The federal government’s largest single ticket spending item – welfare – has failed to rate a mention in the election campaign.
It is the $152 billion elephant in the room. It accounts for around 35 per cent of total government spending. And it affects – in one way or another – most Australian adults’ lives. But beyond childcare policy, where is the discussion and debate about the Australian social welfare system in the election campaign? (more…)
As hinted in earlier announcements by Shadow Communications Minister, Jason Clare, Labor’s much-anticipated policy for the National Broadband Network released Monday commits the party – if elected – to move away from the Coalition’s fibre to the node (FTTN) network and transition back to a roll-out of fibre to the premises (FTTP). This was the central pillar of Labor’s original NBN.
The FTTN roll-out will be phased out as soon as current design and construction contracts are completed.
This is a major shift away from the Coalition’s focus on FTTN technologies, which was a key part of their election platform in 2013. After a number of delays, FTTN equipment is now being rolled out around Australia.
Labor will continue with the Coalition’s plans to deliver NBN services on upgraded versions of Telstra and Optus’ hybrid fibre coax (HFC) infrastructure. No doubt Labor would like to move away from HFC, but the contracts for the HFC network are already signed, and it is probably too late to remove HFC from the NBN.
Apart from a commitment to deliver FTTP rather than satellite services to western Tasmania, there are no significant changes to the fixed wireless and satellite parts of the network.
Labor forecasts that its revamped NBN will be completed by June 2022, with FTTP being available to 2 million more homes and businesses than would have been the case under the Coalition’s current plans. At the completion of Labor’s NBN rollout, approximately 39% or around 5 million homes and businesses will have access to FTTP, compared to 20%, or 2.5 million, under the Coalition.
A 39% FTTP coverage is considerably less than the 93% target in Labor’s original NBN plan. But in a significant longer-term policy initiative, Labor has promised to commission Infrastructure Australia to develop a plan to upgrade the 2.5 million premises served by FTTN to FTTP. This will mean that all fixed-line connections in Australia will eventually be either FTTP or HFC.
Labor’s new policy recognises the possibility that new fibre-to-the-distribution-point (FTTdP) technologies might become attractive in the future, but has reserved judgement on FTTdP until the technology is more mature. NBN Co is already looking at this technology.
Significantly, FTTdP is compatible with FTTP and offers a straightforward upgrade path to FTTP.
Labor has pointed out that NBN Co has an in-house FTTP design and construction capability as well as the IT systems necessary to manage FTTP. In addition, legal agreements in place with Telstra to provide access to Telstra’s ducts and pits.
In fact, in recent months, NBN Co has been rolling out FTTP (including fibre to the basement in multi-dwelling units) at a rate of about 10,000 premises per week. This has been underway at a time when NBN Co has been focusing on ramping up its FTTN and HFC rollout.
With a shift away from FTTN construction, and a shift of resources to FTTP design and installation, it is entirely feasible that NBN Co could double the rollout rate to around 20,000 premises per week. This would be more than enough to serve the 5 million premises targeted over the five-year time-frame of Labor’s roll-out plan.
Labor has not published a detailed budget for its NBN plan. But the total estimated cost ($49 billion to $57 billion compared to the Coalition’s budget of $46 billion to $56 billion) appears to be plausible.
There are a few key factors that support this:
Many critics have highlighted the severe limitations of the Coalition’s slow-speed FTTN network and its relative inability to drive digital innovation.
The pace of FTTP roll-outs around the globe is increasing as other countries recognise the critical importance of super-fast broadband to economic growth.
AT&T, a major United States telco has essentially stopped constructing FTTN networks, and has announced a major increase in FTTP deployments in response to customer demands for higher speed.
In Australia, the Coalition’s FTTN exacerbates the “digital divide”, the gap between broadband haves and have-nots. Here’s how.
The NBN has been a key issue in the past two elections, so will Labor’s new policy be a vote winner? The policy to move back to FTTP provides a clear differentiation from the Coalition’s FTTN-centric strategy.
Many Australians recognise the importance of super-fast broadband as a driver of innovation in the digital economy, and will no doubt think of this on July 2.
