Even when the police foil massacres before they can happen and the prosecution obtains convictions, sentences are likely to be far less than what a reasonable person would regard as appropriate. Terror has changed the way we live. It should also change the way we think about punishment
Rather than indulging his inclination to echo the opinions and prejudices of the Left's progressive choir, the Pontiff would benefit from the example of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in honouring the timelessness of the best Catholic social and political thought
Have you noticed how elections that produce results counter to the Left's wishes -- Trump and Brexit, to name but two examples -- are sneeringly dismissed as manifestations of the hoi polloi's ignorance, stupidity and bigotry? Those progressives, they don't like democracy
Like Lawson, my Christmas memories contain some ghosts -- my grandparents and parents among them -- and some trying times, including being called away to bushfires as I was poised to carve the duck. Unlike Lawson, I've never had to dine on fried plum pudding and salt kangaroo
Despite the global revolution in urbanisation now under way, many Western strategists and military specialists remain cautious about embracing urban warfare as a central mission. They have good reasons for such caution -- and just as many to overcome that reticence
Many of what pass these days for mature adults believe the views of sixteen-year-olds are worth taking into account, and why wouldn't they? Their own views are baseless invocations of ideas blowing in the wind, therefore no more valid than those of callow youths
The SBS series was valuable, but might have achieved much more had it eschewed the easy and obligatory voicing of several participants' 'white guilt'. First, that sentiment is unwarranted. Second, self-laceration doesn't do a thing to get the rubbish cleaned up
Fairfax alumna Lisa Pryor has taken to the pages of the New York Times to insist that Australians, like the editors who chose to run her piece, are scared and sobbing that Hillary Clinton will never be president. Pity about what she got wrong and left out
Judges are supposed to be Parliament’s faithful agents seeking to implement its objectives, rather than joint law-makers. It is difficult to see how that judicial mission might be reconciled with the fundamental principle that it is elected representatives who make laws
Peace on Earth and goodwill to men, it's the spirit of the season -- unless, of course, you are a warmist who needs an ARC grant to confirm that partridges get in pear trees to escape the rising seas. As for those lords a'leaping, it might be they're jumpy because the climate scam is running out of steam
No surprise that sharks are attracted to areas where food is plentiful and, likewise, learn to avoid dangerous locales. In this regard they are far smarter than green-thinking alarmists, who denounce netting while remaining pointedly unaware that a rotting shark drives away fellow predators
Peter Smith has exposed the hollowness of ageing-related excuses for high population growth, but misses the point that these are merely excuses. Until we have a government willing to elevate the interests of ordinary people, the immigration throttle will remain glued to the floor
Does anybody, apart from the Prime Minister, really believe that wrecking the economy in order to combat a trace gas makes any sort of sense whatsoever. Worse than that, if are we just going through the motions to look good before the rest of the world, that isn't working either
They Marched in March -- the usual suspects in all their serried shades of anger and incoherence -- because, well, it would have made even less sense to bemoan the fact that Tony Abbott and the Coalition won an election last September by April-ing in April. Zeg is fearful of such antics' impact on the easily impressed.
At the University of Wollongong there is so much diversity to honour, especially when Christians are demanding all the attention with their mangers and tinsel, that staff have been sent a chirpy reminder that Christmas is about much more than the Messiah
Climate change is torching Australia, according to the likes of Tim Flannery and his fellow warmists at the Bureau of Meteorology. If only the money now spent on computer projections and big-ticket fire fighting gear could go toward fuel reduction
A New Zealand court has rejected the argument that one can claim asylum from the alleged ravages of climate change. For the plaintiff, it is back to teeming Kiribati, where the real problem is a booming population
A cash-strapped America no longer has the resources to continue as the world’s policeman, as its craven capitulation to Tehran makes clear. For Australia the message is chilling
Greg Sheridan doesn't like Donald Trump and never has, but he really shouldn't allow that antipathy to frame the incoming US president beneath the ever-dark cloud of his personal contempt. Still, there is some good news: his columns don't appear daily
When I was teaching, I would try to get students to run their own reliability tests on the sundry internet sites they would plunder in their search for essay material. 'As with any information,' I would intone, 'we must ask who is putting it before us, and what is their motivation in doing so?'
