People & associates
Chris Berg
Protectionism, symbolism and Gillard's jobs plan
Timing is everything. On Sunday, Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced her "plan for Australian jobs" at the Boeing factory in Melbourne: $1...
Forget drugs - there's nothing natural about modern athletes
When the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) brought down its report into performance enhancing drugs in Australian sport, Prime Minister Julia...
Lincoln sheds little light on some of history's dark deeds
Sometimes the reaction to a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. In Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow controversially suggests...
If it looks and smells like a campaign, then it's a campaign
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the National Press Club that she did not want to start "the nation's longest election campaign", the whole...
The Orwell cult is way out of hand
Last Monday the left-wing magazine New Statesman declared it was "Orwell Week". How utterly shameless. George Orwell is no longer a journalist. He...
This doomsday endgame could last a long time
Earlier this month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists counselled the leader of the free world about the apocalypse. ''Dear President Obama,''...
Anti-discrimination laws: an act of confusion
Even when discussing complex pieces of legislation, it's worth trying to get basic concepts right. The Gillard Government's proposed...
Tax exiles vote with their feet
In 1979 Kingsley Amis, author of Lucky Jim, wrote to a friend, the poet Philip Larkin. Amis's son Martin had just published his third novel....
America fell off the fiscal cliff a long time ago. Now it's all about the landing
Karl Marx famously said history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. After avoiding the ''fiscal cliff'' a fortnight ago, the US faces...
Les Mis: a revolution for our times
What do the revolutionaries in Les Misérables actually want? This is not a pedantic question. Victor Hugo's 1862 Les Misérables - or,...