Pearls and Irritations recently posted a series of articles on the theme Making Housing Affordable. The series focuses on Australia’s housing affordability crisis. Most of the articles were posted just before the Federal Budget, but a few were posted afterwards, by way of a reflection on the relevant Budget reforms (or lack thereof). The date of publication of each article on Pearls and Irritations appears after the title. (more…)
Blog
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JUDITH WHITE. Risks of gallery expansion
The NSW Coalition government has allocated $244m towards a major new building at the state Art Gallery. But questions are being raised about its ongoing funding and its mission as a public institution. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. ‘The gentleman you describe.’
We can at least talk about it without pretending it isn’t really there. (more…)
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MACK WILLIAMS. North Korea ICBM threat to Australia.
The DPRK’s recent ICBM test raises some extremely serious concerns for Australia which will need to be carefully considered by the Australian Government before it rushes off into decision making on the run as has been the case in the past week of hyperventilation. Any attraction of the DPRK to include Australia as a target for its ICBM’s would derive more from US defence presence in Australia than from any factors inherently Australian. (more…)
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TONY KEVIN. Hamburg G20 : Much was achieved
Angela Merkel’s firm and statesmanlike chairmanship steered the Hamburg G20
to a content-rich, global economics and climate change-dominated leaders’ declaration https://www.g20.org/gipfeldokumente/G20-leaders-declaration.pdf. (more…) -
GEOFF MILLER. Kim Jong Un – Forcing the pace, or forging a peace?
Kim Jong Un’s continual provocation of the United States can probably be best explained as a considered strategy to bring about negotiations between the two. (more…)
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Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump: The godfathers of the UN treaty to ban the bomb
With a protector-in-chief like Donald Trump, who needs enemies like Kim Jong-un? Clearly, history does irony: the president with the least previous foreign policy interest and experience could end up having the biggest impact on global affairs in a century. (more…)
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RICHARD TANTER. The global nuclear ban treaty: criminalising all nuclear weapons
Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon got it right about the latest North Korean nuclear weapon outrage: neither Kim Jong-un nor Donald Trump are a safe pair of hands for nuclear weapons. A majority of the world’s governments agree with him, and have created a global nuclear weapons prohibition treaty declaring all nuclear weapons and threats of their use inhumane, illegitimate, and criminal. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Chilcot – The Iraq war and Murdoch’s war on critics. (Repost)
On 1 July 2014, I posted a story about the role of News Corp and Rupert Murdoch in the Iraq disaster. The Chilcot Report confirms even more how News Corp publications misled readers and viciously attacked their opponents. News Corp demonstrated that it is indeed a rogue organisation. See repost below: (more…)
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JOHN QUIGGIN. Governments are buying up where the market has failed. Is this the end of privatisation?
Australian governments are back in business. Every couple of months, it seems, we hear of a new venture into public ownership of business enterprises, or an expansion of existing enterprises. Most recently, Victoria’s Labor government has announced the purchase of a sawmill in Gippsland to stave off the threat of closure. Last year the South Australian Labor government announced it would build a gas-fired power plant and issue tenders for large-scale battery storage. After denouncing this action as socialism, Malcolm Turnbull reversed course and proposed a major expansion of the publicly-owned Snowy Hydro scheme. (more…)
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I told you so: realists need to get real on nuclear policy choices
The DPRK is developing a nuclearised ICBM capability as fast as it possibly can because it fears a US attack and forcible regime change. And the dear leader fears the same fate as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. So the US threatens him even more as the answer to make Kim Jong Un desist from his chosen nuclear path. Go figure. (more…)
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GILES PARKINSON. How the far Right have hijacked Australia’s energy policy
If you ever wondered just how comprehensively the Far Right has hijacked the Coalition’s energy policy, it’s worth reading the speech by NSW energy minister Don Harwin we reported on last week. (more…)
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MARK METHERELL. Church chooses plenary team behind closed doors while saying it can’t be business as usual
Amid the turmoil besetting the Catholic Church in Australia, the announcement, after an in-house process, of a diverse team to advise the bishops on the 2020 Plenary Council has raised the hackles of reform advocates. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Why I am still a Catholic
Cardinal John Henry Newman once said that there is nothing as ugly as the Catholic Church yet nothing as beautiful. It is hard to see that beauty at this moment. With sexual abuse it is time for sackcloth and ashes. But I will hang on. (more…)
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Hidden in plain sight: Aboriginal massacre map should be no surprise
Lyndall Ryan’s work on mapping the massacres of Aboriginal Australians builds on earlier work which has been ignored or glossed over by settler Australians. Perhaps this time, finally, we can make the link between Indigenous dispossession and the position of Aboriginal people today. (more…)
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MICHAEL WEST. Goldman Sachs & News Corp tax tricks as Canberra claims battle won
Peering at the local accounts of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Goldman Sachs … is the government’s claim to have sorted multinational tax avoidance correct? As they gaze down from their glass eyries, partners of the Big Four accounting firms must be chuckling. (more…)
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ANNE DUGGAN. The second Atlas of Healthcare Variation – a guide to better practice
The recently-released second Australian Atlas of Healthcare Variation reveals marked variations in the rates of common procedures across the country. It’s a valuable source of data to guide better allocation of health care resources through more appropriate, equitable and patient-centred care. (more…)
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STEVE LEEDER. Health care: getting it right the first time
Ronald Reagan once famously quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’. But that doesn’t, for one moment, stop Michael Horrocks, Professor of Postgraduate Surgery at the University of Bath and a former President of the Vascular Society of Great Britain and Ireland, relaying precisely that message to a room full of vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists. ‘We are here to help,’ he says. ‘We are not the Care Quality Commission. We are here to serve. …There will be plenty of chance to comment as we go through,’ he says as the team [of clinicians and managers] wants to provide answers to what they can see are their less-good figures. ‘We are not here to catch you out. We are here to help.’
