On 9 February, the Guardian published a report on health systems around the world. It drew particularly on analysis of ratings by the Commonwealth Fund and its correspondents around the world. The UK’s national health service was ranked number one in the world. Australia was ranked number four.
For Guardian article, see link below:
In this article, Tony Shepherd, former President of the Business Council of Australia, urges Australia to be more generous in helping asylum seekers from Syria. He says:
‘As I stare out the window on the plane ride home (from the refugee camps in the Middle East) I think that if history has taught us nothing else, it is that generosity is always rewarded. Our nation, Australia, was built by immigration; it has been the secret of our success. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nations that chose to open their hearts and invest in new people, over the decades to follow, came to dominate diplomacy and lead in the global economy.’
See link below to this article by Tony Shepherd in the AFR.
In responding to questions at the Senate Estimates hearing held on 9 February 2016, NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow admitted he did not know the number of nodes being built during the Fibre to the Node (FTTN) rollout and he went on to say that any information about what is being rolled out by NBN Co would be commercial-in-confidence, meaning that he would very selectively answer questions put to him by Senators. By the end of the session, Morrow had answered very few questions.
The purpose of Senate Estimates hearings is to examine the operations of government relating to expenditure of public funds and plays a key role in the parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. But as Morrow demonstrated so diligently is that you can persuade executives from a government business enterprise to attend the hearings but you cannot guarantee that they will answer any questions put to them.
At a time when Australia has embarked on the largest nation building project of the digital era, executives from the government business enterprise rolling out the NBN rely on obfuscation and “commercial-in-confidence” to ignore reasonable and justifiable questions from Senators.
Morrow’s responses at the Senate Estimates hearing included, “I do not know”, “I would have to take that on notice”, “I will take it on notice”, “I would imagine we do”, and I do not have that [information] here” and many variations of these statements.
Senate Estimates hearings involving executives from NBN Co have become a sad pantomime. Senators spend a couple of hours asking Morrow and CFO Stephen Rue probing questions about what taxpayers are receiving for an ever increasing expenditure of public and borrowed funds and unsurprisingly most of the questions remain unanswered because key NBN Co executives that should be expected to be able to answer the questions about expenditure and what is actually being done by NBN Co, are not present.
Australian’s should be concerned that executives from a government business enterprise are permitted to deflect, delay or simply ignore questions from Senators that are attempting to scrutinise how the government is spending taxpayer dollars.
On more than one occasion now, Morrow has refused to acknowledge documents leaked from NBN Co and reported on in the media. If someone within NBN Co believes a document to be important enough to leak to the media, it is highly likely that Morrow would be asked questions about the document at the next Senate Estimates hearings and Australians should have a reasonable expectation that Morrow will provide answers.
But this is not how it works in practice because Morrow’s response to a question about the document titled IOP 2.0 FTTN review dated 26 February 2015 was “The document that you refer to, somebody showed me a copy of that. I cannot confirm that that is even a valid NBN document. If it was, it would be commercial-in-confidence.”
When asked again about a detail contained in the document, Morrow stated “I cannot confirm anything that is in that document. If that was our document, it would be commercial-in-confidence. I cannot even confirm that it is our document. Anybody can prepare something of that nature. Therefore, the information that you are asking, if you want to know the number of nodes or something then I am happy to take that on notice.”
Australians might wonder how hard would it be for the CEO of a government business enterprise to ask that someone check the organisation’s document register and to follow up with an email to employees asking if someone had drafted the document.
And you can be certain that NBN Co carries out an internal investigation to find the people that are leaking documents containing details about the different NBN rollouts and in particular details about NBN Co’s rollout of the obsolete VDSL2 Fibre to the Node (FTTN) component of the NBN.
Morrow’s use of plausible deniability is something that we might expect in a Monty Python skit but not by the CEO of a government business enterprise responsible for Australia’s largest infrastructure project.
The logic goes something like this: As CEO Morrow should not be expected to know the details of what is going on within NBN Co and even though leaked documents are reported in the media, and subsequently brought to Morrow’s attention, it would be disruptive to enquire if the document originated within NBN Co, therefore Morrow is unable to confirm the documents originality and cannot speak to anything contained within the document.
At the end of the hearing the Chair Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds summed up the collective exasperation at what had just transpired when she said “there is a lot of technical information and detail that two people cannot possibly be across. So what I was suggest is that you consider your preparations for the next estimates. As you know, that will be a longer session, no doubt, with nbn. We know it is going to be in the week of 29 May. There are longitudinal themes, so if you and your staff are able to go through and review those themes and make sure that you either have the appropriate officers here, or on hand, so that they can email you some questions and you are able to answer the questions more quickly for the committee members. I think that would also assist you in taking fewer questions on notice, which obviously has a significant workload sitting behind that to get them in on time.”
Morrow’s efforts at Senate Estimates hearings have been nothing more than professional stone-walling. Australians expect more from senior executives that are responsible to government and it is folly to treat the Senate with disdain. The secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the NBN is a warning sign that cannot be ignored. Australians will be left with a second-rate broadband network at a time when our major competitors in the global digital economy are rolling out fibre to homes and business.
Mark Gregory is a senior lecturer in the School of Engineering at RMIT University.
Tim Minchin’s ‘Come home Cardinal Pell’ nails it for many in Oz. Minchin voices the rage, the frustration and the suffering of unrequited victims, their relatives, and Church goers and observers.
Rage boils when people feel unheard. It becomes incandescent over unfairness. It sizzles when one class triumphs over another.
The song flashes the spotlight on the dark places were abuse happened initially or where cover up merchants operated.
The song is composed. Also composed is the Statement from the Catholic Communications Office February 17th. ‘The past few days has (sic) seen a great deal of incorrect information relating to Cardinal George Pell and his upcoming Royal Commission appearance.’
Both compositions seek to persuade. Let’s look at how they do it and the fallout. Minchin uses the long as literature tradition of satire. Satire works with wit, imagination, exaggeration and offence. Satire and protest songs have been the rallying and inspiring forces for much social reform.
The P.R. document purports to tell the truth. However the genre is so steeped in spin that it invites critical reading from most judicious readers. Both genres can, and often do, create a backlash, which is the opposite of their intended purposes.
Satire, seeking the high moral ground can cause serious collateral damage. There is no absolute freedom of speech. There are responsibilities as in the exercise of any right or power.
As it is three factors stand between Pell and his appearing in Australia before the Commission. One is the professional opinion of a doctor. Then there is the acceptance of that opinion by the Commission. Thirdly there is the will of Pell himself. I have not seen any criticism of the first two factors.
Pell is not currently before the court charged with an offence. Even if he were he would deserve the presumption of innocence. That may change. But no matter the amount of pain felt or hatred generated towards him the man, he enters a process of inquiry.
Neither he nor any citizen deserves lynch law or trial by media or art. The problem is that if he is seen as the victim of unfairness he and his advocates can evoke undeserved compassion or complaints of unfairness.
For satire or P.R. the end is frequently seen to justify the means. This is no more so than in social media. But I would argue that if the damage done to an innocent person, the target or bystander of a satirist attack, the attacker needs to review their motivation, means and methods.
If a satirist like Charley Hebdo knows violence would ensue from a particular piece of work are they justified in going ahead? Is it surprising that the media focuses so much on the fate of victims and on free speech? What are the ends, which involve such destructive means?
Zealots thrive on opposition. Second century Tertullian is quoted as saying, ‘The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.’ At times Tony Abbott seemed to regress to a zealous Democratic Labour Party mindset where he believed that he was doing God’s work and that opposition to his cause just proved he was on the righteous track.
It would be too easy and convenient for sexual predators or concealers to claim their accusers were just anti-Catholic bigots.
There is a line between ‘playing the man’ and following due process or solving the problem at hand. Whether in sport, or that other sport, politics currently there is too much tolerance for assault on the person. And the media love it.
Advocates for victims or Pell are challenged to have respect for their clients. Can we all also maintain sufficient respect for the processes of the land to see that supra jungle standards are maintained all round? Or at least have the patience to see what they yield?
Michael D. Breen is a Zen Buddhist ex Jesuit. He is a retired, organizational and humanistic psychologist. He fends off relevance deprivation with forays into woodwork,, metalwork, writing and Zen.
Everyone remembers Psycho, in which Anthony Perkins played a knife-wielding weirdo obsessed with his dead mother, and most of us remember Rambo, in which Sylvester Stallone played a super-patriot action-hero fighting for truth, justice and the American way. We all know about Romeo, and some of us will remember Dumbo, Disney’s animated baby elephant with the big ears. But Trumbo? He’s not exactly a household name, and unless you’re something of a film buff you may never have heard of him. Trumbo is the hero of Trumbo, a wholly absorbing film from Hollywood director Jay Roach.
For the record, Dalton Trumbo was a successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s golden years, one of the notorious ”Hollywood Ten” blacklisted in the 1940s for refusing to testify before Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. The committee was set up to weed out communists in high places, and the definition of “communist” was fairly loose. These were the dark days of anti-red witch-hunts, when many a loyal American was named and shamed for real or imagined communist sympathies. The Hollywood Ten finished up in gaol, and many other writers, actors and directors were sacked or boycotted by the major studios. Some eked out an income by writing under assumed names, but their work was never credited on-screen. In Roach’s film the screenplay – crisp, witty and disturbing – is the work of John McNamara, and I doubt if Trumbo himself could have written a better one
It’s true that many Hollywood celebrities had communist connections . As an opening title informs us, thousands of Americans joined the party during the war years when Uncle Joe Stalin was a loyal ally of Uncle Sam. Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) joined up in 1943, and in the eyes of McCarthy and his witch-hunting mates, was a still a certified security risk years after the war was over. It was much the same here. Thousands of lefties and Laborites, haunted by bitter memories of war and depression, drifted into the communist camp. My own father was one, causing much anguish to poor mum, who was convinced that dad’s CP membership had denied him an army commission.
