It’s no surprise that many would like to be as good at basketball as Kobe Bryant or at golf as Tiger Woods. And it’s equally no surprise that this isn’t possible. But there’s one way to make us ‘more equal’ and that’s to make those better off much worse. To continue with sports, for example, let’s say we limit the amount of time Bryant and Woods train each day. This would disrupt their performance and, in doing so, reduce the gap between our abilities. But the objective has been achieved – we’re now more equal (although still a great deal […]

The late Senator Neville Bonner (1922-99) was Australia’s first federal Aboriginal Parliamentarian, serving in Australia’s federal Senate from 1971 to 1983. I decided to dust off Bonner’s story in a recent Australian magazine because his life and political success is a classic conservative example of rallying around principle over complexion. What’s often brushed aside in the reflections of Bonner is that he was a member of Australia’s Liberal Party – Australia’s equivalent of the GOP. While the political contexts in the United States and Australia clearly differ, Bonner’s journey has familiar appeal to black conservative politics in America – facing […]

Kim Carr, A Letter to Generation Next: Why Labor, Melbourne University Press, 2013 Australian Senator Kim Carr’s A Letter to Generation Next: Why Labor is a rare addition the shallow pool of books encouraging young Australians to be more involved in politics. Carr – a federal Senator for Victoria since 1993 – clearly sees much more of a role for government in his appeal for the next generation to join the Australian Labor Party’s cause. The role of government, Carr recalls in George Black’s words from the New South Wales Chamber in 1891, is to “make and unmake social conditions.” […]

Theodore Dalrymple, The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World, Monday Books, 2012 ‘The most decisive thing that’s happened in my political lifetime,’ said John Howard in a 2009 interview, ‘is the collapse of Soviet imperialism. It dwarfs anything else.’ This is significant from Howard, whose political life covers nearly half a century. His observation, however, is lost on a generation of younger Australians. Certainly, oppressive regimes exist today but are fewer in number, while command and control economics have been trounced by liberal market capitalism and globalisation. For anyone under forty the idea of growing up on […]