John Menadue

  • Trump and American Decay.

     

    In this article in Foreign Affairs, Francis Fukuyama says:

    The decayed American political system can be fixed only by a strong external shock that will knock it off its current equilibrium and make possible real policy reform. Trump’s victory does indeed constitute such a shock but, unfortunately his only answer is the traditional populist-authorian one, trust me, the charismatic leader to take care of your problems. As in the case of the shock to the Italian political system administered by Silvio Berlusconi, the real tragedy will be the waste of an opportunity for actual reform.

    Francis Fukuyama is an American political scientist, political economist and author. Fukuyama is known for his book “The End of History and the Last Man” (1992).

     

     

  • ANDREW PESCE. The Health Care Home: too important to fail

     

    It has been a long road for peak medical organisations in Australia to publicly recognise and support the concept that Fee for Service payments (where medical services attract a Medicare rebate for attendances and/or procedures) may not always be the most appropriate remuneration methods in primary care. Now, both the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners and the AMA acknowledge that alternative payment systems have a place for patients with high healthcare needs because of special circumstances and/or chronic illness. This is a well-established concept, which has shown that primary health care services can establish viable business models based on a mixture of FFS for acute conditions (providing care for a sports injury in a young otherwise healthy person) and payments for annual cycles of care for people living with chronic medical conditions (eg diabetes requiring regular ongoing care from different providers). In New Zealand for example, a shift to up to 60-70% of practice income from blended payments, with the remainder from FFS has been well received from GPs there. (more…)

  • ANDREW JAKUBOWICZ. A Bigots’ Frenzy: how race, class and gender still matter in the Australian politics of Section 18C.

     

    Australia is a democratic pluralist society and there lies the rub. Democracies privilege freedom, while pluralism requires civility. In the increasing hyperbole surrounding the question of the impact of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act many are arguing that freedom of speech should trump freedom from hate, and others that the current “balance” is fine.

    A sociology of the protagonists suggests that those who are proposing to diminish the protections offered to victims of racial vilification under 18C are predominantly well-off (Christian) Euro-Australian males, who are also the majority of those previously complained against under 18C. Those who are opposed to changes to 18C tend to be drawn from minority groups in terms of ethnicity, race and religion, and are more likely to be women. (more…)

  • IAN MARSH. Trump’s Victory and Australian Politics

     

    A new anti-globalisation surge.

    Trump’s ascension no doubt creates new agenda challenges for Australia. But his campaign generated so many diverse and inconsistent statements that the policy landscape remains obscure. What is crystal clear is the gulf between elite worldviews and large swathes of public opinion. Remember those panegyrics to economic globalisation: The World is Flat and The Golden Straightjacket? What now of Thomas Friedman’s assured analysis?

    Here is one potted reading of the past half century or so. Start with the mass party world. The parties drew their power and reach from class identity. Here is Ernest Bevin’s description of his (British) socialisation: ‘I had to work at ten years of age while my employer’s son went to the university until he was twenty. You have set out for me a different set of conditions. I was taught to bow to the squire and touch my hat to the parson; my employer’s son was not. All these things have produced within me an intense hatred, a hatred which has caused me to organise for my fellows and direct my mind to a policy to give to my class a power to control their own destiny and labour….At present employers and employed are too often separated by something akin to a barrier of “caste” …The operatives are frequently regarded by employers as being of a different and inferior order…So long as these views continue to exist they inevitably produce an intense class bitterness.’ (more…)

  • ROBERT MANNE. It’s Time

     

    The Turnbull government has recently introduced new asylum seeker legislation into parliament. It has two parts. The first part aims to prevent any asylum seeker who tried to reach Australia after July 19 2013, including those who have been found to be genuine refugees, from ever being allowed to settle in Australia. The second part aims at banning the adults in this cohort settled in another country from ever visiting Australia even on a tourist or a business visa.

    The first part of this proposal writes into law what has previously been a bipartisan political agreement. Turning this consensus into legislation has however three implications. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Trumpageddon? Not quite …. not yet.

     

    Trump’s victory speech said all the right things. No talk now of putting Hillary in jail. On the contrary: gracious tribute for her hard-fought campaign. And promises to heal wounds, to be a president for all Americans.

