QED
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..."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...September Quadrant
August 29, 2010
Quadrant is Australia’s leading journal of ideas, essays, literature, poetry, and political and historical debate.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Readings by Lionel Farrell
August 15, 2010
Fine readings of fine poems in Quadrant Online's Favourite Poems series of recordings.
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...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...ALP dumps workers
August 11, 2010
On Counterpoint Michael Thompson explains how the Labor party turned against their own base.
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...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...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...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...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...The Waiting City
August 6, 2010
Philippa Martyr has discovered an Australian film worth watching.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Peter Coleman on Counterpoint
July 26, 2010
Peter talks about his new book The Last Intellectuals.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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 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...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...Shiralee Man website
May 19, 2010
An affectionate new website for writer D’Arcy Niland, author of The Shiralee.
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...James Franklin on numbers
May 18, 2010
James Franklin was interviewed on ABC radio on the philosophy of numbers.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Andrew Bolt: Favourite Sonnets
April 19, 2010
Two sonnets selected by Andrew Bolt and read by Lionel Farrell.
Read more...Jordie Albiston: poems
April 19, 2010
Poems written and read by Melbourne poet Jordie Albiston.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Barry Humphries: Favourite Poems
March 15, 2010
Barry Humphries has chosen two favourite poems. Both poems are read by Lionel Farrell.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Two fresh poems
February 22, 2010
Two topical new poems read by the author - “The Last Apology” and “Anthropogenic Global Warming”.
Read more...Poets' Pub readings: Alana Kelsall
February 22, 2010
Poems written and read by Alana Kelsall.
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...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...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...Leave it to Beaver?
February 22, 2010
John Howard understood that family values were like good wines. They age well.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Puritans and speed cameras
February 3, 2010
This puritanical streak is reinforced by a growing trend towards the politically correct.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Australia Day Poem 2010
January 25, 2010
Patrick McCauley reads his Australia Day Poem 2010.
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...Poets' Pub readings: Vivian Hopkirk
January 25, 2010
Poems written and read by Vivian Whiteley Hopkirk.
Read more...Poets' Pub readings: Peter Tiernan
January 25, 2010
Poem written and read by Peter Tiernan.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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..."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...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...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...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...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...Robert Hughes: The Australian Years
December 26, 2009
AUDIO: Patricia Anderson on her new book Robert Hughes: The Australian Years.
Read more...Saint-Simon and the Stranger
December 26, 2009
AUDIO: Sophie Masson reads her short story “Saint-Simon and the Stranger”.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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 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...Rudd's Chamberlain moment
December 7, 2009
Rudd could come back from Copenhagen waving an agreement like Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.
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...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...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...The sceptical poet
December 7, 2009
AUDIO: Patrick McCauley reads two poems about modern Australia.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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 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...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...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...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...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..."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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Education Standards Institute
November 2, 2009
A conservatively minded, internet site is especially needed in the area of education.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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 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...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...Culture catcher: 19
October 12, 2009
‘According to these Poststructuralist relativists, we cannot even be sure that the Holocaust took place.’
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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: 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...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...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: 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...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...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...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: 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: '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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Quadrant testimonials
September 14, 2009
TEN really good reasons for subscribing to Quadrant - and it's great value!
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Homage to Elizabeth Durack
September 7, 2009
Artist, and Quadrant essayist, Elizabeth Durack (1915–2000) now has a stylish online home.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Mission Impossible
June 22, 2009
Please, nice, gentle Godwin Grech – please try and find your missing email!
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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 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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...Australian political identity survey
April 6, 2009
An invitation to take part in the Political identity survey being conducted by Andrew Norton.
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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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...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?
Read more...In good times and in bad?
February 13, 2009
Even with Work Choices in place and operating, Australia still had a noticeably more regulated and less liberal labour market than the Kiwis. The Rudd/Gillard back-to-the-future changes have only accentuated the difference.
Read more...Mark Steyn plays Ontario
February 13, 2009
This week Mark Steyn gave evidence before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario. He was questioned by Liberal MP David Zimmer.
