May 5, 2020

Sound the Trumpists: The deputy sheriff rides again Part Three: Goading the dragon

Cockwomblette: A neologism coined to describe the lesser antipodean cousin of the cockwomble (see Mondays Part One). Its natural habitat is the bush capital of the world; the inheritor of an obsequious line of deputy sheriffs.

February 1, 2018

Shorten hails cheap wind and solar, but will he stop Adani

You would have missed it, if you were relying on mainstream media, but Labor leader Bill Shorten did actually mention clean energy and climate policies in his scene-setting speech for 2018, which may well turn out to be an election year.

July 4, 2019

Christopher Pyne: Consultancy as government

The sudden elevation of Christopher Pyne formerly Minister for Defence Industries to defence consultant with Ernst & Young may have taken some people by surprise. Surely, though, it was always on the cards, especially since he retired from parliament at a relatively young age of 51 and with a pre-election likelihood of not being returned as the member for Sturt. However, his appointment points directly to wider developments in the politico-economic culture of this and other countries.

October 1, 2018

PAUL BONGIORNO. No Friend But The Mountains

When John Minns asked me to help launch No Friend But The Mountains in Canberra I was honoured, because I was aware of Behrouz Boochanis journalistic work in The Saturday Paper. Now that I have read the book I am humiliated.

October 10, 2019

MICHAEL MULLINS. The role of ordinary Catholics in clerical sex abuse

NZ bishop Charles Drennan was forced to resign after a young woman complained about his sexual behaviour towards her. The #MeToo movement has forced a reckoning about the imbalance of power between clerics and lay Catholics. This is a major cause of clerical sex abuse. Recently Cardinal John Dew encouraged the NZ ‘faithful’ to call him by his first name, as an antidote to clericalism. But many baulked at the idea. This suggests the actual source of clerical abuse could be ordinary Catholics playing into the clergy’s hands with a self-deprecating ‘Yes Father’ attitude.

December 19, 2017

HUGH MACKAY. Another kind of deficit

Heres a quick Christmas quiz. (Warning: its not a very merry quiz.)

February 5, 2018

MUNGO MacCALLUM. Merchants of death

Australian government has in recent years, become debased opportunist, secretive, poll-driven, fixated on short term political gain and unwilling to engage in serious issues when (as is always) they interfere with its internal wranglings. It has been depressing and demoralising, and the public has responded by branding our parliamentarians a bunch of untrustworthy go-getters, obsessed with their own well-being rather than the public good.

December 10, 2017

BRIAN TOOHEY. The US doesn't need Asia

The US doesnt need to be the dominant power in Asia to maintain its own national security. No amount of wishful thinking can negate this key insight from Hugh White, a leading professor of strategic studies, about the governments latest foreign policy White Paper.

October 20, 2016

MICHAEL KEATING. Superannuation Tax Concessions

Almost everyone agrees that Budget repair will only be possible if both the revenue side of the Budget is reviewed as well as the expenditure side. In that context, the tax concessions for superannuation have loomed as a prime target.

Indeed, the Treasury Statement of Tax Expenditures shows that the annual cost of the present superannuation concessions is almost $30 billion and rising. Furthermore, it appears that 37 per cent of the total value of these concessions flows to people in the top decile of the income distribution.

February 13, 2018

ALAN GYNGELL. The management of Australias engagement with China is the most important issue in Australian foreign relations.

In 2016, Australias bilateral trade with China in goods and services topped AU$155 billion (US$122 billion), growing three times faster than world trade as a whole. China was Australias largest export market and largest source of imports. It was also the largest source of foreign investment for the third consecutive year.

December 28, 2018

ANDREW GLIKSON. The ABC 2018 year-roundup and the defining issue of our time.

