So, it turns out that trying to prohibit a recreational substance by imposing massive taxes on it only encourages a black market. Who knew! Have they tried outright banning it? That always works. When the tax alone on a pack of cigarettes is over $30, what do the nanny-staters think
Apparently not content with leaving New Zealand in the poo, Jacinda Ardern also flung fists full of her dire legacy across the Tasman. As The BFD has been reporting, dozens of foreign-born murderers, rapists, and child molesters, have been allowed to stay in Australia on the orders of Immigration Minister
You know how it goes, one day you’re the most important cause there ever was, the next, you’re just some shmuck begging in a former Soviet province. Faster than it takes a social media normie to change their profile badge, today’s Great Moral Challenge is yesterday’s
Australia’s foreign criminals debacle just gets more mind-boggling by the day. As The BFD has been reporting, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles — a former boat-chasing “refugees” lawyer — issued Direction 99, which orders the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to give priority to allowing foreign-born criminals facing deportation to stay in Australia. That
Whenever some pro-Hamas ignoramus starts jabbering about Israel, they inevitably screech “zionism”. So, I challenge them to define zionism. Most can’t: they’re simply parroting a buzzword, and, as Orwell once wrote, “the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords”. They’re also too cowardly to say what
Who would have thought, back in the 2000s, that the Howard years would seem like a golden age of good governance? Or that John Howard would teach the self-appointed moral elite what ethics and leadership really mean? Yet, here we are. Labor, whose past great leader warned that, “If the
Andrew Giles’ position as Immigration Minister is now beyond untenable. The last Labor minister to have this much blood on his hands was Peter Garrett, under whose watch four apprentices died, due to the disastrously botched Pink Batts scheme. Garrett, to damn him with faint excuses, could at least plead
Like the Covid pandemic, the Gaza war is a litmus test of basic moral fibre. As depressing as it is to see how many have failed dismally, it’s at least reassuring — and often surprising — to see who passes with flying colours. I am not, it is putting it lightly,
There’s a phenomenon called “pathological altruism”. It refers to supposedly “helping” behavior that actually causes harm. It is caused by a combination of information deficiency, self-righteousness, and misdirected aims. Married to a closely-related psychopathology, virtue-signalling, the desire to be seen to be “doing good”, it’s a recipe for
He’s one of the most iconic images in Australian history. The towering, iron-clad figure emerging from the bush dawn in a haze of gunsmoke. Depending on your viewpoint, he was either an anti-Establishment rebel or a murderous Irish horse-thief with delusions of grandeur. Either way, the Ned Kelly legend
So far, Australians have mostly had a lucky break from the inherent consequences of “Net Zero”. Not from the power price rises indelibly correlated with increased reliance on wind and solar, of course. As even the Albanese government tacitly concedes, by way of its vote-buying cash rebate, household power bills
As Thomas Sowell has noted, one of the most destablising forces a society can ever endure is the emergence of a large class of university-educated “intellectuals” solely based in the Humanities. This is not to say, of course, that the Humanities are inherently to blame. After all, Sowell himself is
The most instructive way to get to Australia’s capital is by road. Sure, air travel is more convenient, as evidenced by the flocks of government-chartered planes scurrying out on a Friday night, but there’s something you notice, on the road. But the Australian Capital Territory is so small
At what point should politicians and bureaucrats be held to account for the blood on their hands? Surely, when their decisions lead directly to the death of innocents, something stronger than merely being allowed to resign and shift sideways is merited? The Victorian Labor government, after all, introduced its Industrial
As Edmund Burke noted of revolutions, a brief outburst of unhinged passion can undo the long, patient work of years, even centuries. Repairing the damage can take far longer than it took to wreak. The Covid pandemic unleashed its own revolution, one that the political-bureaucratic class had clearly long anticipated.
I’ve never been exactly a fan of former Olympian Nova Peris’ politics — after all, she entered politics on the Labor side at Julia Gillard’s behest, and has long co-chaired the Australian Republican Movement. Or, rather: she had. Because, although she might have chosen to go into politics on
