Category Archive: Australian Politics
“My Job is My Number One Priority”
Actually, to be fair, the Premier didn’t say that – his campaign ad launch stated SA jobs were his number-one priority. We guess that’s right. Only – do you feel better off than you did 16 years ago, when a ‘paedophile-hunter’ and self-confessed murderer decided, after having ‘searched his soul,’ to throw the keys of government to the Labor party? They tinkered with the market and feather-bedded it to death. They sand-bagged to weak levies till we all are fit to drown. Now this, “jobs, jobs jobs” after 16 years of “mass misery, mass tedium, mass impotence, mass lifelessness…Cathedrals to…
Continue Reading →Shame
On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made the following statement in the House of Representatives, Canberra: “I move: That today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies…
Continue Reading →Lambaste the Critic
Balance of power
Morry Bailes’ In Daily article entitled “Anti Judge rhetoric a danger to democracy” (https://indaily.com.au/opinion/2018/01/18/anti-judge-rhetoric-danger-democracy/) made the following fairly remarkable claim: “The recent criticism of Victorian judges is not helpful and serves only to undermine the public’s confidence in the judiciary. It’s up to all of us to protect the separation of powers and to denounce anyone’s criticism, especially politicians seeking bumps in the polls.” Unfortunately, this admonition to back off from judicial decisions shows the profession to be several passes behind. If criticism of a judicial decision must be confined to someone with standing and wealth to appeal, a right limited to the…
Continue Reading →Maybe we should Bring Back the Noose?
Capital Punishment On 3 February 1967, serial robber Ronald Ryan, convicted of the felony murder of a gaol warder at Pentridge Prison, was hanged in Victoria. 50 years after Ryan, the last man in Australia to swing, new calls for abolition of the death penalty abound. Some 141 countries have either abolished or suspended indefinitely the penalty, or limit it to war crimes, the remaining 57 still applying it to serious crimes. 10 October 2017 was the 15th “World Day Against the Death Penalty.” (In Reversal of Fortune, the Alan Dershowitz character says of the death penalty, “that’s no penalty,…
Continue Reading →The Cars That Ate Reason
Mitsubishi folded car manufacturing in Australia in 2008. Last year, Ford closed. This October, Holden closed its plant at Elizabeth, with stacks of local workers shown the door and associated industries going to the wall. It is not as if we made crap cars. It wasn’t from lack of an enthusiastic local market for Holdens and Fords. And it’s not as if the good old Aussie taxpayer hadn’t stumped-up its fair share of subsidised cash to keep the embers glowing. Market forces are many and varied. But they tend to follow immutable, organic, rules. When organised car-making started up in…
Continue Reading →