When Australia voted in favour of gay marriage just 5 years ago we were reassured that people against the change had nothing to fear. When the gay marriage bill was in the Senate I moved an amendment, with a supporter of gay marriage Senator George Brandis, to protect those who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. That amendment failed when almost all of the supporters of gay marriage voted against it. Read more

You know we are in trouble when a Swedish teenager starts making more sense than our self-proclaimed leaders on energy policy. This week Greta Thunberg, famous for organising student protests on climate change, reversed course and said that it would be a "mistake" for Germany to close nuclear power plants "in order to focus on coal". Read more

There is one redeeming feature of cancel culture. We can now more easily see who is telling the truth by who gets cancelled by our modern-day, big-tech censors. Coronavirus came from a lab, the vaccines do not stop transmission and hospitals are conducting sex change surgeries on minors are all views that big tech have suppressed in the last few years. They have all been proven true or at least, in the case of the lab-leak theory, credible. Read more

Many would not know there is a nuclear reactor just 30km from Sydney’s CBD. The Lucas Heights nuclear reactor does not produce electricity but medicines, which one in every two Australians will need during their lifetime. Ironically, it is also the reason Australia maintains a unique ban on nuclear energy. In 1998, the Howard government needed to pass legislation to rebuild the Lucas Heights reactor. To get the bill through the Senate, the government agreed to a Labor and Greens amendment to ban nuclear energy. The debate in the Senate on the nuclear ban idea took fewer than 30 minutes. Read more

When the Callide C4 turbine exploded last year half a million Queenslanders lost power. Outages at our other ageing coal fired power stations forced factories to shut this winter just to keep the lights on. Despite billions spent on solar and wind, renewables failed to fill the gap. This should not be a surprise. Solar and wind energy are, by definition, weather dependent power systems. They are part time energy solutions. Yet our society needs full time power to function. Read more

The last sitting weeks of a parliamentary year are a bit like the last week of school. Everyone is keen to finish for the year and get away from class. So it is no surprise that in the last week of the Senate in 1998, a momentous decision for Australia’s energy security was made in haste. Read more

It is a fitting time for Dylan Alcott to be Australian of the Year while the Australian Government invests record amounts in disability care. Dylan Alcott was left a paraplegic in just the first weeks of his life after an operation to remove a tumour in his spinal cord. Dylan has gone on to win gold medals in wheelchair basketball and tennis. This week Dylan had the deserved honour of being just one of 10 "ordinary" Australians officially invited to the Queen's funeral. Read more

It is hard to explain the deep outpouring of sadness on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. The Queen has already been rightfully granted the adjective “the Great” but she won no great battles, passed no reforming laws nor heralded in some great revolution. Instead, she is a hero to millions for her contrast to other greats of the modern age which may be dubbed, for want of a better term, the age of ego. In the age of mass media, instagram and democratic elections, political leaders almost always have to think highly of themselves to succeed. Read more

In Netflix series The Crown, Queen Elizabeth takes a liking to a then young evangelist Billy Graham and invites him to preach at the royal family’s private chapel at Windsor. Later, over a cup of tea, the Queen tells the American preacher that her great joy during his sermon was to feel as a “simple congregant” and that she “thinks of herself as a simple Christian”. Read more

This week an electric car's battery ran dead near a coal mine in West Virginia. Six coal miners helped push the car to the mine for it to recharge. It was a fitting metaphor given that most electric vehicles are charged by coal fired power through the electricity grid in any case. Read more