Favourable welfare benefits and preferment for Aboriginal people are already way out of line. Why should someone of equal disadvantage be treated less favourably because they cannot claim Aboriginal forbears? It is a blot on the fair-go egalitarian society which attracted people like me to make this country their home and a source of entirely justified pride

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The BBC six-part thriller focuses on the abuse and manipulation of cutting-edge deep-fake CCTV footage for personal and political ends. Yes, it's fiction, but only just. During the recent lockdowns, New South Wales and Victoria trialled facial recognition software to help enforce movement-restriction laws, while in Western Australia monitored almost 100,000 people to assure compliance with COVID edicts

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The most popular thing to do in Varanasi is to die—or for those who are already dead, to be cremated. If the ancient city was known as the City of Light, it was probably on account of all the funeral pyres. For the well-to-do, a good old-fashioned body-burning on the banks of the Ganges is still available, even in our world of pollution restrictions. For everyone else, there are handily located gas-fired crematoria

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In years past, you turned up at Circular Quay with the kids, walked around The Rocks and uttered 'ooh-aahs' at the pretty images projected onto the Opera House. How could such a plebeian experience satisfy the yens and yearnings of Sydney's oh-so-woke elite? Obviously, it couldn't, which explains why 2023's festival is a brightly lit adoration of Aborigines, gaydom, the environment and 'curated' $99 cheese boxes

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New-style disinformation requires little in the way of evidence. You don’t have to show the origins of fake reports, as was the case when exposing Soviet mischief, or how they are linked to the crime. No, you infer the crime itself from the fact that something undesirable has happened. After that you confidently attribute it to someone or some thing you don't like and which can be portrayed as benefitting

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How thoroughly was hydroxychloroquine's potential as a COVID treatment dismissed and its advocates derided? Well, consider this telling statistic: researchers who did not receive Big Pharma's grants and support found it was an effective treatment in 86% of cases. By contrast, sponsored researchers concluded that only 5% of patients had positive outcomes. Make no mistake, the fix was in

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Peddling falsehoods garnered from careerist green academics, rent-seekers and doom-laden hysterics takes a toll on journalists working the climate beat. The poor dears are stressed out, fearful of the dreadful future they predict, and that is to say nothing of the moral dilemma confronting reporters garlanded for eco-doom stories that just a few short years have exposed as the most utter, fact-free tosh

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After the Soviet Union's fall, Putin pragmatically abandoned Marxism-Leninism, leaving him in want of a rationale for his loathing of the West and a pathway for restoring Russia greatness. His great mistake -- one of them -- was persuading himself that Ukrainian nationalism was not genuine but, rather, evidence of a conspiracy for which the remedy was short, sharp military action. Oh, how wrong he was

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Wouldn’t you think, were you a disciple of the climate pseudo-religion, that you would do all in your power to avoid planetary annihilation? Perhaps even contemplate the embrace of nuclear energy? Maybe not if your real goal was to stuff the human race; and, say, a quarter or more the global population

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Once the idea of an entitlement takes a grip on the public mind any proposal to reduce it can be easily opposed on moral grounds. If we now say, for instance, that the government shouldn’t endlessly subsidise the lifestyle choice to live in remote regions, it is treated as an affront to Aboriginal rights. How much better were presumptive entitlement to be trumped by a recognition of moral duty and sacrifice

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Keith Windschuttle’s column in our upcoming June edition reveals the current Aboriginal suprema for constitutional change, Megan Davis, who calls herself a Cobble Cobble woman, did not grow up in any community of that name. That exposé has produced requests that we re-publish Keith’s 2022 article in which he shows the Aboriginal population is riddled with claimants who fail the official identity test. So here it is again

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Bamboozling folk with data or simulations that may, or may not, describe reality can be fun. Astrologers, readers of entrails and other sybills made a lucrative living from it. Likewise today's careerist climate oracles, who long ago conceded the inherent uncertainty of their predictions but still insist neither knowing or understanding the immense intricacies of global weather 'is no longer a responsible justification for delay'

