Still maybe suffering from relevance deprivation syndrome, Tanya Plibersek will make the most of this new opportunity to trip the light fantastic. Hint: we should be concerned. She’s in charge of saving critters and all kinds of plant life; of resuscitating nature. The “initiative” is called Nature Positive. The goal: to halt and reverse the…

There is one part in Homage to Catalonia when George Orwell observes that for a time he and his socialist comrades-in-arms in the Spanish civil war enjoyed true brotherhood. Socialism is an ideal where people share each other’s troubles and joys and each other’s worldly goods. You can understand its attraction. It’s just not compatible…

Our obsessive minister for climate change and energy Chris Bowen seems intent on ridding Oz of manufacturing. All unintentional mind. Collateral damage, as it were, from demolishing foul CO2-spewing coal-power stations, and marginalising and driving out its fellow pollutants oil and natural gas. Incidentally, history will thank him because it will be written current-day university…

Just been rereading Tom Wolfe’s wonderful book The Kingdom of Speech (2016). Read it if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed. It’s all about why and how human beings developed the ability to speak and whether there are rules which apply across different languages. Wolfe entertainingly covers the debate between naturalists Charles Darwin and…

I see that a new museum has just opened in Darlinghurst in Sydney in a disused police station. Its focus is queer history and culture. Qtopia it’s called. Apparently some gay demonstrators were thrown into the cells at the very same police station in 1978. So it’s a bitter-sweet sweep of history which, no doubt, will…

It’s Monday 1pm in Sydney. My flat is dark as the rain comes down from a heavily clouded sky. I look out my window. It’s still. There is no movement of leaves on the trees. I’ll guess. Any wind and solar power in the vicinity is generating a fat zero. I am in the dark…

Age and indignities go together. In the grossly overregulated state of NSW I’m now required to have my doctor sign off on my fitness to drive each year. Hoons on the road requiring institutionalisation are however free of medical or psychological restraints. Anyway, I learned to my shock that my doctor had retired at Christmas.…

Our side is too quick to celebrate the odd battle won. The enemy is infinitely resilient; unflaggingly indefatigable; obsessively single-minded; never asleep forever awake. The referendum victory against the mass of federal and state governments, giant corporates, sporting codes, churches, celebrities and assorted elites, was indeed singular. To borrow from Paul Keating it might be…

Pretence of knowledge is a phrase coined by Friedrich Hayek to describe the psychological predilection of those who believe they know enough to plan a path to economic plenty and who inevitably produce economic and social misery. John Maynard Keynes a contemporary of Hayek illustrates the mindset. A few years after The Road to Serfdom…

I read, more or less at the same time, material which emanated from two places whose fundamental laws of economics appear to be quite different. I’ll call them down-to-earth land and cloud-cuckoo land. In down-to-earth land, ASIC reported that 243 manufacturers and 1387 construction companies went into administration in the second half of 2023; an…