Crispin Hull

Earlier this month, then Acting Prime Minister and Nationals Leader Michael McCormack wrote a heart-tugging article for The Canberra Times and several regional news outlets about how 36 years ago as a cadet reporter he covered a shocking fatal crash in which two children and their parents were killed.

Pity about the shameless politicking on road funding at the end of the piece. And, worse, pity about the unstated National Party hypocrisy on road safety.

Continue reading “Nats should relent on speed camera rules”

What about Twitter’s freedom of speech? And that of other social media platforms which have banned President Trump. Surely, non-government corporations have got a right to publish or not publish whatever they want, subject to the law.

Twitter owns its own show, so it is entitled to ban whomever it wants or remove whatever comments it wants.

That is not censorship. Censorship is when the state imposes legal sanction against publication, especially if there are no national security, public order or defamation reasons for it.

Continue reading “Hypocrisy beats consistency on speech”

If you needed any proof that blokes and the blokes that run big corporations rule our lives to our detriment, look no further than the Covid cricket fiasco.

The MCG is now listed as a potential COVID-19 acquisition site after a man who attended Day Two of the Boxing Day Test later tested positive to coronavirus. It will be impossible to track down all his contacts.

And yet on Thursday, the NSW Government has permitted another cricket test at the SCG with thousands of spectators and the cricket writers and commentators complain that the crowd has been restricted to 25% and they must wear masks.

Continue reading “Blokes and money jeopardise health and life”

It should have come as no surprise this week that Australia’s billionaires collectively added more than 50% to their wealth in 2020 – the year of the pandemic. That is what extreme wealth, and most extremely wealthy people, do when unchecked. They take advantage of things, especially adverse conditions.

When the pandemic struck and people struggled to make ends meet, they ate into savings, especially superannuation and shares. Asset prices fell, especially shares and property. Very wealthy people, unconcerned about making ends meet, snapped up the bargains, in the sure knowledge that they would rise again.

Continue reading “Ever upward. Wealth in time of plague”

Breaking quarantine, social-distancing or mask-wearing laws are crimes in a class on their own.

They are so different from other crimes. The criminal act itself – just travelling around the place – in other times would be unpunishable normal conduct.

But the consequences of the crime are profoundly consequential – death of innocent people, widespread suffering and significant economic damage which itself can inflict death and ill-health.

Continue reading “Covid crime in a class of its own”

Friday is the 100 th anniversary of the Royal Assent to the UK Parliament’s Government of Ireland Act which partitioned the island of Ireland to provide two Parliaments, the Parliament of Southern Ireland and the Parliament of Northern Ireland.

It was an example of the great colonialist strategy of divide and rule. Well, 100 years later it is all coming unstuck. It is now a case of rule and divide.

Continue reading “Two good things to come from Brexit”

As this year of living precariously draws to a close, it is worth reflecting why life in Australia is so much less precarious than in most other places on earth and what we should do to make it remain so.

For a start we should expunge from the lexicon the Reaganite nonsense that “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

The things that have made life so much less precarious for Australians than Americans this year are mostly creations of government.

Continue reading “Lessons from the year of living precariously”

The Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping, like Donald Trump and any number of bullying autocrats before them, are playing a self-destructive game.

In a way, Australia should welcome Chinese coercive diplomacy because of its very self-destructiveness.

Continue reading “Coercive diplomacy will backfire”

Short-sighted, uncoordinated, resource-misallocating, inequitable, environmentally destructive, ham-fisted and unhealthy are just some of the adjectives that apply to Victoria’s decision to impose a 2.5-cent-per-kilometre tax on electric vehicles.

Pretty standard fare for much of Australia’s dumb tax system.

Continue reading “The idiocy driving road taxes”

The announcement by the NSW Government that it will abolish stamp duty and replace it with an annual property tax proves that bold tax reform is possible beyond merely giving big socially destructive income-tax cuts to the wealthy.

The tax system is a redistributive vehicle. The vehicle can, on one hand, transfer vast amounts of money from the common wealth to a megawealthy elite or, on the other hand, transfer money from the wealthy to the commons.

Continue reading “Fairer tax is possible, NSW shows”