Tasmania is a small place. It’s hard to know anyone who doesn’t know someone else you know, or isn’t related to. (Yeah, yeah, I know: cue the ‘two heads’ jokes. I’ll just point out that large swathes of NZ have a higher kinship intensity than Tasmania.
Insanity is said to be doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results. In which case, Australia’s ruling elite are barking mad. Well, we knew that anyway. But it’s one thing to “know” something, quite another to have it demonstrated beyond all denial. Because, despite
Once again, we have a government pandering to religious minorities in a transparently mercenary attempt to stitch up a powerful voting bloc. No, I’m not talking about so-called “theocons” and conservative Christians. Despite the left’s obessive gibbering about Scott Morrison’s and Tony Abbott’s religious faiths, “theocons”
Astonishingly, there’s one member of the Albanese government who seems to dimly grasp the basic rule of economics: the allocation of scarce resources. Resources Minister Madeleine King is warning against the Greens’ and environmental groups’ lobbying against gas developments. It’s pure politics, of course: King’s seat is
For months in 2013, the Australian left-media was practically glued, en masse to the Gillard Government’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The ABC was especially salivating, dedicating hours per day to broadcasting testimony (by contrast, it barely mentioned the concurrent Royal Commission into trade union
Dictator Dan may be gone, but his legacy lingers on in the smoking rubble of Victoria’s economy. It’s the second time in the past quarter-century that an electorally popular Labor government has left Victoria all but bankrupt. Indeed, Andrew’s legacy of debt outsizes even Cain’s — but
Viv Forbes Saltbush Club Viv Forbes has spent much of a long life working in the North Australian outback in grazing and mining activities. He has employed aboriginal assistants has inspected aboriginal stone tools and cave paintings, and has been involved in legal matters involving native title claimants. Why I
As I wrote recently, the “Indigenous Voice” referendum has unintentionally been the making of Jacinta Price’s political career. Just a year into her first term as a federal senator, Price is already being talked about as future prime minister material. Her front-and-centre role as a co-leader of the No
For all the “progressive” posturing of the Australian left, it was the Liberal Party who elected Australia’s first woman MP in the lower house, Dame Enid Lyons, and Australia’s first Aboriginal parliamentarian, Sir Neville Bonner, and first Aboriginal cabinet minister, Ken Wyatt. Some political observers are speculating that
It’s on for young and old, down here in Tassie right now. I often describe Tasmanian politics as like a cross between a local Rotary club and a special school. But, as the 1996 documentary of local council elections, Rats in the Ranks, showed, just because politics is local
It’s a generally accepted maxim of Australian politics that state and federal politics have little to do with each other. Mostly, it’s fairly true-ish, but, at the same time, sometimes state bells can chime very ominously for federal politics. For the last few years, the floundering of the
Mel Marquis Mel is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of competition law and policy. Prior to joining Monash he taught law for 10 years at universities in Italy. He has lectured and taught law courses in many countries, including Europe and Asia. Neerav Srivastava Neerav’s thesis investigates
So-called “fact-checkers”, as anyone with a functioning critical faculty is well aware, have very little interest in actual facts. Instead, they function almost universally as narrative-confirmation machines. Contrary to the media’s self-serving palaver about “speaking truth to power”, “fact-checkers” are in the business of telling lies for power. The
As New Zealand’s panjandrums of “combatting extremism” like to babble, “If there’s just one Nazi flag at your rally, it’s a Nazi rally”. Worse, we’re finger-wagged, “If nine people sit down at a table with one Nazi without protest, there are ten Nazis at the table”
If you think it’s a clever idea to send out a malware bot as a major recruitment campaign and still barely manage to suck in more than a couple of thousand confused Boomers, you just might be a “youth climate activist”. The “clever” online campaign was the brainchild of
For all their blatherskite about “truth-telling”, the troughers of the Aboriginal industry persistently peddle one of the biggest, most damaging lies about Aboriginal culture. This is the lie that traditional Aboriginal culture was a peaceful, agrarian utopia. The appalling violence of contemporary Aboriginal society, when they even admit to it,
