Climate change is “a current and existential national security risk”, according to an Australian Senate report released on Thursday 17 May. It says an existential risk is “one that threatens the premature extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for desirable future development”. These are strong words. (more…)
John Menadue
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GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND …
“Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven” — that’s how many older Australians, with the distorted hindsight of nostalgia, look back on the turmoil of 1968. ABC Radio National has devoted a series of its regular programs to the events around 1968. The most concise is a short discussion May 1968 revisited on Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra. Understandably most are retrospective, but there is also a program about lessons for today for those who seek social change – the Gohn Day Memorial Lecture by Mary Frances Berry Lessons from past resistance movements.
Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980 is the title of an article in the New York Times. Why, in spite of the huge and growing amount of money Americans spend on health care, has America;s life expectancy not been rising as fast as in comparable nations? The lack of universal coverage provides one explanation, as do the burden of private health insurance and the influence of Big Pharma. Also, the article’s author, Austin Frank of Boston University, attributes much to general worsening conditions for the poor. The same theme is taken up in Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra last weekend where Sir Michael Marmot explains the influence of “deaths of despair” from alcohol, other drugs and suicide, as well as inequality as contributing to lower life expectancy in parts of the USA.
People are continuing to drop private health insurance. Figures from APRA show that in the year to March 37,000 people dropped PHI. This was a net figure after 98,000 people under 55 dropped PHI, while insurers gained 61,000 members over 55. (Fifty-five is the age below which members are net contributors, and above which members are net drawers.) The insurance trade journal Insurance Business, citing a survey by Roy Morgan, attributes the fall to price, coverage gaps and satisfaction with Medicare. If the Coalition had been true to established form we might have expected some rescue effort in the budget, but there has been no specific mention of PHI in the budget.
Abe walks a tightrope on Japan’s foreign worker policy (Japan Times, April 29 2018)
The Iran deal scuppered – aspistragetist
Alexander Downer’s secret meeting with FBI led to Trump-Russia inquiry – the Guardian.
Nissan drives into home solar and battery storage market – RenewEconomy
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PETER DAWSON. Review of Sunburnt Country.
Peter Dawson reviews Sunburnt Country’ – Dr Joelle Gergis’ new book on Climate Change
Climate Scientist, Dr.Joelle Gergis’s book pulls together from wide-ranging sources the story of the Australian climate since white settlement, but also reaches back 1000 years and more. She seeks to convince us that the climate change challenge we face is, by every measure, real, menacing and urgent. It is both a comprehensive and a compelling answer to the climate sceptics. (more…)
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TSEEN KHOO. What Anzac Day meant for Asian Australians.
This year, just before ANZAC Day, I read a poignant, insightful piece by Nadine Chemali about what new migrants to Australia really thought about Anzac Day. (more…)
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MICHAEL O’KEEFE. Why China’s ‘debt-book diplomacy’ in the Pacific shouldn’t ring alarm bells just yet
Talk of Chinese “debt trap” diplomacy is nothing new, but a recent report by Harvard University researchers has resurrected long-held fears that China’s debt diplomacy poses a threat to Australian interests in the Pacific. (more…)
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The Vicar of Bray
The Vicar of Bray has become a cultural byword for political expediency, hypocrisy, and insincerity. He changed his allegiances time and time again. Can you think of an Australian Minister who reminds you of the Vicar of Bray? (more…)
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STUART KENNEDY. Gloves are off: R&D tax debate
Australia’s science and innovation community has been dudded by the Coalition’s 2018 budget reform of the R&D Tax Incentive scheme, with much less direct, targeted funding going back in than was pulled out of the tax incentive. (more…)
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VIC ROWLANDS. Education, which way forward.
Gonski’s “Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools” is timely but one would hope it will be supplemented by a closer look at the needs of lower achieving students for whom prospects in the next age, with the gap between rich and poor, becomes even more pronounced, are not encouraging. Gonski says:”The basics must be in place by the time you’re eight”, but there is more to this than a change of methodology. (more…)
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RICHARD TANTER. Tightly Bound: Australia’s Alliance-Dependent Militarisation.
