Category: Quadrant

  One disturbing factor regarding the Australian economy is its sluggish growth.  Per capita growth was negative in 2018/9 and has not had a sustained run above 2 per cent since the pre-2007 Howard/Costello years. The key drivers of growth are capital investment (with its associated technological gains) and freedom

You know you are getting old when your country’s Treasurer is called “Josh” and a senator who goes by “Cory” are retiring. Certainly the Treasurer’s recent suggestion that “older Australians” keep on working past what was once considered a respectable retirement age, and to retrain if necessary in order to

Permit me to recount a short history detailing the reality of life without electricity, something I experienced in Dubai during the massive power outage of 2005.  The reports that followed made light of the incident as just a minor inconvenience. It wasn’t.  Rather, and the reason that nightmare comes to

It was an important moment in the Climategate saga. Yet few remember Jerome Ravetz’s damning critique of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) posted on WUWT in early 2010. Ravetz is an eminent American philosopher of science and an Associate Fellow at Oxford University’s James Martin Institute

In classical literature, tragedy tells how a person falls from greatness into ruin, often through arrogance and reverencing unholy things. History also tells such stories. As November 11 and the anniversary of the Great War fades into memory for another year, the tragedy of Erich Ludendorff offers a timely

Dear Prime Minister, I write to bring to your attention what has become an intolerable situation regarding the access to water for the people of Australia. I believe, as do at least two million other hard-working Australians who live in the Murray-Darling Basin, that present water policy is the biggest

Propaganda is most persuasive when it is pervasive.  Right now we are being subject to a massive propaganda campaign designed to advance the Aboriginal sovereignty, agenda and it is being masterminded and largely paid for by Their ABC. I have spent the best part of six months writing a review

It’s the tenth anniversary next week of the 2009 Climategate email dump that exposed top climate scientists’ chicanery and subversion of science – and did so in their own words and out of their own mouths, or keyboards. I’ll list a few emails-of-infamy shortly, but first some background. For the

Discussing the radical, inexorable and a times nasty secularisation of society, the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago once famously lamented: I expect to die in bed, my successor for will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up

It is only November, but 2019/20 is already shaping as Australia’s worst bushfire season since 2009. The horrible fires in NSW have captured the headlines to date, but only the most foolish observer would suggest they will not be followed soon enough by more big, damaging bushfires in Victoria, Tasmania,

Tony Abbott’s colleagues ignominiously ended his prime ministership after just two years and his constituents humiliatingly ejected him from parliament with a 20 per cent swing. So why did the Liberal Party honour his contribution to public life with a testimonial dinner even bigger than John Howard’s? Perhaps it’s because

When Julia Gillard was Minister for Education in the Rudd government in 2008 she appointed a committee to rewrite the national schools curriculum from primary school to year 10. When the curriculum’s compulsory Aboriginal content was published it became a controversial issue. The Coalition opposition under Tony Abbott called it