Rod Tucker is Laureate Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne. This article was first published in The Conversation on 13 June, 2016.
We see their spokespeople quoted in the papers and their ads on TV, but beyond that we know very little about how Australia’s lobby groups get what they want. This is the first article in our series on the strategies, political alignment and policy platforms of ten lobby groups that can influence this election. (more…)
The recent report of the Inquiry into Chronic Disease Prevention and Management in Primary Health Care by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health has been somewhat overshadowed by the current election campaign.
One of the terms of reference of the Inquiry required the Committee to consider the role of private health insurers in chronic disease prevention and management. (more…)
In our brave new world of digital gadgetry, awash with empty slogans and blighted by ever-shrinking attention spans, is there any prospect of rational political debate in this election? A pervading mood of paranoia seems to be the new norm. Who do the Liberals hate most in this campaign? Bill Shorten? The unions? The Greens? The “left-wing media”? In varying degrees they detest them all. But no organisation arouses deeper contempt in conservative breasts – greater fear and loathing, more paranoid suspicion and distrust – than the ABC.
Why should this be so? For many conservatives, the national broadcaster is a hotbed of radical activism, staffed and managed by closet lefties and loony, latte-sipping ideologues opposed to traditional values. Forever on the lookout for examples of ABC bias and irresponsibility, conservatives and their media allies have little difficulty in discovering new ones. The ABC’s latest offence was its wilful refusal to televise the recent leaders’ debate organised by SkyNews (part-owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp). How bad was that? By common consent, the debate was pretty boring, but every commentator (certainly all those in the Murdoch stable) pronounced Malcolm the winner. The ABC, aware of Turnbull’s formidable skills as a debater and wordsmith, had no wish to join SkyNews in promoting his image to voters.
A few days later, talking to some of my Liberal friends (and yes, I have quite a few), I was surprised to learn of another ABC conspiracy. Have you noticed that their top-rated discussion programs – Lateline, The Insiders and the deeply detested Q&A – are deliberately giving prominence to independent candidates to help them capture seats from conservatives? Jacqui Lambie, Nick Xenophon, Tony Windsor and their ilk are getting far more exposure than they deserve. No, I’m serious. As an old journalist myself, I point out that Lambie is a highly amusing character, that Xenophon is a force to be reckoned with in South Australia, and that the much-despised Tony Windsor, despite his scandalous alliance with Julia Gillard in 2010, is an honourable man. All, surely, deserve some coverage at election time. But not if the Libs have their way. When Michelle Guthrie took over as the ABC’s managing director last month, Liberal senator Eric Abetz demanded that she immediately “end the lefty love-in”. (And if you’ve ever wondered why those carefully balanced audiences at Q&A broadcasts display obvious left-wing bias, it’s because Greens and lefties turn up in droves at the studio and declare themselves Liberal voters to gain admission.)
For seasoned ABC watchers, all this has a familiar ring. The organisation has long been accused of left-wing bias, and there was time in the 1970s when the charge had some validity. In those days, the ABC’s special projects department was run by Allan Ashbolt, a left-wing radical and regular contributor to the British socialist journal New Statesman. He also wrote occasional book reviews for me when I was literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. I remember him as a fine writer and something of a radical spirit. But he wasn’t nearly radical enough for the Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen, who declared that Ashbolt’s Lateline program (then a radio show) embodied the values of “bourgeois liberalism.”
Stung by this rebuke, Ashbolt insisted that Lateline reflected the “intellectual concerns of its producers, whose briefs and passions spanned a fairly wide spectrum of thinking from the centre to the left of politics.” No wonder conservatives were angry! The poet Douglas Stewart, reviewing a memoir Ashbolt wrote in 1974, professed his amazement that “for ten mighty years from 1963 to 1973 Ashbolt was regularly sacked, demoted, reprimanded, transferred, promoted, stood in the corner, hanged, drawn and quartered at least once a week for his controversial current affairs programs…” Ken Inglis, in his definitive history of the ABC, wondered why Ashbolt stayed so long at an organisation he had publicly characterised as an “ideological arm of the capitalist state”.
