SOME perceptive social commentators compare population ageing with climate change as a key challenge in the 21st century. But in the community at large it gets much less than its fair share of attention.
But, like climate change, population ageing is unprecedented, enduring, profound and pervasive. It will change the shape of the society in which we live.
Since the industrial revolution, the world’s population has been growing at an unprecedented pace. Successive and ever larger cohorts have kept the age structure of the population young. This young population has proven to …

FREE speech is fundamental to freedom and the very basis of democracy. All ideas, whether great or small, common or controversial, benefit from debate. Silencing argument, by contrast, is counterproductive and dangerous. It closes minds, forecloses options and ultimately risks removing effective political power from the hands of the citizenry.
Yet history demonstrates a pronounced tendency among committed ideologues of all types to silence anyone who disagrees with them. In Australia and the West, it is the so-called progressives from whom free-speech advocates have the most to fear.

The shrillness that defines …

I WAS alarmed to hear that the hugely talented director of the National Art School, Darlinghurst, Anita Taylor, may not be reappointed.
Given that student recruitment is strong, public programs are blossoming, the gallery schedule is sparkling, and there’s a raft of high-profile sponsorships and donors, the powers-that-be should be rejoicing to have Taylor in charge. As stellar as its history has been as Australia’s oldest school of art, the NAS had been dawdling around the turn of the century, constrained by the school-level art education priorities of the NSW Department …