Essays and columns for Quadrant, the Australian magazine of ideas, since 2024.
In the April 2024 issue of Quadrant, I began a column with Enoch Powell’s observation that all political lives, unless cut off at a happy juncture, end in failure.
In two polls taken in the second half of August, One Nation stood five or six points ahead of the Coalition.
In November 2018, officials at Immigration New Zealand began work on replacing the ageing biometric systems that verify identities and manage immigration risk.
A sense of dread has settled over schools and universities.
By 1974, at the Allensbach Institute she had founded a quarter-century earlier, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann had given a name to a puzzle first visible in her election research of the 1960s.
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651, amid the wreckage of the English Civil War.
Campaign slogans used to sell the future.
In early 2004, I wrote a letter to a man I had never met.
Across the democratic world, voters are losing patience with the machinery that stands between a vote and its result—the courts, parliamentary procedures and constitutional limits that do not care who won.
It is strange to observe a nation act irrationally and against its own interests.
© Dr Oliver Hartwich