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil - God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The ABC 2018 year wrap-up included a few seconds of David Attenboroughs science-based warning to humanity of an impending global climate catastrophe (https://www.her.ie/news/david-attenborough-appealing-help-defining-issue-time-438220), as well as a few seconds of the California and Queensland fires. Otherwise, the program was dominated by sports events, ABC domestic affairs, politicians personal scandals, the Royals and a sprinkle of global events, mostly given longer time slots.

June 15, 2018

ELAINE PEARSON. Australia's Government must guard against foreign interference, but not by curbing our rights.

Authoritarian governments around the world use broadly drafted national security laws to silence human rights defenders, journalists, bloggers, and critics of the government. Australia should not join them by passing a revised espionage and foreign interference law that excludes safeguards for legitimate disclosures in the public interest.

August 10, 2018

Q&A with Michael Dillon: History and Indigenous Policy

In this Q&A, former senior bureaucrat Michael Dillon offers some very thoughtful insights into the last several decades of Indigenous policy-making and the role of historical knowledge in the policy process.

November 17, 2019

LIONEL ORCHARD. Home Ownership, Social Housing and Progressive Housing Policy for Changing Times

The foundations of a balanced and equitable housing system in Australia have been corroding for some time to a point where ways forward are becoming more vexed. Questions about how to respond are difficult because of the legacy of neglect over recent times and changing economic and social conditions making for greater complexity in delivering effective policies.

October 28, 2018

JEFFREY D SACHS. Killer politicians: Curtain of deniability lifting (Asia Times 25.10.2018)

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest? asked Henry II as he instigated the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. Down through the ages, presidents and princes around the world have been murderers and accessories to murder, as the great Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin and Walter Lunden documented in statistical detail in their master workPower and Morality.

_One of theirmain findingswas that the behavior of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and amoral than that of the people over whom they rule.

November 27, 2018

JOSEPH CAMILLERI. The seismic shift we can no longer ignore

The acute tensions that disrupted the recent APEC summit, the Brexit fiasco in Britain, the rise of populist discourse and movements in much of Europe, the theatre of the grotesque in Trumps America, are just a few of the symptoms of the seismic shift that has been in the making for over three decades. It is a shift which political leaders, not least in Australia, seem scarcely able to comprehend, let alone address.

April 26, 2018

TIM COLEBATCH. Why is unemployment still so high?

In the first three months of this year, the official jobs figures tell us, 400,000 more people were in work in Australia than a ear earlier. And roughly 300,000 of them were in full-time work.

July 9, 2019

CAI FANG. A trade war will only hasten Chinas structural reforms (East Asia Forum)

On 22 March 2018, the United States, invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act, increased tariffs on imported goods from China. Since then, the trade war has severely harmed both the Chinese and US economies. Yet despite 11 rounds of high-level negotiations between the two sides, the Trump administration has continued to escalate the trade conflict. The result has been an increase in tariffs on Chinese imports from 10 per cent to 25 per cent on 10 May 2019. China certainly did not want a trade war, it was launched unilaterally by the United States. But China was prepared for its escalation.

December 21, 2017

JOHN AUSTEN: What will it take to kick off a serious enquiry into the Sydney transport mess?

While readers relax over the Christmas break, Commonwealth advisers and politicians should be asking about the Sydney infrastructure mess.

October 16, 2019

International Alternatives to Morrison's Crass Views on Sovereignty

While in Washington, the Prime Minister witnessed President Trump speaking about nationalism, patriotism, the treason of traitors and the irrelevance of international treaties, his latest flag waving endorsement of American sovereignty as the entitlement to do what it likes.

January 30, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. we are joined at the hip to a country perpetually at war. Part 2

Next week I will be posting articles asserting that we are running great risks in being tied to what Malcolm Fraser called our ‘dangerous ally’, an ally almost always at war.. The risks, disasters and dangers pre date Donald Trump. Think Vietnam and Iraq.

In recent issues of Pearls and Irritations I have posted many articles about how America has never ever really had a decade of peace.how it has subverted and overthrown numerous governments and has a large military,business,intelligence and political complex that depends on never ending wars.

