Capitalising on failures of US leadership, China is emerging as a potential ‘great green power’ of the 21st century. (more…)
Blog
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Specialists versus generalists: A commentary on John Menadue and Peter Brooks
John Menadue and Peter Brooks have mounted powerful critiques of private specialist medical practice in a series in Pearls and Irritations. The nub of their positions is the high fee structure in (private out-patient) specialist practice is out of kilter with community expectations. (more…)
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BERNARD KEANE. Low emissions target: a win for both Turnbull and climate denialists, a loss for everyone.
The beauty of a Low Emissions Target as a climate action policy is that, as a kind of lowest common denominator, it means everyone wins — and for that matter loses. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. The question Leigh Sales didn’t ask Senator John McCain.
In her “exclusive interview” with Senator John McCain on 7.30 Report last week, Leigh Sales was told: “The Russians tried to destroy the foundations of democracy and to change the outcome of the American election … and they have just tried to affect the outcome of the French election.” (more…)
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ALISON BROINOWSKI. Agents of influence and affluence.
If energy and armaments are the agents behind America’s ‘empire of bases’ and its ‘empire of markets’, how influential are they? On security, barely; on terrorism, hugely. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Shrill parliamentary voices.
Our Prime Minister is obviously not as graceful and elegant as Marceau, nor, unfortunately, as silent: he has spent the last week of parliament repeating the same diatribe in ever-increasing volume in the hope that those few voters who watch question time on television will hear him even when they have reached for the mute button. (more…)
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Gonski 2.0 is a Fiasco
The Turnbull Government’s Gonski 2.0 funding plan is a fiasco. Public schools will remain under-funded and there will be a massive increase in over-funding of private schools. The Education Amendment Bill before the Parliament to implement Gonski 2.0 should be rejected and an alternative Gonski PLUS model that builds on Gonski 1.0 be developed in conjunction with the States. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. The terrorists are over here because our troops are over there.
Political leaders like John Howard, who lead us into the war in Iraq must shoulder most of the blame for the appalling world-wide consequences, particularly terrorism. Yet, conservative political leaders today – John Howard’s successors – seek every opportunity to exploit the community’s fear of terrorism. Our news media cannot get enough of terrorist attacks in Western countries, while largely ignoring attacks in countries that have had much more serious terrorist violence – Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan and Nigeria. Our media never stops to ask how all of this terrorism started in the first place. (more…)
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GEOFF MILLER. “Decline and Fall of America”? No, but a very difficult patch.
President Trump’s actions, and the international reactions to them, are so bad that the question naturally arises, “are we witnessing the beginning of the long-term decline of the West, and of the US in particular?” (more…)
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JOHN TULLOH. Six days of war and 50 years of conflict.
For Palestinians, Nakbar Day means the day of catastrophe. It is commemorated on May 15, the day after the anniversary of Israel’s independence in 1948. It remembers the 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were evicted from their homes and land partitioned by the UN for the new Jewish state. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. Will the forgotten people be heard at last?
The crusaders of the far right have already delivered their sentence: the Uluru statement is to be dead, buried and cremated before it can infect the fairness and decency of the ignorant masses. (more…)
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DUNCAN MacLAREN. Brexit: the danger of a no deal and the UK election.
Electioneering in the UK was stopped in homage to the 22 people who died and the many people injured in the bomb attack on a pop concert in Manchester on May 22nd. It didn’t stop the xenophobic call for ending immigration again despite the fact that the perpetrator was born in Manchester and, as the Mancunian brother of a young man, Martyn, who died in the blast said, probably talked like him. The brother added that he and Martyn were sons of a Turkish mother and the atrocity should not be used to demonise immigrants and ban migration. A kind word of sanity among the hate crimes which predictably doubled after the attack. (more…)
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CHRISTIAN DOWNIE. Time for China and Europe to lead, as Trump dumps the Paris climate deal
President Donald Trump’s announcement overnight that he will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement comes as no surprise. (more…)
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MUNGO MacCALLUM. The Uluru Statement.
It is fitting that the Uluru Statement from the Heart celebrated the triumphant referendum of 1967: “In 1967 we were counted; in 2017 we seek to be heard,” the statement declared. (more…)
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JOHN AUSTEN: The Commonwealth is ‘meddling’ in NSW rail – at last!
There are indications the Prime Minister wishes to modernise infrastructure policy. Reports regarding rail to Badgerys Creek highlight the discomfort this causes to the NSW Government- and enormous benefits if the Prime Minister gets Commonwealth involvement right.
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PAUL COLLINS. There’s Movement at the (Radio) Station
It is not only ABC management that don’t take religion and specialist broadcasting seriously. What can you expect from a board that is made up of business people and technocrats. The fault here lies with the federal government that has appointed these people. (more…)
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IAN BERSTEN. Tax policy and reducing financial barriers for small business in Australia.
