PUTRAJAYA: Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s childhood ambition was to become a doctor and cure disease. Now that she is Malaysia’s most powerful female politician, she says her mission is to improve women’s rights. (more…)
As soon as I made eye contact with the smiling woman in the Doctors Without Borders T-shirt on a busy Sydney street, I knew I’d be asked for money or a signature. And I knew I’d say no.
“I’m a foreign correspondent for The New York Times,” I told her. “I can’t really help because at some point, somewhere, there’s a good chance I may cover what you do.”
I always feel bad trying to explain journalistic detachment in such moments, and I often get looks of confusion in response.
Mastuki, the ministry’s spokesman, told ucanews.com on May 29 that they would not change their policy as it was designed for “the good of Muslims and the nation.”
“We will not revoke [it] but will evaluate the mechanism after getting public feedback,” he said, adding that it has now placed over 500 preachers on the recommended list.
The industry says we have a ‘world class’ system but who does it benefit. ‘It treats us with contempt. It has known for decades about the cost of multiple accounts.’ Here’s how you can tell the Productivity Commission was spot-on in its assessment of the superannuation system.
A substantial Productivity Commission report, Superannuation: Assessing Efficiency and Competitiveness, was released this week with submissions due by 13 July 2018. It is an important report that reviews the $2.6 trillion industry with 15 million members and provides sensible reform proposals though the handling of the default allocation to My Super accounts does require further consideration. (more…)
A single tweet put Monday night’s Four Corners episode into perspective for me. I’d been trying to put my finger on what seemed out of kilter with the whole segment and there it was: the program had virtually ignored the bedrock of Australian health care, the public hospital system. (more…)
The United States has a China problem—and pundits and politicians are making it worse. China is an increasing problem for the United States. But the latest reactions and assumptions about China among America’s political-media leadership class hold every prospect of making China-related problems much worse. How can this be? It involves the familiar tension between short-term political shrewdness and longer-term strategic wisdom. (more…)
Iranian president to be hosted in Qingdao next month as Beijing and Moscow-led bloc looks to protect business interests. As European companies react with trepidation to the Trump administration’s efforts to blow up the Iran nuclear deal, pulling out of business deals in the face of looming sanctions, Chinese and Russian firms wait in the wings.
When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the creation of the massive new Home Affairs portfolio in July last year, he called it “the most significant reform of Australia’s national intelligence and domestic security arrangements — and their oversight — in more than forty years”. (more…)
President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to run away from a summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un should not be a surprise to anyone. The White House is encouraging the notion that China’s Xi Jinping is to blame for souring the notion of a U.S.-North Korean summit and for toughening Kim Jong Un’s negotiating position, and the mainstream media is doing its predictable best to validate such a self-serving explanation. In actual fact, the Trump administration was never prepared to discuss any issue that resembled arms control and disarmament, and national security adviser John Bolton, the formidable chairman of the new “war cabinet,” was never agreeable to the idea of U.S.-North Korean diplomacy.
President Obama had to put a ‘gag order’ on Admiral Harris because of his anti China attitude. Harris was initially slotted to be the next US Ambassador to Australia (more…)
Our understanding that the Mayans and other civilizations once used human sacrifice in their ritual observances sits and contrasts uncomfortably with our sense of civilization. Apart from written history, we have access to more visceral experience of the horror: Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” depicts both the individual impact, and the larger scale trauma of the practice. Who, having seen it, can forget the scene of the terrified hero of the movie stumbling across a valley of literally heartless corpses, sacrificed to appease the angry gods? (more…)
The giant Pine Gap intelligence and military base outside Alice Springs consumes a great deal of electricity to operate its intelligence-gathering and analysis operations.
It now appears that the Turnbull government’s rejection of a $25 bn. bid for the NSW-government owned Ausgrid electricity distribution company on national security grounds from the Cheung Kong Consortium (CKI), owned by Asia’s second richest man, Li Ka-Shing, and State Grid of China (SGC) was prompted by concerns about Pine Gap, possibly including its electricity supply. (more…)
With roughly half the Australian population either born overseas or having parents or grandparents born overseas, it is little wonder that dual citizenship has increasingly emerged as a problem for some Australian citizens seeking election to the Federal Parliament. This is especially so for second generation Australians who were born in Australia, but who may be entitled to citizenship of a foreign country by descent. (more…)
There is neither joy nor bright prospects from any of the recent violence and suffering in Gaza. The tragic loss of life in May naturally focuses attention on Australia’s policy concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict. (more…)
In part 1 I provided a brief overview of the book, Fair Share: Competing Claims and Australia’s Economic Future by Stephen Bell and Michael Keating, published by the Melbourne University Press, and set out as identified in the book, the broad trend of increasing economic inequality and the causes for this, noting that economic inequality has been a long term feature of human society, including but not limited to capitalism. In Part 2 I set out what the book identifies as the negative features of increasing economic inequality when it exceeds a certain level and then summarise the key findings of the book and the policy prescriptions provided for both addressing the impacts of relations. (more…)
The Trump Presidency is an age of unanswerable questions and lose-lose propositions. How is one to maintain sanity, decency, and a measure of moral courage? In a pair of thoughtful essays in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick tackles the problems of dealing with the everyday nature of our current political disaster and of deciding on the best way to try to save the country from Donald Trump: by staying close to him, or by walking away. The latter is a question for members of the Administration and for congressional Republicans. “This is the time,” Lithwick writes, to “think about what combination of exit and voice can make a meaningful difference if a real crisis were to happen. Or rather, when the real crisis happens—if we are not there already.” (more…)
Two populist parties are set to take over the government reins in Italy and about the only thing they seem to agree on is their desire to spend huge amounts of money. That’s bad news for Italian finances and terrible news for the eurozone. (more…)
The bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi on May 21, 1991, blew his face off. India’s former prime minister, and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, was identified by his sneakers as he lay spread-eagled on the ground. Some Indian newspapers, refusing dignity to the dead and his survivors, published a picture of Gandhi’s half-dismembered body. I remembered the image recently when I read about the reaction of Rajiv’s son, Rahul Gandhi, which he related earlier this year, to a similar image of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the mastermind behind his father’s assassination. (more…)
“The stars belong to everyone: The best things in life are free.” Or they ought to be. The last week of Budget Hysteria, made me think, “Is money all there is to life?” That seems to be what the government and opposition believe is all we care about. (more…)
Italy is not Greece. But not all the differences are encouraging. Its economy is 10-times bigger. Its €2.3tn public debt is seven-times bigger; it is the largest in the eurozone and fourth largest in the world. Italy is too big to fail and may be too big to save. The question is whether its new government will trigger such a crisis and, if so, what might follow? (more…)
Because our Reserve Bank has given every indication that it has no intention to raise official interest rates, a degree of complacency about Australia’s high levels of household debt has set in. But in an article on the ABC’s website, business reporter David Taylor shows how rising US bond yields could flow through to Australian interest rates, even if the Reserve Bank maintains its low official rates.
