John Menadue

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.

John's recent articles

Marilyn Lake. Fracturing the nation's soul.

You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.   During World War 1 Australia lost its way. Its enmeshment in the imperial European war fractured the nations soul. World War I had consequences for individuals as well as nations. HB Higginss life would be deeply affected by the British decision to invade the Ottoman empire in early 1915. As a member of the new federal parliament in 1901, Higgins had opposed Australian participation in the Boer War, fearing that this would set a terrible precedent for involvement in other imperial wars, whose purpose, goals and strategy...

Andrew Elek. Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is miles ahead of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a far more economically efficient option than the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for integrating Asian economies to each other and to the rest of the world. While the United States is attempting to thwart Chinas AIIB by completing the TPP, it is likely to result in net costs to countries other than the US. In 2015, very few products face significant transparent barriers such as tariffs when they cross international borders. The most important constraints to the flow of products along modern supply chains are due to weaknesses in transport and...

John Menadue. Murdoch is about ideology not tax dodging.

There was an interesting exchange between Julian Clarke, News Corp's local boss, and Senator Christine Milne in the Senate Economic References Committee into Tax Avoidance. Julian Clarke spelt it out very clearly that Rupert Murdoch was running The Australian for ideological purposes. The exchange was as follows: With due respect, I don't expect you to agree with this, but I consider The Australian to be the finest national newspaper operating in Australia, [Clarke] said in reply to a question from Senator Milne. Milne: We are not agreed. Clarke: You are in a minority. Milne: Not according...

Matthew Beck, Michiel Bliemer. Do more roads really mean less congestion?

Congestion is a major source of frustration for road users and has worsened over time in most cities. Different solutions have been proposed, such as introducing congestion charging (a favourite of transport economists) or investing in public transport. One solution that is most often put forward is to build more roads, but does this approach work? A recent study in the United States identified Los Angeles, Honolulu and San Francisco as the top three most gridlocked cities in the United States. All of these cities use almost exclusively road-based solutions to transport citizens. While China has increased its...

John Menadue. Tax dodging may be legal, but is it fair and ethical.

Senior executives of companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have all admitted to the Senate in the last week that they have avoided billions of dollars of Australian tax by a range of devices such as transfer pricing and earnings made in Australia being diverted to Singapore which has a lower tax rate. In every case they have told us that it is all perfectly legal. And apparently it is. Other companies such as Westfield and News Corp have also received earlier publicity because of their massive tax avoidance. But its all been legal! Michael West in the SMH...

Harold Levien. The Coalition Governments Bankrupt Economic Policies:

The Coalition Government seems to have been fighting the next elections since the day it won Office and using the same misleading tactics. Throughout the last election campaign, and for months before, the Coalition bitterly attacked both Labors budget deficit and government debt. Yet when the Labor Government left Office Parliamentary Library statistics show government gross debt was 19% of GDP. The advanced economies international organisation, the OECD, apparently calculates the figures differently showing Australias debt as 33% of GDP in 2013. This is still much lower than all OECD economies except for tiny Estonia and Luxemburg. Government debt to...

Alcohol is a bigger problem than ice.

In the Herald Sun on April 8, 2015, Jeff Kennett, the former premier of Victoria, said that it was time to stop the promotion of alcohol. See link to article below. In this article he says 'If it is good enough to ban the advertising of tobacco products, if it is good enough to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory, surely if the serious about family violence, the road toll, our crime rate, it is time to ban the promotion of alcohol. ... The time has come to do what we have done for tobacco - ban all...

Fiona McGaughey, Mary Anne Kenny. Lashing out at the UN is not the act of a good international citizen.

The United Nations has again criticised Australias human rights record in relation to its treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. A report by the UNs Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan Mndez, has raised a number of concerns. These include: Australias policy in relation to the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island breaches Articles 1 and 16 of the UN Convention Against Torture. These articles require that Australia, as a signatory to the convention, not allow acts amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in any place under its jurisdiction. Mndez found that the reports...

Vicken Babkenian. Gallipolis inconvenient other side.