Roach’s film is as much a portrait of those paranoid times as a study of Trumbo himself. Cranston, familiar to all except me as the star of the TV series Breaking Bad, gives us a grimly dogged and highly convincing impersonation. But for all his studied mannerisms and surface gestures, we never engage deeply with Trumbo as a human being. If anything, Diane Lane as his loyal wife Cleo, and Elle Fanning as his teenage daughter, are more vivid and sympathetic characters. Roach falls back on repeated shots of Trumbo belting away at an old manual typewriter or writing in his bathtub, sustained by cigarettes, whisky and Benzedrine hits, as if this were enough to reveal his inner life. I wanted to care more for the guy. Neighbours shunned and vilified him, and the syndicated columnist Hedda Hopper (a gleefully malicious Helen Mirren) pursued a relentless personal vendetta . Hopper comes across as the real villain of the story – not McCarthy or the feeble studio bosses or the big-name stars like John Wayne who spurned Trumbo in his hour of need .
How good was Trumbo anyway? He made a tidy fortune as a screenwriter, but apart from Kitty Foyle, about a working-class girl who makes good, and the Oscar-winning romance Roman Holiday, there’s not a lot else of Trumbo’s I remember. Roman Holiday was written by Trumbo’s friend Ian McKellan Hunter, who based his script on Trumbo’s storyline and declined to turn up at the presentation ceremony to accept his Oscar (which officially went to Trumbo in 1975). A turning point came when Stanley Kubrick defied Hollywood moguls by insisting that Trumbo be credited for the screenplay of Spartacus (1960). Spartacus isn’t Kubrick’s best film, but it sealed the fate of the Hollywood blacklist and signalled the end of the McCarthy era.
Could it happen again? I think so. There’s no shortage of political hysteria in the air these days, and plenty of reckless military adventurism of the kind that feeds hatred and suspicion. I can imagine a round of Islamist witch-hunts in the US, especially if Donald Trumbo (sorry, Trump) becomes president: “For our own security I want to weed out all those Islamists in the State Department and the White House.” There’s a telling moment in Trumbo when news comes through of the death of justice Wiley Rutledge, wiping out a narrow liberal majority on the US Supreme Court and denying Trumbo any chance of a successful appeal against his gaol sentence. With the recent death of justice Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama has a choice. He can cement a conservative majority on the court or make it a little easier for liberal causes to succeed. Future Trumbos will await his decision with interest.
Three-and-a-half stars
Evan Williams reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascall Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
Politics has changed so much over the years; our political climate is unstable, since 2007 we have had five different prime ministers. A person in my position would ask how does this affect people with severe physical disabilities?
Neoliberalism has its aim to put into question all collective structures capable of obstructing the logic of the pure market. Such a belief allows one to question the ideology behind the welfare state, progressive taxation and other social policies that can lead to an egalitarian society. Their ideology harvests the sentiment that many welfare recipients are lazy and should do more to help grow the economy. But rather neoliberals are persistently oriented towards supporting a society in which self interest prevails and that is why they give all their energy to policies that claim to further the individual pursuit of wealth. That is, the individual pursuits that are deemed worthy of government support are those that are beyond those living on the “other side” of the great divide between the rich and the poor.
I am lucky enough to live in Australia but even with my poor eyesight I am still able to witness the degradation of impoverishment upon ordinary people whenever I visit my local community, Noble Park.
Individual pursuits, whether of the rich or the poor are always, at least to some extent, justified in terms of one’s self-interest. And this goes a long way to explaining the powerful and dogmatic reasoning behind the powerful ideology as it is supported by those who are very rich. And that is confirmed by the equally dogmatic phrase: ‘power is money’.
Liberal political and economic policies are dominated by this ideological viewpoint. Such policies have been integral to political economies all over the world, in both developed and developing countries. The re-birth of Liberalism as Neoliberalism was seen as the answer to the western world problem of stagflation, which reared its head in mid 1970s. Hugh Stretton put it well:
Alternative strategies for dealing with the offending stagflation would advantage different classes, parties, industries. Economic reform was as usual a political task. Other interests saw opportunities to change the direction of development to improve the mixed economies’ efficiency by means which would incidentally make the rich richer, business freer, welfare cheaper and the poor more self reliant. Those means were described as de-regulating, privatising, restoring competition, cutting welfare, “rolling back the boundaries of government” (Stretton, 1986:7).
Neoliberalism is a political economic theory and practice that has emerged with greater and greater appeal since the 1960s, and since the 1980s it has increased in prominence at the level of public policy formulation. The neoliberal approach rejects social democratic doctrines. Neoliberalism focuses politically on the establishment of a stable medium of exchange, the reduction of localised rules, regulations and barriers to free-ranging commerce, and the privatisation of state-run enterprises. This contemporary and dominant economic ideology of most western countries is referred to with a “neo-“ prefix because it is a latter-day version of the classical liberalism that initially arose in the 18th century. Moreover, neoliberalism claims to be a political system designed to highlight both the political limitations of the market economy in the nation-state, and the economic efficiency and effectiveness of the market economy when it is freed to operate on a global scale.
Classical liberal economics was developed by Adam Smith, and we can sense its appeal at what we now say was the beginning of the industrial revolution. Smith argued that government intervention disrupted the natural order of society. According to Smith, the natural order of society can be defined as a society left to its own devices. Smith based his economic beliefs on the argument that most economic self-interest is altruistic. This can be noted in his famous quote from The Wealth of Nations:
‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves. Not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.’
Now, after thinking about this for some years, I come to the view that something like this principle is working itself out in my own relationship with what is now referred to as the “disability sector”.
As it is commonly understood altruism is about selflessness, it is a principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. But my situation seems to be endorsed by Smith in the above quote. In the social service delivery to which I am a recipient, involving a personal care attendant, the “altruistic effects” that actually work themselves out in the workplace becomes a friendship circle – workers and clients are mates. This workplace is actually our home in which the residents are actively welcoming the visitors to their “space”, under their private “roof”. It is not only those paid for their work in this workplace who have an interest, a general self-interest, in forming what takes place. After all it is also a place sustained by the friendships that are generated.
According to Smith, this classical liberal system would provide for an economic infrastructure that could not only provide economic benefits, but also help promote a proud, virtuous and motivated society (Gibilisco). Amartya Sen portrays the mixed emotions of self-interest:
‘Can you direct me to the Railway Station?’ asks the stranger. ‘Certainly,’ says the local, pointing in the opposite direction to the post office, ‘and would you post this letter for me on your way?’ ‘Certainly,’ says the stranger, resolving to open it to see if it contains anything worth stealing (Sen, cited in Stretton and Orchard, 1994:51).
During an interview with me, Hugh Stretton explained his dissent from this ideological interpretation of Adam Smith. He pointed out that Smith never said that the interests which prompted people’s economic decisions and behaviour were all selfish. Smith’s first book The Theory of Moral Sentiments was about our feelings, and concerns about other people’s needs, safety and happiness, as well as our own. When he said, in The Wealth of Nations, that he owed his breakfast to his baker’s self-interest, there is good reason to think that Smith meant the baker’s joy in his skills and work, and pride in the quality of his bread and the pleasure it could give his bread’s consumers, as well as the money it earned him.
Smith certainly believed that people’s generous feelings, and concern for others’ safety and prosperity, as well as their own, could join in determining their market choices and their social and political values and behaviour. Because it comes from the neoliberal ‘bible’ (i.e. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations) I think this observation must play a vital part of any effective attack on the neoliberals’ assumption that material self-interest is the sufficient cause of market efficiency, which in turn, they then suggest, is a necessary condition – many even think of it as a sufficient condition – of a good society.
Meritocracy
Meritocracy is defined by government policies promoting the principles of merit. The actions pursued by advocates of meritocracy are fundamental to the belief that people get out of the system what they put into it based on what they deserve according to market based principles – i.e. what they produce and how what they produce performs in the market. It is a political vision for the future based on merit, and opposed to the traditionally conservative theories of the aristocracy. However, Michael Young a well-known writer on the subject has argued that “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”. He further argues that meritocracy is detrimental to those with disabilities. Young in his 1998 article titled: “Meritocracy revisited: assessing the social implications of meritocracy” puts it like this:
… showing how sad, and fragile, a meritocratic society could be. If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, and, if they were convinced it was all for the common good, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.
As a result, today we may have the worst of both worlds. Social reality, as portrayed by today’s media, tells us that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer. In the case of people with disabilities, their capacities, under such a system, are rarely deemed meritorious or worthy of reward.
Moreover, this brings into question, possible deplorable links between meritocracy and equal opportunity.
However, we need to keep in mind that the concept of individual merit had been introduced as far back as Michael Young’s 1956 book The Rise of Meritocracy. In a more recent article, he has suggested that:
[a] line of argument that is also made much of in the book is that a meritocracy can only exist in a full form if there is such a narrowing down of values that people can be put into rank order of their worth.
