Opinion Articles

Labor’s Proud Legacy of Science Collaboration — and how Captain JJ is blowing it apart

Here’s one for the political tragics: which party in Australia’s history has built and backed more of our science and public research institutions than any other? Answer — the Australian Labor Party. From Ben Chifley’s decision to turn the fledgling CSIR into the CSIRO in 1949, to Roger Cook’s recent push for a Future Health Research Hub, Labor has treated science like a favourite child — one it knows must be fed, funded, and defended

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Opinion Articles

What Exactly is the State’s Policy on Drought?

Whether this season ends up in the grain record books or just fades as another patchy year, one thing is guaranteed: somewhere in the Wheatbelt, rainfall will slump into the bottom 10% of the long-term average. DPIRD’s own numbers show decile 1 years strike the Eastern Wheatbelt more often than many realise. Yilgarn is the poster child—bottom-decile rainfall in 2002, 2006, 2010, 2019, and again in 2023. A pattern like that gets the climate catastrophists

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Opinion Articles

The climate of Climate Change has changed

Something’s shifted. You can feel it in the air — and no, I’m not talking about carbon dioxide, the superfood of plants. I’m talking about the political climate, the social mood, the economic headwinds, and, most importantly, the dawning realisation across much of the Western world that Net Zero isn’t the pathway to the promised land — it’s a mirage. Not that you’d know it from the days of the federal election, where the government

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Opinion Articles

RSPCA (Routinely Soliciting Public Cash for Activism) RSPCAs Role in the Live Export Ban

So it begins. This week, the Federal Minister for Agriculture has finally — after 14 months of paralaysis — confirmed that the rollout of the transition package for phasing out live sheep exports will begin sometime in the next 12 months! To add insult to injury, there’s still no detail on how farmers will be assessed when applying for funding. But don’t worry — we’re told the best and brightest are working on it. In

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Opinion Articles

The first in, now the first out: why farmers are leading the retreat from net zero

It wasn’t so long ago that every farm group in Australia was racing to outbid each other on climate targets. The mania for net zero swept across the country like a green gold rush, with grains, wool, dairy, beef and sheep all falling over themselves to sign up. Not to be outdone, every other industry – mining, aviation, transport – also jumped aboard, egged on by the government dream of becoming a clean energy superpower.

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Opinion Articles

Spin, Smirks & Stonewalling: A WA Estimates Special

It’s High Time for MPs the likes of Lachie Hunter to go Hunting Being the tragic political junkie I am—thirty years orbiting around party rooms, committee hearings, and bar tabs—I’ve wasted more of my life watching WA parliamentary estimates hearings than any sane human ever should. You’d think I’d learn. But like slowing down to gawk at a roadside crash, every year I can’t help rubbernecking the sorry spectacle. Estimates is meant to be the

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Opinion Articles

The Great Regional Disconnect: Why the Only Towers Getting Funded Are the Ones That Don’t Make Calls

Recently, I sat down with a cross-section of regional stakeholders and Telstra executives for a full-day workshop to unpack the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of bush connectivity. Jointly organised by WAFarmers and Telstra, this wasn’t a PR exercise—though Telstra could certainly use one after the 3G shutdown debacle and the backlash over its increasingly dubious coverage maps. Credit where it’s due: they showed up. But where was Optus? Presumably reclining on its

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Opinion Articles

The science is settled? Not so fast

We often hear that the science of climate change is settled—but a growing number of scientists are challenging that notion, reminding us that science, by its nature, is never truly settled. Frank Batini is one of them. A forester and environmental scientist, Batini holds qualifications from Oxford University, the University of Western Australia, and the Australian Forestry School. Over the course of his career, he has held several senior roles, including Adjunct Professor of Environmental

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Opinion Articles

Greta and the island of green dreams

In 2030, after years of bleating from the sidelines, a motley mix of the nation’s most fervent idealists finally decided to put their cabbages where their mouths were. Disgusted with Australia’s so-called environmental backsliding—failing to meet its 43% emissions reduction target, failing to build tens of thousands of wind turbines, and failing to become the renewables superpower it promised the world—they did what few middle-class dreamers, equipped with useless Arts degrees and heads full of

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Opinion Articles

Ring Ring Ring Ring

Well, the state and federal election circus has come and gone, and nothing has really changed—which means it’s time to dig up the issues that both governments managed to bury under a pile of clown acts that are far from funny. One of the most glaring examples is the implosion of the Whadjuk Aboriginal Corporation—one of the 526 multi-million-dollar Indigenous Prescribed Body Corporates that operate across rural and regional Australia. These entities, large and small,

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