The Times Higher Educational Supplement (THES) has published its 2018 World University Rankings. Rankings are rankings are rankings. They are not Holy Writ! Still they can be interesting fodder for drawing some interpretations and implications. I admit I may be partly biased as Oxford has come out number 1! (I was at Oxford from 1967 to 1970 and did my doctorate there.) The rankings are based on five key criteria: teaching, research, citations, income from industry and international outlook. (more…)
John Menadue
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PETER HAYES and DAVID VON HIPPEL. North Korea – How crucial are oil imports for its nuclear and missile programs?
A recent report by the Nautilus Institute by Peter Hayes and David von Hippel suggests that the impact of strong sanctions against oil imports by North Korea from China may not have a telling or early impact on its nuclear and missile development program. (more…)
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ANNE O’BRIEN. Clericalism is alive and well in the Catholic Church
The Royal Commission has provided few grounds for optimism concerning the future of the Catholic Church in Australia. The institution is moribund and its leaders are unable or unwilling to face reality. (more…)
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EVAN WILLIAMS. Dunkirk – film review.
We all know the story – or do we? It was one of Britain’s great wartime triumphs. With the British Expeditionary Force driven back to the French coast by advancing German armies, thousands of Allied troops were stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, and the call went out from Winston Churchill to rally the little ships and bring them home. Countless small craft – fishing boats, launches, dinghies, even rowing boats – crossed the Channel to gather survivors and ferry them home for joyful reunion with their families. (more…)
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MICHAEL LAMBERT. Australia’s electricity markets policy: The shambles continues.
Over the last week we have been treated to the depressing spectacle of the Prime Minister and his government reacting in a knee jerk, wrong-headed manner to two sensible and useful reports that have been released by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). This highlights the folly of not having a national plan for transitioning the National Electricity Market towards an increasingly renewable energy system. (more…)
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ALAN KOHLER. Coalition’s retreat back to coal-fired power stations and the loony fog
In 2015 Australia’s businesses made the mistake of thinking the Coalition government was serious about tackling climate change, and solemnly lined up to support it….There won’t be any new coal power stations and the lives of existing ones won’d be extended unless the government bizarrely and unnecessarily pays for it. If that happened,it would bring about the final divorce of business and the Coalition and the final retreat by Malcolm Turnbull into the loony fog inhabited by Donald Trump and the coal dancers on the Coalition’s right. (more…)
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PAUL GREGOIRE AND UGUR NEDIM. Asylum seekers left destitute at hands of Dutton
Stooping to a new low, the Turnbull government has begun cutting off the welfare payment to vulnerable asylum seekers and given these people three weeks to vacate their government-supported accommodation. (more…)
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ROD TUCKER AND JOHN DE RIDDER. How to fix the NBN pricing model: An open letter to Bill Morrow.
Dear Bill,
The NBN pricing model is in urgent need of repair. In this letter, we offer our thoughts on how an overhaul of the pricing model can solve a number of problems facing the NBN. (more…)
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KATHARIN R. LESTARI. Indonesia speaks up as global support for Rohingya grows
The Indonesian government has stepped up its support for ethnic Muslim Rohingya promising humanitarian aid and a new hospital in their homeland in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as the military continues to torch villages while battling homegrown insurgents. (more…)
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PAUL FRIJTERS. What does the North Korean situation say about China?
It is easy to get drawn into the drama of rockets fired over Japan, and massive hydrogen bombs tested by a North Korean regime that likes to threaten mass extinction of its enemies, particularly with the tweeter-in-chief responding in kind. I worry though that the real game is in China, because the suspicion is that China has helped NK develop its technology, and one has to wonder what could drive the Chinese leadership to do such a thing. (more…)
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TEJSHREE THAPA. Watching Burma in Flames from Bangladesh
I stood at the edge of the Naf River on the Bangladesh border watching heavy smoke rise from a village on the Burma side. Bangladeshi border guards talked of fires all along the border targeting villages of Rohingya Muslims. (more…)
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PAUL FRIJTERS. It’s not about state versus markets.
It is said that all generals prepare for the last war. So too it often seems in ideology land, where the conflict with the Soviet Union seems to have left us with an obsession with state versus market. Just as we are not preparing for the cyber wars of the future by building obsolete submarines that would only have been useful in WWII, we are not addressing today’s economic challenges by thinking in Cold War economic terms either. (more…)
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PETER MCCULLAGH. Good Suicide versus Bad Suicide
Will legalised suicide, even when presented as ‘assisted dying’, adversely impact on efforts to reduce do-it-yourself suicide?
If it looks like a duck and it quacks, then . . . (more…)
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MAUREEN TODHUNTER. Imaginations of the world, unite!
As news and other media apparently edge us toward a war-ready footing, we need to think critically about what informs our views, to imagine our way into more enlightened, more peaceful co-existence. (more…)
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K. HUSSAN ZIA. American Objective in Afghanistan
The Afghans are not a nation as such but a composition of numerous tribes. These form loose groupings based on ethnicity. Individuals owe their allegiance first and foremost to the tribe and after that to the ethnic group. Among the latter, Pashtoons constitute the dominant force and are the main element in the insurgency. They are divided into a number of tribes and sub tribes that have a common code of conduct known as Pakhtoonwali. There are more Pashtoons in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. They have traditionally treated the border between the two countries as informal and interacted with each other freely. (more…)
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JIM COOMBS. Nicholas Gruen and the lessons of history.
