Blogs
A Tale of Two Shoes
February 3, 2012
Everyone knows about that shoe but how many know about the other one? Also a right shoe, ironically, it too slipped off the foot of a woman under duress.
Read more...Who is an Aborigine?
February 3, 2012
Extract from Relhiperra: About Aborigines by Paul G. E. Albrecht. Relhiperra, first published by the Bennelong Society, is available as a free Quadrant ebook.
Read more...The Hitchhiker's Guide to Climate Change
February 2, 2012
Did Douglas Adams anticipate Climate Change modelling?
Read more...The love bank
February 2, 2012
It has mystified me – why Australians are so negative about their banks, especially at the time of the threatened recurrence of the Global Financial Crisis?
Read more...Constitutional indigestion
January 30, 2012
Australia Day 2012 may well be the moment when the proposed changes to the Australian Constitution, to grant special favours to people of Aboriginal descent, unravelled.
Read more...On Tony Abbott
January 31, 2012
He has become, at least to outward appearances, a man more ordinary.
Read more...The real threat of climate change
January 31, 2012
There is simply too much ego, money, careers, reputations and political commitment now depending upon dangerous anthropogenic climate change for its advocates to even consider that the threat might actually not be so dire.
Read more...Tinker, Tailor, Gary Oldman
January 31, 2012
Gary Oldman’s wonderful, but only because you know he’s not being Gary Oldman’s usual screen self. Instead he just potters about with a big pair of glasses on.
Read more...Sinking, sinking, not
January 30, 2012
Tuvalu and the Maldives would like money from the West as victims of the West's CO2 emissions. However, their purported problems are largely solvable by their own efforts, without the need to lay guilt trips on the developed countries.
Read more...Silencing Constitution debate
January 27, 2012
He is no constitutional authority. He is a law student, and a badly misinformed one at that.
Read more...Australia Day Hate List - 2012
January 26, 2012
2011 was a glorious year for the Left. They had a wonderful time being cranky, and even found some new targets to loathe.
Read more...Baby power packs punch
January 25, 2012
Like a confidence trickster intending to fleece the unwary, the Left will inevitably ramp up a disingenuous campaign to lower the voting age. It is coming. Conservatives better be prepared or be steamrolled.
Read more...Australia Day poems
January 23, 2011
In celebration of Australia Day Lionel Farrell reads poems by Kenneth Slessor, “Banjo” Paterson, Dame Mary Gilmour, and Christopher Brennan.
Read more...The Constitution is anything but racist
January 24, 2012
The report to change the Constitution to recognize indigenous people is written in bad faith. It attempts to intimidate Australians by exploiting the emotions of guilt and shame.
Read more...Back to skool with Julia & Kevin
January 23, 2012
The Perth public high school where I teach last year provided all year nine and ten students with laptop computers. The scheme was a fiasco from the outset.
Read more...Racism on the menu
January 23, 2012
Marcia Langton: “Patrick McCauley, speaking for the old Quadrant club of white men who lunch…”
Read more...Everybody’s Wiggling
January 20, 2012
This really is serious news: given the state of the rest of the economy, we may be looking at a Wiggles-led recovery in 2012.
Read more...I confess!
January 19, 2012
I’m a ninety-nine percenter and I’m not going to take it anymore!
Read more...IPCC correction
January 19, 2012
How a Quadrant Online book review led to the IPCC making a correction. Tony Thomas tells the story.
Read more...Climate correction in NZ
January 19, 2012
A casual visitor to a museum makes a complaint, an official agrees it is valid, and pledges to get to work on a correction. Is life meant to be this easy?
Read more...Gillard EXPO-ED!
December 1, 2011
“Friends, you here in this room and your colleagues around the nation will be the leaders of that change. So by the middle of this century, we will be a different nation – cleaner, smarter, richer.”
Read more...Misogynistic historical fantasy
January 18, 2012
Sam Sorbo: “The filmmakers, seemingly confused about Thatcher’s actual, incredible successes, focus on her dementia and femininity while categorically denying her capability.”
Read more...Man the boats!
January 17, 2012
Perhaps I’m just at core very old-fashioned, but there is something culturally attractive about the ‘hold doors open for women’ ethos writ several orders of magnitude larger and translated to the sinking ship scenario.
Read more...Ersatz conservatives
January 16, 2012
I don’t know whether Judith Sloan and Heather Ridout consider themselves conservatives. I lose the sense sometimes of what being conservative means to some people.
Read more...Sweet monsters
January 16, 2012
Nothing better brings an understanding of one’s humanity and its imperfections than the necessity to look after one’s grandkids.
Read more...A Tale of Two Disciplines
January 13, 2012
As a demonstration of how to present scientific discovery and understanding, the contrast between the possible discovery of the Higgs particle and climate science progress could not be more different.
Read more...Better dead than Green
January 12, 2012
I’m inclined to think the Greens could do more damage to the party they help to victory, given the price they will seek if they hold the balance of power through accumulation of Senate seats.
Read more...Bravo real Iron Lady
January 12, 2012
Miranda Devine: “The last movie I walked out of was a Reservoir Dogs video, during the dental torture scene. But I was pregnant at the time and squeamish. This time it was Iron Lady.”
Read more...Streep-phobia
January 11, 2012
John Nolte: ‘The overrated Meryl Streep (whose acting meter broke decades ago) proves once again that this current crop of actors the world is saddled with is about as classless a bunch as we’ll ever see (hopefully).’
Read more...Doomsday fun
January 11, 2012
Tim Blair: ‘Like most normal people, when I think of modern performance art I immediately want the world to end.’
Read more...The Iron Lady
January 10, 2012
Meryl Streep, who plays the title role as Mrs. Thatcher, gives a superb performance.
Read more...More climate madness
January 9, 2012
Governments, the media and a large portion of the intelligentsia have subscribed passionately to an unshakable belief in the certainty of the imagined threat and the urgent necessity to drastically reduce use of the fossil fuels which are essential to our entire modern civilisation.
Read more...Gimme, gimme socialism
January 9, 2012
Coveting and socialism are more or less synonymous. The whole socialist edifice is built upon some people coveting and confiscating the goods made by others.
Read more...Dollar facts & fiction: debate
December 31, 2011
John Stone: "The first draft of history, they say, is written by the journalists. It would be truer to say that it is written by the politicians and political advisers from whom most journalists obtain their copy. Given also the strong Labor Party affiliations of most Canberra press gallery journalists, the 'history' that initially gets written is invariably weighted towards Labor’s version of events."
Read more...Tacitus made it up
January 1, 2012
All those fabulous sociological details about the Germani in his history were bogus. Tacitus simply made it all up, borrowing from standard Roman stereotypes about foreigners.
Read more...Christmas 2011: John Izzard
December 22, 2011
Almost as good as Quadrant. The slaughter never stops. The take-over bids never end. Best read wearing protective clothing.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Sophie Masson
December 21, 2011
Not to be missed. Action-packed, tender and tragic, it features magnificent acting, settings, costumes and extraordinary battle scenes.
Read more...Havel vs. Kim
December 21, 2011
The deaths of Václav Havel and Kim Jong-Il ought to have been the occasion of some reflection on right vs. left.
Read more...All I want for Christmas
December 21, 2011
Those in this country pushing for a bill of rights never tire of looking for backdoor ways to get some part of one in.
Read more...Christmas 2011: John Dawson
December 20, 2011
Reviewer Peter Craven says that if Christianity makes you scream you won’t like this book. It does, but I did.
Read more...Christmas 2011: George Thomas
December 20, 2011
Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy examines what it was that gave England its special enchantment and cast a unique spell over millions all over the world who had never been there.
Read more...Government of sorrows
December 20, 2011
Gillard’s response to the latest tragedy has been superb to date; she hasn’t opened her mouth and said a word. No sentences with fourteen references to Tony Abbott; no attempt to deny four years of failure.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Steven Kates
December 19, 2011
The book that I would recommend for Christmas reading is the one I wrote myself.
Read more...What did we do wrong?
December 19, 2011
News item: “Julia Gillard's department cancels subscriptions to newspapers outside Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.”
Read more...Plimer at the ABC
December 16, 2011
It was supposed to be about Ian Plimer’s new book but somehow it turned into arguing about the subject matter of his interrogator’s own book, and TV drama series.
Read more...Christmas 2011: John Muscat
December 16, 2011
Were I to encounter Gaia-loving guru Tim Flannery, I would have just five words for him.
Read more...Killing the boys
December 16, 2011
School principals have long suspected a mindset among education department bureaucrats and academics, the majority of whom are women of the leftist persuasion, that boys have had it “too good for too long.”
Read more...Christmas 2011: Peter Smith
December 16, 2011
It’s definitely worth reading because of Mamet’s switch from being, in his words, a brain-dead liberal.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Merv Bendle
December 15, 2011
My holiday books reflect my research interests in war and remembrance.
Read more...Has it worked?
December 15, 2011
There is no better time to judge the quality of the outcomes that the Murray Darling Basin Authority claims will be achieved by delivering additional environmental water.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Michael Kile
December 14, 2011
Would you just like to get to know your inner alien?
Read more...Christmas 2011: Hal G.P. Colebatch
December 14, 2011
Looking at much of the Western World today I see an arrogant, domineering political class, growing more and more Saruman-like.
Read more...The countercultural mainstream
December 14, 2011
The book was an underground classic when it was first released back in the 1960s. Now it is the mainstream. We are not better off as a result.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Philippa Martyr
December 13, 2011
I don't know what it is about Christmas that makes me think of gangster movies, but they do seem to go together quite nicely. This may be a reflection upon my upbringing.
Read more...The Twelve Days of Carbon Christmas
December 13, 2011
Putting the carbon into Christmas with a traditional carol.
Read more...A history of scientific alarms
December 12, 2011
There is a long and dismal history of alarming forecasts that were literally too bad to be true. But many people believed these predictions that human actions would harm the environment and thereby cause disaster for people.
Read more...Mute media & climate madness
December 12, 2011
The contents of this document, turgidly drafted with all the UN’s skill at what the former head of its documentation center used to call “transparent impenetrability”, are not just off the wall – they are lunatic.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Gavin Atkins
December 12, 2011
If anyone can provide a decent explanation as to why there is not a huge statue of a stern but benevolent Clive James standing astride the Princes Highway at Kogarah, I want to hear it – and then shower them with abuse.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Ian Plimer
December 12, 2011
Our thinking and language is driven by two millennia of Christianity. Every aspect of our lives is underpinned by ever-evolving Christianity.
Read more...Free Plimer book
December 9, 2011
Free copies of Ian Plimer's new book, How to Get Expelled From School, for teachers and librarians.
Read more...Christmas 2011: John Stone
December 9, 2011
I look forward to reading the recently published The Conservatives: A History. I can hardly wait.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Greg Melleuish
December 9, 2011
I would definitely recommend Anne Henderson's study Joseph Lyons: The People's Prime Minister, which rehabilitates one of Australia's most important Prime Ministers.
Read more...Barbarians on the Thames
December 8, 2011
The word “stupid” implies only a prudential and not an ethical reason for Duggan’s behavior; presumably, there were others at whom it would not be stupid to shoot.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Peter Coleman
December 8, 2011
The book of the year for me is Australian Poetry since 1788 edited by Robert Gray and Geoffrey Lehmann. A wonderful anthology that will not be replaced for many long years.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Bob Carter
December 7, 2011
Donna Laframboise points out that scientists are only human; regrettably, therefore, they can be as short-sighted, political and dishonourable as the rest of us.
Read more...Christmas 2011: Bruce Beresford
December 7, 2011
At the risk of appearing to be a totally pretentious prat ...
Read more...Climate of corruption
December 6, 2011
Large numbers of IPCC Lead Authors, including those connected to half the chapters of the Working Group I report of 2007 and all the chapters of the Working Group II report, are employed by, or advisors to, environmental activist groups, such as Greenpeace.
Read more...Barry Cohen still doesn’t get it
December 6, 2011
Mr Cohen, and those of his political ilk, should take some time to reflect on whether their good intentions actually do more harm than good. If only they would at least reflect on the evidence, instead of moving in robotic fashion to the next piece of social engineering.
Read more...The politics of water
December 5, 2011
Claims that irrigators were responsible for low river flow during the drought were irrationally shouted by environmentalists seemingly oblivious to the fact that most irrigators were not allowed any water during the drought years.
Read more...On reforming Islam
December 1, 2011
Who really represents Islam? Are the Islamists the real face of Islam, or are the reformers? Do the moderates in fact faithfully reflect genuine Islam, or do the jihadists?
Read more...SBS TV – A case of racial vilification
March 7, 2011
How then should we approach a professor of history, a documentary producer and a taxpayer funded television station who, in the SBS television series Immigration Nation, wove together a sackcloth of half truths, conspiracy theories and lies in a serious attempt at racial vilification.
Read more...Jacques Barzun’s Century
November 30, 2011
This essay was first published in Quadrant, April 2007, and is republished to celebrate Barzun’s 104th birthday.
Read more...How Gillard governs
November 30, 2011
The problem, as most Australians see it, is that Gillard isn’t sure which corner to turn until someone hands her the directions. The image of Gillard as a fumbling go-between is firmly set.
Read more...Oz prelates vs. Abbott
November 25, 2011
The opposition should be pleased with the preferred prime minister poll. And Tony Abbott is right to ignore the theologians at The Australian.
Read more...Big Green Depression
November 28, 2011
You can never keep the Greens happy, short of converting Australia into a defenceless, impoverished, wind and solar powered, bicycle-friendly, forested, backwater, albeit criss-crossed with high-speed rail.
Read more...Julia's glass Slipper
November 28, 2011
The words Harry Jenkins spoke as he offered his resignation to the parliament-assembled said one thing— the pictures of him saying them, suggested something entirely different.
Read more...Left Turn
November 25, 2011
Let me recommend this book at the highest level I can recommend any book.
Read more...What is Wrong With the IPCC?
November 24, 2011
The global financial plunge has highlighted the folly of any nation taking action which harms its own comparative economic advantage.
Read more...Eurodämmerung
November 24, 2011
According to José Manuel Barroso, it’s Götterdämmerung all over again. A Eurozone meltdown will send the continent into a 1930s depression, with all the historical imputations of rampant nationalism run amok.
Read more...What White Aborigines want
November 24, 2011
Ssssh: “Listening respectfully to the ideas and feedback provided by Indigenous staff members and not interrupting.”
Read more...Climategate redux?
November 23, 2011
More leaked climate emails. Anthony Watts says, “They’re real and they’re spectacular!”
Read more...Lawyers vs. Bolt
November 23, 2011
“There are a lot of people and businesses to thank this month, with the success of both the Deadly Trivia Night and the Federal Court racial vilification case.”
Read more...Quadrant & the Bolt Trial
November 23, 2011
Some of the texts published in Quadrant and Quadrant Online dealing with the White Aborigines Trial.
Read more...Crisis or confusion?
November 23, 2011
Crisis, crisis, crisis - almost everywhere we turn there is said to be a crisis. But does this mean we are seriously threatened by some event that we cannot avoid and, if so, what is the extent of damage that might occur to our lives?
Read more...Tiger hunting
November 22, 2011
I simply cannot see the appeal of watching Tour de France bike racing. I don’t see why they don’t skip all the biking and just give the win to the team with the best steroid chemists, or those with the nicest lycra outfits.
Read more...Techno-econocratic putsch
November 21, 2011
With just five weeks to Christmas there are conspiracy theories in the air and they most certainly have a theatrical ring to them —which more than likely gives these theories much credence.
Read more...Unholy alliance of errors
November 21, 2011
The danger is that someone in government, particularly on the Left/Greens side, might actually think there is some sense to Robert Leeson’s arguments, when, of course, there is none at all.
Read more...Same old ABC
November 21, 2011
“I shall now return to my old decision never to do a TV appearance for the ABC.”
Read more...Abbott 1, Obama nil
November 17, 2011
Tony Abbott showed that he has a greater love for America and her abundant ideological gifts to the world than Obama does; the influence of Mark Steyn was unmistakable. (Steyn should be charging Abbott royalties).
Read more...Heretics beware!
November 17, 2011
Let’s not be half-baked in our dedication to non-discrimination: in these sexually amorphous times, surely it’s discriminatory to exclude men from maternity leave, purely on the basis of gender, right?
Read more...Go Green, go bust
November 16, 2011
The slight dip in support of late for the Coalition comes from twice siding with the Green Party over the Labor Party. If there’s a near universal rule for the Coalition it should be that when Labor and the Greens differ, go with Labor.
Read more...Inspiring loyalty
November 15, 2011
Syrians have an excess of loyalty. They are so grateful to their President for not shooting them to death that they are loyal to him to a fault.
Read more...Where did it all go wrong?
November 15, 2011
They are fed, clothed, medically cared for, sheltered. Their children educated and their spirit destroyed. Their life is little different from animals in a zoo.
Read more...Saving the children
November 14, 2011
God forgive me. God forgive my cowardice. I should have picked them up and run. We should pick them and run now.
Read more...Willing to pay more tax, not
November 13, 2011
In one of those tepid “all things to all men” editorials in The Australian - how it manages to get tagged as being conservative is beyond me - it described Mr Abbott as being especially audacious in scouring the budget for savings while rejecting revenue from “massively successful export industries...willing to pay a larger share”. There goes that word again.
Read more...Labor without leadership
November 10, 2011
Gough Whitlam was my first experience of a Labor government in Australia. True I was a little left at the time but in retrospect I can’t help feeling warmness towards Gough and can understand Jim Cairn’s longing for a lost hippy youth with Junie Morosi.
Read more...Speaking Black truths
November 10, 2011
We have had so many self-appointed people, black and white, who have decided to be our spokespeople, who know nothing about us and our issues. They are the people who have been running the show all these years without ever asking us whether it's okay for them to do so.
Read more...Origins of Bennelong Society
November 10, 2011
This paper by Geoffrey Partington on the origins of the Bennelong society is an excellent introduction to its work.
Read more...The Bennelong Society
November 10, 2011
The Bennelong Society is grateful to Quadrant for agreeing to host the principal documents of the society.
Read more...Anonymous
November 9, 2011
If, and it’s a moderately big ‘if’, you can put to one side the putrid underlying message or theme of this movie, then this is great watching.
Read more...
Quadrant's new editor
November 9, 2011
Seriously, I’m going to complain to someone. Quadrant has appointed a new editor and no one bothered to tell me.
Read more...Skeptics "BESTed"?
November 8, 2011
The press of late is full of stories that a new scientific study called the “BEST” project has verified that the planet is warming strongly; that the skeptic case is defunct; and that skeptics now have no place to hide.
Read more...Goodon'ya, Alan!
November 8, 2011
I got my first taste of Australia in a Qantas plane. Our family, two adults and our five-year-old daughter, exhausted after all the trials and tribulations of becoming stateless refugees from the USSR, boarded a Qantas aircraft bound for Melbourne.
Read more...Drachma Dramazone
November 8, 2011
There is not a little indecent irony in a debt-addicted Labor government, propelled there by panicked, wasteful spending and ideological predisposition itself attempting to strike the pose of fiscal rectitude and beneficence against European and Hellenic fiscal dysfunction.
Read more...Delinquent science
October 31, 2011
Donna Laframboise is a Canadian investigative journalist and feminist. She smelt a rat about the IPCC two years ago. The more she investigated, the greater the stench.
Read more...On David Horowitz
November 6, 2011
Horowitz begins by reflecting on the nature and character of his dogs, whom he takes for regular walks. Perhaps those who don’t love dogs will think this an odd way to begin a book on the meaning of life, but it seems entirely natural and fitting.
Read more...Correcting the correctors
November 6, 2011
Is an error in The Delinquent Teenager a mistake by the author, or the IPCC?
Read more...Demise of the insider
November 4, 2011
In the past, investment banking failures tended to be associated with operations on the fringe of the investment world. Now, the prospect of failure has become mainstream.
Read more...Another fine mess
November 4, 2011
I doubt whether this combination of circumstances is ever likely to arise again. We are suffering a rare event: a perfect storm of incompetence, impotence, extremism, and delusions of grandeur.
Read more...Bonfire of the racial vanities
November 3, 2011
“Yes, it’s about my case - and it’s the account that’s got closest to describing the full and sinister farce.”
