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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My Confessions of Conservatism


It is a source of some frustration to me that as I get older I have become more conservative. I made a reasonably successful career based on pushing the envelope, doing new things and doing things differently. I was an inveterate challenger of the status quo. In my somewhat distorted imagination I am inclined to […]

June 6, 2015

Being Kind to Yourself


Martin Seligman tells us that those of us who are pessimists have deficiencies in our self-defence mechanisms. As he puts it, such people when faced with something that is not going right in their lives convince themselves that the problem is: Personal – ie it is due to their own personal shortcomings; Pervasive – ie […]

May 23, 2015

Especially Ordinary


Especially Ordinary Despite our supposed sophistication, vanity is endemic in modern society. I see no end of examples of people who want to look attractive, be seen as important or have some special world-shattering unique characteristics. It seems to me to be a comforting feature of old age to eschew such meaningless pursuits. But then […]

May 17, 2015

A Few Crocodile Tears


Crocodiles are remarkable evolutionary survivors. They have inhabited the earth in their current form for millions of years. On top of that (or maybe because of that) they are quite ubiquitous, continuing to survive in healthy populations in Africa, Asia and Australia. Their predominant diet is fish but they are very partial also, when the […]

May 11, 2015

The Indonesian Executions


Well it has finally happened – the two Australian drug traffickers have been executed by an Indonesian firing squad. I abhor capital punishment and this particular event seemed, because of some of the Indonesian incompetence, more barbaric than it need to have been. Despite my feelings for Chan, Sukumaran and their families and loved ones, […]

May 1, 2015

The Enlightened Mind


In previous essays, I have proposed that the defining characteristic of our humanity is our consciousness. Because we not only have the ability to think and make decisions but are also consciously aware of these mental processes we have what is sometimes called a “theatre of mind”. Consequently we are forced to deal with two […]

April 25, 2015

Men Behaving Badly


Most people who have any familiarity at all with the subject of human behaviour will know of the “Nature vs Nurture” debate. The argument was about whether our biological history or our social conditioning determines how humans behave. We now know however, that both contribute to our behaviour. In fact the influences are so closely […]

April 18, 2015

Tiptoeing Around the Lake Of Happiness


My long-term, long-suffering readers will understand that I (and most likely all of us) have had an abiding interest in happiness, what promotes it and how it may be attained. Indeed if you search the archives of my blog posts you will find a number of essays on this topic. My essay this week will […]

April 12, 2015

Avoiding the Issue


It was one of the most pitiful sights I’ve seen for a long time. Former Rugby League player, State of Origin and Australian representative, Glenn Lazarus was sitting in front of the TV cameras trying to look hurt and demanding that Tony Abbott apologise for his remarks about a “feral” Senate, and this coming from […]

March 28, 2015

Understanding Human Behaviour – Some of the Mistakes We Make!


In our little book Humanity at Work and its subsequent sequel The Myth of Nine to Five the good Dr Phil and I outlined the prime human needs as: Physical needs, Social needs, Intellectual needs, and Spiritual needs. I won’t waste your time going through these as they are largely self-evident. But in this essay […]

March 23, 2015