An older population is a consequence of capitalism making Western societies richer beyond anything conceivable when our grandparents were young. Capitalism, albeit with hiccups and an occasional convulsion, will go on making us richer and better able to care for the elderly
What astonishes me is the lack of evidence to support massive medical intervention aimed at "changing" a child's sex when such procedures are simply not necessary. The enthusiasm of ethics committees in hospitals, health regions and universities for such procedures is an ongoing mystery
Criticise the HRC all you want, but this Coalition government knew about the QUT case for a long time and did nothing. It made no moves to amend 18C. It did not indemnify those QUT students, which it had the power to do. If alleged conservatives can't get this right, what good are they?
When Peter Minter banned Quadrant's poets from his magazine's pages on the grounds that they had published in what he likened to a Nazi journal, the curious might have wondered just what sort of verse he actually favours. Here's a hint
Readers can form their own judgement as to whether this first-person account would count in Andrew Bolt’s challenge to Robert Manne to “name ten” Aborigines stolen purely for racial reasons
PM Stephen Harper has three election victories under his belt and, from a conservative point of view, not much to show for them. Being nice to political enemies is all very well and good, but it leaves your supporters less than impressed
If "Indigenous culture" is to be recognised in Australia's Constitution it is vital to understand what the term means. Rap songs and break dancing, perhaps?
If a slick video and the IPCC's latest inaccurate and untruthful arguments are the best it can do to demonstrate a dangerous warming problem, its advice should be ignored and funding withdrawn
Christmas has come and gone, all the many rich and diverse celebrations of the day proceeding without a single bomb or nasty public word. The Queen and our Prime Minister each endorsed charity and goodwill, many ate far too much and family life, for many, re-assembled itself for a day-long reunion with knife and fork in hand. For most, that is. In the pages of the Fairfax press, novelist Christos Tsiolkas was pondering in no few words the absence of his desire to raise children. They are time-consuming, it seems, and detract from higher pursuits. As Tsioklas writes
My partner, Wayne, has always been clear that he didn't desire children. Like many of us, he is hungry for more time, and when he gets it, he works on the garden.
You'll never have to endure a high school production of Iolanthe when your sole progeny is a turnip.
Tsioklas's The Slap sold well and became, inevitably, an ABC series that introduced the broader Australia to life and anguish in the recently fashionable suburbs of Melbourne. It is a sharply accurate portrayal which perhaps explains why there is not one sympathetic character in the entire novel. They have a way of conducting themselves, you see, the members of this almost-inner-city class of which Tsioklas is both observer and member. It's a certain bluntness, as when describing his reaction to a sentiment mysteriously common among parents (emphasis added)
...a friend would offer that being a mother was her greatest achievement or another friend would state that his being a father had finally given meaning to his life, and I had to check the unworthy feelings of envy and jealousy that crept up on me. These emotions rushed through me, overwhelmed me, and I had to choke back the urge to retort:
"You just had a f--- and got pregnant, what great achievement is that?" Or to repress a poisonous schadenfreude, if, on becoming teenagers, their children had started acting up and were now disappointing them.
Tsioklas can be observed at length, at great length, casting his seed upon the ground via the link below.
-- roger franklin
In today's Fairfax press, former Canberra Times editor-turned-academic Crispin Hull (above) is depressed at the state of the world. Like most columns, columnists and content in the SMH and the Age, its diseased Melbourne sister, there is really no need to read the lamentation, as his dire fixations are entirely predictable: Trump, Brexit, global warming and non-left political parties which, inevitably, he describes as "hard right" etc etc. There is this, however:
...we can hope ... those seeking to retain power will realise that fairness, openness and a determination to govern for all, not just their financial supporters, will lead to political success and a better world to live in.
Noble sentiments -- and yet there was something about that sentence's invocation of fairness and financial supporters which tickled the memory. Ah-ha, that's it! Mr Hull's past as course convener at the University of Canberra's journalism school. As the Australian reported in April, 2012:
Crispin Hull, a former Canberra Times editor, and course convenor, advised a UC tutor to pass two students in their journalism assignments, despite her objections.
