Gillard's Classroom Gospel
Christianity and its shaping influence on Australian history and society are to be expelled from the classroom under Gillard's campaign to "reform" education. In its place, the post-modern creed of cultural relativism
From Kevin Donnelly's essay:
...in addition to adopting a relativistic stance, the curriculum also embodies a subjective definition of citizenship on the premise that “citizenship means different things to people at different times and depending on personal perspectives, their social situation and where they live”.
Taken to its conclusion the statement denies the existence of those common values, beliefs and system of morality that all must agree to and defend if society is to survive and prosper. Without agreement that all citizens are imbued with what the US Declaration of Independence terms “certain unalienable rights” we are defenceless against the threat represented by totalitarian regimes....
Read on...
Her Splendid CV
With so many other Commissioners of This-And-That actively conspiring to limit freedom of speech, The Australian's Janet Albrechtsen proposes that she be appointed Australia's inaugural Freedom Commissioner.
In May's Quadrant
Free articles from the magazine
Mervyn F. Bendle: Remaking Australia as a Frontier Society
David F. Smith: Camped By a Billabong
Peter Smith: Moderate Muslims Are The Problem
Brian Wimborne: The Inexorable Expansion of the Welfare Class
Contents of the latest Quadrant here…
QED
Roger Franklin
The ABC's new hire
Julia Gillard's $10 million pre-election gift to the ABC has borne fruit in the appointment of Age veteran Russell Skelton, a man of strong opinions, to head its new fact-checking unit. Who will fact-check the fact-checker? More...
Terry Barnes
Craig Thomson's consolation
The Member for Dobell will leave Parliament with a severance package ordinary Australians can only dream about. If an Abbott government is serious about reducing the deficit, parliamentary payouts are the place to start More...
Christopher Carr
The Constitution under threat
September's referendum to recognise local government makes a mockery of federalism. It needs to be scotched, thoroughly and absolutely More...
Stuart Wood
Bring back our QCs
There are compelling reasons .jpg)
to reintroduce the venerable title of Queens Counsel, not least that Australian lawyers are at a disadvantage in the quest for international business More...
Tony Thomas
How I missed that story...
Our contributor wasn't always the serious, sober scribe Quadrant readers know and respect. Once, long ago, there was a young reporter with rather more on his mind than covering long and windy speeches More...
The mind of a Gillardian
2GB's Steve Price attempts to have a conversation with prime ministerial lookalike, dinner guest and mummy blogger Eden Riley. Audio here
Philippa Martyr
Pilger alert!
Round up the usual suspect cliches and hoary myths -- the dubious documentarian will tap them all as he turns his camera's selective focus on pallid Australia's oppression of Aborigines More...
Peter Smith
Our age of envy and dependency
Cut benefits? Trim welfare? Set the budget on a sound footing? Every special interest is ready to pounce if their particular allocation of taxpayers’ funds is cut More...
David Flint
Local government in peril
What Canberra has done to our universities, the same enemies of federalism now seek to inflict on municipal councils. They promise gifts and grants, but what they really want is control More...
Philippa Martyr
Sob sister
Our Prime Minister had need of Kleenex when introducing the NDIS to Parliament. Voters needed only a grain of salt More...
Peter Murphy
The universities' rise and fall
Governments drove the .jpg)
expansion of the tertiary sector until it became the bureaucrat-infested testament to waste and, all too often, irrelevance More...
Australia's Killing Fields
In his harrowing four-part series, Tony Thomas chronicles in excruciating detail the waste of lives and dollars in many remote Indigenous communities
Begin reading here
Samuel J.
A Budget speech worth hearing
How might Wayne Swan plug the hole his towering ineptitude has created? Honesty would be a good start, followed by a hit list of the Canberra bureaucracy's greatest wastes of money and desk space (via Catallaxy Files)
The Howl and the Pussycat
Tony Abbott's less-than-muscular prescription for workplace reform hasn't stopped the unions' scare campaign. Zeg has an inkling how it will all play out
Roger Franklin
Wanted: Editors prepared to lead
We have heard much of the need for press reforms, even to the suggestion that a media czar be appointed to keep news organisations honest. If that is the goal, then the place to start is the nation's newsrooms, where objectivity has declined in step with plunging circulations More...
