17 March 2012
What is Australia’s Afghan mission in 2012? It remains unclear. Numerous interpretations are put forward by our political leaders, but none can explain what our troops are intended to achieve, or indeed for how long we can expect them to remain there. In the light of the recent tragic killing of 16 villagers by an unhinged American soldier and the subsequent backlash, it’s time to re-examine the intentions of Australian policy in the region.
As former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer — who committed our troops to Afghanistan in the first place after 9/11 — said in this magazine in...
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10 March 2012
Eric Knight
A friend of mine calls the Speccie champagne for the brain. There are few publications in the world where words zing off the page quite like it. It’s a real privilege to be invited to write a Diary. I’ve just published my first book, Reframe: how to solve the world’s trickiest problems. It’s a cheeky title, one you can only really get away with if you’re under 30. It isn’t my answers to the world’s trickiest problems. It’s the process we need to go through to get there. I argue for the bottom-up over the top-down and make the optimistic...
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10 March 2012
Our economy is lurching to the left, like a drunk staggering down the sidewalk, keys in hand, looking out for the cops. Demonising sections of the mining community as ‘poisonous’ one minute yet calling the Greens ‘irresponsible’ the next, fanning the flames of class envy while pretending to support democracy, pandering to conspiracy theories and promoting a massive redistribution of wealth through a dishonest tax, the federal Treasurer is tipping a toxic brew down the electorate’s throat. Mr Swan wants to party like it’s 1973.
The ‘world’s greatest treasurer’ (who says Europeans have no sense of humour?) has embarked...
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10 March 2012
Peter Coleman
A few weeks ago I quoted Bob Carr on the Labor party. It is, he said, a second-rate, ramshackle affair, like a three-legged stool with one leg missing. He was launching Troy Bramston’s Looking for the Light on the Hill. I thought his summing-up was an affectionate jeu d’esprit. I see now that he meant it as an insight into how the federal government works.
•••
Let me tell you what I think about freedom of speech. It won’t take long, even though the reactionary Finkelstein Report, following the shocking Bolt case, is again making it a cause célèbre....
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10 March 2012
Nicole Hemmer
After a career as a business executive, a handsome Mormon becomes the Republican governor of a Democratic state, then runs for President. He gets a reputation for flip-flopping and, as a moderate, has an uneasy relationship with the party’s conservative base.
It’s a pretty specific biography, yet it describes to a tee two men: Mitt Romney, one of the leading contenders for the GOP nomination, and his father George, who sought the same prize in 1968.
Yet while his father’s campaign fizzled out before Americans had taken down their 1967 calendars, Mitt solidified his frontrunner status this week with six...
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10 March 2012
Rowan Dean
Mark Steyn is a bigoted, bullying, brazen, egotistical, unfunny, crass, self-serving Islamophobe and right-wing homophobe with the wit of a Soviet drains inspector and the sartorial understatement of a deposed Middle Eastern dictator, whose tedious views and repetitious anecdotes leave the listener feeling depleted of insight and starved of intellectual oxygen.
Actually, none of the above is true (apart from the sartorial bit — even Gaddafi would have thought twice about the gold tie and orange handkerchief combo) but the good news is I’m totally confidant that The Spectator Australia’s and the IPA’s recent celebrity guest — who dazzled...
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