Category: Politics

  • ANDREW PROBYN. What did Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes have to do with the Liberal leadership spill? (ABC News, 18.09.18)

    Malcom Turnbull’s demise as Australia’s 29th prime minister was unusual for many reasons, and truly unique for one: his was the first known prime ministership to be the subject of a billionaires’ tug of war between the nation’s most powerful media moguls. (more…)

  • JOE ASTON. Rupert Murdoch to Kerry Stokes: “Malcolm has to go.” (AFR 18.9.2018)

    Murdoch met with Seven West proprietor Kerry Stokes …… “Malcolm has got to go,” he told the Perth billionaire.  

    (This abuse of power by media barons is appalling.There is strong case for Bill Shorten  to propose a Royal Commission into this unacceptable abuse of power and the general failure of our main stream media on issues such as climate change. The health of  our democracy is at stake   John Menadue) (more…)

  • MEREDITH DOIG. Open Letter to Scott Morrison upon becoming Prime Minister.

    Dear Prime Minister,

    The Rationalist Society of Australia (RSA) congratulates you upon becoming the 30th Prime Minister of Australia. We have two concerns we would like to raise with you: firstly, your Government’s response to the Ruddock Report, and secondly, your urging Australians to pray for rain in drought affected areas. (more…)

  • WANNING SUN. Blind Spots in Australia’s Soft Power Strategies.

    Blessed with an enviable healthy and relaxed lifestyle, beautiful landscape, and clean environment, Australia has rich soft power assets and resources. Yet, more than ever before, Australia faces unprecedented challenges in its soft power efforts. The China factor cannot be ignored, even when we are considering Australia’s soft power initiatives in places other than China.  (more…)

  • MAUREEN DOWD. Trump Finally Makes a Friend (New York Times, 15.09.18)

    The president may be shunned nearly everywhere but at the bottom of the world he has finally found a loyal mate. (more…)

  • MUNGO MACCALLUM. ScoMo, ProMo, Status QuoMo

    We still don’t know just who or what the new Prime Minister is, but he is determined to tell us whether we like it or not. Our manic leader is seldom lost for words and this is just as well as he appears chronically short of ideas. (more…)

  • DUNCAN GRAHAM. Robbing Roads To Keep Rice Cheap.

    Unlike their southern neighbours, Indonesians know when they’ll go to the polls – 17 April 2019. That Wednesday will be a public holiday to encourage a big turn out.  Voting is not compulsory.

    In the 2014 election 135 million electors punched a hole in a ballot paper to make their choice – around 70 per cent of those on the roll – in the world’s third largest democracy.  

    Next year voters aged over 17 will get the chance to directly elect the president, 580 members of the People’s Consultative Assembly (known as the DPR) and 128 to the Regional Assembly, (DPD). 

    Fifteen parties will bid for seats but there are only two rematch contestants for the top job – incumbent Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo, 57, and former general Prabowo Subianto, 67, who lost his 2014 bid by just under seven per cent.

    Though campaigning is not supposed to start till 13 October, jostling is well underway.  Now is the time for Australia to keep its head down; if we get dragged into the contest the collateral damage to relationships could be lasting. (more…)

  • ROSS GITTINS. Morrison’s surplus secret: bracket creep kills the tax cuts. (SMH 15-16.9.2018)

    With publication of the Parliamentary Budget Office’s report on the May budget’s medium-term projections, we now know. Short answer: by assuming loads more bracket creep between now and then.   (more…)

  • GREG BAILEY. Whereto for the LNP and the ALP. Part 2.

    What about the ALP which, despite its protestation about its commitment to social justice and the social wage, has also effected neoliberal outcomes over the past three decades? Just witness its recent support to Australia becoming a member of a revised TPPT. And it has done this even in the face of objection from parts of its left wing and the remnants of the union movement. Yet the union movement itself has been corporatized with a number of high profile ex union leaders having moved into the corporate sector.  (more…)

  • JIEH-YUNG LO. Reflections of a Chinese-Australian.

