Blogs
Gillard in ABC land
September 2, 2010
I like to think that the work of the commentariat contributed to Gillard's disastrous campaign, seducing her into believing that Abbott was unelectable. These assumptions came crashing down at Rooty Hill where, away from ABC land, the Prime Minister finally came face to face with people whose opinions really mattered.
Read more...September Quadrant
August 29, 2010
Quadrant is Australia’s leading journal of ideas, essays, literature, poetry, and political and historical debate.
Read more..."Gay marriage" fundamentalists
August 31, 2010
Fatherless families come with price tags, and researchers have known for years that boys need a father and mother, not father-free families. To deliberately plan children’s lives around the needs of sexual minority groups isn’t a consequence-free choice.
Read more...Australia’s New Class
August 29, 2010
If you think things are now bad in the Labor Party, just wait until its leap into bed with the Greens comes to full fruition. Talk about an oppressive New Class warring against the masses. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Read more...Welcome to Greenland!
August 29, 2010
Big brother is now equipped to film and record your waste, and identify what you dispose of.
Read more...Flaky conservatives
August 29, 2010
At least you can say of those on the left that they know where they stand. They know whose side they are on. That is a great strength against political dilettantes on the conservative right.
Read more...The end of Bob Brown?
August 29, 2010
Now that Lee Rhiannon has been elected and the Greens have secured a pivotal position in the Australian political system it appears that a move may be made by the ‘entryists’ in the Greens to seize control of the party and exploit its role as a vehicle for the far-left.
Read more...Green follies
August 27, 2010
The Green beneficiaries of the boom are biting the hand which feeds them. We may be astonished at the spectacle of voters supporting policies which are so contrary to their own interests.
Read more...The Kingmakers
August 26, 2010
The three members are at one in explaining that Australia has spoken in putting them where they are. Fed up with the partisan party system, Australian electors apparently developed and executed a cunning and deliberate plan right across Australia to pass power to Bob, Rob and Tony.
Read more...Beware Green utopianism
August 24, 2010
Utopianism has always been with us. Sadly it seems we have not learned from their mistakes. Thus it looks like we are set to make them all over again real soon.
Read more...It's not dead yet
August 24, 2010
It has long been noted that the fall of the Iron Curtain did not spell the end of Communism. It is still alive and well, mainly in Western universities, and amongst many of our ruling elites. Because this ideology still has such a powerful hold, it would be premature to throw out your collection of anti-Communism books.
Read more...Climate Totschweigentaktik
August 24, 2010
When delving into the Climategate material I found PDF files of promotional pamphlets prepared by a communications agency intended to help UK government departments influence public debate.
Read more...Inception deception
August 24, 2010
Leonardo di Caprio is basically your everyday married man with a terrible past involving violence, bodies of water, knives, an unstable wife, his innocent young children, a great deal of guilt, and some major psychiatric problems.
Read more...Left meltdown
August 24, 2010
Dan Nolan: “Were you to take at face value the grotesque outpouring of utter vitriol from the left-aligned members of the twitter cognoscenti, you would have thought Tony Abbott had taken up a policy of punching babies, burning down forests and beheading immigrants personally.”
Read more...Worst form of government
August 23, 2010
The Melbourne electorate particularly lost the plot by electing a Green. Presumably in Melbourne they are sanguine about Australia becoming impoverished.
Read more...Masterpiece of confusion
August 23, 2010
Getting into bed isn’t the problem. It’s what the Greens want to do under the sheets that is the issue.
Read more...Postcard from Russia
August 23, 2010
I could see Chekhov’s doomed families sitting at shabby tables in the long grass and frenzy of flowers of a beautiful, tender, so ephemeral Russian spring in the countryside.
Read more...Rising sea of irresponsibility
August 23, 2010
Careful analysis of the sea level situation indicates that the risk of extensive flooding of low lying areas in Australia is remote and that State governments and councils are behaving irresponsibly.
Read more...Tony Abbott
August 19, 2010
Tony is a fine, committed, principled and loyal Australian. While that does not mean Australians should vote for him, their vote should in no way be coloured by any misrepresentation about his character and competence.
Minority government
August 23, 2010
A minority government must have the confidence of the House; how many people voted for it or what was their two party preferred vote is constitutionally irrelevant.
Read more...Inside the Howard Cabinet
January 13, 2010
With Howard, “what you saw was what you got”. In this important respect, he was refreshingly different from the multitude of politicians who aren’t quite what they seem. Kevin Rudd, for instance, sometimes lets his choirboy mask slip.
Read more...Election 2010
August 19, 2010
Here’s a few of the many other reasons for voting for the Coalition that seem to escape the sneers of the puffed up, sanctimonious ABC worldview. Start with economics and fiscal policy.
Read more...Third thoughts on porn culture
August 19, 2010
I am inclined to think that this newfound morality stems not from having little ones sitting next to you on the couch during Video Hits. Rather, I think it’s coming from a collective music-biz envy of (the admittedly repellent) Lady GaGa’s astonishing mega-multi-media empire, which is currently coining money out of every orifice.
Read more...Tasmania's greenshirts
August 19, 2010
Miranda Devine: “John Gay’s wife was spat at in the supermarket and the Tasmanian media sat on the fence as a good man’s reputation was destroyed.”
Read more...War of Worldviews
August 18, 2010
Unfortunately, the myth of moral equivalence is making a comeback today. There is a new enemy warring against the West, but some folks see no moral difference between the two contenders.
Read more...Second thoughts on porn culture
August 18, 2010
Our pornified pop culture – of which pop music is one important part – has been turning our children into hyper-sexed tarts, and some of those responsible for it are now beginning to ask some hard questions. However it may be too late – at least for this current generation – who have been sent down a moral sewage drain by a hedonistic, selfish and rebellious culture.
Read more...Seen from the US
August 18, 2010
Ross Terrill: “Gillard faces a thoughtful conservative, Tony Abbott of the Liberal-National party, in a close tussle, and the result is important to U.S. interests. Gillard would support Obama’s worst foreign policy instincts, while Abbott would resist them.”
Read more...CSIRO gets political
August 18, 2010
Michael Borgas, president, CSIRO Staff Association: “And in Australia, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, and many other science agencies have been attacked and threatened in Senate estimates by politicians and in the right-wing media such as Quadrant and The Australian.”
Read more...ABC launches ALP
August 16, 2010
The real loser in this telecast was the ABC. The telecast was appalling. Cameras virtually never cut away to people that Gillard was referring to in the audience, and the ABC kept showing graphics which made it seem they were promoting and electioneering for the ALP.
Read more...The Latham Show
August 16, 2010
Last year, the biggest insult Anthony Albanese could throw at Malcolm Turnbull in the Parliament was to liken him to Latham. One election we voted for him, this election he’s working for 60 Minutes.
Read more...Royal Commission on BER
August 16, 2010
Only a Royal Commission can get to the bottom of the biggest financial scandal in our history. So why doesn’t Julia Gillard want one?
Read more...Death by silence
August 15, 2010
Listen to Shelley Gare in conversation with Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle.
Read more...Election scoops
August 15, 2010
The gladiatorial contest that is the battle between the two leaders of the major parties, is a Roman circus, staged, managed and exploited by the media. It is their show — they are the promoters. They own the Coliseum.
Read more...Readings by Lionel Farrell
August 15, 2010
Fine readings of fine poems in Quadrant Online's Favourite Poems series of recordings.
Read more...Where we are
August 15, 2010
Despite an overwhelming abundance of evidence clearly indicating that most Western nations are on an unsustainable path to a major economic crisis, the prevailing climate of denial is astounding.
Read more...Left in Neverland
August 12, 2010
Those on the Left find it comforting to occupy the superficially moral high ground. It’s impregnable and self-congratulatory up there. The rest of us have to take account of consequences. That’s the price of being grown up.
Read more...Election climate
August 12, 2010
Whatever happens at the election or afterwards, the Australian version of an emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, is unlikely to see the light of day.
Read more...ALP dumps workers
August 11, 2010
On Counterpoint Michael Thompson explains how the Labor party turned against their own base.
Read more...Academics praise failure
August 9, 2010
Why it should be thought that a group of university academics, who have signed an open letter supporting the ALP, have any idea whether the Australian economy really was heading into deep recession and high unemployment is hard to work out.
Read more...Celebrating Peter Coleman
August 8, 2010
Peter Coleman's latest collection of essays, The Last Intellectuals, contains a sharp, funny and sometimes stern series of meditations on a career spent in the domestic and international culture wars.
Read more...Division of Labor
August 9, 2010
The ALP has now been forced into a novel division of labour. While a “liberated” Gillard preaches to the converted journalists, special interests and safe Labor voters, Rudd gets down and dirty in the marginals.
Read more...Clive James on Les Murray
April 1, 2010
Clive James: “Some day soon, perhaps, a jet will take him to Stockholm. Only occasionally changing its personnel and never changing its dark suits, the Nobel Prize committee has seldom been a good judge of poetry, but once in a blue moon they get it right, and Murray’s world currency is hard to miss.”
Read more...Les Murray's new book
March 15, 2010
Les Murray is Australia’s leading poet and the Literary Editor of Quadrant. In April his new book of poems, Taller When Prone, will be publshed.
Read more...Fraud and the election
August 1, 2010
It seems that 100,000 people, who couldn’t be bothered to get on to the roll in time for an election curiously waited until the rolls closed then rushed the AEC to register, and then meticulously did so before the seven days had expired. This is curious behaviour indeed.
Read more...Hypocrisy on the campaign trail
August 8, 2010
Team Labor then followed up the knifing of the PM by revealing Rudd’s rudeness, incompetence and total lack of prime-ministerial ability. Then bingo. Out comes the hypocrisy-wand. All is forgiven. “Kevin…mate… we need your help. Like now…out of bed, mate!
Read more...Julia & Kevin
August 8, 2010
The on, off, and on again, ‘real and genuine friendship’ between Julia and Kevin is a marvellously enigmatic story that may yet have more twists and turns to further confuse and confound Tony Abbott and swing the election.
Read more...Bosom Buddies
August 8, 2010
Finally, the 2010 election has a theme song. Music you won’t hear at the Labor launch.
Read more...Politicians miss the point
August 8, 2010
Stimulated by the announcement of Labor’s “new” climate policy by Prime Minister Gillard, Australian voters were once more subjected to a parade of self-anointed, global-warming-is-dangerous public figures whose innocence of knowledge of the science of climate change is exceeded only by their sense of moral superiority.
Read more...High Court decision
August 7, 2010
After an extraordinarily rushed hearing in time for the election on 21 August, the High Court has upheld the GetUp! challenge to changes to the Electoral Act made in 2006 under the previous government.
Read more...Which Julia?
August 6, 2010
Julia Gillard has announced she will now campaign as the real Julia Gillard. Her citizen's assembly tells us exactly what she remains, committed to a powerful state and an obedient citizenry who will pay and pay generously for all her plans and programmes.
Read more...Gillard's climate spin
August 6, 2010
Who would get appointed to Julia Gillard citizens’ assembly set-up to look at climate change? Would we see many appointees who are sceptical that global warming is taking place at all? No. Would we see many who admit warming is taking place, but that man is not responsible? No.
Read more...The bloodless revolution
August 6, 2010
Marxists and other revolutionaries also knew that a nation could be just as effectively overthrown when undermined from within. Taking over the institutions of power and influence can just as readily bring about the new social order desired by the radicals.
Read more...The Waiting City
August 6, 2010
Philippa Martyr has discovered an Australian film worth watching.
Read more...To debate or not to debate?
August 4, 2010
Australia’s much better economic performance is down to other things and the problem for the Labor government is not being able to claim credit for any of this. And Gillard wants to debate it!
Read more...Shame story
August 4, 2010
Environment Minister Peter Garrett welcomes the inclusion of convict sites on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Yet political cowardice has left the second oldest site of Australian settlement vandalised and derelict.
Read more...Ayaan Hirsi Ali in Australia
August 2, 2010
Hirsi Ali has been under constant threat, and now has a permanent bodyguard. Her books explain the cruelty and violence that are a part and parcel of Islamic cultures, and within them she develops a brilliantly coherent criticisms of Islam and its growing threat to the West.
Read more...Gillard's duty to act
August 3, 2010
The publication by WikiLeaks of details of Afghan informers is a serious breach of national security. Julia Gillard is bound to pressure President Obama into taking firm action to prevent further disclosure and to punish this treacherous act.
Read more...Closing out dissent
August 1, 2010
Bob Carter’s essay is a challenge to both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to ensure that all voices are heard in a true debate over the science of climate change before decisions are taken which, if they are wrong, will destroy generations of Australian lives.
Read more...How to interview Julia Gillard
July 11, 2010
Answering questions like a Radio Moscow announcer, Julia Gillard seems impervious to robust and sceptical media analysis. The gallery could learn from 4BC’s Michael Smith on how to interview the head of the second government in three years to lose its way.
Read more...Bard scripts election
August 1, 2010
The news that Julia, when Deputy Prime Minister, had her own personal bodyguard was a big surprise. Even bigger was that she sent him off as her stand-in for National Security Committee meetings. Why not her hairdresser colourist?
Read more...Labor's leaky leaders
August 1, 2010
Mills and Boon should take note when Julia leaves politics. Her ability to construct plausible political tall tales depicting her heroic qualities might be fodder for a new book series.
Read more...In praise of kids
August 1, 2010
Most people who’ve had children change their minds on the relative weighting of nature versus nurture. This has an effect. It can alter one’s confidence in the ability of institutions to reshape people as much as proponents of this policy or that might claim.
Read more...Least-worst climate policy?
August 1, 2010
Tony Abbott, says Ms Gillard must drop the Citizen’s Assembly and take real action. But there is nothing in his $3.2 billion ‘Direct Action Plan for Climate Change and the Environment’ that will seriously address the issue.
Read more...Tony Abbott at the Sydney Institute
July 30, 2010
The podcast of Tony Abbott’s address to the Sydney Institute is now online.
Read more...Voting for sex
July 29, 2010
In only four weeks as prime minister Gillard has instigated a deeply flawed process of deciding Australia’s taxation policy; presided over the Dili diplomatic fiasco; and proposed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ charade. She also seems to have trouble with the truth.
Read more..."Good Gaia Day"
July 28, 2010
The power is back on. There is talk about extending the nationwide brownouts to two days, making it a Gaia Weekend rather than a single day. It would cut carbon emissions from the nation’s coal fired power stations by twenty eight percent.
Read more...Montevideo Maru controversy
July 28, 2010
There is a deal of evidence confirmed from a variety of sources which states that all those Europeans – well over a thousand – were not on that ship.
Read more...Spinning Julia
July 27, 2010
The Women's Weekly informed its readers that a “ripple of excitement was felt around the globe on the day Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female PM.”
Read more...Federalism returns
July 23, 2010
Predictions of a Labor victory on 21 August do not take sufficient account of one factor. Through their mismanagement and impropriety, the Rudd Gillard governments have achieved something worthy – the revival of federalism as a political force.
Gillard's Iran solution
July 26, 2010
The innovation that our Prime minister has made is to point out that Parliament is not well matched to the will of the people on contemporary issues. Only an assembly of the people will reflect real community attitudes.
Read more...Peter Coleman on Counterpoint
July 26, 2010
Peter talks about his new book The Last Intellectuals.
Read more...The "Journolist" scandal
July 26, 2010
What must actually develop is a recognition across the community that these major media organisations are captives of the left, and the far left at that. They cannot be trusted to bring us the news.
Read more...Election Brown-out
July 26, 2010
Asking the big question: “Seeing the Greens had just about voted against all of the Rudd government’s major Bills, why on earth would the Greens want to do a deal with Labor?”
Read more...Why didn't he listen?
July 26, 2010
If only Kevin had listened to Julia in the first place. Why did Mr Rudd ignore her sensible advice?
Read more...The case of David Holland
July 26, 2010
On Counterpoint listen to Australian scientist John Abbot recount the case of David Holland and his attempts to get climate data from the British Met Office.
Read more...The price of carbon
July 23, 2010
The Greens object to all power stations except for windmills and solar installations. If these ambitions were to be realised Australians would be forced to live as their 19th century forebears lived.
Read more...On Peter Coleman
July 22, 2010
Rafe Champion: "I don’t think that Peter Coleman was even on the list when Robert Manne was voted our Number One public intellectual. However when you have a look at Coleman’s track record over a period of half a century it is very impressive. Robert Manne is not in the same class, certainly not when you contemplate his post-Quadrant career."
Read more...Election economics
July 21, 2010
The economy would now be stronger, if it had not been ‘stimulated’. Interest rates would be lower and builders and others occupied on redundant make-work projects would be employed more productively.
Read more...Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Left loathing
July 21, 2010
It’s a little late, and sad, that the Left, in the guise a silly review by Hilary McPhee, should be ringing the lepers bell for Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s already sold out talk in Melbourne later this month.
Read more...Thoughts on climate change
July 20, 2010
Cardinal Pell: “A politician referred my February article on global warming to the Bureau of Meteorology for comment. In a roundabout way they conceded the truth of most of my factual statements, but ducked the issue of Roman warming and claimed that ‘all available hemispheric to global scale analyses’ suggest recent decades have been warmer than in the Middle Ages. This is misleading.”
Read more...Lights out
July 20, 2010
You might think that these people are deranged but there were 1,400 of them, tertiary educated to a person, clapping and cheering enthusiastically. It’s a sobering thought that these people financed from the public purse and dedicated to destroying the Victorian coal and gas based electricity generation industry are comparable in number to those in gainful employ in that industry.
Read more...Tony does China
July 20, 2010
We are still deciding on an appropriate Mandarin name for Tony Abbott. I am trying to promote the more affectionate moniker, “Ao Bao”, which could mean: “Australian Protector”. I like it because it imparts both the sense of being strong on border protection but also hints at his fondness for budgie smugglers.
Read more...Gillard: Helen Clark redux?
July 20, 2010
I look at Gillard and I see Helen Clark. I think she’s a spender, a big spender. I won’t be in the least surprised if this makes her popular in the short to medium term. I’m convinced it will hurt the country though, and her popularity, in the longer term.
Read more...Getting nervous?
July 18, 2010
The Rudd/Gillard experiment has seen some of the most spectacular and jaw-dropping moments in Australia’s political history. There has never, ever, been a government with such a litany of cock-ups and maladministration.
Read more...Values Added Election
July 18, 2010
What do you run on as a new Prime Minister if you were complicit in all of this and then managed in just three short weeks to create more havoc? What you can’t do is to point to past achievements. An option is to hold out hope for the future and extol one’s virtues or, in this case, ‘values’.
Read more...Climate Science: The Movie
July 18, 2010
A suggestion was made during the Monckton Tour that a movie be made, aimed specifically at young people, to give them the real facts.
Read more...Another nail in the West’s coffin
July 16, 2010
If aliens came to earth and surveyed the scene in the contemporary Western world, they would have to ask themselves, “Why is the West so intent on destroying itself?” Good question. The evidence for this self-immolation is everywhere to be found, but the reasons for it are harder to come by.
Read more...The Climategate inquiry
July 15, 2010
Clive Crook: “The case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no. His record is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed, with apologies that Mann has been put to such trouble.”
Read more...Chop Phooey
July 15, 2010
Having not seen the original Karate Kid, I was willing to give this remake a try. I now actually want to see the original movie, because apparently it looks like Shakespeare compared to this one.
Read more...Oz bad, Islam good
July 14, 2010
Kevin Donnelly: “Those responsible for the booklet, sponsored by the Australian Curriculum Studies Association and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Excellence in Islamic Studies, are happy to assert that teaching Islam should be embedded in every school subject.”
Read more...No cheers for Obama
July 14, 2010
The way out of the economic harm is beyond me, while every day he adds just a bit more to the harm he added the day before and on some special days he adds on an extraordinary amount that create problems that may never be undone.
Read more...Media picks Gillard
July 13, 2010
When you put together Gillard’s inexperience with her record – Medicare Gold, the BER and now the Dili solution - and her complicity in all of Rudd’s disasters, it is nothing short of astounding that she may become an elected Prime Minister. What is going on? Are we to get the government that the media thinks we deserve?
Read more...Taking sides
July 13, 2010
Belief in the gratuitous viciousness of Israeli policy and actions has spread well beyond the ranks of overt anti-Semites, leading to the European Union, and now the Obama Administration, pressurising Israel to make unilateral concessions.
Read more...Kates at Freedomfest
July 11, 2010
It is like going to a Quadrant dinner only times 50 in numbers. It is an unbelievable pleasure to be amongst it, and as an invited speaker as well.
Read more...Pre-election season opens
July 11, 2010
In the past two weeks government ministers have been slowly emerging into the light of day like winter crocuses, pushing through the cold, hard Canberra soil.
Read more...Roger Sandall on Windschuttle
July 9, 2010
Writing for the New Criterion Roger Sandall has reviewed Keith Windschuttle on the Stolen Generations. A book the local intelligentsia seem to have overlooked.
Read more...Mystery needs resolving
July 9, 2010
Writing in the Spectator Peter Coleman has publicised what Paul Monk calls a “great mystery”. Why the Mitrokhin documents dealing with Soviet spies in Australia remain suppressed.
Read more...Climate Change Lunacy
July 9, 2010
The author of a new book on climate scepticism, Mark Lawson, is a senior journalist who writes on environmental matters for the Australian Financial Review. Remarkable.
Read more...Des Moore talks to Alan Jones
July 8, 2010
Des Moore was interviewed by Alan Jones on Islamic extremism in Australia. A topic our politicians are avoiding.
Read more...Our Australian tour
July 8, 2010
Anthony Watts runs the world’s most popular science blog with three million hits per month. One of the reasons for its popularity is that it possibly the most cheerful science blog, which in turn is a reflection on the owner.
Read more...Bulldust: Oz blogger hero
July 7, 2010
Anthony Watts claims that in November 2009 an Australian contributor to his blog was the first to dub the breaking CRU scandal “ClimateGate”.
Read more...Islam and science
July 7, 2010
Many scholars argue that Islam in fact impeded the development of modern science, and that it was essentially Christianity which helped to give rise to it.
Read more...Crikey criticises Flannery
July 7, 2010
Crikey has published an article by Andrew Macintosh, associate director of the ANU Centre for Climate Law and Policy, criticising Tim Flannery. Macintosh disputes seven claims Flannery made in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece.
Read more...Carter on Counterpoint
July 6, 2010
This week Professor Bob Carter was interviewed about his new book on ABC radio.
Read more...The blindness of modern economists
July 6, 2010
Keynesian economics has meant that someone of sound mind and good will, someone like Robert Samuelson, cannot see what was once commonly understood by economists but which is now incomprehensible across the profession.
Read more...The Salisbury Review
July 4, 2010
Ferocious protests from the Left greeted the appearance of the Salisbury Review in 1982. Fury erupted at the audacity of publishing a journal which not only challenged the Left’s ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ but did so with intellectual brilliance and panache.
Read more...Christopher Koch: Favourite Poems
July 4, 2010
Christopher Koch has selected “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats, and “Five Bells” by Kenneth Slessor. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Being Julia
July 4, 2010
With the end of the first week of the new Julia Gillard epoch in sight how was the fresh approach to government by cabinet looking. Full involvement by cabinet in major decisions like the “most important tax reform in generations”? Ah! Well no. We haven’t quite got there yet.
