Since the 1980s Australia has become known for its laissez-faire or lackadaisical attitude to the role of money in politics. At the federal level Australia introduced public funding for political parties to reduce reliance on private donations, but corporate donations have continued to grow – reaching $202 million in 2013–14.
Disclosure to the Australian Electoral Commission is required for donations of over $13,200 but there are no source restrictions or limits for donations. (more…)
The dispute in the South China Sea should not, legitimately, involve Australia. We are only involved because we have such close military ties with the United States. War between the US and China is not inevitable, but dangerous, military escalation is taking place. If hostilities break out, the war will be on our doorstep. (more…)
Statement from the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture, regarding people transferred by Australia to the refugee processing centres of Papua New Guinea and Nauru. (more…)
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pursuing a ‘fresh approach’ with Russia’s Vladimir Putin for resolving the territorial dispute that has prevented the two countries signing a peace treaty since World War Two. It is easy to see what Abe might hope to gain from a settlement, but no breakthrough can be expected unless it fits in with Putin’s own calculations. (more…)
Assent by silence made Hitler’s crimes possible.
As Pastor Martin Niemoller wrote:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no-one left to speak for me.
The warning is as relevant as ever. The more we study how the Holocaust happened, the more we must realise how small steps of acceptance, acquiescence, rationalisation, political convenience and expedience, and above all, silence paved the path to hell from 1933 to 1945. For 80 years, we have glossed over the silent acquiescence of countries like the United States, Britain and Australia in the period after Hitler, for so long dismissed as just another ratbag, came to power by legal and constitutional means in Germany in 1933. (more…)
In Dante’s view, the unfortunate souls who dwell in purgatory may suffer excruciating pain, but the promise of their final destination is clear: paradise. Those who languish on the remote, tiny islands — Manus and Nauru — that host Australia’s offshore immigration detention centers are not so lucky. (more…)
Directed by Cesc Gay, Truman is a wonderful Spanish film about a couple of old buddies saying goodbye for the last time. One of them is dying of lung cancer, and the film traces their last four days together in Madrid. The good news is that Truman isn’t nearly as miserable as it sounds. In some reviews –and in the ads – I’ve seen it described as a “comedy-drama,” though the comic elements are often hard to discern. (more…)
A White Paper could be useful if it is agreed to by the key ministers of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, and Immigration and Border Protection ; and consistently applied by the Cabinet.
A major problem which I see is that we seem to be in a period of fairly intense political and bureaucratic infighting over Chinese activity, especially on the South China Sea. My concern is that there are serious divisions within the Coalition and also divisions within the ALP. (more…)
Newspaper commentary on the Syria conflict has long struggled to provide new insights into the conflict. However, in an analysis published over the weekend in the New York Times, Max Fisher, adopted the novel approach of asking academic experts to comment on how other civil wars came to an end to see if any served as a precedent for Syria. (more…)
In commenting this week, Meredith Burgmann said that ‘my view is that the stories in my book (Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files. New South Wales Publishing, Sydney 2014) collectively represent ASIO as being improper, incompetent, irrelevant, inappropriate and intrusive.’
The following are extracts from her book. (more…)
In the WorldPost, Nouriel Roubini writes “Across the West establishment parties of the Right and the Left are being disrupted – if not destroyed from the inside. Within such parties, the losers from globalisation are finding champions of anti-globalisation that are challenging the formal mainstream orthodoxy.” (more…)
This year is the sixtieth anniversary of the methyl mercury poisoning in Japan that caused ‘Minamata Disease’. Shocking images of victims captured by the American photographer W. Eugene Smith (his Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath perhaps the best known) have served ever since as a warning to the world of the threat from industrial pollution.
Documents recently obtained by NHK television’s Close-Up Gendai current affairs program have revealed how politicians and bureaucrats colluded with the firm responsible for the pollution scandal, Chisso Corporation, to keep it afloat using public money while restricting compensation payments to victims. (more…)
by Milton Moon.©
I’m due to die sooner rather than later.
My wife of sixty-seven years has already gone,
her mortal remains,
in ashes waiting for mine.