I suspect that prevailing conservative attitudes to the ABC had their origins in those events. But the political climate has changed in 40 years, and so, in many ways, has the ABC. Numerous independent reviews and internal audits have found no evidence of systemic political bias, though conservative critics continue to think otherwise. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald when Mark Scott retired as managing director in April this year, Gerard Henderson lamented that after ten years with Scott at the helm the ABC had “not one conservative presenter, producer or editor for any of its prominent TV, radio or online outlets.” Gerard didn’t tell us which conservatives he would have chosen; nor did he name the non-conservative producers and presenters allegedly running the show. He couldn’t name them because they don’t exist – unless we accept that anyone sitting a little to the left of the far right is some kind of Marxist. What the ABC can rightly boast of are some of the best and fairest presenters in the country, and some of the best and toughest interviewers – the likes of Leigh Sales, Emma Albirici and Chris Uhlmann – who can dish it out equally to politicians of all persuasions.
Even so, the culture wars show sign of abating. The last big blow-up was in 2013, when the ABC broke the story that Australia’s spy agencies had been monitoring the phones of the then Indonesian president and his wife. Worse, according to outraged Tories, the ABC had joined forces with the left-wing Guardian Australia to promote the story, based on leaked documents from the notorious Edward Snowden. By any journalistic test, Australia’s phone-tapping operation was a big story, and no self-respecting media organisation would have ignored it. But Malcolm Turnbull, then communications minister, denounced the ABC for its bad judgment and Liberal senator Cory Bernardi branded the corporation a “taxpayer-funded behemoth.” According to political journalist Michelle Grattan, “critics have seized on the ABC’s action as an opportunity to denounce what they see as its view of the world.” The Australian’s Greg Sheridan wrote that the ABC would “go to any lengths to prosecute its endless war against the dark forces of conservative Australia.”
For 23 years until Gough Whitlam’s election in 1972, the dark forces of conservative Australia were kept in check. Conservative governments in those years appointed every ABC board member under the chairmanship of such venerable establishment figures as Sir Richard Boyer and Sir James Darling. Whitlam, in typically provocative mood, replaced the entire board with Labor supporters. Then, in 1975, it was Malcolm Fraser’s turn, and Whitlam’s chairman, Sir Richard Downing, was replaced by Sir Henry Bland. But as politicians on both sides have often found, boards and directors at the ABC have little practical control over day-to-day programming. The ABC carried on pretty much as it
always had. Finally, in what conservatives hailed as a master-stroke, Fraser installed the late Professor Dame Leonie Kramer as chair, confident that her strong personality and well-known right-wing views would reshape the lefty culture. But Kramer, in her short tenure, proved a staunch defender of the ABC’s independence, declaring herself (in the words of a Sydney Morning Herald obituary-writer) a “guardian of the highest standards of broadcasting.”
John Howard rode to the rescue in 1996. A string of right-wing appointments included the Victorian Liberal Party bigshot Michael Kroger, conservative columnist Janet Albrechtsen, and Keith Windshuttle, then editor of Quadrant. As chairman Howard installed his friend Donald McDonald, who was confidently expected to end the “lefty love-in” once and for all. But McDonald, too, proved to be his own man, standing up for the ABC against political pressure and interference from all sides. One thing he couldn’t stop was Howard’s abolition of the staff-elected director’s position – a move that many saw as a gesture of revenge for the ABC’s ongoing intransigence. (The staff-elected director was restored by the Rudd government in 2007.)
How will the ABC fare under Malcolm Turnbull? Perhaps it’s too early to say. Turnbull was minister for communications when the Abbott government cut $254 million from the ABC’s budget in 2014 in breach of an election promise. Malcolm can always be relied upon to make the right soothing noises at the right time, but if Abbott’s so-called “budget emergency” ever materialises he may be tempted to cut some more.
