Category: Quadrant

I used to regularly look forward to watching Alan Kohler’s financial report on the ABC news each evening. But when the global financial crisis hit, I suddenly realised that even he didn’t know what was going on. Fast forward to 2020 and I’m having that strange sense of déjà vu—all

Those characterising themselves as ‘sovereign citizens’ have been re-animated by COVID-19 restrictions. Personally, I think if we live in and enjoy the benefits of society, we should act within the laws of the land and resist flagrantly flouting societal norms of behaviour. However, two caveats apply. Laws should be duly

It is beyond doubt that this Wuhan virus chiefly kills the aged and those with with serious comorbidities.  It is also beyond doubt that a large majority of sufferers are asymptomatic.  In theory and with the benefit of hindsight, these facts should have guided our response from the beginning of

Be astonished: a beautiful woman, beheaded 1,700 years ago, lives on. She is the patron of miners, tunnellers, armourers, military engineers, artillerymen, gunsmiths and those who handle explosives. People put up her effigy at the entrance to tunnels and mines, and seek her protection against thunder and lightning. She supports

We now enter the era of the High Gothic, a time of chivalry, courtly love, and romance amongst the elite, enjoying an often tenuous relationship with reality. Indeed, “even war and theology could become a sort of game,” and “architecture reached a point of extravagance unequalled in history.” It was

If the ABC didn’t have double standards, it wouldn’t have any at all. Case in point: the matter of ABC Adelaide radio host Peter Goers, who has been a ABC radio nightly presenter there for 16 years. He also writes a weekly column in News Corp’s Sunday Mail, with a

I’d like to blame Daniel Andrews for killing my Mum, whom we buried on Tuesday, but that wouldn’t be fair. She was 93 when I found her at the end of her bed, dead and cold but a lady to the end, or so I imagine from the drape of

  Politics becomes wretched when the ideas in circulation turn bad, and ideas degenerate when the rhetoric is rotten. The words are everything. They are the lungs of politics and the foundation upon which parties, factions, fiefdoms and scholarship of all uniforms is built. Regrettably, the poverty of our political

It was four years ago this week that The Australian published a cartoon by the late and great Bill Leak, who was reminding us of the sad state far too many Aboriginal children are in. It was also four years ago today that some sectors of the public erupted in

It has been observed for quite some time that Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube are censoring conservative content, as Forbes recorded beneath the headline “Facebook Deleting Coronavirus Posts, Leading To Charges Of Censorship”. But what has become clear to all with eyes to see is that the mainstream media is

The American Black Lives Matter movement’s invocation of Martin Luther King Jr involves a serious falsification of history, and the uncritical adoption of that movement’s flawed ideology by Aboriginal  leaders is similarly misconceived and misguided. Dr King’s 1950s campaign in America’s southern states sought to overturn the Jim Crow system

Last week we saw how the essential elements of European civilization survived through some 700 years of regime change and barbarism. Sir Kenneth Clark now describes the sudden (re)awakening of European civilization in the 12th century. He sees this as a pivotal moment in human history and explores its roots