Read more...Breaking a working economy
July 4, 2010
The process for conjuring the MTTR out of the RSPT was deeply flawed. Having failed to consult before announcing the RSPT, Gillard and Swan compounded their previous dereliction of good process by ‘negotiating’, and then only with the three largest miners.
Read more...Koch on literature (1996)
July 4, 2010
I wonder if, where literature is concerned, this mean-spiritedness has something to do with the way the subject’s being taught in our schools and universities. I think so.
Read more...Anthony Watts interviewed
June 30, 2010
"Noble Cause Corruption is a belief that what you're doing is so much more important than what anyone else is doing because your cause is noble, you're saving the planet, and because you're saving the planet, you are doing it for the good of mankind."
Read more...Paris mid-summer
July 2, 2010
We think about how it was at the beginning, when we arrived on a snowy winter’s morning with the city draped in chilly grandeur, the trees skeletal not luxuriant, the Seine cold and murky-brown not greenly sparkling, almost inviting, like now.
Read more...The Rudd-Gillard tax
July 1, 2010
The details of the proposed mining tax as announced were simple. Filling in the detail by negotiation may result in a still inequitable tax and much less revenue to the government.
Read more...The Green Dollar
June 30, 2010
John Black: “The Greens are the richest group of voters in Australian politics. The poorest of course are the National Party voters.”
Read more...Mme $5 Billion
June 29, 2010
Kevin Rudd unleashed the federalism genie in the mining states, and Julia Gillard's only hope of neutralising this is by abandoning the super profits tax. And Madame $5 Billion will only regain her credibility by agreeing to a Royal Commission into the biggest financial scandal in the nation's history, the BER rort.
Read more...A-Team Mental Competency Test
June 29, 2010
Herewith my personally-developed brief psychometric evaluation tool which you can use to assess whether you are capable of enjoying this film.
Read more...ABC bills ALP (mate's rates)
June 27, 2010
ABC Tax Invoice: “Herewith is our bill for $11,000 for Kerry’s interview of Tony Abbott, including $1000 GST, payable to Consolidated Revenue. Terms strictly 30 days.”
Read more...ALP's zombie economics
June 27, 2010
The cost itself has been fantastic. The only reason the numbers I presented to the Senate have not been generally recognised is, I think, because no one can credit a government can be this incompetent.
Read more...Spring rolls and a fresh PM?
June 27, 2010
It seems that there needs to be a better way to enthrone a new Prime Minister other than by the decision being made over a warm Vietnamese salad.
Read more...Culture catcher: 24
June 26, 2010
Overland blog: “Make no mistake: this was a coup organised by the sinister nexus of capital and power politics. Its puts 1975 in the shade.”
Read more...Climate of McCarthyism
June 26, 2010
The University of Western Australia is presenting a closed mind discussion of climate change with a university psychologist explaining the “perils” of climate scepticism.
Read more...Festival of Intolerance
May 29, 2010
The Deakin Lectures reflect the continuing fight back by the many politicians and governments, bureaucrats and academics who have locked themselves into the belief that the earth faces a dangerous period of warming unless governments act to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In effect the Wheeler Centre has been established with taxpayers’ funds as a centre to promote left wing views.
Read more...Check Australian measurements - NOW
June 25, 2010
Gillard’s speech suggests a “softening” in the Rudd approach and could conceivably provide the basis for an independent public inquiry into the science or at the least into the temperature measurement series.
Read more...Night of the long stiletto
June 25, 2010
We have a new Prime Minister. Not the one that millions of voting Australians chose, but the one picked by Bill Shorten and David Feeney from Victoria, Don Farrell from South Australia and Mark Arbib from New South Wales. Don’t you just love democracy?
Read more...Ken Henry killed the king
June 25, 2010
The final blow that knocked out Kevin Rudd was delivered by Ken Henry, wrapped up in the guise of the RSPT.
Read more...Gillard government predicted in 2009
June 24, 2010
In Quadrant, January/February 2009, John Stone predicted that Julia Gillard would replace Kevin Rudd.
Read more...Dethroning humans
June 23, 2010
Common sense these days has been thrown out the window, so we must reaffirm and defend basic truths. One such truth is that of human exceptionalism – humans are special and unique. But that truism is under attack today from various quarters, including the animal liberation brigade.
Read more...The GetUp! Story
June 23, 2010
GetUp! is a front organization used for promoting New Class political aims. The videos they make reveal the current mood and prejudices of the public servants who fund their campaigns.
Read more...Taxing light and air
June 20, 2010
A short study of the history of whacky taxes might have given the gang of four, Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard and Lindsay Tanner, some cause for hesitation. Past attempts at whacky, (or shonky taxes), have either failed or caused untold damage. Whacky taxes develop a life of their own.
Read more...Policy of economic vandalism
June 20, 2010
Before us we see the fantastic harm that the stimulus has caused with the introduction of a “super profits” tax in the mining industry. The Government is desperate for money, and this is how they are going to make ends meet.
Read more...CSIRO's "denialist" slide show
June 20, 2010
Anthony Watts: “I find that while I’m doing my tour in Australia, CSIRO organized a meeting that is designed to combat the sort of inconvenient discussions I’m having. Fortunately, I’ve been given the whole slide show.”
Read more...Shame Day in Victoria
June 18, 2010
The Victorian Government sponsors a seminar for public servants on how to deal with “climate denialism”. The presenter is a CSIRO scientist.
Read more...Why Ken Henry gets it wrong
June 19, 2010
Ken Henry advised the Government that the wasteful stimulus schemes had created 225,000 jobs; not because anyone had actually identified and counted the jobs and assessed whether they represented a net gain in jobs, but because a model had said so.
Read more...Fireworks Down Under
June 17, 2010
Anthony Watts on the attempted hijacking of his Brisbane lecture by an Australian academic.
Read more...Culture catcher: 23
June 16, 2010
Julian Burnside in 2007: “When it comes to policy development, no principle is so fundamental that it cannot be subverted or debased by John Howard.”
Read more...Bonk ‘em, don’t eat ‘em
June 16, 2010
Peter Singer is a world-renowned ethicist and philosopher. As a strident vegetarian, all that he is really doing here is telling us that it is OK to have sex with animals, as long as we don’t eat them afterwards.
Read more...No longer raging against God
June 15, 2010
Atheist Christopher Hitchens has just released his memoirs, which has generated a lot of interest. His brother Peter has also released his story, but much of the media seems uninterested in the book. Perhaps it is because Peter has moved on from atheism to Christianity.
Read more...Freedom, history and memory
June 15, 2010
Today we see our liberties disappearing all around us, mainly from secular humanists of the left, and radical Islamists. But we seem to be asleep, unconcerned, and unaware of what is happening. We have forgotten the lessons of history – if indeed we ever learned them in the first place.
Read more...Animal Kingdom
June 15, 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...Warming scam continues
June 15, 2010
Some people think that the global warming scam is finished and that there is no further threat to our jobs, our economy and our energy supplies. Unfortunately there is no reason to relax. Public opinion has changed but the politicians have not.
Read more...The looming energy disaster
June 15, 2010
What is distressing about the renewables approach is that the expansion of the scheme from a few percent of demand to near 20% occurred without serious consideration of the consequences and with bi-partisan support.
Read more...Crashing the economy
June 13, 2010
Is it possible to imagine a government sitting for months on a publicly-funded report on taxation and then, without any consultation, announcing a punitive taxation regime, whose details and impact are beyond the wit of the Government to explain, on the very industry responsible for Australia’s economic good fortune?
Read more...Government in freefall
June 13, 2010
The Rudd government’s eye on taking control of education and health from the Australian states, and its efforts to date, are pure Whitlamesque. The idea of Federation, to them, is a style of house rather than a form of government.
Read more...Blogger tours continent
June 13, 2010
An historic occasion. Anthony Watts’ Australian lecture tour has begun.
Read more...Sharia finance and Australia
June 10, 2010
A new enemy of the free West has arisen, and foolish, naive and short-sighted Western leaders are more than happy to aid and abet the Islamists as they seek the ultimate overthrow of all non-Islamic nations.
Read more...Hypocrisy at the top
June 10, 2010
Kevin Rudd reeks of hypocrisy. It swirls around him like the lingering scent wafting from the fish processing plant worker or sewer repair guy.
Read more...Not happy, David
June 9, 2010
Larvatus Prodeo: “Marr’s article presents Rudd in the bitchiest possible way and is a big time get square. Mealy mouthed and bitchy.”
Read more...Challenging "State of the Climate"
June 9, 2010
Fair Farming Group: "In the absence of sound science the case has not been made for the economic costs to agriculture and industry associated with an ETS."
Read more...Wheeler Centre scam
June 9, 2010
There’s no fear of government funds being used to propagate a one-sided message, because JoNova is discussing the science (with no government funding, no industry sponsorship, and no university support). So that’s what they call, “balance”.
Read more...Warmers Twitter
June 8, 2010
Tim Flannery: “It is my job as curator not to program any climate change skeptics.”
Read more...Dangers of wounded Rudd
June 8, 2010
If, at the next election, Rudd wins, and the Greens control the senate, what we get then will be far worse than the ETS we fought before. They will have carte blanche to run the chainsaws through the intricate branches of business, careers, and livelihoods.
Read more...The politburo and pravda
June 8, 2010
If returned, on their record the Russ-Gillard politburo will bring in two great big new taxes, the ETS and the super profits tax, borrow without control and waste the proceeds. They will damage our country in a way no government, even the Whitlam government, has ever achieved before.
Read more...Rudd Marred
June 6, 2010
David Marr reveals a man with few friends in the Labor caucus, and “a man with an angry heart”. “A politician with rage at his core”.
Read more...Waste equals growth?
June 6, 2010
Every one of those dollars spent wastefully on school buildings ‘made money’. They contributed to growth according to the national accounts.
Read more...Fathers of literature
June 6, 2010
Having gone around two literary houses recently, those of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, I was struck by the contrasting way in which their massive fame impacted on their family life.
Read more...Appeasement and defeatism
June 5, 2010
To avoid making unforced errors or tactical mistakes; to put yourself in a position where you can do no inadvertent harm, is simply modern Western code for appeasement and defeatism. Our enemies, and Israel’s enemies, will have no such code to inhibit them. That we should count on.
Read more...Betrayal
June 4, 2010
Simon Benson’s is the first book which captures the disillusionment which followed the glory days of Kevin 07 - and the chicanery of The Lodge's present tenant.
Read more...ABC Agony Aunt
June 4, 2010
“Valerie, a Labor supporter, phoned in to chew the fat with [ABC radio announcer] Jon Faine about the heartache Labor is giving true believers like her and her friends at the moment.”
Read more...Commonsense on immigration
June 3, 2010
Bearing and caring for our own children, choosing friends on intuition, and having a special affection for our own country cannot be equated with hating others.
Read more...Greg Melleuish on Counterpoint
June 2, 2010
This week historian Gregory Melleuish was on ABC radio’s Counterpoint discussing history teaching in schools and his recent Quadrant article “The Dubious Future of History”.
Read more...Glorious stupidity
June 2, 2010
The Wheeler Centre’s “Festival of Intolerance” rolls on with the announcement of even more speakers - but not a sceptic in sight.
Read more...It's easy to condemn Israel
June 2, 2010
Critics of Israel ought to ask themselves this. What would they expect their government to do if thousands of rockets rained down on their cities, with hundreds of suicide bombers unleashing their evil on buses and trains and in crowded streets?
Read more...Guerrilla theatre at sea
June 2, 2010
This is not the first such example of guerrilla theatre, and it will not be the last. It comes straight out of the radical’s playbook. I and plenty of others have used these tactics to great effect. Now the Islamists and enemies of Israel and the West are also using them, with great – and deadly – results.
Read more...Rudd's Very Bad Tax
June 2, 2010
A summary of the case against the RSPT. The arguments can be divided into those against the idea, against the design and against the tactics used for its introduction.
Read more...Why scientists get it wrong
June 1, 2010
The CSIRO might be forgiven for not having a corporate memory more than 60 years long, but why did they and the Bureau of Meteorology only use 50 years of data to produce a graph [of record hot day maximums] when they had more than 100 years of data they could have used?
Read more...NZ climate crisis gets worse
June 1, 2010
It is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that NIWA’s political urge to prove a warming trend overcame its professional urge to apply objective scientific principles in constructing a sound and defensible temperature series.
Read more...Rudd government initiatives
June 1, 2010
There are Pink Bats, Fabricating the Education Revolution, the Green Car Fund and others. The government is channelling Groucho Marx who said “I have learned from my mistakes. Now I can repeat them perfectly.”
Read more...Left dictates history curriculum
June 1, 2010
That the history curriculum appears to have been written by cultural warriors of the left most likely explains why, on studying the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, that McCarthyism is mentioned, but not Stalin's purges or the role of Ronald Reagan in defeating what he termed the evil empire.
Read more...Rudd's war on the States
June 1, 2010
What is missing so far from this debate are the constitutional implications of the proposal. If this tax becomes a reality the States will have been dealt such a blow that they might as well shut down their parliaments.
Read more...Wilson Tuckey's tidal power
May 31, 2010
The Kimberley tidal idea and a national HVDC electricity grid is something Tony Abbott should examine seriously. This could be the sort of “nation building” concept that our Dear Leader is constantly babbling on about but seems incapable of conceptualising.
Read more...CSIRO in Climate Change Club
May 31, 2010
A second curious, and even dodgier, thing happened after Quirk's Quadrant report. CSIRO “updated” its main graph to include the more recent methane data. No admission was made and the graph's scale made it all but invisible and did not show the plateauing.
Read more...Wrong advice from Ken Henry
May 29, 2010
The situation is parlous. Instead of a reckless government (seeking to impose punitive taxation on Australia’s most important industry without consultation) being held back by its hard-headed economic adviser, we have it being cheered on.
Read more...Israel hatred at Overland
May 29, 2010
Philip Mendes: “[Overland’s contributors] form a mad hatter’s picnic of fanatical attacks on Israel and supporters of Israel followed by more fanatical attacks of the same ilk.”
Read more...Tenured vampires
May 28, 2010
Vampire disciplines found their homes within the humanities and social sciences. But they are quickly spreading to areas as diverse as law and architecture, terrorism studies and geography.
Read more...The "dumb" twenty
May 27, 2010
It was to be expected that a group (the so-called twenty economists, containing some of the usual suspects on the Left) would come out in support of the mining tax.
Read more...CSIRO blame game
May 27, 2010
Apparently, the final draft “State of the Climate” report was not reviewed by CSIRO or BOM scientists themselves, and when it is questioned others are blamed for the errors it contains and the confused dating of information.
Read more...CSIRO responds
May 26, 2010
The methane data were plotted by a non-CSIRO designer in a manner that resulted in about a 20 year lag at the end of the record, presumably to separate them visually from the carbon dioxide record. This should have been explained in State of Climate - unfortunately it was not, and this has lead to Quirk’s misinterpretation of the data.
Read more...CSIRO updates argument
May 23, 2010
Sometime after my essay was posted online a funny thing happened on the CSIRO website. There was a change to page 5 of their “State of the Climate” report. This has the appearance of a response.
Read more...CSIRO abandons science
May 19, 2010
The CSIRO paper “State of the Climate” is as much a commentary on the state of the climate scientists who put the document together. The CSIRO has waded into a large government funded trough and is not inclined to publish anything that gets between it and the trough.
Read more...Peter Coleman: Favourite Poems
May 24, 2010
Peter Coleman has chosen “The Manner of the Worls Nowadays” by John Skelton, and “Fun and Sun” by John Betjeman. The reader is Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Cry for us Argentina
May 25, 2010
Mr Rudd’s ideology compels him to raise taxation and invent new taxes. He seems determined to impose this new tax and there will be no certainty for business until the next Coalition Government repeals it.
Read more...Report from Heartland-4
May 23, 2010
It is surprising that the Australian media exhibited no interest in a major international conference at which copious evidence was provided that global warming is no longer a threat (if ever it was), and that global cooling may well be underway. Robyn Williams, Tony Jones and the Kerry O’Brien team, where were you?
Read more...The boy "stolen" from an ants' nest
May 24, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: “[My mother] wanted to kill me. She wanted to let the ants eat us alive and apparently my mother’s sister was the one that went back and got me from the ants' nest and kept me and grew me up.”
Read more...Media virus spreads
May 24, 2010
It started with Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report and spread instantly throughout the main-stream-media, infecting the weakest and least informed members of our nation’s Fourth Estate.
Read more...Rudd's Cuba solution
May 24, 2010
More mining, more revenue for government, and a more balanced economy; it really is a magic pudding tax. Why stop at 40 per cent? Why not tax and rebate at 50 per cent rather than 40 per cent and get even more benefit?
Read more...Keep Right, Tony
May 24, 2010
Having your team dress-up and pretend to be the other team is not usually a winning strategy. The whole ‘move to the centre’ maxim presupposes that the centre isn’t a moving target, when in fact it is.
Read more...Debating the Case of Roger Hollis
May 24, 2010
Paul Monk’s Quadrant essay “Christopher Andrew and the Strange Case of Roger Hollis” gained international interest and was discussed in letters to the editor from Chapman Pincher, Tennent H. Bagley, and John L. Wilhelm.
Read more...Holes in the Rabbit-Proof Fence
May 21, 2010
Rabbit-Proof Fence is advertised as “a true story”. Many school teachers think it is an accurate portrayal of history. It is anything but. The film gets the names of the major characters and locations right, but not much else. It is a work of dramatic fiction that tells at least ten major falsehoods.
Read more...Rudd's Stupidity Tax
May 20, 2010
This Government has revealed itself many times as ardently hard left but wrapped in a protective cloak of faux economic conservatism. This new tax rips that cloak away, exposing the pugnacious ignorance and economic vandalism beneath.
Read more...Rudd Dictionary: Volume One
May 20, 2010
When Rudd says he will turn back boat people, what he means is that he will repeal laws making it difficult for asylum seekers to stay in Australia, lure flotillas of boats, cause dozens of people to drown on the way here, and turn people smugglers into millionaires within 12 months.
Read more...Shiralee Man website
May 19, 2010
An affectionate new website for writer D’Arcy Niland, author of The Shiralee.
Read more...The politicisation of society
May 18, 2010
As long as these various groups stay free of politicisation, and remain independent, they can provide helpful restraints on the expansionist state. But sadly, many of these bodies and institutions are becoming politicised and unduly quite partisan.
Read more...War of worldviews
May 18, 2010
Melanie Phillips is rightly perplexed and dismayed at the war against the West, and why so many Westerners – including Christians – are simply standing by, watching it collapse around them.
Read more...James Franklin on numbers
May 18, 2010
James Franklin was interviewed on ABC radio on the philosophy of numbers.
Read more...The Pocket Windschuttle
May 13, 2010
Tony Thomas is publishing a reader's guide to Keith Windschuttle’s Stolen Generations on Andrew Bolt’s blog, and on Quadrant Online. Professional historians have attempted to bury Windschuttle’s book but Thomas is making it accessible to a huge audience.
Read more...The tragic life of Bruce Trevorrow
May 18, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: “One of the great ironies of the history of Aboriginal child welfare is that [South Australia] the state most reluctant to remove Aboriginal children from their parents turned out to be the only one that did so illegally.”
Read more...What's a Rudd?
May 18, 2010
If he isn’t a safe pair of economic hands, what is Mr. Rudd? Not a question I think our Prime Minister wants the voters mulling over later this year.
Read more...Turning saving into "stealing"
May 16, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: The missionaries are viewed as having worked in tandem with WA authorities to grab half-caste girls from their parents to be ‘whited-out’ and Christianised.
Read more...My Place: a betrayal of trust
May 17, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: This is the photograph that disproves the central allegations of Sally Morgan’s book My Place.
Read more...The Nostradamus Kids
May 17, 2010
The bare-faced dishonesty of this spin operation was enough to leave the average thinking citizen wondering if there really is a parallel universe.
Read more...Manne, time to retire
May 17, 2010
Andrew McIntyre: “One has to feel sorry for poor old Robert Manne. He was recently humiliated beyond redemption by Keith Windshuttle in the latest Quadrant.”
Read more...Go Greece!
May 17, 2010
Greece should also take a cue from Australia and build thousands of over-priced school halls, libraries and classrooms or any old buildings will do. Then we will see Greece take off.
Read more...Robinvale, France
May 17, 2010
This is a sobering place, with its thousands of graves, and the 11,000 names engraved on the Memorial itself - the names of all those Australian soldiers who died in France but whose gravesite is unknown.
Read more...www.stolengenerations.info
May 17, 2010
Visit a new website devoted to Keith Windschuttle’s book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History - Volume Three: The Stolen Generations 1881-2008.
Read more...Nation falls as Rudd fails
May 17, 2010
The government managed to hide from most Australians the fact that if the budget does go into surplus in 2012, there will still be a massive debt of around $100 billion. That is why it is eying the mining industry to pay at least the interest.
Read more...The attack on Harold Blair
May 12, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: Windschuttle concludes that the late Harold Blair now stands publicly condemned in Bringing Them Home for a holiday scheme that used false promises and lies to steal Aboriginal children. The charge was made on the basis of no substantial evidence whatsoever.
Read more...The facts from the Northern Territory
May 12, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: Justice Maurice O’Loughlin - “Even though one forced removal would be regarded today as one too many, the numbers in the Administrator’s report, if accurate, do not support an argument that there was a large scale policy of forced removals occurring in this period.”
Read more...Unstolen Generations in Victoria
May 12, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: In Victoria, numerous inquiries were launched to document Victoria’s complicity in ‘stolen generations’ policies. Despite failure to find any such policies or any stolen children, other than welfare cases, the major parties still delivered a formal apology in Parliament.
Read more...Aboriginal Protector AO Neville
May 12, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: AO Neville did have some foolish ideas about ‘breeding out the colour’ by integrating half-castes into white society, except that for all his talk, he had neither staff nor funds to do anything about it, and it was logically impossible anyway.
Read more...Peter Read invents the "Stolen Generations"
May 12, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: The “Stolen Generations” tag originated from a 1981 pamphlet of 21 pages by historian Peter Read, now Professor of History at Sydney University, who argued that children were removed to separate them permanently from the rest of their race.
Read more...The "Genocide"
May 14, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: The story about our genocide of Aborigines via child-stealing is demonstrated to be bogus through the 620 pages of Windschuttle’s Stolen Generations.
Read more...Inconvenient truth about Queensland
May 14, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: Bringing Them Home lamented the powers directed at Aboriginals, while omitting to mention the inconvenient truth of how small a number of Qld children were actually separated – four per year from 1908 to 1971, for all reasons!
Read more...Demonising Sister Kate
May 14, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: Keith Windschuttle describes the ‘stolen generations’ historians’ defaming of charity workers and religious figures who spent much of their lives selflessly caring for Aborigines.
Read more...Fabrication in Tasmania
May 15, 2010
From The Pocket Windschuttle: After the death in 1876 of Truganini, the last Tasmanian Aborigine, all Aborigines were presumed to have died out and hence there were no laws based on or directed at race. They were not mentioned again legally until the 1970s.
