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Peter Coleman rss

18 May 2013

Good news that the Institute of Public Affairs is mounting a campaign for a No vote in the proposed referendum to add local government to the Constitution. The Prime Minister… Read more

11 May 2013

It didn’t take long. Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture had barely reached the shops when the Old Guard launched its counter-attack. The always fastidious Bob Ellis was in first in… Read more

4 May 2013

Every 50 years or so Australians need a new book marking the end of an era and the start of a new one, albeit still undefined. In the 1960s there… Read more

27 April 2013

Public, pundits and pollsters agree the Gillard government will be wiped out in September — just about everyone, that is, except Julia Gillard. She believes she can still turn the… Read more

6 April 2013

The tenth anniversary of the ‘shock and awe’ invasion of Iraq in March 2003 has provoked a surge of articles, both pro-war and anti-war. Few from either side reveal much… Read more

30 March 2013

The black comedy in Canberra last week did nothing to clear up one of the minor mysteries of Australian politics: how Kevin Rudd can be distrusted, even despised, by so… Read more

23 March 2013

You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! the Canberra journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, There’s no occasion to. – with apologies to Humber Wolfe… Read more

16 March 2013

It was like an episode of Q&A but with more North Sydney mummy bloggers and pensioners than inner-city young packing the Stanton Library to hear Mark Latham launch his Quarterly… Read more

9 March 2013

There were pluses and minuses for both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott in western Sydney at the weekend. For Abbott one minus was the visit to the railway car park… Read more

2 March 2013

A pack of protesters, most of them young, waved Socialist Alliance banners and chanted ‘The people will not tolerate/Wilders and his racist hate.’ They were noisy but there was no… Read more

23 February 2013

By the waters of Babylon I heard a Public Works official say: ‘A culture that is truly Babylonian Has been ordered for delivery today.’ James McAuley (1946) Any day now… Read more

16 February 2013

‘I feel sorry for the Pope,’ said Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist. ‘Imagine having a wasted life to look back on and no sex.’ Small wonder Cardinal Pell was easily… Read more

9 February 2013

She pulls no punches — Bess Nungarrayi Price, the new Country Liberal Party member of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly. She began her speech launching Stephanie Jarrett’s Liberating Aboriginal People… Read more

2 February 2013

‘Madder than Latham,’ the Rudd-ites are now saying about Julia Gillard, referring to the clumsy way in which she terminated the Parliamentary career of Senator Trish Crossin. The received view… Read more

26 January 2013

If there is one prediction that may be confidently made about the Middle East, it is that there will be no two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict this year —… Read more

19 January 2013

The New South Wales government proposes to grill the broadcaster Alan Jones and the columnist Andrew Bolt before its Parliamentary inquiry on how best to strengthen the law against vilification… Read more

12 January 2013

The last time voluntary voting was tried in Australia was in New South Wales in 1968. The Liberal Askin government, then at the height of its popularity, reintroduced it for… Read more

5 January 2013

It is, someone said, like Captain Cook’s landing in Botany Bay in 1770. It was a desolate landscape ‘in the middle of nowhere’, but it was the beginning of British… Read more

29 December 2012

As a curtain-raiser, William Shawcross could not resist quoting an extract from the recently published letters of the late Queen Mother, Counting One’s Blessings, which he edited. It had nothing… Read more

15 December 2012

What has done more to help the Aboriginal cause: white self-hatred or Aboriginal self-help? Paul Keating’s Redfern bombast or the election of Aborigines to the Northern Territory Parliament? Who speaks… Read more

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