THE British government in 1939 created the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On” to prepare Brits for German attacks during World War II. The Abbott government should adopt it, and take heart.
Of course, the slogan belied the preparedness to assemble the immense power brought to bear by the Allies in 1944 against the fascist forces.
The Abbott government has to go on the attack. It is under siege from Red, Green and Yellow forces, which are unlikely to relent in the near term.
It’s not Joe Hockey’s “leaners” Australians need to fear, it’s the new breed of economic “levellers” who believe that to make an economy work better you just need to dial down levels of inequality.
PROGRESS is found in human ingenuity, and concomitant success and failure. Strangely, reference to progress rarely appears in public debate, or in the literature.
One reason is that egalitarian ideology has displaced progress. It seems that for some, there can be no progress until we are equal.
If you want to know how the left in Australia thinks, then check out Twitter. It will also explain the slow degradation of Australian political reporting into gotcha exposes and personal slurs.
WHO would make the best chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland? Judging from the unseemly row over the appointment of Tim Carmody, not a knockabout barrister appointed by a boy Attorney-General.
Tim “I don’t claim to be the smartest lawyer in the room” Carmody is presently the Chief Magistrate of Queensland. Thick as a brick? Hardly. Carmody was appointed Senior Counsel in 1999, served as the Queensland crime commissioner from 1998 to 2002, as a judge of the Family Court of Australia from 2003 to 2008, and as commissioner for the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry, which reported last year.
There is no rule book to determine the criteria for choosing a judge, only a process. The responsibility for the appointment rests with the Queensland cabinet, on the recommendation of the Attorney-General.
NATIONAL Reconciliation Week finishes today. The Aboriginal industry can put away its ideological bunting for another year. Only those paid to do so, and the ideologically committed, will continue the dreary business of, among other things, reading out a welcome to country message.
‘’I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to their elders past and present.’’
Why do otherwise intelligent people do this? No one believes it, it does no good, and it perpetuates the myth that land is everything. Land is a platform for the brilliance of humans to perform upon. Without skills and willpower, it comes to nought. Unless, and until, the Aboriginal industry learns this, the blighted lives of the smallest part of Aboriginal Australia, those sitting in the dumps of Aboriginal settlements such as, Utopia, in the Northern Territory, will never change.
THE establishment of the (projected) $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund poses two big questions for public policy: Why have a future fund in anything, and why medical research in particular?
Government future funds come and government future funds go.
Who is to say the Medical Research Future Fund won’t go the way of others?
Memo from Treasury to the Prime Minister, re: levy.
The temporary deficit reduction levy will not raise as much money as the government hopes. The impact of extra tax on higher earners will change their behaviour. Less exertion produces less tax. In addition, it may well lower economic output in second and subsequent years, thus harming everyone.
WE export animal welfare. Of the 109 countries exporting livestock globally, Australia is the only one that invests in animal welfare beyond its borders.
Doubtless, Joe Ludwig of the Gillard government, who for a time banned the live cattle trade, and various NGOs would claim ownership. Methinks exporters did the hard work. There are three distinct public policy issues at play. How many animals die during export? How many are killed inhumanely in the destination country? The best response to failure in either or both. On one side are exporters, governments and some animal welfare types, on the other are radical animal welfare types.
BLACKBIRDING is back in Bundaberg and elsewhere in regional Australia. Where Australians do not want to work in “menial” jobs in horticulture, rural producers have had to look elsewhere for a workforce.
Backpackers have been a standby, but producers wanted a more reliable source of labour. That source is Pacific Islanders, just as it was 150 years ago in the infamous blackbirding era.