This connects with a political insistence on the rise of a new form of meritocracy, which can also be prejudicial and ultimately discriminatory against those with socially defined lesser abilities or different abilities. Young argues that what one is born with, or without, is not of one’s own doing. To put it in a more crude form of discourse, being a member of the “lucky sperm club” confers no moral right to advantage. But such a view of “luck” does seem to align with the political-economic doctrines of some advocates of neoliberalism
This article is dedicated to the memory of my friend and mentor, Hugh Stretton.
I would like to thank Bruce Wearne and Christina Irugalbandara.
I would like to promote this worthy new organisation http://www.uvpd.org.au/index.html
According to the ABS, the proportion of Australians born overseas has reached its highest point in 120 years. At about 6.6 million people, the overseas born represent 28 per cent of the country’s total, and, since 2005, migration has contributed half of total population growth. Some 47 per cent of Australians in 2015 were either born overseas or have parents who were.
The diversity of Australia’s population has also increased, and the days of White Australia are long since gone. The traditional major country sources of immigration remain Britain and New Zealand, which represent 20.8 and 9.1 per cent respectively of our overseas born population. But Asian migration has been rising; and, in 2015, 6 per cent of Australia’s overseas born were from China; 5.6 per cent from India; 3.5 per cent from Vietnam; 3.2 per cent from the Philippines; and 2.2 per cent from Malaysia.
How do the Australian people view continuing high levels of immigration, and its increased diversity, at a time of record overall population growth? And how stands its opinion of multiculturalism?
According to the annual surveys by Monash University’s Professor Andrew Markus for the Scanlon and Australian Multicultural Foundations [Mapping Social Cohesion, 2015, National Report P.41], there has been “a consistently high level of endorsement for multiculturalism.” In response to the proposition that “multiculturalism has been good for Australia,” the survey found agreement in the three years 2013, 2014 and 2015 in the range of 84-86 per cent. The proportion in the survey registering strong agreement with the proposition increased from 32.2 per cent in 2013 to 43.3 per cent in 2015.
Since, as Professor Markus notes, the meaning of multiculturalism in Australia is open to interpretation, survey respondents were asked to indicate their agreement with five different statements on multiculturalism. The survey showed that “the strongest positive association was with its contribution to economic development [75 per cent agree] and its encouragement of immigrants to become part of Australian society [71 per cent.]”
This positive attitude to multiculturalism has co-existed not only with a high net overseas migration intake but also temporary admissions of entrants and New Zealand citizens to Australia, totalling close to two million people.
This persistently high net migration level and such a great number of temporary entrants would in past years have aroused heated debate. As Professor Markus notes [page 34]: “Whereas in the early 1990’s, a large majority [over 70 per cent at its peak] considered the intake to be ‘too high’, most surveys between 2001 and 2009 indicated that opposition to the level of intake was a minority viewpoint.”
Subsequently, in the last two years, with the collapse of the mining industry, slow Chinese economic growth, and government deficits, Markus [page 34] notes that there it was expected that support for the existing level of immigration would fall. But instead the reverse has happened-in both 2014 and 2015, Markus found that around 60 per cent of respondents considered that the intake was “about right” or “too low”.
Professor Markus speculates on the reasons for this continuing support and considers [page 35] that, among other causes, it may reflect the “…perceived effectiveness of government asylum seeker policy…” as well as possibly a misunderstanding of the numbers of asylum seekers.
Any observer who recalls the heated debates about immigration policy in the early 1990’s, when the Commonwealth Bureau of Immigration Research provided a plenitude of both scholarly works and public forums, and compares that time with today, can note how the asylum seeker controversy dominates current media coverage. That concentration seems to have pushed aside previous issues, such as the size and composition of the migrant intake.
In many ways, I think this is highly unfortunate. Australia has enjoyed a good reputation for its successful settlement of people from all around the globe. Now, the harshness and inhumanity of the “Stop the Boats” policy is dominating the image of the country. The obsession of both major political parties to try to ensure that Australia is absolved from facing up to the harsh reality that wars, poverty and civil strife create streams of legitimate asylum seekers, is a deep scar on the country’s contemporary history, especially since it has public support. In particular, it ignores the great success of the absorption, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, of such a multitude of refugees after the Vietnam war.
The credit that Australia deserves for its overall immigration program is thus being sadly undermined by a harsh and obstinate attitude to asylum seekers, and a neglect of obligations under the UNHCR convention. Hugh Mackay [The Age, January 26] has rightly damned the policy as “…immoral, because it treats people who have committed no crime as criminals….and fails to honour a moral principle we should claim as one of Australia’s core values-fairness.”
Perhaps political leaders think silently of the asylum seeker policy as a little evil which is compensated for by the great, enlightened good of the general immigration program. But as the author of Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton once wrote:
“Consent to a little evil, and it will grow…and a great evil will overwhelm us…No shame or remorse will save us then. Therefore consent not to… evil at all.”
John Nieuwenhuysen AM FASSA is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University
In this article from The Guardian, Joseph Stiglitz points to the slow growth rates in the developed world and the reasons for them. He says that
‘In the US, quantitative easing did not boost consumption and investment partly because most of additional liquidity returned to central banks’ coffers in the form of excess reserves. … It appears that the flood of liquidity has disproportionately gone toward creating financial wealth and inflating asset bubbles rather than strengthening the real economy. … The risk of another financial crisis cannot be ignored. … [We must] begin with re-writing the rules of the market economy to ensure greater equality, more long-term thinking and reigning in the financial market with effective regulation and appropriate incentive structure.’
See link to article below:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/feb/08/whats-holding-back-world-economy-joseph-e-stiglitz
According to a report on Media Watch on 8 February, Rupert Murdoch brought Tony Abbott as his guest at a banquet in Washington which President Obama attended.
Several of the Murdoch papers in Australia suggested that this was a personal meeting between Tony Abbott and President Obama. It was nothing of the sort. It was a cocktail party and lunch attended by 100 guests and presumably President Obama shook Tony Abbott’s hand, but it seems it was nothing more than that.
It says something about Murdoch’s political judgement that he took an ex prime minister to this lunch. Surely he would have known that inviting tony Abbott as his guest would likely antagonise Prime Minister Turnbull. Or was that his intention?
In any event, it was a beat-up from beginning to end.
See link to Media Watch below:
I just wish that current comment about negative gearing would pay some attention to tax principles. Tax principles? Yes, they do exist.
A person who negatively gears a rental property has two objectives in mind: getting a rental return and reaping a capital gain on disposal.
The interest paid out is in pursuit of both objectives but the difficulty of apportioning it to each of those objectives means that the whole of the interest is charged against income, even income from other sources.
The excess interest over rents received could by legislation be quarantined to future rental income, or held for deduction against the capital gain on disposal.
Money has a time value. Deduction of excess interest against current income provides a present benefit but the tax impact of the capital gain is deferred until the gain is realised. Meanwhile the person’s wealth increases as the property’s value rises.
Taxing capital gains helps to redress the imbalance. But that redress has been damaged by the fiscal vandalism represented by taxing only half of a realised capital gain.
A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. Whether a dollar receipt comes from personal exertion or from property investment it carries the same taxable capacity.
Remove the fifty per cent capital gain discount and negative gearing loses some of its shine.
Trevor Boucher was Australian Commissioner of Taxation 1984-93. This was followed by two years as Australia’s Ambassador to the OECD.
Postcard from Hanoi:
I have been an oncologist for some 35 years, treating adults with advanced cancer. Despite a far greater understanding of the disease, with the discovery of quite remarkable “targeted” therapies, most patients still die of this disease. Many are not suitable for these treatments, many don’t respond or respond poorly and briefly, and of course many simply present very late in the course of the cancer.
As an oncologist I am thus confronted by uncertainty, sadness, despair and grief on a regular basis, as are all the members of the oncology team, but at times leavened by the joy of success, the gratitude of families and the deep insights into the human “soul”.
Through my own adult life I have had a mixed relationship with death, particularly my own, beginning with a simple non-acknowledgment, then noticing an increasingly intrusive terror, with quite visceral reactions to certain patients as they moved towards their own demise under my care. I was in my forties at that time and would experience profuse sweating, tremors, nausea and a curious clouding of consciousness. I thought I may have malaria (a noble affliction) but to whom should I go for wise counsel? There was little wisdom to be found. Over time my symptoms evolved into a depression, but this only became clear to me years later, in retrospect.
Technically I had been suffering “thanatophobia”, that is “fear of death”. A common complaint, but rarely considered (in our society) since we prefer a “cultural denial”. Thus, more recently, over 15 years or so I have pursued a deeper understanding of death, my own and that of others. This universal phenomenon unites us all. As John Donne reminds us: “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee”.
I have learnt much from Joan Halifax who wrote “Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death” and the late Stephen Levine who wrote both “Who Dies? An Investigation into Conscious Living and Conscious Dying” and also “A Year to Live: How to Live this Year as if it were your Last”. I have completed a one year course based on this latter book.
Death has now become less fearsome to me and more interesting! As Buddhism has told us for 2,600 years, a regular meditation on one’s own death will invigorate one’s life and shed some light on the true nature of the world and the meaning of our own experience.
The complete practice of oncology requires some exploration of one’s own mortality, to more deeply understand the experience of each patient, to be of service and, importantly, to learn. There is a long history in most cultures of a specific “companion to the dying”. Medical practitioners including oncologists are ideally placed to occupy this role.
