You can tell a lot about someone by the friends they cultivate. Friends, after all, are the people you pick, unlike your family. Australia and New Zealand are family: a pair of occasionally squabbling siblings who’ve nevertheless spent the last century more or less getting along under the same
Naomi Levin aijac.org.au Australia’s foreign aid to the Palestinian Territories has been cut by 25% over the past year, with funding redirected and long-running programs brought to an end. The cuts – from $44.1 million in 2019/20 to $29.8 million in 2020/21 – are
You have to admire Geoffrey Blainey’s courage. His academic career was practically ended when he dared to stick his head ever so slightly above the parapet in the 1980s and murmur that perhaps unending mass immigration might be a strain on social cohesion. Perhaps appropriately for a historian, Blainey
As I’ve written several times, Australians are simultaneously blessed and cursed with two Scott Morrisons. On the blessed side, Morrison, more than ably backed by Foreign Minister Marise Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton, has shown the sort of steel against China that Australians have long been crying out
Gladys Berejiklian is generally regarded as one of Australia’s more sensible politicians. Apart from a notable lack of judgement in turning a studiously blind eye to a former boyfriend’s corrupt land dealings, the NSW premier mostly seems to live up to her image: a bit boring, but competent
The left have long venerated Scandinavia as a model of “democratic socialism”, even though Scandinavian countries aren’t remotely socialist. A fact that former Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen was at pains to point out to Bernie Sanders in 2015. But hey, there’s still the left’s beloved
The French used to refer to sadomasochism as le vice Anglais, hinting that infant exposure to harshly disciplinarian nannies bestowed the English upper-classes with a fetish for sexual humiliation. Watching the sad decline of Prince Harry – once a hulking, military blue-blood, now a snivelling, wet ginger, a George
In a key scene in Orson Welles’s classic Citizen Kane, an outraged trustee confronts Kane at a party celebrating his purchase of a newspaper. The newspaper is a bad investment, he warns: it lost a million dollars in just the last year. Far from being chastened, Kane replies: “You’
If there’s been one constant in the Wuhan plague, it’s been the utter incompetence of so many governments and bureaucracies. The almost-unbroken rule is that the more authoritarian they’ve been, the more completely, disastrously, useless they’ve been. Every time, “COVID dictators” have pursued policies that
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember sitting in class, robotically reciting the times tables. You’re probably hearing the sing-song in your head, right now: “One times two is two, two times two is four…” It was dull, repetitious – and absolutely foundational. You can probably
Effectively selling the Port of Darwin to a Chinese-owned company is one of the most spectacular strategic idiocies of recent decades. When the Northern Territory government handed a 99-year lease over the port to Chinese owners in 2015, even the strategically inept Obama administration questioned the decision. Because,
One significant outcome of the Tasmanian election has gone barely without mention by the mainstream media: the apparent lack of a “COVID bounce”. Premier Peter Gutwein was surely banking on one, when he called an early election on the flimsy excuse of having been pushed into minority government. After all,
Well, this weekend’s Tasmanian election seems to have been much ado about nothing. The result has left Peter Gutwein’s Liberal government exactly where they started: with a one-seat majority. Still, that’s quite an achievement in itself for Gutwein. Tasmania has long been a Labor-dominated state,
My old Mum had a wise saying about bullies: They can dish it out, but they can’t take it. The same is particularly true of cry-bullies: those who self-righteously harass or intimidate others while playing the victim. Jacinda Ardern is having a bit of a sissy-Mary
Phillip W. Magness aier.org Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research.He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States. This has been a year of astonishing