Michael Galak
Demons in need of tackling
A storied Melbourne football club turns out every weekend to be thrashed and humiliated, prefering excuses and scapegoats to the unpalatable business of self-appraisal and reform. There is a lesson there, not least for Labor More...
Peter Smith
Moderate Muslims are the problem
Much more than a code of .jpg){kind=small}
ethics and a set of guidelines for good behaviour, there is hardly an aspect of human existence about which Islam has nothing to say More...
Des Moore
Obama's Benghazi albatross
Unsettling details are emerging of the Islamist assault on the US consulate in Benghazi and what increasingly appears to have been a cynical and cowardly coverup. For Obama, this scandal is unlikely to go away More...
Terry Barnes
With friends like these...
The Business Council of Australia left John Howard to twist in the wind, conspiciuous by its silence in failing to defend WorkChoices. Now Abbott is getting a taste of the same fair-weather treatment More...
The Queen of Mean
.jpg)
Deep in the fetid bowels of Castle Julia, as reality and retribution pound upon the gates, Zeg catches a glimpse of a delusional leader leaving no screw unturned in her quest for love and lucre
Essential reading
The IPA's Julie Novak has charted 160 years of government growth. Her study can be found here, and she provides some background to her research at Catallaxy Files
Christopher Akehurst
A referendum gay activists can't risk
It seems a reasonable proposal, actually testing claims that the majority of Australians support same-sex marriage. Trouble is, though, ABC and Fairfax types would get to vote only once, the same as everyone else More...
Peter Smith
What we need is a 'levy test'
"Levy" or "surcharge", it really doesn't matter what name the government of the day might choose to use, it will still be a tax. What a pity we can't have more of them, just to establish where all that money goes More...
Philippa Martyr
Always sunny on Planet Julia
The concept of a parallel universes is no longer a mere theory. Going by the Prime Minister's confident prediction she will carry the day on September 14, the one she inhabits must be a wonderful place indeed More...
Will Dallas Brooks
How to pay for the NDIS
The author's research demonstrated that 30 cents of every NSW hospital dollar is squandered. Without overdue reforms, gold-plated bureaucrats will be the chief beneficiaries of any plan to aid the disabled More...
James Allan
Tipple, trek and a very dark cloud
Americans just can't accept that good wine comes in screw-top bottles. The idea that Islamic butchers might want to blow people up is, to a certain kind of commentator, even harder to swallow More...
Des Moore
Deafened by terror's distant rumble
As the echoes of the Boston bombings continue to reverberate in the US and also in Australia, the leaders who should heed them have been overcome by a galloping deafness More...
Tony Thomas
Indigenous abuse can't be overlooked
If the Royal Commission does not want its integrity questioned, it must make offences against Aboriginal children one of its first and most urgent priorities More...
Tom Switzer
The ABC must be privatised
The left-liberal mindset seriously undermines the ABC’s claim to be an impartial provider of news and current affairs. Sell the national broadcaster and no one will have grounds for complaint More...
Des Moore
Jihad? What jihad?
If yet another bombing by Muslim extremists cannot focus US authorities' attention on the threat of domestic terrorism, what hope their Australian counterparts will recognise the threat within More...
Philippa Martyr
Justice for Julia!
A multiple-personalities diagnosis has not stopped a Melbourne embezzler being sent away for a stretch of hard time. Many voters will wish to see the same legal principle observed in September More...
Michael Galak
What Gonski doesn't understand
Pouring billions of dollars into our failing schools is justa further example of a blinkered educational establishment elevating wishful thinking to an art form. The key to learning is to be found not in the classroom but at home More...
