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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A Powerful Life


I suppose that viewing it now, my childhood home wouldn’t seem a very salubrious dwelling to many. But I thought it was wonderful! A hundred metres or so to the east ran the train line. But it didn’t worry us much because the trains were pretty infrequent. On the southern side was the station master’s […]

September 3, 2016

After Bennelong


When Europeans settled in Australia in the late eighteenth century they had little knowledge of its prior occupants. Some of the Dutch and English seamen who had chanced by the shores of the Great Southern Land had encountered the indigenous inhabitants. Some of those encounters were amiable and some were hostile. But, by and large, […]

August 25, 2016

Coping With Social Media


Most of us baby-boomers will remember that in the 1960’s a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, whom we’d never heard of, famously declared “The medium is the message!” It was one of those iconic statements that few of us understood but seemed so right we could not help but applaud it. What did it mean? Some […]

August 12, 2016

In Praise of Mystery


It seems innate in human beings to have a sense of wonder. Being confronted with mystery however brings out different responses in people. The left-brain dominant determinists and materialists are uncomfortable when they can’t answer the questions of “why” and “how”. For that we probably should be grateful because such people have done the legwork […]

August 6, 2016

Detention and Indigenous Disadvantage


Malcolm Turnbull is no doubt justified in initiating a Royal Commission into the treatment of young people in the Northern Territory’s detention centres. The inmates of these facilities have been treated appallingly and we need to see that the welfare of the young men incarcerated in these institutions is protected. No civilised society should condone […]

July 29, 2016

A Little More on Religious Tolerance


In last week’s essay, Religion in the Modern World, I cited the works of John Locke who argued for religious tolerance and played an important role in promoting the basic freedoms that our modern democratic society is based upon. I thought this week I might expand on that theme a little more. Inevitably, in such […]

July 23, 2016

Religion in the Modern World


As you who read my blogs regularly would have ascertained, (both of you) I am not a religious person in the conventional sense of the word. I am however deeply spiritual. My spiritual needs, just like those of most people, demand attention. If our spiritual needs are so demanding let us just spend a moment […]

July 16, 2016

Deluded Through Distraction


It is claimed by some that the 18th century, Dutch enlightenment philosopher, Baruch Spinoza was the pre-eminent writer on eternity. He was certainly one of the initial philosophers in the West to try to come to grips with the notion of Self. His work is credited with initiating biblical criticism.   Spinoza proclaimed, “Only intense […]

July 9, 2016

Globalisation, Chaos and Political Instability


When we step back to analyse what is going on socially and politically in the world it is hard not to be dismayed by the contradictory trends. On the one hand we have the seemingly inexorable move to globalisation. Both the world’s capital markets and labour markets are seemingly growing more encompassing, demolishing national borders […]

July 2, 2016

Offense and Other Nonsense


This is an era when the rarest commodity is a person who says what they think and thinks about what they say. There is a sense that we are being deafened by a cacophony of multimedia noise at the same time we are being crushed into conformity. Chris Kenny, Associate Editor, The Australian The good […]

June 26, 2016