After years fending off assorted threats and confected outrage from the right, I expect the ABC will continue doing what it does best – providing a lively and generally well-balanced news coverage and numerous forums for sophisticated political debate. It has some of the best political commentators and election analysts in the business. Above all, to the great consternation of conservatives, it enjoys solid middle-class support. The Friends of the ABC and the so-called doctors’ wives have always been ready to rally to the cause. Their support, I believe, will deter any future conservative government from scaling back or selling off the corporation. Malcolm Turnbull may have patched up his row with Alan Jones, doyen of Sydney radio shock-jocks, at least for the duration of the present campaign, but at heart , I think, he’s an ABC true believer. We must hope so.
Evan Williams is a former newspaper editor and Walkley Award-winning journalist. He wrote speeches for Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and a succession of NSW premiers. He headed the NSW Government’s cultural sector from 1977 to 2001, and for 33 years wrote regular film reviews for The Australian. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.
It’s half way through the election campaign and both major parties have made some significant health policy announcements with Labor outspending the Coalition on health by over $2 billion (over four years).
However, despite the fact that health consistently rates as the number one issue for voters, neither major party has satisfactorily addressed the key issues essential to ensuring that our health system is fair, efficient and equipped to meet future challenges. (more…)
An opinion piece in yesterday’s Financial Review by James Laurenceson dismisses union concerns on ChAFTA – ‘Don’t believe Chinese worker Free Trade Agreement scaremongering’, 9/6/16. It warrants a response.
Laurenceson’s claims do not stand up to scrutiny. They concern firstly the Chinese installers on the 400 visas, the subject of John Menadue’s blog below.
Laurenceson fails to mention the fundamental point that ChAFTA granted LMT-exempt entry to Chinese workers in this ‘installers and servicers’ category, for the first time in our FTA history. (more…)
The ink was hardly dry on the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) before we learned about labour market exploitation under the agreement. (more…)
An interesting aspect of the Coalition’s suggestion that the ALP had committed to restoring $19 billion to the Australian Aid budget is that pro-Aid campaigners themselves had previously only mentioned $11 billion of cuts. That is, they intentionally inflate the level of cuts to more powerfully demonstrate their commitment to balancing the budget on the backs of the world’s poor. While politicians and Australia’s humanitarians war over the dollar figures in the forward estimates there’s another battle that’s less about our national budget and more about our national character – a war on generosity. (more…)
the news from Manus and Nauru gets worse by the day. Inhumanity is imposed in our name.
Nauru and Manus are unsustainable. I have yet to meet anyone who will admit that what is happening is right or defensible.
See link below ‘Protection denied, abuse condoned; women on Nauru at risk’. This searing story is authored by Wendy Bacon, Pamela Curr, Carmen Lawrence, Julie Macken and Claire O’Connor. Please pass on to friends and colleagues.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the US Studies Centre at Sydney University has produced a study which showed that 8 out of 10 Australians were only mildly concerned about the fact that, as they saw it, China already dominated Asia and they did not think China would go to war with the USA. They thought that the USA had peaked and was on the way out. This situation did not greatly concern them and their attitude was described as neutral. James Brown of the Centre described these attitudes as naive and said that Australians did not understand the importance of the American presence in the region. The head of the Centre, Professor Jackman, said he was going to get on a plane and go to Washington to tell them to ramp up their soft diplomacy because China was doing it better. (more…)
A categorical mistake: Is bulk-billing a reliable indicator of access to GPs?
Where I work in regional NSW, patients have difficulty finding a GP who is prepared to bulk-bill them for their medical care. The phone call to the practice receptionist ends, so often, with, “The doctor’s books are full”. At the same time we’re told that 83% of Medical Benefits Schedule (MBS) services are “bulk-billed”. Like everyone else, I thought this fact would mean increased access and affordability for patients to a local GP.
Had I thought more thoroughly about the problem and scrutinised the MBS data, the penny would have dropped. (more…)
If once upon a time my enemy’s enemy was my friend, then bizarrely enough it now seems that my friend’s enemy is my friend. Confused? Me too. I think I liked it better the way it was before.
Over the weekend, we had the coalition, Labor and that well known bastion of social good, the Australian Hotels Association (AHA), united against … ISIS? Donald Trump?
No. Nick Xenophon. (more…)
With all the kafuffle around the NBN it is very difficult for most people to see the big picture in all of this. The issue has been so incredibly politicised that it is almost impossible to cut through all the noise.
