Opinion

A few months ago I found myself disagreeing with a move to gag barristers discussing their clients’ cases.

As the financial year crawls to a close on Friday, Briefcase thinks it timely to ask two simple questions.

Feeling poorer? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Our Most Influential survey enters its fifth year this week – the first time Geoff Gallop is not heading the list.

Ask any active Western Australian Liberal who their party’s ultimate movers and shakers are and you’ll be told it’s the triumvirate of senators Ian Campbell and Chris Ellison and their man in Perth, Matthias Cormann, who was a former staffer of Court gove

What is it about politicians and pipelines? First we had Colin Barnett promoting a water pipeline, or canal, from the Kimberley.

How can WA’s Liberals argue they oppose compulsory funding of tertiary student political activities but back compulsory funding of political parties?

West Perth has intrigued me for several years. It is everything that governments try to do when they create business parks or clusters to help foster the development of an industry.

Virtually since day one of the present century, Australians have been subjected to a steadily increasing stream of media reports on whether and when Prime Minister John Howard, who is not yet 67, will retire.

A few years back we ran a piece on Western Australia becoming a branch economy, reflecting on the loss of major businesses and brands in sell-outs to national firms.

Mad scientists are normally the people associated with bizarre experiments.

Now that the $5 million Kimberley water report is collecting dust in Parliament House, and disputation over transferring northern water southwards has again subsided, it’s worth reconsidering why tapping it has – in the medium to longer term – been discou

Biofuesls are not going to save rural Western Australia or deliver fuel users from the tyranny of high petrol prices.

The investment world is loaded with theories about how to get rich. This week, Briefcase will explore three. Quick, slow and easy – in that order.

Brisbane motorists got a bit of a shock last month. They discovered that the toll for using a proposed new road tunnel would not be the $2 per trip promised, but $4.

In February 2005, Western Australians voted 61.4 per cent against seven-days-a-week trading by all retailers.

I regret I didn’t take advantage of the Western Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s live streaming of its hearing into the Trades and Labor Council’s application for a 4 per cent wage rise.

Because Sydneysider John Howard has won four elections – and his side seems set to win another – there’s a tendency to attribute to him much that he simply doesn’t, and never will, deserve.

It’s a brave man who calls ‘game over’ these days, especially in Fremantle.

Alan Carpenter won a few friends here at WA Business News when he spoke at our Success & Leadership breakfast last week.

Political activity, more than other human endeavour, so often confirms the old adage about truth being stranger than fiction.

Is it just me, or has the budget lost relevance these days? For months we’ve been primed by reports of surpluses, possible tax cuts and how families will be looked after.

Mrs Briefcase is a canny shopper.

China so dominates talk about the resources boom that its great Asian rival, India, gets little more than lip service.

Just before Anzac Day, several senior federal Liberal MPs had fun slinging off at Labor leader, Kim Beazley, because he’d forgotten, during a radio interview, the names of a few South Australian senators.

The Shovelanna dispute between exploration minnow Cazaly Resources Ltd and mining whale Rio Tinto Ltd will go down in history as a defining moment in Western Australia’s corporate history.

What do Alan Carpenter, Mark Creasy and Rob de Crespigny have in common, apart from the fact that their surnames begin with C?

State Scene has encountered all sorts of forgotten items in the process of sorting dozens of files compiled over nearly 20 years.

Not long after I finished reading Corporate Elders: ‘Organisation Men’ Look Back (UWA Press) I had a lengthy and wide-ranging interview with the author, accomplished academic Professor Leonie Still.

March 2006 was important for several reasons, including the arrest of several alleged jihadists in Melbourne, showing that what US President George W Bush calls ‘the long war against terror’, continues.

There is a lot of conjecture about sport stadia in Perth at the moment as the various codes apply pressure for an outcome that suits them best.

A telling paragraph, carried in a western suburban newspaper story, was drawn to State Scene’s attention last week.