Noel Pearson is admired as one of Australia’s great political leaders and thinkers. Last week, he released a 165-page document Empowered Communities: Empowered Peoples recommending radical changes to government policies for Indigenous Australians. Instead of policies being determined by bureaucrats in our capital cities and delivered by a largely non-indigenous support industry, the report calls for the decision making and its execution to be devolved to empowered communitie

I wonder why the focus of our solutions for social problems seems to be to ask strangers to deal with them and government to fund it. The incidence of family violence in Broken Hill is met by calls to restore funding of a legal aid facility. The incidence of vandalism by 12-year olds in Kununurra is met by calls for improved juvenile detention facilities. In both cases, attention to the root causes of the problems might be more effective – minimizing or preventing the problem

Entrepreneurs create jobs. So if we want more jobs then we have to create an environment in which entrepreneurs flourish.

Many works by the great Australian sculptor Geoffrey Bartlett juxtapose contrasting elements in surprising ways, delighting the senses and challenging the intellect. Likewise, I wish to surprise you with the proposition that the apparent evils of capitalism are the consequences of the principles of the social democratic welfare state. Many modern business corporations do not, in fact, operate in the free market. They use government intervention to provide subsidies, inhibit a

At the first suggestion that minimum wages and penalty rates might be subject to review by the Productivity Commission, the ACTU hit the airwaves and the streets to defend their hard won rights. Rights that had been won by physical, economic and political coercion were not to be trammeled by rational debate; the proposals were offensive. Economics journalist, Peter Martin wrote that there was no evidence to support the contention that minimum wages had a negative impact on e