After Canadian authorities seized a top Chinese executive from the telecommunications giant Huawei at Vancouver Airport last month on a US arrest warrant, Beijing immediately set about retaliating.
A couple of Canadians who, until then, had been working openly in China, were detained. Top-level meetings for Canadian diplomats dried up. And Beijing made clear more was to come, threatening “grave consequences” unless the Huawei executive was released. (more…)
Lobbyists are back in the news but it looks as if the scourge of lobbyists will continue in Canberra if Bill Shorten wins the next election. There is no sign that the ALP, like the Coalition is prepared to curb the way lobbyists are corrupting public policy in Australia.. The media reports that lobby firms are taking on ‘labor staffers’ so that they can influence a future Labor Government. (more…)
In the blue-collar area where there have been very substantial workforce reform and improvements which have helped transform the Australian economy. It was begun under the Hawke/Keating governments and continued under the Howard governments.
But the health sector the largest and fastest growing in the economy has not been seriously reformed. I ‘guesstimate’ that there is a potential productivity dividend of at least 40% in health workforce reform over the next decade. That 40% may be on the low side.
The events of the past year brought American and Israeli Jews closer to a breaking point. President Trump, beloved in Israel and decidedly unloved by a majority of American Jews, moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, with the fiery evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress consecrating the ceremony.
Clearly, budget outcomes rely on two simple issues – income and expenditure.
On the income side of the ledger, the Northern Territory is hugely reliant on our share of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). We have been gutted.
On the expenditure side, the Northern Territory Government has been under enormous pressure to spend. The armchair experts (usually in leafy suburbs on the east coast) seem to expect that the Territory has a limitless capacity to provide gold plated social services, of EVERY kind found in the big cities, to every small pocket of population in the bush.
The Australian Government was quick to appoint a Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory (but not the States who all have serious problems I notice), but slow to assist with implementation of the 189 recommendations. And it has for decades tried to get away with providing the capital funds for something, and then dumping the recurrent costs of operating it on the NT. We could go on and on. (more…)
Attached is a collection of articles on drug policy reform, which were published as a series on Pearls and Irritations between 6 and 11 August 2018. This series was designed to draw attention to this important issue, and to the failure of our current policies.
Despite the clear failure of the war on drugs across the world our police and border force officers tell us breathlessly time and time again about another record drug haul. Who are they kidding about the success of present policies.?Do they even believe their own propaganda? When will they stop and ask themselves some hard questions. They might even suggest to Ministers that they need to embark on a thorough re think of failed policies. The stubbornness of politicians is putting more and more lives at risk. (more…)
In 1974, the Whitlam Government decided to exclude dental care from Medicare for two reasons. The first was cost. The second was political in that Gough Whitlam felt that combatting the doctors would be hard enough without having to combat dentists as well.
Forty-four years later, with Australia much richer and the proven success of Medicare, it is now time for dental care to be progressively included in Medicare. (more…)
I spent my childhood and youth in Tasmanian towns, never had any desire to live on a farm but always enjoyed going to what I knew as ‘the show’, which was in fact an agricultural show. The show offered two kinds of spectacles: what went on in the side-shows and what happened in the main arena. (more…)
‘Perhaps [we could consider] a review of what Pierre Trudeau and his government (in Canada) did in 1984 when they took on a system not dissimilar to ours – uncontrolled fee for service – and legislated that doctors could charge what they liked BUT unless they adhered to the fee negotiated between the provincial government and the profession (on an annual basis) the doctor lost all access to a Medicare reimbursement. The system still works today in Canada and few doctors opt out of it. Now there is a thought and a significant game-changer.’
(more…)
GARRY EVERETT. A Legal Leap of Faith?
In the Weekend Australian (5/6 Jan.’19), Professor Greg Graven wrote an article entitled Taking a Legal Leap of Faith. In essence it is an examination of the key issues involved in trying to legislate in the matter of religious freedom. This is a disappointing contribution. (more…)
The Pope said the ‘resurgence of nationalistic tendencies’ is at odds with the ‘vocation’ of international bodies The Tablet 08 January 2019.
Pope Francis leads an annual meeting to exchange greetings for the new year with diplomats accredited to the Holy See, at the Vatican Jan. 7.
Photo: Pope Francis leads an annual meeting to exchange greetings for the new year with diplomats accredited to the Holy See, at the Vatican Jan. 7. (more…)
Just hours after civil rights groups called on Facebook’s top executives to step down from the company’s board for allowing “viral propaganda” and “bigoted campaigns” to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after a bombshell New York Times report late Tuesday detailed a “special arrangement” the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users’ data and private messages without consent. (more…)
Bob Hawke’s Economic Summit following the 1983 election promoted cooperation and consensus which led to remarkable economic and social reform. With the loss of trust in our political institutions and politicians today, we need a political summit to build consensus on democratic reform. Such a proposal, if carefully implemented, could produce real political and policy dividends for its advocates and more importantly, for Australia.
Australians are sick and tired of politicians. The community is deserting the major political parties in droves.
After the next election we need a government that will assist us in major democratic renewal. It is urgent. We need a summit of community leaders to help chart a new course for democratic renewal. (more…)
America is spending beyond its means on a mission that might only be helping its strategic rivals. (more…)
For many years experts in the field of drug policy in Australia have known existing policies are failing. Crude messages (calls for total abstinence: “just say no to drugs”) and even cruder enforcement strategies (harsher penalties, criminalisation of drug users) have had no impact on the use of drugs or the extent of their harmful effects on the community.