    And new jobs. And infrastructure. And looking after all citizens, including significantly the veterans (of America’s endless wars of choice). And making America truly great again. A lot of warm fuzzy emotion from an exhausted victorious leader.

    The relative decline of a great power (relative to other contenders) does not always happen smoothly. There are discontinuities, surprises, sharp inflection points. Tonight was a major such moment in the United States’ relative decline. (more…)

  • SAM HURLEY, TRAVERS McLEOD, JOHN WISEMAN. Company directors can be held legally liable for ignoring the risks from climate change.

     

    Company directors who don’t properly consider climate related risks could be liable for breaching their duty of due care and diligence, a new legal opinion has found.

    Although the alarm for business leaders has been sounding for some time, the release of the opinion by senior barristers and leading solicitors confirms the potential liability for Australian company directors.

    Australian companies are particularly exposed to the physical, transition and liability risks posed by climate change. The Paris Climate Agreement, which comes into force today, brings the transition risks (and opportunities) forward, given the policy and business changes necessitated by the agreement’s commitment to a sustainable economy. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Is Hillary the Russia-hater a safer American choice?

     

    The final days of the US presidential campaign – a disgraceful saga at best – have been marked by a frantic race to the bottom by both sides.

    On the Trump side: an anonymous but skilfully made video is doing the social media rounds, alleging improper links between Hillary Clinton’s long-standing personal assistant and friend Huma Abedin, through her kinship connections to her powerful Saudi Arabian family, to Wahhabi Islamist extremism which supports Al Qaeda, ISIS and so on. The snide innuendo here is that the people who organised the World Trade Centre attacks have planted Abedin at the heart of Hillary’s political career. The video is thoroughly nasty. It is not clear who commissioned it.

    More overtly, Julian Assange features on a Russian news video today (by www.rt.com). He alleges that because the Clinton Foundation has accepted much Saudi and Qatari government money, and because Hillary Clinton knows both governments fund ISIS, this must mean that Hillary Clinton knowingly connives with ISIS.

    On the other side, the Clinton camp alleges that the Kremlin hacked into Democratic National Congress emails and gave the product to Assange’s Wikileaks to distribute; that seventeen US intelligence agencies have confirmed that Putin is behind this; that Trump is a puppet of Putin; that Putin is manipulating the US election to try to get Trump elected, because he knows Trump will not stand up to him as Hillary would. (more…)

  • Blowback for American sins in the Philippines – The Boston Globe.

    In this article in the Boston Globe on October 15, 2016, Stephen Kinzer points out that President Duterte’s grievance ‘is rooted in history’. President Duterte asserted that the US had unjustly seized the Philippines in 1899 and waged a horrific military campaign to suppress native resistance.

    Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, USA.  See link to article below.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/10/15/blowback-for-american-sins-philippines/VNAmdveJWntU7f8FYnGvPL/story.html?s_campaign=8315

     

  • PETER CHRISTOFF. The Paris climate deal has come into force – what next for Australia?

     

    The Paris climate agreement comes into legal force today, just 11 months after it was concluded and 30 days after it met its ratification threshold of 55 parties accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

    By contrast, the Kyoto Protocol, which this treaty now replaces, took more than 8 years to come into force, slowed by the United States’ persistent and erosive opposition.

    At the time of writing, the Agreement has been ratified by 94 parties, including the world’s four largest emitters: China, the United States, the European Union and India. As Climate Analytics reports, these nations account for 66% of greenhouse emissions. Even if the United States were to withdraw its support under a Trump presidency, the Paris Agreement will remain in force. (more…)

  • BRUCE ARNOLD. Testing the body politic? Lobbying by the pathology industry.

     

    Pathology testing in Australia is big business, getting bigger as the population ages and we rely on high-tech medicine for intractable ailments. Advocacy by commercial interests and government pathology service providers shapes public policy. It potentially affects elections rather than just the national budget. It matters. It is inadequately recognised and less understood.

    What we know about lobbying by the pathology industry in the 2016 election is how little we know. Our ignorance matters, because it tells us something about the realities of a liberal democracy in 2016. It also matters because we need an informed public discourse about health policy and health costs. (more…)

  • JEFFREY SACHS. The fatal expense of American imperialism.