Read more...Where is justice?
September 29, 2011
When Andrew Bolt was mocked and abused in the forecourt of the Federal Court building no one took the slightest bit of notice and not one of the press journalists who witnessed the attacks bothered recording them.
Read more...Singing in the West
November 2, 2011
David Hobson and Teddy Tahu Rhodes in concert. Both exercise a strong pull factor for women of a certain age: Hobson verges on the Liberace school, while all Rhodes has to do is take off his shirt.
Read more...Shambles on the Left
October 31, 2011
The OWS protesters and those copying them in other parts of the world have been criticised for being incoherent. In fact, they are truly representative of the Left.
Read more...Gone to Bali?
October 31, 2011
Where were the protesters? Where were all the indignantaries? The party poopers?
Read more...I came, I saw, I CHOGM’d
October 31, 2011
Well, thank goodness that’s over – although here in Perth we are confiding to each other that it turned out to be a lot more fun that any of us expected.
Read more...The Battle of Qantas
October 30, 2011
No one should count on is some kind of good sense and fair play by the unions involved. It will come down to what they think they can get away with and nothing else. The public be damned is the only principle unions have ever known.
Read more...Seven Billion is Good News, Not Bad News
October 29, 2011
In two day’s time some person on earth, newly born, will be able to claim that unique honour. Of course this can be either good news or bad news, depending on where a person is coming from.
Read more...Rugby PC nonsense
October 28, 2011
This is just self-indulgent, unthinking idiocy, if I might be allowed to understate how I actually feel.
Read more...The climate zealots
October 28, 2011
My suspicions have been deepened over the years by the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views, their demonizing of successful opponents and their opposition to the publication of opposing views even in scientific journals.
Read more...Global Animosity Club
October 27, 2011
The latest episode of the left's default position – when in doubt, hate – is the attempt to prevent the Israel Research Forum at Sydney University next week.
Read more...Do Islamic values equal Australian values?
October 26, 2011
New TV ads state that Islamic values are Christian values, as well as Australian values. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Read more...Upset intellectuals
October 25, 2011
Who’s upsetting the great intellectuals of Australia?
Read more...Matt & Janet videos
October 25, 2011
Matt and Janet Thompson have a YouTube channel with videos taken at Perth’s Election Now rally.
Read more...Islamic values equal Australian values?
October 25, 2008
Christianity not only is quite compatible with freedom and democracy, it is also in many ways largely responsible for it. The same cannot be said about Islam.
Read more...IMF quackery
October 24, 2011
The simple economic message for governments and individuals that have systematically spent more than their incomes is to cut back their spending and save more. This will not send economies into a tailspin as feared by the IMF.
Read more...Plimer's back!!
October 24, 2011
Connor Court publishers have announced the forthcoming publication of a new book by Ian Plimer: How to get Expelled from School.
Read more...The gimme-gimme protests
October 24, 2011
Capitalists don’t take their wealth from society - they make it. Consequently they have no “corporate social responsibility” to give their wealth back to society. The billions Steve Jobs left in Apple’s coffers were not taken from anyone.
Read more...A wish list
October 21, 2011
With things looking so abysmal on the political front, now seems a good time to indulge in a wee bit of hopin’ and wishin’ about what the next couple of years might bring.
Read more...Rebels without the cause
October 21, 2011
They just came for fun - to demand equality, equanimity, equitability, and, possibly extraterritoriality and exhumation.
Read more...Foley falls flat
October 21, 2011
Gary Foley, the sixty-one year old, enters to great enthusiasm and applause. There is nothing at the Melbourne Festival that is not loud leftwing and multicultural. So inclusive, it has all become exclusive.
Read more...Social engineers and the abuse of children
October 18, 2011
Whenever the radicals seek to remake society in their own image, there will always be casualties. And invariably children will be among the first to suffer. All these activists are concerned about is their own selfish agenda, and they don’t give a rip about how many others will be harmed along the way.
Read more...Crikey's QuadRANT
October 17, 2011
Poor old Crikey, its taken them 7 months to catch up with a Quadrant article.
Read more...Money illusion malady
October 18, 2011
President Obama, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Harry Belafonte and Sean Penn suffer from money illusion.
Read more...Achievement in brutality
October 17, 2011
Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas while on patrol more than five years ago, is going home as a result of prisoner exchange. This exchange is ultimately wrong.
Read more...The scam from Snowy River
October 14, 2011
The “environmental” flows down the Snowy River are a totally irrational and wasteful course of action.
Read more...By the minority, for the minority
October 14, 2011
This week, a mere 60 ordinary Australians paid a protest visit to Canberra and secured the undivided attention of no less than 40 MPs. They had come to ask for gay marriage legislation.
Read more...Borgia bliss-kiss!
October 14, 2011
It’s not The West Wing we should be watching to get the new slant on politics and how to run a country. No! The TV series to watch is The Borgias.
Read more...Peter Ryan's new book
October 9, 2011
"… a remarkable range of essays reflecting an independence of view and a grace of style rare in Australian letters." The Australian Encyclopedia on Peter Ryan’s literary career.
Read more...Legal warning
October 5, 2011
In the shadow of the Bolt decision a lawyer sends us a timely warning about the October issue of Quadrant – and he’s only read the cover!
Read more...Australia condemns Coptic persecution
October 13, 2011
The Australian parliament unanimously condemned the ‘persecution’ of Coptic Christians in Egypt, and called on the Government to make ‘immediate’ representations on the Coptic issue both to the UN and to the Egyptian government.
Read more...Dependency, all that's Left
October 13, 2011
The carbon tax gives to government the power to take away and to give. It fits perfectly in the worldview of today’s Left.
Read more...Global warming fad waning
October 13, 2011
A majority of the American people have realised that the policies proposed to address global warming would cause increases in energy prices ranging from substantial to immense.
Read more...Time to speak up is now!
October 12, 2011
When in Egypt, Kevin Rudd said not a word regarding the appalling treatment of the Copts by the Mubarak regime. Thursday’s vote expressing support for the Copts gives the foreign minister and the government to which he belongs an opportunity to make amends.
Read more...The klimate fix
October 12, 2011
This is a travesty. The Joint Select Committee changed the rules after calling for submissions with ‘no terms of reference’ by deciding to publish only those which dealt with the legislation.
Read more...The Eye of the Storm
October 12, 2011
I’m not keen on Geoffrey Rush at the best of times, principally because I have a very low luvvie threshold, which is a genetic problem and one over which I have little control.
Read more...Bolt, the judge, and the gherkin!
October 11, 2011
By putting in writing any notion that I had discriminatory tendencies towards ethnic gherkins, and indeed therefore the people who grew them, picked them, pickled them and bottled them; could I end up before Judge Mordecai Bromberg?
Read more...Klimate Kommittee Korruption?
October 11, 2011
The Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation reported that it had received 326 submissions of which it published 267. Here are examples of what it published, and what it it hid.
Obama's anti-capitalist moment
October 9, 2011
This is a dangerous moment and it is being fed and fueled by the President. This is part of what is a very clear desire on his part to increase the central direction of the American economy.
Read more...Fright Night
October 6, 2011
Thankfully there is no singing or crotch-grabbing; just a human fireball and a wooden stake blessed by St Michael, which is all that any self-respecting vampire slayer really needs.
Read more..."Shame on Australia"
September 30, 2011
Some of the first media reactions to the wrong verdict in the Bolt Case.
Read more...Canberra knows best
October 4, 2011
Poor old Angry. It’s a shame, because he’s got the bald head right – but if only he’d written more songs about fashionable minorities and the rape of the environment.
Read more...Dictators’ literature
October 5, 2011
Kim Jong Il on cinema, and Muammar Gaddafi on gynaecology.
Read more...Elite dictatorship
October 4, 2011
This week: “Greens leader Bob Brown has upped the ante in his calls for stronger state control of media, hinting at a licensing scheme for individual journalists.”
Read more...Being No. 1
October 4, 2011
The Bolt judgment promotes that most nasty form of censorship, self-censorship, whereby a writer is not restricted so much by a clearly defined law, but by the fear of an ill-defined legal entanglement. Australia’s film censorship works this way.
Read more...Questions for the Chief Scientist
October 4, 2011
The government expects the chief scientist to be “a champion of science, research and the role of evidence”, and to promote “evidence-based thinking”. But what qualifies as evidence in the climate change debate?
Read more...This was today
September 30, 2011
Tony Abbott pilloried, Footy Show excused, shop assistant pardoned, Wayne Swan praised and Andrew Bolt guilty.
Read more...The Question of Aboriginality
October 3, 2011
Keith Windschuttle: "While Aboriginal people can question others’ identity with impunity, when non-Aboriginal Andrew Bolt did the same he found himself in court. In short, there is a racial double standard on this issue."
Read more...Bob Brown didn't explain
October 3, 2011
For exercising their right to free speech, by writing a letter to a newspaper, Ta Ann was accused by the Senator of attempting to silence critics.
Read more...One view science policy
October 3, 2011
With such failures of prediction, people might prefer to use a clairvoyant rather than a climate change professor. Respect is now hopelessly lost.
Read more...Why thickheads love Keynes
October 3, 2011
Governments found in Keynesianism a beguiling solution to economic recessions and one that allowed them to spend – with photo opportunities - and seem virtuous at the same time.
Read more...Mark Steyn at the IPA
September 30, 2011
Brilliant Mark Steyn video for an IPA function supporting Andrew Bolt.
Read more...It's the Act that's racist
September 30, 2011
There’s no use blaming the plaintiffs, why shouldn’t they take advantage of the perks and weapons handed to them? Or the lawyers, or the judge. It’s that unjust and malignant law that is the villain.
Read more...Bob Brown, please explain
September 30, 2011
A critic complains that Senator Bob Brown has authorised a “misleading” advertisement with “the wrong words, wrong photos, wrong location, wrong time, wrong company.”
Read more...On the right to offend
September 29, 2011
We have now stooped to the point where people expect that they have the right not to be offended, and governments should make sure that this is the case.
Read more...How Julia jilted Oz
September 29, 2011
I doubt that any comparable precedence for this political double-dealing could be found in Australia’s past. Tinpot is too flattering a word to describe the Prime Minister and the Government she leads.
Read more...Whatever happened to the separation of mosque and state?
September 28, 2011
Maybe if Christians just changed their names to Muslims, they too could be the recipient of all this government help and promotion, and all those cool tax dollars.
Read more...Victoria's lost chance?
September 27, 2011
I simply couldn’t vote for a Baillieu government that muffed this chance to wind back the Charter. I’d spoil my ballot before I gave it to Ted if he leaves this Charter in place as is. And I’d do that even if it meant Labor coming back into power.
Read more...Any Republican will do
September 27, 2011
Obama has been a disaster from Day One and the only thing that has probably kept him even somewhat under wraps is his knowing that he would seek re-election in 2012. As bad as he’s been, if he wins again it will get worse.
Read more...It was Abbott!
September 26, 2011
Labor does not and has never processed asylum seekers offshore. In fact, they secured government in 2007 on the premise that they would end offshore processing.
Read more...Rebooting Labor values
September 26, 2011
Under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard the ALP’s values have become a complete mystery. Survival, at any cost, appears to be their most urgent interest. But is survival a core value?
Read more...“the book of 2011”
September 25, 2011
Mark Steyn’s After America is brilliant. Don’t just take our word for it.
Read more...Swan gong when wrong
September 22, 2011
What do Lehman Brothers and the Treasurer Wayne Swan have in common? Both of them have won a magazine award for financial management and neither saw the GFC coming.
Read more...Depressing economic news
September 23, 2011
There were two related bits of news this week, both depressing in their own way.
Read more...Good & optimistic news
September 22, 2011
The warring parties have narrowed down the area of their conflict. They have achieved a breakthrough understanding that they hate each other’s guts. Both accepted this understanding as a base for future discussions.
Read more...Green dream jobs
September 22, 2011
Asylum seekers will present a dwindling problem as they gradually decline in numbers for lack of economic opportunities. In fact, Australians may well contribute to a wave of economic migrants seeking opportunities in Asia.
Read more...Carbon pathway to disaster
September 21, 2011
By 2050 we will have purchased over 9,300Mt of carbon credits at a cost of more than $750 billion.
Read more...Books in the Rathouse
September 21, 2011
Rafe Champion has summarised three important Australian books.
Read more...Carbon tax betrayal
September 20, 2011
You would need to be a very blinkered observer, or at least a progressive journalist, to deny that a majority of Australians now believe the Gillard minority government has forfeited its legitimacy.
Read more...Manne vs. free speech
September 19, 2011
Robert Manne is an authoritarian who cannot tolerate free speech or open debate. Little wonder he does not like The Australian, its editors, its journalists, or any other free spirits in the media who dare to think for themselves.
Read more...Malaysia, yes
September 19, 2011
The Malaysian solution will not work. However, the government must have the power to refuse entry to those who come here uninvited. Tony Abbott must put away his opposition hat and help the government on this occasion.
Read more...No Labor, no boats
September 19, 2011
The safest way to stop the boats – remove Labor from Government.
Read more...SBS on high wire
September 19, 2011
The decision by public broadcaster SBS to screen the documentary Man on Wire on the tenth anniversary of September 11 seemed at first to be either incredibly insensitive or downright cheeky.
Read more...The Bolt Report
May 8, 2011
If you missed Sunday's great show we have the link for the entire broadcast.
Read more...Time for a rethink on Big Porn
September 17, 2011
Taken together the information and research found here offers an insurmountable argument: porn is bad, real bad, and it is time to reclaim women, men, children, and society from it horrendous clutches.
Read more...Stamping out freedom
September 16, 2011
In the Federal Parliament Senator Conroy threatened Australia’s free press by suggesting the media might be controlled by a “regulator”.
Read more...Hubris, nemesis
September 16, 2011
History at Melbourne University is in crisis. And the descent has apparently been rapid.
Read more...Letter to Mr Abbott
September 15, 2011
That core principle matters to me and to lots of others. It matters a lot. And on the basis of that principle you and the Coalition ought to pass Ms Gillard’s amendments to the Migration Act.
Read more...Manne sneezes
September 15, 2011
Did we say something? Robert Manne seems unhappy with Quadrant Online.
Read more...Crossing the floor
September 15, 2011
You would imagine that with something like 70% of the electorate being opposed to the New Carbon Tax there might be a tendency for federal members of the ALP to at least consider expressing in parliament, the wishes of their electorate.
Read more...Helping al Qaeda
September 14, 2011
The tenth anniversary of 9/11 has been marked by a fresh outbreak in Britain of the political equivalent of auto-immune disease: treating the mortal enemies of the west as the victims of the west, while treating the west’s defenders as its mortal enemies.
Read more...The Angry Genius of Les Murray
September 13, 2011
Just published in The New York Review of Books a major article by J.M. Coetzee on poet and Quadrant Literary Editor Les Murray.
Read more...Michael Smith abducted by aliens?
September 13, 2011
A leading Sydney broadcaster disappears from the airwaves and the media (largely) ignore the story. Cui bono?
Read more...Despair on the land
September 13, 2011
We spent the entire year of 2007 on a zero allocation yet our water bill that year was over $50,000. We were informed that there was no water for our type of enterprise. When water supply is critical, that’s how the Water Sharing Plan works.
Read more...Global Warming ebook
September 13, 2011
The Intelligent Voter's Guide to Global Warming is available as a free ebook here.
Read more...
The migration rorts
September 11, 2011
Australians know that the flood of asylum seekers is a gigantic rort which any government worth its salt would stop within weeks.
Read more...Sit on it, Warren
September 11, 2011
Warren Buffett, for all his business acumen, does not seem to understand the good he does simply by being rich and sitting on it. That is not his fault.
Read more...Neglected truths of climate change
September 9, 2011
Without exception, the environmental threats from AGW are entirely hypotheticals. They are things which might or could happen at some uncertain time in the future.
Read more...In Praise of Heterosexual Marriage and Parenting
September 9, 2011
For over fifty years now the social sciences have been telling us with the utmost clarity that there is no better guarantee of a child’s wellbeing than to have him or her raised in a heterosexual two-parent family, cemented by marriage.
Read more...The Ripples of 9/11
September 9, 2011
It has been a decade since 3,000 Americans were murdered on September 11, 2001. Much of what followed in the subsequent ten years was unexpected, while what was expected did not happen.
Read more...Creeping Sharia
September 8, 2011
Today we have anti-anti-Islamism. There are all sorts of Westerners who seem to have no problem at all with radical Islam, but they do have a problem with anyone who seeks to sound the alarm about Islamism.
Read more...The forgiving 23 percenters
September 8, 2011
There are around 3 million adult Australians who are satisfied with Ms Gillard’s performance. What on earth would she have to do to make them “dissatisfied”? The mind boggles.
Read more...The fall of CSIRO
September 8, 2011
We came under increasing pressure at the end of the 1980s and it was pretty terrible. We had to become more businesslike. The doors were opened to management consultants. The effect was similar to wounding a healthy organism and then leaving it open to attack by parasites - and brother did the parasites pour in.
Read more...Carter in Canberra
August 29, 2011
We, the people, demand of the government and opposition alike that they implement cost-effective policies of adaptation to all climate-related events and change. We, the people, have spoken, and we will be heard.
Read more...Marohasy in Canberra
August 30, 2011
The pressure comes, at one level, from apparently arbitrary decisions made by this Commonwealth government, but the previous Coalition government was no better.
Read more...The bush is bleeding
September 6, 2011
Like the Native Vegetation Acts’ effect on farmers, the license restrictions on our business left us owning a very expensive asset which we were no longer allowed to use. When our business collapsed, Lindley Boseley took his own life.
Read more...Our Censors At Work, Again
September 7, 2011
So Cory Bernardi and Geert Wilders are now evil men who must be banished, but Islam is just hunky dory and should be given a completely free run.
Read more...More Celebrity Wisdom
September 7, 2011
Life will now be so much easier and straightforward, thanks to young Gwyneth sorting us out about all those ethical dilemmas. We now have the Ten Commandments nicely boiled down to just one: “Thou shalt not judge anyone because life is complicated and we are all flawed.”
Read more...What are they hiding?
September 7, 2011
The Australian withdrew a story and apologised to the PM, Andrew Bolt was censored, Glenn Milne kicked off the ABC’s Insiders, Michael Smith suspended. Is it because Bob Kernohan named names in the interview 2UE won’t play?
Read more...Caution: climate debt ahead!
September 7, 2011
Australia will have to pay about $60 billion annually to unidentified foreign entities by 2050 merely for the right to burn its own coal and to keep the nation’s lights on, and a cumulative $650 billion up to that date.
Read more...Malaysian fiasco
September 7, 2011
To criticize the Chief Justice of the High Court looks like blaming the referee for a lost football game, it makes you look a bad loser and changes absolutely nothing in the result.
Read more...Ode to barbarism
September 6, 2011
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is not a grass roots movement populated by rednecks, the mob or the rabble from the streets. It is a political campaign that sprang from intellectuals and academics from the Left.
Read more...Mismanagement on the Murray
September 5, 2011
The flexibility required to manage the Murray Darling Basin cannot be achieved from a centralised bureaucracy in Canberra. The present course of inaction and the emotional dialogue surrounding it is moving us backwards not forwards.
Read more...Perfect storm of incompetence
September 5, 2011
It was a deal put together by incompetents whether legally valid or not. Of course Ms Gillard, in a hissy fit, blamed the High Court. That is what incompetents do.
Read more...Gillard's kingdom of misrule
September 2, 2011
Department of Immigration - overpaid social workers. Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade - humiliated. Department of Defence - fed up. Department of Customs and Border Protection - a glorified taxi service. Department of Homeland Security - irrelevant.
Read more...Samuel Griffith in Brownsville
September 2, 2011
Where else but the home of Bob Brown could you be in a cab on your way into town from the airport and glance over at a billboard enjoining you to ‘Celebrate Threatened Species Day’?
Read more...Vintage Steyn
September 1, 2011
It is always a cause of great joy when the latest Mark Steyn volume lands in one's possession.
Read more...The growing desperation of the climate alarmists
August 30, 2011
The climate alarmists are getting more and more desperate as they push various radical agendas.