Leading up to the Gallipoli centenary, a growing trend emerged in Australia of presenting the other side of the story. From popular books, official histories, films and academic conferences, the Turkish perspective of Gallipoli became widely told.[1] According to this perspective, as illustrated in a recent article by Dr Jennifer Lawless, the allied landing at Gallipoli was an invasion of the Turkish homeland and by the end of the campaign, many more Turks (87,000) than Anzacs (8700) died.[2] The campaign is portrayed as an almost wholly Turkish and Australian affair, contributing to the birth of both nations and a symbol...

Mike Steketee. Our missed opportunity to tackle wealth inequality

The Abbott Government has promised a comprehensive and inclusive review of the tax system, but appears to have ignored a major issue: rising inequality of income and wealth, writes Mike Steketee. The Abbott Government committed itself last week to a comprehensive and inclusive review of the tax system. But the tax discussion paper it released to kick off the process does not find space in its 196 pages to canvass some of the major issues. The rising inequality of income and wealth in developed nations has come into sharp focus in recent years but it does not seem...

John Menadue. The miners may have been better off with a super profits tax.

As a result of the lower iron ore prices there is a dramatic shake-up coming amongst our iron ore companies, the largest of which are foreign owned. These companies conducted a vociferous campaign against the Resources Super Profits Tax. They were successful. As a result of the failures of the Rudd and Gillard Governments to effectively tax the mining companies, the state governments particularly of Western Australia and Queensland stepped in with very large increases in royalties. The Western Australian Government could hardly have believed its good luck in the royalties it extracted from the iron ore companies in...

John Menadue. Cafes and restaurants are booming despite penalty rates.

Despite the booming caf and restaurant industry, the special pleading by employers on penalty rates and minimum wages goes on and on. Employers seem to have little appreciation that there is a difference between the market and society. The latter is much more important. The right to a decent wage and time off for recreation and relaxation with family and friends is essential. Markets are important, but they are a means to an end. Speaking of penalty rates, Peter Martin in the SMH said This Easter give thanks for penalty rates, they keep us human. Easter has become...

John Menadue. Alcohol and junk food - winning at the expense of our health.

If you seriously follow almost any major Australian sport as I do, you will be conscious of the saturation alcohol and junk food advertising. And in the run up to the centenary of Gallipoli there are no holds barred to link heroes and booze... VB now have a new television advertisement filmed at Melbournes Shrine of Remembrance which tells us to bow our heads to the 16 th Battalion,AIF at Gallipoli and raise a glass of VB to their heroism. How tacky can you get! This is a re run of the campaign that VB have been running...

The speech that Rupert had written for Gough. 30 November 1972

The following is the speech that Rupert Murdoch had written for Gough Whitlams final election rally in St Kilda in the 1972 election campaign. It was written by Evan Williams.who at the time was a senior journalist on The Australian. Gough Whitlam decided not to use 'Ruperts speech' . What a journey it has been for Rupert Murodch from 1972 to 2015! John Menadue Everywhere I have gone in this campaign one thing has been clear and unmistakable above all else : the Australian people are crying out for a new deal. They are...

John Menadue. Who and for what are we fighting in Iraq.

Australia has sent troops to fight in Iraq Wars I, II and III. Our participation has been disastrous in each. The latest news tells us that in the battle to oust IS from Tikrit the victory belonged to the Shiite militia controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp. So our 'allies' in Iraq against IS are now Shiite militia led by Iran. This is a sectarian war in Iraq into which we should never have blundered. What side are we on now? Presumably it is the Shiite militia who have a cruel record as bad as IS. Perhaps...

Greg Smith. Australian Tax Reform 2015

Why are we discussing tax reform again, and what really are the priority issues? The Federal Government has released a wide-rangingdiscussion paperon the Australian tax system, yet Australia has been reforming its tax system for the past 35 years. The last major reform in 2000 then called the New Tax System included the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST). For several years afterwards, the tax system looked efficient, robust, and fair, and met the Governments wider policy objectives. So what gets us to this point of reassessment again? Australias tax reforms have...

David Zyngier. Australia should follow Chile's lead and stop funding private schools.

Australia is one of the very few countries in the OECD that publicly funds private schools. More than 40% of Australian secondary children now attend private schools - either so-called independent or religious schools. Australia has one of the most privatised school systems in the OECD. Prior to 1972 no private schools received any government funding whatsoever in this country. While most OECD countries have a private school system, very few of them receive public funding. Think about England, the home of the elite private school, and the exclusive private schools in the USA: not one cent of taxpayers...

