Confessions of an alarmist

28 April 2012

Peter Slipper may or may not have cheated taxpayers out of hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of fraudulent taxi fares. Time will tell, but the Speaker has taken the only appropriate action in stepping down from his well-paid position until the matter is resolved. Meanwhile, another highly paid government appointee has, to all intents and purposes, perpetrated a far greater fraud upon the Australian public, with taxpayers having been conned out of millions, if not billions, of their hard-earned readies.

This week, the godfather of the Gaia theory, the 92-year-old James Lovelock, admitted that he and his fellow...

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Thank God for James Delingpole

28 April 2012
Tim Blair

During Mark Steyn’s recent local tour, the Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen joined him on stage in Sydney to discuss, among other things, why current conservative pundits seem to be winning the battle against their ideological rivals. Confidence, Janet confidently suggested. The secure tone of these conservatives has the dual effect of winning audiences and infuriating leftists. It’s a confidence borne of some considerable effort; Steyn and others may have the tone nailed down, but it’s backed up by near-obsessive gathering of facts.

And it is having a measurable effect, which is more than anyone can say for atmospheric CO2. Perhaps made...

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Latham’s law

28 April 2012
Mark Latham

Each year with the commemoration of Anzac Day, there are some fascinating reflections on our national culture. I think the English satirist William Rushton got it right when he described Australians as ‘a stocky, brownish people with craggy features, their eyes screwed up against the constant glare of the TV sets.’ The Internet may be killing off newspapers, but in the suburbs, television is as indestructible as Barrie Cassidy’s suntan.

Who cares if delegates to the UN still refer to us as Austria or if G20 statuettes of Julia Gillard make her look like a milk-maiden? As long as we...

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People management

28 April 2012
Derek Parker

Bigger or Better? Australia’s Population Debate
By Ian Lowe
University of Queensland Press,
$34.95, pp 208
ISBN 978072239090

Australians have always had strong — if not always coherent — opinions on population policy, perhaps because the number of people in the country seems strangely disproportionate to the size of the continent. Professor Ian Lowe, former president of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a patron of the Sustainable Population Australia group, claims that this book is meant to settle the confusion by providing clear and unbiased information. Had he been able to stay...

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Democratic malaise

28 April 2012
David Martin Jones

In 1971, Australia and the recently decolonised Malaysian government enjoyed, as Peter Boyce observed ,‘something akin to a special relationship’. That relationship deteriorated rapidly after 1973, however, as the Whitlam and subsequent Labor governments preferred ties with non-Commonwealth Asia, notably Suharto’s New Order Indonesia and even Mao’s China.

During the Hawke and Keating era, engaging Asia meant ignoring Malaysia. Paul Keating dismissed long-serving Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohammad as ‘recalcitrant’ for failing to attend the 1992 APEC meeting. Mahathir, by contrast, favoured a ‘Look East’ policy and assiduously promoted an East Asian caucus without Caucasians.

Neither the Howard...

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Hubris, meet Nemesis

28 April 2012
James Morrow

Pride goeth before a fall, counsels the Book of Proverbs. Hamlet spoke of being hoist on one’s own petard. And across Australia, drivers angry at being cut off or losing a parking space call out to their four-wheeled foes, ‘Karma’s a bitch’. No matter how one chooses to express it, across time and space and cultures, the sentiment is as widely shared as it is true: don’t get cocky, or think one’s self too clever, or it will all come unstuck fantastically.

Yet as universal the idea, it seems the Gillard government never got the memo. Now, just a...

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