Australia’s driving future? It’s probably in New Zealand.

Just outside Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, stands Ford’s once-bustling assembly plant. In the mid-1980s it cranked out Ford Britain’s large Zephyr and Zodiac sedans. Later, Ford Falcons were put together in New Zealand by the thousands.

These days the sprawling red-brick Ford plant has been given over to a collect...

On March 13, at a dinner with the cardinals who had just elected him as the new pontiff, Pope Francis quipped, “May God forgive you for what you have done.” When just two days later the Holy See publicly defended the pontiff — against accusations of complicity in human-rights abuses — men of lesser faith might have looked back at the Pope’s joke with suspicion.

No sooner had Po...

Julia Gillard did not just announce an election for September 14 in her first big speech of 2013. She challenged the whole Australian political system to assume a new level of maturity, transparency and integrity.

She held out the prospect of an election that would be fought on the basis of economic reality; one in which all parties have seven months to set out their policy prescri...

Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old folk hero of the internet who recently committed suicide after he’d been hounded for years by US prosecutors, was a great storyteller.

Last May Swartz recalled being introduced to a United States senator (he did not name the lawmaker) who was one of the strongest advocates of the proposed Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) leg...

At the weekend — as roads melted in parts of Queensland, trains crawled on heat-buckled tracks and long-standing temperature records disintegrated in the outback — Australia’s climate change agency slipped out a report confirming that the warming of the planet is behind our record-breaking heatwave and severe bushfires.

It is unlike the Climate Commission — headed by Professor Tim ...

According to Liberal frontbencher Eric Abetz, the Australian Greens Party is the “epitome of extremism”. Talk about the pot calling the kettle extremist.

Abetz was inspired to his alliterative epithet because a couple of Greens Senators, notably party leader Christine Milne, refused to condemn the anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan, over a hoax which — for about 90 minutes, until i...

Forty-eight hours after Adam Lanza did his terrible worst at Sandy Hook Elementary School, something else unthinkable happened in American public life: Two politicians declared the fight had to be taken to the gun lobby.

Without specifics, Connecticut Democratic Congressman John Larson called for measures to immediately halt access to certain types of guns and ammunition.

“We...

The irrepressible reporter Steve Lewis has been bounding around the Canberra press gallery for a couple of decades. He’s been with the The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and, these days, is still in the News Ltd stable writing on national politics for a spread of Murdoch’s local papers.

Lewis is no hard-drinking, hell-raising, out-all-night hack. He’s...

I picked up James, age three-and-a-half, after his first day at preschool in Massachusetts, where we had lately gone to live for a few years.

“How was it, mate?” I asked, knowing already from the look on his face that it had been okay, but that he also was glad to see me after his half-day among these new people with their funny accents.

“Goo-ood,” he said, in a tone somewher...

There are times, like last week, when you despair at the capacity of our politicians to obfuscate. But there are times, too, when the political process can be refreshingly clarifying.

One great example of that is a report delivered on Wednesday by the Senate environment and communciations legislation committee, which did a lot to clear the air on wind turbines. It didn’t get mu...

Short of getting sued, there is probably nothing more mortifying for an Australian journalist, or at least one who takes his or her professional reputation seriously, than an unfavourable mention on the ABC Media Watch program.

I speak from experience. I’ve never been successfully sued, but I did once suffer a spray on Media Watch.

It was humiliating, notwithstanding the fact...

Anthony Albanese, the government’s leader in the House, does have a nice way of summing things up sometimes.

There he was on morning TV Wednesday, talking about the Opposition’s “smear campaign” (to use Labor’s preferred terminology) relating to Julia Gillard and the AWU “slush fund” (to use the Opposition’s preferred terminology), and noting Tony Abbott’s silence on the issue....

It’s a wonderful word, mendacious, on account of its ambiguity.

According to the Macquarie Dictionary (Concise Edition), mendacious has two meanings. It can mean either “false or untrue” or “lying or untruthful”.

You see the distinction.

By the first definition, mendacious is a relatively mild word, for a statement can be false without being a lie.

If I t...

Somewhere about two-thirds of the way through Julia Gillard’s most recent epic press conference early on Monday afternoon, one reporter attempted to ask a question relating to a matter of some substance and relevance.

His subject of interest was sexual and physical abuse within the Australian Defence Force.

Earlier in the day, in response to several hundred plausible allegati...

All The Way Through Evening is a quietly luminous documentary film by young Australian documentary-maker Rohan Spong exploring the music of a group of New York composers who died of AIDS, mostly in the early 1990s, and the musicians and friends who are devoted to keeping their musical legacy alive.

At the centre of the film is pianist and concert producer Mimi Stern-Wolfe,...

If fuels were drugs, then coal would be heroin. It is to environmental good health what smack is to personal good health. Industrial civilisation has been addicted to coal for centuries, and it’s killing us.

Even the World Bank now sees climate change as a dire threat.

Only the woefully ignorant and those corrupted by vested interests now deny the urgent need to de-carbonise ...

No modern leader appears to put more faith in the power of speechifying than Barack Obama.

The US President is prone to periodic charm rampages, and his visit to Myanmar on Monday — the first by a US president — will go down as one of the more notable ones. Obama visited as part of a three-day tour that also took him to staunch US ally Thailand and to the much less reliable Cambodi...

Twitter death hoaxes have been around about as long as the microblogging platform itself. (Who can forget Jeff Goldblum's tragic New Zealand cliff plunge in 2009?) But no public figure’s demise has been falsely touted as routinely, or as gleefully, as that of Margaret Thatcher.

In August, a bogus ‘Thatcher is dead’ tweet elicited this effusive tribute from Fox News anchor Sean Hannity....