There is much discussion about the benefits of reducing tax so that Australia can be competitive with other countries in the world. This is only of consequence to multinational companies considering where to establish their headquarters. All small companies and medium-sized companies in Australia want more sales. From larger sales they get more profits and often lower cost of unit production. The emphasis in Australia should be to increase sales and the biggest problem is the structure of the market dominance by large companies. (more…)
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BASTIAN SEIDEL. Patients want health not necessarily treatment.
Achieving recognition of general practitioners as medical specialists in our own right has been an uphill battle for decades. We only achieved vocational recognition as specialists in the 1990s. For many years we were seen as #JustaGP, a term that symbolises the academic and professional discrimination our members are still subjected to today. (more…)
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JOHN DWYER. Punishing and jailing the mentally ill.
A 37-year-old Sudanese woman has been sentenced to 26 years in jail for murdering three of her children by deliberately driving her car into a lake. The story is a tragic one and has nothing to do with criminal behaviour. It raises, yet again, the appalling way in which we treat those with a seriously mental illness who, while ill, break our laws. (more…)
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MICHAEL McKINLEY. Due diligence in the time of chaos and on the way to hell.
At the present time – when analysts, commentators and relevant government agencies are emphasising the dangerous trajectories of world politics, Australian defence is jeopardised undermined by profound strategic mismanagement and a lack of capability; worse, military Keynesianism is obvious and rampant. Capping it off, the recommendations of a government funded think tank to address this, are based on cherry-picked intelligence reports and consist in no more than resorting to a failed conventional wisdom, and stealth nuclearism. (more…)
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JAMES O’NEILL. More to the Manchester Attack than the Media Would Have us Believe
The terrorist attack in Manchester where 22 people, including children, were killed and scores were injured, many critically, provoked an understandable sense of outrage into how and why this could happen. The answer to that question unfortunately has been to repeat the half-truths and stereotypes that have followed each of the terrorist attacks in western cities in recent years. (more…)
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Manchester and terrorism. Part 3 of 3.
In this three-part article, Ramesh Thakur argues that the scale of the terrorist threat to Western societies must be kept in perspective, that Western actions in the Middle East may have fomented more terrorism than they have defeated, and that an attitude of denial regarding the potential for problems of large-scale Muslim immigration feeds mutual paranoia and hostility and is not conducive to social cohesion. (more…)
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. Australian security and trade policy for 2017 and beyond.
The key issue is not what President Trump says on behalf of the United States but, what the United States actually does. (more…)
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JEAN-PIERRE LEHMANN. Phasing out the US (dis)order in the Asia Pacific
It is widely held that there is qualitative distinction between the benign, liberal US global order prevailing in the Asia Pacific, and a potentially threatening and malign Chinese imperialist order. This perspective is quite hallucinatory. (more…)
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Drug policy and why Victoria deserves better from Premier Daniel Andrews. Part 3 of 3.
Bad drug policy has been good politics for several decades. We can thank US President Richard Nixon for this discovery. (more…)
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PETER RODGERS. Donald Trump, Saudi Arabia and the Hypocrisy Olympics
The breathless hypocrisy of Donald Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia should leave us all reeling. The fact that the new president could make his first overseas journey to the very country he previously castigated, rightly, as the mother lode of 9/11 is bad enough. But the sycophancy he displayed to his hosts, especially King Salman, demonstrated just what a dangerous chameleon Trump is. (more…)
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CHRISTIAN DOWNIE. If the US can’t make coal clean, what hope is there for Australia?
The Prime Minister’s recent decision to back coal rests on the assumption that it can somehow be made “clean”, or more precisely, that carbon, capture and storage (CCS) technologies can be made to work for coal plants. The problem is that they can’t and the US experience shows why. (more…)
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FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Uluru: Take Time to Get This Right
Fifty years on from the successful 1967 referendum, we have all heard the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Aboriginal and Torres Strait representatives have told us that ‘in 1967 we were counted, in 2007 we seek to be heard’. Australians of good will acknowledge that sovereignty is a spiritual notion for Indigenous Australians and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander incarceration and separation of children are indicators of ‘the torment of (their) powerlessness’. We affirm the aspiration of the Indigenous leaders gathered at Uluru: ‘When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.’ (more…)
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LYNDSAY CONNORS. Schools Funding: unearthing the facts
The objections raised by Catholic leaders to the Turnbull Government’s Gonski 2.0 funding model raise as many questions about the governance and operation of the Catholic school system as about Gonski 2.0. One of these questions is: who pays for the teachers in Catholic schools? (more…)
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ALEX WODAK. How can making drugs easier to access save lives? 10 FAQs about drug law reform. Part 2 of 3.
Police, prison officers and politicians are standing side-by-side with drug users to call for law reform. They say the current practice of jailing people for personal use and possession instead of focusing on their health and safety leads to unacceptable outcomes: lives lost and lives ruined. But it’s hard to get your head around the idea that making drugs more easily available could actually reduce the risks. Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about drug law reform. (more…)