Spectator Australia · Lee Cohen
Charles does the diplomatic rounds in Washington and a columnist mistakes routine for revelation. The Sussexes priced the same product and sold it.
The Spectator's discovered the monarchy has a function — turns out the function is showing up. Charles in Washington doing what a head of state does when the head of state actually heads. Harry and Meghan didn't miss the memo, mate. They read it, priced it, and licensed it to Netflix.
Spectator Australia · Steerpike
Sir Philip Barton has gone on the record about the Mandelson appointment, and the diplomatic establishment has rediscovered its objections now that the favour-trading is happening to someone else.
Barton spent four and a half years watching the machinery work and now he's telling us the machinery's broken because someone's jammed a mate into the gears. The mandarins only discover the rules matter when the appointment goes to someone who didn't ring them first. Mandelson's the symptom — the disease is a system where every vacancy is a favour waiting to be returned.
Spectator Australia · Lindsay Brien
I had a great-uncle, the brother of my maternal grandfather, who died at Gallipoli. My father was in the RAAF…
The post Let us forget Welcome to Country on Anzac Day appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: From the Sydney Opera House to Anzac Day: A pattern of impunity | This Anzac Day, I Remember John Elmhurst Price | The Digger’s Code: Anzac Day and the Vernacular of Belonging | Booing, Welcome to Country, and the long activist game
The Spectator's discovered Anzac Day is sacred and the booing was a desecration — the same masthead that runs three culture-war columns a week treating every ceremony as a battleground, then acts shocked when someone treats a ceremony as a battleground. You can't spend a decade telling people the Welcome is a political stunt and then complain when they boo it like one.
Michael West Media · AAP
Survivors mark thirty years since Port Arthur, and the gun laws Howard pushed through against his own base remain the rare permanent policy this country managed to hold the line on.
Thirty years on and the gun laws still hold because Howard, for all his sins, did the one thing politicians dread — he made a permanent decision and copped the bullets for it. Every Nationals backbencher who's tried to chip away since has been told to sit down. Port Arthur is the proof that a country can choose not to be America. We just have to keep choosing it.
SMH · Matthew Knott, Brittany Busch
Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson wants Australia to consider long-range bombers while hedging on the AUKUS submarine deal he calls 'enormous risks'.
Paterson wants long-range bombers and a Plan B on AUKUS in the same breath — the man's ordered the entrée, the mains, and a backup restaurant in case the kitchen catches fire. The Coalition signed the submarine deal, sold it as the cornerstone, and now whispers about contingencies like a bloke checking the exits at his own wedding. Bombers, subs, true belief, hedged bets. Pick a posture, mate.
Michael West Media · AAP
After fifteen months of vacancy, Trump has named a former Virginia congressman as ambassador to Canberra — a posting that reveals Australia's exact rank on the American foreign policy ladder.
Trump's sending us a former Virginia congressman, which tells you exactly where Australia sits on the Washington map — somewhere between Guam and the dry cleaning. The post sat empty for fifteen months and the considered solution was a man whose foreign policy CV reads like a high school civics paper. Metternich sent envoys; the Americans send leftovers.
Spectator Australia · Flat White
Flat White spins a stadium boo into a treatise on activist strategy. The real long game is the masthead's, not the activists'.
The Spectator's discovered the booing of a Welcome to Country and they've turned it into a thesis about activist long games. Mate, the long game here is finding something to write about every fortnight that lets the masthead relitigate the referendum without admitting they won it. The crowd booed, the columnist swooned, and somewhere a sub-editor cracked a tinnie.
SMH · Nick Newling
The PM denies a change of heart on repatriating the four women and their children as both major parties tack harder on immigration.
Albanese won't say when, the Coalition won't say ever, and the kids in the camps grow another year older waiting for a country that can't decide whether they're a citizenship question or a polling problem. Both sides have discovered the same trick — call it 'evil choices' and the moral arithmetic does itself.
SBS News
Angus Taylor condemned Anzac Day hecklers while questioning the frequency of Welcome to Country ceremonies, with Barnaby Joyce and 3AW's Tom Elliott piling on.
Taylor condemns the jeering and in the same breath asks whether the ceremony should happen at all — the political equivalent of putting out a fire while quietly questioning whether the building was worth saving. Barnaby reckons the dead don't need welcoming. Mate, they're not the ones being welcomed. The living are, to a country older than Gallipoli by about sixty thousand years.
Guardian Australia · Josh Butler
Senator Helen Polley posted an Anzac Day video with a US rapper's explicit track playing over wreath-laying footage, then deleted it. She chairs parliament's law enforcement committee.
Helen Polley, chair of the law enforcement committee, can't enforce the audio settings on her own phone. The senator who's meant to vet the federal police vetted a Ching-y track over the Last Post and clicked publish. If she ran the AFP we'd be raiding the wrong house to a Pitbull remix.
Spectator Australia · Melanie McDonagh
The Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in Oxford is well and truly open; there was an Open Day this weekend.…
The post Oxford’s grand new building reveals the university’s misplaced priorities appeared first on The Spectator Australia.
What to read next: Oxford needs to fight back against the university | Russia’s university recruitment drive is an act of desperation | It’s little surprise that an Israeli soldier was caught desecrating a crucifix | The targeting of Trump tells its own tale
Schwarzman writes a cheque, Oxford builds a marble shed, and the humanities department gets a new postcode while the tutorial system rots in the basement. Eight hundred years of teaching reduced to a donor's name on the architrave — the medievals built cathedrals to God and at least had the decency to admit it.
