Terry Barnes is a Melbourne-based contributor for The Spectator and The Spectator Australia.
Australia Day was once a big deal Down Under, but in recent years the annual celebration has been somewhat muted. Take the Australian Open, currently running in Melbourne. The organisers have dedicated days throughout the tournament for a range of causes: there has been a Pride day and a day celebrating indigenous art and culture.
In May 1940, Winston Churchill was not only appointed Prime Minister but Minister for Defence. In doing so, Churchill ensured that he, and not the three traditional cabinet secretaries traditionally responsible for the armed services, had ultimate responsibility for Britain’s war effort. This was an open, and very public, move which was welcomed and praised
Timing is everything in politics. This week in Canberra a new junior minister, an obscure Australian Labor Party MP named Matt Thistlethwaite, was sworn in by the Queen’s representative, Governor-General David Hurley. His portfolio: Assistant Minister for the Republic. A minister of the Crown sworn to bring about the demise of the Crown in Australia.
‘Scott Morrison is empathetic – without the “em”.’ Those words, spoken on Friday by the Labor party frontbencher Jason Clare, on a national breakfast programme, perfectly encapsulated how Scott Morrison was defeated in the Australian election on Saturday. Morrison wasn’t saved by his economic management (this Friday Australia’s unemployment rate was confirmed as 3.9 per
While the main electoral attraction of the moment is the French presidential showdown between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, it is not the only significant election underway in the western world. On 21 May, Australia goes to the polls. The contest is between the nominally centre-right coalition of the Liberal and National parties led
With Russia playing a deadly cat-and-mouse game with Ukraine, this week the world number one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, must have thought we needed a distraction. Following his charm offensive with the BBC’s Amol Rajan earlier this week, Djokovic has announced that he would like to play the Australian Open again, despite the minor complication
The Australian government’s decision to cancel the world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic’s visa was inevitable in the end. Things started well for Djokovic. On Monday he won his initial match in the law courts when his QC-led legal team successfully challenged his visa cancellation as a breakdown of procedural fairness. After this utter
Just minutes from the heart of Victoria’s capital, Melbourne Park is one of the great tennis complexes. For a fortnight in January, it will be the centre of the tennis world as the home of the year’s first Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open. For Melburnians the Open is more than just a tennis tournament.
As former Australian foreign minister and High Commissioner to the UK Alexander Downer wrote in last week’s magazine, almost all Australian states, like neighbouring New Zealand, are determined to eliminate Covid-19 at all costs. At the beginning of this year, Australia seemingly had defeated Covid. Total numbers of people infected, out of 25 million, were
Sajid Javid’s deleted weekend tweet about Britain ‘learning to live with, rather than cower from Covid’ upset just about everyone – from frontline NHS workers to Covid-19 victims’ groups. But Javid could actually have been talking about Australians. While the UK’s Freedom Day went ahead despite 40,000 people testing positive for Covid daily, over half
Melbourne Australia has been a rare success story during the pandemic. There have been around 29,000 cases of Covid, 908 of which have proved fatal. There are currently just 125 active cases in the entire country, a mere 25 of which have required hospitalisation. For a population of 25 million, this is a vastly different