Read more...The Magic Pudding is finished
February 11, 2009
The idea that governments should spend freely for their constituents, and institute bad policies such as Protection, made many Australians in the twentieth century consider government to be essentially a giant honey pot for their benefit. This attitude is best summed up by Norman Lindsay’s book The Magic Pudding. The more that one eats the more that there is to eat.
Read more...Media Wash
February 10, 2009
This year’s Media Watch started (February 10) with a flashy new introduction and Jonathon Holmes sitting at a new angle to the camera — but still looking like the cat that had caught the ABC canary. Well actually while it was yellow, what he caught was more like an ABC lemon.
Read more...Obama - an Australian view
February 7, 2009
The Institute of International Affairs in Melbourne has got a new life. One result is that on 5 Feb, 2009, we had a brilliant presentation by Greg Sheridan on Obama and what he might mean for US foreign/defence policies and for US/Aus relations.
Read more...Batman's grabbed the Treasury
February 6, 2009
Waking up to hear the ABC rambling on about Kevin Rudd going ‘bats’ was enough to get the old heart up to operational speed. Bats, they must be crazy?
Read more...Our soft underbelly
February 6, 2009
"It's time to build a strong country, but that can only take place if we accept the relevance of the right values.”
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...Rudd's verbosity wears thin
February 1, 2009
In the two weeks ended 29 January our Prime Minister made no less than 15 speeches at a time when most Australians, including journalists, are at the beach. Not surprisingly he got limited media coverage. Now he is having a go with an essay.
Read more...Balance in Public Broadcasting
December 20, 2008
“Had you been listening to these [ABC] reports during the recent US elections, it would have been a complete mystery to you as to why any sane person would be considering voting for the Republican John McCain. The fact over 46 percent of US voters ended up doing so would baffle you.”
Read more...Senate Inquiry on Academic Freedom: Why genocide studies proliferate in our universities
October 11, 2008
Senate hearing opening remarks
…the underlying agenda of the academic field of “genocide studies” is not the study of genocide, let alone its analysis or prevention. It is to argue that our own society and those like it, that is, Britain and the United States, are every bit as bad as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. The old moral equivalence argument from the Cold War is alive and well in genocide studies. Let me quote from the 2001 edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History, whose editors, Ann Curthoys and John Docker of the Australian National University wrote:
“Settler-colonies like ‘Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the United States, and Canada’ led the way in setting out to achieve what the Nazis also set out to achieve, the displacement of indigenous populations and their replacement by incoming peoples held to be racially superior.”
Curthoys and Docker are here quoting a claim by former Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado …
See also: Aboriginal History ‘a live political issue’
Read more...Clinton's responsibility for the loans crisis
September 24, 2008
In the past week, the Australian media have given copious quantities of space and time to commentators seeking to blame the American sub-prime loans crisis on the market economy.
Read more...Dissent intolerable
September 23, 2008
Academics in the field of terrorism studies at two Australian universities have responded to a critique of their work by Dr Mervyn Bendle in Quadrant’s September edition by trying to close down debate and punish its author. They have approached Bendle’s employers at James Cook University in Townsville to recommend he be investigated for academic misconduct and suitability for academic employment. Within a week of the publication of Bendle’s article, the left-wing academics he criticised approached the JCU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sandra Harding, to take action against him and suggested his head of department, Professor Richard Lansdown, re-think Bendle’s fitness as a university-employed scholar. At the same they also demanded the September edition of Quadrant be recalled and pulped, and that Quadrant Online remove the article in question from the internet. These actions represent disturbing developments not only for academic freedom but also national security.
Read more...Chicken Little Logic
September 2, 2008
In the ancient fable, Chicken Little thought one acorn dropping on her head meant the entire sky was falling. Today’s Chicken Littles show similar insight.
Read more...Bernard-Henri Levy on the new Anti-Semitism
September 1, 2008
In ‘The Task of the Jews’, The American Interest, September-October 2008, Lévy writes.
Read more...- Online Opinion list
- Bill Muehlenberg
- David Flint
- Doomed Planet
- History Wars
- Michael Connor
- QED