Following the repost yesterday of an article by Andrew Bacevich I post below an earlier article by Jeffrey Sachs . THE FATAL EXPENSE OF US IMPERIALISM. Sachs argues that the scale of US military operations is remarkable and that the US has used force to influence who governs in dozens of countries.

JEFFREY SACHS WRITES The scale of US military operations is remarkable. The US Department of Defense has (as of a 2010 inventory) 4,999 military facilities, of which 4,249 are in the United States; 88 are in overseas US territories; and 662 are in 36 foreign countries and foreign territories, in all regions of the world. Not counted in this list are the secret facilities of the US intelligence agencies. The cost of running these military operations and the wars they support is extraordinary, around $900 billion per year, or 5 percent of US national income, when one adds the budgets of the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, homeland security, nuclear weapons programs in the Department of Energy, and veterans benefits. The $900 billion in annual spending is roughly one-quarter of all federal government outlays.

April 18, 2016

Laurie Patton. Generalists and specialists in the Australian public service.

Why the theory of empty spaces hurts public sector performance

The other day I was talking to a friend who recently retired from the public service. After a career lifetime of studied discretion he now wears as a badge of honour his entitlement to express independent views. Many of these are critical of the processes that played a pivotal part in his rise to a very senior posting. I have a number of colleagues who are now ex-job, having also held extremely high level public service roles. I enjoy hearing about their work experiences more now that they are unencumbered by ambition than was ever possible as they climbed the greasy pole.

August 19, 2019

CHRISTOPHER ALTIERI. Rarely has a Vatican official spoken so bluntly on abuse.

As Spring 2019 turned into summer, journalists, media relations professionals and communications experts gathered for four days in St Petersburg, Florida, to take part in the annual Catholic Media Conference. The event, sponsored by the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada, included a talk by the head of the disciplinary section in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), Mgr John Kennedy.

November 1, 2017

JIM COOMBS. Doing right by our First Peoples needs a little understanding but a LOT MORE RESPECT.

As my Dad, Nugget Coombs, said in his Boyer Lectures years ago, though still ringing true, we are all demeaned by our treatment of our aboriginal people. Even back then, he implored our leaders to consult with, listen to and empower our first peoples to have not just some say, but some control over their destiny.

February 15, 2018

Closing the health gap - ten years on

Warning signs were emerging many decades before, but by the early part of this century it was obvious that the health of indigenous Australians was much worse than that of other citizens. Indicators such as high infant mortality, widespread malnutrition and infections in children, much shortened life expectancy, high rates of chronic diseases and disabilities, mental illnesses, Alzheimers disease, drug- and alcohol-related disorders, suicide and homicide, were all very unfavourable when indigenous and other Australians were compared.

October 1, 2018

JOHN GOSS. Health care is getting cheaper (unless you need a specialist, or a dentist) (the Conversation, 28.09.18)

Public and private health expenditure amounted to 10.3% of gross domestic product in 2016-17, almost exactly the same percentage as in 2015-16, according to figures released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

January 10, 2019

JOHN MENADUE. The Best of 2018: Why dental care was excluded from Medicare and why it should now be included.

In 1974, the Whitlam Government decided to exclude dental care from Medicare for two reasons. The first was cost. The second was political in that Gough Whitlam felt that combatting the doctors would be hard enough without having to combat dentists as well.

Forty-four years later, with Australia much richer and the proven success of Medicare, it is now time for dental care to be progressively included in Medicare.

February 18, 2016

John Menadue. Hoist with their own petard

Private health insurance funds like NIB are complaining about high specialist fees. But these very same funds are major contributors to the problem. And it is a problem. In the last 30 years we have seen a dramatic increase in specialist fees.

A major contributor to this increase in specialist fees is the gap insurance that private health insurance firms offer. Gap insurance effectively underwrites specialists ability to increase fees and weakens Medicares ability to cap fees. In the AFR today, NIB gives two examples of how this is done. For prostatectomy (surgical removal of prostate) the Medicare Benefit Schedule Price is $1,939, but with gap insurance NIB offers to cover this up to $2,941. For knee replacements, the Medicare Benefit Schedule Price is $1,318, but with gap insurance NIB offers to cover this up to $2,014.

May 29, 2020

SUE WAREHAM. Roadmaps on the two biggest threats ready to go

Our security lies in our capacity to work together for the common good, rather than in weapons that terrify other humans. Roadmaps to address our two biggest threats, nuclear weapons and climate change, are ready to go. Were not waiting for a vaccine, but simply for governments, including our own, to learn that increasingly alarming warnings require urgent action.

April 11, 2019

RONNIE KASRILS. I fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel.

As a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist I look with horror on the far-right shift in Israel ahead of this months elections, and the impact in the Palestinian territories and worldwide.

May 29, 2020

GEORGE BROWNING. Australias two personalities-pandemic and climate change

In recent domestic policy and international engagement Australia is demonstrating two contrasting personalities. One is demonstrated through our response to COVID 19 and the other through our troubled inability to form responsible climate and energy policy. Why do we have two personalities?

April 21, 2019

MASSIMO FAGGIOLI. Benedicts Untimely Meditation. How His Essay on Sex Abuse is Being Weaponized

On the evening of April 10, six weeks after the conclusion of the Vaticans summit on the sex-abuse crisis, the pope emeritus, Benedict XVI, made known his thoughts on the genesis of that crisis in a five-thousand-plus-word essay sent to a periodical for Bavarian priests, quickly translated into English, and then diffused online by Catholic websites known for their hostility to Pope Francis.

December 28, 2018

PETER MANNING. The Best of 2018: Public trust and the ABC, a landmine for Turnbull.

Its a long-time ago now but in the early 1990s, just after Id finished my stint as head of ABC TV News and Current Affairs (and having a blue with first Bob Hawke and then David Hill over ABC TV coverage of the first Iraq war), I took over as General Manager of the ABCs Radio National.

April 12, 2018

STEPHANIE DOWRICK. Taxing questions

The duty of any government to keep its citizens safe is apparently taken very seriously in this nation of ours. It justifies the existence of the largest department over which this government presides and gives Peter Dutton, the Minister for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, unprecedented powers with a seemingly unlimited budget. But with the latest revelations of the ways in which the Governments principal revenue collection agency, the Australian Taxation Office, is said to be hounding some very small companies and far-from-rich individuals, while failing to bring into line some very large companies apparently paying little or no tax, we are entitled to ask how meaningful this safety really is. Are these social justice issues more even than economic ones? And what do they say about contemporary Australia?

February 27, 2019

JOHN MENADUE. Hospitals should be the last resort, not the first resort.

Politicians, the media and the public focus on iconic hospitals rather than health. We have too many hospitals and too many hospital beds. We need to focus health improvement not in hospitals, but in primary care in the community general practice, community clinics and at home. The expensive and wasteful hospital frenzy must end.

June 15, 2018

KARL HOWARD. The importance of community .

Communities are a fundamental requirement for the human condition; they consist of a group of people with shared interests, similar attitudes - often with aligned social values -resulting in delegated responsibilities. A community is a product of independent actors joining together, operating in a specific habitat, whether a neighbourhood, a gym, a workplace, or a place of worship. The single key tenet is that collective identity enriches the experience of each and every person, the members of that community.

November 14, 2019

TONY SMITH. The short sighted politicians dividing the nation.

The first speeches of most federal and state parliamentarians (MPs) are idealistic. Some MPs stick to these principles. Others do not. An aim commonly stated by MPs is to represent all the people in their electorates, whether they voted for the MP or not. Unfortunately, some MPs abandon this principle thinking there is political advantage in fomenting division. A swag of current Nationals display this unstatesmanlike behaviour.

