Dubbo Photo News & Dubbo Weekender

Columnists & Opinion

Cartoons: Paul Dorin

2018: The Winners & The Losers

2018 is now thankfully drawing to a close. The usual events, such as a change of Prime Minister and shambolic national energy policy, shared centre stage with severe climatic events and stagnant wage growth. It has been a long and exhausting year that we can now put behind us. But not before the annual Dubbo Weekender Awards! This year the Awards have been spilt into two categories – Winners and Losers – and the judges…

To our American brothers... How to vote better

Australia has a kinship with the United States of America, we often use the saying ‘when America sneezes, Australia catches a cold’. When something happens ‘in the States’, it is not long before we have the same experience on our side of the Pacific Ocean, be it a popular culture high or a stock market low. We see your patriotic declarations of freedom, democratic process and global leadership; and have long admired your courage and…

Trumping Journalism: A danger to democracy

Three years into Donald Trump’s ultimate vanity project, the daily barrage of his atrocities against decency, ethics and the English language continue ad nauseum. Trump is used to getting his own way. His business empire and the Trump ‘brand’ was built around his name and his image – the image of a top negotiator who always came out a winner. Like a true narcissist, this image was carefully stage managed, continually ‘on message’ and not…

Pakistan, Cricket, Morrison: Priority check needed

The Summer of Cricket is off to a chaotic start with the Australian cricket team humiliated by Pakistan in a series played in the United Arab Emirates, meanwhile the games’ administrators are mired in the fallout from the ethics enquiry. Cricket Australia was found to have a culture that treated the game as a business commodity, with a win-at-all costs culture. This culture has infected the players to the point that successive teams have engaged…

Wentworth bites back against government chaos

On the same day Australia welcomed members of the English royal family to our shores to begin a fortnight of celebrating Anglo-Saxon heritage and hereditary monarchy, Australia’s Bigot-in-Chief Pauline Hanson moved the following motion in the upper house of our Nations’ parliament: To move that the Senate acknowledges: 1. The deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western Civilisation, 2. That it is OK to be white. That the motion even made it to…

Morrison the Evangelical

In his maiden speech to Parliament in 2008, Scott Morrison declared “growing up in a Christian home, I made a commitment to my faith at an early age, my personal faith in Jesus Christ is not a political agenda”. “In recent times it has become fashionable to negatively stereotype those who profess their Christian faith in public life as ‘extreme’ and to suggest that such faith has no place in the political debate of this…

Tracking the government spending blowout

$80 BILLION would buy a lot of aged care. $80 billion would buy a lot of public education. $80 billion would buy a lot of water saving measures. Why $80 billion? What is the significance of this amount? This is this amount of money spent by the federal government in just the last THREE months. $34 billion of that was spent in August alone, quietly in the background of the Canberra Backstabbing & Bullying Festival.…

Fixing parliament: Here’s 10 easy steps for reform

Politics and politicians are a very easy target. My last article “How to destroy any remaining voter goodwill in one easy lesson” [Dubbo Photo News, August 30] highlighted how the most recent backroom machinations and leadership ambitions ruined any remaining voter goodwill towards politicians. Given the accumulated behaviour of the last 10 years, capped off by the latest leadership coup, the article wrote itself. Things are no better since the change of leadership a month…

How to destroy any remaining voter goodwill in one easy lesson

What were Peter Dutton and this cabal of urgers thinking? Encouraged by the right-wing press and the conservative hardliners of the Liberal Party, the Abbott-Dutton gang decided that dragging the Liberals further to the right by installing Dutton as Prime Minister was an election-winning strategy – and PM Turnbull had to go. Surely any student of Australian politics knows the swinging voters are in the Centre of the political spectrum, not on the extremes of…

Silence is golden when you’re a shareholder

The easiest thing a person can do is find fault in others, and large companies are magnets for complaints – particularly when they disappoint expectation and make you feel your sole purpose in dealing with them is to feed their shareholding machine. In a recent speech delivered by Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) chair Rod Sims, he pondered why large companies might behave badly and what should be done about it. From the start…

Look who’s advocating we pay our taxes now

When asked what Australia’s national pastime is, most people would answer cricket, swimming, or football of some description. My suggestion would be tax avoidance, and its more devious offshoot – tax evasion. Australians hate paying tax. We dodge it, minimise it, and grumble about it. Elections are won and lost on the propositions of tax policy. The recent announcement by the Australian Taxation Office of up to $8.7 billion in lost tax revenue in 2014-15…

Try old school learning to light up your brain

Remember when you knew phone numbers off by heart? There would be at least 25 of your friends, your parents’ work, probably your school, your grandparents, the cinema along with your uncles and aunties. There would be 50 or 100 sequences of numbers which you could recall in an instant. Did you have a particularly good memory? No. Everybody did it out of necessity. We were born into a world where that’s what was needed…