Satirising anti-Semitism
The scene: a redneck bar in Tuscon, Arizona. Sacha Baron Cohen, under the pseudonym of ‘Arote and his Cowboy Astana Band from Kazakhstan’, takes to the stage to perform a country and western song about...
View ArticleAustralian Notebook
To Sydney for the first of three G20 meetings in Australia this year. It’s a long way to travel, but as the formidable Treasurer, Joe Hockey, reminded the jet-lagged finance ministers and central bank...
View ArticleTrollhunters are a menace to the internet
Within seconds of the announcement of Charlotte Dawson’s death, her body barely cold, lowlifes on the internet were swarming together to make dumb comments about her. No, I’m not referring to trolls....
View ArticleNotes of a diplomat
New York. One of the best overseas postings in Australia’s Foreign Affairs portfolio. So yet another politician is to enliven his retirement in stylish high-status accommodation at Beekman Place, a...
View ArticleYou’re no John Stuart Mill
Our Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, takes more than a little pride in painting himself as an old-fashioned classical liberal. Think of the great philosopher MP John Stuart Mill and you’ll...
View ArticleTerror Australis
A decade ago if you broke down somewhere between Woop Woop and the back of Bourke, the arrival of a jovial, slang-talking, sun-weathered bushman on the scene was a true blue guarantee that she’d be...
View ArticleYou’re no John Stuart Mill
Our Attorney-General, Senator George Brandis, takes more than a little pride in painting himself as an old-fashioned classical liberal. Think of the great philosopher MP John Stuart Mill and you’ll...
View ArticleTerror Australis
A decade ago if you broke down somewhere between Woop Woop and the back of Bourke, the arrival of a jovial, slang-talking, sun-weathered bushman on the scene was a true blue guarantee that she’d be...
View ArticleBlack armband
Adam Goodes does not deserve to be Australian of the Year. The appointment was questionable in the first place, but has since become a joke. Last week, in the Fairfax media, Goodes maintained: ‘I now...
View ArticleMore British than Britain
I went to the Falkland Islands last month. The territory is at something of a turning-point in its history. There are reserves of oil in its waters, and both British and American firms are there...
View ArticleA knife blade on the skyline
Back in 1982 Paul Goldberger, then architecture critic for the New York Times, bemoaned the advent of what he called a new building type on New York’s skyline. In an article headed ‘The Invasion of the...
View ArticleHere we go again
‘The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.’ — Joseph Stalin Perhaps in Russia, but in the last Western Australian election, neither the voters...
View ArticleWe’ll still be a melting pot
One Saturday night late last year, two ‘white-skinned’ cricketers rolled into a petrol station on Sydney’s northern beaches having had a few too many beers after stumps. If you subscribe to the view of...
View Article2014 won’t be like 1914
The Jeremiah strategists are coming out of the woodwork to predict that Asia in 2014 will be a repeat of Europe in 1914. In other words, that there will be an outbreak of war between the major powers...
View ArticlePutting the ‘your’ into the ABC
What to do about the ABC and its shameless indulgence of in-house ideological bias at the taxpayer’s expense? The pragmatic Germans have already solved the problem. They have found a way for citizens...
View ArticleAustralian Notebook
To Sydney for the first of three G20 meetings in Australia this year. It’s a long way to travel, but as the formidable Treasurer, Joe Hockey, reminded the jet-lagged finance ministers and central bank...
View ArticleNotes of a diplomat
New York. One of the best overseas postings in Australia’s Foreign Affairs portfolio. So yet another politician is to enliven his retirement in stylish high-status accommodation at Beekman Place, a...
View ArticleThe devilish problem of Tasmania
Now that the state election is over, and Tasmania has rid itself of 16 years of Labor governments, including a spell of genetically modified Labor-Greens togetherness, we will now be able to see what a...
View ArticleStop ringing me!
It was 6.30 when the phone rang and dinner had just been served. ‘Which telephone company do you represent?’ I asked. ‘How did you know?’ ‘Just a wild guess.’ ‘Is that you Mr Barry?’ was the follow-up...
View ArticleUnder the house with Hergé
‘Ten thousand thundering typhoons!’ I curse loudly as my head crashes into a concrete beam in the darkness. I’m deep in the bowels of the unexplored netherworld beneath our house, sweat pouring off me,...
View Article