Read more...Crisis in New Zealand climatology
May 15, 2010
New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and the Climate Ministers are attempting to save face rather than confess that they have been running their policies on the basis of bogus data for many years.
Read more...Dear Mr Abbott
May 12, 2010
I have become aware of the controversy over your comments at an Adelaide school last week, including the public response by [a] scientist with an alarmist global warming bent.
Read more...Glikson or Nova?
April 30, 2010
Quadrant Online's climate debate between Andrew Glikson and Joanne Nova. Join the discussion.
Read more...Depending on flawed models
May 11, 2010
It’s time for the propaganda of half truths to stop. It’s time for universities to be called to order and shamed for their pathetic standards of logic and reason.
Read more...Effects of CO2 on climate
May 11, 2010
It appears the differences in views regarding the reality and origin of global warming are of a quantitative nature rather than qualitative nature.
Read more...Recent climate videos
May 10, 2010
Two new videos of Bob Carter and Barry Brill on the messy NZ ETS, and other things.
Read more...Bob Carter's new book
May 10, 2010
Climate: The Counter-Consensus by Bob Carter is due for publication in the UK in May, and release in Australia in June.
Read more...Empty suit loses election
May 10, 2010
The best outcome would be for a rainbow coalition of assorted leftists to take power. As the fiscal and financial collapse cannot be avoided it could result in a Conservative Party, minus David Cameron and fellow “wets”, being placed in the position to pick up the pieces and start Britain on the long road to economic recovery.
Read more...Viva debt!
May 10, 2010
Whereas Gordon Brown has had 13 years to puff-up Britain’s debt to a trillion pounds, our Inner Cabinet of four — Kevin Rudd, Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard and Lindsay Tanner — have managed to tick-up what could be one fifth of a trillion dollars in just 18 months.
Read more...Farce in our midst
May 10, 2010
We expect to see farces on stage. When they happen in real life maybe it’s harder to spot them. It must, because we are now living in the middle of one that would stretch the imagination of playwright and audience alike.
Read more...Melbourne's closed minds
May 9, 2010
Wheeler Centre Director Chrissy Sharp: “If we talk about how bad tobacco is, we don’t ask for someone to come in and represent the tobacco companies. I do think we’re seeing that in climate change.”
Read more...As wrong as ABC
May 6, 2010
Letter to Catalyst: “A program on science has a particular duty to ensure that misstatements about the scientific facts made on programs, or included on web sites, are corrected. Your program on the Antarctic has already led a prominent journalist to erroneously accept the presentation in your program.”
Read more...Credibility lies with experienced authorities
April 29, 2010
Andrew Glikson: "As in other fields of science and technology, credibility lies with the respective experienced authorities and is protected, as much as humanly possible, by the peer review system."
Read more...Credibility lies on evidence
April 29, 2010
Joanne Nova: "Andrew Glikson backs his arguments with weak evidence and logical errors. Instead of empirical evidence, often he quotes authoritative reports written by glorified committees."
Read more...No, Dr Glikson
April 19, 2010
The central problem with “attribution” of the cause for the warming is that dozens of major forces are working on our climate, and none of them leave a business card.
Read more...Case for climate change
April 19, 2010
The widening gulf between scientific observations around the globe and public perceptions of the nature and origin of climate change is threatening to lead the world away from evidence-based policies despite projections by the world’s major climate research bodies.
Read more...Climate blacklist in Melbourne
May 6, 2010
How can you organise a climate change conference and not include sceptics? Easy, hold it at The Wheeler Centre.
Read more...Australia, ditto
May 6, 2010
Andrew Klavan: “Leftists will blacklist you—then if you complain, they’ll attack you for whining. They will call you racist and compare your leaders to Hitler—then if you return the insult, they’ll scream about the decline of civility.”
Read more...Targeting the War Memorial
May 3, 2010
When What’s Wrong With Anzac? came out, why was there not even one eminent military historian apparently prepared to enter the lists to combat the deluded but highly destructive claims being made by its authors?
Read more...Rudd and China: diplomacy or fear?
May 5, 2010
Does diplomacy now require that an Australian Prime Minister cannot state the problems [of China] clearly and publicly talk about them honestly even at his own university in the capital of his own country at the opening of a centre devoted to the study of China?
Read more...State of the States
May 3, 2010
Beware! Advocates of a Supreme Soviet are working quietly at plans to create a great big new central government, and they’re at it at a university somewhere near you.
Read more...Bruce Beresford: Favourite Poems
May 3, 2010
Bruce Beresford has selected “On Seeing an Old Poet in the Café Royal” by John Betjeman, and “All the Happiness Ahead” by Michael Cullup. The reader is Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Henry Review: another BIG tax
May 3, 2010
This government has wasted billions of dollars and put us into debt. Their massive incompetence means taxpayers have to pay billions of dollars in interest each year and somehow repay the capital. And what is there to show for this?
Read more...Yummy, free health
April 30, 2010
The last thing that should be done is to make a visit to the emergency department of a public hospital brief and pleasant. That will simply encourage people to attend who would otherwise wait to see their local GP or care for themselves.
Read more...Hubris
April 29, 2010
John Quiggin: “It is necessary to criticise this convention [of debating opposing views] and hammer home the point that the right has become totally disconnected from reality and rational argument.”
Read more...Bad clean air
April 28, 2010
Eli Kintisch has a breath-taking new concept for all of us to contemplate and worry about — “clean air might actually intensify global warming”.
Read more...Big state, big crises
April 28, 2010
Those who think the government has the answer to everything, and more troubling, those who earn their living from feeding off the government (taxpayer) trough, will always find reasons to seek to expand the reach of government.
Read more...Our New Flag: Spirit of 2010
April 28, 2010
I’ve carefully analysed the criticisms of our flag and designed a new flag to take account of all the Left desires. Men and women of Australia, please be upstanding for the flag of Ruddnation.
Read more...Jack the Ripper: the prime suspect
April 27, 2010
This Whitechapel Murderer suspect was a part of the East End streetscape and he has a name: Charles Allen Lechmere. He was discovered beside the still warm body of murdered prostitute Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols. And he walked away.
Read more...Warmists desperate fightback
April 27, 2010
Those fightingback are trying desperately to dismiss the growing revelations that not only is the science used by the so-called consensus highly (and increasingly) uncertain but so too are the temperatures used as statistical backing for that science.
Read more...Henry Tax Review
April 27, 2010
The long awaited release of the Henry Tax Review will reveal Canberra'splans to plunder the wealth of Western Australia and Queensland. Instead Canberra should give the States back their money. A Convention to restore the Federation as the people intended may be the best way to achieve this.
Read more...Wheeler Centre's big fix
April 27, 2010
Of the 30 “best people addressing the climate problem now”, the Alfred Deakin lecturers all appear to be warmists, and include John Brumby and Malcolm Turnbull. Scientists with any knowledge of the global warming debate are in short supply and there are no sceptics.
Read more...The economics of rort
April 26, 2010
The tales now emerging of the rorts in the system are astounding. There has been little evidence of a genuinely serious effort made to extract positive value in amongst all of the billions (!) that have been spent.
Read more...Contra appeasement
April 26, 2010
Every newspaper and media outlet might agree to reprint or to otherwise cover each Human Rights Day any meritorious story or picture or cartoon, in circumstances where organised threats of violence or death have been used to deter or prevent its publication.
Read more...Nick Clegg gets tough
April 26, 2010
Nick Clegg is the most popular leader since Winston Churchill. Pace Karl Marx, Britain's decline over the past 75 years was first a tragedy; it's now a farce.
Read more...Great Books discussion
April 26, 2010
What are the Great Books of Liberty? How did A Clockwork Orange get in there? Join the online discussion.
Read more...Liberty under threat
April 26, 2010
It should not be forgotten that less than six months ago a highly prominent professor of philosophy and candidate for federal parliament was advocating the suspension of civil liberties, and the muzzling or even incarceration of climate change sceptics.
Read more...Our Great Books
April 26, 2010
Ayn Rand was crazy – nobody is disputing that – but her books remain one of the most powerful ways to get young people interested in individualism and liberty.
Read more...For an audience of one
April 25, 2010
Is the interview the lowest form of writing? Particularly interviews with writers which often consist simply of writing what they say about writing.
Read more...Spirit of Anzac
April 25, 2010
It seems the obvious thing to do on Anzac Day — think about bravery, character and courage. So it is with some surprise that the question of these very qualities should surface at this time regarding our formidable, and seemingly indestructible Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.
Read more...Culture warriors against Anzac
April 25, 2010
When Henry Reynolds presented his condemnation of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs materials to an audience of history teachers in 2008 he had to acknowledge that he had not actually read any of the materials he was condemning.
Read more...Great Books of Liberty
April 19, 2010
Any book that champions the ideal of liberty and emphasizes the role that it has played in Western Civilization is a valuable asset. Unfortunately, there are problems with this worthy project.
Read more...Living in the Bangkok storm
April 23, 2010
Suddenly my wife’s phone rings and it's her sister telling us to turn on the news. M79 grenades have been launched into the group of Silom Road protesters and there is widespread mayhem.
Read more...Revelations of a Hamas insider
April 21, 2010
Son of Hamas tells the story of a Hamas insider who was a key player in Palestinian radicalism and Islamic jihad. It also tells the story of how this Muslim ended up working for the Israeli secret service. And it tells how in a land of bloodshed, revenge and hatred, one man found that Christianity is the true answer to such problems.
Read more...Recent conservative books
April 20, 2010
In the war of ideas, being armed with the right intellectual ammunition is crucial. Here is a somewhat random selection of some recent conservative titles covering a wide range of fields.
Read more...Moral dilemmas
April 19, 2010
The notion of doing the right thing has been supplanted by spin, arrogance, and an inability to see anything beyond “the importance of being Me”. Four recent examples of this are the conduct of Peter Garrett, Christine Nixon, Julia Gillard and the artist, Sam Leach.
Read more...Jordie Albiston: poems
April 19, 2010
Poems written and read by Melbourne poet Jordie Albiston.
Read more...Andrew Bolt: Favourite Sonnets
April 19, 2010
Two sonnets selected by Andrew Bolt and read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Anzac Day poems
April 19, 2010
Anzac Day is a day which lends itself to poetry and prosodic thought. It brings not the romance of war but the reality of death.
Read more...The Wynne controversy
April 19, 2010
The ancient Romans paid the ancient Greeks the ultimate compliment of copying Greek marble statuary down to the last toenail and nipple.
Read more...Lateline, biased and unfair
April 19, 2010
A trawl through the Lateline archive netted more than 20 one-on-one interviews in the same period with experts on the true-believer side of the debate. It is a scandalous scorecard: believers 20+, heretics 1.
Read more...Robert Manne's bad economics
April 13, 2010
Manne held Hayek responsible for everything from the collapse of the derivatives market to some colourful rhetoric of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. It probably needs the analytical skills of an historian to make sense of all this.
Read more...Marriagebusters Inc.
April 13, 2010
This whole business is one ugly, grubby attempt to make money off the misery of others. As Biderman admits, he's made millions through this website. Now he wants to make more millions by busting up even more marriages here in Australia.
Read more...Stop laughing, this is Tasmania
April 12, 2010
In the arcane world of Tasmanian politics nothing frustrates the devotees of intrigue and conspiracy more than the state’s magnificent Hare-Clark electoral system.
Read more...The Republic we had to have
April 12, 2010
This poem, not quite a letter to the editor, was the result of jetlag and conversation last night about Les Murray in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Read more...Salon du Livre, 2010
April 12, 2010
The crowds of children and teenagers clustered around the book stands at the Salon and waiting patiently in line to have books autographed testified to the excitement amongst young readers in France.
Read more...Christians on the Left
April 12, 2010
Journalists have no interest in exploring the moral dilemmas confronting Christians in the Labor Party, even if they are thornier than those facing Coalition members.
Read more...Farce on the Reef
April 12, 2010
About once in a decade a ship runs aground somewhere on the Great Barrier Reef. Although this has never resulted in other than trivial damage to the reef, a three ring media circus always unfolds.
Read more...Removing the Stolen Generations
April 12, 2010
Unless comprehensive rebuttal—not just cheap shots—follows, Windschuttle has demolished the Stolen Generations story—to such an extent that reputations would be at risk if it was about a less politically correct subject.
Read more...Robert Manne's bad language
April 12, 2010
Manne should apologize to the Aboriginal people of Australia for describing them in quasi-zoological terminology that, as he says himself, is the equivalent of using the word “nigger” without inverted commas.
Read more...Absurdity at the top
April 7, 2010
This is flat out outrageous. The Australian Research Council’s attempt to hide behind some pathetic abstraction like ‘confidentiality’ is beyond parody.
Read more...Manne avoids the real debate
March 31, 2010
Robert Manne was unwilling or unable to engage in a genuine debate. Yet he knew that major sections of my book disprove the claim that Aboriginal children removed were as young as possible or that they were removed from their families permanently.
Read more...Faine-ing indignation
April 5, 2010
Jon Faine: “Tony Abbott has a history of being late. In fact, it’s got him into trouble during election campaigns, it’s got him into trouble in various ways. He manages to be on time for a triathlon. He’s now 15 minutes late for his appointment here.”
Read more...A step too far?
April 5, 2010
We have to depend on conservative politicians, whatever their past infidelities, because those on the left build their constituencies around undermining individual self-reliance and keeping people dependent.
Read more...The Turin Shroud and climate change
April 5, 2010
It was left to SBS to show some sense of occasion by broadcasting in the 7.30 prime time slot a documentary entitled Turin Shroud — The New Evidence. And the great drama in this, as with global warming, all got down to that most pesky of substances - carbon.
Read more...Rudd the Keynesian
March 29, 2010
Perhaps the profligacy and lack of control in government programmes was deliberate. Perhaps Rudd and Gillard were only following Keynesian economic policy. After all, they kept us out of recession....didn’t they?
Rogue History
September 1, 2009
Some years ago Michael Cathcart published a one-volume abridgement of Manning Clark’s six-volume history. He should have learnt a lesson from that disastrous compilation of false facts, bad analysis and “nicked” vocabulary. He didn’t.
Read more...Keynes-Hayek Rap
March 30, 2010
Here is a video that has had a million hits and if nothing else it has brought economics into households that would never likely pay the slightest attention to issues in the history of economic thought.
Read more...Climate inquiry, now
March 30, 2010
The State of Climate report can only be described as offering a grossly inadequate assessment of both past trends and possible future trends in climate. The many inadequacies offer the Coalition an opportunity to demand an independent inquiry into the science being used to back the dangerous warming thesis.
Read more...Maternity leave and mother wars
March 30, 2010
Governments should not be in the business of showing partiality to one kind of mother over another. They should treat all mums fairly. This is not a call for special favours or rights for stay-at-home mums, simply equity and fairness.
Read more...War against free speech
March 30, 2010
The radicals of the secular left seem to prefer coercive police states to genuine debate and a genuine exchange of ideas. That is their idea of tolerance and open-mindedness.
Read more...Steven Kates’ Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture
March 29, 2010
Steven Kates presents the Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture at the 2010 Austrian Scholars Conference.
Read more...Abbott won!
March 29, 2010
Last Tuesday Tony Abbott won the great health debate, but the majority of the Australian media refused to accept the outcome. And the incredible thing is that they chose to use the highly irresponsible, and unreliable, Channel Nine Worm as their main evidence.
Read more...Conservatives and ObamaCare
March 29, 2010
Speed is essential for any successful rollback of welfarism. Once entitlements are granted, they are nearly impossible to remove in the absence of a financial and fiscal crisis.
Read more...Indoctrinating a new generation
March 29, 2010
Kevin Donnelly: “The ex-communist and historian, Stuart Macintyre, strongly defends his new creation as balanced and impartial and argues that critics have failed to analyse the history curriculum in any detailed way.”
Read more...Babette Smith: Favourite Poems
March 29, 2010
AUDIO: Babette Smith has chosen two favourite poems - “A Bush Christening” and “The Birthstain”. The reader is Lionel Farrell.
Read more...The whitefella issues
March 29, 2010
This impasse in school and education in Wadeye does not exist because there has not been enough taxpayer’s money thrown at it. It exists as a statement of welfare inertia, a statement of utter confusion, a statement of being ‘past caring’, a cry from an exhausted community, as a failed experiment at a tribal communist state.
Read more...How we were censored
March 29, 2010
Few stories in science come bigger than deliberate censorship, and especially so when it concerns material that is relevant to the dangerous global warming debate. We present a brief outline of how we were censored by leading AGW scientists.
Read more...IPCC prayer
March 29, 2010
After Avatar, normal activist extremism, Lenten sacrifices of carbon pollution and special intentions (prayers) for environmental activists a prayer to the IPCC.
Read more...Reefgate on the Barrier Reef
March 29, 2010
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has grown into a 45 million dollar a year bureaucracy charged with “managing” the reef. This it does by remote control from air conditioned offices where it oversees the application of hypothetical solutions to imaginary problems.
Read more...Impasse at Wadeye
March 22, 2010
They trust no whitefellas, not even women whitefellas. Some - enough to be noted, actually hate whitefellas, and are given plenty of ammunition via SBS and the ABC.
Read more...Obamacare as culture
March 25, 2010
The health care fight has served as a proxy for a deeper debate over the ongoing transformation of the United States into a European-style “soft despotism,” to use Tocqueville’s astute description.
Read more...Breaking America
March 25, 2010
If there was ever a way to bankrupt a nation while whittling away its freedoms, this has to be it.
Read more...Reef report lacks credibility
March 24, 2010
A new Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority report, published in PNAS, the journal of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, makes questionable claims of remarkably rapid, large, widespread and diverse environmental and economic benefits from the expanded protected areas introduced on the Great Barrier Reef in 2004.
Read more...Left teach
March 24, 2010
“As conservatives it is our duty to turn the education system around to improve academic standards and counter left-wing indoctrination.”
Read more...Damien Freeman on Counterpoint
March 23, 2010
Damien Freeman’s “The Political Philosphy of Tony Abbott” was published in Quadrant. This week he and Christopher Pearson discussed Tony Abbott on Counterpoint.
Read more...Do I smell a grant?
March 23, 2010
“A rose may stop smelling like a rose. This is the concern of environmentalists as flowers are losing their scent due to climate change and air pollution. And their fragrance may be lost forever.”
Read more...Beware the Celtic Tiger
March 22, 2010
China has warned recently of the possibility of a further recession, which could impact significantly on Australia. If we waste the proceeds of the current export boom, we will not have a buffer when the next inevitable downturn occurs.
Read more...That goat film
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...Tawdry bribery
March 22, 2010
Politicians buy votes by spending taxpayers’ money but lose votes by increasing taxes. This presents them with a fiscal problem which they seldom, if ever, solve by spending less.
Read more...Deceived and manipulated
March 22, 2010
Rule number one: Don’t believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.
Read more...End-phase of the Climate Wars?
March 22, 2010
The controversy continues. But with the imprimatur of Phil Jones to the key fact that recent warming is not unusual, the debate will never be the same.
Read more...Once upon a climate
March 22, 2010
Apart from the “science is settled” spin, which is code for “don’t question us”, the other side of the debate has been the “Outrageous-Claims Department”. This is where the dedicated followers of climate let pass for science any outrageous claim made by any of their front-line “experts”.
Read more...Abbott’s maternity leave scheme
March 17, 2010
Why do politicians – especially those on the right – think that bribing young mums back into the paid workplace is so desirable? And what about the well-being of children? Dumping an entire generation of young kids into the care of strangers is hardly good for them, and is hardly a family-friendly policy.
Read more...The King Has Got No Clothes
January 5, 2010
Dennis Boothby rocks away the climate blues.
Read more...Six myths about "deniers"
March 15, 2010
There are numerous myths surrounding those who are wrongly labeled “deniers”. Most of them can be distilled into six basic accusations.
Read more...We knew these kids
March 1, 2010
I taught for a year up near Port Augusta and mixed with an Aboriginal family in the town, so I was reported by my head for “consorting with natives and other undesirables”. When Maria and I got married in 1966, we enjoyed the frisson of being just three or four years outside of illegality.
Read more...Spinning censorship
March 18, 2010
Margaret Simons: ‘When the Carter and Hendrickx pieces were rejected, Quadrant magazine gleefully published them together with the predictable rhetoric of ABC censorship and "iron curtains".’
Read more...ABC's weekly hatefest
March 18, 2010
Mark Henderson: “All the while the audience was hissing and booing its disapproval of the conservative views.”
Read more...ClimateWorks for Labor
March 17, 2010
Marc Hendrickx: “Why did the ABC not report on the obvious and easily located links between ClimateWorks Australia and the Australian Labor Party?”
Read more...Andrew, you're right
March 17, 2010
Andrew Bolt: “Tony, you’re wrong. These new ceremonies to acknowledge traditional owners aren’t wrong because they’re tokenist. They’re wrong because they’re divisive. Even racist.”
Read more...How the "Stolen Generations" was sold
March 17, 2010
To sell its story to the public, the Human Rights Commission mounted one of the most successful public relations campaigns in recent Australian history.
Read more...History of a tragedy
March 15, 2010
Without The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: The Stolen Generations - Australian history would be so incomplete as to be a lie. In fact, without addressing the Keith Windschuttle hypothesis, we end up with a history of another country.
Read more...Nativity Sydney
March 3, 2003
This is us. In 1803, when George Howe began publishing the Sydney Gazette, most of our families had not arrived in the new homeland. But from the very beginning of our first newspaper its editor captured something familiar and typically Australian.
Read more...Culture catcher: 22
March 8, 2010
Larvatus Prodeo: “These guys are just implacably and ideologically opposed to the factual findings of AGW science, thus it is pointless to engage with them. They can howl and hurl faeces to their heart’s content, but all that demonstrates is that they’re a bunch of monkeys.”
Read more...Unhealthy health care
March 15, 2010
Cutting waiting times doesn’t necessarily improve treatment. I recently fell off the top of my washing machine (never mind why I was up there) and sought help from a local hospital.
Read more...Barry Humphries: Favourite Poems
March 15, 2010
Barry Humphries has chosen two favourite poems. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Climatescam and coral growth
March 15, 2010
The Climategate affair and its ongoing revelations have exposed a deep systemic corruption at the heart of climate science. Unfortunately this corruption is not restricted to climate science but is endemic across the environmental sciences which have become more of an ideology and a scam than they are a science.
Read more...Flannery nags Launceston
March 15, 2010
Without being rude or discourteous, Professor Tim’s lecture would have to have been the worst presented, most head-bangingly-boring and uninformative address that this writer can remember.
Read more...The Hockey Stick Illusion
March 15, 2010
Matt Ridley: “As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.”
Read more...Christopher Pearson: Favourite Poems
February 22, 2010
Christopher Pearson has chosen two favourite poems. Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot and Sailing to Byzantium by W.B. Yeats. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...There were no Stolen Generations
December 1, 2009
No state or territory in Australia ever wanted to steal Aboriginal children from their parents in order to eliminate the race or put an end to Aboriginality. No Aboriginal children were removed as part of an agenda driven by racism or genocide. There were no Stolen Generations.