Patty Fawkner. Leading by flipping the omelette.

Pope Francis leadership differs markedly from that of his predecessors. He models two clear principles that our political leaders and, in fact all of us who lead in some capacity, would do well to emulate, writes Good Samaritan Sister Patty Fawkner*. Weve got to flip the omelette, Pope Francis told a group of religious leaders from Latin America in the early days of his papacy. Why was it, he asked, that its world news when the Dow Jones moves up or down a few points, but not when an elderly person dies of cold in the street? If we...

ICC Cricket World Cup: Alcohol-drenched culture needs to change.

Many media outlets today have drawn attention to the alcohol influenced behaviour of Australian cricketers as they celebrated winning the International World Cup. At the celebration in Federation Square in Melbourne yesterday morning, the Australian captain Michael Clarke seemed to be proud of the fact that all the team members had hangovers. In the link below Michael Thorn, the chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, in today's SMH, draws attention to the influence of the alcohol lobby,the alcohol consumption of the Australian cricket team and advertising. See link below. Michael Thorn comments that 'It...

Peter Day. He is Alive: the Spiritual Big Bang

I love science. It takes us to different places: places of pure logic, of non-emotion, of rational intelligence, of majesty and beauty sometimes even to places beyond our wildest imaginations. Just think: 13.78 billion years ago our universe is thought to have begun as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense, something. After its initial appearance, it apparently inflated (the Big Bang), expanded and cooled, going from very, very small and very, very hot, to the size and temperature of our current universe. It continues to expand and cool to this day and we are inside of it:...

John Menadue We still need to address the defects in our constitutional arrangements that November 11 1975 revealed.

We have rightly been remembering the achievements of Malcolm Fraser on human rights and race. But we should not forget the enormous damage that the events of November 11, 1975, did to Australian public life and trust in our institutions. Conservatives keep highlighting the shortcomings of the Whitlam governments in order to hide their complicity in the deceit and Vice-regal intrigue, even with High Court Judges, that brought about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government that had a clear majority in the peoples house, the House of Representatives. In speaking kindly of Malcolm Fraser in later years, Gough...

Rodney Tiffin. The university rankings no government wants to talk about.

At a conference of university leaders in early 2013, Tony Abbottpromised relative policy stability in higher education if he became prime minister. A year later, Universities Australia began its first Abbott-erabudget submission by welcoming the undertaking of the government to preserve funding arrangements for higher education, including the commitment not to make further cuts to the sector. When it came, though, the Coalitions first budget proposed cutting university funding by a breathtaking 20 per cent and removing the ceiling on university fees. Since then, the only stability in tertiary education policy has been education minister Christopher Pynes repeated attempts...

John Menadue. Improving health outside the health portfolio

Ministers for Health in Australia are seen very largely as ministers in charge of health services rather than health. The fact is that some major issues causing poor health or which could be the means to improve health are outside the normal health portfolio. Major health problems are caused by junk food, alcohol and tobacco. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare tells us that tobacco smoking is the largest cause of preventable illness and death in Australia It estimated that in 2004/5 smoking related disease cost Australia $31.5 b. The AIHW also told us that in that year...

Caroline Coggins. Holy Week: what is our invitation this year?

At the start of holy week we read of a woman who, uninvited, breaks into a gathering of men at table, drops to her knees to pour the most extravagant oil onto the feet of the man she loves, wiping the oil in with her hair! There is no shame or apology, even though those observing are self-righteously indignant, angered by her 'display'. She is not hedging her bets but is utterly there in love. How interesting that this scene, after Palm Sunday, will lead us into Holy week (John12:1-6). We are not invited as strangers, but as intimates. ...

Andrew Wilson. More hospitals, more hospitals, more hospitals.

As Andrew Wilson points out, all major parties are obsessed with hospitals as the answer to our health problems. The three major shortcomings in health in Australia are mental health, indigenous health and rural health. These problems are best addressed outside hospitals. But ministers, the media and the community seldom think beyond hospitals. For ministers they have an iconic status. Ministers can put their name on the plaque for a new wing or refurbishment. The media thinks that health and hospitals are the same thing. They are not. Reform of our health system must focus on primary care and not...

