If you are a premier whose state has been incinerated due to negligence, prefer the counsel of academic theorists fashionably opposed to widespread fuel reduction and indulge land-management departments riddled with green-minded ideologues, blaming 'climate change' rolls all too easily off the tongue. Especially a forked one

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Those on the Left, being childlike in their unthinking enthusiasms, are mostly republicans and prone to the pursuit of instant gratification, hang the details and consequences. That said, I might -- stress on "might" -- back a republic, but only if the likes of Peter FitzSimons spell out in explicit detail what they have in mind

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Were you to believe the Twitter posse, now shrieking in defence of a fauxboriginal's bona fides, the jackbooted Peter Dutton has targeted the 'Dark Emu' author as some sort of reprise and adoption of Nazi racial laws. Yes, they're really saying that, which probably means the AFP probe is going nowhere

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Sir Roger was the greatest conservative thinker of our age, and will stand with Russell Kirk in the US and Michael Oakeshott in the UK as the modern go-to men of tradition, part of the distinguished line that stretches back to Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville

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Very soon in Victoria it will be illegal to counsel a child against taking too big a step too soon to switch genders. Worse than that, it will be an offence to speak out against such 'therapy' in general. If the bill becomes law, radical civil disobedience is the only honourable response

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Scruton’s intellectual integrity made him a pariah in the eyes of 'all the people I knew'. These otherwise intelligent folk had turned their backs on a world he still revered, looking instead 'to Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong as their authorities ... in every area of human thought and action, art, literature, and music included'

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It was the ever-polite Sir Roger's audacious mission to confront time and again the Left with humorous and intelligent critiques of its nostrums and dogma, and to detail their inevitably awful consequences. In uniting tradition and freedom, he provided a counter to the hysteria, fear, irrationality, lies, fallacies, self-delusion and groupthink of ideologues

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With the Sussexes bound for periods of extended residency in Canada, or so it seems, how might the Royal Family handle its hundreds of events, appearances and obligations with two less members for The Firm to call upon? Previous monarchs, who spawned entire football teams of heirs and second-rankers, faced no such problems

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When Bob Carr proclaimed vast tracts national parks he did nothing to manage their ever-mounting fuel loads. Now we have the result: firestorms that roar out of the greenies' notional 'wilderness' to ravage the wildlife they claim to care about, plus farms, livelihoods and entire communities

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'It was towards the end of a long drought, and the country was like tinder for hundreds of miles round -- the ground for miles and miles in the broiling scrubs as bare as your hand, or covered with coarse, dry tufts ...'

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