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Keywords: Comedy

  • AUSTRALIA

    Priced out of parenthood: How Australia's housing crisis is lowering the birthrate

    • David James
    • 24 October 2024

    Soaring property prices and declining fertility rates are entwined in a feedback loop, threatening long-term economic stagnation. As younger Australians are priced out of the market, many are delaying or forgoing parenthood, leading to an increasingly divided and unsustainable society.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Has the developed world run out of ideas?

    • David James
    • 14 October 2024

    Advanced industrial societies are running out of ideas, masking stagnation with financial trickery, which is now faltering. In contrast, developing nations can clearly advance through industrial phases, especially by building infrastructure. For them, the path to improving lives is clear; for developed nations, it remains uncertain.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Remembering Maggie Smith’s enduring magic

    • Peter Craven
    • 02 October 2024

    If you care about theatre and film and television you should be grateful to have lived at the same time as Maggie Smith. She was an artist of incomparable power and nuance, of tremendous wit and complementary poignancy. The Harry Potter kids are lucky to have experienced such style and know-how and grace. 

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  • ECONOMICS

    Australia’s property boom is splitting society in half

    • David James
    • 10 September 2024

    As continued high interest rates and stagnant incomes put a strain on households, leading more Australians give up on the dream of home ownership, government attempts to manage both the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis may be doing too little too late. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The way we lived then

    • Ken Haley
    • 06 September 2024

    When we look back a decade hence on the way we lived in 2020, Shirley is going to serve as a literary time capsule. If you’re in search of a visceral feel for what it’s like to live in a specific place at a specific time — namely Melbourne in 2020, as the first pandemic in a century casts a pall over the zest for life itself — this book is a must read.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The best way to tax?

    • David James
    • 23 August 2024

    The term 'reform' carries an ambiguous weight. It can signify progress but just as often masks harmful change. Paul Tilley’s Mixed Fortunes explores the messy evolution of Australia's tax system, revealing how reforms, far from delivering clarity or fairness, reflect deeper ideological struggles over power and economy.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Surge in protectionism creates new era of global trade

    • David James
    • 06 August 2024

    In a world increasingly divided by geopolitical tensions, a new wave of protectionism is reshaping global trade. As nations turn inward, once-dominant economic models are being dismantled and new strategies are emerging. Is Australia prepared?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Is property investment our greatest vulnerability?

    • David James
    • 10 July 2024

    With soaring Australian house prices creating a generational wealth divide, the increasing inequity of the property bubble is damaging to Australian society. Could diversifying investment options, like industry super funds, lure people away from property and cool the market?

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  • ECONOMICS

    Waiting on the cash flow oracle

    • David James
    • 05 June 2024

    Early every month Australians with big mortgages anxiously wait to find out if the Reserve Bank will raise interest rates and put more pressure on their domestic budgets. It is a bit like waiting for pronouncements from the modern day equivalent of the Delphic oracle.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    What's the deal with Unfrosted?

    • David Halliday
    • 14 May 2024

    Jerry Seinfeld makes his directorial debut Unfrosted, a gleefully silly family comedy about the invention of the Pop-Tart. But the problem with this film is whether the sheer weight of comedic talent involved translates to actual laughs. Packed with countless cereal-based gags, it raises the question: Are disposable, pointless things worth anything?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Courtship rivalry

    • Eddie Hampson
    • 08 May 2024

    What at first appears to be a light-hearted romantic comedy glosses over the dark intensity of Challengers. The tangled and obsessive nature of the relationships within a love triangle mirrors the sport at the centre of Luca Guadagnino's latest. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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