    To ensure we remain as the world’s most successful multicultural society, it is important to get the China debate right from now on to prevent the re-emergence of sinophobia in Australia.  (more…)

  • MUNGO MACCALLUM. Turnbull lets fly.

    Unlike Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull did not hang around in parliament, which must be a major relief for Scott Morrison – one baleful ex-prime minister glowering from the backbench is more than enough. (more…)

  • TAMSIN SHAW. Edward Snowden Reconsidered (New York Review of Books Daily 13.09.18)

    This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet. It has been a long five years, and not a period marked by increased understanding, transparency, or control of our personal data. In these years, we’ve learned much more about how Big Tech was not only sharing data with the NSA but collecting vast troves of information about us for its own purposes. And we’ve started to see the strategic ends to which Big Data can be put. In that sense, we’re only beginning to comprehend the full significance of Snowden’s disclosures. (more…)

  • Scott Morrison, the ‘prosperity gospel’ and neoliberalism.

    Sounding surprisingly like an evangelical revivalist, Prime Minister Morrison in Albury on 6 September highlighted the need for love in our country, for every Australian, and that this set the value base for his own thinking and presumably for policies of his government. No one in Albury objected to the ideal of love of neighbour, but it sounded a bit odd when people were expecting a significant statement about changed policies of his government after the leadership bloodletting. (more…)

  • GREG BAILEY. Whereto for the LNP and the ALP. Part 1.

    Australian politics as judged by the antics of the two major parties over the past three weeks is almost a (hyper-) reality television show, replete with microscopic media coverage of the principal personalities involved. Building up for many years this has implications for the survival of these parties, but disappear they certainly will not. The task for long-term survival is certainly before the LNP, whereas for the ALP the prospects seem brighter. (more…)

  • KIM WINGEREI. The responsibility of free speech.

    I don’t like what Steve Bannon has to say. I find Nigel Farrage’s attempts at shrouding his anti-immigration messages in “Judeo-Christian values” abhorrent. But I am also quite certain that neither pose more nor less of a threat to Australia than Chelsea Manning does. The idea of picking and choosing who gets to speak is what we should be afraid of.  (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. The urgent need for democratic renewal. We don’t trust the major parties

    Australians are sick and tired of politicians. The community is deserting the major political parties in droves.Most recently we have seen it in Longman and Wagga.  We have lost trust in our major political parties and most particularly the Liberal and National Parties in recent months.

    In the 1980s we embraced economic change and reform. It was necessary but painful for some. Today we need democratic reform and renewal. Like the 1980s, it is necessary but it will be painful for some.

    After the next election we need a government that will assist us in major democratic renewal. It is urgent. We could start with a post-election summit in the same way that Prime Minister Hawke called an economic summit many years ago. We need a summit of community leaders to help chart a new course for democratic renewal.   (more…)

  • JOHN MENADUE. Beyond the political rhetoric,hard hats and akubras what do our political ‘leaders’ really believe.

    Power does reveal substance.  It tells us quite quickly about the values that drive political parties and political leaders. Scare tactics are always a sure sign that the values and policy cupboard is bare. (more…)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. Why Serena Williams owes a triple apology.

    CANBERRA – Serena Williams, a deserved legend in her own lifetime, owes a public apology to Naomi Osaka, match umpire Carlos Ramos and the world’s tennis fans. She was the perpetrator, not the victim, of unprovoked abuse. Women should be among the first to recognize and condemn blame-shifting from the perpetrator to the victim. Attempts to confuse her on-court behavior with historical injustices to women and the “everyone else does it” fallacy are an aggravating, not an extenuating, circumstance. Far from advancing, her apologists damage the cause of women’s rights and racial equality. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. John Bolton’s speech: Hostility, misrepresentations, US self-regard.