Read more...How Gillard tried to kill a story
August 31, 2011
The Prime Minister overstepped the line when she called the chairman and CEO of News Limited, John Hartigan … And I ask her: What are you so afraid of? What else would you stoop to in order to cling to power?
Read more...
Durban III and Anti-Israel Mischief
August 30, 2011
We all should be aware of Durban III and why Australia is boycotting it.
Read more...Electing a 21st century president
August 30, 2011
Obama ought to be unelectable given the last two and a half years. But he has a natural constituency on the left and amongst the welfare-recipient class, a class that is of formidable size and growing.
Read more...Advance Gillard where?
August 29, 2011
With Julia Gillard fully supporting Craig Thomson, and presumably the gang from Victoria, this might be a good time to ask her about Labor’s “core values”.
Read more...Three speed economy
August 29, 2011
To have a government right now outspending its revenue in the middle of a resources boom is economic vandalism.
Read more...Red Dog
August 25, 2011
It’s adorable: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll vote Liberal in the next election. It’s what Red Dog would have wanted.
Read more...Profumo for beginners
August 26, 2011
As the Thomson scandal only begins unravelling it’s time to look back at the Profumo Affair. Then it was the cover-up that bought the government tumbling.
Read more...From food bowl to dust bowl
August 25, 2011
A bloated green bureaucracy has managed to minimise production, lower State income and destroy confidence across the food bowl of Australia.
Read more...The Thompsons go to Canberra - 5
August 23, 2011
Matt and I both cried. After 4½ days of driving across Australia, hearing from every-day hard-working Australians about how difficult it is to just get on with producing, we had one hell of a welcome to Canberra yesterday morning!
Read more...Girl in White Dress
August 24, 2011
I was just coming out of another stretch in hospital here in Cambridge when I got the news that Margaret Olley had breathed her last in her famous little house in Paddington.
Read more...Keynesian unto death
August 24, 2011
If there is another economic downturn watch Mr Swan and Dr Parkinson conspire to put us all into more debt to “save” the economy.
Read more...Hate media on the Convoy
August 24, 2011
The Courier-Mail: “What you've got is not so much a Convoy of No Confidence but a caravan of crackpots - sort of an Australian version of the US's 'Tea Party' movement but on wheels.”
Read more...Damp prophet of doom
August 24, 2011
After Tim Flannery prophesised the decline of Australia’s rainfall it started to rain. And it rained - and rained - and rained – and rained.
Read more...Good speech on free speech
August 24, 2011
The recent CIS Forum on free speech was recorded by Counterpoint. Great talks by James Allan, Janet Albrechtsen, Thilo Sarrazin, and Brendan O’Neill.
Read more...No free lunch in life
August 24, 2011
Our High Court in recent years has decided a couple of cases in a way I think is awful. In both cases our top judges struck down legislation passed by the elected Parliament.
Read more...Attacking Keynes
August 23, 2011
I have to face the depressing fact that economists will almost certainly never get over Keynesian economics.
Read more...Those damn people
August 23, 2011
Don’t be fooled by the dismissive comments of the likes of Craig Emerson and Anthony Albanese, who described the protest as, ‘a convoy of no consequence’. They know that the electorate has turned against them.
Read more...The Thompsons go to Canberra - 3
August 21, 2011
The convoys are getting closer to Canberra and on day three Convoy #6 travelled from Penong to Renmark.
Read more...The Thompsons go to Canberra - 2
August 20, 2011
Convoy #6 completed the second and longest leg of the journey to Canberra on Friday: crossing the Nullarbor.
Read more...The Thompsons go to Canberra - 1
August 19, 2011
Matt and Janet Thompson and their family, ordinary Australians, ordinary Quadrant Online readers, are part of the “Convoy of No Confidence”. They are travelling all the way from Perth to Canberra. This is the start of their story.
Read more...Big Red's red tax
August 22, 2011
The refusal by the media and Members of the Federal Parliament to aggressively question the secrecy surrounding who is on the list of the so-called 500 top “polluting” companies, raises serious doubts about the quality of scrutiny being undertaken in regards to the proposed Carbon Tax.
Read more...Can Government quit spending?
August 22, 2011
Shadow Treasurer Hockey was reported last week as identifying possible cuts in Federal government spending of $50-70 billion over the next four years.
Read more...The Brandis Speech
August 18, 2011
Yesterday in Federal Parliament Senator George Brandis made a major speech on the Thomson Case.
Read more...The Convoy Song
August 18, 2011
Dennis Boothby sings his new song, “A Tax On The Air That We Breathe”, written for the “Convoy of No Confidence”.
Read more...Convoy in the media
August 15, 2011
“It's an amalgam of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers who are mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” UPDATED August 16.
Read more...The Big Story
August 17, 2011
Breaking news story in The Telegraph straight out of the Whitlam history books: MP Craig Thomson paid to save Julia Gillard.
Read more...CSIRO's methane problem
August 17, 2011
A careful examination of the likely causes of variations in methane emissions suggests there is little or no basis for concluding that the variations of the last twenty years are due to human activity.
Read more...Is America in Decline?
August 16, 2011
A New York conference in September features some familiar names.
Read more..."Saying what I think"
August 15, 2011
Andrew Bolt: “The one thing that strikes me as a kind of outsider-insider is that so many mainstream political interviews are based on a pretense.”
Read more...Fatherlessness, violence and the British malaise
August 14, 2011
The London riots simply confirm what the social scientists have been telling us for decades now: children need fathers, not the welfare state.
Read more...Unloosing entitlement
August 15, 2011
Entitlement spending unhinged from economic growth produces ruin and then riots in the streets and Australia is not immune.
Read more...Winter of discontent
August 12, 2011
In the dying days of winter protesters are converging on Canberra to protest policies of the Gillard government.Around the country the trucks are being readied to roll in the great “Convoy of No Confidence”.
Read more...There really is Climate Change
August 10, 2011
How can you, in all conscience, allow Geoffrey Luck to mock that poor little empty-headed innocent from Canberra on your website? Everyone knows there really is Climate Change.
Read more...Mark Steyn's new book
August 10, 2011
Mark Steyn’s new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, has just been published in the US.
Read more...How GetUp stole the government
August 10, 2011
The problems started when the political agenda of this government started to sound remarkably like the agenda of the far left special interest group ‘GetUp’.
Read more...Windsor & Oakeshott sink Labor
July 26, 2011
Imagine that Windsor and Oakeshott were genius undercover operatives whose goal was to make Labor unelectable for a decade or more.
Read more...Taxing our credulity
August 9, 2011
The most disturbing aspect relates to the apparent absence of any common sense at the political level and the apparent inability to recognise the seriousness of the critiques by people who are not driving a political agenda.
Read more...Designer anarchy
August 9, 2011
As London descends into anarchy this evening, with disturbances, arson, looting and other criminality breaking out in one borough after another for the third night running, it is clear that this is organised disorder.
Read more...Convoy Cate on Counterpoint
August 8, 2011
Cate Stuart is one of the organisers of the “Convoy of No Confidence”. She spoke to Michael Duffy on Counterpoint.
Read more...Quadrant on Counterpoint
August 8, 2011
Keith Windshuttle from Quadrant and Tom Switzer from The Spectator discuss the role and relevance of traditional magazines in an age of digital media.
Read more...Thank you, President Klaus
August 8, 2011
Mr President, your visit to our country, and the views that you have expressed, could not have been more timely.
Read more...Who are the 500 polluters?
August 8, 2011
It seems incredible that our parliamentarians are going to vote on a tax on which they haven’t been clearly or officially told as to who the targeted carbon-tax-payers will be.
Read more...The Spectator Climate Debate
August 5, 2011
Wednesday’s climate debate in Sydney demonstrated that we need more of these kinds of debates; and particularly more in which scientists are prepared to debate the science in plain English.
Read more...The trucks are coming! The trucks are coming!
August 4, 2011
The spark of an idea on a grassroots website has set alight a nationwide bushfire of protest.
Read more...Our fossil fuel legacy
July 31, 2011
“This is the moment where Australia turns its back on the fossil fuel age” proclaimed Greens senator Christine Milne as the carbon tax was announced.
Read more...Coulter strikes again
August 3, 2011
Along with Mark Steyn, Ann Coulter is probably the best conservative writer on the scene today. Anything she writes is gold, and is well worth getting, digesting and passing on. Three cheers for Ann Coulter and her latest book.
Read more...Government will fix weather
August 2, 2011
Australians have been asking the Federal Government to do something about climate change because of the unstable weather we have been experiencing.
Read more...Captain America: The First Avenger
August 2, 2011
In The Spectator recently, Nick Bryant compared Arnold Schwarzenegger to ‘an anvil dipped in caramel’, and that’s kind of what you get here.
Read more...Freedom's weak pulse
August 1, 2011
The irony of Christine Milne demanding “diversity of ownership” to suppress diversity of opinion is lost on her. Our culture's democratic pulse is fading by the day.
Read more...The myth of right-wing terrorism
August 1, 2011
The campaign by the left to depict the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, as a right-wing Christian fundamentalist is intensifying and becoming increasingly successful.
Read more...Dear Quadrant Online
July 31, 2011
Finally, Julia seeks climate wisdom and she’s come to the right place.
Read more...Daily doomsday climate news
July 31, 2011
Not to be outdone as the world’s leading journal of doomsday climate snuff-stuff, the Guardian published a new map of the world showing the good, the bad and the ugly of world polluters: Australia “very poor”, Indonesia “very good”.
Malcolm & the believers
July 31, 2011
One of the frustrating characteristics of the climate debate is the unquestioning faith, among lay believers, in today’s conventional wisdom on climate science.
Read more...Green politics bad for climate
July 29, 2011
The composition of the carbon tax package is a clear demonstration that the Greens political agenda is driving change, based on ideology rather than science or evidence.
Read more..."RETURN TO SENDER"
July 29, 2011
One way to protest to the Hollowmen of our government is to send the junk mail back to Greg Combet.
Read more...Australia's media crisis
July 29, 2011
While the government seeks to control the traditional media the ABC allows and indeed encourages cyber-bullying on a massive scale that wouldn’t be allowed anywhere else in the community.
Read more...Fanaticism, mass murder and the left
July 28, 2011
Repeat after me very slowly: Breivik did not murder dozens of teenagers because he was ideologically opposed to cultural Marxism; he mowed them down because he was grossly mentally abnormal.
Read more...Guilt by citation
July 28, 2011
The Australian left has been combing through Breivik’s manuscript for citations. Among those they found who are being accused to fueling the murderous rampage are Herald Sun journalist Andrew Bolt and Quadrant.
Read more...Not on same page
July 28, 2011
The real reason Julia Gillard won’t meet with Vaclav Klaus.
Read more...Doing the Vatican Rag
July 27, 2011
I wasn’t the least surprised to see Enda Kenny, in the face of an economy destroyed by stupidity, greed and irresponsible government, decide to be a man, take responsibility, and attack the real culprit: the Catholic Church.
Read more...
Left's blood games
July 27, 2011
It took just two days after Australians awoke on Saturday morning to the terrible news of the mass murder in Norway for the left-wing commentariat to start exploiting the event for political capital.
Read more...Defamed on The Drum
July 27, 2011
The ideological war conducted by the left and their Islamist allies has moved to a new level of aggression, with the media and the commentariat feeling free to intensify the vilification and victimization of their opponents, attacking them personally and professionally. These are becoming desperate and worrying times.
Read more...Explaining Oslo: suspicions & scenarios
July 25, 2011
The ideological struggle over the Oslo atrocities has already begun and threatens quickly to overshadow the hideous and murderous events themselves. The race is on for Islamist and left-wing political groups and their supporters in politics and the media to exploit this appalling tragedy to discredit and delegitimize their opponents.
Read more...Malcolm Turnbull's climate politics
July 25, 2011
One might as well stand under the shower and tear up billion dollar notes for all the effect that cutting Australian carbon dioxide emissions will have on future climate.
Read more...Julia spies
July 25, 2011
What Australian institution does the most telephone, email, SMS and mobile phone hacking in Australia, and who is its CEO?
Read more...Goodbye, Australia
July 22, 2011
Will Australia abolish itself? This is a question that arises with the visit to Australia of the German economist, politician, banker, and freshly minted pariah, Dr Thilo Sarrazin.
Read more...The faces of fear
July 22, 2011
I know anti-Semitism when I smell it, even when it’s dressed up as human rights – and so do they. The demonstration I saw was not a manifestation of free speech; it was bullying, plain and simple.
Read more..."the poisonous policies of the Greens"
July 22, 2011
This book is a welcome antidote to the poisonous policies of the Greens. It deserves the readership of every Australian who is concerned about the future of this nation.
Read more...Rupertgate
July 22, 2011
All I really wish to do here is expose some glaring cases of hypocrisy and double standards. And they can be found here in abundance. One simply has to compare the recent case of Julian Assange with this situation.
Read more...A pogrom is announced
July 19, 2011
In Australia anti-Semitism has bought together the Far Right-wing, the Far Left-wing and Muslim extremists to boycott Jewish owned chocolate shops.
Read more...Julia, please explain
July 21, 2011
A government document on climate change, produced using taxpayers’ money, contains selective evidence; presumably to mislead taxpayers.
Read more...Australia Institute loses debate
July 20, 2011
Richard Denniss, from the Australia Institute, debated Christopher Monckton at the National Press Club, and was soundly defeated.
Read more...Worse than Rupert?
July 20, 2011
In the hysteria there has been no mention of Britain’s most prolific phone hacker, the government, or that it was the previous Labour administration, now pointing the finger at News International, that gave birth to its worst excesses.
Read more...The Greens brought to book
July 1, 2011
The Greens’ policies would have catastrophic, unintended consequences for this country. They would threaten its prosperity, diminish individual human rights, decrease its tolerance and harmony, and make us less secure. Worse, and this is the biggest irony, the Greens’ policies would actually damage our environment.
Read more...The Manufacture and Commodification of Children
July 18, 2011
A hallmark of contemporary Western culture is an obsessive fixation on the wants and desires of adults, to the exclusion of all else. As long as individual adults are happy, who gives a rip about anything else, be it the rest of society, or even any children involved.
Read more...Monty Python's Carbonista Week
July 18, 2011
Has there ever been a mob in the Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia more worthy of a make-over by the Monty Python team, than those who sit on the government benches?
Read more...Lights, action, lies
July 17, 2011
Wayne to Julia: “Above all keep smiling vacuously, keep talking about pollution, keep talking off the point and skirting around the truth in that inimitably deceptive way you have, and talking down to people and asking and answering your own questions.”
Read more...It's all Greek to me
July 17, 2011
We just missed the Greek riots by a day or two, which was a shame because if you can’t riot to be able to retire at 50, on 95% of your final salary, and have German taxpayers pick up the tab for the last 4 decades of your life, then you really don’t understand social justice, do you?
Read more...The spoils of war
May 29, 2011
Rather than leading to reconciliation, the Risdon Cove site disseminates propaganda about the alleged massacre and hints at similar atrocities across the state. Visiting groups of school children are encouraged to read a plaque which inflates the numbers killed and ignores any evidence to the contrary.
Read more...Inventing a pollutant
July 15, 2011
Since both Julia Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan specifically call carbon dioxide a pollutant, I looked up the National Pollutant Inventory, published under the authority of the Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. Surprise surprise, there is no mention of CO2 as a pollutant.
Read more...Household pests? Blame CO2
July 12, 2011
Yes, there has been warming. Yes, this has produced weather of some kind – bound to. Yes, hotter weather causes ice to melt and sea levels to rise. The question is what hard evidence is there that CO2 is responsible for most of the warming.
Read more...Teaching doomsday, learning fear
July 12, 2011
Despite this outrageous psychological assault on young children, federal Schools Minister Peter Garrett has confirmed that the Government will not stop teaching climate science in the classroom.
Read more...Why, why, why?
July 12, 2011
The proposed carbon tax changes the fundamental structure and mechanisms of the economy. The stated goal of this tax is to discourage productivity.
Read more...My fellow polluters
July 11, 2011
John Izzard on the greatest speech Julia Gillard never gave. The one that would have saved her government, and Australia, from the impending disaster.
Read more...Tax launch bombs
July 11, 2011
The big question is whether Tony Abbott can counter the dark forces that the prime minister has at her disposal: ABC radio and television networks, the unions, Crikey and GetUp! - the other left-front opinion-banning mobs.
Why Barry Jones is wrong
December 21, 2009
In so far as bias can be detected in press coverage of global warming it operates in favour of the alarmist message, which is, of course, no surprise to those familiar with the ways of the media.
Read more...Monckton in Sydney
July 10, 2011
Monckton’s credentials are that he has looked thoroughly into the science and drawn conclusions. He has done what we all should do, rather than to simply fall into line like sheep. His views stand or fall on their merits and have to be challenged on their merits.
Read more...Media turmoil
July 10, 2011
What is at stake now is not just the fate of Murdoch’s empire but the freedom of the press. Yet the anti-Murdoch media are incapable of seeing this. They are simply hysterical with the delirium at having so badly wounded the man they have long elevated into a cartoon hate-figure.
Read more...Greens Terrorising Our Children
July 9, 2011
Education should not be about indoctrination and Green alarmist propaganda. No wonder so many concerned parents are pulling their kids out of the public school system
Read more...ABC divides us
July 8, 2011
The future of the politically-driven ABC, the audio-visual arm of the extreme Green Left, needs to be reviewed. It has abused its charter. It does not contribute to a sense of national identity, inform or entertain as its charter decrees. It is divisive.
Read more...Medicare or Medibinge?
July 7, 2011
I have no complaints about the excellent professional care I received, but almost all this cost to the exchequer could have been saved by an initial physical examination by the G.P.
Read more..."Wait and see"
July 6, 2011
On Sunday the Prime Minister is making a statement about carbon pricing that will forever mark her place in our history. John McLean suggests the sensible alternative statement she should, but won’t be, making to the Australian people.
Read more...Silence of the gods
July 6, 2011
When freedom of speech was threatened in Australia the fashionable human rights group Sydney PEN was silent. When academics and Left activists attempted to censor dissidents Australia’s leading writers were silent.
Read more...A brave man in Sydney
July 5, 2011
Next Saturday presents a rare opportunity in Sydney to hear first-hand from a Cairo human rights activist about the political outlook for Egypt in the lead-up to Egypt’s first elections since the fall of Mubarak.
Read more...Next scare? Gas scare
July 5, 2011
No matter that the Australian gas industry is subject to some of the toughest environmental conditions in the world, our local activists, excited by the film Gasland, are predicting dire consequences from shale gas extraction.
Read more...Election NOW!
July 5, 2011
Since 2007 our government has carried on like a teenager with their first Visa Card. There has been no problem (that they have created) that can’t be fixed with money. Just book it up.
Read more...Green leaders, green unbelievers
June 15, 2011
For years Bob Brown and Christine Milne have lectured us on the dangers of rising seas but the Greens own Electorate Office in Hobart is not just close to the sea it has absolute water frontage.
Read more...Union bosses sack the workers
July 3, 2011
Where are the union leaders on this jobs-destroying carbon (dioxide) tax? Are they so gutless that they will let Bob Brown and his inner city elite supporters take away their members’ jobs?
Read more...Eco-fascism & the Greens
July 3, 2011
As Bob Brown has now made clear, the Greens look forward to becoming the dominant political power in Australia, with all the potential for social, political and economic transformations that this implies. He also looks forward to the reign of one world government.
Read more...Ove's right, it speaks for itself
July 2, 2011
Did you know that academics get their name as authors on academic publications because they raised the research money? That’s the claim made by professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg in a blog discussion with Marc Hendrickx.
Read more...Les Murray at St. Andrews
July 1, 2011
On 23 June, Les Murray, Quadrant’s Literary Editor, was was presented with an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of St. Andrews.
Read more...Academics Declare War on Free Speech
June 30, 2011
Once upon a time universities were known as places of free enquiry, openness to various ideas, and above all, a disposition to free speech.But that was then, this is now. Consider the case of Lord Monckton.
Read more...Refugee Nation, why?
June 30, 2011
Conservatives need to get their compassion straight. Sometimes that means making choices between competing claims for compassion. It always means understanding all of the consequences of any action to the extent they can be discovered.
