Last week I began my summary of the Government’s complex negotiations aimed at getting its Media Reform Bill through the Senate with the words: “Make a deal for political expediency and then unforeseen consequences usually follow. The ABC and its future is not a ‘bargaining chip’ for the Government to use to pass legislation in the Senate. Yet a deal brokered by Communications Minister Fifield to gain Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm’s vote some months back, has already come back to haunt it……..”. Well, the ‘haunting’ continues. (more…)
John Menadue
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JEAN-PIERRE LEHMANN. Why the West and Japan should stop preaching to a rising China
Jean-Pierre Lehmann says the imperialist powers of old should acknowledge their own bloody history of plunder and exploitation, and work with Beijing to find a path to a peaceful rise, which so far is unprecedented. (more…)
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JIM COOMBS. Electricity and Banks.
A belief, without foundation, that “the market” is the best way to deliver any product, has our politicians gibbering, when the provision of Public Goods (see my previous article) is properly to be determined by the principle of universal access, not some illusion of competition providing it. (more…)
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GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. “Which of us is safe?”
Graham Freudenberg, of German, Scottish and Irish descent, whose Prussian-born grandparents were declared enemy aliens in 1915 after 50 years prolific residence in Queensland, has recently held a séance with King O’Malley (an American pretending to be a Canadian and Peter Dutton’s early predecessor as Minister for Home Affairs) and Prime Ministers Chris Watson (born in Chile, son of a stateless Swedish sailor), Billy Hughes (a London-born Welshman), Bob Menzies (‘British to the bootstraps’) and Malcolm Fraser (part-Jewish and therefore with a citizen’s right of return to Israel whether he wanted it or not) and writes: (more…)
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‘It’s time to act’: Liberal MP calls for Australia to take refugees from Manus and Nauru
The Victorian Liberal moderate Russell Broadbent has called in Federal Parliament for “genuine refugees” in offshore detention to be settled permanently on the Australian mainland once the US resettlement deal has run its course. (more…)
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LEANNE WELLS. Health insurance: the big shift that’s left patients short
The transformation of big health funds into for-profit business enterprises sheltered by significant government subsidy and regulations has failed to prompt a complementary response from federal governments, Coalition or Labor, to even the playing field for consumers. (more…)
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RICHARD ECKERSLEY. What most concerns us about our personal lives and the societies we live in?
Our quality of life is about much more than our standard of living. (more…)
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JEAN-PIERRE LEHMANN. Aug 15: A day to mark Western imperialism
The date marks the 70th anniversary of the independence and partition of India, an event that has its roots in Western colonial conquest of the Indian sub-continent. It should also be remembered by the imperialists who plundered the planet. (more…)
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TERENCE BEED. Turnbull’s postal “plebiscite” and the Australian Bureau of Statistics: next step in its fall from grace?
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has another debacle approaching brought on by its direction to conduct the government’s proposed postal plebiscite on same sex marriage. Little more than an outmoded postal survey it will be flawed from the start, plagued by biases both known and unknown. The survey will seriously erode the public’s confidence in this once peerless official statistical agency. It needs to start work now to salvage what it can of its reputation for trust and integrity. (more…)
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GRAHAM FREUDENBERG. Malcolm Turnbull’s response to the Korean crisis has been contemptible.
In his grovelling ‘hip to hip’ statement on 10 August, he served up to the Australian people an utterly false and misleading version of the ANZUS Treaty and its meaning. (more…)
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JEAN-PIERRE LEHMANN. The Empires continue to strike back as international order continues to collapse
…as the international order continues to collapse. The best check is a return to a liberal, rules-based, multilateral order. (more…)
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JIM COOMBS. “Just good business” or gun-running.
The “Neo-liberal” language speaks of arms sales as just good business, notwithstanding the concomitant death and destruction. (more…)
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Australia’s Desperate Refugee Obstinacy
[An article by Roger Cohen reposted from the New York Times]
BYRON BAY, Australia — Now we know how desperate Australia is to close the shameful chapter in its history that has seen about 2,000 asylum-seekers and refugees — some now dead, most suffering from depressive disorders — dumped on two remote Pacific islands for four years. (more…)
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RANALD MACDONALD. ABC deal comes back to haunt Government.
Make a deal for political expediency and then unforseen consequences usually follow. (more…)
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DAVID KING AND PETER BROOKS. Coal is the new tobacco.