Peter Smith
Prints of The City & other royal pains
Stock-picking gurus take liberties with the language while economic commentators make the case for remedial education. It's enough to make a fellow forget where he put his "buy" orders More...
Geoffrey Luck
How the ABC was hijacked
There was a time when the national broadcaster played its news coverage with a straight bat. A witness to the corridor feuds and turf wars recalls how everything went wrong More...
Philippa Martyr
Sex ed and Ru486
Recall all those assurances that sex ed would eliminate unwanted pregnancy? It didn't, and neither will a taxpayer-funded 'morning after' pill More...
Roger Franklin
The Anzac legacy
What's wrong with a minute's silence for those fell? To revisionist academics, it is 60 seconds when their voices cannot be heard More...
Des Moore
The nameless peril of Muslim terror
First, the pundits and politicians preferred to blame white, homegrown "patriots" for the Boston bombings. When the identity of the killers emerged, the silence was deafening More...
Christopher Akehurst
Hypocrisy, thy name is feminism
There are feminists like Margaret Thatcher who achieve, and then there is the other variety, the sort whose mourning for Britain's former leader was conspicuously muted. Perhaps they were too busy excusing Julia Gillard's incompetence More...
Daryl McCann
Margaret Thatcher, peacenik
Protesters wanted the world to step back from the brink of nuclear war. They will never admit it, not even now, but Britain's then-PM achieved just that -- with a little help from Ronald Reagan, of course More...
Peter Smith
A fork in our road to Greece
An Abbott victory will mark a challenge much greater than repairing the damage of an incompetent leader and hr cronies. Simply put, government spending as a percentage of GDP must be brought to heel More...
John McLean
The Very Farce Train
The numbers don't add up, discounted airfares are ignored, and it won't be any faster than flying on some routes. About the only thing going for High Speed Rail is that modern journalists decline to question "the experts" More...
Their ABC, for now
Another day, another exhibit in the case for sweeping reform at the national broadcaster, this time courtesy of Virginia Trioli. The morning of September 15 would be a good date start fixing things More...
Gina Rinehart
Murdoch's inspiring address
It was worth the long-haul flight from Japan to hear Rupert Murdoch demolish the key and most costly misconception of our time: that "caring" socialism is moral and free markets are not More...
Murray Walters & Alston Unwin
Sorry excuse for an inquiry
Is the Royal Commission into child abuse likely to achieve anything worthwhile? Only if a largely pointless spectacle is reckoned a public good More...
Dumb and Dumber
No more at home with humour than with sums, Treasurer Wayne Swan has taken offence at a Menzies House suggestion that a balanced budget might best be achieved by killing the poor. He has company in the silly corner. The ninnies at Fairfax seem to think he has a valid point!
John Steer
Academics against free speech
When Melbourne University's Liberal Club launched its membership drive a posse of faculty members cried "Racists!" and had them thrown off campus. Bear this in mind when the talk is of tertiary funding More...
Uphill All The Way
As Julia Gillard and her spendthrift pals push the national debt to unprecedented levels, Zeg wonders how much longer union bosses can expect their members to support the Labor line
Christopher Carr
Maggie's doomed crusade
Alas, when all eulogies have been delivered, the fact remains that she arrived three decades too late to reverse Britain's self-imposed decline More...
Michael Galak
Yom Ha Shoa
A rumination, memoir and acknowledgement of fate's capricious twists, which saved the author's family from the Nazis while so many others perished More...
Peter Smith
Pick a number, any number
The Australian Bureau of Statistics might just as well be throwing darts, for all the credence its employment estimates command. The current process tells us nothing and obscures much More...
Philippa Martyr
What would Charlie Perkins say?
Four happy scholarships winners are off to Oxfbridge in the name of fostering Indigenous achievement. The thing is, though, the recipients already boast lustrous CVs. What about Aborigines who have yet to get a foot on the ladder? More...