Read more...The unpalatable truth
June 30, 2011
When professor Hoegh-Guldberg was reluctant to concede that peer review and publishing decisions were sometimes seriously flawed I posted further material on the web page to highlight the problems, and I used his own papers as examples.
Read more...What is to be done?
June 28, 2011
Fortunately this is indeed The Lucky Country and unlike most other developed countries the situation we face is eminently fixable. All we really need to do is rein in government, unshackle our producers and get the parasites off their backs.
Read more...Invasion is the end of land rights
June 29, 2011
“If it were a conquest then under International Law, native title rights would be extinguished.”
Read more...
Can Sweden Get Any Worse?
June 27, 2011
The truth is, just as individuals can go off the rails big time and really lose the plot, so too can nations. And some nations, it seems, have been going down the gurgler a lot more often and a lot more thoroughly than others. Surely one nation which takes the cake here is Sweden.
Read more...Measuring stupidity & waste
June 27, 2011
Steven Kates has invented a new “unit of account” for measuring government waste. An historic new item of vocabulary that will last as long as governments waste our money.
Read more...Gaia kills planet
June 26, 2011
What is never mentioned by Bob Brown, Christine Milne and the proponents of so called clean, green energy, is the environmental degradation that is occurring in Mongolia and China as a result of the sudden demand for neodymium by the wind-turbine industry in the West.
Read more...Methane: myths & misrepresentations
May 18, 2011
The NZ Government is the first to legislate financial penalties on natural gas emanating from ruminant animals. The claimed justification is that the ETS levy is an “insurance policy” against the possibility that methane might contribute to a future of dangerous global warming.
Read more...How green is my energy?
June 24, 2011
Take a big deep breath, Bob Brown – savour the 78 parts of nitrogen, 21 of oxygen, and the smidgen of carbon dioxide – and contemplate the folly of your alternative energy ideas. Renewables are not green. That’s the view of one of the pioneers of climate science politics. Jesse Ausubel.
Read more...Self-effacing Left
June 24, 2011
While Chris Uhlmann held his ground stoically when interviewing Bob Brown, one can’t help but feel that the petulant indignation on Brown’s part which followed the interview affected his demeanour with Lee Rhiannon.
Read more...More cases of creeping Sharia
June 23, 2011
There is never a shortage of examples of how Islam is slowly but surely creeping into Western democracies, with sharia law and other less than democratic features being promoted and eventually accepted. Democracy of course can be its own worst enemy as it seeks to accommodate itself to anyone and everyone, even those forces which are anti-democratic at heart.
Read more...Dear Prime Minister
June 23, 2011
Quadrant Online is publishing an Open Report to the Prime Minister by the Fair Farming Group which brings further challenges to the government’s carbon dioxide tax. Will she listen?
Read more...Don't ask this philosopher
June 22, 2011
Nick Dyrenfurth and Tim Soutphommasane are academics and regular newspaper columnists. Soutphommasane has a weekly feature in The Australian called ‘Ask the philosopher’. Don’t.
Read more...Andrew Bolt and the Orwellian State
June 21, 2011
I went to hear Andrew Bolt last night discuss his trial by ordeal. It was a lesson in just how silently our rights and freedoms are being taken from us by a process of legal and social protections for designated identity groups.
Read more...Our lives are in turmoil
June 20, 2011
How any government expects a business or family to survive without an income for 6 -12 months is beyond me. Apart from the fact that they will send many of us broke, they have also hurt thousands of Indonesian workers and families that rely on the trade.
Read more...Investing in failure
June 19, 2011
If Professor Garnaut can’t say “with any great precision exactly where the emissions reductions will come from” what on earth are we doing getting involved with carbon dioxide taxes and emissions trading schemes. Have we gone completely bonkers?
Read more...What's the great hurry?
June 19, 2011
If one really believes in doing something expensive about limiting climate change, there is probably no great reason for doing it now. Adaption to climate change in the future will be just as easy (or as difficult) as would be adaption now.
Read more...Warmists shun debate
June 17, 2011
Quadrant Online published a scientific audit of the Climate Commission report, The Critical Decade, by four scientists. The Conversation (a website funded by the CSIRO) has responded with an attack on the critics by Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg.
Read more...Innovation: The Garnaut Cult
June 16, 2011
Professor Garnaut sees a tax on carbon (dioxide) as not sufficient to drive innovation. He wants to encourage companies by luring them with extra rewards. But this looks a bit like the Cargo Cult of New Guinea.
Read more...Dear Four Corners
June 15, 2011
I am asking for a fair go. You have been expertly manipulated. Hear the actual other side of the story let the Australian public see both sides. I am happy to make all the arrangements. This is too important to let sit with the images you portrayed on Monday without recourse.
Read more...Green light for Senate chaos
June 15, 2011
For too long the Greens have flown under the radar. The major parties, community leaders, business leaders and the media have, with a few exceptions, allowed this to happen.
12 long months of Gillard
June 15, 2011
Apart from replacing a procrastinating policy wonk with a policy knee-jerker (as witnessed by Gillard’s flip-flopping on a solution for the asylum seeker issue and her blanket six-month minimum ban on live cattle exports to Indonesia responding to a program on ABC TV) I would suggest not a lot has changed.
Read more...The economics of inundation
June 14, 2011
“If you pull your head out of the sand for five minutes and take a look at the prices of beachside suburban properties you’ll see that they haven’t moved down and in some instances have boomed.” This I found profoundly disturbing.
Read more...Bob rules, OK?
June 14, 2011
Since September the government of this country isn’t taking place in parliament, but is being driven from a Green Star Chamber. Things are decided by Bob, but Julia cops the flack.
Read more...Canberra slugs the states
June 14, 2011
The federal government has developed an insatiable appetite for new taxes, and in doing so has weakened its ability and that of the states to provide good government. The proposed federal tax on state mineral resources is the latest example. It should be abandoned.
Read more...Climate shame
June 12, 2011
The question must be asked why the government and its advisers will not address this scholarly analysis.
Read more...Forbidden books
June 12, 2011
Oriana Fallaci received death threats and feared for her security after writing her books. That ought to be a matter of outrage but of course we have now all been lulled into regarding that kind of threatening intolerance from Muslims as ho-hum.
Read more...Climate policy crisis
June 12, 2011
Why should we be paying climate obeisance to an unelected, unaccountable (to Australian citizens) branch of the UN? Are our own scientists inadequate? Or is it just that we are simply not grown up enough to manage on our own what is admittedly a highly controversial subject?
Read more...Plotting a course for disaster
June 12, 2011
The meaninglessness of the economic modelling, and the failure to recognise the now widespread scepticism with the science, offer another example of this government’s failure and inability to change when the circumstances obviously require that.
Read more...Crazy Climate Week
June 10, 2011
Science stormtroopers are planning to kill off computers, camels and common-sense as they float wind farms above our heads, and promulgate plans to protect the planet from sunshine.
Read more...Death threats – “an opportunistic ploy”
June 9, 2011
The Telegraph: “Claims prominent climate change scientists had recently received death threats have been revealed as an opportunistic ploy, with the Australian National University admitting that they occurred up to five years ago.”
Read more...The publishing game
June 9, 2011
The former Howard government did nothing to stop the creeping pervasive managerialism and bureaucracy of Australian universities and of their overseers.
Read more...The Greens are coming!
June 8, 2011
Finally, a book (to be published in July) which examines Green policies and their devastating consequences if enacted. Why has it taken so long?
Read more..."The evidence is not there"
June 7, 2011
Alan Jones to professor David Karoly: “It's not there. You, the chapter review editor. It's not there! The evidence is not there.”
Read more...RIP Hamza
June 7, 2011
In light of the brutal torture and mutilation of 13 year old Hamza al-Khatib in Syria, is it time to admit that the Arab Spring will never lead to an Arab Summer of Love?
Read more...Cat calls
June 6, 2011
The greatest moral challenge of our time suddenly shifted from climate change to moral indignation, from glass ceiling to glass jaw, and the media loved it.
Read more...The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky
June 3, 2011
Chomsky’s hypocrisy stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk.
Read more...Go green, go broke
June 3, 2011
Our leaders compliment the Chinese on their emission-saving efforts, while they pump ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and sell us, and everyone else, solar panels and windmill parts made using energy from coal that we supply.
Read more...Canada today, Australia when?
May 31, 2011
Not a single poll predicted what was coming, namely the near destruction of the left of centre Liberal Party of Canada, the twentieth century’s most successful political party in the western world.
Read more...Scare or science?
May 31, 2011
The Steffen report provides no sound basis for Australia to adopt a carbon tax or any other measures to reduce emissions.
Read more...Bonelands
May 29, 2011
An Australian museum has the skeleton of an Aborigine on public display and, despite the controversies and media outrage concerning the display of such relics in overseas museums, no one cares.
Read more...Bob and Malcolm and John and Julia
May 30, 2011
Given that Julia Gillard and Bob Brown have been in the same bed for many months now, it only makes sense for these two disgruntled, arrogant, childish and selfish Libs to hop in bed with them.
Read more...Carbon Madness and Green Hypocrisy
May 30, 2011
It is always a bit rich when Hollywood celebs who happen to be multimillionaires start lecturing us plebs about how we need to tighten our belts for the good of the planet.
Read more...Planking for Australia
May 30, 2011
The trick with political planking is to act with concern while actually being as thick as a plank. How could a fairly rational nation (as we were under the very watchful eye of John Howard) turn into such a ratbag country that we are now — and in less than five years?
Read more...The Critical Decade: Part II
May 30, 2011
The perception of dangerous climate change as a result of burning fossil fuels is based solely on the flawed predictions of rudimentary computer models, and has become grossly exaggerated.
Read more...The Critical Decade: Part I
May 30, 2011
The scientific advice contained within The Critical Decade is an inadequate, flawed and misleading basis on which to set national policy.
Read more...Of Gods and Men
May 29, 2011
Of the nine monks in the monastery at the time, seven were taken hostage in March 1996. Their heads were found two months later. Algeria's Armed Islamic Group claimed responsibility. Margaret Pomeranz blamed the monks.
Read more...Global warming: an essential reference
April 25, 2011
To encourage wider discussion of the issue of global warming, we provide a list of articles and papers that address the key issues of the adequacy of the government’s understanding of climate science, and whether theoretical human-caused global warming is a dangerous hazard.
Read more...Why intellectual is a dirty word
May 27, 2011
According to Keith Windschuttle, “Intellectuals work in universities, they work for the state, they drive old bombs, they wear cardigans, they look awful, and they talk rubbish.” The editor of Quadrant talks to Steve Austin on ABC radio on history, the ABC, intellectuals and how he became a writer.
Read more...The Global Climate Standoff
May 29, 2011
The present state of world climate action is easy to sum up. While everyone pays lip-service to the IPCC’s targets, developing countries won’t go anywhere near them unless developed countries go first, and developed countries won’t go unless developing countries join them.
Read more...Rudd challenged over Copts
May 29, 2011
Scott Morrison called on Kevin Rudd to report to parliament on what the Australian government is doing to help the Copts. He also reiterated pledges that an Abbott government would reinstate a program of the last Liberal government to give refuge to Copts who are fleeing persecution in Egypt.
Read more...Water isn't the problem
May 27, 2011
Our recent water shortages were all caused by the failure of Governments to build water conservation structures for the last 35 years; not because there was a shortage of water.
Read more...The idiocy continues
May 26, 2011
The UN have conducted in-depth scientific studies that show that food production can double in 10 years, but only if governments around the world force farmers to use the UN’s ideas!
Read more...Chutzpah Sharia
May 26, 2011
Introducing sharia law will make Australia so screwed up that boat people will stop coming here – there’s another advantage for you!
Read more...Were you born in Australia?
May 25, 2011
Patrick McCauley lodged a complaint of racial vilification with the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the SBS television documentary “Immigration Nation”. This is the reply he received.
Read more...States of deceit
May 24, 2011
Life under communism was unbearable for me. I found a new home in Australia where I cherish my freedom. Lately, I am concerned, even alarmed, by similarities between some aspects of life under communism and here.
Read more...Quadrant dinner: Michael Waterhouse
May 18, 2011
Michael Waterhouse will be the speaker at a Quadrant dinner on Friday, June 3. Booking details here.
Read more...
The Critical Decade: debate
May 24, 2011
Bob Carter debates Andrew Macintosh. Includes link to download the new report.
Read more...Leftland is angry
May 22, 2011
The extraordinary thing about the venomous attack on Chris Uhlmann and the ABC’s 7.30 program, was that the critics were absolutely right. The old Kerry O’Brien 7.30 Report is well and truly buried.
Read more...Audio: "Blood Wedding"
May 22, 2011
Lionel Farrell read’s John Whitworth’s poem “Blood Wedding”.
Read more...Malcolm unbuttoned
May 22, 2011
An exclusive interview with a leading politician from a top political party.
Read more..."my Aboriginal grandmother"
May 20, 2011
This is the first time a photo of Bindi Cole’s Aboriginal grandmother has been made public, and it was not seen by Andrew Bolt before the trial.
Read more...Turnbull PM
May 19, 2011
It seems obvious. Malcolm Turnbull should be the leader of the party.
Read more...Crikey's super-plot
May 18, 2011
Crikey journalist Andrew Crook has invented a complicated plot against Justice “Mordy” Bromberg if the judge finds against Andrew Bolt in the Federal Court case he is hearing.
Read more...Why Abbott scares them
May 19, 2011
It is this possibility that Abbott says what he means that makes him so popular with his base. It’s not something many right of centre voters around the western democratic world are used to.
Read more...Henry redux
May 19, 2011
Australia is in the hands of economists who are dupes of a crank (Keynes) and who therefore have no idea how the economy works.
Read more...Ungraciously yours, Malcolm
May 18, 2011
Malcolm Fraser’s bio has won two lit prizes. But what does he think of John Howard’s book?
Read more...Creeping Sharia Again
May 17, 2011
Alarm bells should be going off all over the place concerning recent Islamic calls for “legal pluralism” in Australia. This is just another step toward the Islamic state.
Read more...Culinary endangerment
May 16, 2011
Gavin Atkins reports that Ouyen is giving up its annual Vanilla Slice Triumph. And links to a great website devoted to Vanilla Slices.
Read more...Mr Rental apologises
May 15, 2011
Letter of apology from Mr Rental for advertising during The Bolt Report. Unfortunately, the viewer had written to praise the show.
Read more...The Galileo Movement
May 15, 2011
“Our efforts are non-political as there are politicians in all parties who need to be convinced of the futility of taxing a beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere.”
Read more...A bye-bye election, please!
May 15, 2011
The sea-Greens, the forest Greens, the gay-Greens, the boat-people Greens and, as yet to arrive from NSW, the dark Greens. Kermit was wrong. Being Green is easy, once you control the Senate.
Read more...Boycotting The Bolt Report
May 10, 2011
What is it with the Left and censorship? Professor Bunyip reports on an advertising boycott of The Bolt Report being organised by the intolerant Left. It's called "Operation Bolt Cutter", seriously.
Read more...Book burning in Sydney
May 15, 2011
The Fisher Library at the University of Sydney has received $27 million in Federal funding – and are using the money to get rid of their books.
Read more...The writing life
May 15, 2011
No, ‘write about what you know’ wasn’t a restriction; it wasn’t a hobbling, as I’d thought it had been as a rebellious child — but I still had to reach that conclusion in my own pace, at my own time, and the way I’d got there had been enriching in itself.
Read more...Love Wayne & Julia
May 12, 2011
"With all of this extra expenditure and our terrible bad luck we have made a loss every year so far; but the bank has been good to us, thanks to the good credit rating you left us with."
Read more...Top book, top seller
May 12, 2011
While conservative writers are ignored by Australia's Left publishing houses, John Howard’s book, Lazarus Rising, has sold more copies than any other political memoir.
Read more...Budget night blight
May 12, 2011
The new member for Longman, Wyatt Roy, put his very young finger on it when asking the Treasurer why we should have confidence in the budget returning to surplus when, in his lifetime (approaching 21 years), no Labor government had managed the feat.
Read more...Further Reasons To Reject Legalised Euthanasia
May 11, 2011
This is a rather remarkable story. It is also another reason why we need to resist the merchants of death.
Read more...Inventing massacre stories
April 29, 2011
The 2011 Australian/ Vogel fiction award has gone to a novel about our past built of blood and genocide. It’s timely to look again at this chapter from Keith Windschuttles’s book to see how the bloodshed the author dipped into was invented.
Read more...ABC bias, again
May 10, 2011
Gavin Atkins on the everyday bias of the ABC. Is the Coalition still out to lunch?
Read more...Max Rheese on Counterpoint
May 9, 2011
Listen to Max Rheese on Counterpoint, talking about the opposition to wind farms.
How to kill agriculture
May 8, 2011
The proposed carbon farming initiative would make it virtually impossible for an individual farmer to remove the trees and revert to food production. This is contrary both to Australia’s international obligations and its self interest.
Read more...
Left's bin Laden Week
May 8, 2011
When their line-of-spin started, it was as though the Navy SEALs had cornered and shot Mother Teresa.
Read more...
The Situation Room
May 6, 2011
QED EXCLUSIVE Leaked photograph from the Obama Situation Room in the White House at the moment SEALs were terminating OBL.
Read more...New Scientist & the blogger
May 6, 2011
The New Scientist has investigated the false story of climate refugees propagated by the warmists without crediting the Aussie blogger who saw the holes in the story the experts missed - it never happened.
Read more...Peter Singer’s Twisted Ethics
May 5, 2011
The bad consequences of bad ideas: the ethics of Peter Singer.
Read more...Bibliotherapy and Paul Howse
May 5, 2011
A party process which resembles a cross between Lord of the Flies and the assassination steering committee from Julius Caesar does not represent the tone for which a political party seeking re-election should be aiming.
Read more...Green for violence
May 5, 2011
Clive Hamilton: “A wave of environmental radicalism, of uncivil disobedience, will have succeeded when the conservative press begin praising Bob Brown and Christine Milne as voices of reason and moderation, as indeed they are.”
Read more...Look & learn
May 4, 2011
All of a sudden the contortions and backflips of this government make a certain sort of sense. Under whatever guise it can find it needs to bring in more revenue so that it can pretend to be economically conservative and responsible.
Read more...Cool Britannia
May 3, 2011
All the nay sayers, the cynics of the republican commentariat seem to have been swept aside in the tidal wave of enthusiasm and unashamed approval of the event. Both Kathy Lette and her pompous husband were swept aside as irrelevant.
Read more...Sorry Manne
April 14, 2011
If the plight of asylum seekers weren’t so tragic, you’d be tempted to burst into derisive laughter at the 11th-hour admissions by Robert Manne that the handwringing Left got it woefully wrong on border protection.
Read more...When YouTube blinked
April 19, 2011
You can be quite sure that the monks being brutalised are not the members of the ‘YouTube community’ who have complained about this attack being recorded and documented.
Read more...Greater Love
April 22, 2011
Quadrant Online presents “Greater Love”: a poem for Easter Anzac Day 2011 by David Cusworth. Read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...As good as it gets
May 1, 2011
What a week. The unhappiness on the faces of Australia’s bourgeois progressives,who inhabit the sneering side of the nation’s media, made the royal wedding perfect.
Read more...Death of a terrorist
May 3, 2011
Bin Laden's death does not destroy al-Qa'ida. Others will take his place, but it is a mighty and symbolic blow against the leadership of this terrorist movement.
Read more...Windschuttle on Behrendt
April 21, 2011
Preview an important article by Keith Windschuttle to be published in May Quadrant.
Read more...Climate speak
May 1, 2011
How did we get to a point where Windsor and his regional sidekick Oakeshott are calling the shots on the CO2 tax and as complete mavericks who regard themselves as wiser than their constituents?
Read more...
Insults replace debate
April 29, 2011
The Australian: ‘The president of the Australian Conservation Foundation has attacked the “scientific bastardry” of climate change sceptics amid weakening public consensus that humans are to blame.’
Read more...Weird ebook prices
April 29, 2011
There seems little logic when an Australian publisher offers an ebook in Australia at one price, yet sells it at less than half that price on Amazon.
