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 Cost of Free Speech


The underlying platform of our liberal democracies is derived from our freedom of speech. There is nothing more important to an enlightened society. Yet, today, it seems to me that our freedom of speech is being constantly eroded. With that our way of life is being threatened. As you can see, I have titled this […]

January 22, 2016

How Not to Have a Birthday!


With the ubiquitousness of social media, it’s now almost impossible to keep anything to yourself! The tentacles of Facebook and Twitter reach into every crevice of our psyche and overturn every metaphorical stone we seek to hide something under. Sometimes reputations are destroyed by anonymous commentators who operate with malignant intent and no accountability. Often […]

January 16, 2016

Taken for Granted


I have always enjoyed sport. When I was young I played cricket, rugby league and basketball with varying degrees of success but with considerable enjoyment. The teams I played in were not champion teams and we probably lost more often than we won. But that was character building as well. I also competed in athletics […]

January 9, 2016

It’s About Time!


So, another year has passed. There is nothing particularly special about that but I am heartily sick of people saying to me, “Where did the year go! It seemed to go so quickly.” In fact it went where every other year we have experienced went. (It is as though they expected to turn a rock […]

January 2, 2016

Can You Believe That?


“If you open your mind too much, your brain may fall out!” Attributed to The Telegraph commenting on a video purporting to show an alien body being dissected. (Although I have also noticed someone recently attributing it to G K Chesterton!) It seems a harmlessly endearing quality of the human race that it seems capable […]

December 19, 2015

The Inevitable Changes in Religious Demography


Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses, the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints, and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches […]

December 12, 2015

So, What Can I Say?


In the early 1960’s, as I remember, the American comedian, Stan Freberg, was quite popular and his recordings were regularly played on Australian radio stations. One such piece (which I think was taken from his radio show in the US) was a bit of a spoof of him attempting to sing the Jerome Kern standard […]

December 5, 2015

Keeping the Bear at Bay


It is said that the eminent Russian writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky was famous for the psychological insights of his writing. In his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions he mounted the following challenge: Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that cursed thing come to mind […]

November 28, 2015

Fronting up to Islamist Extremism


Woe to them who fake Scriptures and say ‘This is from God’ so that they might earn some profit thereby. The Koran   Most of us are familiar with the famous painting by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. It was commissioned by Pope Julius II, a commission only reluctantly […]

November 20, 2015

Another Look at Education


I have written a few essays on education in the past, being an area of some interest of mine. I have been thinking lately, that perhaps we should go back and ask some basic questions about education. It is a very ambitious task, I know, but I am going to attempt to address the following […]

November 8, 2015