Cited and rejected? Better than peer review!

Mr Morrison's Multiple Ministries Meme by Mr Morrison

My submission to the inquiry into Morrison's Multiple Ministries was cited in the final report: Report of the Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments. But ultimately rejected. It's good to be part of the process and even though my recommendations were rejected, they were cited. So it's like being rejected for a journal but they cite you. So that's good.

The submissions will be published on Monday. Here is the section from today's Report of the Inquiry into the Appointment of the Former Prime Minister to Administer Multiple Departments (p. 94) relating to my submission. It did not pick up on my (and others') position that the habit of holding inquiries into previous governments does more to erode trust than Morrison's bizarre actions (see my full submission), but that is the nature of our inquiry process:

In contrast to these views, Dr Michael de Percy contended that public confidence in government is “unlikely to reside in the minutiae of constitutional legal opinion”. Dr de Percy questioned the assumption that transparency necessarily leads to more trust in government, by reference to the findings of a study that “national cultural differences are an important independent variable in assessing whether transparency leads to increased trust". Putting to one side the nuances of the constitutional debate raised by these appointments, and accepting that many variables bear on the quality of trust in government, it is difficult to conclude that the assumption of the capacity to exercise significant public power in secret is not one of those variables.

In the meantime, The Guardian has suggested that the report "lays waste" to Morrison's reasons for appointing himself to the multiple ministries. To be sure, it was unnecessary, but the inherent flexibility in our Westminster system is now likely to be curtailed yet again.

In response, I have written the following letter to The Guardian:

Karp over-reaches in headlining with "lays waste". That Morrison's self-appointment did not "appear to have been closely thought through" was obvious. Voters had already rejected the Morrison government for being on the nose. Yes, it was "exorbitant", "bizarre", and "unnecessary". But the obvious glee your reporter takes in forgetting the laying of waste of the Morrison government by voters is equally "bizarre". Perhaps more journalists acting as the fourth estate rather than "inexcusable" partisan reports on behalf of the government would be more appropriate. It will be interesting to see what inquiry the next government launches into this current government after its rejection by voters.

I find it interesting that my colleagues picked up on the Australian Financial Review on their headlining when I saw no issue, but the letters were still published. Whether that happens on the other side of politics remains to be seen.

Would you fight the next war in a conventional submarine?

CSS Hunley - a woke submarine for our times. Photo: Wally Gobetz [CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Do armchair warriors really believe our submariners should fight in obsolete diesel-electric submarines in defence of our nation? Making the performative French President happy should never come at the expense of our defence force personnel.

Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Ignore the French, the next war requires nuclear subs.

Regardless of whose feelings Australia has to hurt in the process, we must acquire #nuclear subs or we will have no chance of defending ourselves in the next war.https://t.co/g3NGzWd3Sg

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) November 25, 2022

Historical Institutionalism as Method: Applications and Uses at the Micro, Meso, and Macro Levels of Analysis

From De Percy (2022).

Below is an overview of my presentation today at the 8th Biennial ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference.

I have also included the slides from my presentation. If anyone has further questions, please email these to michael.depercy@canberra.edu.au.

Thanks again to ACSPRI for another great conference!

Abstract

Historical institutionalism is one of the three New Institutionalisms. As a research method, the approach typically involves archival research and semi-structured interviews - employing the research techniques of both the historian and the political scientist - to understand the impact of institutional legacies on the present. I have used historical institutionalism to analyse industry policy over time for cross-national comparisons of transport and telecommunications policies and have found the approach effective at the meso-level of analysis. Recently, however, I have applied this approach to the macro-level in geopolitics (to understand institutional exhaustion), and I am currently developing a research project focused on the micro-level to understand how institutions influence the development of military doctrine through a case study of operational tactics. This presentation will demonstrate the analysis of political phenomena over time, drawing on my model of path-dependent, punctuated equilibrium. It will outline how to recognise and analyse exogenous and endogenous critical junctures in applying the model to temporal comparative and institutional studies. In doing so, I will share some of the unique insights I have developed as both a practitioner and an academic.

Presentation

Please see my slides below:

Below are a variety of publications that I have produced using the method I presented in today's presentation. Please email me at michael.depercy@canberra.edu.au if you have any further questions.

References

De Percy, M.A. (2021). Policy Legacies from Early Australian Telecommunications: A Private Sector Perspective. Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 9 (3).

