In the annals of policy, strategy and budgeting, the AUKUS pact comprising Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States will be seen as one of the most mindless, absurd projects of tiny, poorly ...

Graeme Couch. Graeme Couch is an engineering systems specialist, formerly an energy regulator in NSW, and management consultant, recently retired from working with electricity and ...

Long before the rise of the modern novel, fairy tales provided generations of listeners and readers with images of transformation, justice, adventure, and hope. They offered something more than ...

People (rightly) get upset if they are a victim of discrimination in employment or in receiving entitlements from government. In large measure this reflects a widespread conviction that the merit ...

Australia isn't failing through dramatic collapse or overt criminality. It's something more subtle and insidious. Australia is, in a structural sense, a corrupt system, but not in the way the term is ...

All this begs the question of whether what we are seeing is equal employment opportunity or the rules being bent to create an uneven playing field that is leading some key players (especially men?) to ...

Political parties once helped organise public life by turning competing values into programmes of government. But in many democracies, that organising role has hardened into a system of permanent ...

The sad truth is, they don't need rigour. They can walk this into Parliament, get a room full of MPs nodding along, and watch ...

The zero-emissions debate asks when we can stop burning crude oil. The harder question - one that remains largely unasked - is what we propose to make things from once we do. Electricity generated by ...

At the moment, according to the latest Newspoll, the split is One Nation 31 per cent, Labor 30 per cent, Coalition 18 per cent, Greens 11 per cent, and others 10 per cent, with each of those blocs ...

The transition from beneficence to harm is seldom abrupt; it typically unfolds gradually, propelled by good intentions and increasing confidence in one's own judgment. Numerous troubling episodes in ...

And it works a treat. They call it the "silver bullet" - because of how completely it stacks the deck in favour of the alleged victim. Usually, the process is well in hand long before anyone gets near ...