We know that one French resident in 10 is of the Muslim faith.  

Torching cars in poorer Paris suburbs is a regular event. One evening saw 1067. Who does all this?

French law enforcement during the occupation of Algeria was far from perfect.

We can reduce the likelihood of attacks here in Australia by treating our minority groups better, with fairness and firmness.

Fifty-four years’ imprisonment for rapes in Bankstown is not fair, while earlier crimes of the same nature in the same suburb attracted 18 months. 

The Lindt café deaths might not have happened if Australian government officials had done their duty correctly instead of caving in to one particular applicant. They were not being firm.

Our government sending Australian soldiers to the Middle East was probably a bad idea. 

I recently flew to New Zealand to attend the wedding of a close friend.

He and his partner were both born and bred in Australia, live, work and pay tax in Australia and are kind and caring members of their local community. They live their lives peacefully and hurt no one.

Yet purely because they are both men they were unable to marry in Australia.

When is our government going to wake up and realise that these people do no harm to others by marrying the person they love and that spending millions of dollars on a plebiscite is an unnecessary waste of taxpayers' money? 

The Rushworth family would like to thank Theresa and Barbara at Essential Sewing. 

The father of the groom recently left his suit trousers at home in Sydney. He only found out when he went to get changed for the wedding. 

He made a mad dash to Nowra where he bought a pair of trousers which needed taking up.

He saw Essential Sewing and raced in there. Barbara and Theresa quickly did the job. 

Our grateful thanks go to them. They saved the day. 

In days gone by, publishing unemployment figures was a simple exercise. The Department of Social Service collected figures from government employment agencies and published the latest trends.

However in the 2000s cost cutting measures saw the unemployed and those seeking employment placed in the hands of job recruitment agencies.

The outcome: the reporting of figures for those seeking employment became haphazard and unreliable.

To tackle the problem the Australian Bureau of Statistics invented a formula.

Every month the bureau surveys around 26,000 households and asks who in them worked in the past two weeks and who did not. It surveys the same households month after month for eight months, then on the ninth month it abandons one eighth of its survey and replaces it with a new eighth, chosen at random. The new eighth stays in for eight months, and so on. The idea is to get both continuity and change.

The flow chart for October shows unemployment down to 5.9 per cent.

However around half of that figure of 58,600 newly-employed workers appears to have been a statistical artifact, caused by a difference in the type of households that left the survey and the type that joined.

A “thimble and pea” effect of “now you see them now you don’t”.