Opinion

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.

Caravans. As many of you prepare for the next few days or weeks of holidays, that is one foreboding word that may loom darkly across your plans for a smooth ride.

Tell a boy (of any age) to not do something and everyone knows the result. He does it, whether he’s a boy of five or 55.

Curious things have happened in Perth in recent weeks. The most interesting is the boom in uranium shares.

As the federal government’s new industrial relations laws come into force it will be interesting to see if they have any impact on the waning influence of the union movement.

Now that Perth’s tabloids’ reports of the Birney-Omodei clash have wrapped up the kitchen scraps, it’s worth pondering what it’s all likely to mean to Western Australian voters.

As this month’s 31 warm-to-hot days slowly rolled by, one recurring thought was that March 2006 was likely to go down in the state’s political annals as the worst that WA’s two then opposition leaders, Kim Beazley and Matt Birney, were likely to share.

Australia’s two-speed economy, which has the resource-rich states of Western Australia and Queensland, dramatically outperforming the southern manufacturing states, has just got w

The ousting of Matt Birney was a disappointing moment from my point of view.

The ‘what if’ question posed last week is entertaining people in places far higher than that occupied by Briefcase.