The fall of Singapore in February 1942 remains the greatest disaster in Australian military history. The collapse of Britain’s supposedly impenetrable fortress in the Far East...
The competition between Australia’s two major political parties has two characteristics that encourage polarisation. As a zero-sum game, it doesn’t allow for mutual advancement or compromise;...
We have a tendency to overestimate how unified our political adversaries are, because of a particular version of what psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” When...
As we enter the election campaign proper, Labor and the Coalition are promising to make our lives much better. Inflation will go down and wages up,...
It’s always instructive to see how a government behaves in the days before an election is called. At the end of a budget week we weren’t...
Government schools, even in Queensland, will at last get the full Gonski. That is a win: not as big a win as it would have been...
What is a tribe? Anthropologists use the term very cautiously, for it has lost its earlier meanings of ethnicity and bounded social groups and taken on...
Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada begins with the preparation of a room. There’s a practised efficiency as well as a ritual quality to the way three people...
Treasurer Jim Chalmers pulled one unexpected rabbit out of his hat in last night’s budget — a one percentage point cut in the bottom marginal tax...
Things are getting complicated on the environment front. Late last year the prime minister withdrew plans to create a federal environmental protection agency (promised before the...