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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana famously wrote. Australians, by and large, are quite ignorant of their history. They have been condemned to repeat it, in the 2020s. After 230 years, Australia has reverted to being an island prison. And, in an echo
Victoria has become the police state of Australia. Last year the socialist Andrews government placed Melbourne under curfew for the first time in its history. Not even in the darkest days of WWII was such a dramatic stripping-away of basic human rights ever imposed. Now, he’s doing it again.
It was back in 2015 that Foreign Policy bluntly described Barack Obama’s foreign policy as a, and I quote, “giant cluster-fuck”. Welcome back to the future, courtesy of Obama’s Veep, Joe Biden. As Foreign Policy noted, Obama might have inherited a diabolical foreign policy situation — but he went
It’s a common fallacy to assume that dictators are never elected. In fact, some of the worst dictators were elected to power rather than seizing it by coup. Famously, the Nazis were elected, although, to be fair, it was as a minority party. But Mussolini’s Fascists were swept
Every day, it’s as if Einstein and Orwell collaborated on a pithy quote: “Two things are infinite: the universe and the ability of intellectuals to believe foolish things”. The latest — though certainly not the last nor, sadly, the least moronic — eructation of academic cretinism is a proposal to scrap
Julian Burnside is a darling of the Australian green-left. Wealthy lawyer, twice-failed Greens candidate, refugee activist, climate botherer — and frequently accused of anti-Semitism. Truly, he is the very model of a modern lefty-liberal. Anti-Semitism is on the rise across the world, nowhere more sharply and ominously than on the “liberal”
BFD commentators are a smart bunch. Recently a commentator made the fair point that the UK’s sudden reduction in Covid cases after removing restrictions could be explained by people having fewer tests. As I say, that’s a fair call. But it’s pretty difficult to use the same
Margaret Somerville mercatornet.com Margaret Somerville is Professor of Bioethics at the University of Notre Dame Australia School of Medicine (Sydney campus). She is also Samuel Gale Professor of Law Emerita, Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Medicine, and Founding Director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law Emerita
Australia has made a very powerful enemy by standing up to the Chinese Communist Party. I’m talking, of course, about Australia’s own taxpayer-funded national broadcaster. If the princelings in Beijing are furious that Australia has challenged China over its culpability for the Wuhan plague, that’s nothing compared
When I was a teenager, we used to joke about “Queensland: the Police State”. This was, after all, the era when, as the Fitzgerald Inquiry showed, Queensland police and politicians were neck-deep in vice and corruption. The Bjelke-Petersen state government banned public assemblies without permits and police mounted military-style raids
Many years ago, I worked with a Chinese-born colleague. Eventually, he moved on to a high-paying job with an Australian company based in mainland China. Notably, before he moved back, he took out Australian citizenship. “Hedging your bets?” I joked. As it turns out, it probably wouldn’t do him
There’s a meme doing the rounds of social media, with Star Trek’s Captain Kirk asking Dr McCoy when the pandemic will end. “Dammit, Jim!” snaps Bones. “I’m a doctor, not a politician!” In memo veritas, we might say: Queensland government documents show that the premier of that
Once authoritarian governments have stripped away freedoms, they rarely, if ever, give them back without a fight. Anyone who thinks that the politicians who’ve ripped away our most basic human rights – freedom of movement, freedom to work, freedom to associate, freedom of speech – over the past 18 months are
Sir Bob Jones nopunchespulled.com Australia today has the pathetic honour of being the only country in the world which currently prohibits its citizens from foreign travel (excluding visiting New Zealand during the spasmodic bubble periods) without specific permission. They’re doing this under the provisions of the 2015 Biosecurity
In his book Silent Invasion, Clive Hamilton paints an alarming picture of a Communist China determined to dominate the world – including Australia – by any and all means it can. Hamilton outlines China’s multi-pronged strategy: everything from plain old spying, to using international students and “Confucius Institutes” to influence universities,
