The Greens proposal for legalising recreational marijuana is an elaborate cover created to simply raise more taxes and create greater welfare dependency. They argue that valuable cost savings will flow in diverting police time from pursuing marijuana-related crimes – locking up drug users and dealers – because as everyone knows the “war on drugs” has failed. These alleged cost-savings are also bolstered with promises of added tax revenue from sales of legal marijuana. The Greens have found any ally with libertarian LDP Senator David Leijonhelm troubled about rising national debt and welfare costs. However, these calculations rely on key assumptions and deliberately focus on one side of the economic equation. First, that a sizeable bulk of drug dealing will disappear; second, recreational marijuana has limited downstream health-related costs. Factoring in these considerations provides the net economic and community benefit.

An essay on one nation's experiment with marriage that demonstrates why voting 'Yes' is a choice  to deconstruct family and marriage and is the road to statism - again. Are you voting ‘yes’ at the upcoming marriage postal plebiscite in support of gay rights and equality? Then please reconsider how your vote at its core is really not about either of these issues. But before going any further, it needs reminding that gay and lesbian civil unions already have the same legal recognition, protections and tax treatment that every other family possesses, so what is this plebiscite really all about?  

We should relish the freedom of expression that a Christian culture established and particularly that it was not founded on the moral vacuum of atheism, given the tragic outcomes of secular humanistic governments of the past (such as Communist Russia, Romania, Cambodia, China, Nazi Germany, etc.). But ancient history fares no better, it is replete with the continual narrative of ‘blood feuds’, that is, the perpetual generational ‘right’ to avenge the spilling of blood or the threat of imperialist expansionism from Greek, Ming, Khan, Persian or Roman Empires. Here the ‘peace’ of millions was dependent on the submission of subjugated nations, such as the Roman Empire’s “Pax Romana”, or the Islamic Empire’s dhimmi status for conquered people. Against this brutal backdrop comes what some historians have called the “softening effect” of Christianity.