Business shouldn't get a vote in any fair election

​If you live in inner Sydney, your vote for Lord Mayor this September will be worth half that of a business. A convenience store gets two votes; a bank gets two votes; an absent landowner gets two votes. Residents get one.

Next, we must end live export industry

Animal cruelty isn't just a problem for the greyhound industry.

Why we won't see marriage equality for ages

The election's big winners are those few who can't abide the gays being wed.

Pop stars don't need to speak up

The weird belief that the ease of expression brings a duty to say something should be firmly dispatched. Of all the things we need to do, making speech more compulsory than free is not one of them.

Lessons for Australia in overseas political turmoil

The fear is coming from overseas politics, not our own, and it's unnerving.

The problem with victim impact statements

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I can't think of a more powerful case for letting victims of violent crime be heard when deciding an offender's punishment than the letter written by the Stanford rape survivor.

Locking people up makes no economic sense

A century ago, Australia locked up far fewer people than we do today. In 1918, not a time famous for its progressive views on dealing with criminals, the imprisonment rate in Australia was less than 60 prisoners for every 100,000 adults. Today, it's more than 140.

The benefits of the car horn are vastly overrated

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Few things contribute less to the common good as sounding the horn, in a world already too loud, which is almost always done for no proper purpose. All it does is make the driver feel better, briefly, and everyone else worse.

Sex scandal strikes at The Sun on Sunday

Democracy is threatened in London, not because of war, terrorism or the referendum on Britain leaving the European Union, but apparently because the law stopped a newspaper telling the world about an old threesome.