Malcolm Colless
Bait, switch, gouge, distract
Competence mostly eludes our Prime Minister and her team, but not the skills of a sideshow conjurer. Distract the electorate, count on the press not to notice, and -- Presto! -- more bad policy, additional revenue blown and few the wiser More...
Roger Franklin
Margaret Thatcher's final accolade
In her prime, she brought out the very worst in her detractors. The Q&A guests who passed their bitchy judgments on her life demonstrated that not even death can diminish the Baroness' ability to rile all the right people More...
Peter Smith
Our profligate, grasping government
Accept that Gillard & Co's intention to further fund by skimming super accounts is unlikely to become law before September 14. That means it will be Tony Abbott who must to resist temptation More...
Rupert Murdoch at the IPA
Terry Barnes
Short, nasty -- and effective
There has been no shortage of editorialising about the recent spate of political leaders led to the block for a short, sharp shock. Ugly it might be, but better all the same than methods that tie other nation's leadership tussles into intractable knots More...
David Archibald
Australia's looming fuel crisis
In Geelong, one of Australia's few remaining oil refineries is on the block, with no great expectation a buyer will be found. Beyond the loss of 400 jobs, it is the nation's security that is most at risk More...
James Allan
What I left in San Francisco
Our correspondent goes cycling without helmet and lives to tell. Despite a reverence for regulation that would gladden any Australian bureaucrat, Californians still know how to do a cost-benefit analysis More...
Tanveer Ahmed
Winning the ethnic vote
.jpg)
The conventional wisdom holds that Labor has an unshakeable lock on the votes of many, if not most, ethnic communities. Once again, the conventional wisdom is wrong! More...
Christopher Akehurst
No laughing matter
A funny thing happened on the way to the latest celebration of comic edginess: there wasn't much to raise a chuckle More...
Malcolm Colless
Latham: Irrelevance soaked in bile
The failed Labor leader's unhinged lament for Gillard & Co's failed bid to gag and control the press was so flecked with rage you almost expected someone's arm to get broken More...
Merv Bendle
If the jackboot fits...
Image consultants have re-made our Prime Minister once again, slipping this latest Julia into hipster specs and a somewhat more flattering wardrobe. Sadly, they seem to have neglected the brown shirt, traditional accessory of those who advocate the State's supremacy More...
Keith Windschuttle
Australia's 'historical trajectory'
.jpg)
Set aside the Marxist prism so beloved of Australia's academics and our nation's path from penal colony to present traces a rather different and more edifying journey More...
Philippa Martyr
A not-so-shocking truth about FDR
If ABC movie critic Margaret Pomeranz never noticed the philandering Franklin Roosevelt's feet of clay it can only be because of the trousers pooled at his ankles More...
Tony Thomas
Myanmar's perilous path to reform
The transition from junta to democracy is a tall order for any society. In Burma the challenges are even more forbidding More...
Michael Galak
No peace for an ear-bashed Obama
The US President is many things to many people, but he can expect a common reaction on his current trip to the Mideast. From Jew or Arab, all the poor man can expect is a headache More...
John Reid
Right wing? No, I'm liberal
Lazy minds love catchphrases that avoid original thought, hence "right wingers" place in the left's demonology. Funny, that. If they checked their own wardrobes, they would find jackboots that fit to perfection More...
Doomed Planet
Michael Kile
Burning curiosity about Fish River
Warmists love promoting their latest plans to tame the carbon monster. When a potential investor sought information on one such scheme -- a reasonable request, given real money was involved -- he was left none the wiser More...
Mark Poynter
The 'peace deal' that may not be
How much faith can we place in a pact that obliges angry forest activists to desist from attacking Tasmania’s native-forest timber industry? More...
Tom Quirk
Some like it to appear hot
Among the most potent weapons in the arsenal of warmist advocacy are the various charts purporting to demonstrate ever-rising temperatures. What isn't made anywhere near so clear is the impact of the urban heat-island effect More...
