Lacking Transparency: Israeli Drones and Australian Defence
“Give us the chance to compete, to see our capabilities, to compare, to see the benefit we can bring with our [drone] system” (Shaul Shahar, […]
Politics
Political correctness is not stopping silly people from telling lies
Freedom of speech should not confer the right to tell blatant lies but, time and again, that is what we see happening. That bastion of […]
Attacking the ‘socialist left’ is a hard sell
The Coalition have made their strategy quite clear. They are delving back to the 50s for a reds-under-the-bed scare campaign. Turnbull said Shorten was “thoroughly […]
Unnerving the Donald: North Korea’s Sixth Nuclear Test
We are now into reckless territory with the latest North Korean nuclear test – in all probability a genuine hydrogen weapon – sending the ever […]
Coping with Combat Readiness Strategies in US Global Alliance Systems
Denis Bright invites discussion on the state of Australian sovereignty in an age of combat readiness since the ascendency of President George W. Bush and […]
Super Mal of Monaro about to crash and burn.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird? It’s a plane? No it’s super-Mal soaring high above the Monaro Plains! Up, up and away! Faster […]
Mal’s Coalition cascades into chaos
By Ad Astra When we posted How are the ‘adults’ managing our economy? on The Political Sword in April it seemed as if Turnbull’s administration of […]
The Flawed Institution: Australian Marriage and the Same-Sex Debate
It’s a pretty curious thing to see: marriage being defended at all. Like slavery, and not necessarily inconsistent with it, marriage is an institution. It […]
The fluidity of tradition
Tradition is a word we’ve heard a lot these last few weeks, as the anti marriage equality crowd cast about, in increasing desperation, for […]
How many experts does it take to turn on a light bulb?
Despite countless bodies, committees, reviews and an army of bureaucrats, we are still no closer to an energy policy and prices keep rising. In 2005, […]
Durable Conspiracies: Twenty Years after Princess Diana’s Death
It has been two decades, and a stocktake of the conspiracy theories over the circumstances of Princess Diana’s death in the Pont de l’Alma road […]
Empty attack is back
It’s not surprising that the government has decided to target Bill Shorten personally and to run a scare campaign on Labor’s policies rather than pointing […]
The Korean Powder Keg
It was famously dubbed the European power keg, a term deemed appropriate by such strategists as German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Such figures feared the […]
Can the Government Survive?
When the Turnbull government won the last election by just one seat it was generally felt that they would probably survive the next three years […]
From the heartland of privilege: the week in politics
Statues of Lachlan Macquarie and Captain James Cook were graffitied by protesters last week, in an action the most cowardly prime minister in Australian history […]