You might have noticed some talk around the place about a “housing affordability crisis” affecting the country: the fact that house prices in the major cities have rocketed up over the past decade to the point where first home buyers are now pretty much unable to afford a home, and are increasingly stuck renting indefinitely. [...]

Clive Hamilton’s flimsy defence in The Australian last week of Stephen Conroy’s ill-conceived internet filtering scheme, is a nastily flawed polemic that I can’t let pass without comment. First, he spends the first five paragraphs, a quarter of his article, on a bizarrely detailed fictional tale of a young boy finding pornography on the internet [...]