The Cold War is full of stories about words that nearly started a war. They are irresistible because they present catastrophe as a clerical error, something an alert interpreter might have prevented. Most of them do not survive inspection. The famous cases often turn out to be failures of context, myths about errors that never happened or embarrassments with no strategic consequence at all. The following four cases demonstrate this…
The road from studio to statehouse is older than television. Ronald Reagan began as a radio sports announcer, recreating Chicago Cubs games in a Des Moines studio from pitch by pitch wire reports, then hosted General Electric Theater and toured the country giving speeches for the company, before a televised address for Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 launched his political career. He kept this habit in office, delivering a radio…
Few phrases in political commentary do as much work for as little evidence as 'echo chamber.' The left deploys it against Rupert Murdoch and the Facebook algorithm, while the right uses it against the legacy press and universities. Each side is certain the other lives in one, yet almost nobody stops to consider about what it actually means. The term can be attributed to two people: legal scholar Cass Sunstein…
In February, at a gala marking its thirtieth anniversary, Sky News Australia announced it would retire its own name. The announcement came during the official opening of the network's new Surry Hills headquarters, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns presiding over the launch while Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott were among the guests, an eclectic turnout for a network about to shed the very…
Open any newspaper, scroll any parliamentary Hansard, and the same three words seem to appear over and over again - "cost of living." It has morphed into the default vocabulary for economic distress across the Anglosphere, from Westminster to Canberra to Washington. What merits attention here is not that politicians discuss prices, but that they have converged so completely on this particular formulation, one that erodes the substance of the…
Discussions of Australia's peculiar discomfort with visible success typically start with entrepreneurs who leave for the United States, or executives accused of getting ahead of themselves. Those are undoubtedly real examples, and ones worth taking seriously in their own right, but they are downstream of something that starts much earlier and gets far less attention. Long before anyone is founding a company or running a business, Australian schoolchildren are already…
Every generation of Australians seems to discover anti-Americanism for the first time, certain that its objections are a uniquely justified response to the uniquely bad behaviour of whichever president happens to occupy the White House. Donald Trump's approval ratings in Australia are now the worst ever recorded for an American president, which mainstream commentary seems to treat as a self-evident verdict: the tariffs, the erratic diplomacy, the war in Iran.…
Every few months, the same argument resurfaces - the Australian Broadcasting Corporation is biased. Critics on the right point to a segment, a tweet from a presenter, an op-ed commissioned from the wrong side of politics, and conclude that our national broadcaster has a partisan agenda. The ABC's defenders respond by pointing to audits and editorial charters, and the argument goes nowhere, as it always does. Both sides are arguing…
It is easy, perhaps emotionally satisfying, for the Liberal Party to blame the teal independents. They make convenient villains, ones who are affluent, inner-suburban, climate-conscious, professionally polished and effective at winning seats that once seemed permanently Liberal. Their campaigns have benefited from a sophisticated network of donors and organisers, most visibly through Climate 200. The teals are not apolitical neighbours who wandered innocently into Parliament House. Like any other political…
For decades, Western leaders have tried almost every possible approach to restrain the Islamic Republic of Iran. Sanctions, negotiations, inspections, diplomatic warnings and nuclear agreements have all been attempted, initially with great optimism but ultimately with even greater disappointment. By 2026, the central problem remains unresolved - Iran continues to expand its nuclear capabilities, strengthen its ballistic missile programme and empower violent proxy groups across the Middle East. The question…