion...
media November 5, 2022
The Albanese government spent the past week coming to grips with theory versus reality in government. The vast gap between the budget handed down by Treasurer Jim Chalmers and the media’s reporting of it is still being processed by government MPs...
media September 3, 2022
Buzzwords, bullshit and mockery
In the spirit of correcting the failures of our democracy in recent times, especially in the context of the May election, the Albanese government has launched a number of inquiries into particular failures of its predecessor. So far this includes...
media June 25, 2022
What Murdoch does to new governments
As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ’s new ministers settle in to their portfolios , efforts are already under way by the Murdoch media to undermine the government. Take, for example, their complete beat-up about Tanya Plibersek being “sidelined”...
media April 23, 2022
‘Just so nasty and dirty and people hate it’
Scott Morrison has much more to fear from the prospect of a hung parliament than Anthony Albanese. That’s because he is so much further away from the agendas being run by the slew of independents who have a real chance of being elected. At the end...
media April 16, 2022
The campaign to destroy the arts
Art has always drawn its share of opprobrium from authorities, but never more than when the poor are seen to enjoy it. The moralisers of 18th-century England – the same England that invaded the great southern continent to establish a penal colony –...
