Chris Bonnor is an education writer, speaker, advocate and former NSW principal. He has served as President of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council and is author of The Stupid Country and What Makes ...

Books & arts Alone like a finger Nick Haslam 13 June 2025 It was writing that “separated me from everything,” says German writer Judith Hermann in a captivating collection of biographical essays ...

Washington’s ambitions in the region aren’t going unopposed. Among the groups challenging the dominant narrative of the Micronesian islands as “the tip of the spear” for the US military in the western ...

Tasmania presents something of a political conundrum. Back in May 2023 its Liberal government fell into minority after the defection of two members, John Tucker and Lara Alexander. Premier Jeremy ...

What happened when the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died on Saturday at ninety-seven, came to puritanical Adelaide in 1960?

The world’s highest court has just given the Australian government a giant climate headache. For all the rhetorical, political and practical support Australia offers the small Pacific island ...

Last week, kicking off a 15 per cent reduction in the US state department’s workforce, more than 1300 officials received termination notices. Those considered surplus included officials with expertise ...

Australia’s new communications minister Anika Wells had some big files in the in-tray she inherited in May. Among the most pressing was the future of free-to-air TV. Her predecessor, Michelle Rowland, ...

Books & arts The art of disagreeing Jock Given 23 August 2021 “We should be civil with those we don’t know, and aim to know them well enough that we can be uncivil,” argues a new book From the archive ...

There’s a story about Hubert Parry, King Charles’s favourite composer, hearing Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal Five Orchestral Pieces Op. 16. It was in 1914, two years before Parry composed “Jerusalem” to ...

If the biggest surprise of May’s federal election was its lopsided result, a secondary one was the extent to which the Coalition had guzzled down the Voice referendum Kool-Aid. Down to their ...

To really understand a regime, it seems, you need to see inside its political prisons. And in recent years, a succession of intelligent Australians has unwillingly performed that service and written ...