Over the years I have been greatly supported by a mindfulness practice including regular meditation. Again, this cultivation of mindfulness, bringing one’s mind into the present moment with awareness and “heartfulness”, is an ancient Buddhist practice, taught also in other spiritual traditions and in more modern secular environments. This practice enables a deeper understanding of one’s inner emotional life, allowing one to be more “available” for patients, rather than locked within a defensive carapace. The risk of “burnout” and depression is far less.
Strangely (or perhaps not) these skills have never been a substantial part of medical education or the oncology specialty, with some notable exceptions such as the programme at Monash University in Melbourne and the long-running “The Healer’s Art” course developed by Dr Rachel Naomi Remen at University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
What about Vietnam?
I have had the privilege of visiting this astonishing country many times, firstly as a medical student in 1974, then more recently with colleagues, supported by the Hoc Mai Foundation, travelling to Hanoi to teach Medical English, oncology and other specialty topics. However, at a deeper level, I (and I suspect my colleagues also) travel to Vietnam to learn from this resilient, gracious and warm-hearted people. I feel there is a spiritual nature to the Vietnamese society, reflecting elements of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.
It is helpful to leave one’s ‘ego” or one’s “sense of an important self” at home and thereby immerse oneself in this enriching and restorative culture. The Vietnamese (to my eye) seem to embody a friendly mindfulness, a universal respect, remarkable patience and lack the reactivity so often seen in more “Western” cultures.
I am looking forward to a further visit to Hanoi, to renew friendships and, importantly, to imbibe the pervasive spiritual vitality in that city that now has a direct positive impact on my work.
Jonathan Page, Medical Oncologist, Manly and The Mater Hospitals, Sydney, NSW.
In this article, published in the December The Monthly Essays, Robert Manne describes the major obstacles to addressing climate change. He refers to the unique nature of climate change and the difficulties that it has presented for scientists to persuade the world community about the problem and the need to take action. Robert
Manne also refers to the difficulty that just at the time when concerted government action is necessary, the public debate from Liberal economists pointed to the need to scale back government. The post WWII consensus associated with Keynes and Bretton Woods was under challenge.
The problem was particularly acute in the US with funding by oil and energy companies of think-tanks and the ideological Right, which led on to the Tea Party. John Menadue.
For this excellent article, see link below:
www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/december/1448888400/robert-manne/diabolical
A few nights ago on Q&A, the Minister for Rural Health, Fiona Nash, undertook to drop out of private health insurance while she was in office. Ms Nash lives in Crowther, a small town about midway between Wagga Wagga and Bathurst. Foregoing private health insurance makes a lot of sense for her because, like most rural and regional people, she pays a large amount to private insurers and has very limited access to private hospitals and related private services in her area.
The map above shows why rural people are especially short changed with the private health system. The brown markers indicate public hospitals and the private hospitals are shown by purple markers. Crowther is almost in the middle of the map – 180 kms from Wagga Wagga and 141 kms from Bathurst. There is one private hospital in Wagga Wagga and one in Bathurst, and neither has an emergency department. [On my count, there are about 30 public hospitals in this area. JM]
The private health system is one of the most expensive Commonwealth Government programs. In 2016/16 direct outlays by the Commonwealth Government will be $6.3 billion and income tax foregone will amount to $4.2 billion, a total of $10.5 billion for the year.
Ms Nash, as a Nationals Party representative, should recognise that the private health system is particularly costly for her rural constituents because they are getting such a very raw deal. They are paying large sums directly to the private insurers and similarly large sums in taxation to support those insurers. And they are getting very little in return.
Rural Australians should ask themselves what they are getting for the large sums they are paying, both directly and through their taxes, to private insurance companies, and perhaps follow the lead of their elected representative, the Minister for Rural Health.
John Thompson is an economist with an interest in health policy.
It’s time for funds and a plan to preserve and commemorate this visitor from Ancient Australia, writesJim Bowler, the geologist who discovered Mungo Man’s remains.
Forty-two years ago, on 26 February 1974, I first encountered the remains of Mungo Man eroding out of the desiccated shores of Lake Mungo. He had been ritually buried over 40,000 years earlier – at a time when the lake was full – by an ancient community that thrived in the fertile environment. The re-emergence of Mungo Man has changed the way we understand Australian history. Together with the earlier (1969) discovery of Mungo Lady, these burials provided the foundations on which the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area was defined and accepted by UNESCO in 1981. That region stands today as Australia’s richest legacy of early occupation. Yet forty-two years later, after decades of constant calls for the return of Mungo Man, none of the responsible state and federal ministers have committed to caring for these sacred remains.
In November last year, a repatriation group of Indigenous representatives took the first step towards Mungo Man’s return. The 40,000-year-old human remains, along with the more fragmentary remains of some ninety other individuals from the Willandra Lakes area, were transferred from the Australian National University to the interim storage of the National Museum of Australia. After years of frustration, the traditional owners of the Willandra Lakes area – the Mutthi Mutthi, Ngiyampaa and Paakantji tribal groups – reluctantly decreed that unless appropriate keeping arrangements were made by the end of 2017, they will dispose of all Willandra remains, with the possibility of complete reburial. The possibility that the remains of Mungo Man may not be laid in a formal place – an underground sacred crypt with above-ground recognition of the dead, perhaps, in memory of deceased Elders and of those thousands who fought in defence of their lands – should stir the nation’s conscience.
Mungo Man is acknowledged worldwide as the centrepiece of our evidence of ancient Australia. He has featured in documentaries, novels, histories and scientific papers, and he has given us an insight into life in ancient Australia through paleopathology, DNA analyses, and studies of isotopic bone and teeth structures. Moreover, the ritual nature of his burial has changed our understanding of the time-depth and complexity of Aboriginal culture. The body was coated (or heavily sprinkled) with rare ceremonial ochre – the blood-red symbol of life – which had been imported from distant sources. His grave was associated with a nearby hearth, from which smoke might have drifted over the assembled mourners on the lakeshore. The discovery stands without equal on the global stage. Politicians who frequently claim occupancy with members “of the world’s oldest continuing cultures” are denying a keeping place to the very person who provided the historical substance of that claim. The Australian nation awaits his return home.
In Mungo Man, the interaction of climate and people come together. The cultural implications of his burial reflect complex relationships with his environment. The central function of ochre, the association with fire, and the careful details of the grave emplacement combine to define a community with connections to the land they loved. Such evidence resonates with Aboriginal connections to country today. There is great dignity here in that people–land relationship. Exemplified today in the Dreaming, song lines and creation stories, it remains of central importance in helping define traditional people’s identity with and connection to the place they call home. White Australians have something important to learn from our Aboriginal cousins.
Stan Grant’s passionate reminder of our shameful treatment of Aboriginal Australians, and subsequent discussions of our national identity have touched new sensitivities in the fraught relationships between Aboriginal and white Australia. Two centuries of failure to acknowledge the magnitude and pain of dispossession have come back to confront us. The neglect of the human remains of Australia’s oldest identity, Mungo Man, adds yet another dark stain to our relationships with the first Australians. We now must seek new opportunities to restore fractured bonds, to help heal at least part of the pain inflicted on the original occupants of this land.
This year marks the centenary year of the Somme and we honour the memory of those who died on the Western Front during the first world war. It is where my father spent two harrowing years navigating duckboards and dodging shell holes in Amiens and Villers-Bretonneux. A century later, the deaths of the tens of thousands of Aboriginal men and women who died in defence of their land await their memorial occasion. The continued absence of facilities in memory of Mungo Man and all he represents pales against the $100 million Villers-Bretonneux Educational Centre Tony Abbott unveiled last year. While the honouring of our war dead is essential, what is sacred in France demands equality at home.
Unless immediate steps are taken to ensure adequate accommodation for sacred items that amplify and help define the meaning of human occupation of this continent, the iconic figure of Mungo Man could be lost forever. We have but eighteen months to ensure safe passage. The repatriation process needs realistic funding and a discretionary commitment to World Heritage management to ensure it takes place. Without state and federal assistance, the Indigenous repatriation group will be forced to rebury the remains of Mungo Man instead of preserving them for future generations in a sacred keeping place.
We are dealing here not just with an assemblage of ancient bones, but with the dignity and cultural richness of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. As a nation, we need to seize this opportunity to release Mungo Man from his custody. The return and celebration of Mungo Man will set us on a course to heal those bleeding wounds Stan Grant so eloquently defined. It is an act of recognition to Indigenous Australians of the nation’s debt to their ancestral history.
Jim Bowler is a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences. This article was first published in Inside Story on 9 February 2016.
This is an extract from Robert Mickens’ ‘Letter from Rome’ of 10 February 2016, published in Global Pulse. In the full article, Mickens refers to the extraordinary success and acceptance of Pope Francis in so many areas. There is however a downside. Mickens coments:
But there is a dense cloud hanging over all the good this prophetic priest and bishop has done for the Church. It is a pall that is casting an ever darkening shadow on his otherwise energizing pontificate.
The black spot is – how can one put it? – the pope’s seemingly ambivalent attitude and approach towards dealing with clergy sexual abuse of youngsters.
Just to be clear. Francis ticks the boxes favorably in over 80% of the categories where a pope can make a difference. But there are some areas – and the sex abuse issue is probably the most painful – where he doesn’t seem to get it.
And that is a real tragedy.
Thankfully, Vatican apologists are no longer making the ridiculous claim that the sexual abuse crisis (let’s call it what it is, a worldwide pandemic) is a priority for the pope.
Even the apologists need to look themselves in the mirror and admit that it is not.