Read more...Convincing Ground: an invented massacre
December 1, 2007
Damien Cash: “the massacre claim was revealed as a case study in the misuse of historical evidence, beginning with a series of errors made by Robinson in 1841-42, and then perpetuated through a series of unreasonable conclusions and other errors made by historians and consultants.”
Read more...Nullisgate: Part 2
February 23, 2009
Andrew Fitzmaurice, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney [now Associate Professor], published an essay called “The Genealogy of Terra Nullius” in the April 2007 edition of Australian Historical Studies. It was one of the most valuable contributions made in the debate over terra nullius - each page cost Australian taxpayers in excess of $6,666.
Read more...Nulliusgate: Part 1
February 23, 2009
When the first criticisms were published stock of the book had just been transported from the Sydney printer to the distributor’s warehouse in Adelaide. Not a copy had gone into the bookshops. The expert opinion was from experts who had not read my book.
Read more...The Sorrow and the Pity
March 1, 2010
Indigenous Australians, far from languishing in brute savagery under white domination, appear in the archives—and consequently in this book—as lively, irrepressible, audacious, ambitious, clever, eager, talented.
Read more...Great book, great launch
February 26, 2010
“Asking around, it turned out we were all at Keith Windschuttle’s book launch because we admired the work of Keith Windschuttle. As the Americans would say – go figure.”
Read more...AUDIO: Andrew Bolt on the Stolen Generations
March 8, 2010
Audio of Andrew Bolt launching Keith Windschuttle’s The Stolen Generations: “How could a university keep employing a Robert Manne, or a Peter Read or a Sally Morgan? I think this is a scandal, an utter scandal.”
Read more...Prescription for chaos
March 11, 2010
The Rudd hospital plan was clearly not shown to constitutional experts before it was announced, which suggests that, like so many others, it is just another poorly conceived back-of-the-envelope proposal.
Read more...Smearing Steve McIntyre
March 13, 2010
John Quiggin: “Looking over the evidence that is now available, I think there is enough to point to Steven McIntyre as the person, along with the actual hacker or leaker, who bears primary moral responsibility for the crime.”
Read more...Chavez good for murder
March 12, 2010
Reuters: “Homicides in Venezuela have quadrupled during President Hugo Chavez's 11 years in power, with two people murdered every hour, according to new figures from a non-governmental organization.”
Read more...Profligacy, incompetence, and panic
February 23, 2010
The danger for the government is that its distinguishing features seem to be captured by the acronym PIP - Profligacy, Incompetence, and Panic. If the Howard battlers agree, a second term is no longer assured.
Sell the ABC
March 11, 2010
If Tony Abbot announced today, that a re-elected Liberal National Party Government would sell the ABC and SBS within three months of taking government, would they lose votes or gain votes?
Read more...Waking up the Liberals
March 11, 2010
In the culture wars, what some Liberals would prefer to see as an ideological de-militarised zone is actually the ideological high ground. And we as a Party have allowed the radical left to map it out and occupy it by default.
Read more...Wild Strawberries road movie
March 8, 2010
Wild Strawberries is the kind of film that makes today’s leftwing Hollywood culture look passé - and it’s a relief to hear people talking about real-life issues on the screen.
Read more...Paris postcard
March 8, 2010
It is also a city where things, despite the grandiose scale of the public buildings and sweeping boulevards and windswept quays, are still lived on a small, intimate and human scale, in the back streets and neighbourhoods where Parisians actually live.
Read more...Speaking of Say's Law
March 8, 2010
To accept that Say’s Law is valid is the equivalent amongst economists to the denial of global warming amongst those who believe climate change is taking place.
Read more...Obsession with genocide
March 8, 2010
It is difficult to imagine a more horrendous accusation that could be made against a country than that its history is rooted in genocide and that every generation - past, present, and future - are forever and irredeemably complicit in this primal atrocity.
Read more...The Saved Generations
March 8, 2010
Keith Windschuttle continues the battle to save the soul of the nation’s history in what can only be described as a tour de force in both academic research and masterful writing.
Read more...The holes in the rabbit-proof fence
March 8, 2010
The real Australia would never have stooped so low as to try to eliminate the Aboriginal race by stealing its children. The fact that the film has been a popular success is telling. It shows that despite the best efforts of academics and schoolteachers to persuade us otherwise, Australia is not and never has been a country whose people would condone such practices.
Read more...Melbourne's nuclear non-debate
March 8, 2010
The best response came from Dr James Hansen who quietly said that more people had been killed by ice flying off wind turbine blades than from nuclear accidents.
Read more...Turning Heterosexual Children into Criminals
March 5, 2010
We may in fact be actually living through a transition from democracy to a police state. It may be happening incrementally, but it is happening nonetheless.
Read more...Where to from here?
March 4, 2010
The role of the scientist in this debate, is as it has been: to continue to diligently report the facts, test the theories, to be honest, to be skeptical, to avoid hyperbole, to properly outline the errors and uncertainties, to avoid activism.
Read more...Green loans "hijacked"
March 5, 2010
“The $175 million green loans scheme was "hijacked" by opportunists, overseas call centres and companies that specialised in making homes environmentally friendly, leading to a raft of dubious assessments.”
Read more...Sceptics in from the cold?
February 28, 2010
UPDATE: A story that changed completely when the ABC's The Drum rejected essays it had commissioned.
Read more...ABC's iron curtain descends
March 4, 2010
The ABC has again banned climate sceptics from taking part in public debate. This time the victim of censorship by The Drum is Marc Hendrickx.
Read more...Lysenkoism and James Hansen
March 3, 2010
Hansenist climate alarmism has also damaged the standing of many leading science journals and science organizations, which have replaced their formerly careful editorial and organizational balance with environmental alarmism and naked global warming advocacy.
Read more...ABC gags Bob Carter
March 3, 2010
After inviting professor Bob Carter to contribute to an online debate The Drum has backed down and rejected his essay - a criticism of visiting climate alarmist James Hansen.
Read more...Profiling
March 3, 2010
The fact is that our underwear bomber had bought a one-way ticket with cash; that he had not checked in any luggage for a journey taking him near-on half-way around the world; that his ultimate destination was the United States, target number one for al-Qaeda; and that he came from a half muslim country not entirely free of fundamentalists.
Read more...The Fabrication-Deniers
May 1, 2009
After analysing this case in detail in Washout, I concluded that: “Ryan’s instinct for self-exoneration is never too shy to spin her own failings off as her adversary’s culpability.” It is disturbing to discover that she is not the only professor willing to employ this extraordinary strategy.
Read more...Historical Revision versus Holocaust Denial
December 1, 2008
Holocaust deniers, apologists for the gulags and for Japanese atrocities—these are but minor demons compared with His Satanic Majesty, Keith Windschuttle, who is repeatedly compared by Tony Taylor, in all seriousness, to David Irving, a characterisation both absurd and defamatory.
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...Stuart Macintyre rewrites the past
July 20, 2009
Stuart Macintyre tells it like it wasn’t: “There were no mandarin agents of the KGB here, no moles burrowing deep into the establishment, just fervent men and women recruited when the Soviet Union was an Australian ally to provide it with their limited knowledge of Cold War plans.”
Read more...Myths of frontier massacres
October 1, 2000
In October, November and December 2000 Quadrant published the three parts of a long essay by Keith Windschuttle which heralded a new beginning to the writing of Australian history, prepared the way for the first volume in his Fabrication of Aboriginal History series of books, and set in motion what became known as the History Wars.
Read more...Offending Nowra, defending Greer
March 2, 2010
It only took Greer twenty years to work out what it’s taken Louis Nowra forty years, which proves conclusively that women are at least twice as smart as men.
Read more...Abbott urged to stay true
March 2, 2010
Sadly most politicians, even those on the right, no longer think in terms of the big picture or in terms of worldview. They can only think as far as tomorrow’s press conference or next week’s members’ meeting.
Read more...Stuart Macintyre and the Blainey Affair
October 1, 2008
This political caricature of the Australian experience is the curriculum we can expect Macintyre to deliver to the Rudd government. It is no wonder that schoolchildren who have tasted earlier offerings from the same left-wing menu regard Australian history as dreary and uninspiring.
Read more...Welcome to History Wars
February 28, 2010
Introducing Quadrant Online's new History Wars page. A selection of essays that made headlines.
Read more...Robert Manne's "Hogwash"
March 16, 2009
At the time Robert Manne reviewed a book critical of himself in the Australian Book Review he was the Chair of its management committee. He was a politics professor at La Trobe University. La Trobe University was the chief financial sponsor of the Australian Book Review.
Read more...Bombs, Away
March 1, 2010
There is a staggering gulf between Western good intentions, albeit ham-fisted, and a local world view of fatalism, neglect and corruption which has pervaded an entire region for centuries. The Hurt Locker manages to show this without a single word of pontification.
Read more...Against the bullies
December 6, 2004
It did occur to me from time to time that attacking a score of the most renowned academics of the country may not be the smartest thing I have ever done. But whenever that thought struck me, I would re-read a Whitewash essay, and the pounding of another thought would start up again – if academics of such renown can get away with what they do in that book, then honest intellectual enquiry is finished in academia.
Read more...The case for carbon dioxide
February 28, 2010
Putting the climate debate into perspective. The release of carbon dioxide will not cause dangerous global warming. An ETS would impose a severe cost penalty for agriculture and for the economy overall is not required.
Read more...The Invention of Terra Nullius
December 8, 2005
It took less than thirty minutes in the Law Library at the University of Tasmania to suggest that the definitions of terra nullius given by historian Henry Reynolds, which I had been trying to understand, did not make sense and were not supported by the references he gave.
Read more...Robert Manne: a case to answer
January 31, 2010
For a professor of politics at an Australian university to write about a policy of the Commonwealth Government and to omit its most telling decisions is a serious dereliction of his public duty.
Read more...The extinction of the Australian pygmies
June 1, 2002
From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region.
Read more...Gallipoli: Second Front in the History Wars
June 1, 2009
As 2014 approaches there will be a resurgence, intensification and expansion of the already vigorous debates about the war as historians, intellectuals, ideologues, politicians, veterans’ organisations, community groups and laypersons continue to come to grips with the meaning of this titanic struggle.
Read more...Postmodernism in Aboriginal History - Part 2
April 1, 2006
Bain Attwood has spent a lot of time, and a good deal of university money, in an obsessive pursuit of my past. For this project, he had two research assistants and funding from the School of Historical Studies at Monash University.
Read more...Postmodernism in Aboriginal History - Part 1
April 1, 2006
In this article, I want to show how the two postmodernist tactics of language games and character assassination have been deployed in this debate.
Read more...The Assault on Anzac
July 1, 2009
In a previous article I discussed the revisionist attack on the history of Gallipoli and the role it has played as the central component of the Anzac tradition in Australia. I pointed out that this campaign is explicitly being undertaken by the intelligentsia and the Left as we approach the twin centennials commemorating the outbreak of the Great War in 2014 and the Gallipoli landing in 2015.
Read more...History Wars and the Holocaust
October 1, 2009
Why would Australian historians travel to Germany to expound their dark and self-lacerating version of Australian history, likening the tragic situation of our indigenous people to a genocide or holocaust?
Read more...Midnight Batts
February 28, 2010
Peter Garrett was neither at fault nor accountable apparently. Well of course now Kevin Rudd, having briefly and manfully accepted the blame himself, has now thought better of that and demoted Mr Garrett. But should he be singled out for blame?
Read more...Kevin in Wonderland
February 28, 2010
Why does John Howard’s famous cry “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come” suddenly sound so sensible?
Read more...The politics of apology
February 28, 2010
Rudd said sorry again. We are, therefore, back in the realm of apology – a new phenomenon which has enveloped left wing governments of the entire western world over the past few years.
Read more...The culture gap
February 26, 2010
“The demonization of Tony Abbott is no surprise and reflects a larger trend to marginalise and exclude social conservatives from the public sphere. In modern political discourse, they come in only one of two flavours – evil, or stupid.”
Read more...Robert Manne: a case to answer
January 31, 2010
For a professor of politics at an Australian university to write about a policy of the Commonwealth Government and to omit its most telling decisions is a serious dereliction of his public duty.
Read more...Emission Reduction for Dummies
February 22, 2010
Kevin Rudd has called climate change the greatest moral challenge of our time, and he has made no apology for that. Tony Abbott is more succinct, he calls it “crap”.
Read more...Ministry of Silly Speeches
February 24, 2010
Cate Blanchett: “We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere.”
Read more...Monckton on the IPCC
February 22, 2010
Lord Monckton interviewed by Tom Minchin: “The IPCC should be disbanded. It is corrupt from top to bottom, its pseudo-science has been exposed for the scam it is.”
Read more...Australia's Hollow Men
February 22, 2010
In this crucial election year, what should have been one of the highlight of the ABC’s schedule, The Hollowmen, has apparently gone down the gurgler.
Read more...Leave it to Beaver?
February 22, 2010
John Howard understood that family values were like good wines. They age well.
Read more...Please save us from the IMF
February 22, 2010
Milton Friedman once observed that governments inevitably get their timing wrong leading to more pronounced economic cycles than would otherwise be the case. Once they start fiddling with monetary, fiscal and regulatory levers, in the way canvassed in the IMF paper, who knows what further damage they would do.
Read more...Not rape-rape
February 22, 2010
The truth is that Yale University Press were afraid of violence, in a way they are never afraid when it comes to saying just about anything at all, however derogatory, about Christians or Christian beliefs.
Read more...Poets' Pub readings: Alana Kelsall
February 22, 2010
Poems written and read by Alana Kelsall.
Read more...Two fresh poems
February 22, 2010
Two topical new poems read by the author - “The Last Apology” and “Anthropogenic Global Warming”.
Read more...Assault on reason
February 21, 2010
The Age: “Australia green groups have called a strategy meeting to devise ways to hit back at the climate sceptics movement, amid fears they are losing the PR war.”
Read more...Killing fathers
February 17, 2010
The children stolen from their fathers since the introduction of the Family Law Act are in fact the real stolen generations. And they have been stolen by a fear and hatred of maleness that permeates our whole society.
Read more...The perils of fatherlessness
February 16, 2010
Yes, kids suffer when there are no male role models around, and a lack of male teachers is indeed a worry. But this analysis simply does not go far enough. The real problem is boys lack fathers.
Read more...Rethinking the Greens
February 16, 2010
If this were merely a bunch of tree-loving folks who want to help us have a nice environment and such things, there may be a case for preferring them. But the Greens of course are far more than that. Indeed, they are involved in a whole range of radical politics and social engineering policies.
Read more...Climate - everyone is wrong
February 15, 2010
The weight of evidence is such that modellers are frantically revising their strategies. They are asking for an international climate computing centre and $5 billion (for 2000 times more computing power) to solve this new problem in climate forecasting.
Read more...Sarah, Sarah, Sarah
February 15, 2010
If Obama experienced one tenth of the pressure Palin was under, he’d be on free market meds.
Read more...Climategate in the Twilight Zone
February 11, 2010
John Quiggin: ‘All the same elements were there – supposedly disinterested citizen researchers who were in fact paid rightwing operatives, misuse of accountability procedures, and exceptional gullibility on the part of the “sceptical” mass audience.’
Read more...Inflation must follow
February 15, 2010
Combining the useless unproductive public spending we have inflicted on ourselves with a loosening of our inflationary restraints will seriously undermine our future rates of growth and reduce our living standards for years to come.
Read more...Stolen Generations discussion
February 14, 2010
Keith Windschuttletook part in a Radio National panel discussion of the Stolen Generations to mark the second anniversary of the national apology.
Read more...The Orwell scenario
February 14, 2010
Most sceptics find appalling the Orwellian Animal Farm structure that represents the way global warming theorists and the IPCC have actively gone about promoting their theory.
Read more...The people like Barnaby
February 14, 2010
Those in the media who say get rid of Barnarby are out of touch. Barnaby and Tony are just the sort of people the public want.
Read more...Bolt on the Monckton debate
February 14, 2010
“This is how debate should be, and just to read even Lambert’s admittedly partisan account is to see how much faster we are likely to arrive at truths, or at least save ourselves from error, if we promote debate and insist it be held in good faith.”
Read more...Read it for yourself
February 14, 2010
The Australian’s Stephen Romei: I have just caught up with David Free’s recent piece in Quadrant, titled What’s Wrong With Australian Fiction? What ensues is a catty and funny piece. I confess to being a sucker for this sort of writing, though I’m sure others will think it’s as sophisticated as a toddler pointing out the cripple in the room.
Read more...Down and out in Paris, 2010
February 14, 2010
These are the handicapped beggars, most with limbs missing, some displaying bare feet so deformed they couldn’t possibly walk on them, some with arms that end at the shoulder with vestigial hands, some with no legs below the knee.
Read more...Taxing superannuation
February 14, 2010
One of the potential problems of getting divorced – particularly relatively late in life - is finding that your net worth is not only to be halved but that it is much less than you thought it was.
Read more...Corrupting history
February 8, 2010
History is experienced as a psychological assault, as young people plead despairingly: “OK, we get it! Just how many times do we have to watch Rabbit-Proof Fence?” History as crass propaganda - such is the legacy of Zinn and his Australian acolytes.
Read more...Remember this? December 2009
February 10, 2010
Mike Carlton on climate sceptics: “These people are not merely deluded. They are downright dangerous.”
Read more...After the "Apology"
February 10, 2010
“Beside me is a child with nowhere to go because his family members are blind drunk. The parade of the bleeding and bashed has begun. Hanging in the night air is the sickly sweet stench of blood and alcohol, cut by the plaintive wails of beaten humanity.”
Read more...Law Abiding Citizen
February 10, 2010
This isn’t a simple eye-for-an-eye revenge flick, but a movie with an eye on the bigger picture concerning the victims of crime, and it highlights controversial theological differences between soft hearts and soft minds. It basically asks: Who is really going too far?
Read more..."Unscientific behaviour"
February 10, 2010
Watching the UK Guardian catch up with the blog world is a lot of fun. Here’s a new treat.
Read more...Libertarian economics
February 8, 2010
Thomas Woods advocates a return to a gold standard or better still, as Hayek proposed, the replacement of government-issued money with private money. Banks, say, would issue their own money. Good money (with adequate backing, issued by disciplined institutions) would drive out the bad, which no-one would want to hold (to turn Gresham’s law on its head).
Read more...John Howard and the media
February 8, 2010
He was called a “fool” (Michael Leunig), an “unflushable turd” (Mungo MacCallum), a “scheming, mendacious little man” (Alan Ramsey), who silenced dissent (Clive Hamilton), corrupted the public debate (David Marr) and used right-wing religious activists to indoctrinate the nation (Marion Maddox). He was also “far and away the worst prime minister in living memory” (Phillip Adams).
Read more...Culture catcher: 21
February 8, 2010
Jeff Sparrow, the editor of Overland: “Lunacy squared: A deranged Quadrant forum about the Oz's deranged forum on the Left.”
Read more...Monckton at the ABC
February 8, 2010
Jon Faine, ABC Melbourne radio announcer, had Lord Christopher Monckton on his show to debate Rupert Posner. This is what happened.
Read more...Pachauri's voodoo science
February 8, 2010
There they were sitting on fabulous, unassailable scientific arguments like disappearing glaciers in the Himalayas; the snow, melting ice-cream-like atop Mt Kilimanjaro; rain-forests shrivelling in the Amazon, visions of Venice, only viewable via an aqualung and goggles and the poor old Great Barrier Reef turning into a barbecue-burnt-chop when suddenly their cosy little world changed.
Read more...Sophie Masson - Favourite Poems
February 8, 2010
Sophie Masson has chosen two favourite poems by Shakespeare and Yeats. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...As Cory sees it
February 8, 2010
Alan Jones: “Cory Bernardi brings significant intellectual and philosophical resources to the Liberal Party at a time when many of its supporters felt the Party was losing its way.”
Read more...Alice's Adventures in Warmerland (Part 3)
February 8, 2010
“Warmerland’s had a huge increase in acne, acronyms, acts of God, algae, alligator allergies, anthropogenic interference, antibody deficiencies, anxiety, argy-bargy, astrology, asylum seekers, atmospheric anomalies, barmy armies, bats, beatifications, bee stings, big steps forward, black dogs, blizzards, blue mussels, boredom, bozonorexia nervosa, brain-eating bacteria, broken jaws, bubble blowing, bubonic plague, bunnies.....”
Read more...Oz media ‘debate’ Monckton
February 4, 2010
Monckton is given only seconds of air time, while his many attackers are given all sorts of time to abuse and vilify him. And abuse and vilification is exactly what he has been getting. Instead of dealing with his actual arguments and the mountains of evidence he provides, they simply attack his person and cast aspersions on his character.
Read more...Gimme a little respect
February 4, 2010
In something straight out of a George Orwell novel, the Victorian government has recently appointed an MP to become ‘Minister for Respect’. With all due respect – pun intended – this has to be a national first, perhaps a world first.
Read more...Manne on ABC radio
February 4, 2010
Robert Manne said he had a document that proved my accusations wrong. The document he read out was nothing more than one he had used in 2001 in his Quarterly Essay, In Denial. It did not have the meaning Manne attributed to it in his 2001 essay or in his ABC radio interview.
Read more...Monckton in Melbourne - report
February 3, 2010
Monckton's time was cut short by the insistence of The Age newspaper environmental writer on a one on one interview. The article that followed in The Age on Tuesday said next to nothing about the arguments raised and the tone of the article could best be described as “atmospheric”!
Read more...Monckton in Melbourne - photos
February 2, 2010
Lord Monckton lectured yesterday in packed to the rafters venues in Melbourne. The photos tell the story.
Read more...Puritans and speed cameras
February 3, 2010
This puritanical streak is reinforced by a growing trend towards the politically correct.
Read more...The Guardian (!!) on Climategate
February 2, 2010
Guardian headlines:“Leaked climate change emails scientist ‘hid’ data flaws. Exclusive: Key study by East Anglia professor Phil Jones was based on suspect figures.”
Read more...Discovering Maurice Strong
January 31, 2010
The man who managed to get the climate industry to where it is today is a mild mannered character by the name of Maurice Strong. The whole climate change business, and it is a business, started with Mr Strong.
Read more...Marianne et moi
January 31, 2010
Marianne Faithfull is the most amazing woman. I was backstage at the Sydney Festival, of course, catching up with old friends, and I am just so at home in that milieu, so I thought I’d pop along and see if she was anywhere about.
Read more...Islam, academia, and freedom
January 31, 2010
It is a strange paradox of the post-9/11 era that such a dastardly and devastating declaration of war by Islamism against the Western world led not to a hardening of resolve by the victims but to a widespread capitulation to Muslim demands across the globe.
Read more...Art goes square
January 31, 2010
Cubism and Australian Art is a demonstration of how an idea works its way through a community at the public or official level and at the practitioner’s level.
Read more...Abbott and the Bible
January 31, 2010
Don’t teach the New Testament – and the next thing you know Jesus is a vegetarian feminist, driving a hybrid with a pro-gay marriage sticker.
Read more...Alice's Adventures in Warmerland (Part 2)
January 31, 2010
Alice’s misadventures continue in the second part of Michael Kile’s new climate fantasy.