Andrea Carson. Heed Fraser's warning on Australian media concentration - it's getting worse.

The passing of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser last Friday prompted me to recall his warning about the state of Australian media ownership in an interview I did with him during the last federal election. He said: In my term, there were seven print proprietors. Now there is one and a bit. We have the most concentrated media in any democratic country, anywhere in the entire damn world. That is dangerous. Malcolm Fraser for The Conversation: Does it matter who owns our papers? Yes it does Malcolm Frasers warning is one we should...

Peter Day. Mum and Dad, or Mum and Mum, or Dad and Dad?

Human sexuality is a complex and fragile thing far greyer than black or white. It is best tended to by gentle, wise, and humble hands. Alas, there hasnt been much gentleness or wisdom surrounding the same sex marriage debate, let alone same sex attraction in general. Witness the recent furore over an alleged homophobic slur directed at a player during a Super 15 Rugby match between the ACT Brumbies and the NSW Waratahs at the weekend. Like most issues of public importance, we tend to hear from the voices of fear that inhabit the extremes and...

Walter Hamilton. Lee Kuan Yew and Australia

Lee Kuan Yew ran the island-state of Singapore, someone said, with a mixture of charisma and fear. Having worked there as a correspondent for the ABC in the mid-1980s, the remark seems apposite to me. Lees brilliance as a politician and statesman is undisputed, but the country he forged, improbably, out of a remnant of the British Empire in Asia was a place that seemed to miss some essential inner purpose. Others have suggested thatmirroring Lee himselfit lacked a sense of humour, a sense of fun. There is something in this, although in my recollection Lee knew how to...

John Menadue. More problems with the Department of Health and Ageing.

On 16 March, I drew attention to a Capability Review of the Department of Health and Ageing by the Australian Public Service Commission. It set out a very worrying analysis of the overall performance of DHA. We now have a report by the Australian National Audit Office of DHA's administration of the Fifth Community Pharmacy Agreement (5CPA). The 5CPA is the fifth agreement which the Commonwealth Government has made to provide subsidised medicines to Australians who are eligible through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). This agreement is with community pharmacies across Australia. The Australian National Audit office points...

Patrick Shanahan. Connecting the Mouth to the Body

Why is dentistry not part of health care? Most people cannot understand why the mouth is not included in medical management, especially since there is mounting evidence that oral and dental infection can cause medical complications that cost many times more to treat medically than prevent dentally. How did this happen? Dentistry separated from medicine over 500 years ago when the previously allied barber surgeons evolved into two streams, medicine and dentistry, and subsequently established independent schools to train doctors and dentists. Not only is dentistry independent of medicine it is also privatised, self regulated, outside...

Tributes to Malcolm Fraser.

See below, tributes from Fred Chaney and Robert Manne on Malcolm Fraser's achievements in public life. John Mendue. Fred Chaney in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/malcolm-fraser-a-leader-who-believed-there-is-a-moral-compass-in-our-nations-life Robert Manne in The Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/frasers-great-conservative-achievement-cementing-whitlams-progress-on-race

Rachel Wilson, Bronwen Dalton and Chris Baumann. Six ways Australia's education system is failing our kids.

Amid debates about budget cuts and the rising costs of schools and degrees, there is one debate receiving alarmingly little attention in Australia. Were facing a slow decline in most educational standards, and few are aware just how bad the situation is getting. These are just six of the ways that Australias education system is seriously failing our kids. 1. Australian teens are falling behind, as others race ahead The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in more than 70 economies worldwide. And it showsthat Australian 15-year-olds' scores on reading,...

John Menadue. Cars are killing our cities.

At almost every election, we are being wooed with stories of more freeways to accommodated more and more cars. It is self-defeating. In our public infrastructure we waste more money on roads than on anything else. As I have argued in my re-post below, there are a whole range of policy issues that we must address to curb the growing volume of cars and the damage that they are doing to our cities. We refuse to embrace it, but we will be forced to consider congestion taxes to limit road use. In the current NSW state election, the Liberal...