Together they’ll go, somewhere
as part of the seasons
or the tides ebb or flow.
She is still with me,
I talk to her often,
burning incense twice a day
and telling her
“incense is dispersed for the soul
of the young girl.” (more…)
Doctor Dorothy Horsfield of Australian National University is to be congratulated for her vision and hard work in mounting the first serious academic Russian studies conference in Australia for many years, ‘Putin’s Russia in the Wake of the Cold War’, on 24-26 August, under the auspices of the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre in Canberra. (more…)
About eighteen months ago, while talking with a policy analyst at Japan’s Defense Ministry in Tokyo, I asked how the confrontation with China over the disputed Senkaku (or Daioyu) Islands in the East China Sea was affecting morale in the Self-Defense Forces.
‘I recently visited Sasebo,’ he replied, referring to the southern base of the SDF units designated to repel any Chinese attempt to occupy the islands. ‘The expression on the faces of the men was very different from what I’m used to seeing at Ichigaya,’ the district of Tokyo where the Defense Ministry is located. In the Ichigaya compound, a certain non-military air prevails; you’ll notice chirpy tour groups being shown around twice a day and snapping up souvenirs at the commissary. (I cannot imagine this at Russell Hill in Canberra!)
What he saw in the faces of the troops at Sasebo was the tense and fixed expressions of soldiers and sailors who realize their next deployment might not be an exercise, but the real thing. (more…)
On 19th August Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison confirmed his earlier decision to block the NSW government’s planned lease of 50.4 per cent of the New South Wales Ausgrid electricity distribution network to two Chinese companies: the Chinese government-owned State Grid Corporation of China and Hong Kong listed Cheung Kong International (CKI). Morrison based his decision on the Foreign Investment Review Board’s advice that these companies represented a threat to the ‘ national interest…on the grounds of national security’. When asked at a press conference what specific security threat was posed by the Chinese bidders Morrison replied: The only person who’s security-cleared in this room to hear the answer to that question is me’.
The Treasurer’s cryptic media release and public comments leave many crucial questions unanswered. In particular, was the security issue the most important factor or were there other important considerations at play? What was this ‘exhaustive process’ and the major parameters applied? (more…)
A nice story from The Guardian ‘Our better angels’ . See link below. John Menadue
Perhaps we could try to combine humanitarian principles with political pragmatism to find an acceptable “solution” to Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.
Offshore detention policies are falling apart, and a new documentary film, Chasing Asylum, is again arousing shame and anger at the appalling psychological and physical damage we inflict on people who have attempted to seek asylum in Australia.
But then there’s a lot of righteous emotion on all sides of the asylum seeker debate. (more…)
It is not easy being a young person in globalised South Korea. The intense competition that defines South Korea’s education system and the irregular employment market that awaits graduates has led to rising inequality, falling birth rates, insecure employment and high numbers of youth suicide.Beyond South Korea’s domestic wellbeing, globalisation and its accompanying economic insecurity also have implications for foreign affairs, particularly attitudes towards North Korea. (more…)
Meritocracy is a belief that seems to me to still be alive and well in the senior management of disability support. It also seems to drive many aspects of public policy, particularly when appeals are made to “equal opportunity”.
Advocates of a meritocratic approach to disability policy are still assuming that the base-line principle should be that people get out of the system what they put into it. That is why they seek to remove any barriers to people with disabilities’ “putting in”. It is a political vision – often articulated in terms of free market principles – that wants a future based on merit. Hence “meritocracy” (rule by those who gain merit) and is an alternative to aristocracy (the rule by those who inherit land), or more recently to a class-based “luck” of being born in the right place at the right time. But in 1998, Michael Young argued in an article titled Meritocracy Revisited, “meritocracy is even worse than aristocracy because it attempts to acquire plus points because it connotes power and privilege as merited rather than born with”. (more…)
In an age of global media abundance, the notion that public broadcasting is a mechanism to address “market failure” is beguiling. It is also fundamentally wrong.