Read more...The IPCC's flawed data
January 31, 2010
A major new analysis by two Australian scientists shows that the temperature data published by the IPCC and other organisations has been manipulated to give the appearance of a warming trend - but not one that has actually occurred. This analysis has major international implications in regard to the policies to be adopted by countries on emissions reductions.
Read more...Advertising abortion truthfully
January 30, 2010
If the MSM can push along social agendas by its use of imagery, it can do the same by not using certain images. When was the last time you saw a graphic image of the “product of abortion” in the MSM?
Read more...Tony Abbott and media hysteria
January 30, 2010
It is perfectly predictable: have a politician from the conservative side of politics make a quite sensible remark about family issues, and the secular left goes absolutely ballistic.
Read more...Abbott beat-up backfires
January 30, 2010
John Styles: “If Australian parents were to choose anyone other than themselves to give advice to their children about pre-marital sex, Tony Abbott would be preferred by far to Catharine Lumby.”
Read more...Fair and balanced
January 30, 2010
Conservatives (those on the right) believe that they are more wedded to the truth than are those on the left. What I would like to do is to explain why this is might well be true.
Read more...Menzies House has opened
January 30, 2010
Menzies House, a shiny new and wildly enthusiastic website for “conservative, libertarian and centre-right thinkers” has just opened its doors. A welcome addition to the Australian internet world.
Read more...Monckton wins debate
January 29, 2010
“Lord Christopher Monckton, imperious and articulate, won yesterday's climate change debate in straight sets.”
Read more...1400 hear Monckton
January 28, 2010
The Australian Climate Science Coalition reports that on the first day of his Australian tour Lord Monckton spoke to 1400 people at two Sydney functions.
Read more...Australian of the Year
January 28, 2010
Seeing how hopeless they are at choosing an Australian of the Year, Gavin Atkins offers a short list with some good thoughts, and a familiar name that would give the MSM and Left bloggers hiccups.
Read more...Left book burning
January 28, 2010
Two years after its publication Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism has been attacked by US liberal historians.
Read more...Climategate on Kindle
January 27, 2010
Only published in the US last week the very first book on the Climategate scandal is now available in Australia on Amazon’s Kindle.
Read more...Australia Day Poem 2010
January 25, 2010
Patrick McCauley reads his Australia Day Poem 2010.
Read more...Tony Abbott - Favourite Poems
January 24, 2010
Tony Abbott has chosen two favourite poems for Australia Day. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Poets' Pub readings: Peter Tiernan
January 25, 2010
Poem written and read by Peter Tiernan.
Read more...Poets' Pub readings: Vivian Hopkirk
January 25, 2010
Poems written and read by Vivian Whiteley Hopkirk.
Read more...Bill Hayden - Favourite Poems
January 25, 2010
Bill Hayden has chosen two favourite poems for Australia Day. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Monckton in Australia
January 24, 2010
The Australian has performed best in giving space to sceptics and dissenters but has stuck to the save the planet line in its editorials, some say because Rupert Murdoch said so publicly. Yet in a personal communication with Murdoch he indicated his scepticism to me.
Read more...Australia Day Hate List: 2010
January 24, 2010
In the MSM, and on the totalitarian side of the internet, the approach of Australia Day always sets off a dismal moan-a-thon about Australia. To be helpful we have republished our Left Hate List from last year - with updates for 2010.
Read more...Alice's Adventures in Warmerland
January 24, 2010
The Rabbit then ran off towards the wood. Alice noticed something printed in big letters on the back of his jacket: “Save Our Planet! Climate Action NOW!” How odd, she thought. Why was everyone so worried about saving the planet?
Read more...The lie of genocide
January 24, 2010
Supporters of the “Stolen Generations” story have a case they should answer. In his new book Keith Windschuttle makes nearly 656 pages of well supported charges against the whole story, little of which can be easily dismissed.
Read more...The rise of eco-extremism
January 24, 2010
It is a great tragedy that the vital debate about environmental issues should have been so effectively hijacked by the radical left and ideologues channeling the latest version of the irrationalism and totalitarianism that deformed the 20th century.
Read more...Demanding the truth
January 24, 2010
The scientists, and the politicians and media types, who have totally embraced the dogma of human-induced climate change, have gambled heavily with their reputations. They have nowhere to run.
Read more...A simple calculation
January 24, 2010
A doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is always claimed to be where we are heading. Lord Kelvin, in 1895, calculated that so much coal was being burnt that all the free oxygen in the atmosphere would be gone in some three hundred years. This calculation caused some distress at the time.
Read more...Geert Wilders speaks for freedom
January 21, 2010
In a Dutch courtroom, where he is to be tried for inciting hatred and discrimination, Geert Wilders made a speech that will be heard around the world.
Read more...Rudd science based on a lie
January 20, 2010
Sinclair Davidson reveals that both the Rudd government’s White Paper into the CPRS and the Garnaut Report used the false Himalayan glacier story.
Read more...Climategate reviewed
January 22, 2010
“The Climategate files opened up what was happening behind the scenes, and it turned out there was no paranoid fantasy: they really were out to get you.”
Read more...Scandal between the covers
January 19, 2010
It’s out. The first book on the Climategate scandal: “For those who have heard that the emails were taken out of context - we provide that context and show it is worse when context is provided.”
Read more...Favourite poems: John Izzard
January 17, 2010
John Izzard has selected two favourite poems “Bright Star” by John Keats, and “No Man is an Island” by John Donne. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Rudd's China Day speech
January 19, 2010
Breaking with tradition, Kevin Rudd (the Little Helmsman) delivered his China Day remarks, on the state of the Australian colony, in English.
Read more...Open letter on climate change
January 19, 2010
Lawyer Val Majkus has written to Australian MPs asking for a royal commission into man-made climate change claims and protesting that information on a government website "is misleading and deceptive and displays a lack of due diligence by the Government in the wake of Climategate."
Read more...Kids gone wild
January 19, 2010
“Rather than being accused, suspected bullies are merely spoken to and encouraged to think of ways to help a bullied student cope.” Well, that should certainly make the bullies think twice, shouldn’t it?
Read more...Closed pages
January 18, 2010
How Not To Sell A Conservative Book: A Guide. The golden rules for turning a dissident book into an unread remainder quicker than you can say “Melbourne University Press.”
Read more...Haiti - Island of Sorrow
January 17, 2010
A little over 100 kilometres north of where the 97,000 ton aircraft-carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, is disgorging food, water and medical aid to the victims of the Haitian earthquake, lies the site of the wreck of Christopher Columbus’s flag ship, the Santa Maria.
Read more...Abbott's 'Green Army'
January 17, 2010
Tony Abbott’s initiative promises not only to produce practical benefits for the environment, but also provides an opportunity to reassert the conservative heritage of environmental thought, while challenging the hegemony of the left-green statist ideology.
Read more...Munching in the Blue Zones
January 16, 2010
Soon after finishing Blue Zones, a generous neighbour left some garden zucchinis on my veranda. I’m eating them tonight. I plan to drive up the road to the winery and pick up some Catholic-friendly reds. But is my stomach really ready for sheep’s cheese?
Read more...Has China murdered Gao Zhisheng?
January 16, 2010
Chinese authorities claim that civil rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng has gone “missing”. The lawyer, who had previously been tortured, has been imprisoned by the Beijing Public Security Bureau since February 2009. Is this a euphemism for murder?
Read more...Police, Civilisation & Culture
January 14, 2010
Gregory Melleuish reads “Police, Civilisation and Culture” from his new book of essays The Power of Ideas.
Read more..."There were no Stolen Generations"
January 12, 2010
“No state or territory in Australia ever wanted to steal Aboriginal children from their parents in order to eliminate the race or put an end to Aboriginality. No Aboriginal children were removed as part of an agenda driven by racism or genocide. There were no Stolen Generations.”
Read more...Howard and the Left
January 11, 2010
With climate change, John Howard decided to challenge the notion that it should be elevated to the “moral challenge of our time”, recognising that the same crowd who ran this line would have spoken about indigenous disadvantage in the same terms the week before.
Read more...Ecology and compulsion
January 10, 2010
Even assuming that ecological viability itself were in issue, it is still entirely unjustified and unjustifiable to jump to a conclusion that government is able to centrally plan the ecology and the economy, by bureaucratic command-and-control.
Read more...Scam of the century
December 14, 2009
The Climategate files have demonstrated the scientific malfeasance of an influential and internationally well networked segment of the climate research community.
Read more...Peter Spencer
December 21, 2009
Peter Spencer is demanding the Australian government pay fair compensation to him and all Australian property-holders whose property rights were taken without compensation pursuant to the Kyoto Protocol.
Read more...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...Politics of green unreality
December 21, 2009
In Sydney, Greenpeace (who are apparently completely above the law) once again assaulted the Opera House to unfurl a banner demanding a ‘climate treaty now’, as if such a predictable and platitudinous stunt contributed anything meaningful.
Read more...Seeking untainted science
December 26, 2009
The opinion of economists on the science is superfluous to their role and simply gets in the way of informed debate.
Read more...Elders at war
December 27, 2009
Watching last Monday’s ABC “Elders” programme was like experiencing a mongoose and a cobra shape up. The celebrity-atheist Richard Dawkins was quietly circled by celebrity-atheist Andrew Denton.
Read more...Guinness reviewed
December 27, 2009
Countess Elizabeth Báthory’s 399-year-old record still stands. She was the world’s most prolific murderess. Apparently, the Hungarian monster killed 600 virgins.
Read more...Indignant bears protest
December 24, 2009
“The ABC [state controlled media] acknowledges that polar bears are not necessarily driven towards cannibalism because of climate change; this claim should have been attributed to conservationists.”
Read more...The Australian way
December 21, 2009
It would be nice if at least a few proponents of a statutory bill of rights here in Australia fessed up and called this Consultative Committee process what it really is and urged that the question be put to all of us voters.
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...Avatar reviewed
December 27, 2009
With these bald caricatures wearing black and white hats, it’s a good thing the film is lovely to look at, because otherwise it would stink to high heaven.
Read more...The Very Worst Secret
December 26, 2009
Michael Connor reads his short story “The Very Worst Secret”.
Read more...Agatha Christie on acid
January 8, 2010
It’s the season for Midsomer Murders. In our own bleached midsummer, that mythical corner of England that’s forever sunny, green Midsomershire is one of the great pleasures of my slowed-down writing life.
Read more...Monckton luncheon
January 8, 2010
Lord Christopher Monckton will present a luncheon lecture in Melbourne on February 1: “Apocalypse? NO! ‘Global Warming’ is not a Global Crisis”.
Read more...The sceptical poet
December 7, 2009
AUDIO: Patrick McCauley reads two poems about modern Australia.
Read more...Thought Police and Big Brother
January 6, 2010
Even by French standards, this proposed new law is really quite bizarre. A bill may soon be passed by the French parliament in which “psychological violence” will be made a crime. Really folks, I am not making this up.
Read more...Garrett performance falls flat
January 6, 2010
The environment minister should stick to saving whales and doing what he does best - gyrating wildly across a stage whilst making bold political statements that he will never be held accountable for.
Read more...The US will be damned - again
January 5, 2010
The Blackwater case will be seen around the world as an imperialist US protecting the killers of innocent Iraqis. In fact it is the result of a criminal justice system more concerned with the perpetrators of crime than its victims.
The Pachauri affair
January 5, 2010
Largely ignored in the local Australian media was an extraordinary story published in London’s Daily Telegraph two weeks ago which accused the Chairman of the International Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, ‘of making a fortune from his links with “carbon trading” companies.’
Read more...Kevin's Copenhagen Carol
January 4, 2010
On the last day of Copenhagen my Minister said to me “The Departmental Secretary is out of his tree”.
Read more...Climate crisis or energy crisis?
January 4, 2010
New tariffs are now prohibited by the WTO, and both the CAP and VAT are unpopular with voters. Enter “Climate Change” - and an indirect tariff via a carbon tax, an ETS.
Read more...Saint-Simon and the Stranger
December 26, 2009
AUDIO: Sophie Masson reads her short story “Saint-Simon and the Stranger”.
Read more...Robert Hughes: The Australian Years
December 26, 2009
AUDIO: Patricia Anderson on her new book Robert Hughes: The Australian Years.
Read more...Christmas reading
December 21, 2009
A few of our Quadrant readers and contributors have listed some of their favourite books, and some that they intend to read over Christmas.
Read more...Hiding the Crown
December 21, 2009
The Victorian Attorney-General’s word changes do not address the real problems of declining law and order and an effectively inaccessible civil law system.
Read more...Parks and Recreation
December 21, 2009
If you haven’t heard of this comedy, then you’re probably not alone. Thanks to the lack of publicity, few Australians will (a) know that Parks and Recreation is here and (b) that it beats Australia’s sterile politically correct comedies hands down.
Read more...Spend, spend, spend
December 21, 2009
Why can most people count their own money and work out how much they can spend and then lose that ability and become delusional once they are in company?
Read more...Muddle in the middle
December 21, 2009
Pity the politician in 2010. Climate change policies pose an unknown, but potentially strong, temptation to cross party lines.
Read more...How Kevin saved Christmas
December 21, 2009
A central issue for the debate was whether to limit temperature rises to 1.5 or 2 degrees centigrade. The former apparently insured the survival of the Pacific island states while the latter would do them and some of Bangladesh irreparable damage.
Read more...COP15: Day 12
December 19, 2009
Obama’s short speech to the conference plenary was probably the most insulting and patronising speech delivered by a US President in a long time.
Read more...COP15: Day 11
December 18, 2009
It’s hard to stand between developing country governments and a pot of gold especially when the obligations that come with it will fall onto their successors.
Read more...COP15: Day 10
December 17, 2009
Government indifference to serious emissions reduction is driven by political greed because they don’t want to be exposed to the voter policy backlash from actually cutting emissions.
Read more...COP15: Day 9
December 16, 2009
NGOs don’t actually like being called NGOs. They prefer being referred to as “civil society”.
Read more...Prove it, Prime Minister
December 14, 2009
It is bad enough when politicians refer to "the" science, but the Prime Minister of Australia demeaned his high office when he not only called those who question his infallibility “dangerous”, he went on to libel them with a totally unjustified smear.
Read more...COP15: Day 7
December 14, 2009
Considering the religious fervour that many climate evangelists bring to the issue Sunday is, appropriately, an official day of rest.
Read more...COP15: Day 6
December 13, 2009
What was surprising was that the topic of the leaked emails and documents that has prompted ‘Climategate’ didn’t come up in the questions and answers section.
Read more...COP15: Day 5
December 12, 2009
To make themselves feel important most delegates at international negotiating conferences always talk in acronyms, but at Copenhagen they’re in overdrive.
Read more...COP15: Day 4
December 11, 2009
Like the debate about climate change in Australia, symbolism over substance is triumphing in Copenhagen and the pledge to make the conference carbon neutral is looking decidedly hard to deliver.
Read more...COP 15: Day 3
December 10, 2009
The Australian government alone has more than one hundred registered delegates.
Read more...COP15: Day 8
December 15, 2009
Rumours around the conference are that a group of NGOs will try and storm the conference centre to try and get access to political leaders.
Read more...COP15: Day 2
December 9, 2009
The best entertainment was at a side-event with a speaker who dared decry the NGO group think that prevails over the conference.
Read more...On Paul Samuelson
December 14, 2009
Paul Samuelson understood the importance of ideas in shaping the world. It is his ideas as a disciple of Keynes that, for better or worse, now shape policy decisions across the entire world.
Read more...The real Copenhagen conference
December 14, 2009
I attended the Copenhagen Climate Challenge Conference. It was about the science of climate. Speakers were scientists, lawyers and environmentalists.
Read more...AFI AWARDS: The Nite of Nites
December 14, 2009
The real surprise at the AFI Awards was that Cate wasn’t nominated for anything. I mean, this is Cate we’re talking about.
Read more...Fine tuning the ABC
December 14, 2009
Our “ABC acknowledged that the American War of Independence took place between 1775 and 1783.” Or to put it another way: Oops!
Read more...The Adam Smith antidote
December 14, 2009
It is interesting to speculate on whether, if Justice Higgins had emigrated to India rather than Australia, working class Indians would all be enjoying a “fair and reasonable wage”.
Read more...On Quadrant
December 14, 2009
The knockers of Quadrant have yet to understand or admit that during the Cold War the friends of Quadrant were on the honourable and humanitarian side while the communists and their fellow travellers were not.
Read more...What's in a name?
December 14, 2009
Almost all of the disagreements between people take place down in the quagmire of detail and of what precisely the role of government should be.
Read more...The Climate Games - 2009
December 14, 2009
Gold, Silver and Bronze medals are falling out of the sky in the first week of the Climate Games in Copenhagen.
Read more...Give us honesty
December 14, 2009
Leaked emails and computer code reveal manipulation of data to serve political ends, attempted perversion of the peer review process, collusion, destruction of data and worse.
Read more...Brave New Green World
December 14, 2009
As the Copenhagen conference unfolds it is possible to detect the outlines of the grim future dystopia that will emerge if the stealthy and remorseless proponents of global eco-fascism are allowed to remake our world in their image.
Read more...Scaring Our Kids to Death (To Save the Planet)
December 9, 2009
The four-minute opening video at the Copenhagen Summit was a propaganda piece which would have made Goebbels proud. Entitled “Please Help the World,” it has all the hallmarks of a Hollywood end-of-the-world blockbuster. Loaded with emotional hysteria, moving imagery, and screaming children, it is indoctrination at its finest.
Read more...ABC misses Climategate, finds Lesotho
December 10, 2009
The credibility of this segment of so-called news was zero to any intelligent person; even, I would hope, to those wedded to the conventional wisdom of man-made global warming.
Read more...COP15 and Climategate
December 9, 2009
Is any one actually in favour of pollution? Are people really organized and paid to encourage more pollution? Does this make any sense at all?
Read more...Sceptics in Wonderland
December 7, 2009
A milestone in this mess can be said to be when John Houghton of the IPCC said it was the IPCC’s job to “orchestrate” the views of science. Everything that has happened flows as an inevitable consequence of that.
Read more...COP15 Opening Ceremony
December 8, 2009
Anyone sceptical of the UN system or the science of climate change never made it into the opening ceremony under the gaze of the world’s media. Instead their voices were sent to the other end of the conference centre out of sight, and out of mind.
Read more...The Howard Era - book launch
December 7, 2009
A collection of essays analysing the Howard Government was launched at a Quadrant dinner tonight.
Read more...Don't ask, don't tell
December 7, 2009
Trouble is, I can’t write about this film without introducing spoilers, and this is a film which is best seen without knowing too much about it.
Read more...China and Dubai
December 7, 2009
Badly directed public spending is a curse that has brought down many an economy in the past. The example of Dubai, whose expenditures began well before the Global Financial Crisis set in, ought to make governments think about their own expenditure programs.
Read more...Biff me, Kate
December 7, 2009
Kate Grenville started by saying that “I don’t like being bullied” then went on to say that she recently “nearly clocked” a climate sceptic in the National Library coffee shop.
Read more...Rudd's Chamberlain moment
December 7, 2009
Rudd could come back from Copenhagen waving an agreement like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.
Read more...The writing life: 4
December 7, 2009
In our modern society, to be left bereft of the magic and beauty, the robust humour and deep wisdom of fairytales and their older cousins, myths and legends, is to be open to every withering blast of nihilism.
Read more...DIY ocean heating
December 7, 2009
Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
Read more...Undoing knotted minds
December 7, 2009
Suppose a conventional wisdom is substantially astray from the truth (the way the world really is) and its impact is adverse. Never mind how it started, the important question is when and under what circumstances will it go away.
Read more...Abbott and media duplicity
December 7, 2009
The commentariat wrote off Tony Abbott but now they have egg on their faces over the weekend by-elections. In just a few days he has changed the debate. And the electors like what they see.
Read more...Climategate at the Movies
November 30, 2009
A selection of videos about climate change and Climategate. Bring your own popcorn.
Read more...A crime against humanity
November 30, 2009
That the utter disregard for truth exhibited in the CRU emails can be either invisible or insignificant to AGW defenders is indicative of the vast chasm between their faith and the open rational empirical world of real science.
Read more...Climategate Pty Ltd
December 2, 2009
What should we make of the near-unanimity of opinion among a cohort of scientists in such a complex and dynamic field?
Read more...Abbott wins - media loses
December 1, 2009
The choice of Tony Abbott as leader is a victory for common sense. He showed that in his first decision, which was to hold a secret ballot. The party then sensibly decided not to accept the government ultimatum to pass the ETS for the sole purpose of allowing Kevin Rudd to boast about it at Copenhagen.
Read more...John L. Daly
November 30, 2009
Yesterday I visited John L. Daly’s tiny office where he lived on the outskirts of Launceston. It is about the size of two telephone boxes.
Read more...The New Road to Serfdom
November 30, 2009
Why do real people in the real world matter less than those in some speculative, increasingly unlikely, science-fiction vision of the future?
Read more...The Office does "Weight Loss"
November 30, 2009
The American documentary-style comedy, The Office, is the cleverest show around. Even sharper than the BBC’s version.
Read more...Watch on the Left
November 30, 2009
Wikileaks justified the publication of Sarah Palin's stolen emails as in the public interest. There was no outcry from the Left condemning the theft of the emails or questioning the possibly unethical publishing of personal material.
Read more...Peer review locks gate
November 30, 2009
As the Climategate emails show, the warmers captured the whole system – all the journals, all their editors and the journals’ boards.
Read more...Kiwi Climategate
November 30, 2009
Last Wednesday the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition released a document showing that New Zealand’s average temperature had not risen by as much as its National Institute for Water and Atmosphere claims.
Read more...Once upon a Climategate
November 30, 2009
In order to distract the people from massive government debt and invasion, the Prime Minister had the public servants construct a carbon horse.
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...ETS support is turning
November 28, 2009
Opinion is never set in aspic, as Fightback, Cheryl Kernot’s defection and the initial reaction to referendum proposals demonstrate. Scientific fraud, predictions not coming true and a strong and principled Liberal leader- not Joe Hockey - will see to this.
Read more...Rudd-Turnbull Coalition collapses
November 27, 2009
With the collapse of the Rudd-Turnbull coalition, the Liberal Party must choose a new leader from Liberals of principle, not another deputy to Kevin Rudd.
Read more...Climategate: Shutting out dissent
November 24, 2009
Science is supposedly open with data, methods, conclusions and hypotheses all made available to other scientists so that they might confirm the processing and then apply further tests to the hypotheses. The CRU emails reveal the antithesis of this.
Read more...Where does it all end?
November 24, 2009
Our success relative to others is built not on our own increases in public spending, which are now a debt weight cost to the economy, but on the stimulus package introduced in China.
Read more...Working Toward Religious Freedom in Islam
November 23, 2009
Religious freedom is not exactly a hallmark of Muslim-majority countries. One of the most disconcerting features of Islam is the way “apostates” are treated. In Islam those who choose to leave the faith are regarded as traitors, and death is often the penalty.