Australia’s unique military and intelligence relationship with the United States, combined with the country being geographically a part of Asia but historically, culturally and intellectually identified with the Anglo-Saxon world, have significant implications for Canberra’s current military modernisation. Richard Tanter examines how the country’s dependence on its alliance relationships helps determine the direction of that modernisation. (more…)
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DAVID COWARD. The man who did for Mao – a review of a biography of Simon Leys by Philippe Paquet
In 1932, Malcolm Muggeridge, then based in Moscow for the Manchester Guardian, filed reports of what he had found out about Soviet Russia, from the food shortages and forced labour to the deaths of 3 million people following the collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine. His copy was censored and he was ridiculed by the liberal establishment, which preferred the Webbs’ rosier view of the New Civilization in the East. Muggeridge concluded that people believe lies not because they are plausible but because they want to believe them. (more…)
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TIM COSTELLO. The Budget and aid.
The Coalition Government’s fifth budget last week was carefully calibrated to offer just enough to a discontented electorate to restart the political contest ahead of the poll expected early next year. Yet again Australia’s battered aid program took a hit, this time in the form of a multi-year cut, combined with an extended freeze on indexation to inflation – a cut by attrition. This is the same technique being applied to the ABC. But while attacking the national broadcaster is long-running pet project for the Government’s culture warriors and their commercial media cheer squad, the assault on aid is more puzzling, as it is surely self-defeating. (more…)
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ROBIN DERRICOURT. Inside the belly of the monster (and a Cold War mind).
A 1960s British student leftist did not expect to find himself on a tour inside the Pentagon, or briefed by a US Army Colonel on his role there, tracking US radicals, with a distorted Cold War model of who they were – but, well, it happened. (more…)
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GREG HAMILTON. No stomach or mind for democracy.
Australians have a flaw in their character that shows up in their acceptance of a defective political system no decent reform can come close to changing. When their democratic system is attacked by minority anti-democratic forces, they’ll back the attackers, not their system. And, having done so, they choose to believe their system is still democratic. There’s no helping a fickle electorate. (more…)
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Classes & politics.
The return of the concept of ‘class’ to mainstream public debate is an unanticipated feature of the second decade of the new century. Whether defined by people’s relationship to production or distribution, or as a hybrid of economic and cultural identities, a consciousness of class is crystallising once again within democratic countries, and notably in the United States. Some reasons are obvious. (more…)
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MANDY FREUND, BEN HENLEY, KATHRYN ALLEN, PATRICK BAKER. Recent Australian droughts may be the worst in 800 years.
Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past?
In a recent paper, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years. (more…)
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MICHAEL LESTER. Political Culture and the Limits of the APS Independent Inquiry.
There is an old saw that cautions politicians never to establish an enquiry unless they know the outcome beforehand. The Prime Minister appears to have learnt that lesson from the ‘can of worms’ exposed in his Royal Commission on Banking.
Turnbull has announced an ‘independent inquiry’ into the future of the Australian Public Service (APS). An independent inquiry is not a Royal Commission and its terms of reference and membership are presumably designed to keep it focused on his own political agenda. (more…)
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GLEN SEARLE, CRYSTAL LEGACY. A closer look at business cases raises questions about ‘priority’ national infrastructure projects.
Infrastructure Australia’s latest infrastructure priority list has been criticised for being “too Sydney-centric” and for giving Melbourne’s East West Link, cancelled in 2014, “high priority” status. The cancelled Roe 8project in Perth was removed from the list.
So how does a project get onto Infrastructure Australia’s list? This requires submission of a full business case, which then needs to be “positively assessed” to be given priority status. (more…)
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PETER SMALL. Defending the indefensible.
Yet again Australian farmers and their organisation are caught on the back foot defending the indefensible, -the live sheep trade to the Middle East. (more…)
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GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND …
A sense of complacency, a lack of intellectual curiosity, a failure to think about the bigger picture, a pursuit of consensus lessening constructive criticism. These are some of the findings in the Australian Prudential Regulatory Agency report into the Commonwealth Bank. It concludes that “CBA’s continued financial success dulled the senses of the institution”. Its management understood the financial risks, but not the non-financial risks, facing the company.
While we’re on the subject of finance the budget has attracted a wealth of commentary on Pearls and Irritations. John Falzon, Michael Keating, Giles Parkinson, Ranald MacDonald, Michael Pascoe, Ross Gittins, Ian McAuley and Mungo MacCallum have all contributed. Such is our obsession with fiscal figures that the 1000 pages of budget documentation are almost all about money. But what is money? On the ABC’s Minefield there is a rich discussion about money – what it is, what it isn’t, how it’s socially useful, and the danger of believing that money has value in itself.
