John Maynard Keynes famously said that when the facts change, he changed his mind. Your average politician would say, instead: “When the polls change, I change my mind.” Victorian premier Daniel Andrews has changed his mind. Clearly, the polls have changed. Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has largely backed Prime Minister
It’s a flashback to the most searing images of the Cold War: families separated by a border wall and police patrols. Except, we’re not talking about Berlin, 1961. No, 60 years later it’s Australian families who are being kept apart, even on Father’s Day, by a
Mary Politicians in Australia are digging themselves a deep hole in their efforts to coerce mass vaccination of the population against Covid-19. The problems arise at several levels. First, it is now very clear that the protections offered by the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are not long-lasting. Israel, with one
“Nudge theory” is the idea that the hoi polloi are too stupid to be left to their own devices so it’s up to their “betters” to herd them with carrots and sticks. This has been the ruling conceit of the elite classes ever since Plato grumbled that all that
How ever did we win World War II? Were we always this fearful and risk-averse? Or are we reaping the grim harvest of generations raised in padded cells by an obsessively safety-first culture? Once, at least some of us seemed to really believe that “Who Dares, Wins”. The ruling creed
Elisabeth Taylor mercatornet.com Dr Elisabeth Taylor is a graduate from the University of Sydney and Commonwealth scholar with a PhD in Medieval Women’s History from Cambridge University. She now works as a researcher, writer and speaker, presenting on issues relating to gender and sexuality. Australians who rely on
For most of the last year or so of the Covid pandemic, New Zealand and Australia have looked on the United States with smug contempt. The shoe is very much on the other foot, now. We here in the Antipodes remain under the harshest lockdowns outside of a welded-shut apartment
Forget kangaroos, surfers and Crocodile Hunters. Australia is, apparently, the Land of the Vaxholes. Led by the nose by a shameless media pack, Australians have swung from panicking that Covid vaccines were going to kill us all, to insisting they’re the absolute greatest thing, ever. Now it’s anyone
Our neighbour Australia has woken up to the fact that trying to get rid of Covid doesn’t work. Even places like NSW and Victoria have woken up. NZ Herald reports. There have been 107 Covid-related deaths since the Sydney outbreak began in mid-June, and there are currently 957 people
It’s official: nothing, but nothing, is safe from the “diversity and inclusion” crowd. Once upon a time, it was your Obergruppenfuhrer types who dedicated all their time to meticulously analysing racial quotas. Now, it’s the Cancelkulturfuhrers of the Twitterreich casting their gimlet eyes over everything, even children’s
Business owners in Queensland are ropeable that football players and their families are allowed to travel across borders when no one else is. I have a friend who has been trying for weeks to bring their partner to Tasmania. They’ve been stymied by red tape, every step of the
No wonder Victorian premier Dan Andrews was so keen to sign up to Xi Xinping’s notorious BRI: he is clearly bent on reinventing the state as a cheap knock-off of the Chinese communist state. Complete with feral media bootlickers, ever-ready to denounce counter-revolutionaries. Mental health campaigner Patrick McGorry has
In the popular (read: left-wing) media narrative, the war in Afghanistan sits somewhere between WWI and Vietnam. It was, we are told, a colossal waste of blood and treasure. Fought on a false premise and doomed to fail. But is that true? It certainly isn’t true of WWI; despite
There have been few politicians more demonised in recent Australian history than Pauline Hanson. To be fair, Hanson initially invited criticism with her foolish comments about Asian Australians. But the media-political response was feral. The media in particular, in a fore-runner of Trump Derangement Syndrome, were indecently giddy at the
