Run of the mill banking is pretty simple: take deposits at one rate of interest and lend at a higher one. But risk management is another matter and requires bright people. As the failure of Silicon Valley Bank demonstrates, it is not a job for terminally woke incompetents fixated on skin colour and the sexual preferences of clients and colleagues

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For too long, activist groups and NGOs have run the conversation on indigenous affairs. Australia is not better from this. Schools, state governments, businesses and universities shouldn’t treat any Australian as an 'invader' or 'living on stolen land'. This is especially true of children burdened in their classrooms with unwarranted guilt

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Since there is no legal-institutional mechanism for holding the UK's parliamentary government to account, the effect is that it is accountable to no one, except every five years at general elections. The consequences have now been demonstrated by three years of the COVID hysteria's arbitrary edicts and arrests

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During the Brexit campaign, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (a Remainer) opined that sovereignty was rather an 'esoteric' matter, as if it were something the voters would find hard to understand, and should be reserved for experts to discuss. Do citizens in Europe and elsewhere want that? It is doubtful they will be asked

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Promoting students who have not acquired the necessary skills is no kindness. Educators will tell you that repeating a grade damages self-esteem, but the real damage comes later with the discovery that an apprenticeship is unobtainable, nor any other career path that might lead to a better job and higher pay

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One only need cast one’s mind back to the darker days of the Covid pandemic to recall the relish with which suddenly famous scientists and omnipotent moral busybodies went about tormenting the populace for its own good. The climate scare is more of the same, playing out over a much longer time frame

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The burgeoning ranks of Australia's genocide scholars, advocates of a republic and the Voice and, of course, the Prime Minister have their visions of the nation they hope to leave to their children. Figuratively speaking, of course. If they really do get the Australia they want, there won’t be much left to leave

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As the Soviet Union celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its 'revolution', terror had been unleashed across its entire territory. On the subject of the anniversary the Workers’ Weekly became poetic: 'While Mussolini yelps like a mad dog that ‘Bolshevism must be kept out of the Mediterranean’, the spirit and meaning of Bolshevism is filtering through the nations like a fragrant incense'

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There is an established pattern which will soon focus on Peter Dutton, who has not yet been framed by the Left as worse than Scott Morrison. But that will come as surely as the sun rises in the morning, with the Coalition leader certain to be denounced as the worst and most repugnant creature since Tony Abbott, who was worse than John Howard. Conservative evil is not identified by specific acts but by sequence

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The final activity at a recent conference I attended was a presentation of reworked Aboriginal statistics: in other words, lying. The organisers were quick to remind us that, in the name of 'safety', they would shut down any dissenting voices. They needn’t have bothered. The vibe was more Hillsong than struggle session. I couldn’t help but think we were fiddling while Alice Springs burns

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Les Hiddins, better known as The Bush Tucker Man, has spent three decades investigating reports and folk memories of a 'white tribe' of Dutch shipwreck survivors said to have established a colony near the site of what became the Hermansburg Mission. It is so outrageous a theory, the same historians who allow Bruce Pascoe to go uncriticised won't even consider it. Yet archives and detective work keep turning up tantalising clues

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There is much that is worthwhile about My Last Drink: 32 Stories of Recovering Alcoholics, not least the significant difference between Alcoholics Anonymous and government programs. AA customers, by and large, understand that, from a life-management point of view, they are nobody's victims but their own and the solution to their own problems

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It sounds so simple and oh-so lovely: a world soon to be powered by 'clean, green' renewable technologies. Run the numbers, however, and the gold-plated impracticality of such a vision becomes instantly apparent. What a rational analysis reveals is that, if coal and gas are to be spurned, the only power generation that makes sense is nuclear, small modular reactors in particular

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If Australia finds itself in a real crisis—not a COVID crisis or climate change crisis—when our freedom, our homes and lives are threatened by aggressors, then we’ll wish we had read and absorbed the best of Machiavelli’s advice. In a sense, he wrote a book during violent times for violent times

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Will any real information on the disastrous policies of the day, be it it the Voice or climate agendas of state and federal governments, seep into the minds of most voters? A silly question to which the expected and duly delivered response is 'The planet is dying! We must do our bit to save it.' That’s the level of sophistication which swings elections

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All of Murray’s poems, we remember, are dedicated 'To the glory of God'. The keynote of 'May', for instance, is the reference to Mary, as 'the beginning'. This introduces the celebration of God’s gift of the natural world and of the conflation of divine and human life within it, of which the mystery of the incarnation, the Word made flesh, is the eternal focus

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The problem Gildas Sapiens identified in the mid-sixth century was the growing separation of the British isles into divided ‘nations’ and the threat to its integrity presented by unlimited migration from Europe. Were the Welsh monk to return he would, of course, be astonished by the wonders of the modern world, but the problem of migrants pouring across the Channel in their monthly thousands would be instantly familiar

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The spreading of false information to children in Queensland's schools about the 'enormous resource of traditional culture' under the guise of education would not so long ago have evoked loud and spirited public condemnation. Now the feel-good myths of Aborigines inhabiting a pacific and harmonious pre-settlement Eden are to be endorsed by the full authority of an Act of the Parliament

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The extraordinary act of registering two relatively ineffective, inadequately tested and obscenely expensive antivirals while refusing to accept the use of cheap, effective repurposed drugs such as ivermectin reflects the new and grim reality for medicine in the COVID era. Clinical decisions being made by medical bureaucrats outside the traditional doctor-patient relationship may well prove to be the most toxic legacy of the Wuhan virus

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Behind Marcus Stewart's face paint and possum-skin robe is a great-great-grandfather whose story is one of assimilation, hard work, achievement and acceptance. Today, his descendant leads the push for a treaty with Victoria -- a treaty promoted as redressing the sins of the past. Thing is, in Stewart's family history, evidence of such sins is vanishingly elusive

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Niki Savva's latest book concerns itself with Scott Morrison's fall and is spiced with anonymous insiders' quotes about a government that rated conservative principles of little account while marching resolutely into the electoral abyss. A more interesting exercise would have examined Canberra's hollow men and women and why the journo-politico clerisy encourages them to conduct themselves irresponsibly

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The alarmists' warnings about long-term climate changes arise from short-term sampling, which understandably produces straight-line projections. Given that 130,000 years is about the typical length of a planetary climate cycle, this approach is akin to examining one frame from a feature movie and presuming to predict the plot, characters, location, climax and box office receipts. Future generations will shake their heads at such arrogant stupidity

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Delving into Quadrant's online archive, across the years from 1956 to the present, the enthusiasm founding editor James McAuley etched into his very first edition is manifest: 'In spite of all that can be said against our age, what a moment it is to be alive! What an epoch for a magazine to emerge!' A resource and wealth of reading for subscribers, it is also a reminder of how necessary it is to continue the combat he commenced

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The striking thing about ABC Managing Director David Anderson's most recent turn before Senate Estimates was the absence of any direct involvement in his own newsrooms, the least you might expect of a man billed as 'editor-in chief'. Without genuine editorial supervision, it is no wonder the national broadcaster's reporting is a reeking, biased, error-prone mess

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