If anyone doubted that Australia’s most important diplomatic relationship is now brutally transactional, Thursday’s mugged-by-reality announcement in Washington should relegate the idea to fantasy ...

Books & arts In Romancelandia Jock Given 4 February 2025 Stigmatised in the publishing world’s past, romance writers were ready for its future ...

National affairs Who belongs in the Senate? William Maley 6 December 2024 Pauline Hanson is wrong and Fatima Payman right about the question of eligibility ...

To sum up the last half-century: in 1972 and 1974 Labor won all five Tasmania’s seats. Then from 1975 to 1984 the Liberals ...

Government schools, even in Queensland, will at last get the full Gonski. That is a win: not as big a win as it would have been in 2012 when the “I Give a Gonski” movement was riding high, and more a ...

What is a tribe? Anthropologists use the term very cautiously, for it has lost its earlier meanings of ethnicity and bounded social groups and taken on connotations of primitivity or blind adherence ...

Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada begins with the preparation of a room. There’s a practised efficiency as well as a ritual quality to the way three people unpack boxes, move furniture, shift a Christmas ...

Treasurer Jim Chalmers pulled one unexpected rabbit out of his hat in last night’s budget — a one percentage point cut in the bottom marginal tax rate, from 16 per cent to 15 per cent from 1 July next ...

The Melanesian arc running from New Guinea to Fiji is also an arc across Australia, the geography loaded with history and strategic weight. Australia’s life in Melanesia is studded with dreams and ...

The name Miles Franklin will be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Australian literary culture. When the writer died in 1954 she bequeathed funds to create a literary award to be made ...

Donald Trump has declared 2 April “a Liberation Day” for the United States because “we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries.” It’s the day ...