Posted: 9:36 am on 1st May 2012
Opera companies and orchestras worldwide are closing at an alarming rate for a number of reasons (including the global financial crisis), but the lack of change in the fundamental structure of opera companies is an extremely important contributing factor. We live in a very different time and the expectations of the past can be assumed no longer. We can blithely ignore this, and many practising artists in classical music are…
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Posted: 8:00 am on 26th April 2012
France’s fraught relationship with globalisation has once again been laid bare. Global economic, political and cultural integration seem to be a constant source of concern for the French political class. Notwithstanding the policy space between the French presidential candidates, they share an abiding distrust of the rest of the world. The centre-right’s Nicolas Sarkozy is calling on his fellow citizens to ‘Buy European,’ while the socialist presidential front-runner, François Hollande,…
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Posted: 11:06 am on 19th April 2012
Joe Hockey’s comments on Lateline criticising the growth of the entitlement culture in Australia are correct. In this country, we are basically 20 years and one mining boom behind the dire situation in the European social democracies. The costs of an ageing population will add to the tax burdens future generations face unless we start to re-prioritise public spending and rediscover the lost ethic of self-reliance. But before getting too…
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Posted: 10:22 am on 17th April 2012
John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that free speech and the resulting competition of ideas give us the best chance of combating and debunking idiotic and potentially pernicious ideas. He judged that it is healthier for illogical and morally noxious views to be subjected to the harsh light of public debate than to have them fester behind closed doors. While Mill was right to champion free speech, he was…
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Posted: 9:32 am on 14th November 2011
Watching the unfolding drama in Greece and Italy, I can’t help wondering whether governments in the West today, ones trying to run extensive welfare and entitlement programs, are actually capable of cutting spending. Take the United Kingdom. David Cameron’s Tory government is often portrayed as a heartless cutback government, with spending being peeled back here, there and everywhere. That’s a fairly common perception. But the Cameron government hasn’t cut spending…
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