The Canberra Press Gallery is not a homogenous group although its members do seem to suffer from a fair amount of group think; preference for gotchas and speculation about what might happen next in politics; and heavy dependence on leaks and drops for copy.
One part of it – the Murdoch part – subsumes this into propaganda and sneering opinion pieces.
Just recently our former High Commissioner to the UK, George Brandis, pontificated in his regular Age column that Oliver Cromwell was ‘boring until he wasn’t’.
It was apropos Labour Leader and next UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. For those not aware BTW – Starmer didn’t seek a knighthood as many have done with generous donations to party funds throughout English political history right up until today– it just went with his job as DPP.
“Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”
That’s what the jury announced in answer to each of the charges against Donald Trump in New York.
In the unlikely event that Peter Dutton could manage the succession of problems with nuclear power stations – persistent massive cost overruns; State legislation banning nuclear; and NIMBY backlashes -he would still have a big problem – lack of staff to run the plants.
Currently there is an international shortage of engineers and other professionals and the nuclear power industry around the world, according to the Weekend Financial Times, is desperately trying to persuade thousands of retired staff to return to work.
The Murdoch media is about as renowned for irony as it is for balanced political coverage.
The Australian published an article (22/4) about Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign to protect the state from dangerous influences. It was an article which could be read ironically but more likely it was something The Oz approved of and probably hoped would lead to a similar policy in Australia.
When Robert Menzies made his Forgotten People speech on 22 May 1942 he set in train a process which, despite his many references throughout to men, resulted in the creation of a long coalition between Menzies’ Liberal Party and women.
This coalition of Liberals didn’t start to break down until the 1970s and 1980s with a Victorian Labor researcher, Angela Jurjevik, probably being among the first people to identify the trend.
If you are in Melbourne and travel though the CBD along Collins Street on the 109 tram you pass a nondescript building called Collins House.
It looks a bit scruffy and nowadays it is dwarfed by high rise buildings. Yet once Collins House was the centre of a sprawling empire of mining, media and other companies linked through a maze of cross shareholdings.
At last weekend’s Victorian Writers Festival three authors – two of them also bookshop owners and one of them an author and enthusiastic supporter of bookshops – talked about books and the threat to reading.
Ann Patchett and her husband own Parnassus Books in Nashville Tennessee. Lauren Groff, another novelist and her husband Clay Kallman, own a Tampa Bay Florida bookshop, The Lynx, which proudly stocks all the books Florida’s Governor Ron De Santis and Florida schools and libraries have banned.
In 1946 in the aftermath of World War II the German philosopher Karl Jaspers undertook a series of lectures about questions of guilt and recovery.
He argued that the most effective cleansing of Germans must consist of a profound change in their attitude towards discussion. “Germany can only return to itself when we communicate with each other,” he said.
Australia once thought of itself as a country of opportunity and innovation – economically and socially. Like most countries self-beliefs, the thought was not always matched by reality.
Indeed, it would arguably be better to see Australia as a land of lost opportunities with many of those losses being biggest and most damaging in recent decades.