Opportunity Knocks: How Hard Work, Community, And Business Can Improve Lives and End Poverty, Tim Scott, Hachette Book Group, pp. 280, $27.57, ISBN: 154605913X It’s common to look at American politics, but politics anywhere, and lament the division and lack of progress. All camps feel like they’re losing ground. Tim Scott – Republican Senator from South Carolina – is the counterweight to this. A descendant of West African slaves, Scott’s memoir takes us through his journey as a lousy academic performer in school – pigeonholed like so many other young black men to either ‘make it’ in entertainment or the […]

It was former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating who supposedly said to ‘Never get between a Premier and a bag of cash’. And Australians have learnt to get out of the way. Federalism is, to say the least, messy. Even well before responding to COVID-19, it had become synonymous with overlap, duplication, waste and blame between state and federal governments. Kevin Rudd, to his credit, aimed to improve things through performance measures and a sea of commonwealth-state agreements. And Tony Abbott, commendably, tried to invigorate change through a white and green paper. While both efforts either stalled or fell short […]

This week the Queen provided comfort to millions worldwide. Her address, only the fifth of its kind, spoke of gratitude, reflection and unity in our constrained and difficult times. In addition to politicians and medical experts, notes the British writer Douglas Murray, many of us also “wanted to hear from the Queen, who remains the person best placed in our national life — or any nation’s life — to put in context what will hopefully soon recede in the national memory into one of those ugly things that just sometimes happens (italics mine).” Her speech, drawing from her other sparing […]