Nicholas Gruen’s piece in the Saturday Paper, Making the Reserve Bank a “people’s bank”, while gratifying in its support for my recent piece, lacks a particular historical perspective: we’ve been there before. (more…)
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STEWART LITTLE. Titles registry sale a super storm.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian will bequeath the state a financial disaster for millions of property owners thanks to her government’s leasing of Land and Property Information’s 150-year-old Land Titles Registry. (more…)
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ARCHBISHOP FISHER. Does Pope Francis support same-sex marriage?
A number of commentators have recently suggested that loyalty to Catholic teaching, and especially to Pope Francis, would allow, even require, support for same-sex marriage; by implication, the Australian bishops misunderstand Catholic teaching and have been disloyal to Pope Francis by saying Catholics should vote NO. But what has Pope Francis actually said about this? (more…)
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PETER DAY. When Church leaders forget to tell the story that liberates.
Human sexuality is a complex and fragile thing; far greyer than black or white. It is best tended to by gentle, wise, and humble hands – religious leaders might like to consider dropping their megaphone diplomacy, then? (more…)
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CHRIS MIDDLETON. ‘The Church’s teaching, if it isn’t expressed in terms of love – then it’s got it wrong.’
The postal vote on same-sex marriage will no doubt generate much discussion within families and communities, and, in particular, will play on sensitivities in Catholic circles where an understanding of sacramental marriage is so strong. (more…)
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GERMAN LOPEZ. Imagine if the media covered alcohol like other drugs
What if the media covered alcohol like it does other drugs? This was a question that came up in my coverage of flake hka, a synthetic drug that made headlines after law enforcement blamed it for people running in the streets naked in delusional paranoia. What follows is a satirical attempt at capturing that same type of alarmist reporting, but for a substance that really causes widespread and severe problems. (more…)
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‘Theresa May. Hang your head in shame.’
From Dublin to the Somme: How the Death of an Irish priest exposes the tragedy of Brexit, by Robert Fisk. (more…)
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ROB MOODIE. Seven tactics that unhealthy industries use to undermine public health policies.
Across Africa there are examples of governments trying to introduce policies that improve health and protect the environment only to find their efforts undermined by unhealthy corporations and their industry associations. A case in point is South Africa’s efforts to introduce a tax on sugary drinks to reduce the growing burden of obesity. In the process they are facing a barrage of resistance. This is one small example of unhealthy industries undermining the public’s health and the global environment. This is about how rent seekers go about protecting their selfish interests. (more…)
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EMMA CARMODY. Murray, Darling, what’s all this 4 Corners fuss about?
This article examines the contents of a recently aired 4 Corners episode, Pumped, which included allegations of water theft, corruption and regulatory capture in the Murray-Darling Basin. (more…)
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FREYA HIGGINS DESBIOLLES. The politics of public monuments: It’s time Australians looked at what, and whom, we commemorate
Recent events in the US have seen Confederate Civil War monuments pulled down and painful histories revisited. Comparing these acts to those of the Islamic State terror group, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill evocatively called this an “Orwellian war on history” and a “Year Zero mentality” on the march. O’Neill also took aim at Australia’s Yarra Council for its recent decision to no longer celebrate Australia Day on January 26. This is a result of ongoing calls from Indigenous groups to change the date of the national day. This is because it marks the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay and is thus, in their view, “invasion day”. O’Neill is wrong. It is not a matter of erasing history but a question of whose history is told. In Australia, it has been called the “the Great Australian silence”, following W.E.H. Stanner, as we stubbornly refuse to tackle these issues. (more…)
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JOHN FALZON. Politics is concentrated economics
Stark displays of inequality, such as the concentration of homeless people in Martin Place, challenge us to unite in solidarity with those who are oppressed by injustice – an injustice that is a deliberate aspect of our neoliberal economic system. (more…)
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ADAM BROINOWSKI. Picking up the pieces amid the U.S.–North Korea nuclear stand-off
North Korea is often righteously condemned for being the only nation to have conducted five nuclear tests and a barrage of missile tests in the 21st century. Led by a young chubby dictator with a bad haircut, we have long been told that the paranoid hermit kingdom known for its undeniably bombastic, intensely patriotic and anachronistic rhetoric is evil, unhinged and dangerous. (more…)
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PHIL O’DONNELL. A Tale of Two Churches
Threats by Catholic bishops to dismiss employees who marry same sex-partners reveal not only a lack of compassion, but also a deep gulf between the authoritarian and conservative concerns of the church hierarchy and the pastoral and justice concerns of many of its priests, religious and parishioners. (more…)
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The Myth About Marriage
Paul Collins’ recent article, An Open Letter to Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher, has attracted record numbers of readers for this blog. The following article by Garry Wills elaborates on the ‘myth about marriage’.
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MICHAEL LAMBERT. The shambles of Australia’s national electricity policy.
Australia has rich energy resources, both fossil and renewable, and a well considered electricity market design, as evidenced by the National Electricity Market (NEM), so why is our electricity market policy overall in such a shambolic state? Successive national governments have failed to address the core policy issues that are fundamental if the ‘trilemma’ of current challenges are to be resolved. (more…)