Category: Opinion

❝Question Time was supposed to increase trust in the institution of Parliament by keeping the executive government accountable. But it has now been reduced to a scripted pantomime….❞

❝Young people today!” The Yorkshire-accented words emitted from the narrow-screen television in the Monty Python classic skit.

I was reminded of this last week when the “young people today” were hit with a 7.1 per cent increase in their student debt through indexation. On the average debt of $25,000 that is $1775. It is the highest indexation for three decades…❞

❝The Constitution gives some Australians more rights than others. Or in the words of George Orwell borrowed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, “some Australians are more equal than others”. They are called Tasmanians..❞

❝You get more clarity when you ask what you are fighting AGAINST rather than what you are fighting FOR. And perhaps one of the best answers to that comes from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. They are crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, or more precisely waging an aggressive war, genocide, and targeted violence against civilians.

The western democracies must not give up on Ukraine using weasel words like “reality” and “compromise”. The enemy is not Russia or the Russians, but Putin. As it was not Germany or the Germans, but Hitler.❞

❝It would be good if he were for real and Australians could have a serious debate about population and immigration policy without name-calling people as racist if they dare point out that high population growth is appallingly destructive of the environment and an economic misery for all but a few economic elites.❞

Here we go again, yet a couple more subtle quiet shifts of wealth to the already wealthy away from middle- and low-income people.

The process can be seen with several announcements in the past week or so: the Reserve Bank’s decision to lift interest rates yet again; the interest cost of government debt to be $122 billion over the next five years; and the finding that in its last year the Coalition Government spent $21 billion on consultancies…

High immigration threatens multiculturalism in two ways. First, the pressure it brings on infrastructure, particularly housing, and government services hits recent immigrants hardest.

The disappointment – especially among people in the media – at the settlement of the defamation action between Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems was almost audible.

Inequality is rising in Australia. A two-tier society has been created. In the top tier are those who have taken advantage of middle-to high-income benefits or will inherit from those who have. They can buy houses, go to private schools, and afford gap fees and jump the queue for good medical treatment. The bottom tier is everyone else.

❝With Dutton’s reverse doublespeak, he gets something broad, aspiring, and worthwhile and condemns it with narrow, distasteful words: “the Canberra Voice.❞