Addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday, treasurer Jim Chalmers acknowledged the presence of a slew of ministerial colleagues, a couple of key appointees — productivity commissioner Danielle Wood and new treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson — and one of Wilkinson’s predecessors, Ken Henry. Henry’s presence wasn’t a huge surprise. He
Box-ticking is at the heart of Celine Song’s Materialists, now in cinemas. It’s the business model that drives its central character, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who works for an upmarket New York matchmaking service called Adore. There she sees people at their most calculating. Her clients have a tight shopping list
The expanding Middle East war raises the pressure in the most dangerous international period since the cold war eased to an end in the 1980s. There’s a link between that understanding of systemic risk to the state symbolism of the parades honouring the king’s birthday — Charles in London and
There is perhaps no better place to get close to the Peasants’ War and its reverberations than Bad Frankenhausen, a spa town of 10,000 people on the southern slope of the Kyffhäuser Mountains in northern Thuringia. It was here the insurgents suffered one of their most decisive defeats. On 15
Outlining his government’s “positive and ambitious agenda” at the National Press Club last week, Anthony Albanese reiterated a series of health policy commitments made during the election campaign: pledges to improve Medicare bulk-billing rates, limit pharmaceutical co-payments, build more urgent-care clinics, and launch a 24/7 health advice line and an
Though the Liberal Party’s “women problem” might seem perennial, the conservative side of Australian politics could once boast of being at the vanguard of female parliamentary representation — with the important caveat that Australia was never as advanced on this issue as we were with our early granting of female
At the annual Shangri La security dialogue in Singapore two weeks ago, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t just ask Australia to spend more on defence. He also unveiled plans for a new US military project here. The intriguing thing about Hegseth’s announcement that the US was establishing an Indo-Pacific
Judith Hermann has been writing critically acclaimed short stories and novels for almost three decades. Having burst onto the literary scene with the 1998 collection The Summerhouse, Later, she is known in her native Germany as a leading voice of a generation of women authors. With her elegant and coolly
“Scarborough Fair” is what Ellen Stekert calls a “go around song,” one that is passed from singer to singer, down centuries, across oceans, shape-shifting all the while. “Go around songs” shed and acquire tunes, lose lines and gain verses; characters change their names and quite often swap genders. Verses familiar
Right now, according to British political theorist Jonathan White, the future seems very close. Our time horizon is closing in. Crises press in on us, shadowing contemporary politics with an “air of finality,” of “temporal claustrophobia.” Climate change, geopolitical instability, social inequality, out-of-control technology — together they invoke a sense
In a sweeping introduction to his 1958 book Australian Democracy the Melbourne political scientist A.F. Davies notoriously claimed that “the characteristic talent of Australians is not for improvisation, nor even republican manners, it is for bureaucracy.” Laissez-faire, he wrote, “was, in any full-blooded sense, a non-starter in Australia.” Why? “From
Does anyone remember “American carnage”? In his 2017 inaugural address Donald Trump portrayed a collapsing society, emphasising in particular the “crime and gangs and drugs” destroying America’s cities. It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many
Addressing the National Press Club on Wednesday, treasurer Jim Chalmers acknowledged the presence of a slew of ministerial colleagues, a couple of key appointees — productivity commissioner Danielle Wood and new treasury secretary Jenny Wilkinson — and one of Wilkinson’s predecessors, Ken Henry. Henry’s presence wasn’t a huge surprise. He
Box-ticking is at the heart of Celine Song’s Materialists, now in cinemas. It’s the business model that drives its central character, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who works for an upmarket New York matchmaking service called Adore. There she sees people at their most calculating. Her clients have a tight shopping list
The expanding Middle East war raises the pressure in the most dangerous international period since the cold war eased to an end in the 1980s. There’s a link between that understanding of systemic risk to the state symbolism of the parades honouring the king’s birthday — Charles in London and
There is perhaps no better place to get close to the Peasants’ War and its reverberations than Bad Frankenhausen, a spa town of 10,000 people on the southern slope of the Kyffhäuser Mountains in northern Thuringia. It was here the insurgents suffered one of their most decisive defeats. On 15
Outlining his government’s “positive and ambitious agenda” at the National Press Club last week, Anthony Albanese reiterated a series of health policy commitments made during the election campaign: pledges to improve Medicare bulk-billing rates, limit pharmaceutical co-payments, build more urgent-care clinics, and launch a 24/7 health advice line and an
Though the Liberal Party’s “women problem” might seem perennial, the conservative side of Australian politics could once boast of being at the vanguard of female parliamentary representation — with the important caveat that Australia was never as advanced on this issue as we were with our early granting of female
At the annual Shangri La security dialogue in Singapore two weeks ago, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth didn’t just ask Australia to spend more on defence. He also unveiled plans for a new US military project here. The intriguing thing about Hegseth’s announcement that the US was establishing an Indo-Pacific
Judith Hermann has been writing critically acclaimed short stories and novels for almost three decades. Having burst onto the literary scene with the 1998 collection The Summerhouse, Later, she is known in her native Germany as a leading voice of a generation of women authors. With her elegant and coolly
“Scarborough Fair” is what Ellen Stekert calls a “go around song,” one that is passed from singer to singer, down centuries, across oceans, shape-shifting all the while. “Go around songs” shed and acquire tunes, lose lines and gain verses; characters change their names and quite often swap genders. Verses familiar
Right now, according to British political theorist Jonathan White, the future seems very close. Our time horizon is closing in. Crises press in on us, shadowing contemporary politics with an “air of finality,” of “temporal claustrophobia.” Climate change, geopolitical instability, social inequality, out-of-control technology — together they invoke a sense
In a sweeping introduction to his 1958 book Australian Democracy the Melbourne political scientist A.F. Davies notoriously claimed that “the characteristic talent of Australians is not for improvisation, nor even republican manners, it is for bureaucracy.” Laissez-faire, he wrote, “was, in any full-blooded sense, a non-starter in Australia.” Why? “From
Does anyone remember “American carnage”? In his 2017 inaugural address Donald Trump portrayed a collapsing society, emphasising in particular the “crime and gangs and drugs” destroying America’s cities. It was a peculiar and disturbing speech, in part because it bore no relationship to reality. Then as now, America had many
