The news from those who profess to be experts is that koalas are teetering on the brink of extinction, a dire situation for which the solution appears to be more grants and higher profiles for the more quotable doom-ringers. The truth, as evidenced by history and principled research, is that koala populations always have and always fluctuate wildly

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Abortion, nasty business. Best not to think too much about it. Their bodies themselves etc., and leave the girls to it. The comfort of evasion. The false refuge of choosing not to settle on a moral position. That's the way it was until one woman's tears told of anguish, regret and a crippling, hopeless longing

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Daniel Andrews should apologise to Aboriginal citizens for deceiving them into believing his government has the legal right to negotiate treaties of any sort. The best advocates can hope for is a joint 'motherhood statement', one whose cliches must be by definition as empty as this Premier's promises

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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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