Joseph Stiglitz on the Trans Pacific Partnership.

At a community meeting in New York Joseph Stiglitz drew attention to the risks of TPP. He referred to the secrecy about the whole proposal. He said that TPP 'is much worse than a blank cheque about trade'. He added that TPP 'would not only become the law of the land, but every other law would have to adapt to it ... and our Congress would have given up all authority in those areas - the environment, worker safety, consumer safety, and even the economy'. For full report of this meeting, see link below. John Menadue In The Times

John Quiggin. The Trans-Pacific partnership: it might be about trade, but it's far from free.

There can be few topics as eye-glazingly dull as international trade agreements. Endless hours of negotiation on such arcane topics as rules of origin and most favoured nation status combine with an alphabet soup of acronyms to produce a barely readable text hundreds of pages long. But unless you were actually involved in exporting or importing goods, or faced import competition, it used to be safe enough to leave the details to diplomats and trade bureaucrats. That all changed with the emergence of new generation agreements, of which the most ambitious so far is the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, or...

Kerry Goulston. Two health reform issues.

Instead of tinkering around the edges of Health Reform in Australia,and dodging meaningful revision of the Medical Benefits and Pharmaceutical Benefits Schemes, all Federal politicians and leading clinicians could be debating two issues which would have significant effects over the next 20 years. Currently thousands of clinicians (doctors, nurses, allied health and other healthcare providers) are despairing of meaningful healthcare and workforce reform by our Federal and State politicians. Remuneration It appears that, over recent years, other countries have been looking at widening the choices of remuneration to healthcare providers. Why is Australia not doing so? The...

Wayne McMillan. Contemplating our Navels and Fiddling while Rome burns

We have become so self-absorbed that we have little time to think about anything else. We live also in an age of info trivia worship that has become a new art form. Australians have become preoccupied with keeping up with the Jones than helping their next door neighbour. The craving to possess the latest info trinket that promises to give you the latest thrill in techno satisfaction is almost insatiable. The irony is that our hip and info savvy generation appears so disconnected from the real world and unhappy. We are connected emotionally and socially only to our immediate...

John Menadue. Private health insurance and funding a Medicare Dental Scheme.

In this blog I have written extensively about the damage that private health insurance (PHI) is doing in Australia. We are sleep-walking into a US style health disaster. If people want private health insurance, that is their right, but I see no reason why the taxpayer should subsidise a socially divisive and nationally damaging subsidy. The damage of PHI is increasing year on year. In my most recent blog on the subject at the time of the last annual increase in PHI premiums, I pointed out that since 1999 when John Howard introduced the subsidy on PHI, overall...

John Menadue. A capability review of the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (DHA)

In this blog I have raised many times my concerns about the major shortcomings of DHA and the barrier it presents to improved health policy and programs... We saw it most recently over the GP co-payment. I argue that the ministerial/departmental model in health has failed and needs review... Since 2011 the Australian Public Service Commission ( APSC) has conducted a series of capability reviews of Commonwealth agencies. Late last year it released its capability review of DHA. It highlighted many problems in the Department. These include The department is hierarchical and siloed. The department does not...

Amanda Tattersall. Community organising aims to win back civil societys rightfulplace.

In the wake of the Second World War, Karl Polanyi wrote that the public arena is made up of three interconnected sectors: the market, government and civil society. He argued that democracy thrives when these three are in balance. If only that were the case today. Since the late 1980s, the global influence of the market sector has increased and, at the same time, civil society has decreased. This can be felt every day in Australias cities. We see it in declining investment in community infrastructure everything from a lack of public transport to unaffordable housing. First in...

Tony Kevin. A Confused Military Endgame in Tikrit

In an effort to understand what is happening in the very important battle to retake the Sunni city of Tikrit in Iraq, now approaching its climax, I consulted yesterdays news and editorial coverage in the Washington Post, (Iraqi forces break militants hold on Tikrit in major battle against Islamic State), http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqi-forces-battle-islamic-state-in-streets-of-strategic-tikrit/2015/03/11/a0dca5c0-c778-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html CNN, (Battle for Tikrit: Despite billions in aid, Iraqi army relies on militia, and Iran), http://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/11/middleeast/lister-iraq-iran/ Al Jazeera, (Why the US is sitting out Iraqs most important assault on ISIL), http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/3/6/what-it-means-for-the-us-to-sit-out-tikrit-offensive.html and the Christian Science Monitor (The non-military victories in Iraqs battle of...

