Politics
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Ian Marsh. Revolving Prime Ministers.
As has been widely noted, Malcolm Turnbull is our fifth prime minister in as many years. You have to go back to the 1901-1909 pre two-party period for a roughly similar record. Then it was six leaders in seven years. But the analogy is only superficial. The protagonists – Barton (briefly), Watson (briefly), Deakin, Reid Continue reading »
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Arja Keski-Nummi and Libby Lloyd. Resettling Syrian and Iraqi Refugees: A Program for Government-Community Action
Australia has one of the best refugee resettlement systems in the world. So said United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres some years back. We have achieved this reputation not by good luck but because successive Australian governments have understood that early intervention and support in the settlement process are fundamental to long term Continue reading »
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Walter Hamilton. Japanese Sleepwalking
Defying public protests and opinion polls that show most Japanese oppose the move, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party and Shin-Komeito ruling coalition are pressing ahead with legislation to nullify the nation’s constitutional ban on overseas military action. The so-called ‘right of collective defense’ law is being voted out of the committee stage of Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Slogans vs Facts.
In my post of 16 September, I referred to the continual exaggeration over the benefits of Free Trade Agreements. There has been quite a pattern of this type of exaggeration with slogans rather than facts. One example of slogans and one-liners has been the Abbott government’s claim that it ‘Stopped the Boats’. This is just Continue reading »
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Bruce Kaye. Refugees in Australia and the Good Samaritan.
When I was a teenager a famous preacher of the day, Dr Gordon Powell, was the minister at St Stephens Presbyterian Church Macquarie Street Sydney. I recall hearing some of his sermons and in particular a sermon from a series of sermons he preached on the “Hard Sayings of Jesus”. He remarked at the Continue reading »
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The Exaggeration over Free Trade Agreements.
I have posted many blogs in the last couple of years concerning the Free Trade Agreements with the Republic of Korea, Japan and China. I have pointed out that the years of negotiation of these agreements occurred under the Rudd and Gillard governments. The Abbott government gave the agreements the final touch. The other issues Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Turnbull and Abbott
Bill Shorten aside, most Australians will welcome our new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. He offers a more rational, humane and consultative style of leadership. His main problem will be how to reconcile his own progressive views on such issues as climate change, a republic and gay marriage, with the hard-heads in the parliamentary Liberal party. Continue reading »
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Rod Tiffen Lord Leveson, your country needs you, again.
Two events in the past week show the importance of the Leveson Inquiry reconvening to complete its second report. The Leveson inquiry was set up by British Prime Minister David Cameron in July 2011 at the height of the phone hacking scandal centered on Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper. Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry Continue reading »
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Ian McAuley. Refugees and German redemption.
Imagine if Australia were to open its doors to 240 000 refugees. That’s twenty times our offer to take 12 000 Syrians, or around the same number as our total annual immigration in all categories. It’s what Angela Merkel’s offer of 800 000 places would come to if scaled to Australia’s population. Although some may Continue reading »
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“U.S. should bear blame for European refugee, humanitarian crisis”
Disastrous intervention by the US has been the cause of many major refugee flows including the current flows out of the Middle East. The people’s Daily published an interesting article on this subject on 7 September. The article refers to refugees from Syria, Lybia, Iraq and Afghanistan. It could have added that one of the Continue reading »
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Josef Szwarc. Resettling an additional 12,000 refugees.
The Government has announced that “Australia will resettle an additional 12,000 refugees who are fleeing the conflict in Syria and Iraq.” http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2015-09-09/syrian-and-iraqi-humanitarian-crisis This note publishes the statement with some comments about various aspects. “Our focus will be on those most in need – the women, children and families of persecuted minorities who have sought refuge Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Refugees, the community and civil society
It has been thrilling to see the warm response of many people, and particularly the Germans, to refugees fleeing from war-torn Syria and other countries. Over ten million people have been forced to flee their homes in Syria. Pope Francis has appealed to every Catholic parish, religious community or sanctuary in Europe to take in Continue reading »
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Ross Burns. Syria and Persecuted Minorities.
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the international legal instrument to which Australia was an original signatory, contains a clause making clear that ‘The Contracting States shall apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin’. It therefore seems curious that at least Continue reading »
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Ian Marsh. What wrong with Australia’s political system?
Most readers of this piece will not need lessons about the power of economic incentives. They know that efficient price signals can channel investment into productive assets and these same signals will drain funds from unconstructive pursuits. The same process more or less works at individual levels. Both good and bad performance is demonstrated by Continue reading »
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Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer. What’s really at stake if the China FTA falls through.
Earlier this month Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott sounded a warning on the impact to Australia’s economy if the recently signed China-Australia Free Trade Agreement were to fail. In a statement, Abbott said: “If Bill Shorten and the Labor Party try to reject the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement they will be sabotaging our economic future Continue reading »
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Rod Tucker. The NBN: why it’s slow, expensive and obsolete.