Read more...The long and short arm of the law
November 23, 2009
2009 In Western Australia a 12 year old Aboriginal boy was charged by police with receiving a stolen Freddo frog worth 70 cents. In South Australia a man was charged by police with driving without a licence (he didn’t have one), when he lent over to steer a runaway car, to avoid the car crashing into a structure.
Read more...Shopping trolley economics
November 23, 2009
Economic recovery, when set against the wasteful government expenditure we are having and the winding back of labour market flexibility by Julia Gillard, sets the scene for inflation. But it isn’t happening yet and is unlikely to break out in the immediate future.
Read more...The writing life: 3
November 23, 2009
You sometimes hear writers say they never read the work of other authors. Underlying this is a deeper fear: that you may discover that those other writers' books are actually vastly better than yours, leading to a major paralysis in imagination and the feeling that as they've said it all anyway, why bother?
Read more...2012
November 23, 2009
The nice thing about disaster movies is that you can show things that could never happen in real life, like having the US government take the heads of European nations seriously.
Read more...When are we going to wake up?
November 23, 2009
Threats to the environment and the climate change “crisis” are hypothetical arguments presided over by people who have never built, grown, manufactured or produced anything and whose practical ability is challenged by changing a light bulb.
Read more...Flawed research revealed
November 23, 2009
“A key concern is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which advises governments around the world - has used the Murray Darling Basin and incorrect science as an example of CO2 induced climate change.”
Read more...Klive's Kampf
November 23, 2009
Clive Hamilton has now compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and predicted that the effects of climate change would be a hundred or even two hundred times worse than the Nazi Holocaust.
Read more...Ending Climatemania
November 23, 2009
Recent statements from leading politicians concentrate on suppressing debate and ridiculing sceptics of dangerous global warming. Yet anyone who studies the evidence will realize that the science is most uncertain. Objective, unimpassioned debate is desperately needed.
Read more...Time to stand up
November 23, 2009
Voters are crying out for a leader to expose the useless and damaging Rudd-Wong ETS and to provide strong border protection. Tony Abbott’s time is coming.
Read more...Not happy, Clive!
November 18, 2009
There is some irony in being accused of personal aggrandisement by a Canberra based “public intellectual” who seems to be using the Higgins by-election as little more than a promotional vehicle for his next book.
Read more...Political insurgency in Higgins
November 15, 2009
It may well be that Rudd regards Turnbull as close to a best friend who needs to be kept as Opposition leader.
Read more...Why Monbiot ran
November 15, 2009
Initially, George Monbiot agreed to debate Ian Plimer, but someone reasoned that it was a high-risk venture - a debate between a froth and bubble, blog-obsessed journalist and a leading academic with impeccable credentials in earth sciences.
Read more...The Monbiot Affair
November 12, 2009
Ian Plimer and George Monbiot were to meet in London to debate climate change on 12 November. Monbiot chickened out. Here are two emails they exchanged.
Read more...Whitlam Redux
November 13, 2009
Terry McCrann points out the Rudd government is on the way to, or has already become, worse than Whitlam’s. For more than 30 years he says, the Whitlam government has been “the -- unsurpassable -- benchmark for bad government in Australia.”
Read more...Failure of Afghan reconciliation
November 15, 2009
Afghanistan’s security forces lack the leaders to make additional Afghan-led units anything better than brigands in uniform.
Read more...Australia: State of Intolerance
November 15, 2009
Do we have the politicians with the courage required to put the brakes on this increasingly menacing process, or will the future of Australia be sacrificed on the altar of the eco-apocalypse?
Read more...The coming inflation
November 15, 2009
That there is a serious inflation coming seems all too possible. We have now poured an inordinate amount of money into the economic system without creating any buyable goods to match and I fear it is starting to show.
Read more..."V" vill eat you
November 15, 2009
Is political-incorrectness ready to meet sci-fi? Yes, If ABC’s (US) series première is anything to go by. “V” is for “O.”
Read more...Blogging as a fine art
November 15, 2009
The blogger is not off in their own imagination, the blogger is participating in the great conversation of humanity. To my way of thinking blogging is an Oakeshottian conversation.
Read more...After Versailles - The Copenhagen Treaty
November 15, 2009
No-one in those days, or up until recently, would have thought there might come a day when the debt of war would be replaced by the debt of climate ‘warming’, for which reparations were demanded.
Read more...Worshipping at the Altar of Tolerance
November 12, 2009
As people more and more reject the notion of absolute truth and universal morality, they do not remain without belief.
Read more...Debate me, Prime Minister
November 12, 2009
I will debate Kevin Rudd on the science of climate change anywhere, anytime. I am very confident that he will be too cowardly to accept the challenge, far easier to resort to invective.
Read more...Rudd contra science
November 10, 2009
The Prime Minister’s speech to the Lowy Institute appears to have been drafted by one of Australia’s many climate change bloggers. It certainly marks a new low in the standard of political debate.
Read more...ETS or another GST?
November 9, 2009
The description of the impact of the CPRS with its ETS has been an artful exercise in misleading and deceptive presentation. It is another GST dressed up as a tax on carbon dioxide.
Read more...The Education Revolution
November 9, 2009
The loss of deference in our society and authority in our schools means that teachers are among the few people who actually go to work in the morning with a sense of dread, dread of what some child may say or do to them in the course of the day.
Read more...Obama will eat us!!
November 9, 2009
Coming from the US a new TV series called “V” - for Visitors. Interesting political sub-plot. See the trailer here.
Read more...Singer out of tune
November 9, 2009
Pro-infanticide Peter Singer wants you to save the children, and give at least five percent of your income – assuming you work – to his pet causes.
Read more...The bad language of economics
November 9, 2009
If we are ever to stop governments wasting our money we have to begin to change the political lexicon. Only conservatives – in the media, in think tanks and in politics – have the philosophical wherewithal to begin the job and to persist with it.
Read more...Health war victims
November 9, 2009
For evidence to prove that the conspicuous compassion of the Rudd government is a complete fraud, the issue of cataract surgery for the elderly is the place to go.
Read more...Eco-Fascism & Clive Hamilton
November 9, 2009
Because the Greens portray themselves as “progressive” in their political ideology and programme, questions about the “natural fit” between radical environmentalism and fascism have not been frequently asked.
Read more...Labor and the ETS
November 9, 2009
The National President of the CFMEU, a union covering 13,000 coal miners, recently described the term “green jobs” as “dopey”.
Read more...CIA on climate change
November 9, 2009
The CIA goes as far as to suggest that the new global patterns considered likely to last at least 40 years and possibly centuries, could cause political and economic upheaval “beyond comprehension”.
Read more...Goodbye doctors' wives
November 3, 2009
Unless Mr. Turnbull turns his back on the doctors’ wives of Wentworth, he will remain Mr. Rudd’s principal defence.
Read more...Controlfreakonomics!
November 2, 2009
Will the Copenhagen Treaty be debated and voted on by the Australian Parliament? - or will it be simply be another one of those international treaties simply signed by the Prime Minister. Another one of our “international obligations”!
Read more...COP 15 - Copenhagen Treaty
November 3, 2009
The famous COP 15 or Copenhagen Treaty, which few politicians seem to have read, is here.
Read more...Does anybody care?
November 2, 2009
The Government is counting on your ignorance to get away with literally destroying billions of dollars of our wealth. These projects will almost certainly not make us better off, they will just make us poorer.
Read more...An Education at the movies
November 2, 2009
Peter Sarsgaard’s role as the emotional rapist is uncomfortably believable. He is the thinking person’s Brad Pitt. A poster boy with deep acting skills.
Read more...Education Standards Institute
November 2, 2009
A conservatively minded, internet site is especially needed in the area of education.
Read more...Authors, Beware!
November 2, 2009
I then did what perhaps I should have done in the first place and Googled the literary agency, adding the word scam.
Read more...Size is important
November 2, 2009
A small amount of stimulus spending doing little good; does little harm. A large amount of spending doing little good; does harm, because it has to be financed on the other side and because it draws resources way from where they can be used more productively.
Read more...The Eco-Apocalypse Craze
November 2, 2009
It is a measure of the corruption of science amidst the moral panic of global warming that Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ has now been elevated to the status of a scientific theory.
Read more...Plea for tolerance
October 27, 2009
Quadrant Online has received a passionate plea for tolerance - emailed from a gum tree somewhere in Higgins.
Read more...A defining moment
October 29, 2009
Conservatives are not sociopaths as Jill Singer would have it – uncaring about their fellow human beings – but people whose empathy has developed beyond a child-like response to suffering.
Read more...Tracey does whiteface
October 19, 2009
Tracey couldn’t make it for the Big Quadrant Bash. There was an emergency Fabian seminar she had to go to, to deal with Australian racism in the wake of the Hey Hey scandal.
Read more...The daft treaty
October 26, 2009
Are countries like the US, Australia, Great Britain, Japan, and the nations of Europe ready and prepared to transfer their economic wealth and treasure to countries of the third world? Are Japan, China and India?
Read more...A modern fairy tale
October 26, 2009
It seems as though there is a magic pudding. The Government can apparently spend big and borrow very large sums to pay for it without ever having to worry about its effect on interest rates. This seems to be too good to be true; and so it is.
Read more...Prawn cocktail
October 26, 2009
The full complexity of modern South Africa – drugs, gangsterism, crime, black African superstition, white superiority, a desperate and corrupt military – is aired for public consumption, and a very unpleasant mess it is.
Read more...Their favourite dictator
October 26, 2009
To the Martini Marxist, Venezuela is his personal ant farm: “During the first seven years that Chávez was in power, 100,000 people were killed in Venezuela, a country with scarcely more than twenty million inhabitants.”
Read more...Culture catcher: 20
October 26, 2009
McCarthyism in 2009: “Who cares about denialists? Ignore them, don’t feed them. Never link to them.”
Read more...The Kevinator
October 26, 2009
A cunning plan to bring water to Lake Eyre, rain to south east Australia and prosperity to the Murray Darling Basin.
Read more...The science of deceit
October 26, 2009
Though no scientist doubts that humans influence climate at local level - causing both warmings and coolings - no definitive evidence has yet been discovered that a human influence is measurable, let alone dangerous, at global level.
Read more...John Howard at Quadrant
October 19, 2009
John Howard officially opened the new Quadrant office in Balmain, and launched the first in a new series of Quadrant Books - Frank Devine’s Older & Wiser.
Read more...Not Evil Just Wrong reviewed
October 12, 2009
The film is not so much about the science of climate change as it is about explaining the sociology and politics of what is now perhaps the world’s greatest-ever scare campaign.
Read more...Bard does climate change
October 19, 2009
The big question is who will get the part of the Hamlet, Prince of Denmark — Barack Obama, Gordon Brown or Kevin Rudd?
Read more...Julie and Julia
October 19, 2009
While the movie starts off innocently enough, it evolves into a screeching chick flick, weighed down by politically correct talking points.
Read more...They got it wrong
October 19, 2009
What has been done is totally indefensible, will do incalculable damage, weaken our economies and prolong unemployment.
Read more...Red Shoes
October 19, 2009
The parts I enjoyed the most in Mao’s Last Dancer were the ballets. Vivid, lively, colourful, fast-moving, energetic and thoroughly entertaining, they were everything the rest of the movie wasn’t.
Read more...The way ahead
October 19, 2009
All Australian politicians have now for some years lived in terror of a global-warming-brainwashed electorate, and of the strong Green intimidation that continues to be exercised against all voters.
Read more...Left's War on Science
October 19, 2009
The Left should call a halt to their ongoing war on DDT and thereby on science; the collateral damage – mostly third-world children, pregnant women and the old, claimed by malaria – is unacceptable.
Read more...Rethinking Foreign Aid
October 19, 2009
What happens when economists from the developing world start to denounce much of what passes for Western overseas aid? That is exactly what one young woman from Zambia has done. Dambisa Moyo is an economist who has just penned an important new book on the subject.
Read more...My friend Frank
July 4, 2009
Frank Devine was an indomitable cavalier. A bon vivant who loved long lunches, he was a conviction journalist whose religious faith was central to his life. (He used to pray privately at work: “Jesus Christ, Son of God , have mercy on us.”).
Read more...Double dissolution? Yes, please
October 13, 2009
The Liberal leadership should stop being afraid and welcome a double dissolution, using the opportunity to expose the global warming fundamentalists.
Read more...Nobel-esse Oblige
October 12, 2009
Wow! Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize! Gosh, I mean that one really came out of nowhere, didn’t it?
Read more...The neo-Cromwellians
October 12, 2009
The attacks on academics and writers (and ordinary citizens) who question current Left-wing theories on history, society, climate and a host of other issues are not based on freedom of expression and thought, but on suppression.
Read more...Culture catcher: 19
October 12, 2009
‘According to these Poststructuralist relativists, we cannot even be sure that the Holocaust took place.’
Read more...The West in a Nutshell
October 12, 2009
The essays I have written are pieces written, as the occasion presented itself, or the mood took me, over the past decade. Each was written for the sheer pleasure of trying to articulate a thoughtful position on the subject in question.
Read more...The writing life: 2
October 12, 2009
Writers are professional stickybeaks, eyes on stalks, ears flapping, ever on the look-out for the telling vignette, the odd detail, the weird seed that might one day flourish into a full-grown literary plant.
Read more...Stimulus or welfare?
October 12, 2009
It is not just “spending” that matters but what that spending is on. Our productive structures are being bent out of shape towards the creation of what can never give this economy momentum or higher real incomes.
Read more...The wisdom of skepticism
October 12, 2009
Why should the people of the world, whose lives will be utterly transformed by the draconian actions proposed by the global warming fanatics, meekly accept their fate?
Read more...Whither the Liberal Party?
October 12, 2009
Menzies was no saint, but he seemed to have a bit of vision, principle, and a set of core values. If the modern Liberals want to get back into power, they will need leaders with similar traits. Otherwise they may languish on the sidelines for some time to come.
Read more...Rethinking the Crusades
October 11, 2009
Dispelling the many myths about the Crusades takes guts, and someone with the right intellectual and academic qualifications. Rodney Stark is certainly the man for the job: he has become one of our finest writers on the sociology and history of religion, and is unafraid to go against the tide.
Read more...Not Evil Just Wrong
September 27, 2009
On October 18 our documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, will premiere in homes and campuses across Australia and around the world.
Read more...The writing life: 1
August 31, 2009
Children and teenagers are honest. If they aren’t hooked into your book in the first couple of pages, they will simply close it. It doesn’t matter how many prizes its won, how well regarded you are by the literary world, they simply don’t care if your book doesn’t grab them.
Read more...The Big Fix
October 9, 2009
The [Brennan] committee makes much of the fact it received 35,000 responses, with another 6000 odd people attending its round-table sessions. That is the same as saying it heard from 0.2 per cent of the Australian population, or hasn't heard from 99.8 per cent of us. And those it heard from were disproportionately from charter cheerleading lobby groups.
Read more...One of these photos is racist
October 9, 2009
Daryl Somers is in trouble for a Red Faces segment on the Hey Hey It's Saturday Reunion. Here are two photos.
Read more...Killing the Black Dog
October 5, 2009
Killing the Black Dog is Les Murray’s courageous account of his struggle with depression, accompanied by poems specially selected by the author.
Read more...Islam and Polygamy
October 5, 2009
I have been utterly amazed to discover that a major newspaper recently carried an opinion piece by a Muslim spokesman advocating polygamy in Australia. The Melbourne Age evidently thought it was quite alright to actually run with this nonsense, presumably because it was being pushed by a Muslim.
Read more...Comrades vs. Liberty
October 5, 2009
For the vast variety of leftist ideologues that inhabit Leftland, the idea of liberty — or freedom of thought, speech, movement and ideas — always gets in the way of the socialist agenda.
Read more...Stimulus hampers growth
October 5, 2009
If you give everyone a cheque in the mail before Christmas you have to expect that some people will spend it in retail stores.
Read more...Rudd keeps Left
October 5, 2009
Few readers will be aware of a recent news conference at which Prime Minister Rudd fielded questions from ABC and Fairfax News reporters. Oddly enough, all the questions related to the recent change in Samoa from driving on the right hand side of the road to driving on the left hand side of the road.
Read more...Counting the cost
October 5, 2009
The Secretary of the Treasury believes that the $43 billion additional spending accounted for by the stimulus added 200,000 additional jobs to the economy. My own estimate, given the relatively mild recession that we have had, is that no more than 30,000 to 40,000 jobs may have been saved.
Read more...Culture catcher: 18
October 5, 2009
Program for a day in Berlin (courtesy the Australian taxpayer): Left "history" at the Free University, lunch at the Aux Délices normands restaurant, drinks at Luisa, dinner at the Restaurant Piaggio.
Read more...Rachel Carson
October 5, 2009
Rachel Carson’s magnum opus Silent Spring made her famous and a darling of the left. In making her case against DDT Carson constructs not a sturdy cornerstone of scientific truth but rather an elaborate tissue of exaggerations and lies.
Read more...Debating global warming
October 5, 2009
The advocates for what turned out to be markedly opposing views were Des Moore, the former Deputy Secretary of the Federal Treasury and Harry Clarke, Professor of Economics at La Trobe University.
Read more...Dear Malcolm
October 2, 2009
A proper hazard reduction and adaptation policy to deal with known future climatic threats is a very different matter to the political question implicit in today’s headlines.
Read more...Howard and the Nobel Peace Prize
September 29, 2009
But for John Howard, East Timor would not be free. So why was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Kofi Annan and the UN? Was it because of Howard’s refusal to go along with the hijacking of the Tampa?
Read more...Left Forum: Care on the Left
September 27, 2009
The pedestrian and gullible were recruited into the counter cultural left. If they were useful women they became the vanguard of the feminist movement. How many have sailed through academia in paltry women’s studies courses and were later taken up and promoted into areas of the public service by affirmative action?
Read more...Left Forum: On Left equality
September 27, 2009
The equality that must be defended is equality before the law - the equal right of every individual to advance his or her life and pursue happiness in liberty, including the liberty to earn or produce property, and to keep it.
Read more...Media ecoevangelists
September 27, 2009
By what authority does the ABC allow ecoevangelists to grandstand their relentless and extreme views at public expense – effectively providing their organisations with continuous free advertising at the taxpayers’ expense?
Left Forum: The Rudd Ticket
September 27, 2009
A momentous event in our national affairs has all but gone unnoticed. The political party which for over a hundred years was known as the Australian Labor Party has ceased to exist.
Read more...Left Forum: Homepage
September 27, 2009
Last The Australian began publication of a series of articles by some of Australia’s leading Left thinkers explaining what it means to be Left. This Quadrant Online Forum looks at some of those articles, and some of those ideas.
Read more...Left Forum: The lites on the hill
September 21, 2009
The Left has no idea what it stands for or why it is in office, beyond pursuing and indulging the perquisites of power.
Read more...Left Forum: 'What's left'
September 27, 2009
‘What’s left’ is pragmatic politics, in which a social democratic Prime Minister can claim to be an economic conservative and a Keynesian big-spender, a critic of ‘neoliberalism’ and the heir to Labor’s ‘neoliberal’ economic reforms. For followers of political ideas, it’s a confusing mix. But for Labor, it might just be a winning electoral formula.
Read more...Culture catcher: 17
September 27, 2009
This Declaration supports the right of every woman, man and child to associate freely and to volunteer regardless of their cultural and ethnic origin, religion, age, gender and physical, social and economic position.
Read more...Left Forum: Green Left Weakly
September 27, 2009
Those who waste their time with their special pleading for theoretical rigor, are blind to the horrific reality that all the Left is about are simplistic ideas and slogans, jealousy, resentment, opportunism, and a lust for power and personal advancement.
Read more...Charlie & Boots
September 27, 2009
This authenticity is a joy after the paralysing self-consciousness which usually affects Australian film. Refreshingly, this movie seems to be pitched at people who don’t live in expensive inner-city terrace housing and don’t actually care who edits The Monthly.
Read more...Testing the stimulus
September 27, 2009
We do not know in any realistic way what would have occurred had the stimulus package not been introduced, or what would have occurred had some other set of economic policies been applied.
Read more...Left Forum: "TEH left"
September 27, 2009
A very convenient rhetorical strategy is to make mocking references to ‘TEH left’ (misspelling intended) anytime any critique of a thinker or movement identified with the left is attempted.
Read more...Left Forum: Why we differ
September 27, 2009
The enemies of the Left usually in fact turn out to be the best guarantors of genuine social goods, such as freedom, opportunity and prosperity. The things the Left tends to press for are often at odds and conflict with such goods.
Read more...Beginning a new day
September 22, 2009
Mr Rudd’s honeymoon has survived that of even President Obama – why? It is surely not a question of superior charisma.
Read more...The law in black and white
September 21, 2009
In the arcane world Tasmanian politics, nothing is what it seems. Business has an expression of “above the line and below the line”, but in the Apple Isle we tend to define political decisions as either “above the belt or below the belt”.
Read more...Culture catcher: 16
September 21, 2009
“There’s places on this island we can’t walk through; there’s this horrible feelin’ you get. There’s terrible things been done, and tho’ we don’t know what exactly, nobody will go there.”
Read more...Liberals - Whither goest thou?
September 21, 2009
The essence of the problem is the lack of any coherent set of policies that might convey what kind of society the Party considers Australians should have and how that might be achieved.
Read more...The Young (and the Restless) Victoria
September 21, 2009
Apparently Martin Scorsese had something to do with this film; I find that hard to believe. I do, however, find it very easy to believe that Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, had plenty to do with it.
Read more...Understanding the Business Cycle
September 21, 2009
Cycles are cyclical. An upturn follows a downturn, and relatively quickly unless something is done to hold the economy down.
Read more...Think globally, destroy locally
September 21, 2009
As the temperature trend for ten years now has been one of cooling, since the unusually warm El Nino year of 1998, this requires a precautionary response to cooling rather than warming.
Read more...Why This Unholy Alliance?
September 21, 2009
One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with and apologetic for ruthless totalitarian regimes. Whether the Soviet Union, Cuba, or Islamist Iran, there have always been Western leftists who have idolised these brutal regimes and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.
Read more...Quadrant testimonials
September 14, 2009
TEN really good reasons for subscribing to Quadrant - and it's great value!
Read more...A petition not for signing
September 15, 2009
This petition is no more than a plea for more government intervention, a very bad idea indeed. That it has originated in the United States, in an economy now being choked by intervention, is as worrying as the text itself.
Read more...A taste of a Bill of Rights
September 14, 2009
You have to be a bit careful these days when you refer to democracy and Australia in the same breath. This week it became obvious that the idea of democracy got a bloody thumping as ideologues and bureaucrats moved into full gear.
Read more...Culture catcher: 15
September 14, 2009
“By the end of the twentieth century Australia remained one of the few countries on earth without a bill of rights. Emerging nations such as South Africa, Thailand and Timor L’este all developed bills of rights (in 1996, 1997 and 2002), but not Australia.”
Read more...Mayhem at Blak Book Awards
September 14, 2009
A tragic but ultimately empowering story of a Black woman who is often mistaken for white, and of her uplifting and ultimately successful struggle to be recognised as a victim of ongoing colonialism and oppression.
Read more...The eve of destruction: Take 2
September 14, 2009
The atmosphere is not for turnin’
Temperatures rise and people are burnin’
too much fuel but they ain’t learnin’
the earth’s on edge of over turning’
And we are just its overburden.