De Percy, M.A. (2021). Models of Government-Business Relations: Industry Policy Preferences versus Pragmatism in Andrew Podger, Michael de Percy, and Sam Vincent (Eds.) Politics, Policy and Public Administration in Theory and Practice: Essays in honour of Professor John Wanna. Canberra: ANU Press.

De Percy, M.A. (2022). Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19. In Jakupec, V., Kelly, M., and de Percy, M.A. (Eds.) COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order. London: Routledge.

De Percy, M.A. and Batainah, H.S. (2021). Identifying historical policy regimes in the Canadian and Australian communications industries using a model of path dependent, punctuated equilibrium, Policy Studies, 42 (1), pp. 42-59. DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2019.1581161.

Madsen, A. and de Percy, M.A. (2020) Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 55 (2), pp. 218-238. DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.121.

Time to put the "local" back into local government

There is no kerb and gutter in parts of Gunning, Upper Lachlan Shire Council, NSW.

One of the great things about our federal system is that local governments ensure local issues are dealt with by political representatives who are closest to the people. But recent fires and floods are proving that council amalgamations have replaced political representation with bureaucratic symbolism that is not meeting local expectations.   

Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Local government or bureaucratic symbolism?

There's something going very wrong with local councils in Australia.

They were created to ensure that local communities could be taken care of by political entities embedded in the local community, but have they become a bureaucratic mess?https://t.co/Ih68KZgGPX

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) November 22, 2022

Freedom of Speech: What gives us the right?

33rd Infantry Battalion AIF - Report from April 1918. My Great-Grandfather probably saw this! 

While writing an article for The Spectator on a windy Sunday, I was thinking of the importance of freedom of speech when it comes to airing an opinion that is unorthodox or even utterly crazy. I am human like everyone else, and occasionally I self-censor or double-check when writing for a public audience. I am certain there are times when I have overstepped the mark of polite company, even with years of training in social etiquette and the highest level of education one can obtain in Australia. It wasn't so when I was younger but there you go. But why is freedom of speech so important and what gives us the right?

The growing culture of woke self-flagellation scares me. The global geopolitical situation has changed and Australians seem to be getting weaker and whinier. I often think of the importance of the Australian Army to my family. My great-grandfather, my grandfather, my son and I all served. I take great pride in that family tradition even though there are times I wish I could go back and take down the egotistical fool I worked for in my last two years in the Australian Regular Army. If I'd gone to war with him, I don't know what I might have done to save my men.

But my great-grandfather was the real deal. He served in the 33rd Infantry Battalion in the AIF. He joined up on 21st June 1916 (as soon as he was 18) at Narrabri and was sent to the front, arriving with the Battalion on 28th April 1917. He was wounded during the Messines Offensive on 7th June 1917 where he fought on the extreme right flank with D Campany, 33rd Infantry Battalion. Later, he fought in the First and Second Battles of Villers-Bretonneux. During April 1918 the Battalion suffered heavily from gas shelling and by 1 May 1918, my great-grandfather was invalided to Oxford Hospital.

Reading the 33rd Battalion records puts my daily grind nonsense into so much perspective, to the point where I feel guilty whenever I become self-conscious about public scrutiny. But today I realised that the long tradition I am part of calls for courage. Not because courage is reckless in the way egotistical fools pretend it is, but in the sense of Aristotle's "Golden Mean".

When you read the histories of actions during the Great War, you realise that one must fight or die terribly - not terribly as in the manner of death - but to read of German troops dying in their dug-outs without putting up a fight makes me feel so ashamed. 

Better to die fighting if one has to die. Or perhaps better to escape - is it one's duty to wastefully die for the actions of idiotic leaders? But how many have been put in that position by poor leadership, where one is so disillusioned one simply curls up, already defeated, as if welcoming death? 

This is how the 33rd Battalion recorded the sad wasteful end of demoralised troops:

Only in isolated cases did the enemy show fight and they were easily dealt with. One man, Private J. CARROLL, singlehanded captured a machine gun and killed the crew. In addition, he bayoneted five other Germans during the subsequent "mopping up".

Thinking of poor leadership, I remember being frightened for my men's safety (he'd already proven time and again he was there for himself and nobody else).  But I was so young. I don't regret my time but I do regret not knowing what I know now. Yet when I think about the situations I am dealing with now, I realise I am succumbing to the same issues. 