If it were, the pope would have at least made time to meet with the 17-member Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors that gathered last weekend in the Vatican. This is a body Francis instituted in 2014, but only after he was shamed into doing so by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, a member of his privy council (C9) and the US Church’s sex abuse trouble-shooter.
But the Jesuit Pope seemingly had more important things on his agenda, like addressing devotees of the mysterious and still-controversial St Padre Pio, one of two Capuchin saints whose fully clothed corpses were brought to Rome last week and paraded through St Peter’s Square in glass boxes.
Francis was also unavailable to see “Spotlight”, the recent film on the Boston Globe’s investigative reporting that helped bring clergy sexual abuse to light.
The filmmakers offered a private screening for members of the Vatican’s child protection commission (the flick is not out yet in Italy) but only five of the seventeen bothered to show up.
Five!
One of them was Peter Saunders, a Brit who was sexually abused by a priest when he was a boy. The other members then voted Mr Saunders off the commission because, in their view, he’d rather be an advocate for the victims than an advisor to the pope.
Obviously, Francis is not the only one who doesn’t get it.
The latest episode in the long, sorry saga of how badly we can treat people seeking asylum was played out in the High Court in February 2016. Long because the story started in 1992 when the Paul Keating Labor government introduced mandatory detention ‘as a temporary measure’ in reaction to a handful of people arriving in leaky boats from Cambodia. And I use the term ‘people seeking asylum’ advisedly, because the term ‘asylum seekers’ dehumanises the people and has been shown to cause Australians to switch off. The High Court found it is legal for the Government to send babies born in Australia and children and adults transferred to Australia for mental health and other problems back to Nauru. This decision was predictable because the Government passed retrospective legislation making it legal. As the human rights lawyer Daniel Webb put it so eloquently, the law is complex but the morality is simple. Bad Governments pass bad laws to allow them to do things that are morally wrong. I am a doctor not a lawyer, so I am not qualified to say at what point the High Court has a duty to make sure our Government does not exact really heinous legislation, but this is pretty bad. Excising Christmas Island from the mainland and sending people into detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island is our Guantanamo. These are ‘black sites’ where people can be severely mistreated under a veil of secrecy: out of sight and out of mind.
To argue that people are now free to come and go from the detention centre on Nauru is disingenuous. They are not safe if they leave the detention centre and they are not safe in the detention centre. Their visas to stay on Nauru are restricted to 5 years, so their future is as uncertain as ever. Nauru is their prison. Mr Dutton has stated that the hospital on Nauru is comparable to Australian hospitals. I did a clinic at the Republic of Nauru (RON) Hospital in December 2015 and it is far, far worse than any Australian hospital I ever visited. Furthermore, the staffing is as important as the facilities and the RON Hospital struggles for qualified staff. Of course, Mr Dutton will argue things have changed in the last year. Verifying the truth is impossible when the only journalist allowed in for years was a single Murdoch Press Government sympathiser and doctors who speak out risk two years in prison.
Ethics can be defined as ‘how we ought to behave’ and medical ethics as how health professionals ought to behave. I recently published a paper (available on request) in the Journal of Medical Ethics (http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2015/12/20/medethics-2015-103066.abstract) in which I argue that prolonged immigration detention fulfils all the criteria for torture. I then argue that doctors and other health care professionals are conflicted: they have a duty to their patients to help them but they also have a duty not to condone torture. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) argues to this day that water-boarding prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was not torture because the technique was devised by psychologists and supervised by doctors. The doctors would presumably argue that the water-boarding was going to happen anyway and they were ensuring the prisoners did not drown. Highly respected colleagues and lawyers have said to me “Nauru is not as bad as Guantanamo”. Is it not? Are we to have degrees of torture? There have been unconfirmed (probably unconfirmable) reports by a guard of water-boarding and ‘zipping’ being inflicted on people in immigration detention in Nauru (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-14/guard-tells-parliamentary-inquiry-asylum-seekers-tortured-nauru/6699162). Why would the guard lie? Mr Dutton denied it, but he would wouldn’t he.
The harms we are inflicting on adults to punish them for having the temerity to flee persecution in their homelands are immoral. We treat innocent adults worse than we do convicted criminals. But the public are more likely to sympathise with the argument that children are innocent victims. Gillian Triggs realised this, which is why her Forgotten Children enquiry is so powerful. Alison Light, in her wonderful book “Common people”, describes how the 19th century English workhouses were intended to punish men who did not want to work, but the biggest victims were women and children. I was struck by the parallels with immigration detention centres. I am proud that increasing numbers of paediatricians and paediatric nurses have decided to speak out against what is being done to children by our Government in our name. Alanna Maycock, Hasantha Gunasekera, Karen Zwi and Josh Francis have all risked imprisonment for telling the truth.
What should happen? The Government mantra, ‘We’ve stopped the boats’, means the immigration detention centres are redundant. Keeping people imprisoned can only be to deter other desperate people from seeking asylum. Europe, struggling with a far bigger immigrant problem, has not resorted to such vulgar deterrent policies, although extreme right wing European groups cite Australia as an example to follow. We should allow the derisory number of children to remain in Australia with their parents. We should close the detention centres on Nauru and Manus, which are not only immoral but hugely expensive (it costs over half a million dollars per year for each person kept on Nauru). Mr Turnbull committed his Government to a tough stance on border control. If that stance includes continuing to torture innocent people we should hang our heads in shame.
Professor David Isaacs is Senior Staff Specialist, Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Clinical Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney. He works at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.
My pen and paper
I walk a deep sadness path with my loneliness. This emptiness makes me slow.
I fall to my knees and cry out loudly.
Tears knock silently at my eyes.
I can’t find anyone to share my pain with so I make friends with my pen and paper. I share with them all my pain.
They cry with me.
The paper becomes wet with their tears.
Feelings of Loneliness
I am alone
very alone.
And this is what alone is:
To be nothing
To have nothing
To hurt so badly
Aching not only in your heart
But in every cell of your body.
I am ignored,
utterly unnoticed,
thrown aside
as a completely uncared for orphan.
And friendless
because they’ve all gone.
Their love,
their smiles
all gone.
I was left behind
with no one to walk with.
Oh how I want them back! With no friend to see or hear my agony I cry.
With all possibility of hope
vanished
sorrow moves in to love me.
After travelling to Australia from Sri Lanka by boat, Ravi was detained in Nauru Regional Processing Centre and Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation for over three years. He is now living in the community and has published a collection of his poems written from within our detention centre system.
In the SMH on February 5, 2016, columnist Waleed Aly says ‘The history of asylum seeker policy in Australia will be remembered as a story of how successive governments legislated their lies to justify a world of make-believe borders and imaginary compliance.’
See link to article below:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/nauru-how-long-can-we-keep-lying-to-ourselves-20160204-gml6or.html
An opening title informs us that The Big Short is “based on a true story.” That usually means that the film we are about to see has only a tenuous connection with reality, that most of it is invented and the events depicted may not have happened at all. Is anyone suggesting that the Global Financial Crisis, the subject of this scarifying comedy from director Andy McKay, may not have happened, that the millions who lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses, or saw their families shattered by the crisis were victims of some strange delusion? Well, of course not. McKay’s film is a viciously funny and horrifically convincing account of how the GFC came into being, driven by the base instincts of crooked bankers and cynical financial go-getters.
It’s based on a best-selling book by Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, described by Reuters newsagency as “probably the best single piece of financial journalism ever written.” McKay’s film, already a winner of many awards and a nominee for best picture Oscar, I rank as the best single film on the subject – though there haven’t been many. The last big one was J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, set in the (well-disguised) offices of the New York investment banker Lehman Brothers, whose collapse in 2008 triggered the global crisis. In one of the more poignant moments in The Big Short, McKay gives us a desolate recreation of Lehman Brothers’ abandoned offices, a wasteland of scattered paper, idle computer screens and overturned chairs.
So it’s funny, it’s sad and it’s scary. I remember when it first occurred to me that stock exchanges were little more than glorified casinos. But compared with those dignified bastions of financial sobriety, with their long-established rules and venerable traditions, the Wall Street financial scene (at least in the years from 2005 to 2008) was closer to a certified mad-house. And as befits a film about an outbreak of collective insanity, McKay’s film is pretty mad itself – a bundle of cinematic tricks with scarcely a moment for reflection or calm analysis. We get it all – jump cuts, freeze frames, little touches of animation, odd mixes of colour and black and white, hand-held camera stuff, and characters speaking direct to the audience as if to vouchsafe some deeper truth. But it’s never overdone, and somehow, miraculously, it works.
McKay has assembled a top-flight Hollywood cast and given them their heads, with the result that there is much shouting and ranting and a generous scattering of four-letter words from actors of both sexes. Among the standouts are Michael Burry (Christian Bale) a retired neurologist and former Deutche Bank guru who is the first to recognise mysterious trends in the US housing market; Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a hedge-fund manager with a troubled conscience; and a barely recognisable Brad Pitt as Ben Rickert, a retired banker and one of the film’s token good guys. The cast also includes plenty of “himselfs” and “herselfs”, though I don’t think I’d heard of any of them. Margot Robbie is a real-life glamour-puss who appears in a bubble bath quaffing champagne while explaining the intricacies of the sub-prime housing market.