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DUNCAN MACLAREN. Scottish Independence: deferred not abandoned
Another referendum on Scottish independence has been deferred but not, to the chagrin of Scottish Unionists, abandoned. The shrieks and howls of protest from the three leaders of Scottish Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament could be heard in their party HQs in London. They wanted their nemesis, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, to take a second independence referendum completely off the table so that Scots would have to accept the English-negotiated Brexit deal no matter how destructive it would be to Scottish society and the Scottish economy. As we say in Scotland when sarcastically negating something – aye right! (more…)
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TIM COLEBATCH. One census, three stories
In the broad picture, the 2016 census has confirmed things we already knew about ourselves. But burrow down into the detail, and you’ll find much that will surprise you. (more…)
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DENNIS ARGALL. Ignore Trump’s tweets about North Korea ; the diplomacy is being handled by adults
Since his election in May South Korea’s President Mon Jae-in has developed a productive relationship with US President Trump, particularly on the difficult issue of both countries’ dealings with North Korea. Regrettably Australian and other mainstream media is reporting Trump’s rants, intended for his domestic support base, rather than the positive outcomes from those summit meetings. (more…)
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How a regional nuclear-free-weapon zone can benefit Japan
More the half the word’s countries are parties to nuclear weapon-free zone treaties. A regional Northeast Asian nuclear weapon-free zone would quarantine the region from the real risks of nuclear war. It would delink regional tensions, disputes and conflicts from the geopolitical equations between the nuclear powers, and would aim to prevent any cross-contamination of regional and global quarrels. (more…)
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CAVAN HOGUE. Crisis In Korea: can the irresistible force and the immovable object co-exist?
The launch of an ICBM by the DPRK may yet bring a positive result if it gets China, Russia and the USA all working together to find a solution involving carrot and stick. Any solution will need to make the DPRK feel secure form foreign attack and its neighbours secure from DPRK attack which means negotiations that the US has so far refused. However, the kind of wider peace treaty idea put forward by Russia and China could work; it is hard to see any other practical solution.. Kim Jong Un is not, as some claim, inconsistent but knows exactly what he is doing. Can we say the same for Donald Trump? (more…)
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PETER HUGHES. Citizenship changes: poisonous and pointless
The government’s proposed changes to the requirements for Australian citizenship are both poisonous and pointless. They are bad public policy and should be rejected by Parliament. (more…)
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GILES PARKINSON. Garnaut: CET may be useless without higher emission targets
Leading economist professor Ross Garnaut says the clean energy target recommended by the Finkel Review could be useless in meeting current emission reduction targets, because technology change and coal retirements will get us there in any case. (more…)
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PETER DAY. “Hands-up if you think George is guilty!”
The Australian judicial system will have its work cut-out ensuring the case against Cardinal Pell does not descend into a show trial cum media circus – some feel the horse has already bolted. (more…)
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JAMES O’NEILL. The Belt and Road Initiative and Australian Foreign Policy: A Golden Opportunity
The Australian Cabinet recently turned down an opportunity to join the world’s greatest infrastructure project. The rhetoric and the approach disclose much about how Australia is failing to adjust to the realities of the 21st Century. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Tony Abbott shoots first and asks questions later.
In all, [Tony Abbott’s] program is for a regime which can best charitably be described as a socialist theocracy, somewhat along the lines of Abbott’s mentor, Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria – although the Abbott version would be considerably more totalitarian. (more…)
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GILES PARKINSON. Coal on limited lifespan as CCS hopes go up in smoke
The coal industry is facing a new crisis point as a group of leading scientists call for the construction of new coal generators to cease within three years, and as the industry’s flagship “clean coal” and carbon capture and storage project went up in smoke in the US. (more…)
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LOUIS COOPER. Trump and Trudeau – the troubles at the 49th parallel deepen
Given the problems with the Trump White House, Trudeau gives every appearance of being a strong, smart leader on the Canadian and world stage. (more…)