Make Australia Great Again!

It’s not hard to make the argument that on many fronts Australia has regressed in recent years. Our standard of living in real terms has diminished over the term of the Albanese government. Whilst our GDP, masked by record migration might have increased, our percapita GDP has fallen. We have endured high levels of inflation […]

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Breaking Through the Woke Barrier

Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist. In his 1979 book Distinction, Bourdieu introduced the concept of symbolic capital. In contrast with more conventional notions of resources, such as wealth and material assets, Bourdieu argued that symbolic capital is the resource available to an individual on the basis of prestige, celebrity status and public recognition. A […]

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The Palestine Dilemma

On 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists emerged from Gaza to commit an horrendous atrocity against Israeli civilians. This deadly incursion has been well documented so I won’t elaborate on the gruesome details. Inevitably Israel responded with deadly force in order to deter further aggression and to rescue the civilian hostages that Hamas had kidnapped during […]

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The Downside of a University Education

At the age of eighteen, I left my family home in Charters Towers to start an engineering degree at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville. In those days it was quite an extraordinary thing to do! In my high school years I can only remember two students in the cohort that I knew ahead of […]

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Revisiting Global Warming


To most of us the climate signals are rather confusing. Whilst the press has often provided stories of shrinking ice-caps with commentary from global warming alarmists insisting this is evidence that increasing level of atmospheric CO2 , the same folk seem rather bewildered by the record cold conditions now blanketing North America. If the truth […]

January 24, 2018

The Challenge to Democracy


Our democracy seems to me to be floundering. Our politicians seem too keen to embrace populist issues without sufficient concern for the long-term. Serious reform which underpinned our economic success in the late twentieth century seems now impossible because voters can’t be convinced to make short-term sacrifices in order to access long-term benefits. Our two […]

January 12, 2018

The Human Dilemma


I celebrate myself, and I sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you. Walt Whitman, (American poet and humanist.)   In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe; therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe. David Bohm, […]

December 31, 2017

In The Beginning


The Universe is both mysterious and awesome (and I use “awesome” with its classical meaning and not in the debased way it is used colloquially today). As we have seen in past essays humankind has two principal instruments with which it attempts to fathom the Universe, viz. Logos which relies on our faculty of reason, […]

December 16, 2017

Lessons from High School and University


When I was a teenager in a State High School in a regional town, I only knew one person in the classes that preceded mine that had gone to University. I knew quite a few who had gone to be trained as teachers at Teachers Training College. In those days Universities did not train teachers. […]

December 1, 2017

Why Evolution Has Made It Difficult for Us to Wait for Our Marshmallows


In my last essay I tried to make the case that delaying gratification was essentially good for us. Foregoing an immediate pleasure helped build our moral fibre, improving our resilience and ultimately our satisfaction with life. [Psychologists call our ability to delay gratification in this way our intertemporal utility function. I have often wondered whether […]

November 18, 2017

Waiting for Our Marshmallows


I seldom watch TV, but whenever I have recently, it seems I get bombarded with ads cajoling me to take out short term loans. The ads usually portray someone, seemingly not very well-off, who just must have something (appliance, laptop, building renovation or repair) immediately. No doubt the targeted customers have little economic literacy and […]

November 4, 2017

Why Do People Come to Work?


The title of this essay provides a useful question for leaders to ask. Knowing what employees want out of work encourages leaders to either help employees be fulfilled or filter out those employees whose expectations are unrealistic or are counter to the ambitions of the organisation. Let us start with the assumption that all human […]

October 14, 2017

The Dangers of Appeasing the Victims


We know from our studies of human beings that behaviour is fashioned by the consequences that follow from the behaviour. If the consequences are negative we are less likely to repeat the behaviour but if the consequences are positive the behaviour is reinforced and more likely to be repeated. In their great little book Declare Yourself: […]

October 7, 2017

Coming to Grips with that Voice in Our Heads


Understanding the nature of our humanity is a useful step in securing our sense of well-being. As we have seen on many occasions before, the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Our consciousness not only makes us aware but aware of our awareness. It creates for us a “theatre of mind” which gives […]

September 30, 2017