The findings of the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption, released in December, if implemented by Federal Parliament, will go some way towards tackling the abuses of power by leaders of a handful of trade unions, but many issues remain unresolved. Dyson Heydon. The royal commission was roundly attacked by the ALP and…
For years, successive governments in South Australia, backed by radical environmentalists, have trumpeted alternative energies such as wind and solar as the future for the energy-starved state. Leigh Creek township relies almost entirely on the coalmine. Unlike the eastern states, which have plentiful supplies of coal for base-load power generation, South Australia has relatively little coal, and its major deposit is found at Leigh Creek, over 500 kilometres north of Adelaide. The source of electricity until the 1940s was the privately owned Adelaide Electricity Supply Company, which refused to use the brown coal from Leigh Creek. Seventy years ago, when…
Over the Christmas/New Year holiday period, Victoria and Western Australia were ravaged by bushfires that caused the loss of hundreds of houses and thousands of farm animals, though, thankfully, few lives. Gary Featherston, chairman of the Victoria division of the Institute of Foresters Australia. The ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology – predictably – blamed “climate change”, and pointed to the higher temperatures and lower precipitation which accompanied the el Niño event in Australia in 2015. State premiers and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited the fire-ravaged regions to express sympathy for those families who had lost everything, promised…
Even before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s meeting in Paris began, ambitious plans for a global agreement on mandatory reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions had been scaled back, following clear signs that major greenhouse gas emitters – including the United States, China and India – were unwilling to accept a binding agreement. The polar bear…
