9 March 2013
As politics and public life have become part of the entertainment industry, they have given their own unique meaning to words. The other day I was listening to the ABC news and on came one of those...
View Article16 March 2013
You would think that pride alone would be enough to encourage the ABC to do something about Insiders. Last Sunday, The Bolt Report on Channel 10 had 168,000 viewers, while Insiders languished with...
View Article23 March 2013
Ms Gillard says we live now in days of campaigning and days of governing. But she is only two-thirds right, as there are also the days of impending doom and those are the days that are principally...
View Article30 March 2013
Raking over the ash heap of the Labor Party’s leadership debacle to find something original or worth remembering is a soul-destroying business. But among the sludge of double-dealing, treachery and...
View Article6 April 2013
It’s happened again. A young gay man coming to me for legal advice, but not the sort of advice the commentariat would have you believe occupies the sleeping and waking time of the entire gay community...
View Article20 April 2013
I had thought that everything that could be said about Margaret Thatcher had been said by now, but it is a mark of her influence that the ferals, luvvies and lefties are still frothing at the mouth and...
View Article27 April 2013
I knew there had been a breakthrough in the Boston bombings last Saturday when I woke up and turned the wireless on. The ABC broadcasts an early-morning current affairs program to give us our moral...
View Article4 May 2013
You might have noticed that the most recent Gillard disasters (the looming budget deficit, the failure of the mining tax to produce any revenue worth having, the absurdity of cutting education spending...
View Article11 May 2013
The opinion poll results are in and it is clear that the government did not get a bounce from the new disability scheme or the vast new expenditure on education. Why? Several reasons. Nothing that the...
View Article18 May 2013
I don’t like to praise politicians too much as it only encourages them. But you have to hand it to Tony Abbott for so deftly finessing the Coalition industrial relations policy that it is now well on...
View Article25 May 2013
I thought one of the public opinion gurus made a good point the other day when he was trying to explain why, after the federal government had committed billions of dollars to the new national...
View Article1 June 2013
Last Friday, it seemed as if I was reliving my life as a member of parliament as I tried to spread myself between two formal dinners in one night. In the old days I used to go non-stop from one...
View Article7 June 2013
As this is a journal of record, it would be strange if we ignored the storm that hit Melbourne last week on the issue of racism. The redoubtable Eddie Maguire, TV gameshow host, president of the...
View Article15 June 2013
It now looks as if the asylum-seekers issue will dominate the coming election. Recent events have touched a raw nerve with the Australian people, who must now be thinking that our security is seriously...
View Article19 June 2013
I am glad that, for once, the latest public opinion polls have revealed a trend that I suspected was developing. For a few weeks I had detected the early rumblings of what has now become a very...
View Article26 June 2013
The strange thing about Julia Gillard is that she was touted as a strategic and negotiating genius. As it turned out, she was hopeless at strategy and instead of negotiating her way around looming...
View Article6 July 2013
As this is the thinking man’s column, I thought it useful to reflect on some of the wider issues emerging from the backstabbing mayhem and bloodletting involved in the removal of Julia Gillard and the...
View Article13 July 2013
The first public opinion polls since the return of Kevin Rudd show that the Labor party is in with a fighting chance of winning the federal election. So? To listen to some people who should know...
View Article20 July 2013
London Here, you can scarcely avoid the looming presence of the European Community. It seems that, every day, news arrives of some new expansion of European bureaucracy or yet another restriction on...
View Article27 July 2013
New York It was probably inevitable that my stay in the United States should coincide with another of the volcanic eruptions of fury and outrage over the one issue that continues to divide this...
View Article
