Politics
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John Menadue. ‘We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem’.
Treasurer Scott Morrison has been expounding the above philosophy of his for months. But he couldn’t be more wrong. Unfortunately the Secretary of Treasury has now followed up with nonsense that Australia should have a ceiling of 25% of GDP on government spending (I assume he is referring to Commonwealth Government spending). Michael Pascoe (Michael Continue reading »
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Stephen Duckett. Health in 2016: a cheat sheet on hospitals, Medicare and private health insurance.
We start 2016 as we started 2015 – with big challenges for the health system and uncertainty as to how governments will meet them. The health care headaches in 2016 are, in fact, the same ones we faced a decade ago, albeit different in severity and symptoms. They include population growth, ageing and the rise Continue reading »
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Bruce Duncan. Australia’s moral crisis: shipping babies and families off to Nauru
How has it come to this, that the Australian government is poised to send back 37 babies, 54 children and their families – 267 in all – into the traumatic conditions of Nauru? Only a few years ago many Australians would have considered it inconceivable that our governments should have imposed such shocking treatment on Continue reading »
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How long can we keep lying to ourselves.
In the SMH on February 5, 2016, columnist Waleed Aly says ‘The history of asylum seeker policy in Australia will be remembered as a story of how successive governments legislated their lies to justify a world of make-believe borders and imaginary compliance.’ See link to article below: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/nauru-how-long-can-we-keep-lying-to-ourselves-20160204-gml6or.html Continue reading »
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Frank Brennan SJ. High Court not the answer to Nauru depravity
The moral depravity of Australian funded and orchestrated holding of asylum seekers, including children, on Nauru and Manus Island is to continue. On Wednesday the High Court made clear that it is in no position to question the retrospective law passed by the Commonwealth Parliament on 30 June 2015 authorising the Australian Government to do Continue reading »
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John Menadue. What has happened to the 11,990 Syrian refugees?
After telling us for months that Australia would not take additional Syrian refugees, Tony Abbott announced on September 9 last year that the government had ‘agreed to settle 12,000 Syrian refugees … one of the world’s largest (intakes) to date’. We were told that the first refugees would arrive by Christmas and the 12,000 by Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Tax reform and vested interests.
We are in the midst of a misleading campaign on tax and budget reform. Large corporations and high income groups are pressing the government to increase the GST in order to reduce company tax and taxes for high-income groups. I have seldom seen such a blatant and self-interested campaign by vested interests. And they seriously Continue reading »
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John Menadue. ‘Balance’ and the ABC
The ABC has a mistaken notion of media balance. It has become clear that Nick Ross, a Senior Technology Editor at the ABC, could not publish a story critical of Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN unless he also published an article critical of Labor’s NBN. To add to this bias by ABC management he was told that Continue reading »
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Ian McAuley Private health insurance – does the lady protest too much?
Sussan Ley, the Commonwealth Health Minister, has hit out at private health insurers’ bid for a six per cent price increase. In view of the strong support the Coalition has always given private health insurers, such public criticism from a Liberal Party minister may surprise us. As one-time Prime Minister Tony Abbott said “private health Continue reading »
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Ian Webster. Alcohol and Sport.
The facts about alcohol should stop politicians in their tracks. But they are unmoved. A quarter to a third of the work of a general hospital is alcohol-related. On Australia Day one in seven ED attendances were caused by alcohol; in some EDs it was one in three. The Senior Australian of the Year, Gordian Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Royal commissions – partisan politics or public interest.
Australia has had a string of politically inspired and often useless royal commissions. The fiasco surrounding Dyson Heydon’s acceptance of an invitation to speak at a Liberal Party dinner made it even more likely that his enquiry into trade unions would be quickly discounted, except for those who wanted to pursue a political agenda against Continue reading »
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Chris Bonnor. Labor goes back to the Gonski future.
The ALP’s commitment to funding Gonski for the full six years has created interest and even excitement, being welcomed by the three main school sectors, but panned by the Coalition. So why do I just feel that we’ve been here before? It could be because everyone welcomed Gonski’s findings and recommendations in 2012, but what Continue reading »
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Niall McLaren. A case for ‘armed neutrality’
In its short history, Australia has been among the most aggressive nations on earth, regularly engaging in wars that, on any objective basis, have nothing to do with us. These military adventures cost us dearly in men, material and credibility without ever showing the slightest evidence that they improve our security. Malcolm Fraser argued that Continue reading »
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John Tulloh. Middle East: The Arab Spring becomes the Arab Winter.
‘Arabs have rarely lived in bleaker times’. The Economist. An impoverished Arab would have been been flabbergasted at the consequences of his single, desperate protest five years ago. It precipitated the ousting of his country’s ruler and two other Arab leaders, the greatest upheaval and carnage of this century in one country, protests in others, Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Australia Day doing well, but could do better.
The following repost is from Australia Day 2014. I wonder what indigenous people thought when they saw Captain Phillip with his ships come uninvited and sail up Sydney Harbour in January 1788. There does not seem any doubt that despite their concerns they were less hostile than we are to boat people 226 years later. Continue reading »
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Cavan Hogue. Mr Turnbull goes to Washington.