Julia Davison. It takes a nation to raise a child.

The week after Australia Day each year, around 260,000 five-year old Australians start school. Of those, almost 60,000 children 23 per cent will start school developmentally vulnerable in some way. Children who start school behind often stay behind, and are likely to finish school with skills and competencies that have not equipped them for the workforce or future life. The economic and social costs can be profound and long lasting. The first five years of a childs life are when most of their brain development occurs. It is a period when children are most open to learning...

Peter Cosier. A healthy environment and a productive economy

Over the next 12 months, the Commonwealth is going to lead discussion on two major areas of reform: to the roles and responsibilities of the Commonwealth and states in the Australian Federation, and reforms to the Australian taxation system. At the same time we have an adversarial battle raging across Australia between the environment and the economy. Despite the significant advances in environmental policy of recent decades - national water reform, land clearing controls, a price on carbon - the public dialogue in recent years has increasingly shifted to a position that we must now sacrifice the environment to...

Graeme Pearman. Managing climate change: in whose interest?

The role of greenhouse gases in determining the temperature of the Earth has been known since the first half of the 19th century and in recent decades observations have shown clearly that human activities are changing the levels of these gases in the atmosphere. The science community has articulated the broad consequences of this for more than three decades. Yet in Australia the period from the late 1980s to the present has been characterised by a trend from an internationally leading and proactive approach to an approach that puts Australia in danger of incurring political and economic sanctions reflecting...

Brian Johnstone. The execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.

The deaths of these two men now appear to be inevitable. The key argument of President Joko Widodo is that this lethal means (death by firing squad) is justified for the purpose of saving his people from the addiction and death caused by drugs. The Indonesian government claims that, in that country, approximately 50 victims of drugs die every day. The number of persons who die each year as a consequence of drugs in Australia is around 1,500. The damage to lives from drugs is amply documented by the recent book by Dr. John Sherman and Tony Valenta, Drug Addiction...

Helen Sykes and David Yencken. Leadership in the public interest.

No fundamental social change occurs merely because government acts. Its because civil society, the conscience of a country, begins to rise up demand demand demand change. (Joe Biden, Vice President of the United States) History shows that the public interest can vary over time and between societies. These are, nonetheless, ideals that every nation should have for the wellbeing of its citizens. For Australia they include the protection of core values of democracy and society and the proper care of its people. They require the protection and nurturing of the physical environment as the source of...

Safdar Ahmed. A moving inside story about detainees in the Villawood Detention Centre.

Safdar Ahmed has sent to me a very moving and powerful online comic book about life in the Villawood detention centre. The press release which he issued, follows. John Menadue A new graphic novel depicts life inside the Villawood Detention Centre A documentary web-comic by Safdar Ahmed depicts the stories of asylum seekers and refugees inside Sydneys Villawood detention centre. [Villawood: Notes From An Immigration Detention Centre LINK] depicts the testimony of people from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, including men, women and teenagers. Some of those included are long-term detainees who have been detained for up...

Max Corden. Bring Back the Carbon Tax?

Mr Hockey has invited the Australian public to join in a conversation about the economy and budget issues. Here is my mildly radical contribution. There are two strong reasons for bringing back the carbon tax. Tony Abbott, when Leader of the Opposition, promised to repeal the carbon tax brought in by Prime Minister Julie Gillard. And he has fulfilled his promise. Congratulations. Now circumstances have changed: the budget deficit and public debt have turned out to be important problems in the eyes of the Government because of the somewhat unexpected decline in export prices. So Mr. Abbott or...

John Falzon Welfare reform but where are the jobs?

If by welfare we mean giving assistance to those who dont really need it and who are living off the public purse, then it is indeed time we had a comprehensive review of welfare. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the McClure Welfare Review was given the task of cutting social expenditure to those who actually do need it. If only we devoted as much effort to welfare reform for the corporates and the rich as we do for the people who struggle! If only we were able to admit that our irrational spending on those who need it least has...

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