Opinion

The minutes from the latest board meeting demonstrate that it gets the big picture, but the analysis of what it all means is addled. Consumer spending and private-sector investment in plant and equipment are not the same thing, but this simple fact is ignored

How do you replace a heritage of assimilation and civil liberties with diversity and repression of free speech? First, promote the mere giving of offence as subject to prosecution. After that, count on professional panderers like Bob Carr to agree that ethnic voting blocs need those special protections and, of course, lots of handouts

On paper democracy is gaining ground around the world. How curious, not to mention dangerous, that the popular will is now so often violated by unelected judges and courts in the very countries where the rule of the ballot box was born, as James Allan laments in his new book

The shrieking, howling, shout-you-down left likes to present itself as motivated only by the yearning to right injustice and make life more fair for all. 'Fair', especially, for second-raters whose instinct is to smash what they could never build themselves

The gay lobby should step very carefully in joining with the left in marginalising those holding traditional values. Should real discrimination based on sexual preference ever again raise its ugly head, they may well find conservatives to be their most effective supporters and protectors

Had the Romans adopted our current law's determination to save the sensitive and litigious from distress, the Pharisees would not have had to tolerate the enmity and harsh words of an upstart preacher from Galilee

If veteran journalist Seymour Hersh is to be believed, and there seems little reason to doubt him, the infamous sarin gas attack was the work of rebels acting in concert with Turkish intelligence and supplied by an unknowing US. The US President, it seems, was played like a fish on the hook

Get 'em young and fill their heads with warmist propaganda -- that seems to the unofficial motto of Britain's education establishment, which has just been warned by the Home Secretary that peddling propaganda as fact is a punishable offence

It came crashing out of the blue in Western Australia's re-staged Senate election -- that fuming, smoking, reeking bundle of adolescent incoherence known as The Greens and their policies. The big loser in Saturday's vote was Labor, and who can be surprised by that? With the Greens' Scott Ludlam tailoring his campaign to attract Labor's disaffected ferals -- 'Abbott is a homophobe', 'Abbott hates women' etc etc ad nauseum -- where else could Labor's hard-left contingent turn? Zeg's wonders where it will all lead.

Want your, er, highly innovative research to get lots of attention, the sort that keeps those grants coming? You could do worse than start with some kind words from a peer-reviewer whose work is glowingly cited in your own paper. After that, apply for the next batch of grants

You could argue that Russia's seizure of the Crimea was a popularly endorsed manifestation of robust democracy. Be that as it may, the notion that the invaded's unarmed renditions of their national anthem represents an effective response is clearly lacking

When your child is being conditioned to dismiss you as a hopeless crank for doubting the warmist dogma, when art classes produce apocalyptic visions of ecological collapse and lesson plans are inspired by the infallibility of Al Gore, it is a typical day in an Australian classroom

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing in itself, but an overdose of arrogance makes it infinitely more so. Doubt that? Just lend an ear to the oracular pronouncements on global climate by those whose greatest skill is not comprehension but a talent for hogging the microphone

The frightening aspect of this whole controversy about the Act's restrictions on free speech is the realisation that a large section of the political class, the media and professional multiculturalists not only dislike personal freedom, they actively detest it

Here's a way for defenders of Section 18 to demonstrate that the loathsome gag on freedom of speech might be worth keeping: They could prosecute their bigoted friends. You know, the March In Marchers with their placards calling for the assassination of a conservative Prime Minister