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Like rough terrain in a rear-view mirror, the bumps and jolts of the COVID years are fading from memory and public debate. There are new crises and threats, from inflation to the Left's vituperative abuse for Voice opponents, but to lose sight of what was done in the name of public health is to allow those in whom we placed our trust to get away with their lies and bullying. Justice demands at the very least a royal commission

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As the COVID panicdemic raged, JobKeeper paid out $89b to workers forced to stay at home, with payments often higher than what people had received while working. More money out the door. Between 2019 and 2021, Commonwealth public debt rose from 35 to 48 per cent of GDP, the states going even further into hock. Here we might learn from the Swiss and the 'debt break' that has served them well since 2001

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There are superb works to be seen at the Gallery of NSW, but not if you amble downstairs to view 2023's Archibald and Sulman finalists. With one or two exceptions what is to be found are the scrapings of shallow minds, meagre talent and paint-by-number cliches about the evils of capitalism, Gaia-killing cows, oppressed Aborigines and ... well, you know the stuff that gets luvvies excited

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Among the most despicable moral failings of the zealots of decarbonisation, environmental, social and governance principles is an indifference to the point of callousness that elevates a 'first world' ideology above all else -- including the welfare of the world’s poorest people. Bluntly, climate activists are at best shallow, parochial and self-centred, and at worst, greedy narcissists

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The way literature is taught defines how destructive and impoverished education has become. No longer expected are humility, patience and a willingness to accept the limits of one's own knowledge. In today's classroom, students are now taught the author is dead, that there are as many interpretations of a text as there are readers and, the greatest travesty, that those same texts have no inherent value or meaning

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If the spirit of tolerance endorses the fundamentalist 'other', it also endorses intolerance at second hand. This is the West’s multicultural dilemma. It requires all citizens to tolerate non-Western minorities in the name of diversity, but the minority need not adapt to the secular values of the adopted country. Put simply, cultures move from barbarism to the rule of universal reason at different speeds

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Narendra Modi will receive a rapturous welcome to Sydney, the cheering crowds begging to differ with activist academics who will tell you that he has made India a tyrannical fascist dictatorship. Check the facts, and you'll find that India is the freest country this side of Poland -- and the freest in the world with anything like its GDP per capita of just $2600

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As economic activity recovered post-COVID, energy demand surged, but supply could not keep pace due to the neglect and closure of carbon-fueled generation. As a further and directly related factor, add to this finance sector's enthusiasm for ESG -- environment, social and governance -- which has seen capital expenditure on oil and gas decline by almost 60 per cent since 2014

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Voice 'representatives' -- erroneously labelled because there will be no electoral roll and no voting -- will act only in the interests of a tiny, ill-defined minority. Ill-defined? Sure is. Would it 'make representations' on behalf of all 812,728 Australians who identified as indigenous in the last census ? Don't be silly! Should the referendum get up it will be the Aborigine Industry embedded in the Constitution

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Because trans activists insist words have both a common, surface-level meaning and a deeper ideological one, the truth is ignored by policymakers who hear only the superficial rhetoric of human rights. The solution, though, is simple: liberal democracy and free speech -- allowing, of course, that gender dissidents are prepared to wear the piled-on consequences of their candour and respect for facts

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Even a short visit to the supermarket can raise profound questions of human existence. How far, and to what extent, are people the masters of their fate? Totally? Not at all? Somewhere in between the two -- in which case, how does one apportion the ratio between misfortune and the bitter fruits of self-infliction?

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The Earth Journalism Network is an organisation you've most likely never heard about. But journalists eager for handouts and paid trips to international doomfest eco conferences certainly have. All they need do to secure such largesse is get themselves noticed and produce the green piffle their patrons demand. In South Africa this has meant glowing stories about the joys of renewables even as the lights go out

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