It takes character to do what’s right and it takes courage to disagree with your peers. On this score, Bob Carter was a good and brave man whose memory we should honour and whose example we should strive to emulate. As Professor Carter found, and later his James Cook University colleague Peter Ridd also, this…
Originally published in the Sun, 12 June 2018 Less than a year before Britain formally leaves the EU, it’s still not clear what sort of a Brexit the government wants. Because some senior members of the government don’t want to leave at all, they’re investing far more energy in “remoaning” than in getting the best…
Originally published in Quadrant, April 2018 Paul Ramsay was an unlikely billionaire. On his own admission, he was not a dominating personality; not an organisational expert; not an intellectual giant; not an impresario of ideas; and not a financial genius. Yet he founded a business from scratch and turned it into one of the world’s…
Originally published in the Australian, 23 February 2018 One thing I am not going to cop is gratuitous criticism from ministers who are only in government because I led them there. It is the prime minister’s right to choose his ministerial team and, given some of the policies of this government, I’m happy to serve…
Australian politics is at a low ebb for many reasons but one is our tendency to tell other people how to do their jobs rather than to get on with our own. A classic instance was the Queensland premier’s recent demand for a national approach to anti-bullying in schools. But unlike Queensland, the federal government does not…
Originally published in The Australian, 1 February 2018 One of the current government’s great successes has been border protection policy. Given the scale of the people smuggling that had developed under the former Labor government, not even the original architects of border protection, John Howard and Philip Ruddock, thought it could be done. But very…
Originally published in The Australian, 22 January 2018 “All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” asks the John Cleese character in the classic film Life of Brian. It’s worth asking the same question…
Originally published in The Australian, 20 November 2017 It is never easy to talk to someone about death, even in the abstract, but it’s especially daunting to raise it in the context of “what happens after you’re gone”; and if it involves a vast sum of money, it’s all so much the harder, seeming both ghoulish…
Originally published in The Australian, 14 November 2017 Whichever way it goes, the supporters of marriage between a man and a woman can be proud of their campaign. With polls showing support for same-sex marriage as high as 70 per cent just two months ago, the No campaign has done a fine job reminding people of…
Originally published in the Spectator Australia, 10 November 2017 The other week I was trying to elicit some interest in politics from a dozen country schoolkids. Eventually, I managed to coax a single question out of them. It wasn’t the standard query of teenagers forced to think beyond their usual interests. There were no teacher-pleasing…