The Bloody Crossroads

‘This book makes no claim to be a “theory of everything”’ wrote Paul Mason at the start of Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere, his 2012 investigation of the many protest movements to have emerged in the wake of the global debt crisis. Written in the heat of the historical moment, that book was indeed more reportage than economic analysis, its […]

Diversity Council Australia’s #WordsAtWork campaign copped a lot of flak last week, not all of it from the usual suspects, and not all of it unjustified. Certainly Julie Bishop’s characterisation of it as an attack on free speech was way over the top – reminiscent of George Brandis at his most self-satirising – and the broadsides from the anti-PC brigade […]

‘If you want a vision of the future,’ O’Brien tells a broken Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.’ Alternatively, you might consider this scenario, from the comedy sketch show That Mitchell and Webb Sound on BBC Radio 4 … The time is about thirty years in the future; the place, the […]

An interview on Saturday Extra recorded in March 2014. Listen to it here.

The front cover of And Yet … strikes a defiant note, showing its author, Christopher Hitchens, doing the two things that killed him: chugging large glasses of Johnnie Walker Black Label and smoking cigarettes down to the filter. But the more interesting challenge thrown down by this book – a collection of essays, reviews and opinion pieces published in the […]

In the wake of the San Bernardino shootings last week, speculation about the killers’ motives was, not unreasonably in the circumstances, rife. Were the killings related to a workplace dispute – to a personal or professional grievance – or were they terroristic in nature? US President Barack Obama was careful to differentiate the two possibilities, to caution against jumping to […]

This is the introduction to the book I stopped writing on 15 September 2015, when Malcolm Turnbull grabbed Tony Abbott by the pants and pulled him back down the greasy pole. It was to be called Operation Shirtfront: Tony Abbott and the Crisis of Australian Conservatism. I always knew it might not see the light of day, and was perfectly […]

When I read in the telly guide that the Treasurer Scott Morrison was going to be making Annabel Crabb a Sri Lankan curry on the season-opener of Kitchen Cabinet I thought it must be a joke. Oh right, I can remember thinking; and what else will the one-time Minister in Charge of Not Answering Questions about Border Security and Refugees […]

‘Events, dear boy, events,’ British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan is said to have replied when asked what was most likely to blow his government off course. What goes for politicians goes for writers too, as I discovered for myself on 14 September, when Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. At that time I was writing my own book […]

Though it didn’t attract a huge amount of comment, Bill’s Shorten’s article for Fairfax last Thursday may turn out to be an important moment in the campaign for marriage equality – not for the outcome, which is all but assured, but for the manner in which we reach that milestone. His argument – not new, but newly prominent – is […]