Coal is the new tobacco in terms of the harms it has on our health. No hospital would think of lending its logo to support the marketing of cigarettes or allowing any of its key decision makers to have strong links to cigarette companies. Yet, such an extraordinary situation has arisen around the Mater Hospital in Brisbane. (more…)
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MICHAEL LIFFMAN. Is it time for National Civic Youth Service Program?
Perhaps the time has come to consider a notion, at which most progressives’ immediate reaction is to recoil, that a compulsory non-military youth civic service program be introduced in Australia? (more…)
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LYNDSAY CONNORS. The Coalition applauds most queue jumpers.
The sound of transactional businessmen – Trump and Turnbull-brokering a Faustian bargain was never going to be edifying. The question is how Australians want to deal and to be seen to deal with the world as it is, while working out how we would like it to be. (more…)
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CHARLES LIVINGSTONE. Pokies, sport and racing harm 41% of monthly gamblers: survey
For the first time, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey has turned its attention to gambling, revealing that around 1.4 million Australians are directly harmed by the activity. (more…)
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China’s Maritime Provocations Are Nothing Next To America’s Adventurism A Century Ago
The message from the U.S. is that China should be more like us. But Americans should be careful what they wish for. (more…)
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How Trump is trashing the US Department of State.
In the New York Times International Edition of 29 July 2017, Roger Cohen writes – Why is Trump hollowing out the State Department? Is it punishment for Hillary Clinton’s department? Or an extreme iteration of the “deconstruction of the administrative state” sought by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon? Roger Cohen writes… (more…)
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DAVID CHARLES. The Australian media’s emphasis on the downsides of technological change has implications for innovation, growth and living standards.
There is systematic tendency in Australia compared to many countries in Asia for the mainstream media to place greater emphasis on the potential downsides of technological change rather than the upsides. (more…)
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JIM COOMBS. What Economic Policy should be about
The idea that government economic policy should only be about making capitalist enterprise easier is just plain wrong. It should be trying to make it better for the nation. (more…)
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RAWDON DALRYMPLE. A personal link to World War One.
All of us who have a stake in understanding the Great War should be grateful to Joan Beaumont for her magisterial history of Australia’s involvement in that terrible conflict (Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War). (more…)
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ANDREW LEIGH. Why Scott Morrison isn’t entitled to his own facts on inequality in Australia
“You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts”, the great American professor-turned-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to enjoy saying to opponents. (more…)
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HANS J OHFF. Horse for Courses: Nuclear and Diesel-Electric Submarines
Arguing for a review into nuclear-powered submarines former PM Abbott laments that ‘the RAN will take delivery of a class that will have less power, less range, less speed and less capability … and that it will come into service about a decade later than would be optimal at a time when strategic circumstances are changing against us.’ (more…)
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IAN MARSH. Australia’s gridlocked Parliament. (Repost from 9 September 2016)
There is a structural contradiction at the heart of the new parliament. Two diametrically different political systems co-exist. Incentives and expectations are at cross purposes. Until this contradiction is addressed the prospects for major legislative change must be judged slight. (more…)
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JOHN QUIGGIN. People have lost faith in privatisation and it’s easy to see why. (Repost from 22 August 2016)
From the viewpoint of ordinary Australians, privatisation is a policy that has consistently failed but is remorselessly pushed by the political elite. It is little surprise that voters are turning to populism in response. (more…)
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WILLIAM GRIMM. Why have US Catholics turned right? And Paul’s epistle to the Fallopians
American Catholics have traditionally supported the Democratic Party, but a combination of episcopal intransigence, Democratic abortion policies and a primitive cast to US society have brought about a change. (more…)
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TIM LINDSEY. Jokowi’s dilemma: turning Islamists into civil rights heroes?
Indonesia’s emergency law, enacted in response to the growing disruptive influence of Islamist hard-liners, could be a blow to the open, liberal democracy that Indonesian reformers have been trying to build ever since the fall of Soeharto in 1998. And it has the ironic result of forcing civil society groups that are usually against the hard-liners into their camp. (more…)
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BEN NEWELL, CHRIS DONKIN, DAN NAVARRO. worried about shark attacks or terrorism? (Repost from 21 April 2017)
The world can feel like a scary place. Today, Australia’s National Terrorism Threat Level is “Probable”. Shark attacks are on the rise; the number of people attacked by sharks in 2000-2009 has almost doubled since 1990-1999. Travellers are at a high risk of getting the Zika virus in places where the disease is present, such as Brazil and Mexico.