Recently added articles from National Observer - Australia and World Affairs:
Editorial comment.(Editorial)
Dec 22, 2008; ... The curse of Kosovo Georgia's military incursion into the effectively autonomous, and unwillingly Georgian, provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where Russian peacekeepers, according to international agreement and the desire of those provinces' people, were stationed, and ...
In this issue.
Dec 22, 2008; ... We lead with the second part of Mervyn Bendle's two-part article on Saudi funding in Australian universities. When the first part of this important study was published in National Observer (No. 72, Autumn 2007), it brought on its author's head the wrath of the authorities at Griffith ...
How to be a useful idiot: Saudi funding in Australia--part II.
Dec 22, 2008; ... This article complements an earlier paper that discussed the implications for Australia of the availability of massive funding, largely secret, from Saudi Arabia and related fundamentalist Islamic regimes. (1) It was noted in that paper that such funding would be likely to damage and even ...
Lights out on liberty.
Dec 22, 2008; ... On August 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe." Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more ...
Australian intelligence: confronting the past for a safer future.
Dec 22, 2008; ... A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the ...
Global warming--myth, threat or opportunity?
Dec 22, 2008; ... The most critical problem we face is not global warming, or how to make fuel more expensive so we will use less, but providing enough at affordable prices to keep our economy going until alternatives can become reality. The Lucky Country has the choice between disaster and a unique ...
Sinful WASPs.
Dec 22, 2008; ... My topic for this article is the relevance of secularism for understanding our political situation, which is the one that is now dominant in Canada, the US and much of the Western world. Underlying this investigation are two assumptions about what secularism is or is not. One, it is not ...
Margaret Thatcher: a legacy of freedom.
Dec 22, 2008; ... It is a great pleasure to be back at Hillsdale College, Michigan. It is some 32 years since I first visited the college for a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. Those few days were an important education in American politics for me. The conference was attended by many people who had just ...
Days in the life of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Dec 22, 2008; ... The last great figure of the 20th century, the Russian novelist and dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, died on August 3rd. He first came to prominence with the publication of his concentration camp novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962. This was part of Khrushchev's ...
Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism.
Dec 22, 2008; ... TERROR: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism edited by Michael T. Davis and Brett Bowden (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2008) Paperback: 408 pages Rec. price: $45.00 "Know one's enemy" applies to the war on terror as ...
Our culture-killers.(Editorial comment)(Editorial)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The latest evidence from Queensland supports the view that many of the nation's children are being denied adequate knowledge of their centuries-old culture. Culture begins with language. Corrupt language, by malign neglect of grammar, proceeds to remove from the curriculum most of what our ...
In this issue.(Editorial comment)
Sep 22, 2008; ... The current issue of National Observer is headed by a powerful, scholarly article on the limited nature of Australia's form of democracy, which is not, strictly speaking, democracy at all, but something more accurately described here as a ballotocracy. The ancient popular assemblies in ...
Australia--a democracy or just another ballotocracy?(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Try to imagine Australia if its 1890s colonial founding fathers had incorporated into the federal constitution the following clause: (1) No Bill passed by both Houses of the Federal Parliament shall be assented to by the Governor-General until after a referendum, if a referendum ...
Dr H.V. Evatt--part II: the question of loyalty.(Herbert Vere Evatt)(Report)
Sep 22, 2008; ... This article (1) focuses on a question that haunted Evatt's political career during the Cold War--his loyalty to the Labor Party and, above all, his loyalty to Australia and its national security interests. Despite his tactical and opportunistic rejection of selected communist policies, ...
"Reshaping Australia": 2020 and all that.(Australia 2020 Summit)(Essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... When the full glory of the Australia 2020 Summit burst upon me, my first thought was of that old Groucho Marx saying that he wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have him as a member. In company with about a million other Australians, the aberrant thought emerged, ...
Suharto's legacy.
Sep 22, 2008; ... The recently deceased President Suharto of Indonesia is routinely referred to by Australian journalists as a brutal dictator--they can't find a good word to say about him. Yet no-one did more to improve Indonesia as a nation, and to provide long-term stability for Australia and the region ....
CSIRO's political partisanship.(Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation editorial on abortion)(Critical essay)
Sep 22, 2008; ... Last year, the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) journal Sexual Health (2007, 4) published an editorial by Jo Wainer entitled "Abortion and the full humanity of women: nearly there". It strongly supported the legalisation of all abortion. ...