I have some sympathy for ABC commentator Dave Hughes, a card-carrying Liberal, in his article professing confusion about his party’s direction. He is reading Naomi Klein, and is worried about her critique that market forces won’t magically solve all the environmental issues, such as climate change. Read it here (as the software is being naughty): […]

Everyone is into geo-political conspiracies around the plunge in the price of oil, including Graham Lloyd in today’s Australian. His is a good article, not least because it has two useful graphs at the head of it. The first graph is of US oil production over the last 30 years. The second graph is of […]

Having read Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine some years ago, I was keen to read her latest book on climate change and capitalism. Now only about 1/3 through (holidays getting pleasantly in the path) I can say that my view of her as one of the world’s premium intellectuals has been confirmed. She is issuing a […]

Tony Abbott really is beginning to look terminal. It’s not that he’s doing a bad job, it’s just that he’s doing a good job poorly. It’s not what he is doing it is how he is doing it. One of the themes the Liberal Opposition ran before the last election was that it was time that […]

Since the Cypriots found that their cash actually belonged to someone else, I have been suspicious of the Australian bank guarantee scheme. This says up to $250,000 per person per institution is secure, without charge. Do you remember the stunned interviews, just a few years ago, of small business owners and pensioners in Cyprus who […]

…perhaps the President of the United States is not the best choice. After all, our relative status to this behemoth is one of minnow to a shark and client to a corporate. No one can believe Julie Bishop when she leapt to dispute that the Great Barrier Reef is vulnerable to climate change. We all […]

What annoys me about the current discussion on burkas and Parliament House is not the way it briefly became practically the only political issue worth of media coverage. It is that the level of discussion, and the way the matter has been mushed around, indicates scary political correctness accompanied by lack of guts. We know […]

This morning Fran Kelly had a woman on who was introduced as ‘a feminist and a Muslim’. The conversation quickly turned to questions about the burka and its appropriateness in situations like Parliament House, or a bank. The interviewee trotted out the old line: ‘it’s ok to wear the burka if the woman chooses to’. […]

Bill Shorten thinks it is a “dirty deal” done “dirt cheap”, but the repeal of the Mining Resource Rental Tax merely returns money to its rightful owners. The decision by Gillard Labor to mug the mining industry may have been justified by it on the basis that these minerals are “our assets” but in fact it […]