Read more...Methane madness
April 27, 2011
Now they want to tax methane. It is difficult to imagine a more surreal policy, where no one else in the world understands or intends to bother with methane but we must set an example.
Read more...Terrorism charity
April 26, 2011
Sydney [Left] Writers Festival: “David Hicks was in the Pakistan/Afghanistan region undertaking training to help the people of Kashmir when the September 11 attacks changed everything, leading to his imprisonment in Guantánamo Bay.”
Read more...Wrong advice, wrong policy
April 25, 2011
The members of the Multi-party Climate Change Committee are making major public policy decisions that are based upon patently flawed and inadequate scientific advice.
Read more...Bunyipitude unleashed!
April 25, 2011
Voice from the Billabong: “The answer must surely reside in that closed, hermetically sealed container in which the likeminded love each other’s work. It is a small and stinky world under the lid, a place where there is no tolerance whatsoever for the antiseptic benefits of dissent’s sunlight.”
Read more...Carbon capers
April 25, 2011
Charles Manson, of the 1969 Sharon Tate murders fame, has come out in favour of human-induced climate change— or as he likes to put it, global warming. And he’s not happy about what’s going on; not one bit!
Read more...Anzacs and Political Correctness
April 25, 2011
Let me say this boldly and bluntly: when the Anzacs died in huge numbers nearly a century ago, they did not do it so that we could legalise same-sex marriage. Nor did they fight and die to see creeping sharia engulf Australia.
Read more...Steffen science advice
April 25, 2011
In November 2010, Professor Will Steffen gave a definitive science briefing to the Multi-party Climate Change Committee. If he got it wrong the policy consequences for Australia will be disastrous.
Read more...Behrendt Tweet cover-up
April 23, 2011
The Australian: “Using a post-modern political map, any view challenging their own is labelled "right wing" and their own fringe positions are treated as mainstream.”
Read more...The coming tsunami
April 23, 2011
Labor parliamentarians from outside the inner city electorates are now beginning to grasp the size of the tsunami which is coming towards them. They will have to take action soon or see the Labor Party swept out to sea, never to be seen again.
Read more...Crikey loves us
April 22, 2011
When it comes to culture Crikey turns to Quadrant. Yes, really.
Read more...Rating rating agencies
April 21, 2011
Leaving aside the fact that dunderheads could do banking if the only thing to it was purchasing triple-A rated securities, the experience of the GFC illustrated the inadequacy of relying on rating agencies knowing that something is wrong even when it is only thinly disguised.
Read more...Why aren't we being told?
April 19, 2011
Given that we are told that “the science” on anthropgenic global warming points only one way and everyone else is a “ratbag denier”, surely the Australian people are entitled to know of testimony by an expert which flies in the face of the establishment position.
Read more...Extremism in power
March 31, 2011
After many years of assiduous lobbying of US officials and Washington foreign policy wonks by Muslim Brotherhood representatives, President Obama now says that the Egyptian Islamists should have a ‘seat at the table’ of power in Egypt. The Egyptian army has taken him at his word.
Read more...Left go the Arts
April 18, 2011
Matt Hayden wrote “Culture of Conformity”for QED. This week he was interviewed on Counterpoint on why the Arts in Australia are Left terminally deformed.
Read more...Climate of discontent
April 18, 2011
With the continuing shift in Australian opinion polls on the attitude to the causes of warming, it is now becoming conceivable that Abbott might even dare to describe global warming science as a scam.
Read more...Crimes against Christians
April 18, 2011
The story we are ignoring. Peter Day in conversation with Michael Duffy on the persecution of the Copts in Egypt.
Read more...Twits or Tweets?
April 17, 2011
If you rely on your news from Fairfax, the ABC or SBS, you would be blissfully unaware of the Shakespearian saga that unfolded this week in the aftermath of the Andrew Bolt trial.
Read more...Combet: 10 big errors
April 17, 2011
The Australian government is heading for disaster. Four leading scientists analyse the errors in a speech given the Climate Minister, Greg Combet.
Read more...Combet: unbalanced advice
April 17, 2011
Climate Minister Combet revealed again that he is receiving unbalanced scientific advice, and that his understanding of the problem of hypothetical dangerous global warming is inadequate.
Read more...Sucker Punch
April 17, 2011
This week we went to see Zack Snyder’s latest graphic-novel-style epic, Sucker Punch. I didn’t have to pay, as I had a complimentary ticket from when the film they used for Black Swan a few weeks ago caught fire.
Read more...The stolen election
March 23, 2011
Gillard’s promise of no carbon tax effectively removed this issue from the election debate. Without this promise it seems certain that the close balance of votes would have favoured the opposition. The attempt to now impose a carbon tax makes it difficult to perceive the promise of no tax as other than a deliberate lie calculated to deceive voters.
Read more...Exaggerations unfounded
March 30, 2011
New, frightening predictions from the Climate Commission are based on the same old and faulty climate models. Only the exaggerations are new.
Read more...Our Lucky Country
April 14, 2011
Literary awards for Andrew Bolt, Larissa Behrendt, Paddy Gibson, and John Birmingham.
Read more...Everyday Fairfax hatred
April 11, 2011
Sydney Morning Hatred: “The appropriate response to Bolt is disdain and mockery and the poking of his readership with sharp sticks in their yellow, suppurating eyeballs.”
Read more...The Lincoln Lawyer
April 13, 2011
The good news is that they’re making Dirty Harry movies again. The other good news is that they’re making them really, really well.
Read more...Ego festivals
April 13, 2011
Sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes the unexpected happens. Somebody breaches the unspoken protocol by accident or design ... and then the veneer peels off, cogs fly off the well-oiled machine and veer off in all directions.
Read more...United States of Socialist America
April 11, 2011
Along with most other Western societies (Australia too but the resources boom disguises it), the United States is now in the second and terminal stage of creeping socialism.
Read more...The Shadow State
April 12, 2011
Discontent is stirring in the Australian electorate. More are coming to resent this arbitrary power lying in the shadows of their political, legal and constitutional arrangements. More are demanding that it be confronted and exposed to sunlight. If only their politicians were up to it.
Read more...Science without method
April 12, 2011
That some meteorological agencies and “leading” climate scientists believe that they have the right to deny provision of their data to other credentialed scientists is but one of the signs of a research pathology that characterizes many powerful, contemporary climate science teams.
Read more...Debating with devils
April 12, 2011
Allan Labor at the national level may well think that demonising Mr. Abbott is good politics. But having started down that road, they can’t complain when the tables are turned and similar tactics used by the Coalition. The rest of us, though, would be better off without all this demonising and imputing of bad faith.
Read more...Women in Combat
April 12, 2011
Just what in the world is the military there for? I used to think that it had something to do with the defence of a nation, fighting wars, and securing the peace. Now it seems to be all about pushing radical social engineering agendas and the like.
Read more...Minister, please reconsider
April 10, 2011
I urge, Minister, that you take independent advice from a range of scientific expertise that is wider than is represented by your present advisors in the IPCC, CSIRO and BOM, and that you reconsider the government’s presently unrealistic, and politically unwise, climate change policy.
Read more...Government ignorance
April 10, 2011
It is common knowledge that Ministerial advisers maintain a library of stock-reply letters to use when their Minister receives a complaint or enquiry along predictable lines. Consider one such letter from Greg Combet.
Read more...Chicken Little syndrome
April 10, 2011
As long as the climate-alarmists, and the Australian Labor government, uses devices, statements, reports, advertising and propaganda that are likely to induce the Chicken Little syndrome, how on earth can they be taken seriously?
Read more...Justice in Melbourne: 3
April 6, 2011
On Monday, Eatock v Bolt resumed in Courtroom 1 of Melbourne’s Federal Court.
Read more...Justice in Melbourne: 1
March 30, 2011
Herman Borenstein, SC, to Andrew Bolt: “Don’t trust lawyers, Mr Bolt.”
Read more...Les Murray in NYT
April 5, 2011
A new book by Les Murray, Quadrant’s literary editor, was reviewed in The New York Times at the weekend.
Read more..."It's the peas, stupid!"
April 4, 2011
“Garnaut, he single-handedly destroyed Australia’s wool industry”, stated one weary farmer, wiping his brow. “No he didn’t,” replied the other farmer. “He used both bloody hands.”
Read more...Pants on fire
April 3, 2011
The real lie in the CO2 tax affair is that Gillard is now giving the impression that the tax has been forced on her as a substitute for an ETS which she would have otherwise introduced but for the need to deal with the Greens.
Read more...Selling a bad tax
April 3, 2011
An ALP strategy paper reveals how the Labor government is selling their CO2 Tax.
Read more...Climate facts Labor overlooked
April 3, 2011
Three experts separate climate fact from political fiction. A deconstruction of Labor’s internal policy strategy for selling the carbon dioxide tax.
Read more..."Without the CO2 we’d all be dead"
March 29, 2011
I heard some of the speeches at the rallies and thought them a bit technical. I think we need simpler messages, so to give it a go I wrote the following poem – a bit of doggerel to re-inforce just one point.
Read more...The new Gold Rush
March 21, 2011
There's a new Gold Rush apparently going on in the literary world in the USA, and though it hasn't quite reached Australian shores yet, echoes of it are already echoing across the Pacific to us.
Read more...Silencing opposition
March 29, 2011
The metropolitan elites don’t like it at all when top politicians give voice to the concerns of everyday people, people they consider to be ill-informed, stupid and lacking the moral perspicacity they so clearly think they have.
Read more...Gender bender moonbattery
March 29, 2011
The madness of political correctness is especially to be found in a whole range of gender-bending activities being promoted by radical activists and social engineers. They are intent on destroying not only marriage and family, but gender and sexuality as well.
Read more...Swingers or deserters?
March 28, 2011
The huge swings in formerly safe Labor electorates point to one clear conclusion: socio-economic status is no longer the prime determinant of political allegiance. There is a new divide.
Read more...Climate Commission shirks debate
March 27, 2011
Australia’s Climate Commissioners are simply peddling long discredited arguments about global warming that have been made for 15 years by the IPCC, all of which are carefully crafted to demonize human CO2 emissions. Most of these arguments carry a political overtone, and most are espoused also by Australia’s current government.
Read more...ABC Boredom 24
March 27, 2011
On ABC News 24 there was never a cross word, not an insult, nor a whiff of political point scoring. No spite, no jabs, no barbs. It was as though we were attending a political funeral and everyone was showing respect for the dead. And, well, they were.
Read more...Age hatred
March 27, 2011
When reading some Tweets I realised that there was something worse than being associated with rednecks – old people. As an older person I hadn’t noticed. Pauline Hanson, the Australian League of Rights and some crude placards, I thought might not do the cause any good. Age had not entered my head.
Read more...Redeeming a Liberal pledge?
March 27, 2011
In 1996, Peter Collins, then NSW Opposition Leader, pledged to restore the Governor to Government House. But Labor stayed in office until 2011 and Bob Carr’s legacy has remained. Will Barry O’Farrell redeem his party’s promise?
Read more...Sharia Apologists
March 25, 2011
There will always be Western apologists for Islam, just as there were apologists for the Communist regimes. Both ideologies have declared war on the West. Fortunately Communism as a political/military machine has been largely defeated (although it still continues in the West as a powerful ideology). Whether the same can one day be said about expansionist Islam remains to be seen.
Read more...Wind policy failures
March 24, 2011
The attitude within government and the bureaucracy to wind farm complaints has been characterised succinctly, with adversely affected persons within rural communities explicitly referred to as political “road kill”.
Read more...GetUp's good idea
March 23, 2011
Left wing pressure groups are well organised, wealthy, and clever. They are also very good teachers.
Read more...Labor’s brand in extremis
March 23, 2011
Gillard’s hasty marriage of convenience to Brown gave her a political stay of execution and Brown a dowry of green-left goodies including the Greens’ monster tax on everything forever, which eventually would make Treasurer Wayne Swan’s mining shakedown look like a video rental late fee hike.
Read more...Going green costs jobs
March 22, 2011
Wind energy and all the alternative energy projects are largely a waste of time. They are very expensive, they do not save carbon at anything like the levels claimed by wind advocates, and will cost jobs.
Read more...The Whiteman's dream
March 21, 2011
Aborigines mostly live on their land in remote parts of northern Australia. They live in a world bequeathed by the Whiteman’s dream of Aboriginal self-determination. They live blighted lives.
Read more...The when and where of wind
March 7, 2011
Transmission lines have to be built to distant wind farms but built to take full output, for when the generators are operating at full tilt, and not the average. It is akin to building super highways to a remote town to handle traffic that, for most of the time, is at the volume found on a suburban road. This is an enormous, additional expense.
Read more...Expensive "free energy"
March 15, 2011
For a free energy source wind promises to be extremely expensive to harness, but just how expensive is impossible to say with any real accuracy.
Read more...Blowing away money
March 1, 2011
Governments like wind generators because they are very visible symbols that they are doing something about the green concerns of voters, and they don’t have to raise taxes to pay for them. Voters pay through increased electricity prices.
Read more...Intolerance in Malaysia
March 20, 2011
Malaysia Did you know that the friendly Government of Malaysia treats Bibles as a threat to national security? We publish an appeal for tolerance from Malaysian Christians.
Read more...Nuclear sanity
March 18, 2011
Amidst the media fear and hyperbole it’s hard to get a grasp on what’s really happening at Fukushima . John Timmer offers a lucid explanation.
Read more...Broadband Babylon
March 16, 2011
Julia Gillard’s Labor Government is set to make a blunder – to second-guess the market and spend tens of billions to back one technology, fixed-line broadband, over others in the midst of a rapidly changing business-technology environment for political reasons.
Read more...Carbon facts in freefall
March 16, 2011
Both Greg Combet and Bob Brown have been stressing how far China is ahead of Australia with carbon pricing. Brown quoted $15 a tonne of carbon dioxide while Combet was more modest at $8.
Read more...Selling climate doom
March 16, 2011
Professor Garnaut seems completely sold on the idea that only scientists directly within the global-warming research community can give authoritative advice on climate change.
Read more...Global warming: 10 little facts
March 14, 2011
It is a blight on Australian society that an incumbent government, and the great majority of media reporters and commentators, continue to propagate these scientific and social inanities.
Read more...Alan Jones talks to Bob Carter
March 15, 2011
Alan Jones speaks with Bob Carter about the new Gillard-Brown CO2 Tax.
Read more...The Climate Caper
July 20, 2009
Lord Christopher Monckton: “Dr. Paltridge’s little book will be regarded as one of the few, rare, precious beacons of enlightenment that prevented humanity from wandering through carelessness, ignorance and absent-mindedness into a new Dark Age.”
Read more...NO Cucumber Tax!!
March 15, 2011
To encumber the cucumber growers and eaters of Australia with a Cucumber Tax while our trading partners have none makes us look like complete gherkins.
Read more...First instincts
March 15, 2011
Small-L liberal Coalition voters would be greatly put off by the instincts of this sort of frontbench politician. Put bluntly, those sort of instincts are much more at home in the Labor Party, or the Greens, or even in the odd rural socialist independent MP.
Read more...Animal wellbeing and economics
March 14, 2011
The scientists claim that Coles’ policy will produce more greenhouse gas emissions. No scientific piece of barely literate propaganda (and that is the way this reads) is complete these days without climate change.
Read more...Where's Julia?
March 12, 2011
I’m just back from the No Carbon Tax Rally outside Julia Gillard’s energy-hungry office.
Read more...Unknown - the movie
March 11, 2011
Much to his surprise, Liam Neeson is hit by a falling fridge and almost drowned, waking from a coma four days later to find that he has missed most of the conference’s swanky cocktail parties and hobnobbing. From there, I think it would be safe to say that things go from bad to worse.
Read more...Postcards from Washington
March 11, 2011
Quadrant Online EXCLUSIVE. Untouched, unedited, raw pics of Gillard & Co in the US.
Read more...Jason Soon hoaxcatcher
January 10, 2009
Jason Soon, on Catallaxy, was the first blogger to discover the identity of trickster Sharon What’s-her-name.
Read more...Educating dummies
March 10, 2011
It is possible that the dismal mediocrity of the proposed National Curriculum could in the end be a good thing, because it could encourage more parents and students into private schools.
Read more...Women, quotas and affirmative action
March 10, 2011
Sorry Joe, but you are dead wrong on your call for mandatory quotas for women in the boardroom. And plenty of women know you are wrong as well.
Read more...Blogger novelist
March 9, 2011
Blogger novelist One of Australia’s most successful bloggers (and Quadrant readers) has published a novel. Amazon readers say it’s great.
Read more...Resisting climate hysteria
July 26, 2009
The need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.
Read more...Answering 3 simple questions
August 3, 2009
The brief answers to Senator Fielding’s questions are: (1) Yes, temperatures did fall after 1998 while carbon dioxide rose; (2) Yes, late 20th century warming was indeed not unusual in either its rate of change or magnitude; and (3) Yes, all IPCC models did project warming through a ten year period when instead cooling occurred.
Read more...ETS Forum - Global targets won’t work
August 8, 2009
There are formidable measurement, verification and enforcement issues that stand in the way of any internationally-agreed scheme of binding emissions reduction targets. In the meantime, Australia should not commit itself to the large costs and inefficiencies of an emissions trading scheme of the kind that is currently before the Parliament.
Read more...ETS Forum - Roll on climate rationalism
August 8, 2009
If you are going to set up a new cult, which is what the emissions trading bill is all about, you really have to get in quickly and corner all of the best descriptive and emotive words; seize the moral high ground; then get out and kick hell out of any doubters.
Read more...ETS Forum - Great, let’s close the beef industry
August 8, 2009
Ross Garnaut, a key advisor to the government on climate change, suggested in his final report on climate change that the end of the beef industry would be a good thing for the Australian environment and that a switch from beef cattle to kangaroo would have multiple environmental benefits additional to reducing emissions.
Read more...ETS Forum - Green jobs subtract value
August 8, 2009
It has quickly become apparent that green jobs will require massive government subsidies to sustain them. They do not create additional value and so cannot become self-sustaining. The biggest question, of course, is to what extent will green jobs crowd out existing jobs? In short what is the opportunity cost of a green job?
Read more...ETS Forum - Domestic solar power is a con
August 8, 2009
An emissions trading system, unlike a straight carbon tax, has merit for governments. For it makes it harder for industry and consumers to see the costs that are being imposed upon them.
Read more...ETS Forum - The models are wrong
August 8, 2009
There is a serious risk that we will end end up with the worst outcomes possible because of the frailties of computer modelling: carbon dioxide will prove to have little impact on climate but implementation of the Rudd government’s cap and trade legislation will seriously raise energy costs and expand unemployment.
Read more...ETS Forum - Softly, softly
August 8, 2009
By 2020, the need for emissions reduction policies will be clearer, and presumably we will have access to all the technological advances that Treasury claim will be forthcoming by that time. Preparing for action should it be needed, but meanwhile deferring the introduction of a tax that will wreak massive economic damage, could be an ideal solution for Australia to adopt.
Read more...ETS Forum - A tax would be better
August 8, 2009
I’m against cap-and-trade and Australia enacting its own such Bill for all of the above reasons, and because I think some people in favour of it are hypocrites. If global warming is such a big risk that it demands action, then it demands a carbon tax and nuclear power.
Read more...ETS Forum - Why no cost:benefit analysis?
August 8, 2009
Australia’s emissions reductions can have no significant impact on global emissions or global climate. Therefore, the incremental benefits to Australia of the Government’s policy are zero.
Read more...ETS Forum - It’s the Sun, silly
August 8, 2009
The government’s intention to introduce an emissions trading system in Australia rests upon their belief that human carbon-dioxide emissions are a cause of dangerous global warming. That belief is incorrect.
Read more...ETS Forum - Agriculture is a carbon zero sum game
August 8, 2009
The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (the Australian ETS) cannot have any beneficial effects on climate, but it and its associated policies will certainly increase farm costs, decrease farm employment and reduce food production.
Read more...ETS Forum - Get ready for power cuts
August 8, 2009
Wind and solar are fantasies in the Green mind. Where they have been seriously tried, as in Spain, the costs have been prodigious and the impacts on employment calamitous.
