The sudden collapse of Ansett Airlines has been followed by the inevitable recriminations against Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines, the NZ Government, and anyone else who had a hand in the company’s fall. The real blame lies closer to home: with successive Australian governments which have approved foreign takeovers of companies like Ansett; and which…
The sudden arrival of hundreds of "boat people" on remote Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island, and the stand-off regarding the future of some 400 "boat people" rescued by a Norwegian container ship near Indonesia, have raised the question of Australia’s treatment of refugees and illegal immigrants, but more fundamentally, of the inadequacy of Australia’s maritime…
About 70 years ago in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley predicted that scientists would clone human beings. His was a nightmarish vision of a future society in which human beings were designed by genetic engineering, mass produced artificially, and controlled with mind-altering drugs and a manipulated media. In 1997, just four years ago, scientists in…
The Federal Government’s decision to appoint a Royal Commission into the culture of corrupt and intimidatory practices in the building industry is an overdue attempt to restore confidence to an industry which for decades has been marred by violence and standover tactics. The building industry’s culture of violence came to the fore with the Builders’…
The latest revelation that American scientists have created the first babies carrying DNA from a man and two different women, through manipulating a woman’s ova, has caused the alarm bells to ring – momentarily – around the world. The practice, used to boost the low success rate in IVF by introducing exoplasmic material from a…
The Federal National Party leadership has been in a state of denial over vitally important research that shows it and other key institutions have grossly underestimated the value of the domestic market to our farmers. It shows that two decades of free-market policies eroded farmers’ access to the vital domestic market, this being a major…