Culture catcher: 11
August 17, 2009
Elitism 101: “I thought there might have been a statement dressed up as a question from a denialist but no-one was game. Perhaps my mockery of Andrew Bolt cowed them into silence, sorry I mean CRUSHED THEIR DISSENT.”
Read more...Culture cather: 12
August 24, 2009
Australian Viet Cong: “Dr Jim Cairns, Bob Gould, Albert Langer, Michael Hyde, Jean McLean, Brian Laver, Jack Mundey, Mike Jones, Germaine Greer, Allan Ashbolt, Ann Curthoys …”
Read more...Culture catcher: 13
August 31, 2009
Henry Reynolds: “through [his wife] he was able to pass notes to prime minister Paul Keating regarding native title (and his speechwriter and adviser Don Watson often made calls to Reynolds to ask for advice) …”
Read more...Culture catcher: 14
September 7, 2009
“[Barry Humphries’ Sir Les Patterson] is a savage take on both the assertive Australian cultural nationalism that flourished briefly under Australia’s Weimar, the Whitlam Government of 1972-75, and Labor itself.”
Read more...The Garnaut Cult
September 9, 2009
More and more questions are being asked about the scientific foundations of the ETS by highly qualified scientists and others. Yet these doubts are simply being disregarded. This is a high risk path with no apparent ability to back-down if the entire edifice is built on sand.
Read more...Homage to Elizabeth Durack
September 7, 2009
Artist, and Quadrant essayist, Elizabeth Durack (1915–2000) now has a stylish online home.
Read more...Quadrant search
September 7, 2009
Quadrant is preparing its online archives and needs copies of some magazines. Can you help find missing copies?
Read more...Cities that don't work
September 7, 2009
Our roads are congested; our public transport overcrowded; our water supply inadequate; and our amenities are under threat. Experts warned recently of more frequent disruptions to our electricity as power supplies fail.
Read more...The god who failed
September 7, 2009
It is something of an open question, even today, whether Keynes knew much at all of the economics of his own time or whether he lied outright to gain attention for his own approach.
Read more...Spanking New Zealand
September 7, 2009
So in 2007 the law was changed ... This law made spanking for correctional purposes a criminal offence (in effect), though it left a small loophole for spanking to stop disruptions.
Read more...Resenting resentment
September 7, 2009
The 1999 Referendum will celebrate the 10th anniversary of its defeat on the 6th of November this year - a defeat by a majority of citizens in a majority of States. The nation seems to have suffered little from its rejection of resentment.
Read more...Tracey and the Fabians
September 7, 2009
At a weekend seminar Fabians vote to sell ABC. Tenders to be called.
Read more...Global science or global panic?
September 7, 2009
My assessment is not based primarily on scientific analysis but on many years in Treasury and outside of analysing proposals for government intervention to solve perceived “crises”. Much analysis of the present proposal requires little more than common sense.
Read more...Return of the culture wars
August 31, 2009
A UN emissary by the name of Professor James Anaya, of Apache Nation heritage, managed to discover in 11 days - what has eluded this nation for over two centuries - how to improve the well-being of our Indigenous Nations … all 500 of them.
Read more...The Little Black Schoolbook
August 31, 2009
Most students assume that if they receive a disappointing result that it is due to the quality of their work. This may not be the case.
Read more...14 things about Teddy
August 31, 2009
In retrospect, I don’t think many of Teddy’s really great achievements have been praised enough. It’s easy to remember minor achievements like driving his first wife to drink and Mary Jo Kopechne into a pond, and yet so many other things go unacknowledged. So here is a list of what I think are the defining achievements in his career.
Read more...Western Immigration and Global Jihad
August 31, 2009
There is always a moral asymmetry between the free West and its enemies. The West is meant to play by the rules, and it usually does. It seeks to conduct it affairs within a moral framework, and certain things are simply off limits. But the enemies of freedom and democracy know no such compunctions.
Read more...A policy to hurt Australia
August 31, 2009
To pass this Bill, or any incarnation of it ahead of the Copenhagen talks, is sheer folly. To do so, when Labor’s scheme is not even scheduled to commence until 2011, would suggest that politics and politicians have taken leave of their senses.
Read more...Forget the Kids, We’re Gonna Save the Planet
August 30, 2009
The truth is, there is a population crisis. But it is not over-population that we should be worried about, but under-population. Yet the alarmists continue to spin their tunes, urging us to reduce the number of children we have, if not remain childless altogether.
Read more...Creating catastrophe
August 24, 2009
It is claimed that there is a scientific consensus about human-induced climate change. Consensus is a process of politics not science. There is certainly no scientific consensus about human-induced climate change and the loudest voice does not win scientific discussions. Science is married to evidence, no matter how uncomfortable.
Read more...The costs of power
August 24, 2009
The terrible conclusion to be drawn from all this is that while we are exporting expensive energy to Japan, China, India and our other customers we will set about destroying a competitive advantage of cheap power while literally tilting at windmills!
Read more...ETS - Energy Tax Swindle
August 25, 2009
The Liberals should welcome a double dissolution and turn it into a referendum on the ETS, which has absolutely nothing to do with halting global warming and everything to do with damaging the living standards of the Australian people.
Read more...Robbing Hoods
August 24, 2009
It’s intriguing that the movie industry can portray even closeted gays in the military as just as tough as, if not tougher and even more meritorious than, everyone else, but when it comes to Hoover, gays in the FBI are effeminate and rather cowardly snobs.
Read more...Stimulus fed stupidity
August 24, 2009
Economies are cyclical. There will be downturns every so often but to treat each and every one as the end of the world as we know it is a form of short-term lunacy.
Read more...This is the house that Kevin built
August 24, 2009
Alison Anderson’s electrifying speech in the Northern Territory Parliament during a no-confidence motion in the Henderson government was, to put it mildly, sensational.
Read more...Sell the ABC
August 24, 2009
Selling off the ABC would be a way for the Rudd government to start paying back its huge stimulus debt. And it could be a vote winner.
Read more...Think Green, Vote Liberal
August 24, 2009
The astonishing bipartisanship on an environmental issue that threatens Australia’s ability to compete internationally has quickly inspired a startling proposal on “how to save” Malcolm Turnbull by “doing a Whitlam”.
Read more...Accomplices in deceit
August 24, 2009
In my view what is important about The Climate Caper is that it is an insider’s account of how Australia’s scientific institutions were suborned into being accomplices to a religious crusade and, how, in accepting the bribes that were offered, they have seriously compromised their integrity.
Read more...I was there
August 24, 2009
I asked David Karoly why he had not replied to my invitation to attend a lecture by a US scientist who described the kind of science he presented as a “scam”. K said he was on leave, to which I responded “you could have replied”.
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 - 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...Carbon dioxide isn't guilty
August 17, 2009
I was asked at a conference in New York last March where public opinion has to be before we can turn government away from climate change. My answer was 70 per cent, and I believe that's the objective.
Read more...Omar Khayyam and the climate
August 17, 2009
As the waters slowly settle on the ETS debate in the Senate last week, the realisation emerges that it all had very little to do with scientific argument and reason and nearly everything to do with economics and politics. Saving the planet gave way to saving face … which at lease was a saving grace.
Read more...Greening the children
August 17, 2009
As a popular textbook explains to students: “ ‘Green politics’ is a term used to refer to issues that ‘Green’ parties throughout the world focus on: protecting the environment for future generations and supporting human rights and social justice.”
Read more...Colette at the movies
August 17, 2009
So I watched the gorgeous scenery (apparently France basked in perpetual summer for the last quarter of the nineteenth century), admired Lea’s real pearl necklace, wondered when Chéri was going to strangle her with it, and regretted that he didn’t.
Read more...Shrinking birds?
August 17, 2009
Reports that climate change is causing some kind of far fetched change in something or other are now a daily occurrence in a news media which has abandoned any vestige of due diligence in reporting stories which appear to support the dogma of global warming.
Read more...An unsustainable future
August 17, 2009
Following the lead of the British Government with the example of the Tate Modern in the old Battersea Power Station, will we see governments create a string of art galleries and museums in the Latrobe and Hunter Valleys or will some sanity return to the essential provision of electricity?
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 - 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...Punished For Speaking the Truth
August 3, 2009
There is one thing that can be counted on with absolute certainly in this relativistic world: there is a protected species which no one even dares to cross, certainly not in the mainstream media. This group can now get away with anything, and the MSM refuses to offer a contrary point of view.
Read more...Silence of the Lambs
August 3, 2009
I’m not suggesting anything here that justifies the Leyton Hewitt variety of triumphalism, but boy, the report in The Weekend Australian about a judgement by Judge Peter McClellan did wonders for a flagging spirit.
Read more...Ann Coulter's Guilty
August 3, 2009
According to Coulter, the “most worshipped figure in modern America is the ‘single mother.’” 63 percent of all youth suicides are associated with single-parent setups, and she contends that it is time to stop promoting fatherless families as just another family choice.
Read more...Harry without magic
August 3, 2009
Julie Walters is winsome and heroic and red-haired; Helena Bonham Carter dresses up in corsets and does her by-now-patented mad girl routine (Hamlet, Fight Club, Sweeney Todd, etc etc etc). Michael Gambon was the cause of some serious sniggering with his faintly paedophilic visit to the young Voldemort’s ghastly orphanage.
Read more...Culture catcher: 10
August 3, 2009
“Thank Dog [sic] the IPA and their fellow travelers [sic] will never have any influence in this country.”
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...Tales out of court
July 26, 2009
There has been a bit of consternation around our way recently. Tracey’s partner’s dealer has been in court.
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...Keynes for our times
July 26, 2009
To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the trouble with Keynesian economics is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. By waiting until that day of reckoning, we postpone the inevitable. But as the very meaning of the word clearly states, the inevitable inevitably arrives.
Read more...The Climate Caper
July 26, 2009
As the parallel universe of Global Warming moves from the science-as-politics-phase, to the silly-phase, then to the religious-phase — hold on to your seats. It is going to be a rough ride.
Read more...Money where mouth is
July 26, 2009
Mr. McClelland, when not writing reference letters for all and sundry, paints himself as a big supporter of human rights, and so wants to hand over a lot of decision-making powers currently residing with Parliament to the unelected judges.
Read more...Culture catcher: 9
July 26, 2009
“And what we find extraordinary, reading through the main New Right publication which is the journal Quadrant, is in fact how thin on the ground the New Right history is.”
Read more...How PC is Putting Us All at Risk
July 25, 2009
Political Correctness is certainly annoying, foolish and a pain in the neck. However, it can also be quite dangerous, especially when it is applied to issues of national security, policing and justice. In the attempt of our elites to make sure we do not offend anyone, ordinary citizens can find themselves in positions of real danger.
Read more...Culture catcher: 8
July 20, 2009
“There were no mandarin agents of the KGB here, no moles burrowing deep into the establishment, just fervent men and women recruited when the Soviet Union was an Australian ally to provide it with their limited knowledge of Cold War plans.”
Read more...Adventures in English
July 20, 2009
The President of Indonesia, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, a practicing Muslim, had no trouble using the words “terrorist” and “terrorist group”. Nor did Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who described the slaughter as a “terrorist bombing”.
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...PM plans to retire
July 20, 2009
Prime Minister Rudd offers intimate details of his personal super scheme - which he has kept “secret within myself and my partner” - and reveals his retirement plans.
Read more...British elections
July 20, 2009
There has not been a great deal in the local media about the recent British local government and European Parliament elections, apart from the fact that the BNP got two seats in Brussels (with nearly a million votes), but there were some interesting aspects to them.
Read more...Reflections on the Revolution in France
July 20, 2009
Bastille Day, the French national holiday, was observed for the 220th time just recently in France. What happened on July 14, 1789 was to leave a lasting legacy on not only that nation but the world as well. How one views that legacy depends in part on where one stands on the political and ideological spectrum.
Read more...Rudd’s dangerous obsession
July 16, 2009
Why do the elites so fervently pray for an ETS? What happened to common sense?
Read more...In Europe its Lobsters In, Babies Out
July 13, 2009
What do you call a continent which cares more about the rights and wellbeing of crabs, lobsters, and even the common octopus, than it does about unborn babies? Just in case you cannot come up with anything, let me suggest a few possibilities: deranged, degenerate, despicable and delirious. And just to keep the alliteration going: dumb, really dumb.
Read more...Living in the occupied territories
July 13, 2009
We are racist, sexist and homophobic – and that’s when we take time off from agitating for war, destroying the planet and plotting new ways to oppress the poor and disadvantaged. We’re not just wrong, we’re evil.
Read more...Galarrwuy Yunupingu and the Aboriginal future
July 13, 2009
Galarrwuy Yunupingu blames lack of resources for failures by many indigenous Australians to get jobs and claims that ‘the jobs that exist are usually taken by balanda’. Just how genuine indigenous autonomy can be achieved if people cannot fix their water bores or repair their roads and sewerage, he does not explain.
Read more...I love a sunburnt country
July 13, 2009
Project Lexicon is a planned attempt to re-educate Australians in the use of language. That is the English language - as it is used to describe terrorists. Apparently to use such words as “terrorist”, “jihad”, “martyr” and “the war on terror” is likely to offend Muslims, or at least give them bad press - so the Ministry of Love is about to teach us how not to offend Muslims.
Read more...Culture catcher: 7
July 13, 2009
On nearly every count, the evidence suggests that taking seriously the Green complaints about capitalism and science would be the worst thing for nature and humans particularly those in the developing world.
Read more...Flannery Marina - selling now
July 13, 2009
Enjoy global warming with seafront views at the beautiful Flannery Marina (previously known as Hahndorf) in the tropical Adelaide everglades.
Read more...What science-war?
July 13, 2009
Given that Australia still has an emissions trading bill on the Senate table, is it not of public interest to know that climate science Minister Penny Wong is acting on the basis of flawed, if not incompetent, science advice?
Read more...Rethinking Darwin
July 13, 2009
With this year being a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and the 150th anniversary of his Origin of the Species, there has been much hagiography produced about Darwin. It seems many biographies are trying to paint Darwin as a secular saint. A brand new biography is willing to ask hard question about his life and teachings.
Read more...Homeschooling and the War Against Children
July 12, 2009
Children are our future. The way our children develop determines how society develops. And when ideological battles are being fought in a culture, children are the trophy. Those who can control the children will be able to control a culture. That is why totalitarian states always seek to get control of children, especially from very early ages.
Read more...Taking responsibility
July 6, 2009
Responsibility seems to be what the Royal Commission into Victoria’s 2009 bushfire disaster is trying to establish, and responsibility is what the Brumby Labor government is desperately trying to avoid.
Read more...Shameless self-promotion
July 6, 2009
Anyway, what follows is a bit of shameless self-promotion. My excuse is simply that I was asked to indulge in it, and succumbed to the temptation.
Read more...A slobbering love affair
July 6, 2009
Something curious happens when a left-wing journalist meets Obama. She (or even he) takes the role of a hormonal cheerleader. And you can usually tell that some things are not quite right when the state-serving scribblers stand for Obama.
Read more...Culture catcher: 6
July 6, 2009
“To set forth, as only art can, the beauty and joy of living and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion - to a cause, an ideal, a passion even - the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is my ambition here.”
Read more...The PM had the last laugh: thanks to the besotted media
July 6, 2009
Isn’t it time the gallery got over its love affair with Kevin Rudd? “Working families” will eventually realise they have been fed a diet of spin, and that will not be good for the future of a free press.
Read more...Culture catcher: 5
June 29, 2009
“It may sound harsh, like no-smoking laws at bars, or requiring catalytic converters to cut down on vehicle emissions, or China’s one child policy, but in time people will realize it is for the greater good: Celebrities should not be allowed to have children. Period.”
Read more...Libs mentally ill
July 6, 2009
I hadn’t seen Tracey for a while until I bumped into her the other day in Dick Smith’s looking at talking bathroom scales. I told you she had joined the Fabian Society. Well, she already seems a little over them.
Read more...Culture catcher: 4
June 22, 2009
Australian history writing from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in the early 1970s to the land rights politics of the early 1980s.
Read more...Paying People to be Responsible
June 29, 2009
The concept of personal responsibility has taken a battering lately. People are quite happy to blame anyone and anything other than themselves for their behaviour and actions. We are happy to pass the buck and shift the blame instead of taking ownership of what we do.
Read more...Mission Impossible II
June 29, 2009
“This email will self-destruct in 5 seconds” — well, as everyone now knows, it darn well didn’t. It turned up in Godwin’s Grech’s house, on Godwin’s personal computer.
Read more...What Science Knows
June 29, 2009
What Science Knows will not please the enemies of science, whose willful misunderstandings of scientific method and the relation of evidence to conclusions Franklin mercilessly exposes.
Read more...Rudd servants or public servants?
June 29, 2009
The timing and framing of this first survey of environmental views and behaviour is not inconsistent with the apparently increasing tendency of the public service to serve the interests of the government rather than the wider national interest.
Read more...Answers on climate change
June 29, 2009
Assessment of Minister Wong’s "Written Reply to Senator Fielding’s Three Questions on Climate Change" by Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and William Kininmonth.
Read more...Culture catcher: 1
May 31, 2009
“When men spend, they buy luxuries - cigarettes, alcohol, petrol, pornography and women’s bodies for their individual use.”
Read more...Mission Impossible
June 22, 2009
Please, nice, gentle Godwin Grech – please try and find your missing email!
Read more...Economics in interesting times
June 22, 2009
The often predicted suicide of the West may truly be upon us. If we actually believe that we will be economically better off with Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama choosing where our savings should go, then our economies will over the longer term weaken and slow.
Read more...The Wriedt stuff?
June 22, 2009
Sadly, feminism can be short-winded on the responsibilities accompanying the making of choices, especially poor choices.
Read more...Major changes in views on the environment
June 22, 2009
Surveys have obvious implications in terms of the all-important US policy position on global warming. Unfortunately, our major political parties seem way behind the ball game in gauging both community attitudes and the fundamental flaws in the science used in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Read more...Why did the media mislead us about President Obama?
June 22, 2009
President Obama was using an autocue in Cairo, but the media tried to hide it. This is testimony of a wider malaise.
Read more...More Green Lunacy
June 22, 2009
Some of the more radical green groups can come up with some quite bizarre and ludicrous stuff. One is left wondering whether the best response is laughter, tears of hari-kari. The supply of examples seems endless.
Read more...The Indian Mutiny
June 15, 2009
Some might say that David Jones, that bastion of White-Australia supremacy, blue-rinse gals and affluent Anglo-Saxon privilege, is the last place to study racism/racialism. On the contrary; it might possibly be the best.
Read more...Government Motors Inc.
June 15, 2009
If you had to make a sweeping generalisation, I figure you wouldn’t go too far wrong in saying some of GM’s most loyal customers are what might be described as Sarah Palin Republicans – or rednecks if you work for National Public Radio in the US, or for that matter for the ABC here in Australia.
Read more...Online newspapers
June 15, 2009
The project aims to digitise the vast newspaper archival resources in every state, and create a searchable database which will, for the first time, open up thousands of previously-forgotten news items to historical researchers.
Read more...Culture catcher: 3
June 15, 2009
A High Court judge: “If you take the view that the political process is increasingly, in a sense, an elected dictatorship softened by spin doctors and alienated from the people, then there may be a case for the expansion of the judicial role.”
Read more...Obama and Muslim apostasy
June 15, 2009
If an Ahmadinejad sponsored apostasy law had been passed in 2008, President Obama may already have been targeted for murder by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Read more...More Secular-Left Double Standards
June 15, 2009
I know it seems like ages ago, but try to think back to the days when George W. Bush was in the White House. You knew he was there because almost on a daily basis the mainstream media was warning about the dangers of having a professing Christian lead the nation. We were regularly warned that America was about to be turned into a theocracy.
Read more...Part 4: Is anybody listening yet?
June 11, 2009
The greatest Australian special interest of all lies with the average voter upon whom Prime Minister Rudd and Climate Minister Wong plan to impose their unnecessary, ineffectual and swingeingly costly carbon dioxide tax. Are you listening out there, True Blue?
Read more...Part 3: The NIPCC book launch
June 10, 2009
Have you ordered your copies yet, Bob Brown and Christine Milne?
Read more...Part 2: Heartland-3
June 9, 2009
This is scarcely a scientific secret, so how come that Ross Garnaut doesn’t seem to know about it?
Read more...Part 1: The Waxman-Markey Bill
June 8, 2009
“In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse”. Are you listening, Kevin Rudd?
Read more...
Tracey turns Left
May 31, 2009
Tracey’s joined the Fabians. I suppose it had to happen. She’s very career conscious.
Read more...Watching Big Brother
June 8, 2009
The image of Sasha Baron Cohen’s (Borat) bare bottom, inches from the face of Mr Nasty was a stunning example of a well executed live-television stunt, bringing down the arrogant and repulsive.
Read more...Islam, Obama and Appeasement
June 8, 2009
To simply seek to get along for the sake of getting along, without acknowledging fundamental differences of worldviews, belief systems and values is a recipe for disaster. Indeed, the attempt to achieve peace at any cost can often be extremely reckless and costly.
Read more...The uselessness of useless spending
June 8, 2009
There are some of us who believe that what is being done will actually make economic conditions worse, with the potential to slow recovery, reduce real incomes, lower employment, push up inflation and cause investment to fall back.
Responding to anti-semitism
June 8, 2009
“Bendle is in the pocket of Judaism. [His article] is no more than a well-orchestrated part of a concerted attempt, by Jewry, to take the heat off the recent barbarity and murderous conduct of … Israel in its dealings with [the] Palestinians [who] Jewry, has set … up as sitting ducks for Jewish armed killing incursions”.
Read more...Culture catcher: 2
June 8, 2009
“In the case of the jihadist war, where we [Australians] are fighting proponents of a distorted view of the Islamic religion, we occupy the moral high ground and we must be confident of that position.”
Read more...Ice-sheets and sea level
May 31, 2009
As the world has been getting cooling since 1998 the global warming alarmists have to scare us with other things. A favourite is rising sea level, allegedly caused by rapid melting of the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland.
Read more...Humanitarians: Please, Spare the Humans
June 1, 2009
I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories. They tend to be a dime a dozen, and are usually without merit. I do not think there is a monolithic cabal of conspirators plotting to take over planet earth. However, it is certainly the case that there are plenty of people out there who are hatching sinister schemes on a regular basis. And when you put a bunch of these folks together in the same room you can certainly end up with some really big trouble indeed.
Read more...What fresh Hell is this?
May 31, 2009
While looking at an awful photograph on page 11 of The Australian of Sheikh Issa (brother to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi) torturing an Afghan by burning his genitals and beating him with a nail-studded board; a lump of jam fell off my morning toast and hit a large advertisement at the foot of the page.
Read more...Business Class Radicals & Holocaust Denial
May 26, 2009
Australian historians can contribute to this strategy of Holocaust denial in a number of ways. After all, they have demonstrated a fierce and unquenchable desire to portray the history of indigenous Australians in terms of alleged genocides perpetrated by white Australians, involving the ‘Black Wars’, the ‘Stolen Generations’, and other over-hyped alleged depredations.
