The policy of negative gearing — which gives the owners of investment properties an unlimited ability to deduct losses from their overall taxable income — has come to symbolise the disparity between t

The war poetry of Wilfred Owen refuses the comfort of hollow consolation in response to the mass loss of life it also urges the sacrifice of the kind of bellicose pride that sees nothing but territo

With the US presidential election on the horizon, to say nothing of a number of Australian elections, our airwaves, news sites and social media feeds are filled with political rhetoric.Many of us ha

Given the dependence of many Australian universities on international student fees, a significant drop in enrolments with no corresponding increase in government funding will likely yield a decline in

One of Australias greatest strengths has been the remarkable diversity of its multicultural society. But is this also a potential source of weakness? In this live recording at the Festival of Dangero

Even for a nation obsessed with the concept of freedom or perhaps it would be better to say, concepts, not all of them easily reconciled, some of them utterly incommensurable the prominence it w

In democracies with a history of racial injustice, are colourblindness and recognition of a common humanity which were at the heart of the moral philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. desirable

When the first episode of Seinfeld went to air in 1989, it faced stiff competition from a packed field of American sitcoms. By its finale in 1998, the show about nothing had redefined the sitcom gen

Humour can often be a response to the sense of being ill-at-home in society perhaps even ill-at-home in the world. But whether it takes the form of fatalism or self-deprecation, all such forms of ir

In one form or another, comedy often proceeds from a certain exaggeration of life exaggerated bodily movements, or facial expressions, or scenarios, or reactions. These exaggerations have an unreali