Is it part of the human condition to experience demoralisation to such an extent that we become paralysed? Even in times of peace, it would seem better to "die" from public humiliation while fighting than to die meekly from a broken heart. The Stoics were on to something when they focused on not leaving our happiness to chance but on our own self-reliance.

Courage, then, rather than emanating from an individual's moral state, can be seen as a deliberate choice. We can choose how we live, and we can choose how we die. But being able to make that choice is not something we should take for granted.

In my article in The Spectator to be published later this week, I state:

...my great-grandfather's service, and the service of the many other Australians since federation, gave us the freedom to air our views and to get to the truth of a matter.

That is what I have been trying to do in recent times. But there is a theoretical aspect to it that is part of my soul: free speech. Like Stoic philosophy, liberty is something that connects me to the philosophers of times past. To paraphrase that great man Harold Bloom, when you have an independent, original thought but later read something and discover that your thought was not original, this is not a time to feel sad about your lack of originality but to rejoice in your connection to humanity. I have experienced so many of these moments but they didn't seem important until I read Bloom.

And to paraphrase John Stuart Mill, that great man who had foibles not unlike my own, even if we have stupid ideas they need to be aired so they can be disproven - if we allow people to air their grievances or state their concerns about an idea, we can use these opportunities to uncover the truth of a matter. Better to prove an idea stupid than to let it fester and take on a life of its own.

So, our forefathers fought so we can exercise our right to freedom of speech. That's why I love The Spectator - unlike The Conversation, it doesn't censor ideas that challenge contemporary orthodoxy. I once thought I could research politics as an independent observer, but that is nonsense. I can do so while remaining aloof from groupthink, but I am a participant nonetheless.

And freedom of speech enables us to arrive at the truth of a matter even if it is through a particular:

...contrivance that allows one to assess one's truth as if one were a "dissentient champion, eager for [one's] conversion.

Or at least that is what Mill said. Thanks, Pop. I wish I had met you. I will continue to do my best to honour your legacy. I take that responsibility seriously. God bless.  

COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order

 

COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order

Here are the details of my latest book project:

For book details, click here.

For my chapter details, click here.

Book Description

This book provides a timely, critical, and thought-provoking analysis of the implications of the disruption of COVID-19 to the foreign aid and development system, and the extent to which the system is retaining a level of relevance, legitimacy, or coherence.

Drawing on the expertise of key scholars from around the world in the fields of international development, political science, socioeconomics, history, and international relations, the book explores the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on development aid within an environment of shifting national and regional priorities and interactions. The response is specifically focused on the interrelated themes of political analysis and soft power, the legitimation crisis, poverty, inequality, foreign aid, and the disruption and re-making of the world order. The book argues that complex and multidirectional linkages between politics, economics, society, and the environment are driving changes in the extant development aid system. COVID-19 and Foreign Aid provides a range of critical reflections to shifts in the world order, the rise of nationalism, the strange non-death of neoliberalism, shifts in globalisation, and the evolving impact of COVID as a cross-cutting crisis in the development aid system.

This book will be of interest to researchers and students in the field of health and development studies, decision-makers at government level as well as to those working in or consulting to international aid institutions, regional and bilateral aid agencies, and non-governmental organisations.

Table of Contents

1. Towards a post-COVID world order: A critical analysis

Viktor Jakupec, Max Kelly, and Michael de Percy

2. International multilateralism in a non-hegemonic world

Andrey Kortunov

3. COVID-19 and the decline of the neoliberal paradigm: On the erosion of hegemony in times of crises

Tobias Debiel and Mathieu Rousselin

4. The global dialectics of a pandemic: Between necropolitics and utopian imagination

Nadja Meisterhans

5. The rules-based world order and the notion of legitimacy crisis: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid

Viktor Jakupec

6. Pandemic shock and recession: The adequacy of anti-crisis measures and the role of development assistance

Leonid Grigoryev and Alexandra Morozkina

7. COVAX, vaccine (inter)nationalism and the impact on the Global South experience of COVID-19

Max Kelly and Mary Ana McGlasson

8. Health emergency or economic crisis? Fail forward and de-risking opportunities in IMF COVID loans to Egypt

Lama Tawakkol

9. Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19

Michael de Percy

10. The COVID-19 pandemic and its impact in sub-Saharan Africa: Geostrategic dynamics and challenges for development

Matthias Rompel

11. Economic and social prosperity in time of COVID-19 crisis in the European Union

Angeles Sánchez

12. COVID-19 Impacts in Pacific Island Countries: Making an already bad situation worse

Mark McGillivray

13. COVID-19 vaccines and global health diplomacy: Canada and France compared

Stephen Brown and Morgane Rosier

14. Strong capacity and high trust: Perceptions of crisis management and increased nationalism among Chinese civil servants