The Abbott Coalition government came to power two years ago this week with a promise to change Labor’s fibre to the premises (FTTP) National Broadband Network (NBN) to one using less-expensive fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) technologies, spruiking its network with the three-word slogan: “Fast. Affordable. Sooner.” But with the release in August of the 2016 NBN corporate Continue reading »
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Peter Hughes. Designing a more generous Australian response to the Syrian crisis
The Australian government announcement of 12,000 additional permanent places for Syrian refugees is a reasonable scale of response, if implemented the right way. Taken together with the existing program of 13,750 refugees, the new program constitutes a manageable 13% of the planned 2015–16 migration intake of 193,485 permanent visas. It is only 4% of the Continue reading »
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John Menadue. A one-off increase in the humanitarian program rather than a safe haven is now possible.
In this blog several of us have advocated a safe haven arrangement, as was the case for the Kosovars, to meet the present Syrian refugee crisis. It was then clear that the government was not going to do much at all. That has now changed. The government has been reluctantly dragged along by state premiers, Continue reading »
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Klaus Neumann. Stepping up to the plate.
Angela Merkel said last week ‘There will be no tolerance towards those who question the dignity of others.’ Prime minister Tony Abbott is in favour of increasing the number of Syrian and Iraqi refugees allowed to resettle permanently in Australia. But when he announced on Sunday that Australia would “step up to the plate,” he Continue reading »
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Michael Kelly SJ. The challenge of people movements.
Great as the gesture of Pope Francis is to mobilize parishes in Europe to accommodate the influx of tens of thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East (they call them migrants), the problem is more complex than offering immediate support to needy people. The Pope knows that. He’s said so many times. The Pope Continue reading »
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David Isaacs, Alanna Maycock, The Senate Report on Nauru.
On 31st August 2015, the Senate finally tabled its lengthy report on conditions at what is euphemistically called the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru (http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Regional_processing_Nauru/Regional_processing_Nauru/Final_Report). The RPC is in reality a prison camp where people live indefinitely in tents, their applications are not processed for over a year, and they are kept in ignorance of Continue reading »
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Paul Budde. The NBN – from bad to worse.
I am sure that I am just as frustrated as most Australians – especially as month after month, year after year, it becomes clearer that what I, along with others, have been saying since 2011 – that a cheaper and faster NBN such as the Coalition Government is trying to install by retrofitting ageing copper Continue reading »
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John Tulloh. Return to the Syrian battlefield.
‘Foreign (military) adventures have long appealed to insecure leaders’, wrote the veteran British journalist, Sir Simon Jenkins, in the right-wing Spectator magazine. ‘Those who’ve had no experience of war seem to crave it’. He was referring to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s renewed enthusiasm to get involved in Syria. He could just as well Continue reading »
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Luke Fraser. True Blue
On Father’s day, anybody around the world lucky enough to have been woken by a happy young son (as I was) would have been hard-put not to have paused and thought of the image of the young Ardyl Kurdi, washed up lifeless on a beach. Millions are again on the roads of Europe, running away, Continue reading »
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Josef Szwarc. Measuring our response to the refugee crisis of Syria and Iraq
“PM RESCUE MISSION” shouts the headline of the morning newspaper. My heart races with expectation that is immediately deflated by the first sentence: “Australian will open its doors to more Syrian refugees fleeing the troubled nation but won’t increase the overall humanitarian intake.” The prospect of an increase was hinted at by a press release Continue reading »
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Two years in – even supporters despair of Abbott’s feeble government.
The Abbott government marks its two-year anniversary of winning office today, September 7. I was tempted to begin by claiming that Tony Abbott has established himself as one of Australia’s more successful prime ministers, but I struggled to find a second sentence. The headlines in the opinion pages of August 29’s Weekend Australian show that Continue reading »
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John Menadue. The death of Aylan Kurdi may not have been in vain.
In the last week our media has been extensively covering the plight of Syrian and Iraqi refugees fleeing into Europe. Their reception has been mixed but the governments of Germany and Austria, and their people, have been extending help and kindness. I have posted three blogs in recent days on these issues: Mother Merkel and Continue reading »
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Brian McNair. News Corp and the future of public service media.
I’ve been teaching students in Hong Kong about the relationship between politics and the media, and wanted to illustrate the sometimes problematic relationship between media and power. So I showed them Robert Peston’s BBC Panorama documentary about the “industrial-scale” criminality of Rupert Murdoch’s UK red-tops in the era of Andy Coulson and Rebekkah Brooks (* Continue reading »
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John Menadue. Don’t add to the disaster.
The government is considering adding to the disaster in the Middle East by instructing the RAAF to bomb targets in Syria. Will we ever learn from our past mistakes? In supporting the US invasion of Iraq, Australia helped trigger the tragedy that is now unfolding. Perhaps a million lives have been lost and refugees are Continue reading »
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Bob Kinnaird. China FTA and binding trade treaties are undemocratic.
The China FTA and all international trade agreements are essentially undemocratic because they are ‘binding’ on all future Australian governments. They provide incumbent governments with the opportunity permanently to limit the options open to the Australian people and to tie the hands of their political opponents when they take office. Most Australians and probably some Continue reading »
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