“This is the end of my policing career,” New South Wales Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox said on Monday. “I realised that from the moment that I decided to speak out.”

And so Fox essentially threw himself on his sword when he dared to tell Lateline last week what he believes to be true about the Catholic Church deliberately hiding sexual abuse of children, including effort...

Amid the 54 lawyers who jammed the benches on Monday when the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption opened its long-heralded public inquiry into corruption allegations at the Labor Party’s top, a trim, silver-haired figure in a dark suit and black boots slid gently into the far back row.

Ian Temby has the timelessly good-looking face of a lawyer who has long enjoyed the...

In the hours immediately following the announcement of the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, the British press has made much the fact that he is an Old Etonian. But probably that’s an indication that few people in Britain know very much about him.

Justin Welby, 56, is presently the Bishop of Durham and he’s only been a bishop for a year. Some say that inexperience may count against h...

It was a good night for women in America. A record number will serve in the US senate (19 seats and counting). And there is growing consensus that the women’s vote proved decisive in the election results. (CNN exit polls also showed that women voted for Obama in far greater numbers than men — 55 per cent to 45.) More on that later.

But for all this the US ranks just 78th for female...

There was a time when federal parliamentary Question Time was the best show in town. The people came in droves in hope of seeing one of then Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating’s sporadic star rhetorical turns.

Now, sometimes, it was disappointing; sometimes he skated over the edge into crude and brutal language. “Dogs returning to their own vomit,” is the one most often ...

There is a woman who lives in Sydney’s northern beaches who owns a hearse. She lent it to my friends once, when they wanted to hold a mock funeral for higher education. It wasn’t the largest protest ever staged on the thinning green front lawn at the University of Sydney, but it got the media’s attention. Everyone loves a photo op.

Everyone, that is, except federal MPs Anthony ...

Tony Abbott is looking a bit beaten down these days. He has been for a little while actually.

People who watch these things closely — and that means almost everyone in this merciless place — are noticing and reacting.

In the press gallery, that means lots of speculation over coffee, if not yet so much in print and on air, about who might replace him. Give it a couple more of ...

Whatever her other virtues, Greens leader Senator Christine Milne is not usually thought of as a satirist.

But at her press conference early yesterday, called to record her party’s opposition to the latest attempt by the government to stop the flow of asylum seekers to our shores, she brought a prop that brilliantly lampooned the new plan.

It was a map of the world, with one ...

The former journalist Maxine McKew tells a wonderful little story early in her new book, Tales from the Political Trenches, a memoir of three years inside the Labor Government. A little story, but, nevertheless, hugely telling.

But it didn’t happen in her years inside; the moment came some four years earlier — in 2003 — when the Labor Party sounded out McKew’s interest...

On Wednesday, October 10, a comedian stood up in the Great Hall of Parliament House in Canberra and delivered a 15-minute performance that contained 15 seconds of material that has been described by Australia’s Prime Minister as “deeply offensive”.

Treasurer Wayne Swan said it “crossed the line”; Labor MP Craig Emerson said he felt compelled to leave the room in disgust.

The ...

They call it American exceptionalism. It holds that America is culturally superior to the rest of the world, a beacon to the rest of the world, and has an evangelical mission to spread American values to the rest of the world.

President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney paid due lip service to it in the last of this election’s three Presidential debates, th...

The old political maxim goes that sincerity is the secret of success; once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Well, Mitt Romney has a long way to go on the fake sincerity front. He may smile and frown at all the right places in debate, he may have mastered the Ronald Reagan diction, but the effect is not the tiniest bit real.

And that, I would suggest, was never more obvious th...

Isn’t it just grand that older folk have embraced the Internet with such gusto? Why, Gramps and Granny can now Skype with the far-flung grandkids, and bitter octogenarian megalomanic billionaires can tweet about all the “toffs”, the “scumbags”, and the “lying” who’ve tried to bring their media empires down.

Bitter octogenarian megalomanic billionaires like, well, Rupert Murdoch...

It was our first week in Lebanon, and my husband and I were driving up the freeway that links the south of the country to Beirut. A hulking 4WD pulled in front of us, with two people sitting in the front. As the boot of the car came into view, my jaw dropped. Sitting on the floor of the car, hugging her knees, was a Sri Lankan woman, dressed in a pastel servant’s uniform. The whole b...

My only question is this: If Barack Obama were to come down with a bad case of laryngitis just before his next debate with Mitt Romney, could he send his understudy instead?

After the President’s metaphorical speechlessness in the first debate, actual speechlessness might be Obama’s best tactic next time round.

Let Smokin’ Joe do it.

Seriously, Joe Biden’s performan...

So there was the ABC’s uber-interviewer, Tony Jones, on Lateline Thursday night, bumping on and on and on in the same stupid rut as all the rest of them, as he interviewed Treasurer Wayne Swan. Did he accept Julia Gillard’s assertion that Tony Abbott was “a misogynist, a woman-hater?” he asked.

Then, after getting an answer, he asked again: “The word means, literally, ‘The...

It doesn’t take a sharp eye to notice some changes at The Global Mail today. After months of feedback, planning and hard work we’ve launched a more user-friendly design for our site. I call it TGM 2.0. Things change fast on the web. We’re still young, just eight months old, but already we’ve been on a technological adventure. I joined the ranks at TGM, in Janua...

At no point in the life of web 2.0 has the divide between the people who write the news and the people who consume it been as starkly defined as this week. Julia Gillard delivers a ripping speech on sexism and misogyny, and before she’d even sat down the web was ablaze with commentary and praise for her words. No one out there was focusing on Peter Slipper. No one, that is, except th...