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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The Resurgence of Tribes


Evolutionary processes have always created a tension between the welfare of the individual and the welfare of the tribe. To be a dominant individual in the tribe is to advance your welfare and that of your progeny and is no doubt a great advantage. But if your tribe is of little significance even being a […]

September 23, 2017

Living with Our History


What a messy business history seems to have become. History is such a subjective study that it is amenable to the self-serving interpretation of many stakeholders. We have had recent news reports of some disgruntled people wanting to defile the statue of Captain Cook in Hyde Park in Sydney who claim Cook is a symbolic […]

September 16, 2017

Encouraging Male Parental Responsibility


Sometimes the world seems a cruel and irrational place. You have probably read of the incident where a TV advertisement run for Father’s Day by fathers’ advocacy group Dads 4 Kids was pulled for being “too political” in the context of the same sex marriage debate. Our society has suffered immeasurable damage from the breakdown […]

September 9, 2017

Leadership


“The happiness that we seek depends on our ability to balance the ego’s needs to do with our inherent capacity to be.”   Dr Mark Epstein, Going to Pieces without Falling Apart.     “Because of our obsession with how leaders behave and with the interactions of leaders and followers, we forget that in its […]

September 1, 2017

Tribal Warfare and Gesture Politics


The good Dr Phil told us that because we were conscious (that is aware of our thoughts) it naturally implied we were compelled to live in two worlds. The first is the material world that we observe with our physical senses. This is the world “out there”. It is an important world because it has […]

August 26, 2017

History, Culture and Self


Our sense of self is largely a story we have constructed about ourselves which we imagine might help us cope better in the world. Oftimes such a story can prove to be not only unhelpful, but actually inimical to our well-being. When our imagined self is too out of kilter with reality we become dysfunctional, […]

August 19, 2017

The Rise and Decline of the West


The emergence of the West as a political, economic and philosophical force is principally a story of the history of Western Europe. With the decline of the Roman Empire, these peoples reverted to a subsistence economy which in turn imposed strict limits on the organisation and the extent of power. Authority among the barbarian peoples […]

August 13, 2017

The Essential Arrogance of Mankind


I have always believed that it is beyond the capacity of Mankind to fully understand the universe. Yet our continuing efforts to do so are some of our noblest undertakings. There is no doubt that we will always be able to learn more about this cosmological wonderland that we inhabit, and we can benefit immensely […]

July 29, 2017

Work and Meaning


I have written extensively of the importance of our spiritual needs and the necessity of humans to have a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. Traditionally many of us found meaning and purpose in our lives through our religion, our family or our contribution to the community. But such institutions are now in […]

July 22, 2017

Energy Trauma


I don’t watch much television. It presents me with an unenviable choice. Do I watch commercial television and be assailed with endless, brain-numbing, intellectually demeaning advertisements? Or should I watch ad-free ABC to be lectured by left-wing advocates, Greens’ politicians and committed virtue signallers? Faced with such a choice I watch a little news and […]

July 15, 2017