I will stick to what I believe is at the heart of the issue – the future of our national telecommunications infrastructure. We are spending close to $60 billion dollars on our national digital economy infrastructure and we need to do it wisely and effectively.
This has nothing to do with doing things cheaper and faster; as a matter of fact I would argue for slowing it down, to make sure we do it right. (more…)
In the 1890s, Texan cowboy Clark Stanley began marketing a new product at medicine shows.
A man who could kill rattlesnakes with his bare hands, Stanley promised people that his rattlesnake extract would bring relief from rheumatism, sprains, swelling, back pain and toothache.
It wasn’t until 1917 that Stanley’s operation was finally shut down, with a court finding that the product not only didn’t provide a cure; it wasn’t even made from snakes. And so the term ‘snake oil’ was born.
I’ve been thinking about Clark Stanley since budget night, as Coalition leaders have boldly claimed that a cut to company taxes will whiten your teeth, improve your car’s fuel efficiency and make your chooks lay more eggs.
Yet just as Stanley didn’t want people to read his recipe, so too I’m not sure the Coalition wanted Australians to delve into the Treasury report that underpins their big business tax cut.
Titled ‘Analysis of the Long Term Effects of a Company Tax Cut’, the Treasury analysis makes clear how a company tax cut is supposed to help households. You’ll have to bear with me, because this one’s longer than a scrub python.
Since Australia has dividend imputation, domestic shareholders don’t benefit much. As the Grattan Institute’s John Daley has pointed out, local shareholders only gain if profits are reinvested rather than paid out. However, our firms tend to have pretty high payout ratios, so this turns out to be a modest impact in practice.
So in the first instance, most of the gains go overseas. There will even be some cases in which US-based multinationals repatriate their profits, paying the difference between their higher rate and our lower one.
In such cases, an Australian company tax cut simply flows into the coffers of the US Treasury – meaning that some of the reduced revenue from an Australian company tax cut would be available to be spent by the successors to President Clinton or President Trump.
Having enjoyed the first-round benefits of a company tax cut, the Treasury report then argues that foreign shareholders will respond to higher after-tax profits on their Australian investments. The theory goes that overseas shareholders then invest less in other countries, and more in Australia. More investment means greater demand for land and labour. So in the long run, land prices and wages are supposed to rise.
As Keynes famously put it, we are all dead in the long run – so it’s worth asking how long we’re talking about. And the answer, typically, is 7 to 10 years. Since Malcolm Turnbull’s tax cut only reduces the tax rate on big business to 25% on 1 July 2026, this means that the Coalition is promising to raise wages somewhere between 2033 and 2035. At that point, Turnbull would be in his late-70s, and well on the way to becoming the longest-serving Prime Minister since Robert Menzies.
And how big will the gains be? It depends how you pay for the company tax cut. The Treasury report suggests that tax cuts could be funded by a nationwide land tax, higher personal income taxes, or lower government spending. Since that the federal government last levied land taxes in 1952, that option can be safely set aside as hypothetical.
So that leaves a company tax cut funded by less spending or higher income taxes. According to Treasury, if a big business tax cut from 30% to 25% is funded by lower spending, the boost to households is 0.7%.
But for every ladder in the Treasury report, there’s a snake. In this case, the modelling is based on the idea that none of us get any direct benefits from roads, schools and hospitals.
As the authors note:
‘It is important to recall that the modelling of government spending is assumed not to affect directly the welfare of households. While this is a common modelling assumption it ignores the fact that government spending provides goods and services that would otherwise not be provided by the market sector; households derive direct utility from government spending; and infrastructure spending can improve market sector productivity.
This suggests the results reported in this section overstate the benefits of this funding alternative.’
In other words, Treasury knows that the benefit to households of a company tax cut funded by less government spending will be smaller than 0.7% – they just can’t say how much smaller.
One more reason not to rely too strongly on the idea that we can get a big boost out of a company tax cut funded by lower government spending. Since the Abbott-Turnbull government won office, spending as a share of the economy has gone up, not down.
So that leaves as the most likely option a company tax cut for big business that’s funded by higher personal income taxes. According to the Treasury report, the benefit to households is 0.1%.
