The recent sole sitting week in September showcased the tensions on both sides as we move closer to the October 2024 election. The Premier, back from leave, was looking to regain standing after media scrutiny while the Opposition was preparing to capitalise on the leadership rumblings. Given the events in August, the Premier sought to […]

Truly great leadership provides guidance, inspiration, and motivation. Great leaders help create vision and rally people around a common cause. When politicians work across party lines to get things done, the community benefits. When the opposite occurs, we all lose, and voters’ faith in our political system lessens a little. When this happens consistently, our ‘democracy’ […]

The contest of sport is deeply rooted in the Australian psyche, no more so than at this football grand final time of year. Two deeply combatant teams compete for a position of supremacy after a season of hard work. We share the pre-game excitement, the intensity of game-day, the exuberance of the winning team and […]

Too much talk and not enough action!  This is just one of the many damning observations from the Chair of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.  Commissioner Nick Kaldas, a former deputy commissioner of the NSW Police Force, took the unorthodox approach of appearing at the National Press Club recently, in what appeared […]

American President Abraham Lincoln understood something about the challenges that lay ahead for his country and said that “The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it. And so it should still be today for the Federal Government through its Treasury generated Inter-Generational Report (IGR).  Started by Peter Costello under the Howard […]

Australia has a long tradition of story-telling bush poets – from Banjo Paterson to Henry Lawson, PJ Hartigan and Dorothea Mackellar. The list is long and distinguished. Recently, I was lucky enough to be at a lunch event where the speakers included some of Australia’s finest modern balladeers – Murray Hartin, whose extraordinary Rain From […]

If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime … and if you give innovative industry veterans a challenge, they create a fishing fleet.  Last week, the first of 10 affordable housing cottages for women aged over 55 […]

The term ‘sensible centre’ is often used by politicians to describe their view of where best to position their party in politics, somewhere between left and right, or extreme and moderate; a position that the majority of Australians would support on important issues. Former Prime Minister’s Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull both used the term […]

Appropriately and famously on November 11, 1947 (Remembrance Day) in the House of Commons Winston Churchill said that: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst […]