In the last week, Melongate has proceeded along its sordid way. But it has now taken on a new significance. It was bad enough when it consisted solely of the Prime Minister’s vulgarities and his ham-fisted contribution to the denigration of women. But it has now become more significant by the emergence of new participants with their own vulgarities in ...
I served on the staff of Alf Rattigan’s Tariff Board, the Productivity Commission’s ancestor, in the years it began pulling down the tariff wall. So it is with something close to filial grief that I report the institution’s defection. In its interim report on GST distribution, the Commission now recommends the most incentive-destroying fiscal ...
The enemy of ‘common sense’ is ‘ideology’. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says ‘ideology’ means ‘beliefs and values held by an individual or group for other than epistemic reasons’. And that (perhaps unfamiliar) word ‘epistemic’ just means ‘knowledge’. In other words, ‘ideology’ is not based on testable knowledge, it is just adopted in the absence ...
Every so often something comes along that is so bad it fills the soul with wonder and dismay. It seems like a denial of nature that the upshot should be as bad as it is and it is all the weirder when criticism is the subject of the story. All things being equal, dire criticism is part of the descriptive apparatus of a review. Kenneth Tynan (the great ...
To the average Australian, Liddle is a typo. And even for most Brits, a surname which is a homophone of a discount supermarket chain would make you low-hanging fruit for workplace wags. Unless, of course, your workplace was the Sunday Times or the The Spectator, in which case few of your co-workers would live close enough to a Lidl for it to impinge on ...
Antisemitism is an abomination, unacceptable in any civilised society. Yet, as we look at the current state of our streets and the safety of our citizens, we must confront a jarring reality: the antisemitism which has surged through Australia is not an accidental by-product of global tensions. It is a political import, adopted by certain political ...
One of the most illuminating pieces of evidence given to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion came in its dying days, as Commissioner Virginia Bell rushed to finish proceedings early, from a witness who had been called to explain how to stop people from being dehumanised.
Rita Jabri Markwell, a solicitor with the Australian Muslim ...
We all know the Australian, the national newspaper Rupert Murdoch created in 1964, as a publication that generally occupies the conservative side of Australia’s political and ideological divide. From economic policy and US alliance management to the culture wars, the Oz is rarely mistaken for a left-of-centre newspaper.
But it was not always so. In the ...
Most Spectator Australia readers won’t have heard of Sir Simon Woolley, the Right Honourable the Lord Woolley of Woodford, a baron in the House of Lords. Yet this grandly titled clown deserves to be remembered as a symbol of the Tories losing their way. After police revealed that the fraudster Jason Arday apparently died by his own hand, Woolley ...
Raising the profile of a not-for-profit organisation is no easy task. Add to that trying to bring in new members. And then imagine trying to fundraise and get all sorts of members of the public to give their hard-earned money to that organisation. It’s a brutally tough set of tasks, especially in these Albanese economic times. In my native Canada and ...
How exciting. Three weeks ago in these pages, I predicted that if Pauline Hanson sought special leave to appeal to the High Court in her case against Mehreen Faruqi, she would get it – and win.
She has now applied for special leave.
Hanson has already lost before a single Federal Court judge and then before all three judges of the Full Court. ...
Last week, the federal government’s debt dial clicked over one trillion dollars. It’s a figure we should have avoided. But given that our gormless Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is not predicting a return to budget surplus until the middle of next decade, this debt figure will continue to climb.
On Jimbo’s figures – OK, Treasury did the counting – government ...
In the last week, Melongate has proceeded along its sordid way. But it has now taken on a new significance. It was bad enough when it consisted solely of the Prime Minister’s vulgarities and his ham-fisted contribution to the denigration of women. But it has now become more significant by the emergence of new participants with their own vulgarities in ...
I served on the staff of Alf Rattigan’s Tariff Board, the Productivity Commission’s ancestor, in the years it began pulling down the tariff wall. So it is with something close to filial grief that I report the institution’s defection. In its interim report on GST distribution, the Commission now recommends the most incentive-destroying fiscal ...
The enemy of ‘common sense’ is ‘ideology’. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says ‘ideology’ means ‘beliefs and values held by an individual or group for other than epistemic reasons’. And that (perhaps unfamiliar) word ‘epistemic’ just means ‘knowledge’. In other words, ‘ideology’ is not based on testable knowledge, it is just adopted in the absence ...
Every so often something comes along that is so bad it fills the soul with wonder and dismay. It seems like a denial of nature that the upshot should be as bad as it is and it is all the weirder when criticism is the subject of the story. All things being equal, dire criticism is part of the descriptive apparatus of a review. Kenneth Tynan (the great ...
To the average Australian, Liddle is a typo. And even for most Brits, a surname which is a homophone of a discount supermarket chain would make you low-hanging fruit for workplace wags. Unless, of course, your workplace was the Sunday Times or the The Spectator, in which case few of your co-workers would live close enough to a Lidl for it to impinge on ...
Antisemitism is an abomination, unacceptable in any civilised society. Yet, as we look at the current state of our streets and the safety of our citizens, we must confront a jarring reality: the antisemitism which has surged through Australia is not an accidental by-product of global tensions. It is a political import, adopted by certain political ...
One of the most illuminating pieces of evidence given to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion came in its dying days, as Commissioner Virginia Bell rushed to finish proceedings early, from a witness who had been called to explain how to stop people from being dehumanised.
Rita Jabri Markwell, a solicitor with the Australian Muslim ...
We all know the Australian, the national newspaper Rupert Murdoch created in 1964, as a publication that generally occupies the conservative side of Australia’s political and ideological divide. From economic policy and US alliance management to the culture wars, the Oz is rarely mistaken for a left-of-centre newspaper.
But it was not always so. In the ...
Most Spectator Australia readers won’t have heard of Sir Simon Woolley, the Right Honourable the Lord Woolley of Woodford, a baron in the House of Lords. Yet this grandly titled clown deserves to be remembered as a symbol of the Tories losing their way. After police revealed that the fraudster Jason Arday apparently died by his own hand, Woolley ...
Raising the profile of a not-for-profit organisation is no easy task. Add to that trying to bring in new members. And then imagine trying to fundraise and get all sorts of members of the public to give their hard-earned money to that organisation. It’s a brutally tough set of tasks, especially in these Albanese economic times. In my native Canada and ...
How exciting. Three weeks ago in these pages, I predicted that if Pauline Hanson sought special leave to appeal to the High Court in her case against Mehreen Faruqi, she would get it – and win.
She has now applied for special leave.
Hanson has already lost before a single Federal Court judge and then before all three judges of the Full Court. ...
Last week, the federal government’s debt dial clicked over one trillion dollars. It’s a figure we should have avoided. But given that our gormless Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is not predicting a return to budget surplus until the middle of next decade, this debt figure will continue to climb.
On Jimbo’s figures – OK, Treasury did the counting – government ...
