Sanctions are ineffective, partially effective or cripplingly effective. I think we can say that while Russian oil and gas are needed, the sanctions will fall in the middle category. Stranger than fiction, is it not? We’re sanctioning Russia and its rich citizens as comprehensively as possible yet pleading with them to keep the oil and gas flowing

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Here's an opportunity for Scott Morrison to take the high ground and maybe win the election by making it clear that coal, oil and gas will remain the dominant form of energy in Australia. It's a a matter of national security, he might begin, explaining that wind and solar farms and transmission lines running every which way are the very definition of sitting ducks

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Tribalism explains the way politics is played these days, not just here but all over the democratic world. It is that blind loyalty to side rather than principle which explains why voters from Labor's traditional base persist in backing a party in the thrall of elites and fashionable opinion. My party right or wrong sums it up -- a tragic mindset as the election draws near

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It is possible -- nay, probable -- for rational folk without barrows to push being of two minds about the failed Religious Discrimination Bill. No law, as I see it, should license schools to discriminate against students for their sexual orientation, but it is also proper to insist on adherence to behavioural protocols such as boys dressing as, well, boys

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As in wartime, pandemics can justify the curtailments of freedom, but they must make sense and be applied only for a well-defined and temporary set of circumstances. That isn't what Australia has endured and continues to endure, with no end to the python grip of autocratic edicts anywhere in sight. What we can see is worse than failure. It is a betrayal of everything a healthy democracy holds dear

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The vaccines and their boosters are, like 'the science', never to be questioned, especially by those who have noticed the triple-vaxxed (and soon, no doubt, the quadruple-vaxxed) continue to feature in death and hospitalisation statistics. Political capital, reputations and, yes, money are on the line, so reasonable doubts are dismissed, rather than discussed, as 'COVID misinformation'

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Let me put it this way: one thousand times zero is not larger than one hundred times zero. Less theoretically, one thousand wind turbines not a-turnin’ provide no more power than one hundred turbines not a-turnin’. Yet here we are, being driven ever further down the road of folly by annoyingly noisy green romantics and their parasitical fellow-travelling carpetbaggers

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How mad is life in Australia's national asylum? Well, here is NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard from just the other day: 'The booster is ... pushing back against the evil of this virus, the evil air can wreck upon us.' Meanwhile, in the sane world of benign air, the readily spread but mild Omicron strain is removing any excuse for restricting freedoms

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I'm sorry, but after two years of hysteria my patience runs thin with the leaders who, to their shame, are now touting the mass vaccination of young children in no unjabbed danger whatsoever. As the vituperative rhetoric of the Djokovic debacle continues, one cannot observe Florida, its governor, his common sense and backbone without being overcome by jealousy

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America's founders had it right when they drew up the Bill of Rights and added the first ten amendments to their Constitution, all having to do with to do with shielding the individual from the State. COVID has shown that, while they didn’t try hard enough, the fruit of their efforts still surpass the protections extant in Australia and what used to be known as the Free World

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