Destroy the Joint, schmoozing and the hypocrites

The announcement of a Royal Commission into child abuse by clergy is as big an issue as was the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption, if not bigger. This is…

13 Comments

A hypocrite for a Prime Minister, a hypocrite for a Chief Minister

Each man reaches perfection by doing his own duty; he worships god – from whom all beings come, by whom this universe was stretched forth – by doing his appointed…

13 Comments

The War on Terror and democracy’s faustian bargain

FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus. Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease,…

25 Comments

A lie by any other name does not make a truth, unless you’re the AFP

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its adversaries but rather by the fact that these adversaries finally die, and a new generation grows up familiar with the…

26 Comments

The real problem with hypocrisy – it knows no honour

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Milan Kundera One of the first Communist texts I read, following the French edition of Quotations from…

25 Comments

Forty years on, Indigenous women still without rights

It was freezing last night where I slept in my travels, below freezing in fact. In Bangerang country, home of the Yorta Yorta people, Mother Nature may have frozen the…

28 Comments

An ‘Ethics Commissioner’ without ethics: welcome to Australia

Yesterday, Thursday I received a phone call from Captain Fred Martens, the man who spent a 1,000 days in jail, having been wrongly convicted of an offence under Australia’s Child…

20 Comments

Lost Sovereignty; a disgraced judge and a kidnapped Attorney-General

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is both famous and obscure. A twentieth-century political theory, containing two canonical sentences: "Sovereign is he who decides on…

1 Comment