Tag Archive for: "review"
On the screen: Cold warriors

The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, is a film of the Cold War with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as backdrop. The central characters, British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and GRU (Soviet military …

Reviewing the Department of Defence (part 2)

Australian defence reviews always wail about fuzzy accountability and indirect responsibility. The critique was immortalised by Defence Department Secretary Allan Hawke, back in 2000, when he decried ‘a culture of learned helplessness among some Defence senior …

On the screen: farce and fury

It was John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, who characterised his office most pithily and dismissively. The formidable Texas Democrat, ‘cactus Jack’, declared that the vice presidency of the United States was ‘not …

Defence Reviews: no Gnus is good news

Previously on the Life cycle of the Australian defence review we explored the life pattern of this robust herd animal from conception to gestation, birth, infant years and the review’s emergence into full maturity. This time …

Defence reviews: nothing Gnu here

If the venerable British naturalist David Attenborough was to make a television series entitled The life cycle of the Australian defence review, he would say that reviews are to Defence what the Gnu or Wildebeest …