Today in The Australian
It was predictable, but nonetheless a pity, that the row over Australia Day would prove to be all heat, no light.
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Today in The Australian
It is one of the paradoxes of the modern world that while the concept of honour has about as much influence on daily life as that of chastity, honours abound, and — as this week’s polemics showed — so does the controversy that surrounds their award.
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Today in The Australian
150 years on, Germany’s past shows fragility of freedom
One hundred and fifty years ago this week, on January 18, 1871, the German empire was proclaimed in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, which the troops of the German states had just captured in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.
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Today in The Australian
The genius of democracy lies in converting adversaries into rivals, channelling their enmity into organised and orderly political competition. But because that competition relies on passions as much as on interests, there is always a risk that the antagonisms it mobilises will spiral out of control, unleashing the violence that democracy itself is intended to avoid.
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Today in The Australian
Coming at the end of a year in which Australians have been subject to restrictions that are unprecedented in peacetime, including widespread and persistent border closures, it may well have been appropriate for Scott Morrison to remind us that we are — or should be — “one and free”.
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Today in The Australian
“Anno bisesto, anno funesto” — leap year, fatal year — goes an ancient Italian saying, whose origins apparently lie in the devastating plague that hit the Italian city-states in the leap year of 1348.
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