Category: Politics

With a tumbling share price and increased pressure from governments across the world Facebook will have to make major changes quickly if the company is to survive. (more…)

We live in the driest occupied continent. Most of our soils are old and fragile. Rain is variable in our most arable areas and our precipitation to evaporation ratio is low. Dust storms and soil exposure caused by unprecedented, catastrophic bush fires in Queensland in the last weeks of November remind us of the fragility of our land mass, 60% of which is in the stewardship of our farmers and graziers. To many, but not all, of these landholders it is not a mystery that soil and water, as with the relevant sciences, is the basis to all agriculture. It has been calculated that each of our meals costs 10 kg of soil. Food security is a real debate in a world facing the accelerant of climate change on our resource base; care of our soils becomes critical.  (more…)

The Information-technology Revolution is challenging the assumptions on which the education of children and the provision of their entertainment are based. The doomsayers argue the big companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, et al. – despite their rhetoric of preventing evil and promoting global togetherness – are in fact exacerbating inequality, poverty, unemployment, invasion of privacy, breakdown in social cohesion, supporting political disruption and Donald Trump.  (more…)

Yet again we are assured that the Adani mine is going ahead – Adani Lite, they’ll only put it in a little way and if it hurts, well, they’ll just see how far they can keep shoving. (more…)

Today’s kids are way ahead of our broadcasting regulators and television producers in the way they use both television and digital media. It’s time for a radical rethink of content regulations, quotas, and subsidy for children’s media education and entertainment in their best interest. (more…)

A regular collection of links to writings and broadcasts covered in other media. (more…)

Almost twelve months ago, I first wrote of threats to democratic advocacy from three foreign interference Bills.  On Tuesday this week, the final most controversial Bill, the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform Bill, was passed with the support of civil society. The story of this transformation from horrified opposition to support for the Bill is a story of Australian civil society working together to influence legislation in a way rarely seen. It opens the way for future collaboration to proactively promote the strengthening of our democracy. (more…)

Facebook and the like are not interested in truth in journalism. They use their algorithms to create news that confirms their users’ pre-existing views. If they gave them content with views they didn’t like, chances are that the users would ditch the feed for a rival and revenues would drop. (more…)

Democrats are now preparing to assume control of the House. This offers many possibilities for oversight and investigation. For one, the House Ways and Means Committee has the right to inspect the president’s tax returns, and Democrats are sure to swiftly call on the Treasury to hand over President Trump’s tax records. (more…)

In this article, Marcia Angell reviews four books on pain-killers, doctors ,drug overdoses and the drug companies.  She concludes that alcohol and tobacco have far more serious health consequences than opioids.Opioids at least have the redeeming feature that they have a medical use as painkillers . She comments. “As long as this country [the US] tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education and childcare, some people will want to use drugs to escape.”

Marcia Angell is a member of the faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School .  She was former Editor in Chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.  See article below.
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The acute tensions that disrupted the recent APEC summit, the Brexit fiasco in Britain, the rise of populist discourse and movements in much of Europe, the ‘theatre of the grotesque’ in Trump’s America, are just a few of the symptoms of the seismic shift that has been in the making for over three decades. It is a shift which political leaders, not least in Australia, seem scarcely able to comprehend, let alone address. (more…)

Additional background to the case can also be found at:  https://chuffed.org/project/release-the-palace-letters

The results of the Victorian State election are devastating for right-wing politics right across Australia. It is now blindingly obvious that the policies that they have been spruiking are irrelevant to mainstream voters. It is as if the Coalition parties presently exist in a parallel political universe, hermetically sealed off from the everyday opinions and needs of contemporary Australian voters. It’s time for the Liberal Party leadership to understand that the party is no longer a “broad church” embracing liberals and so-called conservatives.

The increasingly phalangist tendencies of the alt-right rump in the party (along with their mates in the National party and News Ltd) have to be jettisoned once and for all. Moreover, it’s time for the political right in Australia to understand that their obsessively bullying minions in the Murdoch media are frankly impotent. Australian voters have well and truly moved on from the pugnacious pontificating that stains the reporting and analysis in most of the Murdoch outlets. (more…)