    In this article, Jeffrey D. Sachs says

    “the United States … is squandering vast sums and undermining national security. … today the United States has similarly over invested in the military and could follow a path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China.”

    See link to full article below.

    http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/30/the-fatal-expense-american-imperialism/teXS2xwA1UJbYd10WJBHHM/story.html

    Jeffrey Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. This article was first published in the Boston Globe on October 30, 2016.

  • PHIL GLENDENNING. We Need To End Australia’s Refugee Shame. Now

     

    ‘Human beings are never a means to an end. They are an end in themselves’. Emmanuel Kant’s words in the seventeenth century echo down the centuries in stark contrast to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Island. The recent Four Corners program, The Forgotten Children gave Australians an all too rare opportunity to hear from the refugee children of Nauru themselves, and to see for ourselves what is being done in our name.

    Two days ago a young asylum seeker rose early, turned on his computer and read that the Government was preparing to ban all post-July 2013 boat arrivals from ever entering Australia under any circumstances. He went to his bathroom and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. He is one of the 30,000 asylum seekers in the community without rights or resolution to his case. (more…)

  • JOHN NIEUWENHUYSEN. How Australian Political Leaders Can Abandon and Mistreat Asylum Seekers

     

    Living as a White youth in apartheid South Africa in the 1950’s, I often wondered how it was possible for a small minority to dominate and oppress the large majority of the population who were denied the vote because of the colour of their skins.

    Much of the answer lay, I believed, in the capacity of the apartheid system to separate the lives of the different racial groups and to ensure that when people met, it was always in the context of White master-Non-White servant relationships. Members of the different defined racial groups were thus hardly ever able to converse ordinarily and to learn of the lives and aspirations of their fellow South Africans of different skin colours. (more…)

  • Royal family are even more secretive than MI5.

    Jenny Hocking has been researching and publishing some vital information about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government by Sir John Kerr . In that research, she has been denied access to the papers.  She is taking legal action in the Federal Court against the National Archives to release correspondence between Sir John Kerr and the Queen.  (See ‘The Palace Letters‘)

    In The Times, Ben MacIntyre writes about the secretive nature of the British Royal Family. See his article below from The London Times of October 28, 2016. John Menadue. (more…)

  • RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The present threat to global security.

     

    In the second decade of this century we are living in a greatly changed world, compared with that to which we accustomed ourselves, following the defeat of Japan and Germany in WWII in the second half of 1945.

    The international “rules based “situation of the late 40s and early mid 50s was essentially created by the US with some British and French support. It is now completely dated and out for touch with the present situation, driven as it is by the rise of China and India,and the rapid growth of the domestic economies of Indonesia,Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.

    The apparent present insistence of the US that no other power, including China,should resist its belief in its own global supremacy, can be a serious danger to global stability.

    Also, a threat of Russian ambition,promoted by the US, is not the main threat to peace at present. As US supremacy recedes,Chinese power rises and Russia continues its recovery, it is US resistance to this tide of historic change now underway,which puts at risk,as this century unfolds both global security and the emergence of an Asia Pacific community.

    If Australia does not respond promptly,we shall find ourselves left behind.

    Richard Woolcott, Former Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (1988 – 2002), Permanent Representative to the United Nations (1982 – 1988)

  • ARTHUR CHESTERFIELD-EVANS. Compulsory Third Party insurance in NSW- a Bad System about to Get Worse?

     

    CTP, Compulsory Third Party insurance (Green Slips) in NSW are looking increasingly like a scam. In theory, if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident that is not your fault, all ‘reasonable and necessary’ treatment is currently paid for by your insurer. People might assume this means good, standard medical practice. This is not so.

    In principle, patients are entitled to immediate and early treatment but the first problem is that insurers have up to 3 months to decide if they are liable for the accident. Payment can be delayed until the liability is accepted. Sometimes when two cars collide both insurers decide that the other is liable, and neither will pay. This is quite common. (more…)

  • ROBERT MANNE. How we came to be so cruel to asylum seekers.

    This is an edited extract of a talk delivered to the Integrity 20 Conference at Griffith University on October 25, 2016

    If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed.