Public broadcasters have a unique national responsibility to provide a public good to citizens, rather than the more narrowly defined and easily measured mission of commercial broadcasters, to engage consumers and maximise the return to shareholders.
Public broadcasters provide a return that is more complex to measure, but with the increasing sophistication of “impact measurement”, not impossible. The exact nature of the outputs and outcomes varies from one country to another, but includes providing platforms for news, entertainment and education that foster a shared sense of national coherence. (more…)
See link below – article by Ben Doherty in The Guardian, 16 August 2016. It includes an interview with me, Peter Hughes and others, on the need to act quickly to process in Australia, the detainees presently held in Manus and Nauru.
‘They are not laughing now’. So the UKIP leader Nigel Farage gloated in the European Parliament in July 2016. It was not the first time these exact words have been uttered, in the same spirit of vengeful vindication in a European parliament. (more…)
The tantalising prospect of a 10% growth rate is on India’s economic horizon in the next few years, now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has won legislative backing for the long-awaited goods and services tax.
On August 3, India’s upper house approved a bill to bring in a nationwide GST, creating a much simpler tax regime that will help create a unified market of 1.3 billion consumers. In theory, interstate trade barriers will come down, enabling the faster and cheaper delivery of goods across the country.
But – and it is a massive but – there are numerous obstacles to the introduction next year of what most economists agree is the most important Indian tax reform for decades. Modi still needs more than half the states to approve a constitutional amendment, parliament will need to pass at least one more bill and a special GST council needs to be set up. (more…)
Yeah, sure, let’s ’embed’ ABC journalists in businesses, but don’t forget the unions, or Nauru.
The recent review of ABC business coverage may have come down in favour of the National Broadcaster, but, as has been suggested in the media, any move to “job swap” or “embed” ABC journalists within private corporations is nonsensical. (more…)
The Guardian recently ran a story regarding its Freedom Of Information request on boat turn backs, the subsequent denial of material, and its appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) to review the FOI decision. At some point during the AAT hearing the Guardian found itself locked out of part of the hearing on putative “national security grounds”. This week the Guardian reported on some 200 incident reports from the Nauru offshore processing centre, many regarding the 49 children and the abuse of them by those who are supposed to be their “protectors”. (more…)
On Tuesday night, SBS’ Insight program aired concerns about temporary migrant labour exploitation. These issues tend to come to national attention when a particular case is exposed, but mostly they are not seen as national priorities – and, as such, the response is generally reactive rather than proactive.
The exploitation to have attracted attention most recently often involves student-visa holders, working-holiday-visa holders and 457-visa holders.
Just a little under ten years ago, many of these situations would more immediately have been framed as issues of labour trafficking. But, since then, there has been a shift away from identifying and responding to these cases as potential slavery or trafficking offences, and instead focusing on labour exploitation as an issue for the Fair Work Ombudsman to review and/or redress. (more…)
In this article in the Harvard Business Review, Jeff Kehoe poses the future of capitalism. He says
Although it may be necessary to treat inequality as an economic problem, it is not sufficient. The US as a country needs to ask and answer some basic questions. Who gets to set the rules? What value should they reflect? What’s fair? What do we owe to one another?
See link for full article: https://hbr.org/2016/07/can-capitalism-be-redeemed
An exceptionally difficult UN Secretary-General selection process is set to continue
On 29 July, Malcolm Turnbull controversially announced that the Australian Government will not nominate Kevin Rudd for the UN Secretary-General position. Here in Australia, the focus of discussion on the Rudd candidacy has been on domestic political issues of precedent and loyalty to Team Australia.
Only Carl Ungerer and Geoff Raby, both strong Rudd supporters (see Farmer and Ungerer references below), touch on more basic questions of what outcome might now be best for the UN system, in an increasingly multipolar world that is impatient to break out of old power structures and private deals among the UN Security Council (UNSC) Permanent Members. This note seeks to further inform that discussion. (more…)
In the New York Times of 4 August, 2016, Nicholas Kristof gives a make-believe account of a security briefing of Donald Trump by a CIA officer. It is quite funny – but at the same time, quite worrying. John Menadue