Read more...ETS Forum - It’s all in the rocks
August 8, 2009
There is no direct, real world evidence for dangerous human-caused warming at all, and that despite the efforts of thousands of scientists and organisations since 1990, and the expenditure of approaching $100 billion, looking for precisely such evidence. Instead, the global warming scare is built entirely around unvalidated computer climate models that are known to be wrong.
Read more...ETS Forum - Economic stupicide
August 8, 2009
Air and ocean temperatures have been dropping for the last few years, contradicting the climate model predictions made in 2001 of soaring temperatures. Yet the world won’t listen, and seems determined to commit economic stupicide. How did it come to this?
Read more...ETS Forum - ETS are immoral
August 8, 2009
Comfortably clad, fed and housed, and egged on to view themselves as original sinners, our chattering classes and their media flag-wavers have proved astonishingly susceptible to ecoevangelistic propaganda about dangerous human-caused climate change.
Read more...ETS Forum - The Great Climate Scam
August 10, 2009
The IPCC projection of the “very likely” average temperature increase to 2100 has a range of uncertainty that is so wide (50-60 per cent) as to make it meaningless for policy decision-making.
Read more...ETS Forum - The Climate Craze
August 11, 2009
Even when alarmist evidence is conclusively discredited (e.g. the hockey stick graph), the climate alarmists continue to use it, and to dismiss all conflicting evidence no matter how sound or voluminous it may be. When their own claims fail, they revise the evidence, not their hypothesis.
Read more...ETS Forum - The "Save Our Seats" strategy
August 8, 2009
By asking three succinct questions regarding climate change, and exposing the Minister’s inability to answer them, Fielding’s actions have given many politicians within all parties cause for pause.
Read more...ETS Forum - Science bullies
August 12, 2009
There are many silent skeptics. If the ALP or the Coalition offered their members a silent ballot, they might be shocked at how few privately believe the dogma.
Read more...Emissions Trading Scheme Forum - Home page
August 8, 2009
The government’s emissions trading legislation is to be considered again by the Senate on 13 August. The vote that Senators deliver then, and again later should the bill be defeated and resubmitted, is the biggest decision that they will make in their political careers. For the passage or not of this bill will determine the fate of the Australian economy, and the standard of living of average Australians, for decades to come.
Read more...The LSE and the Dictator
March 7, 2011
All of this has occurred because Western universities have enthusiastically grabbed at the vast flood of petro-dollars channeled into the West to influence and ultimately subvert the intellectual life, culture, and politics of Western societies.
Read more...Feel good, aid psychopaths
March 7, 2011
These people are the victims of psychopaths in power in Pyongyang, Khartoum, Harare, Tripoli, and many other places. By helping tyrants we help prolong their enslavement of their own people. We will do it no more.
Read more...
Helmut Schmidt calls for IPCC inquiry
March 7, 2011
Helmut Schmidt, the respected former Chancellor of Germany, has told an audience at the Max-Plank-Gesellschaft that a full inquiry needs to be held into the credibility of advice on global warming that stems from the UN’s IPCC.
Read more...RIP Ron Kitching
March 4, 2011
Ron died quietly at his home in Rockhampton on 2 March 2011 aged 81.
Read more...Five star interview
March 4, 2011
The ABC is notoriously mean spirited towards Coalition politicians. A Counterpoint interview with Philip Ruddock allows, for once, a sensible discussion of our flawed immigration industry to be heard.
Read more...Hot air tax
March 3, 2011
Then there is the strange timing of the carbon tax plan’s announcement. If there were any thoughts the media’s focus on the tragedy in Christchurch would divert attention from the broken promise, that was a bad miscalculation.
Read more...Coalition Climate Change Committee?
March 3, 2011
Conservative politicians need to have the integrity and courage to reopen the climate change debate at its very source, including by exposing and dismantling the self-evident scam that the science is settled. Perhaps the Coalition could start by establishing its own climate change committee.
Read more...Rudd and the Muslim Brotherhood
March 3, 2011
The news that Kevin Rudd has called for an accommodation with the Muslim Brotherhood should alert all people concerned with the threat posed to liberal democracies by Islamism and raises important questions about the role he is playing as Foreign Minister.
Read more...Climate crank to carbon czar
March 2, 2011
Only a few weeks ago most of the Canberra political establishment and the media looked on slack-jawed as Bob Brown bizarrely blamed Australia’s coal miners for the Queensland floods and demanded that they pay for it. It was colossally cynical and politically demented even for Brown.
Read more...Why did I do it?
March 2, 2011
I’d decided to forego ever again reading anything, anywhere written by Peter van Onselen. I realised I could quite enjoyably read through my morning’s Australian without even a glance at anything running under his by-line. That was my new resolution.
Read more...Bob Carter interview
March 2, 2011
Bob Carter’s calls for action against Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax, published in Doomed Planet, have flashed around the world. Listen to him in this interview with Chris Smith.
Read more...Triumph of the functionaries
March 2, 2011
The functionaries have reached critical mass, and they're playing the Greens off against Labor for power and influence. This story won't make it into the progressive media, but it accounts for much of the mendacious shadow-play of the current parliament.
Read more...Left Crusade vs. People's Revolt
March 1, 2011
“Climate change” has become code for the new socialist crusade, pursued by a parasitic affluent intelligentsia.
Read more...Shhsshh … don’t talk about the science
February 28, 2011
A broken election promise of some magnitude and a stupid policy provoked an immediate blizzard of public criticism and resistance. Yet, after almost 4 days of saturation press coverage, not a single mainstream media commentator appears to have discussed the real issue at hand.
Read more...Island with sea views
February 28, 2011
We should sell Christmas Island. Resettle its entire population on the mainland and place the island up for auction to the highest bidder. The refugee camp and township should be mothballed carefully so as to be in good working order for the future owners.
Read more...Latham in the closet
February 28, 2011
Is not Mark Latham better served, by coming out of the closet and embracing his true, conservative self?
Read more...Whose life is it anyway?
February 28, 2011
I have witnessed a patient being allowed to choose death, and another being prevented from choosing death. The first was sad; but the second was horrible. More to the point: the first was just, and the second was not.
Read more...Carbon dioxide tax – the People’s Revolt - I
February 24, 2011
Tony Abbott has rightly called for a People’s Revolt against this ridiculous attempt to compulsorily reduce the living standards of all Australians with especial impact on the poorer ones. The good news for the leader of the opposition is that that revolt has already started, and is growing by the day.
Read more...Is Don, Is Bad
February 26, 2011
What they were so rapturous about in Sydney I can understand with perfect ease, but it does not speak highly of the moral values these people must hold.
Read more...True Grit
February 24, 2011
Unreconstructed aspects of this movie that Quadrant readers may enjoy are the prevalence of heavy drinking, smoking, eating cholesterol-laden food, and a travelling dentist clad in a bearskin.
Read more...Comes the Don
February 21, 2011
The story is a continuation of the original “Don’s Party” which takes place in 1969 at an election party on the night of Whitlam’s losing election. Some 41 years later most of the same people are back, a lifetime of experience later, to watch the results of the election in 2010.
Read more...The Men Who Stare at Goats
March 22, 2010
It doesn’t take itself seriously at all, and this too is a pleasant change from movies which have stupid plots and mediocre acting but take themselves very seriously indeed (cf Avatar).
Read more...Ministry of Propaganda
February 21, 2011
In the absence of proprietors and strong editors, the strongest influence on our journalists is other journalists. This is manifested in the herd mentality of the press gallery, and the emergence of the journalism cabals which run Fairfax, the ABC and SBS.
Farewell, Dame Joan
February 23, 2011
La Stupenda never did get to sing in Westminster Abbey, well, not until 15 February, four months after her death, at her Memorial Service.
Read more...Conservatives and reform
February 23, 2011
When Wayne Swan sets up a flood levy that is so shot full with loopholes and gaps that multi-millionaires on river front properties who lost power for three days are not only exempt, but get a nice cheque in the post, his response seems to be to blame the people who take what the rules give them.
Read more...ABC smothers complaints
February 23, 2011
I was waiting to hear the sceptical view, which I assumed would indicate that historical evidence suggests that the extreme weather events are neither unusual nor more frequent. But in vain: no other view was canvassed by Lateline. The ABC was happy.
Read more...The ethanol scam
February 21, 2011
The ethanol scam is an outstanding example of the application of Green fantasy to the real world. And once it has been legislated into existence it is very difficult to undo the damage.
Read more...Anger in Wisconsin
February 21, 2011
It says something when Democrat state senators abscond in a grandstanding gesture to establish their sharing and caring credentials. They are intent on remaining part of the problem and will never be part of the solution.
Read more...Open borders
February 20, 2011
The information, which apparently came from a Senate estimates hearing, also noted that, of the arrivals who had paid a people-smuggler, an unstated number were transactions that had been funded by a family-member. What is unclear is whether these “family members” are living in Australia and how this funding process actually works.
Read more...Historic amnesia
February 20, 2011
For their propaganda, global warming alarmists rely heavily on “historic amnesia”. Some examples from Australia.
Read more...Greenpeace dropout
February 20, 2011
Patrick Moore is now considered to be an apostate and a heretic by many of his former green fellow-travellers. Well, so be it. The time has well and truly come for the radical, loony activism of so many greens to be replaced by realistic, science-based and sensible environmentalism.
Read more...Destroying their future
February 16, 2011
In the new National Curriculum the human history of the past ten thousand years is portrayed as reaching its climax with AC/DC and Kylie Minogue. That’s the good part.
Read more...Poirot, too
February 13, 2011
The other day I listened again to the record that was one of the enduring musical milestones of my childhood, though it was recorded when I was scarcely two years old.
Read more...Government must act
February 16, 2011
It is the ultimate in hypocrisy for the Commonwealth government to be insisting farmers give back water under a new planning scheme to save the environment, while continuing to pocket millions from water wasted by Snowy Hydro for derivative trading on the electricity market.
Read more...Brotherhood of Cain
February 16, 2011
Australia and its SE Asian friends should be concerned when the head of US intelligence thinks the Muslim Brotherhood is about charitable works and civic values.
Read more...The whole truth
December 16, 2010
The Snowy Hydro chief executive recently confirmed that water was dumped into the already flooded Murray-Darling Basin, but said the authority had little choice. A real time operational diagram, however, tells a very different story.
Read more...Time for crim rights
February 14, 2011
From now on all home owners will no longer be allowed to lock their doors or windows. After all, the process of breaking down a door or smashing a window could prove to be harmful to the burglar, therefore it is now off limits.
Read more...Restless Egypt
February 14, 2011
Demonstrations and uprisings are nothing new to Egyptians. Caesar and Cleopatra had to put down riots as did the Pharaohs before them. What is important about revolutions, riots and demonstrations isn’t the uprising, but what follows.
Read more...The mythmakers
February 14, 2011
The recent floods and cyclone in Queensland, fires in Western Australia and various blizzards in the northern hemisphere have had alarmists wailing about “weather extremes” becoming more frequent with global warming.
Read more...Let’s Create a Master Race – Again
February 13, 2011
We either recall the lessons of history and act, or we allow the horrors of history to once again be unleashed upon us.
Read more...Disasters happen
February 13, 2011
Despite strident claims by global warming pressure groups, no scientific evidence exists that human carbon dioxide emissions have anything to do with our current climatic woes.
Read more...400 candles
February 13, 2011
As one gets older the appeal of celebrating most anniversaries seems to decline. It’s as though there were some sort of inverse relationship, the bigger the number the less desire to make a fuss about it.
Read more...Simple death
February 13, 2011
Some argue the situation would be very different if voluntary euthanasia became legal, as all social constraints would be removed. They ought to look at Oregon in America, where voluntary euthanasia has been legal for over a decade. That experience has been much studied and refutes this and almost every practical argument against legal voluntary euthanasia.
Read more...Gervais bites Hollywood
January 29, 2011
Ricky Gervais is not the most popular man in Hollywood at the moment. He may have even fewer friends at present than Mel Gibson, which is saying something.
Read more...Another Green Brain Drain
February 11, 2011
It seems that the Greens position runs something like this: ‘We fully support the killing of unborn babies, the elderly, the infirm, and anyone who wants an easy way out. Yet we will fight to the death – no pun intended – for the right to life of drug lords who peddle their poison to the rest of society, causing untold misery and death”.
Read more...Blindness in academia
February 9, 2011
John Quiggin “There is not a single economist in Australia with any professional credibility who denies the reality of global warming or the need for a global policy response.”
Read more...Gillard's Oprah tears
February 10, 2011
As a culture, we’ve come to expect, particularly since the death of Princess Diana, our public leaders to grieve in a profuse, infantilising way, slowly turning the culture into a population of Bambi-eyed grief junkies.
Read more...Spoilt Rotten
February 9, 2011
A dad rages against the town’s supermarket because his daughter found a chicken’s foot in her roast chicken dinner. Apparently everyone in the family threw out their dinners in sympathy with the child’s hysterical distress.
Read more...Garnaut fails Australia
February 6, 2011
Ross Garnaut’s failure to recognise the continued criticisms of and questions raised about the whole basis (as distinct from one or two specifics) of the dangerous warming theory since the 2008 Review is little short of amazing.
Read more...Only 170 years late
February 8, 2011
David Cameron has declared an end to “passive tolerance” of divided communities, and said that members of all faiths must integrate into the wider society and accept core values.
Read more...Intellectual poker
February 8, 2011
The ones we are playing against don’t follow the rules, or at least the rules we understand to be the nature of the game. The game is undoubtedly intellectual poker. The prize is the heart and soul of this nation.
Read more...Reagan's first 100 years
February 6, 2011
One hundred years ago Ronald Wilson Reagan was born. The 40th American President is remembered for many things, but here I wish to highlight just a few key points. He was a remarkable man and I believe he was providentially placed to lead the free world at a critical hour.
Read more...No massacre at Risdon Cove
February 6, 2011
After this book, no one can now plausibly argue that Risdon Cove is a massacre site. John Owen’s book establishes beyond reasonable doubt that, as far as Risdon Cove is concerned, the case for atrocity does not stand up.
Read more...Obituary: Maria Schneider
February 6, 2011
Maria Schneider: “Never take your clothes off for middle-aged men who claim that it’s art.”
Read more...G’Day Augaylia
February 4, 2011
There is no attempt being made by Christians to take over Australia and turn it into a theocracy. But there clearly is an attempt by homosexual activists to turn Australia into a gayocracy.
Read more...Culture catcher: 26
February 3, 2011
Honour Killing Conference: “Honour-motivated violence is a trans-historical and cross-cultural phenomenon, yet it has recently become a metonym for Islamic and anti-modern cultures … Scholars, artists and activists are welcomed as presenters.”
Read more...Unfair schooling
February 3, 2011
Neighbours of ours had three young daughters at the same private school. He was a police sergeant. He and his wife used to do letter box drops to make ends meet. That kind of thing has to be stopped. Children of parents like these may gain an unfair advantage.
Read more...Big Green bullies
February 3, 2011
SMH: “The mayor of Randwick, Murray Matson, a Green, applauded the hardline stance taken by the court, which he said would make others think twice in the future about damaging public trees.”
Read more...PIGS Inquiry
February 3, 2011
Research by a group of eminent scientists has identified that time is accelerating. For some time there has been growing suspicion that the years are passing more quickly.The UN has intervened and established a Panel (Inter-governmental) on Global Speeding (PIGS) to examine the crisis on an international level.
Read more...Climatitis pandemic
February 1, 2011
A new pandemic is sweeping the planet. A rogue form of climatitis, it is more virulent than Robyn’s rancoria, Flannery’s fever and the delirium typical of advanced cases of Gaia nervosa.
Read more...Your taxes at work (part 1,476)
February 1, 2011
Extract from the latest Australian Historical Association newsletter.
Read more...Obama's sputnik moment
February 1, 2011
Obama lauded the efforts of a small roofing company in Michigan that was helped by a government loan to manufacture solar shingles, as evidence of “the promise of renewable energy”. No I am not kidding.
Read more...As Egypt burns
January 31, 2011
What is happening in Egypt now bears only a superficial resemblance to what happened in Tunisia earlier in the week. The reality is far more nuanced.
Read more...Climate looters
January 31, 2011
Flood looting has not been restricted to property and purse. Some have seized the chance to blame climate change and push the alarmist agenda.
Read more...suicide-dot-com
January 31, 2011
The kid put a shotgun to his head, fired – and missed. He lay there twitching, his mouth and chin shredded. A piece of his forehead hung off. He rolled his head about, dislodging gore, opening what was left of his mouth. He still had a tongue. I slammed my computer shut.
Read more...On Muslim integration
January 31, 2011
Lee Kuan Yew: “I think we were progressing very nicely until the surge of Islam came ... I would say today, we can integrate all religions and races except Islam.”
Read more...Alarmists ignore physics
January 30, 2011
Simple physics shows us that human activity is not to blame for the recent warming of the oceans around northern Australia and the same physics can account for the rise in average global temperatures that have been blamed on human activity.
Read more...Australia Day Hate List - 2011
January 23, 2011
Hate defines the Left. Left intellectuals run on toxic. Read their blog sites, magazines, newspapers and you enter a world fuelled by anger and hatred. On 26 January any Left intellectual who isn’t feeling cranky is obviously not having a good Australia Day.
Read more...The White Australia Policy
January 13, 2011
The history of Australia that the SBS documentary “Immigration Nation” overlooked. The White Australia Policy was introduced for economic and cultural reasons, not primarily because of racial prejudice. A proper reading of its history reveals there is no ghost of racism haunting mainstream Australia culture.
Read more...His name is Alfie Boe
December 15, 2010
In the record shops they ask how you spell his name - and then type "Alfie Boe" unbelievingly into their computers. They come up blank. Just wait.
Read more...Immigration Nation
January 13, 2011
The viewing of this appalling, biased, one-sided, ill-considered SBS program immediately began conjuring up images of it being eagerly spread out to schools and academic institutions across the nation and its nasty content being transmitted far and wide to young school children and university students.
Read more...Are we going under?
January 13, 2011
The CSIRO forecasts 1 metre sea level rises over this century. This is a near doubling of the IPCC forecast extreme. A direct measurement suggests that the effect of increasing temperatures has been overestimated by a factor of 4.
Read more...Science for sale
January 13, 2011
How could the global warming scare story have become so widely accepted by the politically correct of Europe and their acolytes in Australia and North America? A good part of the answer can be found in the flow of public money.
Read more...Left's useful murders
January 13, 2011
Hours after the Arizona massacre The New York Times lead the Left in an ideologically vindictive all-the-insinuation-not-fit-to-print campaign to censor political debate.
Read more...The King's Speech
December 29, 2010
It’s quite superb, and easily one of the best movies made in the last ten years, and it richly deserves to win everything thrown at it.
Read more...Culture of conformity
January 11, 2011
Grovelling submission to political correctness is routine in Artsworld. It's clearly not the place to be if you have a rebellious, independent mind and spirit. Frankly, you'd be better off in business.
Read more...Left's witch-hunt
January 10, 2011
It took just hours for the media to finger the villain responsible for the shooting of US Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It was Sarah Palin what done it, officer. And other Right-wingers just like that witch.
Read more...The politics of happiness
January 10, 2011
These happier people, not to put too fine a point on it, have the characteristics of those who might be described as – how can I put this delicately – conservative.
Read more...Climate inquiry needed
January 9, 2011
The latest display of highly questionable opinions and supposedly factual statements by “experts” strengthens the case for a proper independent inquiry.
Read more...Bob Ellis writes right
January 6, 2011
In his new book Bob Ellis has a Quadrant moment.
Read more...On The Pocket Windschuttle
January 8, 2011
Why am I mixed up in this controversy? Because, as a journalist, I want to make Keith Windschuttle’s rigorous and magisterial research on the “Stolen Generation” accessible to the public and especially, to students.
Read more...In praise of incest
December 16, 2010
Once this full-frontal assault on the institutions of marriage and family is allowed, then there is no logical reason to prevent other deviant types of sexuality from being recognised and legitimised.
Read more...Designer babies means dead babies
January 8, 2011
I do not mean to pick on this particular couple. They are simply representative of so many others who have bought the lie that the entire purpose of existence is to have your wants and demands satisfied – instantly, and at any cost.
