Category: Politics

Now that the Coalition (should that be COALition?) Government has announced that it will abrogate is duty to formulate and implement a national energy management policy, it is up to the Australian people to do so.  We can express our choices through our State and Territory Governments via the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), which can coordinate the development of a National Electricity System (NES). (more…)

The growing number of people sleeping rough on the streets of our cities has alerted many Australians to the fact that Australia is no longer the egalitarian society we once were, and that, as in other western democracies, inequality is on the rise.  (more…)

When the world falls apart, when all those carefully plans collapse in smouldering ruins, when the present seems desolate and the future seems hopeless, there is only one recourse: invoke the ghost of Robert Menzies. (more…)

Now there is talk about a new generation in Australian Politics. So what is new? Not the players.  Not the structures, nor the  rules of engagement. Could it be a more basic factor is needed? Could it be, for want of a better term, the ‘moral infrastructure’? Is this the bedrock foundation, the sine qua non for any successful rebuild? This would involve the ways in which individuals and groups regulate their behaviour.  (more…)

Powerful and sensitive weapons need to be handled with extreme care if they are not to harm the user as well as the intended victim. Ministerial intervention is a powerful and sensitive weapon. (more…)

The Productivity Commission – the Australian government’s highly influential economic advisory body – released a report titled Rising Inequality? last week. The question mark indicates its scepticism about other research findings on rising inequality in Australia. The commission responded to its own question in the report’s very first heading: “Over nearly three decades, inequality has risen slightly in Australia”. (more…)

Conservatives in Australia are up for a fight. They are determined to recapture their heartland, reclaim the political right from the progressive interlopers: they are marking out their territory and it is as much about identity as ideology. (more…)

Young Australian families are living in brand new suburbs on the outskirts of our cities.  They now constitute a significant proportion of the nation’s population.  A few years ago, these suburbs were sandhills and bush.  They have no post-settlement history.  Do they have a culture?  What interests these young couples?  In political terms, what is the issue?  (more…)

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

“Here I am back again in the Treasury . . . but with one great difference. In 1918 most people’s only idea was to get back to pre-1914. No one today feels like that about 1939. That will make an enormous difference when we get down to it.” The financial crisis was a devastating failure of the free market followed by a period of rising inequality within many countries. (more…)

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here. (more…)

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There has never been a more exciting time to be a critic of the ‘greed is good’ philosophy of the corporate sector. The revelations from the banking and finance royal commission have been gobsmacking. There was also the beat up of my university for having the temerity to weigh the attraction, of substantial funding from the Ramsay Centre, against demands for having voice and veto in academic decisions on staffing and curricula. (more…)

The first time I voted in a federal election was in December 1972. I had just graduated from university. In three undergraduate years, as a member of the turbulent Monash Association of Students, I had learned that there was deep artificiality in a political view that reduces debate to two sides. I cast my inaugural vote knowing that if the McMahon Liberal-Country Coalition were returned, I would have a National Service obligation to deal with. But then they lost to Gough Whitlam’s Labor and conscription was scrapped.  (more…)

From waving Au Pairs through the immigration queue, throwing money at unsuspecting charities and denying medical treatments for children – to ignoring climate change and the bullying culture that is endemic to party politics; what the last few weeks of politics have shown above all, is that our political leaders just don’t know the difference between being right and doing right. (more…)

If you were going to reduce a 150-page Productivity Commission examination of trends in Australian inequality to a few words, it would be nice if they weren’t “ALP inequality claims sunk”, or “Progressive article of faith blown up” or “Labor inequality myths busted by commission”. (more…)