Essays For Australia

Our constitutional founders are on trial. Edmund Barton, Samuel Griffith and, most recently, Alfred Deakin are under the spotlight for their contribution to Australia’s racist past. Talk of removing Barton’s statue and renaming Griffith and Deakin universities; all are now in the mix. But such talk is misguided, making sacrificial lambs of long-dead politicians when the real spotlight should be

In 1999, Australia conducted its largest taxpayer-funded focus group – the referendum on a republic. Voting in the referendum was compulsory with 95.1 per cent of Australians eligible to vote doing so. In contrast, the 2017 Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which had optional voting, had a 79.5 per cent participation rate. The result of the republic referendum was a

Patrick White is far and away the greatest writer Australia has ever produced in any medium and not to take stock of this would be a very sad thing indeed. It’s only a couple of generations ago when the penny dropped that White, a toff of pastoralist stock who turned in his latter days into a raging lefty, was in

I think I would have been around ten years-old when I watched the film ‘Ladri di biciclette’, known in English as ‘Bicycle Thieves’ or ‘The Bicycle Thief’. Produced and directed by Vittorio De Sica, it was made in 1948 and is set in Rome just after the end of the Second World War. By the mid-1950s much of the Italian

Their Fiery Cross of Union’ is a brilliant book and one of the most important works of Australian history to appear in recent years. It is deeply insightful, beautifully written, and succeeds in making forgettable and forgotten politicians interesting. It’s both scholarly and entertaining. In 1890s Australia, federation was what climate change is today. It sounded worthy, it was vague,

In April 2022, a month before the federal election Gideon Rozner, the Director of Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs, was a guest on the ABC’s Q+A program. When asked about the legacy of Scott Morrison as Prime Minister, Rozner stated: My concern is what Scott Morrison has done to the Liberal Party and to liberalism, to the values

In 2017 Australia’s oldest university, The University of Sydney launched what it described as a ‘brand campaign’ to advertise itself to potential students and donors. The campaign was called ‘Unlearn’. According to the university it had ‘reimagined the way we teach, so our students can reimagine the world.’ The campaign demonstrates that while we’ve all been taught how to memorise

ccording to last year’s census for the first time in Australia’s history more than half our population was either born overseas or had an overseas-born parent. Australia has the second-highest proportion of foreign born residents in the developed world (after Luxembourg). In the United States 13.6 per cent are foreign-born, in the UK 13.7 per cent, and in Australia 29.9

The 2022 federal election ended eight and a half years of what was, in general, a mediocre Coalition government. I say ‘in general’ because the two years of Tony Abbott’s prime ministership were the exception. Abbott promised to do three key things – ‘axe the [carbon] tax’, ‘stop the boats’, and ‘fix the budget’. He delivered on the first two.

‘When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.’ That’s one of my favourite quotes from Thomas Sowell, the great American writer and thinker. Sowell grew up in segregated North Carolina, and then lived in Harlem. His father died before he was born and