The United States under President Donald Trump is on a mission to add economic policy to the armoury of national security policy to deal with a rising China. The approach holds the global economic order hostage to the attempt to put China back in its box. The stakes are as high as they get. But how should middle powers like Australia and its neighbours like Japan or Indonesia respond to the hard choices they now confront? (more…)
We all hope for an overflowing stocking on Christmas morning, but for most people, the biggest gift they will ever receive is an inheritance. Whether a house, a car, or a share portfolio, inheritances can change lives. And as wealth grows and inheritances get larger, these intergenerational transfers will also play more of a role in shaping Australian society. (more…)
Last year, Australia discovered the debt owed to Chinese banks by Pacific island countries. As the debate over China’s intentions in the region grew, commentators pointed to the possibility that Pacific countries might be compelled to accept debt-for-equity swaps if they could not repay. The port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, where a Chinese company obtained a 99-year lease to run commercial operations in return for helping to pay the country’s debt, was the commonly raised example.
The 2017 tax cut has received pretty bad press, and rightly so. Its proponents made big promises about soaring investment and wages, and also assured everyone that it would pay for itself; none of that has happened.
Yet coverage actually hasn’t been negative enough. The story you mostly read runs something like this: The tax cut has caused corporations to bring some money home, but they’ve used it for stock buybacks rather than to raise wages, and the boost to growth has been modest. That doesn’t sound great, but it’s still better than the reality: No money has, in fact, been brought home, and the tax cut has probably reduced national income. Indeed, at least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer thanks to that cut.
Let me explain each point in turn. (more…)
Like all our big cities, Sydney needs better public transport. The Government’s responsibility is to secure this with the best system, for the best price. But as a minimum, new investments cannot be allowed to threaten the productivity and growth potential of our existing public transport system and its commuters.
Sydney Metro Rail is starting to show clear signs of failing us on all these counts.
The Royal Commission into Banking shows us how ‘official’ stories can change dramatically once confronted with a process where evidence can be compelled and witnesses protected.
On its first day in government after the next NSW election the new government should establish an enquiry into the developing rail mess. (more…)
Razo Khan woke up suddenly to the sight of assault rifles pointed at his face, and demands that he get out of bed and onto the floor. Within minutes, the armed raiders had separated the men from the women and children. Then the shooting started. As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up in flames. Within were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot three times in the head. Villagers who rushed to the home found the burned body of her 3year-old daughter, Marina, in a corner of a bedroom that had been set on fire. (more…)
By abetting the ad industry, universities are leading us into temptation, when they should be enlightening us. (more…)
The Labor leadership has announced, if it wins government, that a drug summit will be held at which pill testing will be discussed. This announcement was made in the run up to a March State election and so is a political action– it will appeal to a lot of younger voters in many electorates. It is a common sense announcement. It is hoped that a trial of pill testing will follow and that pill testing will then be introduced more generally. (more…)
The claim that Britain’s economic model is systemically unjust was recently deemed radical and extreme. Now it is indisputable. (more…)
The killing of construction workers in Nduga and the Indonesian security force’s subsequent military operations impact quite differently on the politics of the Papua – Indonesia conflict. It is contested whether the 16 construction workers were unarmed civilians or members of the security forces but the event on 2 December 2018 marked a departure from the predominantly peaceful, political struggle for independence developed since 2000. In terms of numbers of those killed, it was the largest attack in recent years. (more…)
More than twenty years ago, writing about Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland, Colm Tóibín recalled what it was like to study history in Ireland in the 1970s—to be on the cusp of the revisionist wave, questioning all the old narratives. “Imagine if Irish history were pure fiction,” he wrote, “how free and happy we could be! It seemed at that time a most subversive idea, a new way of killing your father, starting from scratch, creating a new self.” The burden of having relatives has been a constant theme of Tóibín’s stories, essays, and reviews: “A Priest in the Family,” “How to Be a Wife,” “The Brother Problem,” “The Importance of Aunts,” “Mothers and Sons,” and, for equality’s sake, both “New Ways to Kill Your Mother” and “New Ways to Kill Your Father.” And these are just some of the titles. The desire to start from scratch, to worm (or to smash, but mostly to worm) your way out from under the yoke of dull, unavailable, or tyrannical parents figures in most of his fiction. (more…)
The investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, in his memoir “Reporter,” describes a moment when as a young reporter he overheard a Chicago cop admit to murdering an African-American man. The murdered man had been falsely described by police as a robbery suspect who had been shot while trying to avoid arrest. Hersh frantically called his editor to ask what to do.
“The editor urged me to do nothing,” he writes. “It would be my word versus that of all the cops involved, and all would accuse me of lying. The message was clear: I did not have a story. But of course I did.” He describes himself as “full of despair at my weakness and the weakness of a profession that dealt so easily with compromise and self-censorship.”
I have recalled several times that Rupert Murdoch has said that he has never asked a Prime Minister for anything. That is quite brazen. From my own personal experience I know that is just not true.
I was the intermediary when Rupert Murdoch asked new Prim Minister Whitlam in late 1972 that he be appointed Australian High Commissioner to the UK
One other example which I describe below is an example of the way Rupert Murdoch operates, in this case in association with Peter Abeles, to extract aviation concessions from governments. At the time in 1988 Murdoch and Abeles had a business partnership in Ansett Airlines. I was then CEO of Qantas. (more…)
There is everything wrong with the way in which Donald Trump reached his decision to pull US forces out of Syria, apparently without touching base with his own advisers and commanders. Australia is also now exposed to such impromptu creativity in foreign policy as in PM Morrison’s attempt in October to float a new initiative on moving the Australian Embassy to Jerusalem, again without prior warning even to Foreign Minister Payne. (more…)
Peter Dutton failed as Health Minister. His track record since then is even worse. (more…)