Category: Quadrant

As Australia prepares for the Voice referendum, let me recommend the autobiography of a man who will be influential in the debate. ‘Warren Mundine in Black + White’ with the subtitle ‘race, politics and changing Australia’ was published in 2017, with an updated second edition in 2018. His story

Another school year is starting and ABC Education stands ready, as always, to provide kids with curated learning material. This is in line with the ABC Charter 1(a)ii, “to provide innovative and comprehensive broadcasting services of a high standard (and) to provide broadcasting programs of an educational nature.” The

An amazing, but little remarked, fact in the current concern about securing Australia’s borders – cue ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ – is that they are entirely maritime.  We have no land borders, and Australia is the largest country in the world not to have any.  According to Geoscience Australia, we

The ABC seems to have invented a genocide by English colonists in the Caribbean. A story on Barbados’ cruel history as a slave island reported that slaver descendants, such as actor Benedict Cumberbatch, could be pursued for compensation and included an assertion that the indigenous population was slaughtered by

Indigenous voice indeed. No one speaks for the indigenous people of the Norway House Cree Nation except the people of the Norway House Cree Nation (or their democratically-elected representatives). Recognised by treaty on September 24, 1875, the Norway House Cree maintain their own high school, health centre, sewage treatment

At lunch the other day, one of our number, who knows a thing or two about constitutional law, of which to say I know little embellishes my knowledge, made the point that the Voice would be an unusual addition to the Constitution. It would not in fact create anything.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is leading a ‘small target’ approach to the referendum aimed at enshrining race in the Constitution via an indigenous Voice. He calls it no more than ‘a simple courtesy, a common decency’ — a mere advisory body, if you take him at his word, that will

In 1868, the English poet Matthew Arnold wrote the beautiful “Dover Beach” dedicated to two themes, the first of which is the decline of faith. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But

NSW’s Premier Domenic Perrottet, 40, is in trouble for having worn a Nazi uniform to his 21st birthday costume party in 2001. Tasmanian green-minded Independent Andrew Wilkie suffered even worse exposure in 2011 when it came out that as a senior Duntroon cadet in 1983, he allegedly forced his

Below is the text of George Cardinal Pell’s address to an August 2022 fundraising dinner at Campion College — one more reminder of the great man and mind we have lost. ________________________                          I was born and then educated in the olden days of the nineteen forties – fifties,

At Murwillumbah on Saturday, January 14, ardent bushwalker and Quadrant Online contributor Marc Hendrickx spoke at a community rally devoted to debating the ban on the now-denied right of non-Aborigines to ascend the summit. Below is an edited version of his speech.                                                             _____________ Thank you all for coming

This week past there has been pretty much only one story in the news. It is, of course, the passing of George Cardinal Pell, Australia’s globally known and mostly respected titan of the Rome Church.  Perhaps appropriately, he died in the Eternal City, (I suspect) his favourite place. A