How big is a gain in household incomes of 0.1%? To test this, I pulled up data back to the early-1970s, to see how household income (specifically, real net national disposable income per person) has grown. It turns out that over this period, household income has risen by an average of 0.1% each month. So Treasury’s most likely scenario is that a company tax cut delivers an extra month of household income growth.
To see how risible this is, you need to recognise how poorly the economy has been performing for middle-income households since 2013. Living standards are down 4%. Wage growth is at a 30-year low. The home ownership rate is at a 60-year low. Inequality is at a 75-year high, with the top 1% having doubled their share of income in the past generation.
In an environment like that, you might expect that supporting average households would be a national priority. And yet Malcolm Turnbull’s first budget contained precious little for middle Australia. One of its most expensive measures was a tax cut for those earning over $180,000. Ninety-four percent of that tax cut will go to the top 1%.
While the top 1% get their tax cut the day before the election, the benefits of Turnbull’s company tax cut will trickle down very slowly… if at all.
For all the hype, Treasury’s own modelling suggests that the Coalition’s company tax cut will deliver one more month’s growth – in the 2030s. Even the great snake oil salesman Clark Stanley couldn’t sell that as a recipe for ‘jobs and growth’.
Andrew Leigh is the Shadow Assistant Treasurer.
This piece originally ran in Business Insider Australia.
This weekend, hundreds of people will make the pilgrimage to the small town of Bingara on the NSW North West slopes and plains, for the annual commemoration of the Myall Creek Massacre.
The memorial site, just out on the Delungra Road, marks the site of the massacre of 28 unarmed women, children and old men that occurred there on June 10, 1838. This is a place where terrible things occurred, a place shunned and avoided by locals, especially Aboriginal people, for over 150 years. (more…)
This article is the third in a series about transport. The first two dealt with topics raised by the Prime Minister; mass transit, 30-minute cities etc and noted some challenges for the Commonwealth.[i]
Urbane Transport policy. Part 1 of 3
Urbane transport policy. Part 2 of 3
The articles draw on public information – the basis for the community trust necessary for effective democracy. Unfortunately, some information has reduced trust. Restoring that trust begins with the top tier of Australian government – the Commonwealth – and depends on how a future Government approaches land transport. (more…)
Malcolm Turnbull’s supporters have been praising him for keeping on his message, which at least has the virtue of simplicity: my government has a national economic plan for jobs and growth.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and this is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know, as John Keats more elegantly put it. (more…)
It is timely as the federal election approaches to consider whether all Australians are getting the healthcare they need. Approximately 30 per cent of Australians live in rural and remote areas.
Arguably they do not get a ‘fair go’ in relation to their healthcare compared to the rest of us.
Rural and remote Australians are disadvantaged by social circumstances that influence their health status and ripen them for avoidable chronic disease when compared to counterparts in Australia’s major cities. (more…)
So the election is in full swing and the word ‘Gonski’ is once more up there in lights. You have to feel a bit sorry for David Gonski. His achievements are indeed stellar but his name has become a proxy for just one: a major review into schools.
Actually it has become a proxy for school funding – and even more narrowly, a proxy for school dollars going this way or that. After Bill Shorten announced extra school funding, electorate by electorate, we now know how many Gonskis will flow and who gets them. Under Labor it seems everyone will get a Gonski. (more…)
The issue of budget repair has not been addressed adequately in the current election campaign. See below an earlier article by Michael Keating on various revenue and expenditure items that need to be considered. John Menadue
A Report by the CEDA Balanced Budget Commission
The Committee for Economic Development of Australia, which has a long history of independent public policy engagement, this week released an important report discussing the options for restoring the Australian Government Budget to balance. (more…)
Queensland’s victory over NSW in the June 1 game was reported as the highest rating State of Origin match ever and ‘the top TV event of 2016.’ Both teams carried alcohol advertising on their clothing into the match.
