Anyone concerned about the speed with which our freedoms are being lost should read 'A Liberal State', David Kemp’s new book, to find out how slowly they were won. It is also a reminder of Robert Menzies’s fight against conventional thinking and how nobody liked him -- except the voters

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The Garden State has become Animal Farm, where all are equal but some more equal than others. Major supermarkets thrive while mum-and-dad stores go broke. Union building sites operate, but non-Left public protests are quashed by a politicised VicPol. What matters these days isn't who you are but who your mates are

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It is perhaps a blessing that veteran climate alarmist Lesley Hughes is such a magnet for prizes, awards, accolades and honors. With all the horrors she predicts for our ravaged planet, it must be restorative to take a break from doom and revel in the acclaim of the catastropharian cult's fellow leading and most vocal members

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When I joined the Foresters of Australia it was an organisation supporting experienced, pragmatic, scientific land management and healthy debate. As demonstrated by the rejection of the paper I was to have presented, yet another body has come to be dominated by politically correct groupthinkers prepared only to hear views that endorse the dogma of preconceptions

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US-built Virginia-class submarines present many advantages over the misbegotten French submarines now being re-designed from nuclear to diesel-electric, a folly fraught with so many complications no sane materiel-acquisition policy would even consider such a move. More than that, such an improvement in our defence systems would be cheaper, much cheaper

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Incompetence, vainglorious arrogance, lies, blind eyes on the bench and an aggressively politicised police force have all helped make Victoria an even more miserable spectacle in this age of COVID. That the Andrews government continues drowning the state in the cesspit of its own corruption is to be expected. But why is the Prime Minister defending and underwriting the race to ruin?

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Little known these days and out of print, 'Chain of Darkness' is nevertheless a book worth tracking down. An acidic roman-à-clef inspired by a gifted journalist's stint with the ABC in the early days of TV news, it will lead readers to an unavoidable conclusion: then as now, the national broadcaster was a poorly managed dysfunctional mess, just in a different way

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"After watching the heartbreak of the latest lockdown in Victoria I have formed the view that border closures and other knee-jerk reflexes jeopardise national cohesion. My fellow Australians, I remind you that we are one and free, and that the greatest threat to our freedom is not COVID but our response to it. Now, after delaying too long, I propose to do something about it"

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Ollie Robinson -- that modern rarity, an Englishman who can actually play cricket -- has been banished from the sport amid howls of outrage over tweets he sent years earlier, when still a callow teen. Once again, the scolds have risen to brandish their virtue and, once again, they are proving far more offensive than the target of their condemnation

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When Maori warriors ate a foraging party their shipmates sought vengeance. Cook would have none of it, instead determining what prompted the slaughter and then inviting aboard the offending chief as an honoured guest. Peace prevailed to the benefit of both Maori and Pakeha. We might do well to reflect upon Cook's forebearance as a practical example of reconciliation-in-action

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Homosexual identity has become one of many battering rams for intersectional politics. Homosexuals are not Magical Elves. Being homosexual is messy. It involves sexual acts that were until recently recognised as hazardous to health. There is no basis, in Scripture or Natural Law, by which the Church can bless practising homosexuals

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Common Grace is a 'progressive' Christian organisation that has taken up the fight for a treaty with Australia's Aborigines. How this might be achieved, the legality of such a pact and what it might promise are issues never explained nor, apparently, examined in anything but the fuzziest focus. Could it be that advocates prefer not to notice the devil in the details?

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Art needs patrons, but discriminating ones, which no doubt helps to explain why practically all public art these days manages to combine mediocrity with monstrosity. This strikes me as particularly so when alleged artists are granted access to the public purse by hapless bureaucrats taking their advice from aesthetically and intellectually corrupt apparatchiks

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Of all the errors in Bruce Pascoe's amalgam of epic nonsense, the publishers of his latest edition appear to have corrected just one mangled 'fact', an incorrect latitude reading. Meanwhile the book remains in use in schools, its blatant twisting of the historic record untouched as a blatant fraud's career horizons and bank account continue to expand

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It was undeserved, given that Victoria's incompetence in dealing with COVID has been wrapped from the start in a caul of lies, but Treasurer Josh Frydenberg nevertheless has come to the party with yet more aid to take the pressure off the incompetents ruining Victoria. The pity is that he didn't ask some very pointed questions before doling out the latest aid

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That the demoted attorney-general would claim a triumph in the resolution of his libel action against the ABC is understandable. His political career has been, if not wrecked, certainly shunted into a siding, there is to be no vindication nor reversal of calumnies, and his ABC tormenters remain defiantly and loudly unchastened

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Historians who soften the realities of Aboriginal life before white settlement hide the truth for political purposes, intent on depicting an Arcadian black paradise torn apart by brutal intruders. That's why William Buckley's account of his 32 years with the tribes of Port Phillip has been sanitised, redacted and, above all, misrepresented by broadscale and quite deliberate omission

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Viking helmets are fetching and widely available, plastic ones as well as metal. Were I to buy one, and still more wear one, it would cement my new identity. Who could doubt me? I have blue eyes, surely a clincher, and I sometimes use one of the rowing machines at my gym. By current standards, what better credentials could I need to file AHRC complaints about anti-Norse racism?

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You needn't be a professional art critic to appreciate the skill and the power Johannes Leak poured into his entry, a portrait of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. Indeed, as this year's competition demonstrates perhaps more than any previous year, being a luvvie arbiter of merit obliges the specific exclusion of what is beautiful, good and worthwhile

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The more I learnt of Curzio Malaparte the less I trusted him. At times he was a visionary writer but I wonder how much invention was involved in his portraits of contemporaries such as Himmler, whom he claimed to have met. The lack of trust affected my reading of his books, though not my interest in the man who wrote them

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The Australian expat's saturation in Italy’s culture and its religious past is evident everywhere in his new novel, 'The Diviner Comedy', whose success in melding disparate material into a fascinating whole is owed to decades of developing that most valuable of literary skills, paring away the inessential

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Cabals of unnamed 'professors' attempting to silence him, the miraculous discovery of Aboriginal textile technology no one else has ever seen, possum skin cloaks of time-warped provenance ... yes, the lips of Australia's leading and most richly rewarded fauxborigine are moving yet again and the lies grow ever larger

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The actor who has brought the artists Turner and Lowry to the screen and, indeed, to life, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he was honoured as the year’s most promising actor. Those who recognised his talent were not misguided

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The term ‘illegal logging’ keeps popping up in media coverage, especially at the ABC and The Conversation, despite a court having ruled there is no shred of substance to such criticism, as harvesting operations are approved by a government agency and subject to detailed pre-planning, in-field supervision and post-harvest regeneration. Yet the lies never stop

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