Boris Johnson is a well-known climate sceptic, and fellow sceptics are pointing this out to suggest that his victory means that climate scepticism isn’t a political handicap afterall. I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the UK local government elections, and we obviously don’t do any polling there, so this post is quite […]

What was this week’s Four Corners all about? Chris Masters, an icon for investigative journalists in Australia, delivered a squishy program that was all fluff. Was it a travelogue about the gentrification of Harlem? Was it a very vague look at race relations in the US, 40 years after Martin Luther King’s death? Perhaps there […]

Many of my friends have been swept up by Obamamania. I’ve been listening to his speeches. They sound disturbingly isolationist and protectionist. Clinton is singing some of the same tune. So far both are being carried by celebrity rather than substance, but I think it’s about time we started paying attention to the substance. All […]

The US film industry is definitely becoming more socially and politically aware. In the past few years movies have tackled issues including the drug trade (Traffic), international arms dealing (God of War), the impotence of international help in the face of genocide (Hotel Rwanda), racism in the US (Crash), the dark underbelly of the diamond […]

We can’t vote in US elections, but that didn’t stop On Line Opinion from running a primary for the Democratic and Republican parties involving Australians. This is the release that I put out to publicise the results. You can read a longer and more entertaining version in the article that I wrote for OLO. Australian […]

$145 Billion sounds like a lot. That’s the amount that President George Bush is promising to pump into the US economy in an attempt to avert recession. Using the latest World Bank data on a purchasing power parity basis this is the equivalent of releasing $7.86 Billiion into the Australian economy. To put this into […]

Sometimes the illusion is worth more than the reality. Australia’s claim to an exclusive economic zone in the Antarctic was only plausible while we tried to enforce it against smaller nations because, for example, they were catching Patagonian tooth-fish. And while it was plausible it had some validity. Now a Pyrrhic court victory by an […]

“No blood for oil” – the defining chant of the anti-Iraq war protestors. Let’s assume for a second that they were right, that the US action was all based on access to oil. Why should that preoccupation only apply to Americans? What if it applied to Iraqis too? What if much of the insurrection were […]