Latest Articles
We are encouraged to rely more and more on government officials to do for us what we could equally well do for ourselves—and, maybe more importantly, not to do what might help us solve our own problems.
Sep 08 2024
10 mins
If we imagine a metric called the Pinocchio Scale, which measures the number of lies told by a politician as a percentage of his or her overall public statements, our current prime minister (for want of a better description), Airbus Albo, has moved well into uncharted territory.
Sep 06 2024
5 mins
Grim and Growing Darker
A friend in funds management in Sydney sent me an email last weekend which said in part that special interest groups “will not be receiving government funding for much longer. The outlook for the Australian economy is nothing short of frightening. We have utterly squandered a one-in-a-hundred year economic boom.”
Yes, a lot of people are now running around saying that the sky is falling, but how far could it fall? Let’s have a look at iron ore. The chart following shows Australian iron exports and prices from 1969 with a projection to 2020. The prices are in 2015 constant Australian dollars. Iron ore volumes are the blue line and prices are the green line:
Iron ore exports took off in the 1960s with the Japanese steel boom then hit a brick wall with the first oil price shock of 1973. There was a 14% volume decline from 1974 to 1981. The iron ore price entered a gentle long term decline from the early 1970s, losing about 30% of its value and bottoming out in the…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins
