The Australian’s claim (“Protesting against all that keeps us free and wealthy”, 21/10) that the Occupy movement reflects a disengagement from “liberal-democratic market economies” is only half right. Far from being disengaged from democracy, the protesters are practising it, by rejecting the failed free-market experiment they believe has rewarded unelected elites for causing the economic suffering of the rest of the population. The editorial’s stubborn adherence to the minority contrary view is beside the point.

Democracy and unregulated markets are not sides of a coin: there are dictatorships with market economies, and there are socialist democracies. There is no inherent connection between democracy and any particular economic system. If the people choose to regulate their economy for the common good, then that is also democracy.

Janet Albrechtsen is right about one thing: there is no comparison between the Occupy and Tea Party movements (“Krugman’s army stirs up bulldust on Wall Street, The Australian, 19/10”). The Tea Party is a US-only astroturf movement bankrolled by a handful of billionaires, with a mish-mash of far-Right hobbyhorses from armed insurrection to fundamentalist anti-science. The Occupy movement is a global, spontaneous expression of anger at corporate hijacking of the economy and democracy, a simple message Albrechtsen feigns not to understand.

Albrechtsen finds irony where there is none, in the fact that some protesters appear not to be poor. Like many conservatives, she seems unable to grasp that people may actually care what happens to someone other than themselves.

When the pesky U.S. Constitution gets in the way of a government’s desire for lethal revenge, Christopher Hitchens has a brilliant workaround: just strip your targets of citizenship first, then assassinate them (“Reason can define rules for treason”, The Australian, 18/10). But why stop there? Boring court cases could be avoided for all sorts of things ranging from murder to tax evasion, simply by declaring the defendants’ rights void.

Trouble is, people have become accustomed to the vain trappings of civilisation and are rather attached to due process. Sorry.

Aside from a fact-free sneer from Brendan O’Neill (“Wall Street occupiers are an insult to the workers”, 17/10) and a desultory piece in the Business section (“Busy protesters fail to maintain rage”, 17/10), The Australian seems oddly reluctant to mention the wave of thousands-strong protests against corporate kleptocracy in a thousand cities worldwide, including Sydney and Melbourne. Contrast this with its many news and favourable opinion pieces on the “Convoy of No Confidence”, an astroturfed rabble of barely 300 people whose gripe was a $10-a-week tax. It seems newsworthiness has come second to ideological preference.

As Dennis Shanahan points out, debate fails when the protagonists’ religious beliefs become the focus (“Not a first violet in sectarian spring”, The Australian, 7/10). But the current spat between free-market Liberals and DLP-style conservatives is symptomatic of a real schism.

Economic conservatives like Peter Costello, despite their conventional description, have a radical project of privatisation and deregulation, and may well be socially progressive. They have little in common with social conservatives like John Madigan, who may well have traditional statist views on economic management. They are only united by their opposition to the progressive agenda, but even then, not to the same parts of it. Cracks are bound to appear in such a marriage of convenience.

Janet Albrechtsen’s contends (“Yes, there’s a silver lining to PM’s green salad days”, The Australian, 5/10) that the year since the election “has allowed the electorate to move from a state of somnolence to one of deep circumspection about the Greens”. Good story, but one small problem: Green support has risen.

Her eagerness to prematurely report the death of the current “power-sharing paradigm” betrays an undemocratic willingness to disregard minority views. The electorate is composed entirely of minorities – of which the Greens are the third largest – who all deserve representation. Democracy is complex and is not served by rounding off to the nearest major party.