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Even though it does not matter, it is impossible to know where to begin. In the face of so much darkness and such an appalling absence of light, no combination of words perfectly placed, meticulously checked for truth, will make any of this okay. Or make any of it stop. This writer is as trapped…

It’s ironic that the Sydney Writers’ Festival event at which Laura Tingle made what has become a bizarrely infamous comment about the pervasive racism of Australian society was a live version of the Insiders we used to have when we used to have nice things on the ABC. Back when David Speers was safely sequestered…

We are being played for suckers, we know it, and yet we can’t resist the lure.  It is of course logically impossible for the News empire to simultaneously run a campaign proclaiming that Australia is experiencing a tidal wave of antisemitic racism of unprecedented force – headlined by Josh Frydenberg’s reinvention as the David Attenborough…

In the twisted unreality that pulsates from televisions and newspapers, unwittingly absorbed by the sponges we call minds, students camping on university lawns with cardboard signs, meditation sessions, and both halal and kosher catering options – all across the world (except Gaza, of course, because there are no universities left there) – are presented as…

I have flashes of climate grief, recognition in photographic bursts: Pakistani cotton farmers walking through knee-deep water trying to salvage a few white puffs of income off blackened plants; precious graves of ancestors being inundated by the sea in Fiji, the Torres Strait Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, the Marshall Islands; the view of fire-ravaged forests,…

If you do not harbour at least a smidgen of existential dread about the world we are leaving behind for our children, this beautiful boiling rock of overlapping catastrophes and bountiful television streaming services, then you are either not paying attention or are benefitting from the ruin in some nefarious, misbegotten, moustache-twirling fashion. I have…

The cyclonic wind that whistled across the nation at 1:15pm last Monday was the exhalation of a thousand sighs of blessed relief as survivors, women and their allies digested Justice Lee’s stark finding: “Mr Lehrmann raped Ms Higgins.” Justice Lee’s impressively exhaustive and winningly acerbic account of what happened on that fateful night and its…

A sense of exhausted déjà vu hung over Court 22A last week as it settled in for the latest round of hearings in the Lehrmann defamation case. Justice Lee had put the final touches on his judgment during Lent, “entirely appropriate”, he said ruefully, as he resignedly agreed to let Channel 10 and Lisa Wilkinson…

On the May 2018 Barrie Cassidy iteration of ABC’s ‘Insiders’, a clip resurfaced of Anthony Albanese speaking about killings in Gaza. With fuller cheeks and a fuller heart, he spoke with conviction: “Those people who have guns on one side, and on the other side have rocks – the people with guns have the responsibility…

Journalism In Australia hit new depths this month as the federal press gallery became increasingly frothy-mouthed about the politics of non-existent nuclear subs and has-been pop stars and something called religious freedoms and well, largely fuck-all else, madam, really. Holly Somebody in the UK said something and then Nigel in the UK said something, before…