James Allan
“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”
(Ecclesiastes 9:11 – King James Version)
Windsor & Oakeshott sink Labor
July 26, 2011
Imagine that Windsor and Oakeshott were genius undercover operatives whose goal was to make Labor unelectable for a decade or more.
Read more...It's all Greek to me
July 17, 2011
We just missed the Greek riots by a day or two, which was a shame because if you can’t riot to be able to retire at 50, on 95% of your final salary, and have German taxpayers pick up the tab for the last 4 decades of your life, then you really don’t understand social justice, do you?
Read more...The publishing game
June 9, 2011
The former Howard government did nothing to stop the creeping pervasive managerialism and bureaucracy of Australian universities and of their overseers.
Read more...Canada today, Australia when?
May 31, 2011
Not a single poll predicted what was coming, namely the near destruction of the left of centre Liberal Party of Canada, the twentieth century’s most successful political party in the western world.
Read more...Why Abbott scares them
May 19, 2011
It is this possibility that Abbott says what he means that makes him so popular with his base. It’s not something many right of centre voters around the western democratic world are used to.
Read more...Look & learn
May 4, 2011
All of a sudden the contortions and backflips of this government make a certain sort of sense. Under whatever guise it can find it needs to bring in more revenue so that it can pretend to be economically conservative and responsible.
Read more...Debating with devils
April 12, 2011
Allan Labor at the national level may well think that demonising Mr. Abbott is good politics. But having started down that road, they can’t complain when the tables are turned and similar tactics used by the Coalition. The rest of us, though, would be better off without all this demonising and imputing of bad faith.
Read more...Silencing opposition
March 29, 2011
The metropolitan elites don’t like it at all when top politicians give voice to the concerns of everyday people, people they consider to be ill-informed, stupid and lacking the moral perspicacity they so clearly think they have.
Read more...First instincts
March 15, 2011
Small-L liberal Coalition voters would be greatly put off by the instincts of this sort of frontbench politician. Put bluntly, those sort of instincts are much more at home in the Labor Party, or the Greens, or even in the odd rural socialist independent MP.
Read more...Why did I do it?
March 2, 2011
I’d decided to forego ever again reading anything, anywhere written by Peter van Onselen. I realised I could quite enjoyably read through my morning’s Australian without even a glance at anything running under his by-line. That was my new resolution.
Read more...Conservatives and reform
February 23, 2011
When Wayne Swan sets up a flood levy that is so shot full with loopholes and gaps that multi-millionaires on river front properties who lost power for three days are not only exempt, but get a nice cheque in the post, his response seems to be to blame the people who take what the rules give them.
Read more...400 candles
February 13, 2011
As one gets older the appeal of celebrating most anniversaries seems to decline. It’s as though there were some sort of inverse relationship, the bigger the number the less desire to make a fuss about it.
Read more...Gervais bites Hollywood
January 29, 2011
Ricky Gervais is not the most popular man in Hollywood at the moment. He may have even fewer friends at present than Mel Gibson, which is saying something.
Read more...True north strong and free?
December 29, 2010
Canada is the capital of political correctness run rampant. You get the newspaper columnist Mark Steyn taken before various Canadian Human Rights tribunals not for the fact what he wrote was false but rather simply because people were offended.
Read more...Boomers win, kids lose
December 9, 2010
Baby boomer parents will get a better deal on retirement and pensions than their kids do. In many countries in the West the kids will be in the bizarre position of having to pay for their parents’ retirement while also funding all of their own retirements.
Read more...Prediction: election day massacre
December 1, 2010
But (and Peter van Onselen eat your heart out because I’m going to make an election prediction even before you do, though you’ll be relieved to know it’s not in favour of Labor) I predict now that if Tony Windsor runs again he’ll lose. As for Herr Oakeshott, he’ll be slaughtered.
Read more...Pontificating
November 25, 2010
Writers on the left see the world in such Manichean terms (with themselves always on the side of the angels); that they become insufferably boring. It’s near-on impossible to think of who, on the left, is as funny and as self-deprecating as Mark Steyn is, say, on the right.
Read more...
Read Quadrant on your iPad!!
Out now!
Subscribe here...
New from Quadrant Books
The Quadrant Book of Poetry: 2001 - 2010
edited by Les Murray
Details here...
- Recent posts
- QED
- Selling austerity
- Progressive Women’s Immunity
- Does Australia Need a Racial Vilification Law?
- Doomed Planet
- Environmentalism and the Decline of the West
- Grossly graphic gun-play in Goulburn
- Death threat emails?
- Online Opinion list
- Bennelong Papers
- Bill Muehlenberg
- David Flint
- Doomed Planet
- History Wars
- James Allan
- Michael Connor
- QED