It’s not important – thank goodness – that we follow what’s going on or understand what anyone is talking about. The gobbledegook of the high-end finance industry has an inscrutable charm of its own – credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, “ninjo” loans (mortgages issued to people with no job and no income), bespoke opportunity tranches, and my favourite, collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). There’s even something called a synthetic CDO, which I leave to your imagination. But we get the picture: when these guys talk about “shorting the AA-rated tranches of CDOs” we know they’re up to no good. Something has to give, and eventually, tragically, it does. We laugh and seethe with anger at the same time.
It’s a compelling film – even when we have no idea what actually going on. I had the much same feeling reading Paddy Manning’s book Born to Rule, his excellent account of Malcolm Turnbull’s rise to power and prominence in the worlds of finance and politics. Of course, no one would dream of comparing our esteemed PM with the wicked wolves of Wall Street, but both in their time pursued similar intricate paths of financial wheeling and dealing, and I had little idea of what Turnbull was up to.
In The Big Short McKay seems to be hinting at something deeper than mere financial skulduggery: his glancing references to cocaine addiction, strip joints, idiotic pop music, drug cheating in sport, and other contemporary foibles suggest that The Big Short is both a critique of market capitalism’s worst excesses and something closer to cultural decadence. Only one banker was charged in the wake of the GFC and nothing whatever was done by governments to tighten regulation in the finance industry. Yes, it could happen again. I read somewhere that Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed socialist candidate for the US presidency, has commended The Big Short as “excellent.” He would say that, wouldn’t he? But what does Malcolm think? Or Bill Shorten? I urge them to see it.
The Big Short (M) is in national release in selected cinemas. Four and a half stars.
Evan Williams has reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
What beautiful photos of refugees – our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren!
In its short history, Australia has been among the most aggressive nations on earth, regularly engaging in wars that, on any objective basis, have nothing to do with us. These military adventures cost us dearly in men, material and credibility without ever showing the slightest evidence that they improve our security. Malcolm Fraser argued that we graft ourselves to foreign military powers in the hope that they will come to our aid in an emergency but that this has never benefited us. At present, our military is fully enmeshed with the American war machine at all levels, to the extent that Australian officers serve in command posts in US sectors. However, there is no reason to believe that the US would ever go against its interests in order to rush to our defence.
Most scenarios envisage that, in future conflicts, our most likely enemies would be either Indonesia or China. Bearing in mind that, by its control of the Strait of Malacca, Indonesia has us and the huge economies of North Asia in a stranglehold, picking a fight with them seems the height of folly, especially as everything says the US would not endanger its relationship with Indonesia in order to help us. China is now our biggest market and supplier so squabbling with them would take especial folly. But there is another problem to bear in mind: with the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership, Australia’s industrial capacity will be further downgraded. Very soon, we will be unable to manufacture any of the most basic requirements for fighting any sort of war. That is, we will be rendered essentially defenceless. I don’t believe this is in our interest.
My case is that we should immediately begin to move to the defence stance known as “armed neutrality,” meaning we would build our defence capacity to the point where we would be “too prickly” to attack but would have very limited offensive capacity. There is very little reason to believe our northern hemisphere “allies” would be happy with this, because at present, they have the best of all possible worlds. We don’t, and it could easily get very much worse, meaning we would be on our own.
Niall (Jock) McLaren is a psychiatrist with extensive experience in remote area, military and post-traumatic psychiatry. His politics and interests are humanist, rationalist, socialist and poking fun at the self-righteous.
The Turnbull government has proved just as determined as the Abbott government to hide from the Australian community the truth about what their FTA deals mean for the 457 visa and other temporary work visa programs.
Under the Turnbull administration, the conclusion of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations was announced on 6 October 2015 and the TPP text released on 5 November 2015. The China FTA (ChAFTA) entered into force on 20 December 2015.
In both cases, the Turnbull government has treated the Australian community like the proverbial ‘Mushroom Club’.
The TPP
Three months after releasing the TPP text, no Turnbull government Minister has yet admitted publicly that it has once again negotiated away Australia’s sovereign right to regulate key temporary visa programs in crucial areas.
Australia has committed not to apply labour market testing (LMT) or caps (quotas) in the entire 457 visa program to all citizens of Canada, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam; or to all foreign nationals who are employees of businesses in Canada, Peru and Mexico who transfer to an Australian branch of that business (‘intra-corporate transferees’).
On top of that, Australia has also made a standing offer to do the same for the three other TPP countries without a total 457 LMT exemption (the USA, Peru and Singapore) if they provide access to limited categories of ‘Australian business persons’ down the track.
The ChAFTA concession not to apply LMT to ‘installers and servicers’ of machinery and equipment on 400 visas has also been extended to eight TPP countries – Brunei Darussalam , Chile, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Canada, Malaysia and Mexico.
The only public admission of Australia’s real TPP commitments on what FTA-jargon calls ‘the Movement of Natural Persons’ (or MNP) was extracted from an official of the Department of Trade in Senate Estimates by Labor Senator Penny Wong in October 2015.
Ms Elizabeth Ward, First Assistant Secretary, Office of Trade Negotiations in DFAT had this exchange confirming LMT ‘waivers’ for various categories of persons from several TPP countries:
Ms Ward: In this particular agreement what we have done is provide MNP on a category-by-category reciprocity basis. If parties offered to us, then we offered to them. Many of them already have had LMT waived as a result of previous FTAs. The additional LMT waivers, as a result of the TPP, are intra-corporate transferees for Canada, Peru and Mexico and contractual service suppliers for Canada, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.
Senator WONG: We reserved policy space for LMT in the Malaysia free trade agreement. Has that been removed by the TPP?
Ms Ward: That has.
Ms Ward was not asked why the DFAT TPP ‘Fact Sheet’ failed to mention that Australia had committed to ‘waive’ LMT in 457 visa program and the 400 visa program for the various TPP countries.
The best that DFAT could do was: ‘Australia’s TPP commitments are consistent with Australia’s existing immigration and workplace relations frameworks and the approach taken in other free trade agreements’.
Apparently the drafting instruction was ‘Don’t mention we’re removing 457 labour market testing’ after the bruising ChAFTA experience.
ChAFTA
The main effect of Australia’s ChAFTA obligations on the 457 visa is that from 20 December 2015, Australia has given up the right to apply labour market testing or quotas in the standard 457 visa program to all Chinese citizens or nationals; and to all foreign nationals who are employees of businesses in China and transferring to an Australian branch of that business (‘intra-corporate transferees’).
There was no official announcement of this important change by Trade Minister Robb, Immigration Minister Dutton or any Turnbull government Minister when ChAFTA entered into force.
This was despite Trade Minister Robb putting out two media releases (on 9 and 20 December 2015) announcing that ChAFTA would enter into force on 20 December. Both neglected to mention the 457 visa program changes in the list of claimed ChAFTA ‘benefits’.
On Friday 18 December 2015, the Immigration department quietly updated its 457 visa website to incorporate the ChAFTA 457 obligations described above, with a link to the relevant legislative instrument. Neither the Immigration Minister nor his department made any public announcement of the update.
The Immigration Minister also had nothing to say publicly on 4 December 2015 when he signed the formal legislative instrument listing the categories of ‘natural persons’ for which ‘the imposition of labour market testing would be inconsistent with international trade obligations of Australia arising under the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement’. This ‘Determination’ is the only regulatory change needed to implement all of Australia’s temporary work visa obligations under ChAFTA.
The instrument was simply posted on the Comlaw website along with all others made that day.
The Turnbull government’s silence on ChAFTA and the 457 visa program follows the same pattern set by the Abbott administration. When the Korea and Japan FTAs entered into force in 2014, there was no public announcement that they removed 457 LMT for all ‘citizens/nationals/permanent residents of Korea’ and ‘citizens/nationals of Japan’; and for all foreign employees of businesses in Korea and Japan transferring to an Australian branch.
The Immigration 457 website was simply updated, with a link to the relevant legislative instruments.
In fact, the department’s email advice to Registered Migration Agents on the removal of 457 LMT in the Korea and Japan FTAs even warned that ‘this information is not for external distribution or publication’!
Apparently the Immigration department wanted migration agents to play their part in keeping the Australian public in the dark about how these FTAs removed labour market testing from the 457 program – or, more likely, their Ministers did.
The Department also told Senate Estimates in December 2015 that it would communicate any impact of ChAFTA to ‘relevant stakeholders’ – which apparently does not include the general Australian community.
Conclusion
The Federal Labor Opposition, having voted for ChAFTA in the Parliament, is not likely to draw attention to the Turnbull government’s efforts to hide the truth about ChAFTA, other FTAs and the 457 visa program either.
The irony is that it is only because of Labor’s 457 reforms to the Migration Act in 2013 that the Australian community has faintest chance of knowing anything about the impact of FTA obligations on the 457 visa program.
Labor’s June 2013 457 amendments provide for the Immigration Minister to make a publicly-available legislative instrument setting out the categories of persons in FTAs and other international trade agreements for which ‘the imposition of labour market testing would be inconsistent with international trade obligations of Australia’ (s.140GBA of the Migration Act 1958).
As a result, the Immigration department must now also publish information on its website and elsewhere about the precise 457 LMT exemptions due to Australia’s international trade obligations, as determined by the government of the day.
Before Labor’s 2013 amendments, Ministers and bureaucrats had no legal obligation to disclose this information, did not voluntarily disclose it and obfuscated when asked.
Labor’s decision to support ChAFTA means it is now less likely to hold the Turnbull government to account when it fails in its duty to inform the Australian community about what proposed FTA obligations mean for the 457 and other temporary visa programs.
Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.
In early December, I went into surgery to give my eight-year-old son Harrison my left kidney. He heard me groaning in recovery as the anaesthetist put him to sleep a few hours later so that he could receive it. The operation was the first of my life and Harrison’s 13th. He’d experience his 14th general anaesthetic two weeks later when surgeons removed the vascular catheter that had been used to connect the dialysis machine into his heart three times a week for the five months leading up to the transplant.
After a successful surgery, Harrison had a number of complications that meant an eight-day stay in the intensive care unit of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital in Adelaide, followed by another six days in the surgical ward. Daily blood tests, a Christmas Day virus that precipitated an extra five days of hospital hospitality, and then on Sunday, 3 January, our family enjoyed our first hospital-free day in well over a month.
As is my wont, I covered the process extensively via my social media outlets, interspersed with the occasional comment on the social and political issues of the period – a Myefo update committed to balancing the budget on the backs of the poor here and abroad; welcoming refugees and asylum seekers; supporting my brilliant friend Wawira Njiru’s work in Kenya making sure kids don’t have to go to school on an empty stomach; protecting penalty rates from being cut by people wealthy enough not to be forced to rely on them.
On Christmas Day, before the infection set in that evening, I took Harrison into hospital for an 8am blood test wearing the full Santa suit I’d donned to give our three children their presents early that morning. I figured if we had to be in hospital on such a day, we should at least make it memorable. We handed out candy canes to taxi drivers waiting at the rank outside, orderlies cleaning the halls and other families having a similar experience to our own. Driving home, I filled the car with petrol in full costume while commuters took photos and small children gawked in confusion. Harrison loved every moment.
On Christmas Day, before the infection set in that evening, I took Harrison into hospital for an 8am blood test wearing the full Santa suit. That afternoon, resting after a hearty Christmas lunch with the in-laws, I posted on social media: “Trip to hospital – saw Drs, nurses, cleaners, servo staff, RAA and more helping folks enjoy Christmas. Of course they deserve penalty rates” to which one person responded, “Enough politics for the day”.
It’s easy to understand the sentiment – why sully the joy of Christmas with “politics” when there’s backyard cricket to play and pudding to consume? But if you’re any kind of activist or political advocate, it’s a familiar response.
Children spending their third Christmas in immigration prisons; Australian Aid set at the lowest level in Australia’s history; health and education budgets being slashed by billions of dollars; one in three Australian pensioners living below the poverty line; climate change; sexism; racism; recognition of Australia’s Indigenous people … the easiest way to avoid thinking too deeply about any issue that arises around the barbecue on the beach is to dismiss it as “politics”.
This is nothing new – people have always employed the word “politics” in the work of absolving themselves of personal responsibility for addressing inequality, injustice and the exploitation of the earth and its people.
For our family, however, there’s no amount of using the word “politics” that can distance us from the truth that government-funded healthcare has not only kept Harrison alive for eight-and-a-half years but has also enabled him to thrive despite a range of other physical challenges.
He’s required a huge volume of medical supplies and medication that have been provided free of charge or heavily subsidised; publicly-funded in-school support services have allowed him to keep up with his peers educationally; 14 operations and more-than-regular appointments with physicians since birth would’ve attracted a financial cost I can’t even comprehend, entirely borne by the public purse.
So, while it might be easy to dismiss $15bn of cuts to the annual health budget as “politics” when you read it as a headline in the paper, the reality is that those are dollars that may have been spent on a child like Harrison. Forcing people to pay for pap smears and other preventative procedures is either “politics” or it’s a change that will mean some people won’t have their illness diagnosed early or accurately enough with huge impact on them and their families.
Similarly, cuts to the education budget and the cancellation of the Gonski funding model are either an ideological minefield to be avoided in polite conversation – or it’s $196m that won’t be spent in my electorate alone on making sure that every Australia child receives a quality education . It’s either “politics” or it’s some children missing out on the opportunity to achieve their full potential because of the economic circumstance of the family they were born into.
For the nurses, service station staff, cleaners and other workers that helped millions of Australians, including Harrison and I, have a good Christmas, penalty rates can’t be dismissed as mere “politics”. They’re students, single parents, new Australians and more who rely on every dollar to make ends meet.
Children in immigration prisons, women enduring the violence of men, pensioners below the poverty line, parents who can’t afford child care, Muslim Australians being vilified by politicians and abused in our streets, Aboriginal people being forced from their communities – while others treat their experiences as abstract, impersonal political concepts, these people have no such convenience. That which is derided as a topic that should not interrupt the Christmas cheer invades their lives without their consent.
Harrison and I went back in to hospital last week for blood tests. He’s on a huge amount of anti-rejection medication. We’re in the hands of the best medical practitioners in the field, the nursing and other support staff at the hospital are wonderful and Harrison has all the social scaffolding he needs to thrive. But this situation didn’t happen by chance – throughout Australia’s history progressive people fought for this outcome, so successfully that it would be culturally unacceptable for us to be paying for this level of care. Australians naturally assume it’s what sick children deserve.
We are living, and grateful, beneficiaries of those who valued other people enough to make politics personal.
Brad Chilcott is the Founder of Welcome to Australia. This article was first published in The Guardian on 16 January 2016.
We’re now in a race to the top on innovation. Better late than never.
Liberating ideas could reboot Australia’s economy, as we argued a year ago.
Now it seems there are more ideas about how to generate ideas than ever before in Australian policymaking. Both the Liberal-National government (“Welcome to the Ideas Boom” and the National Innovation and Science Agenda) and Labor opposition (“Powering Innovation” and “Getting Australia Started”) have put down markers around innovation in the lead-up to this year’s federal election.
The Coalition and Labor pronouncements have much in common:
Yet within this apparent new spirit of bipartisanship are some key differences. Some are subtle, others are not so. That is before one starts haggling over whose purse is bigger than the other’s.
The Turnbull government’s package is pitched further down the value chain, notwithstanding measures to promote STEM studies. It presumes a core capability in the economy: the assumption is that what’s missing is the key to unlock and leverage this capability. Coalition policy includes, for example, reforming Australian Research Council linkage projects and connecting industry to innovation infrastructure.
Labor seeks to build foundational capabilities from the ground up. It puts more emphasis on teaching computer coding in schools, preparing small to medium-sized enterprises to access government procurement, developing a national digital workforce plan and incentives for graduates to start businesses.
Interestingly, in a political role reversal, the Coalition’s plan has more of a selective orientation by technology and institution. This is reflected in the Biomedical Translation Fund, the Cyber-security Growth Centre and the CSIRO Innovation Fund.
Labor is more about generic capabilities across the board. This distinction, however, is not black and white.
Labor emphasises the innovation ecosystems view of the world. It plans to create regional hubs, with university-based accelerators at the core of this approach, and a national entrepreneurship support network. It speaks of an Innovation Investment Partnership to bring together venture capital, superannuation funds and start-up stakeholders to promote new business.
A distinguishing feature of the government’s package is its emphasis on an innovation culture. Reforming insolvency laws to reduce the stigma of failure is its centrepiece.
Also noteworthy is a revised approach to measuring research impact. That includes engagement with industry metrics. This is in the spirit of breaking out of research silos.
Both parties have a “challenges program”.
The Coalition has nominated five national policy and service delivery challenges. Businesses are invited to submit proposals to address them, with winning ideas to receive grants. The most successful could be accelerated to prototype or proof of concept.
Labor’s approach is more grassroots-oriented, like in the US. It proposes a portal for government agencies to propose challenges for the public to respond to.
There is strength in diversity and much to commend in both plans. Yet more could be done in the following areas:
Finally, to be credible, innovation policymaking must be located within a long-term vision of the structure of the Australian economy we should aspire to. It also demands honesty about the scale of the transformation required.
So the glass is half-full and rising. There are international precedents more like pints than pots.
China’s innovation hub, Chengdu, has partnered with European Union companies and organisations to share innovations among small and medium businesses and universities. The US has launched next-generation manufacturing hubs. Even one of the world’s oldest universities, Oxford, wants to be more agile in developing and translating ideas conceived in the dreaming spires.
Ideas have started to travel the world over. Australia has barely reached base camp in the race to the top.
Still, it’s encouraging to see Australian policy proposals breaking free of archaic and stifling debates about protectionism and picking winners. The world of ideas knows no boundaries.
Anand Kulkarni is Senior Manager, Planning & Research, RMIT University. Travers McLeod is Honary Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. This article first appeared in The Conversation on 18 January 2016.
Researchers have known for a long time that alcohol consumption is quite concentrated in a small part of the population. They argue about the exact distribution, but there is substantial agreement that, so long as alcohol sales are not heavily restricted, consumption is distributed in a quite predictable way. That is, there are many light and moderate consumers, along with a long tail of those drinking at heavier levels.
In Australia, the top 20% of the drinking-age population in 2013 consumed around three-quarters of all the alcohol consumed. The top 5% consumed more than a third.
The concentration of alcohol consumption among the heaviest drinkers has actually increased in recent years. The top 10% of consumers accounted for 49% of the consumption in 2001, and this had increased to 53% in 2013.
The heaviest-drinking 20% of the population reported consuming a daily average equivalent to 43 grams of pure alcohol – a bit over four standard drinks. This is a substantial underestimate of their actual drinking.