Read more...Christmas Books: Tony Abbott
December 11, 2010
Tony Blair’s memoir is the most riveting book on politics that I’ve read for a long time. It’s thoughtful, occasionally self-critical and sometimes very funny. I’ve told my senior staff that they should give it text book status.
Read more...Science and pseudo-science
January 5, 2011
Barry Hunt’s long-term climate model can never be tested against observation because any departure from reality can always be dismissed by him as “natural variability”. Such an approach to numerical modelling is dubious scientifically.
Read more...Top articles in 2010
January 3, 2011
A selection of leading articles from Doomed Planet published in 2010.
Read more...Combet's hot air tax
January 3, 2011
No matter how hard Mr. Combet tries to spin it as beneficial, the Labor government will introduce a carbon dioxide tax at their considerable electoral peril. For where global warming alarmism is concerned, the good news is that the bullshit detectors of the Australian electorate are both alive and activated.
Read more...The Greens' Agenda
November 11, 2010
The Australian Greens are part of a worldwide movement that is actively engaged in the political process. As their writings state, this objective involves a radical transformation of the culture that underpins western civilization. As a political party, they should be treated like any other political party and subjected to the same scrutiny.
Read more...Who are the climate denialists now?
January 2, 2011
In a world teetering on the edge of economic chaos with a huge population highly dependent on a healthy economy and severe winters not seen since the Little Ice Age, the ongoing obsession with global warming and decarbonisation is surreal.
Read more...Evolution explained
January 2, 2011
Only the thickest of those who we now know as left wingers survived. And because they reaped without sowing, the grasping and indolent genes gradually predominated until the fully-fledged left winger of today emerged.
Read more...True north strong and free?
December 29, 2010
Canada is the capital of political correctness run rampant. You get the newspaper columnist Mark Steyn taken before various Canadian Human Rights tribunals not for the fact what he wrote was false but rather simply because people were offended.
Read more...Mr Churchill's resignation
December 26, 2010
Who was this Mr. Churchill? All these events occurred some years before I was even born and I confessed I’d never heard of him.
Read more...The global warming pagans
December 26, 2010
The basis for my suspicion is, in large part, the irrational and superstitious way Global Warmingism proponents and adherents react to any kind of extreme weather as evidence that modern economic and scientific activity is making global temperatures unnaturally rise.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: 2010
December 26, 2010
The DVDs Quadrant writers and readers recommend for holiday viewing.
Read more...Summer fiction
December 26, 2010
The Strange Case of the Illyrian Emerald: A Christmas cracker
Read more...Boxing Day heroes
December 26, 2010
Boxing Day meant tennis, and the start of the Davis Cup “Challenge Round”. To 1950s sporting fans this was the World Cup of tennis, with the two top teams playing off.
Read more...Megamind megareview
December 26, 2010
I chortled right through my first viewing of it, and then made my nephew (already goggle-eyed from Tron: Legacy in the cinema next door) come and see it while I sat through it a second time.
Read more...Dereliction of duty
December 22, 2010
Let’s not pretend that people smugglers are the problem. They are just a symptom. Nor are asylum seekers to blame. The real problem lies with those among us who have neither the will nor inclination to protect our borders.
Read more...The right way ahead
December 20, 2010
Grants, conferences, and awards for artists who know the value of faith, morality, and liberty could counter the present cultural support system that helps almost exclusively the illiberal Left.
Read more...Two poems
December 19, 2010
They all meet at the corner of Napier and Gertrude. The shouting man, the keening woman, the transexual prostitute, and the woman in the pink dressing gown.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Merv Bendle
December 18, 2010
I plan to watch Band of Brothers and The Pacific, along with the Australian triumph about the Great War (filmed largely in Townsville), Beneath Hill 60.
Read more...Ned Kelly types again
December 19, 2010
In the case of Assange, as with NedKelly, there is the guiding hand of the lone mother, the dysfunctional childhood, the hatred of authority.
Read more...Christmas Books: 2010
December 18, 2010
John Izzard asked Quadrant contributors and readers to write about some of the books they have read in 2010 or are saving to read over the Christmas holidays.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Andrew Bolt
December 18, 2010
The conservative philosophy made high art - “For things to stay the same, everything must change”.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Sophie Masson
December 18, 2010
We love box-sets of TV series at our house, and the Christmas holidays is a great time to catch up on some you may have missed. Here’s some suggestions.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Philippa Martyr
December 18, 2010
I’d forgotten what a superb film it is; a once-in-a-lifetime combination of tension, laziness, comedy and righteous indignation. Just the thing for long warm evenings and mint juleps.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Lionel Farrell
December 18, 2010
The best enjoyment from DVD-land this year for me has been the purchase of the old production of Edward the Seventh, and keeping in the historical vein, Bright Star, John Keats and his attachment to Fanny Brawne, was superb.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Keith Windschuttle
December 18, 2010
Just about the last thing I felt like watching at the end of a long day was an American cop show praised for its realistic portrayal of the foul-mouthed black drug dealers of Baltimore’s welfare housing estates and crooked white unionists on the city’s docks.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Anthony Cappello
December 18, 2010
The good news is that I got my copy for only $14.95 at the Mustard Seed Bookstore in Sydney only last month.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Michael Duffy
December 18, 2010
Like many people I have come to enjoy boxed sets of the more thoughtful American cable television series.
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Ben-Peter Terpstra
December 18, 2010
For a light treat, though, there’s no beating 2008’s Quantum of Solace, a comfort movie, with Daniel Craig as the pro-torture James Bond. Fast cars. Terrible pickup lines. Big guns. I mean, what’s not to like?
Read more...Christmas DVDs: Jean King
December 18, 2010
Bruno’s favourite DVD at the moment is a Japanese animation called Bakugan. He kept talking about it and calling it “Battle Gun”.
Read more...Bureaucratic flood damage?
December 11, 2010
Because of a formal agreement between NSW Office of Water and Snowy Hydro, involving an obligation to South Australia, approximately 500,000 megalitres, equivalent to one Sydney Harbour of water, must be released as soon as possible as environmental flow into the already flooded Murrumbidgee River.
Read more...Banking on bad policy
December 15, 2010
A government knows almost nothing else but politics and therefore, whatever might be the economic effects of this decision, it has decided that it will be a vote winner whatever damage it may do to the country overall and the economy in general.
Read more...WikiWanks
December 11, 2010
That 200 or more of Australia’s so called public intellectuals cannot see the difference between an out-of-control anarchist, and a genuine whistle-blower says plenty.
Read more...On Peter Coleman
December 13, 2010
One central theme of these essays is his disillusionment with politics as an activity and as a way of life. He describes it as a ‘virus’ which he must have picked up early in life, and from which he took a long time to recover.
Read more...Wayne's (banking) world
December 15, 2010
Wayne’s package is scored here. Is it better than Joe’s? There is nothing to choose between them really. Choosing neither would be a good option. Unfortunately it is not available; we are stuck with Wayne’s world.
Read more...Animal Kingdom
June 16, 2010
There is nothing PC about this movie; there is no chai-latte inner-city angst or posing. It’s just a really hard but really good film, and a moral one.
Read more...Water Act wastes water
December 15, 2010
Water that should have been held in Eucumbene Dam as river flow and to satisfy future irrigation requirements has been flushed to the sea to waste.
Read more...Christmas Books: Patrick McCauley
December 11, 2010
I have found myself in the company of Stephanie Dowrick, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante, Diana Georgeff’s excellent biography of the late Shelton Lea, Melbourne’s much loved bohemian poet, and an eclectic and unique mix of Australia’s very best contemporary poets.
Read more...Christmas Books: Bruce Beresford
December 11, 2010
Having been put off J.M.Coetzee by Waiting for the Barbarians, which I found banal, I am now a total convert , having read Boyhood and Summer.
Read more...Christmas Books: Peter Ryan
December 11, 2010
Theodore Dalrymple remains in fine acidulous form with Spoilt Rotten, his anatomy of the madness of much modern social “science” and the social services and doctrines which spring from them.
Read more...Leaping into the abyss
December 11, 2010
But, I said, since nothing is determined, wouldn’t you rather end up as the most westerly state of the United States than the most southerly province of China? No, he said, he didn’t. So I walked away because there is no talking to such fools.
Read more...Sharing the "pride"
December 11, 2010
Wayne Swan said we should be “proud” but I haven’t been out there recklessly spending my own money, which apparently is another way to help the economy. I felt left out.
Read more...Christmas Books: Ian Plimer
December 11, 2010
Over the last few months, I have twice read Bob Carter’s Climate: The Counter Consensus. It is a far better book than my Heaven and Earth. Carter’s science is readable and totally demolishes the ideological paradigm that humans can create a climate catastrophe.
Read more...Christmas Books: John Izzard
December 11, 2010
Joy of the year was re-reading Jane Gardam’s 2006 novel Old Filth based on Sir Edward Feathers QC, then to read the follow-up, The Man in the Wooden Hat.
Read more...Christmas Books: Peter Coleman
December 11, 2010
Peter Coleman’s Christmas reading list.
Read more...Christmas Books: John Stone
December 11, 2010
Professor Bob Carter provides a highly readable and utterly convincing survey of the nonsense on "global warming" with which both sides of politics continue to assail us.
Read more...Christmas Books: Peter Smith
December 11, 2010
I haven’t read this book. I am saving it for Christmas. I like my Christmas - New Year reading to be entertaining, unchallenging and agreeable. By agreeable I mean that I will agree with all of it.
Read more...Christmas Books: Patricia Anderson
December 11, 2010
Being mistrustful of “best sellers” I gave Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections a big miss all those years ago. Big mistake.
Read more...Christmas Books: Michael Duffy
December 11, 2010
Any year that has new novels by four of the best crime writers around can’t be too bad.
Read more...Christmas Books: Bob Carter
December 11, 2010
I’m still reading real books, among which the latest tranche of Clive James’ autobiography, The Blaze of Obscurity, stands out for its readability.
Read more...Christmas Books: Gregory Melleuish
December 11, 2010
I’ve worked my way through Robert Tilley’s excellent Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth. We need to understand and appreciate Benedict who is one of the leading intellectuals of our age.
Read more...Christmas Books: Andrew McIntyre
December 11, 2010
It’s a perfect foil for the pessimism of the Left, and an inspiring Christmas present for anyone wanting to understand Mankind’s stunning economic progress, or who worries about environmental problems or world poverty.
Read more...Christmas Books: Steven Kates
December 11, 2010
The most insightful book I read this year was William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State.
Read more...Christmas Books: John Muscat
December 11, 2010
Niall Ferguson is arguably the best historian writing in English. Without a trace of postmodernist cant, he is a hard-nosed chronicler of raw financial, political and military power, showing scant interest in retrospective moralising.
Read more...Christmas Books: James Allan
December 11, 2010
The most intriguing book I’ve read this year was Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. It’s not terribly well written prose and style wise, but the ideas are powerful.
Read more...Christmas Books: Hal Colebatch
December 11, 2010
Peter Kocan’s The Fable of all Our Lives is certainly the most important and powerful Australian novel I have read this year and further confirms Kocan’s position at the forefront of Australia’s writers.
Read more...Christmas Books: Merv Bendle
December 11, 2010
Summer reading can range from the recreational, to a system reboot, to a total upgrade, depending on whether one is lazing on the beach or labouring in the study.
Read more...Christmas Books: Sophie Masson
December 11, 2010
You might have heard about the films made from the books—which are OK if a bit glib, but nowhere near as good as the books. These are actually the best fantasy novels I’ve read in years.
Read more...Christmas Books: Robert Murray
December 11, 2010
Though an authorised biography it has its share of warts. Hancock once worked for Gorton and conveys, in a way few do, a gritty “insider” look at non-Labor politics and names lots of names, not always favourably (and not all deceased).
Read more...Christmas Books: George Thomas
December 11, 2010
By far the best book I read this year was The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton, one of those rare books that one finishes truly enlightened.
Read more...Blood, sweat & tears in Cancun
December 10, 2010
The UNFCC’s new Costa Rican executive secretary used her opening statement to urge attendees to embrace the wisdom of Ixchel. The “high-segment” audience fortunately was spared details of the goddess’s darker – and bloodier – side. Could a formidable old woman with a writhing serpent headdress and crossed bones embroidered on her skirt ever be reasonable?
Read more...Christmas Books: Gavin Atkins
December 10, 2010
It’s been fascinating to see the non-reaction of the Left, who seem to have collectively decided (do they decide anything any other way?) that ignoring the book will make it go away.
Read more...Christmas Books: Jennifer Marohasy
December 10, 2010
One of the funniest books of the year - Solar by Ian McEwan. For lots of laughter, insights into human folly, and also the politics of climate change.
Read more...Climate clarity or climate blather?
December 10, 2010
Peter Smith argued: “There is no substitute for clarity of thought and communicating the results plainly and consistently. The sceptics are not doing that. They might have truth on their side. It is being lost in the blather.” Bob Carter and Alex Stuart disagreed.
Read more...Boomers win, kids lose
December 9, 2010
Baby boomer parents will get a better deal on retirement and pensions than their kids do. In many countries in the West the kids will be in the bizarre position of having to pay for their parents’ retirement while also funding all of their own retirements.
Read more...The trial of Andrew Bolt
October 5, 2010
The nine “Aboriginal” complainants want Andrew Bolt silenced on this issue, and of course that means any other writer, journalist and commentator who enjoys freedom of expression and thought in this country— and that is OUR right.
Read more...Bravest denied justice
December 8, 2010
Why do our parliaments guarantee a gold-plated justice system for hardened criminals, but weight the dice against the bravest of the brave, those who are prepared to die for their country?
Read more...Michael Duffy's murderous prose
December 8, 2010
It is a Sydney tradition for murderers to take their victims out to sea in a boat and throw them overboard.
Read more...Prediction: election day massacre
December 1, 2010
But (and Peter van Onselen eat your heart out because I’m going to make an election prediction even before you do, though you’ll be relieved to know it’s not in favour of Labor) I predict now that if Tony Windsor runs again he’ll lose. As for Herr Oakeshott, he’ll be slaughtered.
Read more...Climate riposte
December 7, 2010
Politicians have found it too difficult so far to agree on worldwide measures to materially reduce emissions. However, that seems more to do with economics than it does to any scientific recanting.
Read more...The economic mess Australia is in
December 7, 2010
There was a very panic-stricken world economy that was under the impression that the Great Depression was about to descend upon us once again. There were Treasury forecasts that said unemployment could go to 8-10% if immediate action was not taken.
Read more...Sceptics losing clarity
December 6, 2010
There is no substitute for clarity of thought and communicating the results plainly and consistently. The sceptics are not doing that. They might have truth on their side. It is being lost in the blather.
Read more...Science is about testing hypotheses
December 6, 2010
If losing the debate means that the United Kingdom adopts a sensible policy of adaptation to climate change, Canada rejects emissions limitation legislation, Japan rejects absolutely any continuation of Kyoto-style international action, and the Cancun meeting ends in disarray, then I for one shall be quite happy to keep right on blathering.
Read more...Peter Ryan book launch
December 6, 2010
Peter Ryan’s memoir of his 26 years as Director of Melbourne University Press, Final Proof, was launched by Geoffrey Blainey on Friday night with a dinner at the Marriott in Melbourne.
Read more...A challenge for conservatives
December 6, 2010
“In Australia political philosophy is rarely discussed and political conservatism hardly at all.” So declared Luke Slattery, the editor of The Australian Literary Review, in its December issue.
Read more...Wind fails, bills climb
December 1, 2010
The Mercury: “The Tasmanian Government has been told it needs to pray for wind of "biblical proportions" to return Hydro Tasmania's wind-farm business to profitability.”
Read more...BOMB alert!
November 29, 2010
Don’t be fooled by the trailer: you’ve actually just seen all the best bits of the movie, and at a thrilling pace. If you decide to see the movie, you have to sit through the other eighty minutes of it. You will regret this.
Read more...Shoot the audience
November 30, 2010
There is a type of theatre-goer who complains all the time and who does so much damage. I know our theatres need to pay attention to the box office, but really, some people are simply dreadful.
Read more...Feminista film flops
November 30, 2010
Most disappointing is that the ‘ideas’ part of the film end up being trite. The endless ruminations and discussions sounded more like a polite and earnest discussion of a ‘dangerous idea’ on Jennifer Burns’ First Tuesday Book Club.
Read more...More rock star duplicity
November 29, 2010
Bono can do what he wants. It's his life. But a bit less preaching would be nice. Especially if he insists on living like King Tut.
Read more...Marry us, marry us!
November 29, 2010
I have been studying the arguments put forward by those in favour of same-sex marriage. You now, I think they are on to something here. It is high time we have real marriage equality.
Read more...Licensed to deceive
November 28, 2010
The Herald Sun identified 3000 media advisors employed by Australian governments at the cost an estimated quarter of a billion dollars each year. The Victorian Liberal David Davis claimed that “John Brumby has build the biggest propaganda unit outside North Korea.”
Read more...The victory that might have been
November 28, 2010
A question remains as to whether the Victorian Opposition differentiated itself sufficiently: it is not unreasonable to suggest that a potentially major victory may have been lost.
Read more...Truth in observation
November 28, 2010
If this foundational assumption - that water vapour amplifies a greenhouse-induced rise in temperature - turns out to be wrong, then the notion that man-made CO2 is a source of catastrophe for mankind is also wrong.
Read more...The Murray: salt water solution
November 21, 2010
That the salt water solution is resisted, and that the Murray Darling Basin Authority insists in its new plan that even more water be taken from irrigators to keep the lakes fresh, suggests that this key institution is more influenced by politics than science.
Read more...Gillard's climate U-turn
November 23, 2010
Despite the IPCC’s overstatement in 2007, no measurable, empirical evidence for global warming is yet known that requires a human influence to explain it, and that despite the expenditure of many tens of billions of dollars seeking just such evidence.
Read more...The Fable of All Our Lives
September 19, 2010
Peter Kocan, poet, novelist, critic, essayist and regular Quadrant contributor, has just published a new novel.
Read more...Pontificating
November 25, 2010
Writers on the left see the world in such Manichean terms (with themselves always on the side of the angels); that they become insufferably boring. It’s near-on impossible to think of who, on the left, is as funny and as self-deprecating as Mark Steyn is, say, on the right.
Read more...Homosexual marriage and the slippery slope
November 25, 2010
The same arguments used for legalising same-sex marriage could be used to argue for legalising incest, polygamy, and any number of other sexual combinations.
Read more...Buffett & brains
November 25, 2010
Where to start on all of this: the ridiculous claim or the ridiculous comments from Warren Buffett?
Read more...Free Liu Xiaobo
November 25, 2010
Many Australians understandably want to do business and trade with China - an entirely reasonable idea - but it should not be done while turning a blind eye to China’s human rights abuses.
Read more...More PC mischief and mayhem
November 11, 2010
Whenever the forces of political correctness and a morally bankrupt mainstream media come together, you know there is going to be trouble, big time.
Read more...Get well Ron
November 22, 2010
Our friend Ron Kitching is unwell. Jim Fryar has the details.
Read more...Kocan wins writer's award
November 24, 2010
Peter Kocan, a regular Quadrant contributor, is the winner of the 2010 Australia Council for the Arts Writer’s Emeritus Award. Congratulations Peter!!
Read more...Wedding belles divide Left
November 24, 2010
Left fights left. “Influential union leader Joe De [sic] Bruyn has slammed Labor for ‘pandering’ to the Greens on gay marriage and says supporting a law change will not yield more votes for the party,” reports the ABC.
Read more...Our abused democracy
November 24, 2010
The key principle of democracy is at stake. Are the voters really supreme on the one day that is important for them — the day of the election? Or are they to be extinguished by the post-election bartering, in which the PM is the main dealer?
Read more...Gay marriage?
November 23, 2010
If Australian politicians were genuinely interested in finding out what the Australian people thought they would simply move that the question of gay marriage be placed on the upcoming referendum paper — the referendum that wants to recognise Aboriginal people in the Preamble to the Constitution. It’s really not that hard!
Read more...The Murray: a fresh perspective
September 19, 2010
Few understand how different ecologically the Murray Darling Basin was before European settlement and the impacts of agriculture and the construction of barrages designed to keep salt water out.