Hull wrote in an email that he took a "pragmatic view" about the poor English of overseas students, explaining it was a case of "grinning and bearing" it.
"They will return to China and never practise journalism in Australia," he wrote.
"If these assignments had been produced by a native English speaker who might be let loose with a UC degree on the Australian journalism scene, I would fail them. But that this (sic) not the case.
"I think it best to give them a flat pass without breaking it up. Tell them their English expression needs a lot of further work. It is a question of grinning and bearing it."
Responded Lynne Minion, the tutor Hull urged to pass the fee-payers and whose failing grdes were subsequently overturned.
"I believe to award a pass mark to undergraduate students that should fail really is a scandal ... I think it is fundamental to the quality of the tertiary sector in Australia that this must be eradicated. That this happened at UC is an ethical lapse in those who pursued it and those who turned a blind eye."
The Australian's archived report can be read via the link below.
In the Age and Sydney Morning Herald today, remaining readers of those publications will have preconceptions further confirmed that Donald Trump is a Hitlerian svengali whose election has invited the brown-shirted "far right" to goose-step through the corridors of power. The report, picked up from the Washington Post, begins by noting that "a small but determined" band of neo-Nazis in Michigan has stopped flaunting swastikas in an effort to go "more mainstream". This in turn prompts a journalistic round-up of the Left's handy and standard boogeymen -- the Klan, David Duke, backwoods militias and, if you can believe it, people who wear their hair "in an undercut style once popular among the Hitler Youth".
Nazi haircuts! What more proof could anyone demand?
Need it be said that the story is piffle, that it is part of an emerging narrative intent on framing the next four years as a period that will see the politically correct tirelessly encouraged to denounce tax cuts and any easing of the regulatory straitjacket as the moral equivalents of invading Poland? You would need to be supremely dim to give such a slur any credence, which explains why Fairfax editors published it.
Trouble is, the jackbooted legions whose hatred is said be soiling America's fruited plain are an uncooperative lot, as Fairfax US correspondent Paul McGeough will have to admit if he ever gets around to correcting a pre-election report that appeared beneath his byline on November 3. The multi-Walkley winner informed his readers:
"Vote Trump" was spray-painted on the ruins of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, 160 kilometres north-west of Jackson, overnight on Tuesday. Local fire chief Ruben Brown said the church was badly damaged but no injuries have been reported.
Coinciding with the Ku Klux Klan's endorsement of Donald Trump in a campaign that has become overtly racist, the attack kindles fears of a return to the 1960s civil rights unrest, when southern black churches were often torched or bombed by white supremacists.
It's a minor quibble that McGeough preferred to generalise about "white supremacists", rather than identify the church-burners of long ago for the segregationist Southern Democrats they really were. So let that omission pass and focus instead on the real problem with his bid to tie Trump to the Klan: it wasn't white men in pointy hoods who burnt that Mississippi church. According to the state police, it was a black congregant -- that's his mugshot atop this post -- who set the fire, presumably in hope of prompting some pro-Clinton votes and publicity.
Mississippi Department of Public Safety spokesman Warren Strain says Andrew McClinton of Leland, Mississippi, who is African-American, is charged with first-degree arson of a place of worship.
It would be nice to think McGeough's editors will publish a retraction, that they are keen to set the record straight. And while they're at it, they might take a close look at another of his dispatches which alleged a wave of attacks by racists celebrating Trump's victory. Yes, there have been many reports of Trump-inspired racist assaults -- and it seems, as even the Washington Post concedes, more than a few were false-flag hoaxes.
But this is Fairfax we are talking about, so don't hold your breath. The failing publisher's latest beat-up can be read via the link below.
-- roger franklin
Australian voters are not being told the truth about the proposal for constitutional recognition of indigenous people. The goal of Aboriginal political activists today is to gain ‘sovereignty’ and create a black state, equivalent to the existing states. Its territory, comprising all land defined as native title, will soon amount to more than 60 per cent of the whole Australian continent. Constitutional recognition, if passed, would be its ‘launching pad’. Recognition will not make our nation complete; it will divide us permanently.
What does it take to be a successful writer in Australia? Alan Gould draws on …
