Category: Politics

At The Australian Institute’s Revenue Summit in Canberra on 17 October 2018  Bernie Fraser raised an important question as to why with Australia’s 27 years of successive  economic growth  there is so mush social disquiet and sense of unfairness in the community.

Bernie Fraser was formerly Secretary of Treasury and Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

He asked …’How do we explain (the) disconnect between Australia’s impressive economic growth story and its failure on so many markers to show progress towards a better,fairer society? In my view a large part of the answer lies in the influence of the political ideology of neoliberalism on policy making in Australia over much of the last few decades. In varying degrees similar influences and outcomes are evident in several other developed western countries.

At its highest level neoliberalism encourages policy makers to focus on their economies,rather than their societies,with an apparent assumption that what is good for the economy will be good for society,with limited need for government interventions.’

See link below for full notes

Bernie Fraser background notes (2)

But politicians and military leaders had to justify the dead and the enormous sacrifices they had demanded from their people. Thinking back, the most chilling part of the vain bloodbath is that the citizens of the belligerent nations did support the war and its sacrifices for years, some until the breaking point of revolt. (more…)

Welcome to the hung parliament. A disaster, according to our PR obsessed prime minister – instability and chaos, But for ordinary Australians it might not be so bad.  (more…)

Now that the dust has settled after the coup that toppled former Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull it is clear that this was more than a tale of revenge and malice within the Liberal Party.

But while Turnbull’s son, Alex Turnbull, might be right in his assessment that the Liberal Party has been taken over by extremists on the hard right, he is mistaken if he thinks that the Party can be ‘brought back from the brink’ and its small-L liberal credentials restored.   (more…)

I stood the other day in a post office queue. Among a range of souvenirs marking the centenary of the end of WWI, were commemorative snow globes. It suggested all that is perverse in marketing, but then it might be argued that marketing is a perverse science. Australians are increasingly being convinced to ‘buy’ a product that they neither want or need – militarisation and all that goes with it. (more…)

Remember when Australia was a nation of makers?  As in: the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Holdens and the Opera House?  Imagine the productivity increase if Australia had a mobile army who would deploy across the country to provide skilled workers where, when and for as long is required.  Fruit pickers, mobile phone tower erectors, wind and solar renewable generator constructors, road and rail builders, mine developers are examples.  When the work is done, the mobile workforce moves to the next location needing their services. Many people struggling to find affordable housing and employment in overcrowded cities would find work and accommodation across Australia, and the drudgery of city commuting would be eliminated. (more…)

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

So it is done.

The Coalition government has admitted defeat. (more…)

In 1901 the cultural Zionist Israel Zangwill, borrowing a phrase from Lord Shaftesbury, declared, ‘Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.’ That cliché has continued to influence the impasse in the Middle East for almost a century. (more…)

It is five minutes to midnight on climate change. We will have to alter our trajectory very quickly if we wish to have a good chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to less than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. That was a goal of the Paris agreement of 2015. Achieving it means drastic reductions in emissions from now. This is very unlikely to happen. That is no longer because it is technically impossible. It is because it is politically painful. We are instead set on running an irreversible bet on our ability to manage the consequences of a far bigger rise even than 2C. Our progeny will see this as a crime. (more…)

The most interesting political action worldwide is happening in Europe and right now the focus is on Italy’s coalition government of left and right standing up to Brussels rules.  Similar forces are at work in the United States of America. Are these working-class pressures building up in Australia?  I hope so but we will learn nothing about them from the Wentworth by-election.  (more…)

Comment on Australian universities and China needs to correct the universal Western oversight of the reality that China’s past, present and future can only be understood in the context of its unique classics and millennia of recorded history.  (more…)

Australia has had six Prime Ministers since 2008, with the likelihood of a seventh in May 2019. Is this an index of instability in Australian politics and society, one perhaps marked also by the massive swing in last Saturday’s Wentworth by-election? Is this instability a consequence of the emergence of a series of extremely ambitious, stubborn and vindictive individuals over the past decade, or is it something deeper which has penetrated the system and would continue even if such individuals were to be excluded  or absent themselves from the political arena? Does it stand in contrast to the apparent stability of most levels of Australian society and economy?  (more…)