In Daniel Pipes’ view, uprisings against Mid-East despots deserve support only insofar as the likely results – according to his speculations – suit U.S. or Israeli interests (“Blind to the Islamist threat in the Middle East”, The Australian, 30/3). This offends democracy, which must not depend on whether the destiny people choose suits our purposes. Anything less is to participate in despotism.

The many articles in The Australian linking the NSW election rout to Julia Gillard, the Greens, the independents, the carbon price and other recent federal issues are off-target, for the simple reason that the polls have been predicting that state result since before the last federal election.

Contrarian Brendan O’Neill has excelled in his never-ending quest to come up with a position absolutely no-one agrees with in “West’s vain Libyan venture must end” (The Australian, 24/3), even disagreeing with his own impassioned support for the Libyan rebels, who pleaded for the international help he now decries.

Christopher Pyne would prefer it had remained a secret that taxpayers don’t get value for money by funding private schools (“My School fuels politics of envy”, The Australian, 26/3).

His defence that any form of education must be tax-funded because “[e]veryone pays taxes” is perversely socialist and specious: can anyone who builds a road on their own property have it paid for out of the public purse?

No government is obliged to fund everyone’s personal philosophies. In the case of religion, our Constitution forbids it. That Australian governments fund private schools is an anomaly which My Schools has brought into focus, and it is too late for Pyne to put the cat back in the bag.

Paul Kelly tries to resuscitate Howard’s phoney “culture war” and recycles his own “polarised nation” theme in “Abbott and Gillard down and dirty” (The Australian, 26/3).

But again he can provide no hard demographic evidence, because it doesn’t exist: there is no “insider-outsider” divide, except insofar as a climatologist may uncontroversially disregard the opinion of a radio announcer on climate.

As if Kelly’s characterisation of the progressive minority of the media as “insider” and the dominant commercial giants as “outsider” were not absurd enough, he goes further: “The ABC…has departed from its charter obligations to the Australian people” by not mimicking the far-right shock-jocks of Macquarie. Even if that charter were merely to uncritically reflect popular views, which it is not, Maquarie’s line does not fit that description any more than that of the pitchfork-wielding mob they sent to Canberra. If they are Kelly’s “outsider” cultural army, then the war was over before it began.