The association of alcohol with sport is deep, complex and profitable. Sport provides a lucrative vehicle for advertising and in turn many codes have come to depend heavily on the support of alcohol sponsors. The relationship is one of co-dependency. (more…)
Hearing or reading about vocational education and training (VET) today, we expect it to be another story of rorts and wrongdoings. And it is an horrific story, a story of for-profit private providers accessing public funding and not delivering the education and training students expected. It is a story of a number of private providers using brokers to search out vulnerable and naïve prospective students, and signing them up to a lifetime’s debt with promises of free courses and iPads. How did we get to such a position in such a short time? (more…)
A looming decision on weekend penalty rates presents problems for both major parties in the lead-up to Australia’s federal election. The Fair Work Commission seems likely to hand down its decision in the controversial case soon after the federal election.
Nobody knows what the commission’s decision on penalty rates in the retail and hospitality industries will be. There seem to be more tea-leaf readers predicting it will cut Sunday penalty rates to match Saturday rates than who think it will make no changes.
If so, employer organisations would be happy, but many retail employees will be worse off. Pressure would grow for cuts to penalty rates elsewhere.
The commission president’s request for submissions on whether some employees should be given a right to refuse to work on Sundays, perhaps as a trade-off, has added to the confidence of the former group of tea-leaf readers. (more…)
Yesterday, in a moving ceremony, the remains of 33 Australians who were buried in military cemeteries in Malaysia and Singapore were returned to Australia. Our Governor General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, and Chief of the Defence Force, Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, were at Richmond airbase to witness the repatriation of 33 Australians who had died in foreign lands.
What a contrast this is to our refusal to acknowledge the 30,000 aborigines who died, not in wars in foreign lands but in defending their homelands where they had lived for hundreds of generations. (more…)
Part One. Structural reforms for better health outcomes from a redesigned more cost-effective health care system.
The most important pre-election health care initiative has received very little publicity. Labor has committed to establishing a “Healthcare Reform Commission” if elected. While not likely to generate much discussion in one’s local pub it represents an acceptance by a major political party that we do need to explore structural changes to the way we deliver health to achieve better outcomes and fiscal sustainability. What follows is an evidence based scenario for the evolution of major structural reforms, many of which are currently being pursued internationally. (more…)
Part Two. Structural reforms for better health outcomes from a redesigned more cost-effective health care system.
There is broad agreement that in the near future our General Practitioners and their teams will earn the majority of their income from capitation payments that will require, for the first time in our Primary Care system, the documentation of health outcomes. Many doctors are concerned about this direction and argue that they may have neither the time nor the necessary kills to fulfil such requirements. International experience informs us that these doubts can be reversed with the creation of Primary Health Care Organisations to assist with these and many other issues. (more…)
Malcolm Turnbull is all very holy about the independence of the Federal Police following last week’s raid on ALP offices and homes over embarrassing (to him) NBN leaks.
Why, the government had absolutely nothing to do with the cops, the Prime Minister asserted virtuously. Bill Shorten should be ashamed of even thinking such a thing.
Well, perhaps, in 2016. But there was a time when Turnbull knows very well that the government of which he was a minister leant on the AFP, and leant very hard indeed. (more…)
Political “outsider” Kaitlin Walsh, self-proclaimed “ordinary person”, rakes over the pallid entrails of our body politic. And considers what might shut Mathias Cormann up. (more…)
Climate change policy has been a noticeable absentee from political debate in the current Australian federal election campaign. Recent news reports, however, suggest this silence masks secret bipartisanship on the need for an emissions trading scheme – or ETS – to help bring down Australian’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Labor’s commitment to introduce an ETS if elected in July is well-known: the party has in fact pledged to establish two such schemes – a specific ETS for the electricity sector and a wider economy ETS with emissions caps set in line with Australia’s international climate change commitments under the Kyoto Protocol and recent Paris Agreement. But the Coalition has steadfastly opposed any kind of ‘carbon price’. It repealed the Gillard government’s Clean Energy legislation for a carbon tax and ETS, and replaced it with the Direct Action policy which channels government funding to emissions-reducing projects. Environment Minister Hunt has also repeatedly rejected the idea that the Coalition government plans to introduce an ETS. So why are some in the media claiming that the Turnbull government is introducing an ETS by stealth? (more…)