    In 1992 we introduced a system of indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Since that time, we have accepted the idea that certain categories of refugees and asylum seekers can be imprisoned indefinitely; that those who are intercepted by our navy should be forcibly returned to the point of departure; that those who haven’t been able to be forcibly returned should be imprisoned indefinitely on remote Pacific Islands; and that those marooned on these island camps should never be allowed to settle in Australia even after several years.

    How then has this come to pass? There are two main ways of explaining this. (more…)

  • PAUL DALEY. Why Australia Day and Anzac Day helped create a national ‘cult of forgetfulness’.

    Australia Day and Anzac Day are months away.

    But I’m getting in early. It’s beyond time Australia cast off these sturdy cultural crutches that both, somehow, define national birth, so we can discover who and what we truly are.

    Australia Day, celebrating British invasion in 1788, and Anzac Day, marking Australia’s involvement in the failed invasion of the Ottoman empire in 1915, are but relatively recent, fleeting moments of note among innumerable others in our 60,000-year continental human history. (more…)

  • BINOY KAMPMARK. Des Ball: The man who sank the myth of controlled nuclear warfare

    The late Professor Des Ball of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre came as close as any on being a public intellectual on nuclear strategy.

    While some of his counterparts in the United States felt that using nuclear weapons was feasible and sound, Ball, who died last week, issued his pieces with mighty caveats and sensible qualifications.

    Controlling the process of deploying weapons of mass extermination in an active theatre, far from being deemed obscene, was lauded by advocates. Human sense will always prevail, somehow. (more…)

  • TONY KEVIN. Clinton-Putin-Trump: foreign policy dimensions of the final debate.

     

    There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton trumped her contender on domestic economic and social policy issues, migration, and proper respect for women. She has neutralised the personal emails and Clinton Foundation questions. Barring the unforeseeable, she will cruise to victory next month.

    On foreign policy, her words and what she left unsaid left many important questions: and Trump more often found himself on the right side of the foreign policy argument, for those who follow these things. Such debates proceed according to a free flow of their own and important issues easily get submerged and diverted as the caravan rapidly moves on. Here are my notes for what they are worth. (more…)

  • HAMISH McDONALD. What really happens at Pine Gap.

    Hamish McDonald wrote this article in the Saturday Paper on October 1, 2016. The paper was also a tribute to Des Ball who died recently. He was the best informed and independent commentator on Pine Gap.  The following is an introduction to Hamish McDonald’s article with a full link at the end to the Saturday Paper.  John Menadue

    It’s one of two sacred sites to which you can drive from Alice Springs. The other is the red stone monolith of Uluru, said by the Pitjantjara to bring down a curse on anyone who removes a rock.

    This one, though, is the huddle of gleaming white fibreglass domes known as Pine Gap which, if penetrated by the uninitiated, could threaten the security of the West. (more…)

  • JAMES ROSE. From Tampa to now: how reporting on asylum seekers has been a triumph of spin over substance.

     

    Spin designed to dehumanise and demonise asylum seekers.

    This year marks the 15th anniversary of one of the most divisive national election campaigns in Australia’s recent history: the Tampa affair.

    Coming just weeks after the September 11 terror attacks, the pitched battle between John Howard and Kim Beazley drew heavily on fear and panic. The divisions of 2001 are not only still with us, but they are far deeper today.

    The September 11 terrorist attacks in the US were given a sharp-knife twist here in Australia. The country was still entangled in the issue of the MV Tampa and its cargo of more than 400 desperate asylum seekers. And there was a public outcry over the events surrounding the interception of the SIEV-4 and its 223 asylum seekers – some of whom, politicians claimed, had thrown their children overboard.

    The way the media frames public debate on asylum seekers and their impact on Australia was forged in this time. Three key strategies helped achieve this. (more…)

  • NICHOLAS FARRELLY. What is King Bhumibol’s legacy?

    New Mandala co-founder Nicholas Farrelly reflects on a remarkable and contentious reign.

    The 70-year reign of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej started and ended inauspiciously. It was a family tragedy that unexpectedly brought Bhumibol to the throne. He went on to become the world’s longest serving monarch but, in death, his formidable legacy is deeply tarnished by the ambitions of those who fought hardest to defend him.

