The Sensible Jew

The elections have come and gone, and now we’re launched into the great unknown.
So what have we learned about the politics of Australia in the past few weeks?
1) The Greens have gained the status of a genuine third party and now hold the balance of power in the Senate, and possible in the House of [...]

The ugly get very ugly.
These are the groups that – given any power – would do considerable damage to the country. Beware: there be monsters here.
Senator On-line: D
This party has no policies.
This may sound strange, unless you take the populism that exists in the campaign to the extreme.
The party plans to be merely a bum [...]

This group of parties and individuals – “the bad” – actually comprise the middle band of candidates: they’re not great but shouldn’t wreak too much damage on the country. As before, marks are assigned from A (the best) to F (the worst)
The Greens: D
The Greens are very lucky to have Bob Brown.
Brown presents well and [...]

Continuing the series on the Australian Federal elections I have done a quick analysis of many of the minor parties contesting these elections, giving them a mark from A to F.
In this section I have listed what I believe are the best of them. These are mostly parties and individuals who are focused on good, [...]

Alex Fein writes:
When this election was first called, I was worried that Yaron might spontaneously combust from sheer excitement. Instead, he has simply written a comprehensive guide to every political party – major, minor, and batshit crazy – that will contest the Senate election.
We’ll present them here as a series.
Yaron Gottlieb writes:
Ok, I will admit [...]

In an unprecedented move the Council of Orthodox Synagogues of Victoria (COSV) has come out against the Rabbinical Council of Victoria, demanding transparency in the Rabbi Meir Rabi kashrut debate.
The Galus Australis blog provides a copy of the COSV letter here.
Rabbi Rabi, a Melbourne rabbi, has started his own authority to certify products as kosher [...]

Recently the Federal Government re-affirmed their commitment to setting up an internet filter to censor what Australians can view online.
They then decided that this might not be a great policy to spruik right before an election, so they decided to delay it for a year – but they have not scrapped it.
Such a filter would [...]

In the past week, while reading the papers online, a couple of articles jumped out at me.
The first was a story in the Daily Telegraph about NRL footballer, Israel Folau.
It seems that the big news is that he is a decent person (and in the NRL that is big news).
He is a devout Mormon and [...]

Over the past week there has been a storm in the media over the incident in which Israeli commandos clashed with activists aboard a flotilla that attempted to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. For the genuinely disinterested observer, sifting between fact and fiction in this instance would seem a near impossible feat. There are, [...]

The proposal to legally hand over the rights to the word ‘kosher’ to the Jewish establishment is even more troubling than it initially appeared from the article in this week’s AJN.
Thankfully some in the blogosphere have stood up and spoken up against this proposal.
The AJN, on the other hand, only wrote about the need for [...]