    Bolton’s authorized major speech on the International Criminal Court misrepresented it, expressed deep hostility to it, but was revealing of just how deeply entrenched in US foreign policy is the notion of US exceptionalism, under which it and Israel are immune from international law.  (more…)

  • MELISSA PARKE. Conflict in Yemen

    ‘I don’t want to live any more’ said the man standing in the rubble of his destroyed home. His teenage daughter beside him burst into tears and the younger daughter looked up at him, not understanding. The airstrike, in the UNESCO World heritage old city of Sana’a, had come without warning in the middle of the night killing all other members of the man’s family, leaving them homeless. They had no connection to any of the warring parties to the conflict in Yemen but were among its tens of thousands of civilian victims. (more…)

  • JOSEPH NYE. The two sides of American exceptionalism (Project Syndicate, 5.09.18)

    In July, I joined 43 other scholars of international relations in paying for a newspaper advertisement arguing that the US should preserve the current international order. The institutions that make up this order have contributed to “unprecedented levels of prosperity and the longest period in modern history without war between major powers. US leadership helped to create this system, and US leadership has long been critical for its success.” (more…)

  • JERRY ROBERTS Whither Labor?

    Stan Grant in his interesting post of 10 September asks which kind of conservatism our Prime Minister will practise.  Since we are about to commence a decade of Labor in office in Canberra a more pertinent question is what type of Labor Government will it be? (more…)

  • GEOFF RABY. Prometheus bound: How China’s power is constrained

    The more Australia positions itself as if there is only a binary choice between US or Chinese hegemonic influence in the region, the more likely conflict becomes. (more…)

  • PETER JANSSEN. Wealth gap remains under Thai junta rule.

    PM Prayut Chan-ocha vowed to tackle the kingdom’s politicized income inequality but has failed to pass a redistributive land tax that would hit elite holdings (more…)

  • GARRY WILLS. Resistance Means More Than Voting (New York Review of Books Daily, 10.09.18)

    When former president Barack Obama called on the nation to oppose Donald Trump at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign last week, he said there was only one way to do it, by voting. This was a criticism of the internal resistance supported by the anonymous op-ed writer in The New York Times. Obama said that people who “secretly aren’t following the president’s orders” are not defending democracy: “These people are not elected. They’re not accountable.” (more…)

  • NICK DEANE Invictus and the arms manufacturers connection.

    The Invictus Games will be familiar to all who watch the ABC, their  promoter and sponsor. The Games will be taking place in Sydney in October, the participants being injured service personnel from 18 countries.But why are major arms manufactures ‘official supporters’? (more…)

  • ROSS GITTINS. How we could revive faith in democracy (SMH 6 June 2018)

    How much is our disillusionment with politicians, governments and even democracy the result of our pollies’ 30-year love affair with that newly recognised mega-evil “neoliberalism”?

    To a considerable extent, according to Dr Richard Denniss, of the Australia Institute, in the latest Quarterly Essay, Dead Right.  

    (more…)

  • ISHAAN THAROOR. The White House’s new attack on the international system.

    In his first major policy address since joining the White House in April, national security adviser John Bolton offered a particularly aggressive demonstration of President Trump’s “America First” agenda. He threatened the International Criminal Court, a U.N.-mandated body based in The Hague, with punitive measures should it pursue an investigation into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan. He warned that the United States would ban ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the country, sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system and punish any company or government that complies with an ICC investigation into Americans.

    (more…)

  • MICHAEL SAINSBURY Can a woman save Wentworth for the Libs? (Crikey, 12.09.18)

    Liberal candidate Andrew Bragg has bowed out of the race for Wentworth, citing a need for women candidates. But will it be enough? (more…)

  • MICHAEL PASCOE. For-profit funds take a hit off back of royal commission (11.09.18)

    Never mind the fines and compensation building up, what about retail fund managers losing more than $20 billion of assets in the June quarter? (more…)