Blogs
How I missed that story
May 20, 2013
Our contributor wasn't always the serious, sober scribe Quadrant readers know and respect. Once, long ago, there was a young reporter with rather more on his mind than covering long and windy speeches
Read more...Pilger alert! Pilger alert! Pilger alert!
May 17, 2013
Round up the usual suspect cliches, the dubious documentarian will need them all by the time he has turned his camera on pallid Australia's oppression of Aborigines. He'll be so busy, ib fact, he may have no more than a few moments to be feted on Q&A and other ABC programs
Read more...The fire sale at Fish River
May 17, 2013
"Brochuresmanship" is the order of the day whenever warmists are pushing their latest scheme to tame the carbon monster. When a potential investor sought further information on one such scheme -- an entirely reasonable request, given that real money would be involved -- the response was a stonewall
Read more...The age of envy and dependency
May 16, 2013
Regards of the tweaks and fiddles, no matter which programs are cut or fostered, any budget invoking the myth of boundless plenty will be written in the ink of delusion. It won't be pleasant when grim reality intervenes
Read more...Keep Canberra’s tentacles out of local councils
May 16, 2013
Federation's fathers saw no reason to include local councils in the Constitution and neither should we. Unless, of course, you regard diminished accountability, meddling from afar, the further shrinking of the states' authority as civic virtues
Read more...Crocodile Tears
May 15, 2013
Our Prime Minister had need of Kleenex when introducing the NDIS to Parliament. So what is she has to cry about?
Read more...Some Like It To Appear Hot
May 11, 2013
Among the most potent weapons in the arsenal of warmist advocacy are the various charts purporting to demonstrate ever-rising temperatures. What isn't made anywhere near so clear is the impact of the urban heat-island effect. Melbourne's records provide a good example
Read more...The Budget speech we'd like to hear
May 14, 2013
How could Wayne Swan plug the budget hole his towering ineptitude has created? Honesty would be a good start, followed by a hit list of the Canberra bureaucracy's greatest wastes of money and desk space
Read more...Wanted: Editors prepared to lead
May 13, 2013
We have heard much of the need for press reforms, even to the suggestion that a media czar be appointed to keep news organisations honest. If that is the goal, then the place to start are the nation's newsroom them, where objectivity has declined in step with plunging circulations
Read more...Demons in need of tackling
May 13, 2013
A storied Melbourne football club turns out every weekend to be thrashed and humiliated, prefering excuses and scapegoats to the unpalatable business of self-appraisal and reform. There is a lesson there, not least for Labor
Read more...A forest 'peace deal' that may be anything but
May 12, 2013
How much faith can we have in a pact that obliges angry forest activists to desist from attacking Tasmania’s native-forest timber industry?
Read more...Obama's Benghazi albatross
May 12, 2013
Unsettling details are emerging of the Islamist assault on the US consulate in Benghazi and what increasingly appears to have been a cynical and cowardly coverup. They paint a worrying picture of a president more concerned with electoral success than his obligation to defend American lives and property
Read more...When the horrific is mundane -- Part IV
May 9, 2013
Sexually mutilated infants, toddlers raped, children sodomised, women so badly beaten they come to envy dogs. Stripped of cant and buck-passing, beyond a patronising and indulgent judiciary, remote Indigenous communities are being eaten alive by the cancers of grog, misogny and endemic violence
Read more...'Yabbered' to death -- Part I
May 6, 2013
Death, disease, degradation -- that is what the enormous expenditure "close the gap" is buying. That and a bureaucracy which wraps its failures and waste in the management-speak
Read more...The long history of Aboriginal violence -- Part II
May 7, 2013
It is fashionable to excuse the current and appalling levels of Indigenous violence on dispossession and oppression, but the unpalatable truth is that it has been a feature of Aboriginal culture since long before the First Fleet
Read more...A blacked-out past -- Part III
May 8, 2013
One hears much of Aboriginal suffering from those who would pin the blame on "invaders". Politically expedient as those excuses may be, they omit a richly documented record of appalling sexual violence and mutilation
Read more...With friends like this...
May 8, 2013
The Business Council of Australia left John Howard to twist in the wind, conspiciuous by its silence in failing to defend WorkChoices. Now Abbott is getting a taste of the same fair-weather treatment
Read more...