A year ago, in the cabinet room, Australia’s most senior bureaucrat, Stephen Kennedy, made some remarks that surprised a few people. Meeting with economy-wide leaders gathered in Canberra for treasurer Jim Chalmers’ roundtable on productivity, the head of the prime minister’s department was discussing how the bureaucracy was using artificial
On the surface, Singapore gleams. It’s wealthy, orderly, safe. The trains (generally) run on time, the amenities are plentiful, and the tiny city-state punches above its weight in international rankings to do with governance and education. Singapore is regularly brought up by policy wonks and politicians around the world —
A few months ago, when I was in the middle of a dispiriting time wrestling with words and seriously questioning my professional choices, my friend Siobhán got in touch bearing unexpectedly good tidings. Siobhán is a writer and editor for a European news magazine who had commissioned me the year
Politics in Australia is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Measured in terms of their apparent emotional connection to issues and causes, Australians seem more “political” than ever, and yet political institutions and voluntary organisations are shells of their former selves. Twelve per cent of Australian employees are members of trade unions,
Some years ago, Belinda Webster, the founder of Tall Poppies Records, received in the mail a cheque for $10,000 from the writer and arts patron Barbara Blackman. It wasn’t payment for a large order of CDs or even a donation to the not-for-profit label, but a personal gift — a
One measure of the significance of a political concept is the persistence of contests over its meaning. As the political scientist Uriel Abulof pointed out in 2023, “self-determination” was “the single shared principle” to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler all subscribed — “in words,” at least,
Angus Taylor says changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount have put housing into “freefall,” blaming Labor’s “toxic taxes” for “a collapse in the housing market.” His comments followed news that house prices have fallen across most of the nation since May and ANZ forecasts that Sydney
Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann met just once, for afternoon tea, but the encounter had long-lasting consequences. The recent discovery of an unpublished short story by Sontag, “At Thomas Mann’s,” sheds new light on their conversation. The meeting took place on 28 December 1949. She was a starry-eyed sixteen-year-old admirer
Not long ago, Gina Rinehart asked an audience at a Queensland bush summit to imitate bulldozers. She had summoned on stage the bulldozer-in-chief, her ally Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation would — she said — smash the bureaucracy and red tape strangling initiative and enterprise. Rinehart seized on the precedent
Michael Young deserves to be remembered for many things but is in fact remembered for just one: he was author of that extraordinary book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Published nearly seventy years ago, Rise is enjoying a second life, thanks mainly to its remarkable prescience: it foresaw a populist
When IBM’s custom-built Deep Blue computer beat world champion chessplayer Gary Kasparov in 1997 — the first time a machine had defeated a world champion — a threshold was crossed, at least symbolically. Some saw the victory as a death knell for chess. But trains and cars have for many
On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce the public scepticism and
A year ago, in the cabinet room, Australia’s most senior bureaucrat, Stephen Kennedy, made some remarks that surprised a few people. Meeting with economy-wide leaders gathered in Canberra for treasurer Jim Chalmers’ roundtable on productivity, the head of the prime minister’s department was discussing how the bureaucracy was using artificial
On the surface, Singapore gleams. It’s wealthy, orderly, safe. The trains (generally) run on time, the amenities are plentiful, and the tiny city-state punches above its weight in international rankings to do with governance and education. Singapore is regularly brought up by policy wonks and politicians around the world —
A few months ago, when I was in the middle of a dispiriting time wrestling with words and seriously questioning my professional choices, my friend Siobhán got in touch bearing unexpectedly good tidings. Siobhán is a writer and editor for a European news magazine who had commissioned me the year
Politics in Australia is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Measured in terms of their apparent emotional connection to issues and causes, Australians seem more “political” than ever, and yet political institutions and voluntary organisations are shells of their former selves. Twelve per cent of Australian employees are members of trade unions,
Some years ago, Belinda Webster, the founder of Tall Poppies Records, received in the mail a cheque for $10,000 from the writer and arts patron Barbara Blackman. It wasn’t payment for a large order of CDs or even a donation to the not-for-profit label, but a personal gift — a
One measure of the significance of a political concept is the persistence of contests over its meaning. As the political scientist Uriel Abulof pointed out in 2023, “self-determination” was “the single shared principle” to which Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler all subscribed — “in words,” at least,
Angus Taylor says changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount have put housing into “freefall,” blaming Labor’s “toxic taxes” for “a collapse in the housing market.” His comments followed news that house prices have fallen across most of the nation since May and ANZ forecasts that Sydney
Susan Sontag and Thomas Mann met just once, for afternoon tea, but the encounter had long-lasting consequences. The recent discovery of an unpublished short story by Sontag, “At Thomas Mann’s,” sheds new light on their conversation. The meeting took place on 28 December 1949. She was a starry-eyed sixteen-year-old admirer
Not long ago, Gina Rinehart asked an audience at a Queensland bush summit to imitate bulldozers. She had summoned on stage the bulldozer-in-chief, her ally Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation would — she said — smash the bureaucracy and red tape strangling initiative and enterprise. Rinehart seized on the precedent
Michael Young deserves to be remembered for many things but is in fact remembered for just one: he was author of that extraordinary book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. Published nearly seventy years ago, Rise is enjoying a second life, thanks mainly to its remarkable prescience: it foresaw a populist
When IBM’s custom-built Deep Blue computer beat world champion chessplayer Gary Kasparov in 1997 — the first time a machine had defeated a world champion — a threshold was crossed, at least symbolically. Some saw the victory as a death knell for chess. But trains and cars have for many
On Monday Donald Trump issued an executive order that, if implemented, would substantially reduce the number of vaccines American children receive and, in practice, how many of them are vaccinated at all. While it’s not clear whether Trump’s order has any legal force, it will reinforce the public scepticism and