While our government has been sending mixed and confused messages about our relationship with China, Deutsche Welle reports that German Chancellor Angela Merkel has led a high-level delegation to China aimed at strengthening two countries’ already strong economic cooperation. Merkel said that Beijing and Berlin “are both committed to the rules of the WTO and want to strengthen multilateralism.”
Which of our two main parties is better at managing the economy? Ross Gittins diplomatically doesn’t answer that question, but he does outline the budgetary differences between the parties. “Labor would make income tax more redistributive, whereas the Coalition would make it less so. If that doesn’t offer voters a real choice, I don’t know what would” he writes.
Karnataka poll outcome indicative of India’s coalition future – UCANEWS.
Unions support Liddell’s clean energy transition – RenewEconomy
Brexit won’t happen – Simon Wren-Lewis
Get to know Elliott Broidy, the next major trump scandal figure – Washington Post
New Italian Prime Minister is a latin version of Jacob Rees Mogg – Spectator
Almost half of Australians being ‘conned’ into taking supplements – New Daily
Racism and the China debate: a response to Chris Zappone – David Brophy
Trump too good to be true – Emanuel Pastreich, Korea Times
A Gandhian stand against a culture of cruelty – New York Review of Books
In Saturday Extra (ABC Radio): Over the last six months the Cambodia Daily closed, and the Phnom Penh Post, an English-language newspaper widely seen as the last bastion of free press in Cambodia, was sold to a Malaysian investor with ties to the Cambodian government. In Thailand the editor of the Bangkok Post has said he was forced to step down. We examine threats to press freedom in South-east Asia. Anniversary of the Uluru statement from the Heart anniversary. Guests: Prof. Megan Davis & TBC Julian Leeser, Chair of the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition Relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples . Pressure on boards and directors – Eric Kutcher, McKinsey senior partner and second guest to be confirmed. A Foreign Affair: Elsina Wainwright, Kean Wong, Hervé Lemahieu. The Epic Voyages of Maud Berridge: The seafaring dairies of a Victorian lady
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/
If you’re a surgeon living in one of the opulent suburbs on the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, then congratulations: you are a member of the highest paid group in Australia. (more…)
Having watched with interest the unfolding debate over the future of auDA – the organisation charged with managing the Internet domain name space here on behalf of the federal government – I was delighted to recently be invited to join its new Consultation Model Working Group. auDA has drawn together a group of 16 members, which includes a broad range of people with knowledge and expertise in the running of the Internet in this country over many years. (more…)
The Holy Grail of teaching is not how children learn so much as when and why they learn, why they learn differently with the same teacher, or differently within the same class. The Age (26/5) reported: “Schools have largely ignored data on their students published on the government’s MySchool website, and one in four principals say the initiative has harmed their school.” (Two thirds said the effect was neutral.) (more…)
Governments at both federal and state levels continue to rely on the supply of bricks and mortar to solve Australia’s housing issues. We should be focusing not only on how many buildings are supplied, but what those buildings contain – people, trying to make a home. (more…)
2017 was hoped to have been the year of the renter. As Federal Budget 2018 ticks by, the picture remains grim for low-income renters, despite property prices having come off the boil (for now) in some capital cities. (more…)
This year’s Federal Budget delivered no vision, plan or commitment for addressing the growing housing affordability crisis, yet again failing to recognise how fundamental it is to our nation’s wellbeing to prioritise solving this problem. (more…)
Australians need to save Kosciuszko from legislative action that will lead to the decline of one of Australia’s most beautiful areas, its mountain water catchments and unique alpine native animals and plants. (more…)
As the world economy groans under soaring levels of debt, the place to look is Japan, whose current government debt-to-GDP ratio is an eye watering 253 per cent. It is Japan, which led the developed world into its current mess, that is likely to lead the world out of it by cancelling debt. The consequences of such a move, if it happens, would be far reaching. (more…)
ON BLOODY MONDAY this past week, when the number of Palestinian killed and wounded was rising by the hour, I asked myself: what would I have done if I had been a youngster of 15 in the Gaza Strip? (more…)