Read more...Life of the Murray
October 27, 2010
The only sound solution to the problem is to provide increased freshwater to the system or the river will die. The health of the lower river is an excellent barometer of the wellbeing of the whole system.
Read more...Putting Greens last
November 21, 2010
Antony Green: “After the Liberal Party announced last weekend that it would put the Greens last on its how-to-vote material, I was asked what the Liberal Party used to do with the Communist Party.”
Read more...The Drum on the GFC
November 18, 2010
Quadrant ran a series of articles arguing that the economic profession in government service would appear to have been hijacked by interventionist Keynesian economists. That’s an understatement.
Read more...Keynesian economics is dead
November 21, 2010
Finding some kind of straw man version of economic theory to pin the downturn on may be very soulful for those dwindling number of Keynesians out there but the fact remains that recovery will not happen until we again find private sector activity on the rise.
Read more...The Prime Minister we deserve?
November 21, 2010
“Our two countries are great mates, as we say in our terminology,” she said to Obama. I inwardly groaned - how did the Australian body politic arrive at this point? While there have been hiccups in the past, I can’t recall anyone elected to office looking so singularly out of their depth, and I include Rudd.
Read more...Goodbye, free speech
November 17, 2010
Andrew Bolt: “Apologies, but to better protect my right to free speech, I must prevent you from commenting on this thread.”
Read more...Europe waking up?
November 17, 2010
Anne Applebaum: “Europeans are starting to realize that their governments are too big. Will Americans catch on next?”
Read more...Call for climate Royal Commission
November 16, 2010
Dennis Jensen: "I am calling for a Royal Commission into the science of climate change and the roles played by the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology. Only a Royal Commission into the science of climate change will provide the most climate effective and cost effective solutions in this debate."
Read more...How I saved Bob Brown
November 9, 2010
The true story of how our fearless reporter saved Green Leader.
Read more...Writing historical fiction
November 15, 2010
The trick is to learn enough facts and absorb enough cultural atmosphere to feel as though you are comfortable in that period; but not to think you need to know absolutely everything.
Read more...Abandoning men's health
November 15, 2010
For 12 months the Labor cabinet has been sitting on a Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee’s decision to release a drug called Avodart which could help reduce the size of the prostate in the 400,000 Australian men suffering from the complaint. Would they be delaying approval, with no indication as to when it will be approved, if it involved women’s health?
Read more...Trumping the Chinese
November 15, 2010
What the US needed at the just-concluded G20 meeting was not the mild-mannered Mr Obama trying to cajole the Chinese into allowing the Yuan to increase in value but the man of steel Donald Trump.
Read more...Turning off the lights
November 11, 2010
Tasmanian electricity is generated without burning gas, oil or coal yet it has one of the highest electricity price-regimes in Australia. No fuel costs, free water from the sky running turbines, yet electricity prices are tipped to increase 26%.
Read more...NO, NO, NO!
November 11, 2010
There’s a lesson in the US election for Mr. Abbott and the Coalition. Saying ‘No’ makes sense if what is being proposed goes against small government, conservative values. And that’s the case even if every political commentator drawing breath at the time thinks otherwise.
Read more...Green for danger
November 10, 2010
Charles Moore: “If the drift of this TV programme is correct, the consequences for politics will be large. There will be a political prize, I suspect, for the first party which dares to put its eggs elsewhere.”
Read more...Howard on green politics
November 10, 2010
John Howard: “As far as the eye could see there was a steady flow of Green preferences to the Labor Party.”
Read more...Blood News
October 31, 2010
When the video images reached the ABC newsroom, someone made the decision to include the vision in the 7 pm news. So much for the man’s dignity, or his family and friends who might have seen it.
Read more...Not happy, John
November 8, 2010
Sally Sara, of the ABC, responds to John Izzard’s “Blood News”.
Read more...Doing our job
November 9, 2010
Our job is to report the situation we find on the ground. If families choose to talk with us and express their personal sorrow, anger or frustration that is their right.
Read more...Reflections on the American election
November 8, 2010
There are some positives. In not taking the Senate the Republicans will not be seen as the party in charge. By not winning the Senate seat in Nevada, it has left the dour and sour Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.
Read more...A pain in the bank
November 8, 2010
The problem with untutored bank bashing is that it diverts attention from more substantive economic matters. That might suit Wayne Swan. It is a mystery why it suits Joe Hockey.
Read more...Facebook face-off
November 5, 2010
I’ve just been reading Andrew Marr on the pimply, unhappy and very drunk males who – in his view – make up the blogging community. What I didn’t realize was that this was how Facebook was invented.
Read more...From defeat to rout
November 4, 2010
National Review: “The Republicans deserve some credit for their own success. The early popularity of the president did not prevent them from opposing a bloated stimulus, and they rejected the superficial arguments for cooperating with the Democrats in extending government control of health care. They refused, in short, to acquiesce in their widely predicted extinction.”
Read more..."Lost" or leaked?
November 4, 2010
A briefcase was discovered in the Sydney airport Qantas Club lounge a few nights ago. Inside were a series of half-completed newspaper opinion pieces. Initial investigations suggest these are the work of a regular contributor to one of Australia’s leading newspapers.
Read more...Madness on the Murray
November 3, 2010
On 27 October the Australian Food and Grocery Council released a report showing a foreign trade deficit of $1.8 billion in foodstuff for 2009-10. For the first time Australia has become a net importer of fresh and processed foods.
Read more...Save the Planet: hate humanity
October 31, 2010
There is never a shortage of those who are so obsessed with saving the environment that they are quite happy to implement quite anti-human policies along the way.
Read more...Quote me! Quote me!
November 2, 2010
25 politically-incorrect quotes on same-sex “marriage” from heterosexuals to homosexuals, and even a few celibates (to mix things up a bit).
Read more...John Howard book launch
October 31, 2010
Cheering took the place of polite handclapping. Mr John Howard, former prime minister extraordinaire, was Quadrant-launching his biography Lazarus Rising. [Audio links included]
Read more...Clarity on the Murray
November 1, 2010
Is there a real threat to the Murray-Darling Basin system? Southern Australia has only been getting drier in comparison to the very wet 1950s and 1970s. It is not drier with respect to the first half of the 20th century.
Read more...Protecting Australia's history
October 29, 2010
Mervyn Bendle speaks with Chris Smith on 2GB about the attacks being made by the academic Left on the teaching of history in the school curriculum. As the assault on our history continues there has been widespread community concern about the denigration of Anzac Day.
Read more...Declaring war on ACARA
October 31, 2010
The Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is proposing to introduce a radical national history curriculum that encourages students to criticize, ridicule, and debunk (‘deconstruct’) the Anzac tradition.
Read more...Ponzi governments
October 29, 2010
People who want more and more of free entitlements are far more vocal and strident than those who want them stopped and rolled back. To ever be part of a righteous street protest against government spending, you would probably have to move to the US and join the Tea Party crowd.
Read more...Glaciergate meltdown
October 27, 2010
The IPCC’s assessment reports are widely regarded as the ultimate references on climate matters. Behind this esteem is a belief that teams of scientists impartially evaluated a vast pool of information and together drafted and refined an impeccable document for each report. The gulf between this belief and reality is in fact huge.
Read more...Bush burial
October 28, 2010
The victimisation of Peter Spencer, Maxwell Szulc, and Matt and Janet Thompson, and that of many other country persons, is a national outrage - and all the more so because it is being pursued with the force of intimidatory law.
Read more...Media and the Left
October 28, 2010
My cohort of politicized friends and associates were radicalised in what was the most self-indulgent group of people ever to be raised anywhere on the planet.
Read more...Left loves violence
October 26, 2010
Another “peace lover” who can only express his point of view by resorting to violence, intimidation and harassment. This is so typical of the leftists. And I should know. I have been there and done that. Back in my radical days as a hippy and student activist, I did the very same things.
Read more...Campaign countdown
October 26, 2010
Mark Steyn: “So we’re not facing ‘decline’. We’re already in it. What comes next is the ‘fall’ – sudden, devastating, off the cliff. That’s why this election is consequential.”
Read more...Fired for truth telling
October 25, 2010
Juan Williams, a black American liberal broadcaster for (the partially publicly-funded) National Public Radio in the United States, has just been sacked.
Read more...Divorcing the ABC
October 25, 2010
Remember the time when marriage was a contract and not a fashion accessory? Way back then, one way to break the marriage contract was a legal device or argument that a lawyer could present to a judge. Well! I’d like to apply for a divorce from the ABC on the grounds of mental cruelty.
Read more...Wounded freedom
October 25, 2010
Video of Keith Windschuttle on the threats to our freedom of speech.
Read more...The "precautionary principle"
October 25, 2010
Josephine Kelly: “The only real chance the climate sceptics had of winning the debate was to challenge the fundamental principle on which the theory was based, the precautionary principle .”
Read more...The Great Escape
October 18, 2010
No one in authority is confirming how the Risdon escapes were undertaken but the same little bird claims that the prisoners discovered that by kicking out the lavatory pedestal from its base, the cell-wall can be breached by then kicking in the composite material surrounding the sewer-pipe outlet.
Read more...Our war against children
October 20, 2010
The activists and social engineers keep telling us that family structure has absolutely nothing to do with the well-being of children. There are only two reasons they might say this: they are either woefully ignorant about a half century of social science research, or they are simply lying big time in order to push their activist agendas.
Read more...Raptors vs. rationality
October 20, 2010
It is this kind of sentimentality that has allowed Barack Obama to become President of the United States. It is the kind of unthinking underlying belief system that the Mont Pelerin Society is trying to wake people from.
Read more...Muddle on the Murray
October 21, 2010
A definite seasonal relationship shows the hotter summer months produced statistically significant increases in rainfall in the Murray-Darling Basin with no significant change for the rest of the year. Such evidence as is available suggests that as it gets warmer it also gets wetter.
Read more...Václav Klaus on liberty
October 20, 2010
In a major speech on climate change President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, referred to writers and articles published in Quadrant. Thanks to the internet voices ignored and censored in Australia are heard beyond our shores. Seems the old Left tactic of ignoring critics isn’t working so well anymore.
Read more...BOM loses rainfall
October 14, 2010
Analysts at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have some explaining to do. In the last two years some 900 mm of rainfall have been removed from the rainfall record of the Murray-Darling Basin.
Read more...Finding "lost" rainfall
October 20, 2010
The corrections made to the rainfall record tend to reduce the rainfall in the last half of the twentieth century. This is important since our projected future is for a hotter climate and less rain.
Read more...Wind review needed
October 19, 2010
The premise underpinning the pursuit of renewable energy through wind power, at any cost, needs urgent review before we move from the current 266 turbines in Victoria to the planned total of 1228, as well as massive planned expansion in South Australia and NSW.
Read more...Heartland in Sydney: Part 1
October 18, 2010
The 5th International Climate Conference, sponsored by the Heartland Institute of Chicago, was the first to travel outside the USA. It was held in Sydney on 1 October, and provided a depth of interest and scholarship which delighted the hundred-plus attendees.
Read more...Heartland in Sydney: Part 2
October 19, 2010
At the Heartland Climate Conference in Sydney, David Evans and Jo Nova blasted the ‘cheating culture’ which permeates the field of climate science world-wide.
Read more...You waste, we pay
October 19, 2010
The full dams in South East Queensland now hold enough water to last until 2018 even if not a single drop of extra water falls until then. But once again, the urban media just skims the surface of the issue without getting close to what is actually going on.
Read more...Insider on insiders
October 19, 2010
Australian Conservative: “Barrie Cassidy assumes, of course, that the prime minister has the capacity for something more. Her record is extremely thin. Even when she switched from puppet Julia to the real Julia mid-campaign, nothing really changed.”
Read more...Shovel-ready futility
October 18, 2010
What about the waste? This doesn’t matter. Keynes said that burying stuff in the ground and digging it up again would be good for the economy. As crazy as that sounds, his modern-day disciples are faithful to the script.
Read more...Plimer on the Royal Society
October 18, 2010
Ian Plimer discusses the Royal Society’s updated guide to climate with Michael Duffy on Counterpoint.
Read more...ABC fails listeners
October 5, 2010
Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition nominates the ABC’s Science Show for the “worst ever” climate change interview.
Read more...Culture catcher: 25
October 14, 2010
Klu Klux UQ or how the University of Queensland is making universities and schools less “white”.
Read more...The arrogance of Julia
October 13, 2010
In using her Afghan visit to score cheap political points, Julia Gillard has gone too far.
Read more...Will Gillard "unravel"?
October 13, 2010
Gavin Atkins on Julia Gillard’s first 100 days: “Like all good disasters, there are always clues, and my bet says that this one is going to unravel in spectacular fashion.”
Read more...Pimpled and slightly seedy
October 13, 2010
Andrew Marr: “A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.”
Read more...Writer at work
October 13, 2010
Every writer knows the moment when a vague story idea starts thickening into something much more real. For me, that often happens when I start getting the names of my main characters.
Read more...ABC beats own Drum
December 21, 2009
Chris Masters worries that the ABC is replacing time consuming investigative journalism with quick and cheap opinion-based journalism, of which there is an endless supply. He’s not wrong.
Read more..."Read this book"
October 12, 2010
Rodney Hide: “It’s a very significant book. It will save countless lives. These would be the lives lost should the world’s poor be condemned to the grinding poverty implicit in the now world-wide political goal of dramatically curtailing the use of fossil fuels.”
Read more...Climate action
October 8, 2010
For the Coalition to provide a coherent alternative, it must challenge the assumptions and theory underlying current Government policy. Dennis Jensen’s call for a Royal Commission into the science of climate change should be a first step.
Read more...Scientist says "No!"
October 10, 2010
Hal Lewis: “My former pride at being an American Physical Society Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.”
Read more...Tax is in the air
October 10, 2010
Did you true-believers really imagine that the top priorities of the new 2010 parliament would be, in this order; Euthanasia, Gay Marriage, Poker Machines, upping the GST and a look at various schemes to increase the cost of electricity by 100%? Silly you!
Read more...Opening closed minds
October 7, 2010
The Royal Society’s most devastating statement for alarmists is that “It is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future”.
Read more...Manne's whitewash
October 5, 2010
Andrew McIntyre: “The litany of racist and inhumane bigotry by the Left is documented in detail by Hal Colebatch. His article thus reveals Robert Manne’s strange delusional rewrite of history.”
Read more...Inventing White Aborigines
June 22, 2009
By changing the text of her PhD thesis for her best-selling book on the Tasmanian Aborigines Lyndall Ryan turned modern "part-Aborigines" into "Tasmanian Aborigines".
Read more...Skewed, stacked, biased
October 4, 2010
When it comes to rigging consultation type committees or shamelessly stacking gatherings of the self-styled great and the good, this Labor government has what is known as ‘form’. It hasn’t seen a rigged process it doesn’t like.
Read more...Marohasy on Counterpoint
October 4, 2010
On Counterpoint Michael Duffy interviewed Jennifer Marohasy on her recent Quadrant Online essay “The Murray: a fresh perspective”. Listen now.
Read more...Climate inquiry needed
October 4, 2010
Our fate seems to be in the hands of true believers, akin to religious fanatics, who have no first-hand involvement with the science. How do they get so sure of themselves?
Read more...John Dawson audio
October 4, 2010
Listen to John Dawson discussing the new edition of Washout.
Read more...Military persecutions
October 4, 2010
For the sake of the morale ability of the armed forces, Parliament must immediately correct its error in ceding absolute power to its creation, the Director of Military Prosecutions.
Read more...Climate common sense
October 1, 2010
The Times: "Britain’s leading scientific institution [the Royal Society] has been forced to rewrite its guide to climate change and admit that there is greater uncertainty about future temperature increases than it had previously suggested."
Read more...The Death Party
October 1, 2010
It appears that the party of death never sleeps. Already the Greens have introduced their pro-death bill into Federal Parliament. Bob Brown argued that most Australians support voluntary euthanasia. But I suspect most Australians in fact may not have a clear understanding of just what the euthanasia agenda is all about.
Read more...Spin on spending
September 30, 2010
Perhaps, in that alternative universe that Swan occupies, he sees himself as having been an undercover inspirational force of fiscal rectitude throughout the Howard and Costello years? Who knows what politicians think when spin totally replaces truth.
Read more...Climate Royal Commission
September 30, 2010
There needs to be a review of the issue. The review needs to be rigorous, not some kludged up Committee of Predetermined Outcomes. A Royal Commission into the science is required.
Read more...Crikey does klimate
September 28, 2010
Crikey: “The only recalcitrants are the Coalition, and as more high-profile businesses join the calls for a carbon price, that recalcitrance means the Coalition will lock itself out of a role in shaping what should be the most significant economic reform of this decade.”
Read more...Diary: Laos
September 28, 2010
As I walk back to my hotel through the gardens of what was once the royal palace, now the National Museum, under a huge silver mountain moon, I glimpse a winged, glittering apsara, a Laotian angel, flitting ahead of me on the cobbled path.
Read more...Film: The Other Guys
September 28, 2010
The only disappointment is Ray Stevenson as the purportedly Australian tough guy-cum-bad guy with an accent that ranges uneasily between the Thames Estuary and Johannesburg.
Read more...Killer Greens
September 27, 2010
Already the Greens’ federal leader Bob Brown is telling us that our number one national priority must be the right to kill. It is a strange kind of compassion which says that the way to relieve suffering is to kill the sufferer.
Read more...Carbon greenmail
September 27, 2010
The New City: “Greenmail occurs when officials and activists with media power disrupt stability and certainty in a particular industry, maintaining pressure and an air of crisis, to intimidate business leaders who hold out against some senseless green measure.”
Read more...An Australian tragedy
September 27, 2010
Andrew Bolt: “The four ‘independent experts’ appointed by Gillard to advise the committee include people who are either not expert (in global warming policies, at least) or not independent.”
Read more...Wall Street snores
September 26, 2010
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is a movie to be seen only to understand how little people like the Hollywood left (or for that matter the left in general) understand markets.
Read more...Sniffing for a quisling
September 26, 2010
Abbott can do something to remedy the situation by taking voters into his confidence. Tell us what we already know; that he participated in a wretched process. That he would not do it again; and that the pairing agreement was one of many egregious parts of that process.
Read more...Diary: Bangkok
September 24, 2010
Farangs, Auntie Gun insists, smell bad because they eat so much meat, and this meat-eating also attracts mosquitoes, which is why westerners are bitten more than Thais in the wet season when mosquitoes breed.
Read more...The problem is us
September 26, 2010
Video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali telling an unhappy Sydney interviewer how Australians should be dealing with Muslim immigrants.
Read more...Dumbing down debate
September 26, 2010
Kerry O’Brien: “I spoke with Tim Flannery in Sydney today.”
Read more...Heartland's Sydney seminar
September 23, 2010
The Heartland Institute’s one day climate seminar will take place in Sydney next Friday. Featuring Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter, Jo Nova, Cory Bernardi, David Evans, Alan Moran, and Barun S. Mitra. Registrations are free.
Read more...rightnetwork.com
September 22, 2010
A right-minded perspective that includes an entire spectrum of opinion from thoughtful and reserved to bold and brash.
Read more...Waffle Street
September 21, 2010
It is a book that you might actually want to read since it provides a practical application of the principles behind Say’s Law in an actually funny real life human setting.
Read more...Combet and climate change
September 16, 2010
New Minister for Climate Change, Greg Combet, has started his term by calling for the application of commonsense to the debate over global warming policy. Even more important is the application of some independent scientific analysis to the alarmist advice rendered by the UN’s now discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Read more...Black ban on Bolt
September 20, 2010
Media reports of a legal attempt to censor Andrew Bolt.
Read more...International BlogAid
September 19, 2010
The National Bank is evicting the Thompson family in Western Australia and the international blog world is asking for help.
Read more...Crossover novels
September 19, 2010
‘Crossover’ novels are a big thing in publishing these days, since the success of children’s and YA writers such as Stephenie Meyer, JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, who have found readers on both sides of the age divide. But it’s also a controversial thing, at least for some critics.
Post-election blues
September 17, 2010
The perquisites of office have gone to the victors and Rudd 747 is off again. Just to show how people are searching for something to say in this post-election lacuna, Sarah H