Category: Quadrant

Currently, the SBS documentary series The Australian Wars is being aired on the SBS and NITV channels. The director and presenter of the three-part series is Rachel Perkins, the Aboriginal activist who also directed The First Australians. Perkins has quite mastered the art of the political documentary, also known as

Professor Greg Craven of the Catholic University has a piece in the Weekend Australian (paywalled) posing ten questions for opponents of the Voice. I will attempt to answer those questions.  What follows is the text of Professor Craven’s article with my responses indented after each question. Referendums are much

And we all thought Wagner’s The Ring Cycle was overly long!  Well, the Great COVID Show still ain’t over yet because the Fat Lady in this opera bouffe is still singing, as she has been for nearly three years now, thus knocking Herr Wagner’s interminable opus into a cocked

Some stories I come across are so weird that I don’t know how to write them. No-one will believe I am serious. For example, in 1974 I attended a talk by Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Dr Jim Cairns at the ANU in which he called for the abolition of

Not one media commentator pointed out the absolute normality of the Queen’s Funeral Service. Apart from the two thousand worshippers inside Westminster Abbey, I suppose that a billion were in the global television congregation – virtually inside the Abbey. For many it would have seemed exotic. But most of

Graham Lloyd, the environment editor at The Australian, has a moderately good record of digging up politically incorrect material which dispels this or that building block of the climate scam. He’s never shy of reporting increased coral on the GBR, for instance. I’m not sure how he survives. Glad

There are few events in life that shake us to the metaphysical core, even fewer that we share with millions of others, but the death of Queen Elizabeth may well be such a moment. Her Majesty’s death prompts me to ask who are we and, indeed, who am I?

Brash young newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe (above) was perhaps the most hated man in England during World War I. The upper class banned his papers from their clubs and ceremonially burnt them at the Stock Exchange, while pacifists, socialists and many others damned him as a warmonger. Middle England,

As highlighted in George Orwell’s 1984, language and how it is used influences how we think and act, so controlling language is a key strategy employed by totalitarian regimes of the left and right to manipulate people and enforce group think. In Orwell’s dystopian novel what is described as

In a recent piece in The Australian,  concerning the proposition in the 1970s that the then Prince Charles might become Governor-General of Australia, Paul Kelly made the following observation concerning the dismissal of Gough Whitlam by Sir John Kerr: Kerr always knew the prime minister had the constitutional power

It’s a mystery how and why the Australian Academy of Science made its plea to the media tech giants to silence its critics. The Academy wants them to cancel Twitter and Facebook accounts or add “Disinformation” and “Code Violation” labels to those objecting to the Academy’s fatwa against fossil

It was the inevitable event we all knew would happen — for all men are mortal — but which somehow we could not imagine would actually take place. The death of the Sovereign after a reign of seventy years is the end of an epoch but also a personal