Boardrooms believe they have mastered the “Theory of Everything.” Margaret Court makes a fair point. Alan Joyce is using Qantas as a corporate “bully pulpit” from which to propagate – and to elicit consent to – a biological falsehood: the notion that two men (or two women) can form a marriage. “There’s a strong business case”, Joyce claims, for same-sex marriage. That’s because, he went on to argue, “there are a lot of shareholders these days who will only invest in companies

Seeing, but not recognising, your enemy Peta Credlin should have known. As the former chief of staff to former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and before that Deputy Chief of Staff to Malcolm Turnbull, she more than any one should have known who were numbered among Tony Abbott’s enemies. The other day, Credlin wrote in The Daily Telegraph of Christopher Pyne’s “Black Hand” dinner boasting about – among other things – his having always been, together with George Brandis, in the T

It’s not something we want to hear. Retired chief of the defence force, Admiral Chris Barrie, has claimed that “complacent” Australia was unprepared for war and that world political leaders were “sleepwalking” towards one. Barrie’s reference to “sleepwalking” echoed the title and thesis of Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914”. Barrie’s remarks came at the 2017 Australian Leadership Retreat which ran over 18 – 21 May on the Queensland Gold Co

Daylight robbery. For whose children this great work of education? About Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s “Gonski 2.0” and the funding of schools public and private: something is missing. It’s odd that a major policy announcement on schools funding could be made without discussion of the principles engaged. Just joking. It’s all about the politics and the money, of course. Especially about the politics. ‘Oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of admiration from the commentariat have greeted the

Globalisation and its social price. Here is an absolute must read before the second round of the French presidential elections on 7 May. It’s an article in City Journal by Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. The subject of Caldwell’s essay is Christophe Guilluy and the “Coming Apart” of France. Christophe Guilluy is a French property consultant, self-styled geographer and a widely respected analyst of Franc

Antonio Gramsci: the master intellectual behind post-socialist Marxism. With no God everything is permitted … even capitalism. If, during this Eastertide 2017, you want to understand where Australia is headed culturally and politically, you could not do better than read Paul Kelly’s “New progressive morality rapidly taking over from Christian beliefs” published in The Weekend Australian of 15 – 16 April. Some lines from this article astonished me to read: things I have long b

The wilderness pregnant with prospects. Abbott is back – this time with power and conviction. On February 23 Tony Abbott launched the book Making Australia Right published by Connor Court and edited by the distinguished James Allan. The book is a collection of essays from Australia’s right-of-centre luminaries. The speech Abbott gave on the occasion was the best of his political career and may turn out to be the turning point in his political fortunes. This was his policy pun

Christmas is wonderful because it confirms a childlike cosmology. Christmas is about God or nothing. The phrase “God or nothing” hit me as I visited a vast shopping mall the other day in search of a mobile phone repairer. The mall is the cathedral of our times. The antithesis of a cathedral built to the honour and glory of God, the shopping mall has no architectural centre. (Or could it be the food court?) The place roared and blazed and teemed. “Oblivion,” the thought checke

The other Paul — a cooler, harder edged Paul — joined me yesterday for lunch over The Oz. He is not a regular. He seems reticent of joining the usual gang when they gather, tub-thumpingly, at my table. Anyway, there were just the two of us on this occasion and I was glad. Paul is such a — How can I put it? A Stephen Maturin phrase springs to mind — such a “deep file” that I’m happy the usual crowd failed to gather. I am all ears, then, and just as expected, he delivered him

On the fragility of human judgments. A typical Saturday: morning walk; spot of gardening; café luncheon; The Weekend Australian. (I would never ruin my little treat on sacred Saturday by opening the pages of the SMH, even less The Age, still less The Canberra Times.) I’ve been reading The Oz since I was 17 and I know the current crop of leading reporters and columnists almost by heart. I hear their familiar voices rising up before me as I spread out the paper over the coffee

What sets the leading edge atheist apart from his comrades is that he treats denying the existence of God as a matter of tactics rather than of strategy. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Back in 1879-1880 when he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, 37 years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Fyodor Dostoevsky looked deep into the heart of the socialist project: “For socialism is not only a question of the conditions of labour … but rather, for the most part, a question of atheis