Utopia, you are standing in it!

Two committees of the Australian Federal Parliament examining proposed legislation on religious discrimination handed down their reports on Friday 4 February, 2022. Both committees recommended that the Bills introduced in November 2021 be passed by the Parliament, with some minor amendments. The report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights (“PJCHR”) can be found here, and that of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee can be found here.

While each report mentions a number of objections to the legislative package, it is significant that these cross-party committees both end up by recommending the enactment of the laws in substantially their current form. In my view this is an encouraging sign, that may signal that the legislation might find sufficient support to pass the Parliament before an election is called this year.

(There were “additional comments” made by ALP members of both Committees, but they did…

I wrote last month about a tax-and-spend proposal for single-payer healthcare in California (sort of a state version of “Medicare for All“).

I also analyzed the scheme in this discussion with Gene Tunny of Australia.

What’s remarkable, as Gene mentioned in his preface, is that the left’s push for single payer failed – even though Democrats have complete control of the Golden State, including more than three-fourths of the seats in both chambers of the state legislature.

So why didn’t those politicians hasten the state’s slow-motion economic suicide?

Almost certainly, the biggest reason is that even folks on the left have second thoughts about the enormous tax increase that would have been required.

As I noted back in 2016, big government is only fun when somebody else is picking up the tab.

Which motivates me to unveil a Twelfth Theorem of Government.

Let’s take a closer…

This is a timeline of the Roman Republic, cobbled together from various sources with some details added from Mary Beard’s history of Rome, SPQR.

As you can see, it consists almost entirely of wars because Rome was one of the most aggressive and relentlessly militaristic states in the ancient world, which is the basic reason for its eventual world domination. And when, by about 80 BC, they’d run out of people to conquer, they started fighting each other.

Military campaigning was a defining feature of Roman life and Roman writers organised the history of this period…around its succession of wars, giving them the shorthand titles that have often stuck till the present day.

…the Roman tradition [viewed] war as the structuring principle of history…

The Romans directed enormous resources to warfare and, even as victors, paid a huge price in human life…somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent of the…

Not for the first time in recent memory, Northern Irish politics is in flux, the UK government’s Brexit deal is causing ructions and the power-sharing institutions are on the brink of collapse. Alan Whysall assesses the current crisis and argues that the foundations of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement are at serious risk of crumbling.

Northern Ireland appears headed for further political turbulence, and it is not clear that devolved government will survive. Two steps within 24 hours by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), currently the largest party in the Assembly, have triggered this.

On Wednesday night, the DUP Agriculture Minister, Edwin Poots, announced that his staff would no longer carry out checks required at Northern Ireland ports under the Northern Ireland Protocol.

On Thursday afternoon, the DUP First Minister (FM) of Northern Ireland, Paul Givan, announced that he would resign his office on Friday morning over the Protocol, although…

Taking wind turbines out to sea not only escalates the cost of the occasional power they produce, it destroys coastal landscapes, birds and other marine life.

Millions of birds of battered out of existence by these things every year. And offshore turbines are driving puffins and other threatened species to the brink of extinction.

Wind turbine noise has been proven to disrupt whales’ sonar guidance and communication systems, creating another threat to the already threatened Atlantic Right Whale.

The damage done by offshore wind farms to fishing grounds is met with practiced contempt by wind power outfits and malign indifference by their political enablers.

And, as Viv Forbes puts it, offshore wind power facilities threaten the lives and lifestyles of coastal communities, everywhere.

Whirling ‘Triffids’ are now cluttering our coastlines
Spectator Australia
Viv Forbes
29 December 2021

‘I saw them now with a disgust that they had…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains how Energy has become the first and foremost world public concern in her Spectator article Energy is the most important issue in the world. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Gas prices are climbing, Russia is building pipelines, yet we’re focused instead on appeasing climate activists

One issue more than any other will dominate airtime and influence policy in 2022: energy.Americans are seeing the highest prices at the pump in seven years. Since Biden took office, average gas prices are up by more than $1 a gallon. In November, gas prices in Mono County, California hit more than $6 per gallon, forcing some residents to drive to Nevada (where gas taxes are lower) to buy fuel.

The price of natural gas in the US is at its highest in seven years, and up more than 180 percent in the last year…

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]
Another example of how ‘net zero’ dogma is going to be highly disruptive and expensive for energy customers, all in the name of appeasing climate obsessives.
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Installing a heat pump will require one in three homes to have an electricity upgrade, a power company has said.

Heat pumps and electric car chargers will mean a big increase in a household’s electricity demand, with many older properties requiring upgrades that can cost thousands of pounds, though most companies are planning to start “socialising” the cost by spreading it out among bills, says the Telegraph.

Western Power Distribution (WPD), which manages the electricity network for the Midlands, South Wales and the South West, said providing power to heat homes was one of the “biggest challenges” of the heat pump rollout.

“We anticipate that this will lead to the…

The above heading doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Isn’t that what one would expect, that a school set up to educate students in a particular religious view would apply those beliefs in its practices? But the press in Australia sees it differently, apparently. “School rules: Brisbane college expects students to denounce homosexuality” is the way that the Sydney Morning Herald puts it (Jan 31). Citipointe Christian College has sent a letter to parents spelling out its views on a number of issues, letting them know that the College expects students and parents to be aware of these views if students are to be sent there. Here I will comment on whether the College is legally justified in so doing.