Untangling left-liberals from left-authoritarians

Published at LibertyWorks blog on 19 December 2016 under the title “What I’ve learned from Dr Jordan B Peterson, Professor of Psychology”.

Dr Peterson is a former Harvard professor who now teaches at the University of Toronto, and he has done some rigorous and fascinating quantitative research into the behavioural and personality traits of people with different political philosophies, including ground-breaking work on Political Correctness (PC) or Social Justice Warriors (SJW).

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Review of 2014 QLD budget

Published in The Conversation on 4 June 2014 under the title “Queensland budget another case of the disappearing surplus”.

With the release of a plan to sell and lease $33 billion worth of assets after the next election, the state government has shifted attention away from its budget. Though in truth, it would have been quite easy to distract people from this budget, because there is nothing new.

We already knew that the ever-elusive budget surplus had disappeared. Two years ago I commented in The Conversation that: “The forecast for a fiscal surplus in 2014/15 is nice, but it is hard to take long-term budget predictions too seriously” and also that “it is easy to predict future austerity and surpluses, but it is harder to actually make it happen”. Time has justified that scepticism. The government’s original estimate for 2014/15 was a A$0.7 billion surplus, but it is now expecting a A$2.3 billion deficit.

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