Qun Cui, Lisheng Dong, and Tom Christensen

15. China’s inward- and outward-facing identities: Post-COVID challenges for China and the international rules-based order

Yan Bennett

16. Soft power and the politics of foreign aid: The case of Venezuela

Anthea McCarthy-Jones

17. Nationalist politics, anti-vaccination and the limits of the rules-based world order in an era of pandemics: The case of Tanzania

Japhace Poncian

18. COVID-19 crisis and the world (re-)order

Max Kelly, Viktor Jakupec, and Michael de Percy

Editor(s)

Biography

Viktor Jakupec is an Honorary Professor at Deakin University and the University of Potsdam. He is an international development aid consultant and a member of the Leibniz Sozietät der Wissenschaften, Berlin.

Max Kelly is Associate Professor of International and Community Development, and Research Associate at the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership, Deakin University.

Michael de Percy is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Canberra. He was appointed to the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts in 2022.

Reviews

"This edited collection provides an in-depth discussion and analysis of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on foreign aid within a context of the rules-based world order and the geo-political health crisis. In this volume, various political, social, and economic aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic are examined from diverse geo-political vantage points. This highly ground-breaking and timely volume is worthy to be read by scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students in the fields of geopolitics, political economy, rules-based world order, and foreign aid."

Prof. Dr. Christa Luft, Rector (i.R.) University of Economics, Berlin, Germany

"Financial crises, pandemics, climate change, the growing risk of a nuclear conflagration, the growing assertiveness of China and Russia, and the new Cold War are accelerating the decline of the West’s confidence on the world stage. This will see traditional foreign aid and the model of global development that characterised the past 70 years disappear. To understand how this is happening, and how the foreign aid-global development nexus will unfold in coming years, this book is indispensable reading."

Prof. Dr. Wim Naudé, University College Cork, Ireland

"Global cooperation is seriously challenged when it is needed more than ever. This book considers the problem from all angles in a well-balanced intersecting manner. The deeply thought-provoking exploration is worth immersing oneself in."

Dr. Tetsushi Sonobe, Dean and CEO, Asian Development Bank Institute

My chapter details:

Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19

ByMichael de Percy

BookCOVID-19 and Foreign Aid

ABSTRACT

The multilateral rules-based world order was already under threat from the rise of populism, China, and instability in US politics before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global diplomacy and brought about far-reaching economic crises. In response, nation-states have adapted to emerging nationalism amid the US–China trade war. Such multifaceted disruption forced nation-states to re-evaluate their traditional foreign aid partnerships, resulting in a weakened commitment to existing multilateral institutions. Such institutional exhaustion provided opportunities for China and Russia to challenge the existing rules-based world order through foreign aid. The result has been a parallel, albeit novel, world order for developing nations, resembling a competing form of neo-Cold War diplomacy. The foreign relations strategies of the US under Biden have resulted in a fragile balance of competition and cooperation between the major global powers, supported by the UK and Australian leadership and the strategic interests of other countries. This chapter examines foreign aid amid changing patterns of geopolitics in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and multilateral institutional exhaustion. It focuses on the shift in global geopolitics towards a new multipolarity that threatens to undo the much-lauded success of global capitalism and the rules-based world order upon which such success is presupposed.

 

 

Rewire the Nation or Go Nuclear?

Power Lines at Canada's Darlington Nuclear Plant [Photo: Milan Ilnyckyj CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] 

Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Rewire the Nation or go nuclear?

Despite #Labor pundits’ claims to the contrary, a clear choice is emerging between Rewiring the Nation and #nuclear when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. Whoever wins the social licence to operate holds the key to Australia’s future energy security.https://t.co/DT4Dz9Tglr

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) November 14, 2022

A Contest of Ideas: Teaching Politics in Australia

House of Representatives in Action [Parliament of Australia, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0]

One of the most challenging aspects of teaching politics in Australia today is the rate of change in societal attitudes that appears to be out-pacing our political institutions. But Westminster-based liberal democracies, supported by the liberal arts tradition, have evolved and proven to be resilient over historical periods of great upheaval. I argue that we should not give up on a liberal education just yet.

