John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations

Last week the Sydney Daily Telegraph spent a couple of days playing silly buggers with our beloved Treasurer Scott Morrison, depicting him first as Santa Claus and then as not. Continue reading →

Australia gets a mention in The Atlantic, but probably not the kind we wanted.  It’s a review of the work of Terry Hughes (of James Cook University) and others who have had a paper published in Nature on the effect of global warning on the Great Barrier Reef. Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer writes:  “The Great Barrier Reef will continue to collapse and die until humanity stabilizes the amount of greenhouse-gas pollution in the air. But fixing that problem will require remaking the energy system, moving away from oil and gas and to solar, wind, and other renewable sources.”

Katie Acheson, Chair of the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, writes in the Canberra Times about a war being waged in Canberra. It’s a war against young people, subjected to unaffordable housing, high unemployment, expensive education and inaction on environmental damage that will become manifest over their lifetimes.

Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers to access one free article per month. In an article “Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution: The Long Road to Democratic Decline” Ivan Krastev,  of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia analyses the decline of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe.  “A new illiberal consensus is emerging, marked by xenophobic nationalism and supported, somewhat unexpectedly, by young people who came of age after the demise of communism. If the liberals who dominated in the 1990s were preoccupied with the rights of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, this new consensus is about the rights of the majority.”

On the ABC’s  Rear Vision Annabelle Quince has assembled an  impressive collection of gambling experts  in her program Australia: the world’s biggest gamblers.  It’s a history of gambling in Australia, leading to the post 1970s fiscal pressure on the states to raise funds through taxes on poker machines.  By now Australia has 76 per cent of high-intensity poker machines (200,000 machines) and we spend $23 billion a year on gambling ($3000 a household). (29 minutes)

Whichever way you cut it, Turnbull’s climate policy is still a sham – Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy

Senator Rand Paul suggests the chemical weapons attacks in Syria  could have been false flag, unless Assad is the dumbest dictator on the planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=K4V3jQCi8-o

And Admiral Lord West wonders the same thing in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIA_dNkscsw

In Syria, the fog of war, Ross Burns

Scandal pursues Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe – New York REview of Books.

The President Is Not Above The Law. The constitutional order may soon be at stake in the investigation of Donald Trump – The New York Times editorial.

Politics with Michelle Grattan: “Clive Hamilton and Richard Rigby on Chinese influence in Australia”

Clement Atlee, the mouse that roared – New York Review of Books.

On Saturday Extra this 21^st April, Geraldine Doogue speaks with James Eyers from the AFR on this week’s Royal Commission into the banks and a discussion on the default life insurance built into our superannuation funds with minister for financial services, Kelly O’Dwyer as one of the guests.  The disturbing rape stories coming out of India but is this more about a growing division between Hindus and Muslims in that country and navigating freedom of the press in this era of fake news with foreign correspondents Peter Greste and Salil Tripathi. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/

Malcolm Turnbull has made it clear that his mantra of ‘Jobs-and-Growth’ will be at the forefront of his campaign in the next election. This week he will be talking about the growth of a million jobs in 5 years, but there is nothing really remarkable in that on average over the last 15 years about 200,000 new jobs have been created each year. Further, it is less impressive because our population is growing by about two million every five years.  Continue reading →

The Abbott and Turnbull governments have mounted the greatest attack on freedom of speech in Australian history. Continue reading →