Quadrant – April 1999 SIR: Garry Woodard’s piece about Australia’s role in the 1938 Munich affair is interesting (January~February 1999). But why the assumption that Chamberlain’s concessions at Munich, and Canberraís involvement in those concessions, were a disaster for the West? Seen from other directions, the conventional view of Munich
MoreLetter to the Editor – Quadrant December 1998. SIR: M. Rathbone (September 1998) rejects my claim that the brutality of Western intervention against the 1917 Russian Revolution contributed to later brutality. He says the intervention was peripheral. Maybe. But my own conclusions based on living and working in the Soviet
MorePublished in The Quadrant November, 1997 SIR: During the Khruschev liberalisation years of the early sixties, I was working in Australia’s Moscow embassy. In those days it was not hard to meet Russians critical of the regime. But on one thing they were all agreed. This was the correctness of
MoreQuadrant – October 1996 SIR: Lloyd Peasley (September 1996) points out the costs to Australian consumers from tariff protectionism. But the choice is not between tariff protectionism and no protectionism. In Australia’s case, it has to be between tariff/subsidy protectionism and exchange rate protectionism. The latter has imposed far greater
MoreThe Quadrant – July-August, 1996 So Bill HAYDEN sees a shameful contrast between Australia’s multicultural openness and Japan’s racial exclusivism. I could ask him when Australia will ever have a governor-general, prime minister, or foreign minister who can speak any Asian language, or any other difficult language for that matter,
MoreSIR: Brett Mason (September 1995) quite misunderstands my points. I agree with him entirely when he says that Canberra fifteen years ago was filled with soft leftwingers apologising for communist regimes. My point was that when the Vietnam intervention was getting underway another fifteen years earlier the Canberra intellectual climate
More‘The Japanese do not like dry, rationalistic argument. They will have a Shinto wedding, be educated in a vaguely Confucian ethic and when they die they have a Buddhist funeral. The Japanese see no contradiction in this at all.’ THIS IS AN EVENING of some significance for me. I have
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