Underpinning my views on teaching politics are some classic texts, including Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, John Locke's Two Treatises on Government and A Letter on Toleration, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, and C.B. MacPherson's Life and Times of Liberal Democracy. Each of these texts presents different ideas that have been incorporated into our political system over time.

While prevailing senses of manners, etiquette, and ethics have changed, liberal democracy has been the greatest engine room of ideas in human history. The results include higher standards of living, increased longevity, and greater choice for individuals.

Most importantly, within this system, individual citizens have rights and responsibilities that are central to the system's survival. Balance is achieved not by mandates, but by what former Prime Minister John Howard referred to as "a contest of ideas" that are freely expressed in the public sphere. As John Stuart Mill argued, even bad ideas should be allowed to be aired so that these ideas can be determined to be bad by the body politic. To prevent bad ideas from being aired only enables these ideas to fester and take on a life of their own.

Free speech in a liberal democracy, just like free, fair, and regular elections, provides a safety valve for citizens to let off steam: a form of bloodless revolution if you will. But to understand our rights and responsibilities is not something that suddenly appears from a happy accident. It requires a liberal education. For me, teaching politics in Australia is about teaching students how to think, not what to think. 

Teaching students how to think relies on a long tradition. Much like Sir Isaac Newton standing "on the shoulders of giants", our students will be given a better vantage point to grapple with current and future problems if they embrace this tradition. Even the most radical teacher began at the beginning - while happy accidents can and do benefit our society, it is too speculative an approach to leave our common good to mere chance.

In The Great Conversation, Robert M. Hutchins argued that the great upheaval of the first fifty years of the twentieth century did not invalidate nor make irrelevant the tradition of a liberal arts education. In a liberal democracy, that tradition is still relevant today.

Nonetheless, one of the major challenges to our liberal democracy is not from outside the citadel, but from within. Contemporary politics is awash with calls to silence opposition as if the contest of ideas should be limited to the ideas chosen by one side or the other. In the United States and New Zealand, incumbent political leaders are suggesting that democracy itself is under threat from the contest of ideas that is the very stuff of liberal democracies.

In my own pedagogical approach, teaching students how to think means that I have to overcome my own inherent political biases. I have to step back from the contest of ideas and find a way for citizens to make their own sense of the world we live in. That is no easy task. But as teachers, we ought not to think our students are simple sponges that soak up what we say.

Students bring to their studies their own inherent biases, their experiences, and the ideas they have been exposed to prior to their education. A liberal education challenges those ideas as a matter of course.

I often say to my students that a liberal education is a choice, but a choice between the red and the blue pill as in the movie The Matrix. Take the blue pill and one can live in ignorance, for ignorance is bliss. Or take the red pill, and be exposed to the unsettling and transformative "truth".  For one can never go back once a liberal education begins.

That transformative, life-changing power of a liberal education brings together the best of tradition with the best of the present. By presenting the methods of comparative politics, we bring into sharp relief differences between societies that help us to see beyond our own limited experiences. Bring in the scientific method, and we have an opportunity to remove our biases. Study political history and philosophy, and we can understand ways to live a good life, and so on.

These are just some of the ways that I approach the teaching of politics in Australia. I do not suggest that my approach is the right way, but I hope my words here contribute to the conversation and that some of my more provocative writing contributes to the contest of ideas. 

My slides from the presentation are available below.

Renewable Woke: Welcome to ‘nightmare’

Kale is great for attracting cabbage moths but it tastes like shite [CC0]

 
Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Renewable Woke: Welcome to ‘nightmare’.

To borrow from Lamb Chop🐑, we're living in the #Woke that never ends...

In the last 5 years, painful virtue signalling has permeated every corner of civilisation with its vacuous sanctimony.

How can we escape?https://t.co/45RZ71r49c

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) November 8, 2022

Nuclear Energy in Australia: From Barriers to Benefits

"Greenflation" is one of the many uncertainties in Australia's energy future [CC0]

Here are the notes from my presentation on nuclear energy at the Goulburn Soldiers Club on 3rd November 2022. 

