Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, better known as Ahok, will be the first ethnic Chinese to govern Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. Ahok is not the first ethnic Chinese to gain political prominence in Indonesia, where…
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Tax reform is squarely on the agenda for the G20 Brisbane summit in November. The current international tax regime is broken and it’s going to take significant effort on a global scale to fix it. In a…
Back in January, Education Minister Christopher Pyne set up a contentious review of the national curriculum, to be led by two controversial appointees, ACU’s Kevin Donnelly and business academic Ken Wiltshire…
Whether you trust it or ignore it, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and accessed by millions of people every day. So would you trust it any more (or even less) if you knew people…
Stretching from north Africa to east Asia, many Muslims are engaged in a life-and-death tussle with extremists who are bent on extinguishing the diversity of opinions within the Muslim community. Atrocities…
Bill Shorten had little practical alternative but to name himself as the person police had been investigating in relation to an alleged rape in the 1980s. The opposition leader told reporters that the…
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is considering whether to approve the latest Medicines Australia code of conduct for pharmaceutical companies. The code lays out disclosure requirements…
The use of the term “sovereign risk” by Trade Minister Andrew Robb to describe the federal budget stalling in the senate shows just how fast and loosely the term has come to be used. But to whom is the…
China’s leaders have been vocal in their support of a new growth model, one where consumption leads the way. Economic commentators fret about what this means for Australia. One view is that economic pain…
The death of Berry Springs farmer Tran Van Lanh is the third confirmed crocodile-related fatality in the Northern Territory this year, and has left many people anxious about what they see as a growing…
It looks like it’s all over bar the shouting for the chance of this year bringing on a “super” El Niño. Or is it? The Bureau of Meteorology has brought the odds of an El Niño event down to 50%, from 70…
Art raises a lot of questions. That’s what it does. If an art work in a gallery or a news story has made you ask “what the …?”, it has already started to do its job. But for many who are not familiar with…
Last September, I sat down in the Capital Theatre in Bendigo to listen to American composer Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No.2 played by the Flux Quartet from New York. Sounds a nice way to spend an…
Bulk billing without restrictions has been a feature of the Australian health system since the introduction of Medicare in 1984. It is particularly important in general practice, as it means any Australian…
If multinationals operating in China were not already aware China has a competition law and is not afraid to use it, events of the past few weeks should have prompted them to call their lawyers and ask…
Opposition leader Bill Shorten has identified himself as the senior Labor figure investigated by Victoria Police after an allegation he had raped a young woman in the 1980s. In a claim made last October…
September 2005, Father’s Day. On a dark night a car veers off a country road near the Victorian town of Winchelsea and plunges into a dam. The man at the wheel survives, but his three children aged ten…
It may sound overly simple, but just five processes can define us as animals: eating, metabolism, reproduction, dispersal and death. They might not seem like much, but, thanks to a mathematical model from…
Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable disease and early death among Indigenous Australians, with smoking responsible for about one in every five deaths. Among Indigenous Australians, tobacco…
The US government has confirmed the veracity of a video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley by Islamic State (IS) militants. US president Barack Obama condemned the act overnight…
Julian Burnside and Daniel Reynolds wrote recently for The Conversation that: … animals do have greater rights than asylum seekers in Australia. In fact, Australian law requires that animals be treated…
More than 60 years after The Catcher in the Rye was first published, and four years on from his death in 2010, American author J.D. Salinger continues to divide people. He even divides some people from…
It is now more than three months since the Abbott government released its first budget. Amid the subsequent wrangling over controversial measures such as the A$7 GP co-payment and re-indexing the fuel…
Every scientific discipline has its own language, largely to save time when conversing with others from the same discipline. For instance, in trigonometry it’s much easier to talk about the “hypotenuse…
It’s tempting to view The Australian’s latest broadside at the ABC as just another salvo fired between our nation’s two biggest media organisations. But the coverage, based on an Institute of Public Affairs…