Read more...Observations on Government Policies
May 27, 2009
Prime Minister Rudd is clearly wrong in attributing the crisis to policies that reflect the neo-liberal views of free marketeers. President Obama is also wrong in taking a similar view in the United States, as is Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the UK.
Read more...President Obama: “No we can’t.”
May 18, 2009
The retention of military commission trials at Guantanamo Bay shows how unrealistic much of the Democrat campaign was. George W Bush and John Howard are vindicated.
Read more...Sex and the single footballer
May 25, 2009
When Australian Rules footballers invite a stripper to perform in the dressing room before a show, "it is absolutely, completely unacceptable and inappropriate and it sends all of the wrong messages.” Name the source of that quote -
Read more...Spin, spun, splat!
May 25, 2009
If there were such a thing as the Eurovision Spin Contest, Australia’s Kevin Rudd would have won it hands down. Nobody in Australia, but nobody, does a wall-of-sound like our Kevin Rudd.
Read more...Business Class Radicals
May 25, 2009
On the Left, it rains money - public money. On the Left, you can say anything - and get away with it. On the Left, they get to see the world - and often someone else does the paying.
Read more...ETS in the Twilight Zone
May 25, 2009
In the words of Sir Humphrey Appleby, it is a “courageous act” to tax pipelines with such an extraordinary formula. It is more than courageous, it is really stupid.
Read more...A double dissolution election: not much room to move
May 25, 2009
Kevin Rudd has only a short window for a double dissolution election early next year – and the result is not guaranteed.
Read more...Thinking About Islam and Public Policy
May 25, 2009
How Western governments deal with the threat of militant Islam is a vexed issue. Easy answers are hard to come by. Yet a new volume seeks to carefully explore such issues. I refer to Islam, Human Rights and Public Policy, edited by David Claydon (Acorn Press, 2009).
Read more...Defending the Indefensible
May 18, 2009
If anyone wonders why society is in such a mess, they simply need to look at our ruling elites. Many of our opinion makers, judges, movers and shakers, and intellectualoids tend to promote ideas, values and worldviews which are not only contrary to the sensible majority, but are often perverse, irrational and outrageous.
Read more...Sex and the single girl
May 18, 2009
Feeling bad about oneself is the first sign of wrongdoing in present-day antipodean culture, and finding the culprit – who is invariably someone else – is the customary solution.
Read more...How long is temporary?
May 18, 2009
Thank goodness they have repaired the Hubble Space Telescope because we might need it when trying to find the end of Wayne Swan’s “temporary deficit”. His vague estimate, and that of the Australian Treasury people, is that “temporary” means some time between 2015 and…well…er…infinity?
Read more...Money, spin and lies
May 18, 2009
With the next federal election almost certainly less than 18 months away, the Coalition parties face a difficult task. One of the big questions will be, as the economy declines, whether or not today’s more media savvy electorate will see through what will be, most certainly, a very dense fog of Labor and media spin.
Read more...Magnanimity in victory
May 18, 2009
These twin evils of sore losing and sore winning can even tell us something about democracy. To make a democracy work, you need to be able to throw those in power out peacefully, whatever sort of job they’ve been doing. And you need them to leave without being sore losers.
Read more...Spinning the truth
May 13, 2009
There was Elmer Fudd, in the bath, pulling out the plug. The bath water (the nation’s treasure), was gurgling down the plug-hole, and all Elmer could say was that it was “only temporary” and the bath would be full again by 2015.
Read more...Towards a banana republic
May 15, 2009
A model in economic management eighteen months ago, Australia seems to be on the way to becoming a banana republic. What went wrong?
Read more...A remainder is announced
May 11, 2009
An ex-Tory, ex-Liberal, ex-Prime Minister is writing his memoirs, with the help of a Doctor of Creative Arts “collaborator”, which are to be published by a Left publishing house.
Read more...Budgets, debt and deficit finance
May 15, 2009
For Obama, Brown and Rudd, I can see there has been no pain in choosing the big spending, high deficit options they have chosen. It’s no doubt lovely when the actions they are compelled to take by the prevailing theory happen to coincide with the very things they would like to do as political leaders.
Read more...Picking losers
May 11, 2009
It is the timeworn role of governments to pick losers. It is what governments can be expected to do for which they have had much practice. I cannot think why they should be encouraged further along this road than they have already gone.
Read more...Debating Steven Kates
May 11, 2009
On Rudd’s cash handouts: “It is a budgetary matter. Some people, including many recipients of today’s handouts, will pay a little more tax in later years, or suffer a little from the RBA allowing government a little more inflation to make discharge of debt easier.”
Read more...Targeting Toddlers
May 11, 2009
The activists of the secular left are no dummies; they know that in order to win the culture wars, they must get access to our children, and the younger the better. They know that if they can indoctrinate our kids at the most early ages possible, they will have a much better chance of seeing their social engineering agenda accomplished in full.
Read more...Robert's nice new friend
May 7, 2009
Hal Colebatch shows how a superannuated defender of mass murder has been wheeled out to applaud - Kevin Rudd.
Read more...Rudd writes to Quadrant!
May 4, 2009
We too were “surprised and gratified” when we found the Prime Minister had written to us with an exciting new plan for fixing the economy.
Read more...The ACCC and Richard Pratt: a case to answer
May 4, 2009
When the ACCC pursued Richard Pratt to the end, were they acting as a model litigant as the government requires? Was the criminal prosecution harsh and oppressive? How was it related to their campaign to have Parliament criminalise cartel offences? Only an independent judicial inquiry can answer these and other questions.
Read more...Music without instruments
May 4, 2009
Kitchen sinks, polypipe, empty tin cans, bin lids, water, newspaper, brooms, dustpans, brushes, boxes of matches, hubcaps, and all the other detritus of any industrial workplace are transformed by STOMP09 into a symphony orchestra.
Read more...Fat men can fight too
May 4, 2009
So, can one single father doing it tough rise above it all? Is there hope for today’s pot-bellied man? If a drunken man wakes up with a Loch Ness tattoo does he not feel?
Read more...A reply to Robert Manne
May 4, 2009
The Prime Minister has no skills as an entrepreneur. None. He has no personal judgement about what will create value and what will not. He may be able to lead a government, he may be able to hobnob with the great and the good, but what he cannot do is work out what sorts of things will add to economic growth and what will not.
Read more...Fat chance
May 4, 2009
As I walked in, I was greeted with the sight of a rubber model of 15 kilos of fat and two pleasant ladies who appeared to be in charge. I was handed over to a man who was going to be my personal weight-loss consultant. He was a cheerful man.
Read more...Caught in the net
May 4, 2009
John Howard, who out rates Rudd with the number of YouTube sites, by 16 to 1, does so by the sheer number of nasty clips produced prior to the last election. For the rabid anti-Howard clique, he must be sorely missed.
Read more...May Day Message
May 1, 2009
We celebrate May Day with a custom called the “Cash Splash”. I am not clear when this habit started but do the names of Costello or Swan mean anything to you?
Read more...Eavesdropping on a cultural crisis
April 30, 2009
Mervyn Bendle is dead right when he writes about Asian students haplessly absorbing mega-jive about Australian history and culture.
Read more...Senators against hypocrisy
April 30, 2009
The Invitation to the Brisbane “launches” of Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth carries a remarkable statement about two Federal Senators.
Read more...Gran Torino un-snubbed
April 27, 2009
The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences snubbed Eastwood’s movie, Gran Torino. It’s disappointing. Sad, in fact, that our elites can’t see the cracks on those colourful picket fences.
Read more...The censor cometh
April 27, 2009
Censorship happened this month in Australia when the Rudd government censored what had happened to the appallingly injured Afghan boat-people when their Indonesian fishing boat exploded in the Indian Ocean.
Read more...Rogue Science and Human Cloning
April 26, 2009
The danger always exists that if science can do something, it will do it. But simply because something can be done does not mean that it should be done. Some scientific possibilities are better left alone, never to be pursued. Human cloning is one such case.
Read more...More Population Madness, More Human Culls
April 24, 2009
With increasing regularity our elite moonbeams are coming out with over-the-top proposals to save the planet. In their zeal to rescue mother earth, these green fanatics are quite happy to wipe out much of the human population to achieve their goals.
Read more...Stop outsourcing policy to the refugee industry
April 20, 2009
Kevin Rudd should follow the example of the Chifley government and take full control of our refugee intake. The government should stop queue jumping - the risk to people’s lives, including our sailors’, is too great.
Read more...Our children will pay for this madness
April 17, 2009
The government and its advisors do not know what to do about the financial crisis, but feel they must do something, however foolish. This is a tragedy; a tragedy for which we and our children will pay.
Read more...The Boat that Sucked - Big time
April 17, 2009
The only thing I can recommend in this film is the clothes. The costume department excelled itself: Chris O’Dowd’s patchwork velvet wedding jacket is to die for; ditto Rhys Ilfans’ purple velvet sharp-fitting suit. The irritating lesbian wears some lovely crocheted waistcoats.
Read more...Australia's debt sentence
April 17, 2009
With a budget outlook suggesting over $200 billion in national debt will be accrued in little over three years. This is Mr Rudd’s debt sentence to all Australians.
Read more...BHO and Dhimmitude
April 17, 2009
Barack Hussein Obama promised us he would take a different approach to Islam and the Middle East. That he has certainly done. There is a name for it - it is called dhimmitude. On his recent overseas trip he has made it clear that national self-loathing and grovelling to Islam will now be basic elements of American foreign policy.
Read more...Blame it all on Lawrence
April 13, 2009
For many of us the only early visual images of Saudi Arabia were from the film Lawrence of Arabia in which Lawrence was endlessly going about the desert blowing up the railway line to Medina. Oh well, it had to start somewhere!
Read more...Paradise seeks us
April 13, 2009
It is widely believed that there are too many human beings and that our success will be our demise. It is fundamentally believed that we, homo sapiens, do not belong here on earth.
Read more...The Flea Market
April 13, 2009
At the Flea Market you will also discover that many middle-class Australians have no idea of fundamental economics, which could be why they are currently in debt up to their eyeballs.
Read more...Climate fundamentalism
April 13, 2009
Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science.
Read more...Our Christophobes at Work
April 13, 2009
It seems that anytime is a good time to take pot-shots at Christianity. But if this anti-Christian bigotry can take place over holy days on the Christian calander, so much the better. Thus this Easter we see more drive-by shootings against Christianity.
Read more...What happens to Kevin Rudd?
April 2, 2009
A reader replies to William York. Copy of letter supplied to Quadrant Online courtesy Patrick McCauley.
Read more...
Australian political identity survey
April 6, 2009
An invitation to take part in the Political identity survey being conducted by Andrew Norton.
Read more...
The Slippery Slope in Action - Euthanasia Kills
April 7, 2009
Whenever contentious social changes are promoted by various activist groups, we are always assured that adequate safeguards will be set in place, and that things will not spiral out of control. Whether it is abortion, drugs, prostitution, or pornography, we are always assured that these things will be kept in check. Consider the issue of euthanasia.
Read more...Churchill's trial
April 6, 2009
The [Ward Churchill] verdict seems to suggest that a citizen’s right to “freedom of speech” includes the right to falsify documents, falsify research and invent historical occasions.
Read more...A Fake Prime Minister
April 6, 2009
Wealthy Lefty property developer Morry Schwartz’s Monthly has published an essay of nearly 8000 words under the apparently sincere belief that it was written by the Prime Minister of Australia.
Read more...Reading April Quadrant
April 6, 2009
John Stone has never liked the electors of Wentworth and I suddenly saw why - all Veliz’s croakers live there! Lovely issue.
Read more...Phillip Adams nude
April 6, 2009
Free Quadrant pornography. Guys, gals - naked people. Gay marriage - free gay divorces. Lots of really sexy photos.
Read more...Coming soon: Heaven and Earth
April 6, 2009
At Easter, my book on climate change comes out. I destroy every single argument that has ever been raised about human-induced climate change.
Read more...The Coercive Utopia Known as Sweden
April 6, 2009
There are plenty of countries in the West which have promoted secular, leftist ideologies and have embraced radical social engineering. And these utopian schemers are quite happy to use the coercive powers of the state to enforce their radical objectives. Sweden is a leading case in point, and its latest act of radicalism is to legalise same-sex marriage.
Read more...On David Williamson
September 2, 2008
Behind me the ladies ate Maltesers, in a satirical manner, while talking of crumbling bones and ABC reruns of As Time Goes By.
Read more...April 1: Remembrance Day
April 1, 2009
“William York” is a well known contributor to OnlineOpinion. His friend Tom recently received a letter from him.
Read more...The Dandelion Liberation Front
March 31, 2009
One keeps coming back to the dictum attributed to GK Chesterton: “When a man ceases to believe in God, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in anything.” Europeans of course have taken this further than anyone else. The most secular continent on earth, Europe is also the most radical when it comes to attacking human dignity and the sanctity of life. It is also the most radical when it comes to conferring legal status and rights on non-humans.
Read more...Training Manual for Conservative Radicals
March 30, 2009
Everything you need to know about conservatism, but are too afraid to ask.
Read more...John Stone at HR Nicholls
March 30, 2009
"However politically propitious the economic circumstances late next year might seem to be for the Coalition parties, they have little hope of winning office under their present leadership."
Read more...Whale songs
March 30, 2009
Members of parliament caught attending strip-joints in foreign cities can argue that magnetic field deviations caused them confusion.
Read more...Saving the past
March 30, 2009
History warriors wedded to political schemes cannot be good historians because they cannot allow themselves to be open to the ambiguous and elusive qualities of human beings. For political purposes all they want to see are the massacres and the brutality.
Read more...The Skeptics Handbook
March 30, 2009
Joanne Nova’s lively The Skeptics Handbook has been published in the US with an astonishing 150,000 copies print run which will be distributed to thousands of politicians, scientists, journalists and teachers. A further 10,000 copies are being published for Australia and New Zealand.
Read more...Treading the world stage
March 30, 2009
Is the Prime Minister’s wish to strut the world stage damaging to our national interest? Is Australia paying too high a price for Prime Minister’s thespian ambitions?
Read more...Those Funky Debaptists, and Other Tales
March 30, 2009
If I were paid for every case of lunacy I document on this site, I would have enough moolah by now to purchase a small nation. It is a fulltime job just keeping up with all the moonbeam ideas and activities taking place around us every day. What was that saying about ‘whom the gods would destroy, the first make crazy’?
Read more...History Wars - the dream cast
March 23, 2009
Quadrant has acquired the performing rights to the History Wars. The cast list is mouthwatering.
Read more...The break-up of Australia
March 28, 2009
The Chief Justice of Australia, Robert French, has been reported as supporting calls for a treaty with Aboriginal Australians. With his eyes wide open, the Chief Justice is driving Australia towards a precipice. Inexcusably, he is ignoring the obvious, the desired consequence of the treaty sought by activists - the destruction of Australia's sovereignty.
Read more...Right wing pornography!
March 26, 2009
Openly on sale in Melbourne bookshops. A report on the shame from the front line. We name the booksellers!
Read more...Burchett whitewash continues
March 23, 2009
Bill Hyde published On Burchett by Tibor Méray. He has now written an account of the reaction to the book.
Read more...Heartland-2
March 23, 2009
The International Conference on Climate Change was held in New York from March 8 to 10, 2009. While the international media ignored the conference Quadrant Online carried exclusive reports by Bob Carter.
Read more...Vaclav Klaus on Ian Plimer
March 23, 2009
Vaclav Klaus: “The book I wrote two years ago Blue Planet in Green Shackles comes to very similar conclusions but I have to say that if I’d had a chance to read Professor Plimer’s book, my book would have been better.”
Read more...How to Kill a Nation (From Within)
March 23, 2009
There is nothing great about Great Britain any more. Having jettisoned and renounced its own Judeo-Christian heritage, it is left floundering on the raging tempest of relativism, subjectivism, radical individualism and statism.
Read more...Thank God for Carbon
March 1, 2009
Thank God for Carbon, a new publication by Ray Evans, explores the demonising of carbon by climate change extremists – including the Rudd government.
Read more...Robert Manne's "Hogwash"
March 16, 2009
Left academics are ideologues first and second, and scholars third.
Read more...The Islamic Assault on Free Speech
March 16, 2009
To have religious anti-defamation laws on an international scale would achieve as much for the Islamists as 9/11 ever did. As always, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and this goes for religious freedom as well. The question is, will the West resist this clampdown on freedom of speech, or will it instead submit to appeasement and dhimmitude?
Read more...Remembering the future
March 16, 2009
An angry woman shouted out from the gods that we were all invaders who had destroyed the Garden of Eden. This is Melbourne in 2003 when Keith Windschuttle debated Pat Grimshaw.
Read more...Intellectual delusions
March 16, 2009
Just how dishonest, ignorant, self-obsessed, and delusional can the Australian left get? Consider some of its latest contributions to the intellectual and cultural life of Australia.
Read more...Bob Carter at Heartland-2
March 8, 2009
Travellers from around the world are today converging on the Mariott Marquis in Times Square, where the Heartland Institute is hosting its second Manhatten conference on climate change.
Read more...DIY bill of rights
March 10, 2009
We asked Professor James Allan to write a DIY bill of rights. This was his reluctant response.
Read more...Life on Earth #1
February 25, 2009
A report of life on planet Earth with appearances by Anna Bligh, Robert Mugabe, Timon the meerkat, Rupert Murdoch and others.
Read more...Anti-Natalist Fatalists
March 9, 2009
Planet earth is doomed. That is the clear message coming from the population control zealots. These anti-natalists are certain that if we do not immediately take radical steps to curb population growth we will all perish. Of course we have been hearing this gloom and doom ideology for decades now.
Read more...Media Watch Dog bites
March 9, 2009
Gerard Henderson, executive director of the Sydney Institute, has launched Media Watch Dog a blog that is sure to do much more than simply bark and snap at the heels of wayward journalists.
Read more...The monetary collapse
March 9, 2009
Ron Kitching, who celebrates his 80th birthday in April, was one of the organisers of the month long visit to Australia by F.A. Hayek in 1976. He is the author of Understanding Personal and Economic Liberty.
Read more...Memory loss and dependency
March 6, 2009
With increasing welfare dependency, the obliteration of memory and rule by judges, the elites are seriously damaging our way of life.
Read more..."Hayek's got Inflation by the balls"
March 5, 2009
Ron Kitching’s famous photo of F.A. Hayek and Inflation is now over 32 years old.
Read more...Rudd's not so New Deal
March 2, 2009
Last year Kevin Rudd declared that: “We simply don't have to choose between Friedrich von Hayek and Leonid Brezhnev”. He was confident that he could stand astride the ideological seesaw placing just the right weight on his left foot then his right to keep both the free enterprise and the government controlled halves of our economy buoyant. It didn’t take long for him to get the wobbles.
Read more...What Marriage Means
March 4, 2009
David Blankenhorn is a world authority on the institution of marriage. One of the biggest debates concerning marriage today is whether we should expand the concept to include same-sex unions. Blankenhorn thinks not, and has penned a book to explain why.
Read more...The academic publishing game
March 4, 2009
Early in 2008 Henry Reynolds launched a new book of old history by Dr Ian McFarlane called Beyond Awakening, The Aboriginal Tribes of North West Tasmania: A History. It had an interesting publishing history.
Read more...Retaking the universities
March 2, 2009
An audio interview with Roger Kimball to mark the publication of the third edition of Tenured Radicals suggests how change, for the better, could be brought about.
Read more...Bob Brown has an affair
March 2, 2009
The story was broken in the Hobart Mercury under the headline - "Printed proof of love affair".
Read more...The Dangerous Return to Keynesian Economics
February 3, 2009
The Great Depression, in most places, began with the share market crash in 1929 and by the end of 1933 was already receding into history. In 1936, well after the Great Depression had reached its lowest point and recovery had begun, a book was published that remains to this day the most influential economics treatise written during the whole of the twentieth century.
Read more...Email from Heaven - and a reply
February 25, 2009
An email from father Frank Brennan in response to James Allan on Telstra's Bill of Rights submission - and James Allan's reply.
Read more...Top global threat - terror or economics?
February 25, 2009
The Obama administration is desperate to distance itself as quickly as possible from the war on terror associated with the previous presidency. Unfortunately, its desire to downplay the terrorist threat is leading it down a strategic blind alley.
Read more...Phoning at the mouth (Telstra's bad bill)
February 23, 2009
Telstra doesn’t know anything at all about how bills of rights work or what their effects are in other countries that have them. But never mind, dear chap. This phone company feels free to launch an attack on Australia’s human rights record and to urge the government to adopt a charter of rights.
Read more...Racist Andrew Bolt
February 23, 2009
Is the Left’s fraud squad at it again? Now it’s Andrew Bolt’s turn. Attempts have been made to place racist comments on his blog to embarrass him and his readers.
Read more...Science versus propaganda
February 24, 2009
Australia needs adaptive policies to deal with real climate change in place of the government's expensive, inefficient and ineffective plans to “prevent” an entirely hypothetical global warming. Why is it so difficult for our major political parties to discern this obvious truth?
Read more...The next disaster: Denticare
February 24, 2009
The socialisation of dentistry will be as much a disaster as the socialisation of medical practice, hospitals and universities has been. The elites know it, but this will give them wealth, more power, and the votes of a growing client class.
Read more...The Stimulus Bill explained
February 23, 2009
A joke (or serious explanation of the US Stimulus Bill) which has flashed around the internet in the last few days.
Read more...Sexual Suicide
February 23, 2009
We are today witnessing the bitter fruit of allowing sex to become a tyrant. Each day new headlines testify to the fact that when we abuse the wonderful gift of sex, we abuse ourselves and our neighbours. The question is, how much more abuse can we take as a culture before society can no longer function or continue.
Read more...Terrorist Victory Without Terrorism
February 19, 2009
During the height of the Cold War many Westerners refused to believe that there was an “evil empire” intent on conquering the world. And if they did recognise the overt nature of Soviet imperialism, they were taken in by the covert operations. In the same way today many Westerners do not want to admit to an Islamist threat. And while they may acknowledge overt acts of terrorism, they are ignorant or gullible about covert jihad.
Read more...Censorship and the Secular Left
February 18, 2009
Liberal or leftist secularism is the reigning ideology amongst our Western intelligentsia and elites. It certainly has a stranglehold on our educational system. It can be very difficult to get in alternative points of view. Most attempts to penetrate this ideological hegemony are usually met with stiff opposition, animosity, and censorship.
Read more...Simon channells the Zeitgeist
February 18, 2009
Simon’s got a job. He’s started “channelling the Zeitgeist” for Cripes – the online gossip website that Tracey says is going broke.
Read more...Will Rudd turn a recession into a depression?
February 18, 2009
Cato Institute: “Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance.”
Read more...The Left blacklist
February 18, 2009
In the National Review Ronald Radosh reviewed Blacklisting Myself by Roger L. Simon - a Left-Hollywood writer who had second thoughts.
Read more...Keynes and Keynesianism: from correct diagnosis to flawed remedy
February 17, 2009
John Maynard Keynes: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize…the way the world thinks about economic problems.” He was right; but was he right?