    In 1946, the untimely and mysterious death of his older brother, King Ananda Mahidol, catapulted the young Prince Bhumibol into a role for which he was unprepared. King Ananda died violently in Bangkok’s Grand Palace. He was found in bed with a pistol shot to the head. To this day, nobody knows who pulled the trigger. Forensic reports suggest that neither suicide nor an accident were likely. Whispered speculation about regicide has continued ever since. (more…)

  • DAVID JAMES. It will take more than a royal commission to tame the banks

    The recent appearance in parliament of the chief executives of the Big Four banks was notable for its well orchestrated apologies, which were about as convincing as a life insurance ad that promises only to pay out to the immortal.

    (more…)

  • PETER DAY. Is western civilisation bored?

     

    Religion. The mob. Capitalism. Fundamentalism. Bad parenting. Racism. Materialism. Youth unemployment. Poverty. Thugs. Multiculturalism. Rich vs poor …

    Take your pick; even add to the list, as we collectively grapple to decipher the root causes of the violence and the mental illness that pervades our world – be it terrorism, random shootings, war, suicide.

    ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ shakes us to the core. We start to question what it means to be human. We apportion blame. We want answers. ‘Gosh’, we ask, ‘what just happened?’ (more…)

  • Catholic Bishops – It Is Time To Bring Them Here

    Statement in support of offshore detainees
    By Archbishop Denis Hart, President, Australian Catholic Bishops Conference

    One of the greatest crises of our day is the plight of people forced from their own countries by war, persecution or poverty and forced to live without a home, without safety and often separated from their families.

    Pope Francis has called on Catholics to welcome such vulnerable people as our brothers and sisters. In Australia, we do not have to directly meet the responsibilities that many other nations bear. But we do bear the shame of the expulsion and harsh treatment of the people who sought our protection only to be detained on Nauru and Manus Island. (more…)

  • LYNDSAY CONNORS. Cometh the hour, cometh the man?

     

    Is the Hon. Simon Birmingham, Federal Minister for Education and Training, the man?

    In his recent appearance on the ABC’s Q&A, Senator Birmingham announced that there are private schools that are ‘over-funded’.

    This came as the Turnbull Government is under pressure to commit the Commonwealth to meeting its share of the funding required to achieve the Gonski resource standards. The Coalition Government will have, reluctantly, funded only one-third of the transition towards those standards by 2017. For schools that are yet to reach the appropriate standards under the formula developed by the Gonski Review in 2012 the Commonwealth bucks will stop there. The Coalition budget commitment of only $1.2 billion over four years will not do much more than cover the effects of inflation. It falls far short of the $3 billion needed to bring all schools to the Gonski standards in 2019 according to the timetable foreshadowed by the previous Labor Government. (more…)

  • JIM COOMBS. “CIRCLE” Bail Hostels

     

    One of the common reasons for incarceration of Aboriginal children is failure to appear at court and breach of bail conditions (often a residence condition). One way to overcome this is to establish “bail hostels” like those in the U.K. Too often ignorance of the need to comply, losing court papers, illiteracy, and homelessness militate against compliance with the requirement to appear at Court on the appointed day. This often leads to an arrest warrant being issued, arrest, incarceration, and often refusal of renewed bail. This is both costly and administratively time consuming, when the infraction that led to it would rarely lead to a prison penalty. Research by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (BOCSAR) shows that this is so for persons before the courts generally. (more…)

  • ROBERT MANNE. Oh, No Jim, No Jim, No Jim, No

                                        

    As readers of John Menadue’s blog might be aware, I believe that Australia ought, on the one hand, to find homes in the next months for the 1,700 or so refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island who we are allowing to be destroyed in body and spirit and, on the other, retain the policy of naval interception and return to point of departure so as to avoid a return to the situation of 2009-2013 when 50,000 asylum seekers reached Australia by boat and 1,000 or 1,200 drowned.

    Accordingly, my position on the question of how Australia should now respond to the asylum seeker issue is close to Father Frank Brennan’s and, roughly speaking, equidistant between the position of two other panellists on Monday night’s Q & A, the legal idealist Professor Jane McAdam, and the military realist, the architect of the Operation Sovereign Borders policy, General Jim Molan. While however I disagreed with several of Jane McAdam’s ideas, I was appalled and angered by both the tone and content of several of Jim Molan’s remarks. (more…)