John Happs
Warmism's bellowing dinosaurs
They rant and rave while gorging at the public trough, predicting disasters and catastrophe en route to whichever five-star resort is hosting the latest doomsayers' convocation. Let their own words condemn them More...
Walter Starck
Sue a warmist
"Lawfare" is one of the left's key weapons. Given the travesties of science perpetrated in the name of climate change, why not give the most dubious practitioners a dose of the same medicine? More...
Tom Quirk
More heat than light in BoM numbers
Surrounded by traffic and bathed in heated exhaust fumes, the BoM's hallmark monitoring station on the edge of Melbourne's CBD leaves much to be desired. So does the computer-driven calculation of the site's mean temperature More...
Peter Smith
The unsettling 'settled science'
Science is about truth while politics is the quest for advantage. When the latter trumps the former what we get are error-prone partisans like, well, Tim Flannery More...
John Happs
Dear David Attenborough...
The TV naturalist is an intelligent man, no doubt about it. So why does he persist in parroting easily demolished propaganda about global warming and endangered species, polar bears in particular? More...
Des Moore
Climate query? Ask a paleontologist
Would you hire a plumber to re-wire your home? If the answer is "yes", then the qualifications, such as they are, of the Climate Change Commission's members will be enough to persuade that the planet really is on its last, overheated legs More...
Barry Brill
A believer's faith falters
Even The Economist, formerly a supporter of measures to control greehouse gases, is losing its faith in the theories that have unwritten the warmist monolith. Let us hope Australia's politicians are attentive subscribers More...
Roger Underwood
& Athol Hodgson
Death by fire and culpable neglect
Summer's bushfires have passed, but the flames will return, and with them the likelihood of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives being lost. The time to act is now, before it is too late More...
Peter Smith
Climythology
The Warming Monster inspires barely a yawn these days, except from the increasingly manic Tim Flannery and other professional alarmists. If climate change does pose a real threat, it is that governments will persist in funding its shrieking priests and tax-hungry apostles More...
Viscount Monckton
The Individual and the Hive Mind
The individual's access to traditional rights and liberties is being eroded where not under direct attack. There are countermeasures, though, and the most potent is a citizen's refusal to be stripped of that which has been so dearly won More...
John McLean
Model of a modern climate scientist
As one of the Gillard government's expert advisers, Prof. Will Steffen should know the difference between climate and weather. His latest doom-laden utterances indicate otherwise More...
Sceptics and Sex Monsters
The ABC's Robyn Williams and Quadrant's Keith Windschuttle exchange notes on the logic of likening warmism's doubters to child molesters.
In the April edition of Quadrant, now on sale
Tony Thomas
Comedy's new duo: Manne & Karoly
What happens when two seasoned performers are dragged back to reality by an impudently fact-based question from our man in the stalls? Why, climate pros that they are, they stick strictly to the script! More...
John Dawson
Professor Bolt and the dunce
The columnist and Queensland University's John Quiggin have been disputing each other's grasp of some relatively simple projections concerning CO2 reductions. If errors were fact and arrogance an asset, the Climate Authority panelist would win at a canter More...
Barry Brill
World saved! Warming stops
The anxiety-industrial complex won't stop pumping out alarms, but don't let any of that raise a frown. The numbers say it all: the planet isn't getting any hotter More...
Christopher Akehurst
Earth Hour's dim bulbs
Fairfax readers and Burchett Hill residents -- one and the same for the most part -- have once again celebrated modern life turning it off at the switch. Our parody-prone correspondent was on hand to record what the enlightened get up to in the dark More...
John Happs
Another climate myth runs aground
Those "sinking islands" the warmists are always promoting as symptoms of global warming? It turns out some are growing and none are in any more danger of inundation than they were in less alarmist times More...
Otto Nebbler
Oreskes fails peer review
Lionised on her most recent Australian tour, author and professional climate alarmist Naomi Oreskes impresses her colleagues a good deal less than she does ABC interviewers More...
