He may not have landed any concrete results, but he continues to give the myths and legends a good workout.
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Category: Politics
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MUNGO McCALLUM. Turnbull’s Passage to India.
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JAMES O’NEILL. Scientific evidence exposes the falsity of US government claims about Syrian gas attack.
The irresistible conclusion is that those same senior politicians know that the White House claims are false and misleading and therefore highly dangerous to Australia’s national security. That they should maintain their silence on this while continuing to perpetuate a barrage of lies and half-truths about the ongoing Syrian tragedy raises serious questions about their fitness to govern. (more…)
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ALLAN PATIENCE. The seduction of pessimism.
It seems that the end is nigh of much of what we know and love about our planet as climate change intensifies across the globe. Climate change science is painting a depressingly pessimistic picture of the future. Is there no hope? (more…)
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Trump is Ignorant of History and So is His Chump Sean Spicer
This article by Middle East expert, ROBERT FISK, was first published in The Independent on 12 April 2017.
Fisk comments ‘Gas, cruise missiles, barrel bombs, Hitler and the American media. Mix them all up and I suppose you get Trump’s new policy in the Middle East.’ (more…)
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ANDREW HAMILTON. Labor Party reform through Catholic Social Teaching
It can be disconcerting to hear our family history told by a sympathetic but unaligned outsider. We may recognise the partisanship that coloured some of our past judgments and be led to reconsider them. (more…)
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GILES PARKINSON. Tide turns as solar, storage costs trump ideologues and incumbents
Looking at the machinations over the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin this week, or seeing certain Coalition Senators howling at the moon over wind turbine “emissions”, or the Treasurer brandishing a lump of coal in parliament, it is hard to imagine that any sort of progress has been made in Australia in what all but a determined few accept is the inevitable clean energy transition. (more…)
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ALLAN PATIENCE. Is it time to resurrect the Albury-Wodonga city plan?
The housing crisis, hitting young Australians in particular, is one of the cruelest consequences of economic rationalist policy making to which both our major political parties remain super-glued. Neither party has a clearly articulated, long-term solution to this ideologically generated and completely unnecessary crisis. (more…)
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JENNY HOCKING. Why was Malcolm Fraser Hidden at Yarralumla When Sir John Kerr Dismissed Gough Whitlam?
Revelations from the secret correspondence between the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, and the Queen in the months before the dismissal of the Whitlam government have shed new light on a persistent puzzle. When Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam at 1pm on 11 November 1975 why was the leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser already there, secreted at the other end of the Yarralumla corridor with the Governor-General’s private secretary, David Smith? (more…)
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RICHARD BUTLER. US Missile Attack on Syria
The US missile strike on Syria was an act of aggression the consequences of which could be immense. The facts of what happened at Khan Sheikhun must be established. (more…)
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JOHN TULLOH. Turkey – Erdogan’s day of judgment.
Turkey’s voters face a momentous choice: whether they want their president to have the dictatorial power of a potential tyrant or one whose authority remains curbed by parliamentary government. (more…)
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KEITH JOINER. Negating the Impact of the Future Submarine at Next Election
Australia’s future submarine project has already been a factor in Australia’s political pulse, in both the fever of pre-elections and in the now omnipresent prime-ministerial instability between these all-too-frequent elections. South Australia’s Xenophon factor has become powerful, and appointments like the new Defence Industry Minister from South Australia are probably an attempt to mitigate that factor. (more…)
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The importance of better security and trade policies.
The relationship between the United States and China is now the most decisive bilateral relationship in the world. It works on two levels, one public and one private.
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IAN McAULEY. Can we please have a more intelligent debate about corporate taxes
The simple explanation behind the Commonwealth’s proposal to cut corporate taxes is in terms of a struggle between the interests of business and of the broader community, but it is also about the Coalition’s determination, under pressure from vested interests, to wind back the economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating Government. (more…)
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PETER BROOKS. Physicians ‘outed’ on fees – Time for Patients to take more control.
If all [of the above] fail to work perhaps a review of what Pierre Trudeau and his government 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. This system still works today in Canada and few doctors opt out of it. Now there is a thought- and a significant game changer.
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Another distraction, but what a distraction.
The starting point is putting a price on carbon – some form of emissions trading policy. But this is total anathema to the coalition party room – worse even than negative gearing. (more…)
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MASSIMO FAGGIOLI. Are US Catholics too American to stand up to Trump?