Something as distant from the budget as possible – Bach in Japan, Bach in Hermannsburg. On the ABC’s Spirit of Things Noel Debien is engaged in conversation with Masaaki Suziki, director of the Bach Collegium of Japan, and Morris and Barbara Stewart who have taken the Aboriginal women’s choir to Germany. Hear about Christianity in Japan, the Hermannsburger Missions Gesellschaft, and the adaptation of German liturgical music in different cultures. It ends with a promo for the film The Song Keepers.
Cambodian Government forces sale of last independent newspaper – Human Rights Watch
All eyes on India’s key Karnataka election – ucanews
Saturday Extra:http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/
Trump’s only possible Iran Strategy is a fantasy – Washington Post
It’s a neoliberal budget when we no longer believe in neoliberalism. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/11/its-the-neoliberal-budget-when-we-no-longer-believe-in-neoliberalism?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Gmail
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CAMERON HILL. China’s policing assistance in the Pacific: a new era?
While there has been renewed discussion and debate surrounding China’s infrastructure assistance to Pacific nations over the last several months, less attention has been paid to China’s growing policing and law enforcement presence in the region. While still in its early stages, this presence spans several of the Pacific Island countries which recognise the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and, in some cases, has expanded beyond the provision of facilities and equipment to include training, secondments and joint operations. (more…)
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RICHARD ACKLAND. Peter Dutton’s power grabs may yet be his undoing
The fate of Amber Rudd offers some hope to Australians who disapprove of Dutton and his methods. (more…)
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PHILLIP BAKER, MARK LAWRENCE. Sweet power: the politics of sugar, sugary drinks and poor nutrition in Australia.
Unhealthy diets and poor nutrition are leading contributors to Australia’s burden of disease and burgeoning health-care costs. In 1980, just 10% of Australian adults were obese, today that figure is 28% – among the highest in the world.
And yet, as shown on Monday night’s Four Corners’ episode – which was a stunning expose of food, nutrition and health politics in Australia – successive governments have done little to address it. (more…)
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JOHN FALZON. Budget 2018: Noodle Nation?
Budgets should be a time when governments outline a practical vision of the future in which we share our commonwealth for a just, prosperous and equitable future. In a wealthy country such as ours, it should be a time of hope. (more…)
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BRENDAN BYRNE. History taints Turnbull’s fight against corruption
While it is a matter of public record that the Turnbull government blocked attempts to establish a royal commission into the financial services sector on multiple occasions, the question as to why the government has been so recalcitrant on this issue — especially when it expeditiously facilitated a similar inquiry into corruption within the union movement — is of more than academic interest. (more…)
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HENRY SHERRELL. A snapshot of temporary migrants in Australia
A budding public conversation is underway about Australia’s population. Perhaps to help inform this conversation, the Department of Home Affairs has released a new data product documenting the number of migrants in Australia who hold a temporary visa. (more…)
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MARTIN WOLF. How the Beijing elite sees the world
How does the Chinese ruling elite view the world? Over the weekend, I participated in a dialogue between a handful of foreign scholars and journalists and top Chinese officials, academics and business people, organised by the Tsinghua University Academic Centre for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking. The discussion was franker than any I have participated in during the 25 years I have been visiting China. Here are seven propositions our interlocutors made to us. (more…)
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TOM ENGELHARDT. The Caliphate of Trump, and a Planet in Ruins
Here is my six-category rundown of what I would call American extremity on a global scale: There is US violence at home and abroad. (more…)
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CHAS FREEMAN. On the Souring of Sino-American Relations
(Remarks to the Committee of 100)
I am honored to stand before you this morning to discuss US-China relations. It’s a challenge to speak on a subject so many here know so much about, and to do so at a moment of such radical inflection in the relationship. But Sino-American relations are a matter of great importance to all in our country, and especially to Americans of Chinese heritage. A candid discussion of the deterioration of those relations and its implications could hardly be more timely. (more…)
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TIM LINDSEY. Post-Reformasi Indonesia: The Age of Uncertainty.
Twenty years ago, the Soeharto era ended with reformation. Today’s post-Reformasi Indonesia is full of uncertainty, with profound implications for its foreign relations. (more…)
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RANALD MACDONALD. ABC cuts – the gloves are off.
The Coalition’s latest budget aimed at ensuring the voters return it to the government benches has dropped any pretence of supporting a vibrant, independent and properly funded ABC. (more…)