28 April 2022
Censorship Is The Real Threat To Twitter, Not Elon Musk
If politicians around the world have their way, it won’t be the owner of the company deciding what can be said on the platform but state social media censors. This week Elon Musk bought Twitter for $US44 billion ($62 billion). Depending on the day-to-day fluctuations of Tesla’s share price, the world’s richest person, the 50-year old Musk, is worth at least $US200
18 April 2022
Why It’s No Contest On The Economy
The ALP of the 2020s has lost interest in Australia’s economic future. And the Coalition appears to be following suit. It says a great deal about the condition of Australian policy and politics that the biggest story of the first week of the 2022 federal election campaign was Labor leader Anthony Albanese’s inability to name the level of unemployment and
31 March 2022
Fighting The Free Money Syndrome
Tesla drivers, the Morrison government and the Reserve Bank are united by the same idea. That it does not really matter where money comes from. It is a strange world we live in, if when the government cuts taxes on a product it is accused of giving it a “subsidy”. But this is exactly what’s happened after this year’s federal
17 March 2022
Kitching Wasn’t Just Bullied – She Was A Victim Of Cancel Culture
The treatment meted out to Kimberley Kitching by some of her Labor “colleagues” was on any definition bullying, nasty and completely unfair. But that’s politics – politics, like life, is unfair. But certainly, what happened to Kitching Kimberley Kitching at a Senate estimates hearing in 2019. Alex Ellinghausen was particularly vicious and the labelling of some of the perpetrators of
17 February 2022
The Cut That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Recent calls for Scott Morrison to commit to tax reform are well made. But given his and his government’s track record, it might be best to leave the task to someone else. Given how the PM somehow allowed his efforts at ensuring religious freedom to turn into a debate about whether schools can expel students who are gay, it can only be
3 February 2022
How the Liberals have found their inner Kevin
Whether there’s now much difference between the Liberals and the ALP is a constant topic of conversation among the members of each party. Liberals ask how a $1 trillion of debt and a commitment to net zero emissions is different from anything Labor would do, while ALP members question whether there is any point to a future Labor government if
20 January 2022
PM Seeks The Credit, So Cops The Blame
The problem with running a one-man government is there in the descriptor. All the credit is yours and so is the blame. Scott Morrison won the 2019 federal election for the Coalition single-handedly. Because history doesn’t allow you to test alternatives, we will never know whether he was the only person who could have led the Coalition to victory, but he and
6 January 2022
Djokovic Cast Perfectly In Australia’s COVID-19 Drama
The story of Novak Djokovic in Melbourne for the Australian Open is a perfect cameo of this country’s management of COVID-19. The world’s No.1 tennis player has made a brief but high-profile appearance in a drama that two years ago Australians were told could run for some months. Djokovic is a character in Australia’s COVID-19 drama. First told by the
6 January 2021
It Reeks Of Blasphemy, But Might More MPs Give Us Better Service?
Australian democracy faces a crisis of representation. People feel alienated from our politics and our institutions. Donkey votes are up, minor parties’ votes are up, and the major parties are riven by internal dissent. In a way, even the proposed Indigenous Voice to Parliament can be seen as an attempted end-run around the dysfunction of our electoral process. In short, no-one seems to think that our Federal Parliament can do its