It also reveals a much more complex issue – the deep-seated fear of the state within American Catholicism and of the gap between US Catholicism and the global Catholic Church’s view on the state and of political authority. This creates a complicated situation for the Catholic Church in the United States and its role to be one of the voices that questions the trajectories of the nation under Donald Trump. (more…)
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And Jesus said unto Paul of Ryan …
Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times on March 16, 2017, writes about a ‘discussion’ between Jesus and Paul Ryan, the Republican Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Ryan claims that Catholicism has shaped his political views. Is Nicholas Kristof’s account a parable or a parody. John Menadue. (more…)
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ALLAN PATIENCE. Is globalization ending?
It is the fashion to declare that globalization is coming to an end. Evidence for this includes: nationalism being on the rise; protectionist policies making a come-back; borders being slammed shut; populist politicians multiplying at rabbit-like rates. Trump and Brexit, it is said, are the isolationist tips of two vast metaphorical icebergs that both represent populist hostility directed towards the idea of a world that would be one. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Who is to blame for the last Liberal Party election failure – Turnbull or Nutt.
Malcolm Turnbull will plough ahead pushing the doors marked pull and ignoring the lessons, not just from the last election, but from all the polling since. (more…)
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MARK BEESON. What it is to be popular
At a moment when the world needs informed responses to complex problems that transcend national borders, a retreat to nationalist tub-thumping is the last thing we need. Yes, there are important questions about who ‘we’ are and whom national public policies actually benefit, but they are unlikely to be answered, much less addressed by the current generation of populists. (more…)
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WAYNE McMILLAN. David versus Goliath: reform and reinvention (Part 2 of 2)
What Sally McManus’s is saying is correct, I agree with her conclusions about what has happened to workers over the last 30 years and what is becoming intolerable now in 2017. Across Australia in 2017, little or no wage growth, increased working hours, increases in casual jobs, a decrease in full time meaningful work, rising increases in household debt and rising inequalities in income and wealth is the bleak future facing Australian workers and their families. In the public sector, outsourcing and privatisation have meant an erosion of working conditions and rates of pay for workers. What can be done to rectify this alarming trend? (more…)
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WAYNE McMILLAN. David and Goliath: One step forward, two steps back. (Part 1 of 2)
Malcom Turnbull’s recent comment that he couldn’t work with Sally McManus the recently elected Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is just another excuse against strong union representation for ordinary waged workers. (more…)
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DAVID PEETZ. How tax minimisation affects CEO pay
Firms whose executives behave ‘unethically’, as proxied by not paying any company tax, are also likely to pay their CEOs an average of around a fifth more than firms of similar size and circumstances who do pay company tax. (more…)
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ALLAN PATIENCE. Where do we go from here?
“Why do we experience such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society? Why is it beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage? Are we doomed indefinitely to lurch between a dysfunctional ‘free market’ and the much advertised horrors of ‘socialism’?” – Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (more…)
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TONY SMITH. Company tax cuts by any other name
The federal government might have called its company tax cuts bill by another almost Orwellian name, but semantic disguises should not fool anyone. Tax cuts are being delivered to Australian business. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Even in Malcolm Turnbull’s own terms, it is a fizzer.
Well it wasn’t what was hoped for, and certainly not what was required; but it was better than nothing. (more…)
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TOM BURTON. Data rights for all.
A proposed new legal right for consumers and businesses to control and access the data created about them is set to be one of the major reforms of this decade. Not everyone is supportive. (more…)
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TIM COLEBATCH. Old coal, no new gas: how to generate an electricity crisis.
We need to set a timetable to reduce emissions from electricity generation, which now contributes a third of Australia’s greenhouse gases – and, by and large, the third that will be easiest and cheapest to reduce. We need price mechanisms to drive it.
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JOHN MENADUE. Alexey Navalny has roused a democratic Russia. Turnbull and Bishop are too busy sleeping to care.
In Australia we conjure Russia through the basest of filters: take your pick of Pauline Hanson expressing her admiration for Russia’s autocrat Vladimir Putin, or of the sometime boxer-sometime- Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s vows to ‘shirtfront’ said autocrat. (more…)
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DUNCAN MacLAREN. Article 50 triggered: the farce heats up
Are you ready for another dose of Brexititis? This past week, PM May triggered Article 50, meaning negotiations can begin, after due examination by the 27 remaining states, between the exiting UK (or, at least, the parts that survive) and the EU but only as a body. The EU has forbidden the divide and rule of the UK pitting one EU member against another, an insidious act by what Guardian journalist, Antony Beevor, called last year “the most hated nation in Europe”. The terms of Mrs May’s letter didn’t win too many friends either. (more…)