First steps towards 21st century rail
Ideas@TheCentre – The CIS newsletter (Sydney), 30 October 2009 According to a Chinese proverb, every long journey begins with a first step. This holds true even for a [...]
Ideas@TheCentre
Regulation for regulation’s sake
Regulation is supposed to encourage good behaviour and control it to maximise the public good. But regulation has become an entity unto itself. [...]
Sisters are doing it for themselves
There is only one place on earth where a man’s world is still as it should be, and that’s Russia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has just released pictures showing him shirtless on a horseback, making fire by a lake and relaxing in a tree. As his steely blue eyes were gazing into the Siberian sky, nobody would have dared to tell the muscular ex-KGB man that men couldn’t be left to run things on their own. [...]
“Then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s”
The Catholic Church has long put the obstacle of the advocatus diaboli in the path of sainthood – someone who argues the devil’s case against the canonisation of a prospective saint. What the Catholic Church had not yet introduced, though, was an advocatus Australiae, an Australian gate opener to heaven. [...]
By their scandals ye shall know them
As long as we can get excited over something as trivial as Utegate, our condition may be hopeless but not serious. [...]
Who wants to be a neoliberal?
It is quite ironic how neoliberalism re-surfaced a few decades later, albeit bearing an entirely different meaning. Where neoliberalism once was a positive, optimist philosophy it has been reduced to nothing but a political swearword. Unsurprisingly, nobody wants to be a neoliberal any more. [...]
Happy Tax Freedom Day!
On 23 April, celebrate your Tax Freedom Day for 2009. You will be free from the taxman for the rest of the year. But enjoy it while you can: The government is working hard to push your Tax Freedom Day well into May next year. [...]
Lost in numbers
A billion here, a billion there, and soon we’re talking about real money. But how could we make the money figures our politicians are throwing around more comprehensible? [...]
Just another Muppet show
It takes a degree of chutzpah to hand over big subsidies to the car industry only to claim that this was a great environmental achievement. It’s the political equivalent of having your cake and eating it. [...]
An end to all lists
What a miserable place Australia must be if it finds itself behind a bankrupt economy and a country left ungovernable by the financial crisis. However, we may feel a bit better because Australia did not need to be bailed out by the IMF, nor did our capital cities see rallies of angry citizens which recently brought Dublin to a standstill. [...]