Despite one welcome outburst of independence by refusing a request for more troops on the ground in the Middle East and a generally less sycophantic approach than most of his predecessors,the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington had all the usual hallmarks of a client presenting tribute to the Emperor. The fact that Australian and American Continue reading »
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The media, those agencies and the Data Retention Act
The media’s attention this past week turned to the 61 “fringe agencies” trying to get access to our metadata. Many have missed the point that when Parliament passed the Data Retention Act the Government heralded the fact that it had cut the list of those able to access our private and personal information to the Continue reading »
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Brad Chilcott. I donated a kidney to my son. Don’t tell me not to make it ‘political’.
In early December, I went into surgery to give my eight-year-old son Harrison my left kidney. He heard me groaning in recovery as the anaesthetist put him to sleep a few hours later so that he could receive it. The operation was the first of my life and Harrison’s 13th. He’d experience his 14th general Continue reading »
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Anand Kulkarni, Travers McLeod. Battle of ideas on innovation.
We’re now in a race to the top on innovation. Better late than never. Liberating ideas could reboot Australia’s economy, as we argued a year ago. Now it seems there are more ideas about how to generate ideas than ever before in Australian policymaking. Both the Liberal-National government (“Welcome to the Ideas Boom” and the Continue reading »
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Bob Debus to deliver Frank Walker Memorial Lecture.
Invitation to attend Frank Walker Memorial Lecture. Join us as we celebrate the life times of former NSW Attorney-General the Hon. Frank Walker QC, with guest speaker the Hon. Bob Debus AM. This event is free to attend. Post-lecture drinks will be held at Penny Lane (the bar above the lecture theatre). “Over-representation of Aboriginal people in Continue reading »
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Robin Room and Michael Livingston. Alcohol companies target the 20% of Australians who drink 75% of the alcohol.
Researchers have known for a long time that alcohol consumption is quite concentrated in a small part of the population. They argue about the exact distribution, but there is substantial agreement that, so long as alcohol sales are not heavily restricted, consumption is distributed in a quite predictable way. That is, there are many light Continue reading »
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What do we owe each other?
In this opinion piece from the New York Times, Aaron James Wendland draws on work by Emmanuel Levinas in response to the surge of refugees around the world and particularly into Europe. Levinas describes the allergic reaction to refugees. In response he suggests three things. First, an appeal to the ‘infinity’ in human beings, that Continue reading »
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Steve Georgakis. The unholy trinity of sports advertising in Australia – betting agencies, junk food and alcohol.
Why we shouldn’t be surprised that tennis is implicated in match-fixing. The first day of the Australian Open was marred by revelations alleging widespread match-fixing and cover-ups in men’s tennis stretching back more than a decade. World number one Novak Djokovic confirmed he was approached with a reported offer of US$200,000 in 2006 to throw Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Media censorship and the NBN
The ABC’s outgoing editor of its Technology and Games subsite, Nick Ross, has claimed that he has been ‘gagged’ by ABC management from publishing further articles about the NBN. He has now left the ABC. For link to an article on this latest gag on NBN coverage, see link at bottom to article by Renai Continue reading »
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How ‘Crazy’ are the North Koreans?
Joel S. Wit writes about how the North Koreans have played their cards extremely well despite the appalling nature of their regime. See link to an article in the New York Times, by Joel S. Wit, who is a Senior Fellow of the US-Korea Institute at John Hopkins University. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/opinion/sunday/how-crazy-are-the-north-koreans.html Continue reading »
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Allan Patience. Can We Continue to Afford Australia’s Federal System?
Australians are facing a gruelling 2016. A growing revenue crisis is placing severe constraints on the budget, meaning the government will probably be contemplating cuts in services and other “soft target” areas like pensions, child care subsidies and related welfare measures. The neo-liberal vandalizing of the country’s manufacturing sector, and the short-termism that is now Continue reading »
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The policy scandal of a $11b taxpayer subsidy to private health insurance.
I don’t think that I can recall a domestic policy that is so outrageous as the $11 b. annual cost to the taxpayer of the subsidy to private health insurance (PHI) companies. The subsidy is paid to policy holders, but it really means that PHI companies receive the benefit of the subsidy. For further explanation Continue reading »
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John Duggan. Advice from expert clinicians or the AMA
For those interested in the cost of health care the recently released interim report by the Medical Benefits Schedule (MBS) Review “obsolete MBS items track one” demonstrates the dawning recognition that there are procedures and tests that do not justify their existence or federal funding. The story begins with the decision of Ms Sussan Ley, Continue reading »
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Jennifer Doggett, Ian McAuley, John Menadue. Four Corners: No wonder we’re wasting money in health care – we got the incentives wrong
Repost from 06/10/2015. A recently-aired ABC Four Corners program aptly titled “Wasted” exposed three areas of unnecessary, ineffective and outright dangerous health interventions, in knee, spinal and heart surgery. The show’s host, Norman Swan, presumably extrapolating from the findings in those three areas, claimed that waste could be as high as 30 percent of all Continue reading »
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