The presentation focused on the policy aspects of nuclear and addressed the following issues:

• Why nuclear?
• The policy landscape and nuclear
• Arguments against nuclear
• The wind and sunshine gap, Victoria 2019
• Greenflation?
• Rewiring the Nation
• Policy impacts

Below is a list of supporting materials for my presentation at the Goulburn Soldiers Club, 3rd November 2022.

Supporting materials:

Allen, L. (2022, 3 October). Bill introduced to remove nuclear energy ban in Australia. Small Caps.

Australian Nuclear Association (2022). Teaming with Canada for Australia’s Nuclear Energy Future: Report on a recent trip by the speakers to USA and Canada.

Australian Electricity Market Operator (2022). Data Dashboard.

Davasse, G. and Merle, C. (2022, 3 Jun). Greenflation, the new normal? Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking.

De Percy, M.A. (2021). Models of Government-Business Relations: Industry Policy Preferences versus Pragmatism in Andrew Podger, Michael de Percy, and Sam Vincent (Eds.) Politics, Policy and Public Administration in Theory and Practice: Essays in honour of Professor John Wanna. Canberra: ANU Press.

De Percy, M.A. (2021). Policy Legacies from Early Australian Telecommunications: A Private Sector Perspective. Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy, 9 (3).

De Percy, M.A. (2022). Institutional exhaustion and foreign aid in the time of COVID-19. In Jakupec, V., Kelly, M., and de Percy, M.A. (Eds.) COVID-19 and Foreign Aid: Nationalism and Global Development in a New World Order. London: Routledge.

De Percy, M.A. and Batainah, H.S. (2021). Identifying historical policy regimes in the Canadian and Australian communications industries using a model of path dependent, punctuated equilibrium, Policy Studies, 42 (1), pp. 42-59. DOI: 10.1080/01442872.2019.1581161.

Madsen, A. and de Percy, M.A. (2020) Telecommunications Infrastructure in Australia. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 55 (2), pp. 218-238. DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.121.

De Percy, M.A. and Poljak, J. (2022, 5 May). Energy security: Embracing technological neutrality. The Interpreter. The Lowy Institute. 

De Percy, M.A. (2022, 19 October). Old habits die hard: Labor’s uncosted infrastructure. The Spectator Australia.

De Percy, M.A. (2022, 1 November). Victorian Labor: Waste and Rorts. 

De Percy, M.A. (2022). What are the possibilities for hydrogen? Presentation at the CILT World Congress, Hyatt Regency Perth, 25th October.

Dubner, S.J. (2022, 22 September). Nuclear power isn't perfect. Is it good enough? Freakonomics Radio [Podcast].

GE Gas Power (2022). Cutting Carbon [Podcast].

International Atomic Energy Agency (2022). Nuclear Explained [Podcast].

Keefer, C. (2022). Decouple [Podcast].

Natural Resources Canada (2022). Uranium and nuclear power facts.

Platt, G. (2018, 27 February). 'Baseload' power and what it means for the future of renewables. CSIRO. ECOS, Iss. 240.

Poljak, J. (2022, 11 May). Hydrogen versus LNG: Choices for Europe. Illuminem.

Poljak, J. (2022). keynumbers.

Shakil, I. (2022, 26 October). Canada commits C$970 million to new nuclear power technology. Reuters.

Shepherd, A.F. (2007). Stumbling towards nation-building: impediments to progress. In John Butcher (Ed.) Australia Under Construction: Nation building past, present and future. Canberra: ANU E Press.

Tomago Aluminium (2022). Tomago Keeps The Lights On Across The State.

Victorian Energy Policy Centre (2022). Australian NEM Data Dashboard.

WSJ Podcasts (2022). Is nuclear poised for a comeback? The Journal [Podcast].

World Nuclear Association (2022). Chernobyl Accident 1986.

World Nuclear Association (2022). Fukushima Daiichi Accident.

World Nuclear Association (2022). Nuclear Power in Canada.

World Nuclear Association (2022). Three Mile Island Accident.

Victorian Labor: Waste and rorts

Daniel Andrews' How to Vote card, 2014 [CC0]

 
Here is my latest article in The Spectator's Flat White, Victorian Labor: Waste and rorts.

Are you ready for another round, Victoria?

Daniel Andrews promises to bring more rorts and more waste to an already debt-laden state.https://t.co/a4nDec8gQb

— The Spectator Australia (@SpectatorOz) October 31, 2022