Articles – Archive

Judas is one of the most hated people in history. There are now some attempts to clean up his image but overall I think that little can be achieved. For example, in January 2006 Vatican scholar Monsignor Walter Brandmuller suggested that Judas was simply "fulfilling his part...

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The location of the "Sydney" warship has been another reminder of the great assistance that science can provide historians. Another reminder in the last few days has been the way that the British have been cleared of murdering Napoleon. But his death carries a warning to peo...

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Sydney is now one of the most tolled cities in the world. The United States is having the same sort of debate that Sydney is now doing over whether tollways are the right way to go. Americans pay taxes - they do not want to pay road tolls as well. The idea of a private for-p...

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The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) is one of the country's oldest voluntary organizations. This year it is celebrating 126 years of service and I was a speaker at its NSW Parliament House luncheon this week. In ...

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For the first time in Australian history, the first major action of an incoming government has been the ratification of an international treaty. The Rudd Labor Government has ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. ...

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24th April 2008. This morning I spoke at Wesley Mission's Frank Vickery Village at the very moving ANZAC Day service. Part of my talk concerned a new book on Albert Jacka, the first Australian to win a Victoria Cross in Wo...

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How would you like to be able to sell your energy to the energy companies? With the right policy, people worldwide can profit from creating their own renewable energy. There is now an international campaign to have governments permit customers of energy companies to sell ene...

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The old Soviet Union used to be notorious for the way in which people had to waste time standing in queues. In many occasions, people had to wait literally for hours at a time. I wonder if Australia is now going the same way. ...

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The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has again warned about the growing problem of homelessness. I have been reading - rather belatedly - a lecture on how a group of Christian lay people decided to take their own action on homelessness in Melbourne in the 1930s, which led to chan...

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A historic debate took place at the United Nations General Assembly in New York last week - the first major debate on the emerging issue of "human security". The keynote speaker was His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, who is well known internationally fo...

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Schools have changed a great deal over the years. Last week, on May 28, about 50 people in this state were given the opportunity to be a Principal for a Day and so see what teaching and learning are like nowadays at the sharp end. This was part of the state's observance of E...

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Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's recent decision to hold the 2020 Summit showed the value of bringing people together from all walks of life for an exchange of views to generate new ideas. There is an international organization that already does this very well - and I think that ...

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Not being a person interested in superstitions and so ignorant of their silly histories, I decided to find out about the significance of Friday the 13th. The most common explanation for the belief that Friday the 13th is u...

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One of the organizations that helped trigger the post-war environment movement - The Club of Rome - has turned 40. I was in Rome last week for the commemorative activities. I have been a member since the early 1990s and I always return from the annual meetings full of new id...

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You never get a second chance to make a first impression. A great deal depends on the opening minutes of a meeting. If a meeting gets off to bad start, then it may not recover its momentum. There is now an industry based o...

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The Bill of Rights debate is on again. At the Prime Minister's "Australia 2020 Summit" at Parliament House in April 2008, the Australian Governance group's report "...expressed strong support for a statutory Bill or Charter of Rights, with minority support for a parliamentar...

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This week's arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, is another indicator that life is slowly getting more difficult for dictators. Having spent 13 years on the run, he will now be transferred to the United Nations war crimes trial in The Hague. ...

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Information is now easier to capture because it is in digital form - rather than a person having to tabulate figures by hand (which is what I was doing in the War Office in London in the 1960s as a junior clerk). The progress in developing computers has enabled this revoluti...

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This weekend there will be the usual annual pilgrimage to the village of St Radegund, Austria (near the German border) to honour a "brave and simple farmer". This year's pilgrimage will be different because the Vatican - with unusual speed - beatified this victim of Nazi hor...

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The Rudd Government has now been in power for exactly one year. It has been a tough year but the Government has managed to survive a lot of turmoil. Kevin Rudd is the first Western leader in history fluent in Chinese langu...

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This will be my last Radio 2GB News Commentary for Wesley Mission. This commentary is therefore a farewell to the listeners and readers over the years. The series began in 1991, when I joined the Mission's staff for a seco...

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It is now fashionable to talk about the “rise” of China. But in fact China’s current remarkable economic growth means simply that China is “returning” - and not “rising” - to world importance. About five centuries ago it was responsible for about one-third of g...

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