Category: Uncategorized

IT IS now a year and a day since Queensland Coroner Michael Barnes handed down his findings in the case of the sinking of the Malu Sara – a Department of Immigration border protection vessel – with the loss of five lives. Continue reading “Families of dead Islanders await justice”

A COUPLE of weeks ago I was saved by a sub-editor from committing an egregious error of history in this column. Continue reading “We should adopt US spelling”

HOW apt that the debate which major political parties have tried to avoid for so long should become one of the major talking points of the week of Australia Day – our population. Continue reading “Australia’s day of population reckoning”

THE Government has been holding back the report of the Henry Tax Review for a month now. It is an unusual piece of media-policy-agenda manipulation. The more astonishing thing is that nothing much has leaked from it, except a few pronouncements by Ken Henry himself. Continue reading “Risky approach to Henry tax report”

OK, I’m sorry. I weakened. I didn’t mean to. I had been off them for more than a week and I was doing really, really well. The substitute was working, though it was somehow not the real thing. The kick did not last long enough. Continue reading “Addiction and journalism”

ISRAEL’S military spending is the sixth highest per head in the world. You might wonder why it would need any further help. Yet last week the US pledged to give Israel almost $US3 billion in military aid in 2010.

Continue reading “Religion behind US military support for Israel”

HERE are a few minor and major annoyances that big organisations and individuals should have a go at fixing in 2010. Continue reading “Some annoyances to fix”

ALL but the crankiest conspiracy theorists now accept that the world is warming and humans are causing it. But the baffling, illogical and scary thing is that political leaders seem blind to a critical element of the human causation – the more humans we have the more carbon emissions we will have. Continue reading “China right to link population to climate”

IN 1975 the then Liberal Opposition Leader, Malcolm Fraser, formulated a doctrine that an Opposition which controlled the Senate could refuse an elected government Supply (the money to govern) if the Government engaged in “reprehensible conduct”. Continue reading “People’s recall better than royal sackings”

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott is on to something in portraying the Government’s climate-change policy as a great big tax and in ruling out an emissions trading scheme or any carbon impost. He is cleverly tapping into behavioural economics theory, whether consciously or not. Continue reading “Rational appeal to the irrational on climate”