The total amount of drinking reported in such surveys is calculated to be about 55% of the alcohol sold in Australia, so their actual daily average is likely to be about 7.8 drinks. This is nearly four times the low-risk limit of two standard drinks per day recommended by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
If you drink enough alcohol, you get intoxicated, making you unfit for a lot of everyday activities. This includes, for instance, driving a car, most kinds of work or looking after children. Apart from these issues of injury and social functioning, alcohol also carries longer-term health risks.
At an average of four drinks per day, the chances of dying of an alcohol-related cancer or other chronic disease are two in 100 for men and 2.5 in 100 for women. At 7.8 drinks a day, the chances are about five in 100 for men and eight in 100 for women.
Adding in risks of dying from alcohol-related injuries more than doubles the risk for men, and increases the risk for women by more than 50%. Just considering the risks of health and injury harms, alcohol is by far the riskiest commodity that a majority of us regularly consume.
The current guidelines “to reduce health risks from drinking alcohol” set upper limits calculated on lifetime death risks from drinking. These are around four times the rate National Road Safety Strategy aims for as an upper limit of lifetime rate of deaths from traffic collisions. They contrast, for instance, with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) guidelines on water safety, which aim to keep the risk of death from contaminated drinking water below one in a million.
Those in the business of selling alcohol have long known about the skewed distribution of alcohol consumption in the population. In meetings among people in the industry, those at the top end of the distribution are called the “super consumers“, and they are vital to maintaining or increasing sales.
If all the “super consumers” reduced their drinking to the two-drinks-a-day average recommended by the NHMRC as an upper limit, it has been calculated, based on self-reported consumption, that alcohol sales would fall by 39%.
In its public face, the alcohol industry takes the line that it is only seeking to protect and promote “responsible drinking”: how to “drink properly”, minimising risks of harm.
But, in its internal discussions of the need for retailers to “identify and target super consumers”, the industry is acknowledging a large part of its sales are to drinkers who are taking substantial risks with their own lives and the lives of those around them. If all drinkers in Australia were to drink within the government guidelines for low-risk drinking, the alcohol market would shrink substantially.
If governments want to reduce alcohol-related harms, they can’t rely on the industry’s commitment to responsible drinking. It’s directly against the industry’s interests for the heaviest drinkers (who make up the majority of their sales) to drink less.
Given this inherent conflict, policymakers should focus on well-evaluated policies such as reduced late-night trading hours for pubs and nightclubs and smarter taxation of alcoholic products. Most importantly, governments should be sceptical of working in partnership with an industry whose interests are diametrically opposed to public health.
Robin Room is Professor and Director, Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, Latrobe University. Michael Livingston is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, Latrobe University. This article was first published in The Conversation on January 20,2016.
In this opinion piece from the New York Times, Aaron James Wendland draws on work by Emmanuel Levinas in response to the surge of refugees around the world and particularly into Europe. Levinas describes the allergic reaction to refugees. In response he suggests three things. First, an appeal to the ‘infinity’ in human beings, that other people are always more than our categories can capture. Second, faces confront us directly and immediately. Thirdly, hospitality involves curtailing our enjoyment of the world when confronted with another’s wants.
See link to article below:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2016/01/18/what-do-we-owe-each-other/
I’m not alone in rating her the best actress in the world. Or as some would prefer to say, the best female actor in the world. Or more precisely, the best female English-speaking screen actor working in mainstream cinema. And yes, I’m talking about our Cate – up there with Garbo, Hepburn, Streep, destined for legendhood (if I may use that word) – and currently starring in Carol, an absorbing romantic drama directed by Todd Haynes.
She’s in her usual impeccable form. A critic once said that Cate Blanchett has “the kind of beauty – svelte, ravaged, angular, irresistible on screen – that combines sternness with vulnerability … acutely sensitive, finely nuanced, every twitch and head toss perfectly judged.” Who wrote that? Well, I did, actually – reviewing Rowan Woods’ 2005 film Little Fish, in which Blanchett starred with Hugo Weaving. Her performance was the best thing in the film. Indeed, every one of her films seems to demonstrate some new aspect of her power and versatility. A couple of years after Little Fish, in which she played a reformed junkie in Sydney’s western suburbs, she turned up with a cultivated English accent to reprise her role as the first Queen Elizabeth and won an Oscar. And she’s won a string of Oscars, Globes and similar baubles since.
But to say that she’s best thing going in Carol may be a little unfair to Rooney Mara, who plays Therese, Carol’s lesbian lover. Mara won an Oscar nomination for her performance, with Blanchett conspicuously passed over, probably on the grounds that she’d won more than her fair share already. And speaking of fairness, why is the film called Carol and not Carol and Therese? The characters have equal weight, the performances are comparably fine. It’s as if Thelma & Louise, Hollywood’s last great all-girl romantic escapade, had been called Thelma, or if someone had made a film of Romeo and Juliet and called it Romeo. I could go on, but it’s time to get serious.
Haynes’s beautiful and sombre film is drawn from a novel by Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt, from which Phyllis Nagy has adapted the screenplay. By all accounts, Highsmith based the character of Therese Belivet on herself, after an affair she had with a woman in 1948 while working at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. Carol is set in New York in 1952 (Eisenhower has just been elected) and, as in all the best period adaptations, no relevant background detail is forgotten or out of place. Gleaming Packards cruise the streets, gas stoves are lit with matches.Haynes’s last film, the excellent Far From Heaven, was another story of illicit love set in the 1950s, in which a middle-class suburban housewife has an affair with her African-American gardener. Carol is the better film, and the more daring. Lesbian love is still a no-no for the big studios, and I think I’m right in saying that this is Blanchett’s first venture into full-on sexual passion. Certain male admirers may also be interested to note that it’s the first film in which she gets her gear off, though unlike her great contemporary, Nicole Kidman, in Eyes Wide Shut,s he doesn’t give us the full Monty.(Sorry about that.)
Carol has been through a difficult divorce from her thoroughly unlikeable husband (Kyle Chandler), and Therese, an aspiring photographer, is coping with a devoted boyfriend (Jake Lacy), whom she doesn’t much care for. The women meet by chance in the toy department of a store called Frankenberg’s (real name?), and are reunited when Therese discovers a pair of Carol’s gloves left (accidentally?) on the counter and mails them back to her. The progress of their doomed affair is chartered with a depth and sensitivity wholly in character with the social constraints and polite inhibitions of the time – routine courtesies become sympathetic gestures, then something more serious, the lightest touch of a hand on another’s shoulder conveying a lingering erotic charge.
At just under two hours it’s a bit too long, considering that little actually happens and what does happen is largely predictable. There’s a violent twist about three-quarters of the way through which seems oddly jarring at the time but delivers some much-needed dramatic impetus. In its miserable way Carol is a wonderful and truthful work, superbly shot in the best Fifities tradition on 16mm stock by Edward Lachman. The ambience of the time is charmingly recaptured, though someone should have told Todd Haynes that respectable gentlemen never wore beards in those days, no one could take photographs in available light indoors without a flashlight, and that someone as rich as Carol could surely afford to have her piano tuned. According to my life’s companion, “It sounded terrible.” But I suppose that even the best pearls have some minor irritations.
Carol, rated M, is showing in selected cinemas nationally. Three and a half stars.
Evan Williams has reviewed films in The Australian newspaper for 33 years. He is a Life Member of the Film Critics’ Circle of Australia for services to film criticism and the film industry.In 2015 he received the Geraldine Pascal Lifetime Achievement Award for critical writing.
The first day of the Australian Open was marred by revelations alleging widespread match-fixing and cover-ups in men’s tennis stretching back more than a decade. World number one Novak Djokovic confirmed he was approached with a reported offer of US$200,000 in 2006 to throw a match.
Hyper-commercialised sport in the 21st century has resulted in a number of benefits for athletes and spectators. Athletes are able to make significant amounts of money; spectators can enjoy excitement of the highest order without having to leave their lounge rooms. But it is naïve to think that all changes have been beneficial.
In recent decades doping has consistently been the most-visible negative consequence of commercialised sport. So much pressure is now exerted on athletes that they are tempted, for whatever reason, to take performance-enhancing substances.
While the Australian public demands a level playing field, Australian athletes and sports have been caught up in doping. For the most part, though, Australian sports are heavily regulated and proactive in addressing doping. But the same cannot be said about gambling.
Online and live sports betting has become much more prevalent in recent years.
All major sports in Australia now have some kind of a relationship with sports betting agencies. Online bookmaker William Hill is the “official betting partner” of the Australian Open and – in a first for a Grand Slam tournament – it has been allowed to advertise inside stadiums.
For television and pay-per-view providers, sports betting agencies provide significant advertising dollars. Betting agencies, alongside junk food and alcohol, form an unholy trinity of sports advertising in Australia.
Gambling, particularly on poker machines, can be destructive. So too has sports betting been responsible for creating a new breed of problem gamblers. Sports gambling is accepted as a rite of passage for many Australian males.
However, sporting authorities are cautious about upsetting their sponsors. Tennis officials largely dismissed the revelations of match-fixing as old news.
Tennis is a sport very suitable for corruption in this hyper-commercialised era. Here’s why we shouldn’t surprised that match-fixers have targeted the sport:
Steve Georgakis is senior Lecturer of Pedagogy and Sports Studies, University of Sydney. This article was first published by The Conversation on January 19, 2016.
Joel S. Wit writes about how the North Koreans have played their cards extremely well despite the appalling nature of their regime. See link to an article in the New York Times, by Joel S. Wit, who is a Senior Fellow of the US-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-crazy-are-the-north-koreans.html