Professor Ross Garnaut recently signalled that Australia needed new industries built alongside mining and called for the exchange rate to come down about 40 per cent. Australia’s prosperity has been substantially dependent on supplying raw materials — minerals and energy — to feed China’s rapid growth over the past two decades. However, in an interview with MacroBusiness TV (May 21, 2013), Garnaut said…

Suffer the little children… Sir, Visiting Britain, one is assailed by the growing list of little girls sexually assaulted and murdered. An association with watching child pornography is no longer disputed. The British government is making moves to put pressure on the internet service providers, whose sites transmit this material, to monitor and censor. They reply that they are already doing so, conscientiously.…

Man of Steel (rated M), a 3D superhero science-fiction film, is reviewed by Symeon Thompson. Returning to historical origins, Man of Steel darts back and forth in time, to explore how a child from another world, raised by decent folk in Kansas, might become the most-well known hero of the modern mythos. The planet Krypton is nearing annihilation. While chief scientist Jor-El (Russell…

THE MORA STONE by Agnes-Mary Brooke (Nelson, NZ: The Medlar Press) Paperback: 249 pages ISBN: 9780958219808 RRP: AUD$23.70   Reviewed by Siobhan Reeves   Sales of young-adult (YA) fiction have increased dramatically over the past two decades, driven in part by the successful transition to Hollywood of a number of YA fiction series, such as Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games and others.…

  TAXING AIR: Facts and Fallacies about Climate Change by Bob Carter and John Spooner (Williamstown, Victoria: Kelpie Press) Paperback: 280 pages ISBN: 9780646902180 RRP: $29.95   Reviewed by Peter Westmore   Taxing Air is an unusual collaboration between Professor Bob Carter, a geologist and palaeoclimatologist, and well-known cartoonist John Spooner, with the assistance of the former head of the National Climate Centre,…