By Brian Morris Australia has already been described as a ‘soft theocracy’. The question is, despite the public showing less religiosity, will a more overtly Christian PM subvert the nation’s preference for secular values? Australia has continued to move steadily towards progressive policy – most notably to finally legalise same-sex marriage last year. But that came…
Every now and then The Australian Financial Review has an article that gives me a good laugh. Ok, it’s behind a firewall so I can’t give you a link but today’s article about Angus Taylor begins: “Energy Minister Angus Taylor has slammed greenhouse gas reduction policies as “corporate greed dressed up as saving the planet”…
By George Theodoridis It is a case -as it bloody nearly always is- of relevance deprivation and diminution, thanks mainly to the prodigious proliferation and ever burgeoning of social platforms and the largely bored hoi polloi, bored by celebrities who have nothing to offer but the empty, irrelevant minutiae of their lives. The celebrities, like the…
There is something peculiar doing the rounds in Australian food circles. The land down under, considered something of a nirvana of fruit and vegetable production despite horrendous droughts and calamitous cyclones, is facing a new challenge: human agency, namely in the form of despoliation of strawberries. The results have knocked Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket chains,…
By Henry Johnston Auguste Rodin’sThe Thinker is universally regarded as a symbol of science and philosophy. But Rodin originally called it The Poet as a detail of a larger work known as The Gates of Hell to be used as an entrance to a Parisian museum. Neither the museum nor the bronze doors — the…
Breaking news….well kind of. Company linked to alleged foreign bribery conspiracy in Nauru received $2.5m Australian government contract Shock horror. Our AFP have discovered corruption in Nauru….eventually. Which leads me to repost an article I wrote over two years ago….. August 14, 2016 In June [2016], in an interview with A Current Affair, Nauru’s Justice Minister…
Regardless of the prognostications of politics in Australia, the ‘message’ delivered by politicians from the larger parties is always professional, well-rehearsed and well delivered. Even as the dust was settling on the Turnbull/Dutton/Morrison brouhaha recently, Morrison had his message sorted (‘he’s representing us’ in case you didn’t pick up on it). It’s just like a…
As Australia’s tattered yet new government, led by the increasingly oafish and amateurish Scott Morrison trundled into its post-climate phase, states which see their existence as dependent on the cutting of carbon emissions have been more than a touch concerned. Their reality remains divorced from the paper clip conspiracies of Canberra and the energy cliques…
“You are a fucking mendicant,” Scott Morrison tells Tassie Treasurer, Peter Gutwein, reports Paul Bongiorno who quotes a Herald Sun article, Wednesday, citing “senior Liberal sources”. Gutwein doesn’t dispute the claims. Bean-counter Gutwein can’t find a good word for Morrison when asked how it feels to be so bullied and abused by his new leader.…
First speeches in parliament can be revealing and so it was with the speech delivered by our new Minister for the Environment, Melissa Price, in December 2013. She began by congratulating Bronwyn Bishop for her elevation to the role of Speaker of the House, assuring us that Bishop’s “grace and good humour, will bring dignity…