Gough Whitlam spent a lot of time and energy persuading the ALP before 1972 that Labor could only accomplish things in government. Being in opposition, he argued, meant being impotent. And Labor had spent a lot of years in opposition by 1972.
This idea, that it was all about winning […] Continue Reading…

But then a HECS debt is in effect an hypothecated tax on tertiary educated Australians. If HECS debts lead to lower fertility, then so too must higher taxes. The sound you can hear is a dog chasing its tail.
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Order 39 of the Coalition Provisional Administration in Iraq has reached cult status courtesy of an article by Naomi Klein of No Logo fame…Yet Klein’s reasoning is dubious and many of her facts wrong.
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John Howard says Australians are not a warlike people. I don’t think Australians are especially warlike, but we have a history of governments sending off Australian boys to fight wars for our imperial masters. Sudan , South Africa, World War One, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc – Australia has a bad […] Continue Reading…

The real question therefore is (a) whether this is a fallacy that Brandis perpetrated by intention, or (b) whether he has some more fundamental problems with reality.
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“The change of government provides a new opportunity for us to reassess a whole range of Autralian foreign policies and attitudes…the general direction of my thinking is towards a more independent Australian stance in international affairs, an Australia which will be less militarily-oriented and not open to suggestions of […] Continue Reading…

There’s a comforting Labor myth (comforting if you’re a Labor supporter anyway) that the only reason John Howard is Prime Minister is because he has “dog whistled” the xenophobic vote
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I think Mark Latham is the biggest gun in the Labor armory, but he’s wrong about taxes. Labor should spend all the surplus, whatever it is, and not give it back in tax cuts (and especially not to the wealthy); in fact, Labor should increase taxes – or just […] Continue Reading…

There are a lot of parallels betwen Iraq and Vietnam. A deeply conservative, single-mindedly pro-US prime minister sends Australian troops into an internationally unpopular war started on the basis of lies. Then it was to defeat international communism, supposedly on the verge of destroyng the west, this time it […] Continue Reading…

I lost it just a little in an interview on Hobart radio earlier this week. Tim Cox was interviewing me about Pauline Hanson and he started talking about separation of powers.
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