The kiddies' plan for your super
Michael Kile
A summer of sweltering similes
Creative interpretation of temperature records hasn't worked, so warmists now push a formerly denied link between CO2 and "extreme weather events". And if that doesn't convince, they let loose with the florid metaphors More...
Des Moore
Angry Summer? Not even miffed
Tim Flannery and his sweaty band of climateers have gone off half-cocked again. That can happen when you send a palaeontologist to do a weatherman's job More...
John McLean
How the IPCC writes its own ticket
Pull back the curtain on the IPCC and what you find are mates peer-reviewing mates, papers manufactured on demand and, worst of all, an institutionalised bias that rejects all but the notion of mankind as the planet's greatest enemy More...
Soon, Briggs & Carter
Golly, the sun affects climate!
Warmist orthodoxy has ranged so far into the realm of partisan theory that solar radiation is quite specifically rejected as an influence on global temperatures. Three researchers, including Australia's Bob Carter, demonstrate otherwise More...
Barry Brill
Plumbing new depths
Remember when global warming was all about surface temperatures? Now that IPCC Chairman Pachauri has let the climate cat out of the bag, the mainspring of catastrophe is said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea More...
John McLean
Another dose of Flim-Flannery
The latest Climate Commission exercise in rampant alarmism and twisted stats is a case study in selective omission. Why let the facts get in the way of a good scare? More...
Roger Underwood
A good word for drought
It's a concept doom-preaching members of the green religion have quite some trouble accepting, but the fact remains that dry spells bring their benefits More...
Australia's most-feared .jpg)
marsupial has inspired a groundbreaking study. Students of catastropharian literature will recognise all the hallmarks of modern academic inquiry More...
Steve Kates
From sham marriage to faux divorce
That rift between the Greens and Labor you have been hearing about? Big deal. Fact is, this divorce is as steeped in opportunism as the union that preceded it More...
In a three-part series, Michael Kile surveys the warmists' brash certainties and quieter qualms.
1. Weird-weather shenanigans
2. Tricks of the climate trade
3. This year's climate model
Roger Underwood
Flaming idiocy
Until green politics and academic abstractions clouded official thinking, Western Australia was the prime example of how best to minimise mega-bushfires' destruction of life and property. Now we burn like the rest of Australia More...
Peter Wales
Lies, damned lies and dolphins
Green activists are once again turning Japan's annual dolphin hunt to their financial advantage, deep-sixing facts in favour of fund-raising propaganda. Sure, the slaughter at Taiji Cove is not for the squeamish, but neither is any Australian abattoir More...
That is what the Bureau of Meteorology has been saying, but at least one expert has his doubts
Tom Quirk
Climate science and stomach bugs
Climateers insist the science is settled and no reputable reseacher would dare to disagree. Their medical counterparts swore that spicy food caused ulcers -- and they were no more tolerant of those who proved them wrong More...
Burning Mad
If timid bushland creatures could vote, Zeg reckons Greens leader Christine Milne might get a hard and pointed lesson
.jpg)
John McLean
The IPCC's original sin
You can't blame the organisation for seeing climate change as the sole consequence of anthropogenic influences. Blaming humanity, to the exclusion of all other factors, has been its brief since the very start More...
Geoffrey Luck
Warmist gasbags' noxious emissions
If catastropharians' dire warnings that flatulence threatens the planet are to be heeded only a national wind mitigation scheme can save us More...
John McLean
Sins of omission and Commission
Tim Flannery & Co. know the world is melting and want you to believe it too. That may be why so many salient facts and perspectives are missing from their latest epistle More...
Roger Franklin
Green policies burning bright
.jpg)
Put no credence in the very many press reports blaming summer's fires on "carbon pollution". Instead, rent Stork and spot the real reason why the bush's future is in flames More...
Michael Kile
Climateers' endless Silly Season
Nuts are always on the menu when warmists draft the bill of fare, and this year's Christmas menu of catastropharian predictions and pronouncements has proven to be no exception