COVID stats, The Australian's editorial recently assured us, show a direct relationship between vaccinations and fewer deaths. Look a little closer and the official numbers are inadequate at best, misleading at worst. The problem, a glaring one for those who care to notice, is that a wealth of other factors are neither mentioned nor taken into account

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As soon as Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1934 he enshrined environmentalism as a guiding principle, explicitly including organic farming and sustainability as key items of the agenda. Those policies fared no better than that of today's Greens, albeit with one exception: the Nazis never tried to run the Reich on wind power

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Who can deny that life would be dull without the involvement of Madame Folly? She thrives among desperados searching frantically for a workable plan and especially enjoys cavorting with folk who believe they can control the weather. But most of all she adores those who insist the cause of an energy crisis is also its solution

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Daniel Lewkovitz, who might once have served as the dictionary illustration of a typical Liberal candidate, contested Wentworth for the Liberal Democrats and finished as one of May 21's also-rans. He's smart, so the result was no surprise, yet he felt compelled to run in order to protest 'the Liberal Party doing fundamentally illiberal things'

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Black armband historians have long presented as an indisputable fact that scores of Tasmanian Aborigines were slaughtered near Hobart in 1804, all accounts hanging on the 'eyewitness' testimony of convict Edward White. Well it turns out White couldn't have been there, as the authors of a remarkable new book demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt

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Aid to remote Aboriginal communities has done more harm than good. But to those well-meaning souls who empty the horn of plenty into communities whose power structures and mores they can't begin to understand it always seems a good idea. That insistence on repeating failure in hope of a different result is the genesis of so many ongoing tragedies

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The problem with boys, if you put credence in feminist thought and the teachers it influences, is that they are not girls. It's a perspective recently aired on Twitter by a US professor of journalism, who fears XY chromosomes make young lads natural alt.right recruits. The professor was soon taken memorably to task

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Federal and state govern­ments, their bureaucracies, institutions and courts have all shown themselves unable to satis­factorily resolve the question of who is and isn't an Aborigine. Expect a plague of Bruce Pascoe-style pretenders if Labor's referendum to give Aboriginal people their own constitutional platform carries the day

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Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston's 'The Dismissal' purports to be the last word on the events of 1975, and many people believe that, with its release in 2015, the subject has been done to death. Not true. The only thing that has been butchered is the reputation of Sir John Kerr -- a gross injustice I hope my new book goes some way towards remedying

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Along with hermaphrodite toads, snowless ski slopes, empty dams and extreme weather events (formerly known as 'storms'), it seems climate change drives otherwise bright people to venture far beyond the reach of reason. The medicos imploring women in labour to forego the pain relief of nitrous oxide, a minor greenhouse gas, illustrate one of the more extreme symptoms

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