March 12, 2019

JOHN WARHURST. Why I am not leaving the Catholic Church

Not only am I not leaving the Catholic church, but I am redoubling my efforts to join with others in making the case for much needed reforms. At heart I believe it is an institution worth working within to improve because it does way more good than harm in Australian society. For me the church is both a community and a formal institution. The twin crises of child sexual abuse and leadership failure by covering it up have certainly shaken my faith in the formal institution part. But while that has been happening my spiritual and social life within the broader Catholic community has remained strong.

January 3, 2018

CAVAN HOGUE. The ambassadorial minnow and the whale.

Australian angst about the failure of the US to send an ambassador to Australia reflects the nature of our relationship. Tim Fischer is right to see it as an insult but it should not surprise us.

November 14, 2017

PAUL FRIJTERS. Advance Australia Fair: ignore the other national histories on offer.

National history is the story that binds us who make up the nation into a single entity with a collective memory. It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current contenders for our national history, I think we should pick Advance Australia Fair as the only truly useful one.

November 25, 2019

GREG BAILEY. Climate Change Politics in Theory and Practice (2). The ALP

Arguably the ALP since its election loss in 2013 has not been able to legislate for climate change mitigation though it was able to make some contribution when the National Energy Guarantee was proposed in 2017only to be defeated by the right of the LNP. However, It had played a significant role in its genesis, in part because it was a COAG development involving some state Labor energy ministers. When it was in office from 2007-2013 its efforts in developing a carbon tax gave us a taste of what might have been.

May 20, 2019

WILLIAM BRIGGS And So Unto Dust ...

Amid all the hand-wringing, wailing and gnashing of teeth in the aftermath of the election, it might be wise to reflect on some possibly painful little truths pertaining to the process and indeed legitimacy of the entire electoral system.

May 26, 2019

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES IN AUSTRALIA. May 21, 2019 Media release on Manus and Nauru asylum seekers.

Marking this time of new beginning, we urge the newly elected Federal Government and Prime Minister Scott Morrison to resolve the plight of the 1000+ refugees in Manus and Nauru, some of whom are now in Australia. Let them settle here.

February 15, 2016

John Thompson. Fiona Nash and private health insurance for rural Australians

A few nights ago on Q&A, the Minister for Rural Health, Fiona Nash, undertook to drop out of private health insurance while she was in office. Ms Nash lives in Crowther, a small town about midway between Wagga Wagga and Bathurst. Foregoing private health insurance makes a lot of sense for her because, like most rural and regional people, she pays a large amount to private insurers and has very limited access to private hospitals and related private services in her area.

February 25, 2018

GARRY WOODARD. The role of strategic ambiguity in Australia's China Policy

For half a century, strategic ambiguity about the application of ANZUS to Taiwan served Australia well. Is it time to apply this policy more broadly?

October 14, 2019

MIKE SCRAFTON. The shallowness of Australia's strategic policy

Two largely neglected issues highlight the paucity of Australias strategic policy; energy and global warming

October 15, 2019

CHARLES LIVINGSTONE. Guns and money: How the pokies' proponents channel the NRA image (Monash University 8-10-19)

Whenever Australians learn of a mass shooting in the US, we tend to feel relieved and maybe a little smug that our political leaders were sensible enough to restrict gun ownership after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

March 5, 2018

STEPHEN LEEDER. Two roads converge in a yellow wood

Two roads converge in a yellow wood when it comes to preventing obesity blaming the victim (eat less sugar, exercise more, you lazy sloth) and thinking that if we focus on children all will be well. Follow either and you will end up in the same sulphurous place lost.

November 12, 2017

MUNGO MACCALLUM. Bizarre 'No' campaign still trying to grab the controls

Simon Birmingham and other exasperated colleagues are quite right: it is bizarre and dishonest in the extreme for those who have spent the last months - years even - implacably opposing same sex marriage to now demand the right to determine how it is to be implemented, assuming the interminable plebiscite get a majority this week.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal