July 20, 2018

KIM WINGEREI. The Naked President.

I try to refrain writing about Trump, he gets much more attention than he deserves! But the problem with Trump is not Donald Trump. The problem is not the people that elected him, nor the media that supports him. It is not the Republican party, or the support of the National Rifle Association, the Ku Klux Klan and the Koch brothers. Nor is his misogyny, disdain for truth and inability to express anything but simple - often incoherent - sound-bites or tweets what should give us the most concern. The really scary part is that nobody is standing up to him.

February 1, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. We are joined at the hip to a country perpetually at war. Part 4

Next week I will be posting articles asserting that we are running great risks in being tied to the US, an ally that is almost always at war. The risks pre-date Donald Trump. Think Vietnam and Iraq.

In recent issues of P & I, I have posted many articles about the US almost perpetual involvement in war, the overthrow of foreign governments and a powerful military and industrial complex that depends for its profitability on continuing wars.

I repost below an article by Professor Tom Nichols ‘How America lost its faith in in expertise and why that matters’ It is a disturbing account about public ignorance in the US on the world and foreign matter.

July 1, 2019

ELAINE PEARSON. What Next for Australian ISIS Suspects? Government Should Pursue Full Investigations, Fair Trials (Human Rights Watch)

The Australian government is taking an important step by helping eight Australian children of suspects of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) return home from northeast Syria. The children were held for months without charge under horrific conditions in Syrias al-Hol Camp. The youngest is two years old.

May 2, 2018

MARK KULASINGHAM. 'Malay tsunami' to decide Malaysian election.

MALAY TSUNAMI TO DECIDE MALAYSIAN ELECTION

_Next Wednesday 9 May, Malaysias fourteenth general election will take place.__I think its going to be a cracker._After speaking to Malaysians across the country I sense there is something different about this election. In previous polls, there was always a sense of resignation that the ruling coalition would cruise to victory until the stunning Opposition gains in 2008 and 2013 reduced the Governments majority to just 22 seats.

January 3, 2018

ALLAN PATIENCE. Melbournes South Sudanese youth problem and the confection of a crime gang crisis.

That there are groups of disaffected and anti-social youths of Sudanese (and other) origin in Melbourne is not in dispute. What is at issue is the way it is being handled by the yellow press and by right wing politicians.

October 21, 2019

Japan's least bad choice on North Korea (Japan Times 3-10-19)

If Japanese officials have conducted any clear-eyed, hard-headed analysis of the governments policy options on North Koreas nuclear challenge, they have managed to keep it well hidden.

November 23, 2017

GREG BAILEY. On the Importance and the Difficulty of Renewing Australian Democracy

John Menadue has offered a series of nine excellent practical proposals as to how the current two party system which has virtually assumed monopoly status as a duopolymight be converted into a multi-party system. This would seemingly reflect the real concerns of Australian voters whose voting patterns by the increasing percentage of votes going to minor parties show increasing support for a multiparty system. But can the very useful suggestion of a professional and independent review of our parliament and the democratic renewal really come to fruition and what would be needed to bring it into operation?

November 16, 2017

SOPHIE VORRATH. CBA challenged for "weakest climate policy," dirtiest investments.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia has made $6 billion worth of new loans to coal, oil and gas projects in the 20 months since committing to the Paris climate agreement, a new document has shown more than four times the amount it loaned to renewable energy projects over that period.

April 14, 2019

GEOFF HARCOURT. Sluggish Wages Growth

Recent comments on sluggish wages growth in Australia trace their origins back to the Accord introduced in the early 1980s. It is also argued that the Accord was a precursor to the introduction of the neo-liberal era in Australia. I was one of the academic pioneers of the Accord. A group of us were led by the late Eric Russell; we were backing up Ralph Williss voice crying in the wilderness arguments in political circles. Joe Isaac took a similar stance.

June 26, 2016

ALEX WODAK. Global drug prohibition and national security

Buddhists say that everything has a cause and everything has an effect. Violence, oppressed minorities, rampant corruption and failed states are both causes and effects of global drug prohibition. Serious threats to national security are an important but rarely discussed cost of drug prohibition.

October 15, 2018

DOROTHY HORSFIELD. The St Petersburg International Economic Forum. A New World Order?

_One of the most interesting aspects of this years St Petersburg International Economic Forum was__the way it undermined commonplaces about a post-Soviet Russia with an economy is on the skids as__a result of sanctions, international vilification, and its overdependence on energy sector revenues._How plausible were the Forums optimistic evocation of a new world economic order, shaped by__a Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which Russia can play an integral role?

June 21, 2018

PETER RODGERS. Israel-Palestine - Vale the two-state solution; where to now?

With the two-state solution in the morgue, governments around the globe will need to consider anew the unpalatable realities of this long-running conflict.

January 4, 2020

GEORGE MONBIOT.-There is an antidote to demagoguery its called political rewilding(The Guardian 19.12.2019)

This form of radical trust devolves power away from top-down government, often with some very unexpected results.

April 23, 2018

JIM COOMBS. Crime and Punishment: Who do we do first, the Banks (and financial advisers) or dole bludgers?

I was horrified today to hear that the coalition government this week wants to step up its pursuit of welfare cheats, a few millions of dollars chasing the poor, disabled and ignorant. Then Treasurer Scott Morrison is impelled to say, the government might gaol the execs who defrauded bank customers of what may well prove to be billions, not due to impoverishment (quite the reverse), disability (lets grab the loot) and we know its illegal (but thats business, isnt it ?) A further Memo to Kenneth Hayne: Proportionate punishment, enshrined in law, should mean that if a dole cheat manages a few thousand and gets two years, then a crook banker who engineers billions should get a life sentence. Has anyone even been charged ? Until equality before the law becomes a reality rather than a legal fiction, now we know that they knowingly engaged in systematic theft, the managers , if the principle holds, should have a severe criminal penalty imposed, and the bank should have its licence revoked, on the basis of clear breach of trust. All those shareholders who thought banks were a licence to print money ( i.e., steal), should wear the risk they took in buying the shares. Isnt that what capitalism is all about ?

January 26, 2018

MELISSA STONEHAM. Who wins when powerful health leaders align with the gambling industry?

Last November, Australian casino giant Crown Resorts announced it had appointed former Federal Health Department head Jane Halton to its board.

In the post below, Dr Melissa Stoneham laments the high profile move, asking why a health leader who had taken on the tobacco industry would now work for another industry that causes great harm to individuals and the community, and what Crown might hope to get from the appointment.

November 3, 2019

MIKE SCRAFTON. The Speech Albanese should have given

No! No! No! The headland speech given recently by Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, was just more of the tired old evidence that he doesnt get it. His are the economic and political priorities of another time when people still believed resolutely in the worth of neo-liberal economics and unfettered globalisation. It was not the bold speech for a time when the natural environment and ecological systems that sustain all of human activity are collapsing, and global warming threatens not just more and worse storms, droughts, and floods, but also climatic shifts with unpredictable consequences for, inter alia, agriculture, public health, and the viability of existing urban infrastructure.

May 30, 2019

ANTHONY PUN: The Battle of Huawei escalates with new fronts opening.

President Trump has upped the ante on the US-China trade war by opening several new fronts in the Battle of Huawei. These fronts are designed to kill Huawei off by banning Tech companies in supplying essential chip hardware. This has caused cancelling of software licences (Google Android) and non-purchase of Huawei equipment. With these new attacks, can Huawei survive? A view from the Chinese media seldom seen in the West is shown here and, in their view, Huawei will survive.

September 1, 2019

ARTYOM LUKIN. China and Russias sky-high strategy (East Asia Forum 29-8-19)

On 23 July 2019, Russian and Chinese warplanes long-range nuclear-capable bombers accompanied by fighter jets and surveillance aircraft conducted a joint patrol over the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. This marked the first ever joint air force operation by Russia and China beyond their borders.

March 21, 2019

PAUL COLLINS. Talking Heads in the Catholic Church

March 5, 2018

MARK BEESON. Can Trump be socialised into good behaviour and policymaking?

Will Donald Trump have a lasting and possibly pernicious impact on American foreign policy, or will the so-called adults in his administration educate him and change his ways?

December 14, 2017

PETER JOHNSTONE. Public relations responses to Royal Commission

The damning findings of the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in the recent reports on the Catholic dioceses of Melbourne and Ballarat seem to have elicited a standard Church response: 1. Accept critical findings; 2. Express regret to victims and families; 3. Apologise for failings of the incompetent bishop at the time; 4. Accept responsibility.

November 26, 2018

ALLAN PATIENCE: The dilemma now facing Coalition politics in Australia

The results of the Victorian State election are devastating for right-wing politics right across Australia. It is now blindingly obvious that the policies that they have been spruiking are irrelevant to mainstream voters. It is as if the Coalition parties presently exist in a parallel political universe, hermetically sealed off from the everyday opinions and needs of contemporary Australian voters. Its time for the Liberal Party leadership to understand that the party is no longer a broad church embracing liberals and so-called conservatives.

The increasingly phalangist tendencies of the alt-right rump in the party (along with their mates in the National party and News Ltd) have to be jettisoned once and for all. Moreover, its time for the political right in Australia to understand that their obsessively bullying minions in the Murdoch media are frankly impotent. Australian voters have well and truly moved on from the pugnacious pontificating that stains the reporting and analysis in most of the Murdoch outlets.

October 9, 2018

ANDREW TILLETT. Deputy PM Michael McCormack shelves inquiry into road pricing

A raft of economists have called for a road-user charge, including former Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, in his tax review, and former Productivity Chair, Peter Harris.

_[We continue to waste billions of dollars on more and more roads, but refuse to face the political hot potato of road congestion charges. John Menadue]

December 18, 2015

The Refugees and the New War.

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Ignatieff draws a link between failure of Western policy in the Middle East, it’s failure to counter ISIS and the resulting refugee flow into Europe. He says

‘ISIS wants to convince the world of the world’s indifference to the suffering of Muslims; so we should demonstrate the opposite. ISIS wants to drag Syria even further into the inferno. … The US needs to use its refugee policy to help stabilise its allies in the region. … If Europe and the US show them a way out, refugees won’t take their chances by paying smugglers using rubber dinghies.’

December 3, 2019

JOHN AUSTEN. Sydney and the mock Metro

The Sydney Metro saga continues, with renewed and still unrealistic - promises of a $20bn west Metro giving travellers a 20-minute trip from Parramatta to the CBD. Talk of this, and progress with tunnelling under the CBD, must be a welcome distraction from a Parliamentary Inquiry into part of the plan.

November 12, 2017

ANDREW GLIKSON. at 2.5 minutes to midnight, we must defend the planet

On the 27 January, 2017, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the arms of its doomsday clock to 2.5 min to midnight, the closest it has been since 1953, with enormous implications for humanity and nature. A book titled The Plutocene: Blueprints for a post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth elaborates the reasons for the decision of the Atomic Scientists.

November 9, 2018

TONY STEPHENS. 1918

Ill go to the Armistice Day service at the Balmain war memorial this November 11 because it will mark the centenary of the end of the Great War and because it will be the end of nearly five years of almost continuous remembrance. While the youthful nation of only 18 years rejoiced with good reason 100 years ago, the end of all the remembrance will be a great relief to many Australians today.

December 17, 2018

MUNGO MACCALLUM. Nightmare draws to a close.

The darkest hour, they say, is just before dawn. And it just may be that a glimmer of light is appearing in the five year nightmare of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison dynasty.

December 6, 2017

ALLAN PATIENCE. Its time for a citizens constitutional convention.

Unsurprisingly, very few Australians have any interest in their Constitution. It was designed in the closing stages of the 19th century by mostly older white men (no women were involved) for a horse and buggy era. It is an awfully dull document, originally an Act of the British parliament, intended to persuade a gaggle of recalcitrant colonies to come together into a federal compact. In contemporary Australia there is no serious educating of citizens about the extent of federal powers, the complexities of federal-state relations, whether the Constitution is truly protective of human rights, and just how adaptive it is to the challenges of the contemporary world.

January 30, 2018

HENRY SHERRELL. Assessing the effect of recent 457 visa policy changes

On 18 April 2017, the Turnbull Government announced the abolition and replacement of the 457 visa program. A number of new visa eligibility criteria were introduced immediately, and formal abolition will follow on 1 March 2018, when the 457 visa is set to be replaced by the Temporary Skilled Shortage (TSS) visa.

June 19, 2019

CRISPIN HULL. Transport policy takes us on Argentine road (Canberra Times 7 June 2019)

Transport should not be a hostage to politics and ideology, but in Australia it has been since before the rival colonies of NSW and Victoria decided to have different railway gauges in the 19 th century and it is likely to continue and get worse with the re-election of the Coalition Government.

October 12, 2018

GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND

A regular collection of links to writings and broadcasts covered in other media.

October 16, 2017

TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI. Australian Roulette: The Games our Government Plays with Asylum Seekers Lives

As the former refugee detention centre on Manus Island is closed down, asylum seekers there are being encouraged by the Australian government to volunteer for removal to Nauru. This confronts them with a pressing and terrible dilemma. Should they stay without support in the dangerous environment of Manus, or put themselves back into de facto detention in a place whose conditions have condemned as unsafe by the UNHCR? The Australian government is forcing them to gamble with their lives.

June 5, 2016

CHRIS BONNOR and BERNIE SHEPHERD. Will we really get Gonski?

So the election is in full swing and the word Gonski is once more up there in lights. You have to feel a bit sorry for David Gonski. His achievements are indeed stellar but his name has become a proxy for just one: a major review into schools.

Actually it has become a proxy for school funding and even more narrowly, a proxy for school dollars going this way or that. After Bill Shorten announced extra school funding, electorate by electorate, we now know how many Gonskis will flow and who gets them. Under Labor it seems everyone will get a Gonski.

November 21, 2019

PAUL BARRATT. Its too easy to take us to war

Where we are today is that the practice of the last twenty years has purportedly taken the power to send Australia to war away from the Governor-General and placed it at the disposal of junior ministers in the Defence portfolio. This cannot be allowed to stand. The war powers must be relocated to the Australian parliament.

May 1, 2018

RICHARD BROINOWSKI. Iran on the ground

Iran continues to be stereotyped in western media as a rogue state full of corrupt mullahs ,an abuser of human rights, an exporter of Islamic terrorism to Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip and Yemen, and an extremist theocracy with territorial and nuclear ambitions on a collision course with Saudi Arabia, Israel and their backer, the United States .

A three-week tour of the country in April 2018 by the Australian Institute of International Affairs provided a much needed reality check, and an update on a country first observed by this writer as a young Australian diplomat during the Shah’s time in 1971-73.

November 28, 2019

Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness Oct/Nov 2019

This is a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness with hypertext links to the relevant source.

November 28, 2019

Sunup in Sawojajar

Expat blogs praise the joys of living in Bali. A low-cost paradise, they say. Sundowners with fellow retirees while a maid (a real treasure) prepares dinner and our gardener trims the lawn. Good time to bitch about deemed interest rates on pensions. Below the green paddy, the cheerful reapers. This is Indonesia. So is East Java, though unalike Bali on every measure. A peek next door.

August 14, 2019

AMITAV ACHARYA. Why ASEANs Indo-Pacific outlook matters (East Asia Forum 8-11-19)

After more than a year of deliberation, ASEAN adopted the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific (the Outlook) on 23 June 2019. The Outlook then got an airing at the ASEAN Regional Forum meetings in Bangkok. The Outlook document provides a guide for ASEANs engagement in the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean regions and resembles an Indonesian-conceived plan.

June 29, 2019

PETER SAINSBURY. Sunday environmental round up, 30 June 2019

In the USA young people are trying to lodge a legal case against the federal government for failing to protect their constitutional rights, and health professionals are supporting them strongly. Indeed, frustrated at government inaction, health people are getting increasingly active on climate change worldwide. The inaction is well exemplified at current inter-governmental meetings in Bonn and Osaka. Bill McKibben presents a nuanced view of the US militarys contributions to climate change, and a video of life for coastal communities in Senegal graphically displays the difficulties they are facing daily.

December 21, 2019

OECD Says 3 in 4 Australian Students Do Not Try on PISA Tests

The hand-wringing over the continuing decline in Australias PISA results misses the issue of whether students try their best on the tests. The OECDs report on PISA 2018 shows that about three in four Australian students and two-thirds of students in OECD countries did not try their hardest on the tests. There are also wide differences between countries. It has potentially explosive implications for the validity of international comparisons of student achievement based on PISA.

November 30, 2017

DAVID WATTERS AND COLLEAGUES. An open letter to the Australian Parliament regarding the health of asylum seekers and refugees on Manus Island

(The following letter appeared in the MJA Insight on 27 November 2017)

WE are senior Australian clinicians who write in our individual capacity to express our concerns about the ongoing health and well-being of the former detainees still based on Manus Island and now in alternative accommodation. They, like all human beings, have a universal right enshrined in the United Nations charter to health and well-being. Their political and citizenship status should not affect this right. All politicians regardless of their political party should respect the human right to health and themselves be strong advocates of health for all without discrimination.

February 18, 2019

MOBO GAO. The Chinese United Front Strategy: Its History and Present.

Amidst the fear of political interference of the Chinese government there is often a reference to one organ of the Chinese State, i.e., the United Front (UF). In some Australian news stories about the China, UF is sometimes dangled to the unsuspecting Australian public as an all-purpose threat in the same way the Red under the Bed was used to scare the living daylight out of a fearful child. Asa recent story in the Sydney Morning Herald shows, suggesting a whiff of connection with the UF on the part of both Chinese diasporic members and Australian politicians could justify as a legitimate angle for a news story. But what is UF, how did it come into being, and is it really a threat to Australian democracy? A better understanding of the UF (not UFO!) might be helpful.

January 20, 2016

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 other people are always more than our categories can capture. Second, faces confront us directly and immediately. Thirdly, hospitality involves curtailing our enjoyment of the world when confronted with another’s wants.

July 13, 2016

JOHN MENADUE. Road funding - what is going on.

Road funding is becoming a mess with quite serious misunderstandings of what is being spent and how much is being wasted. The benefits are of increasing doubt.

In this blog I carried a post by John Austen ‘Road spending incurs billion dollar new debts annually’. He pointed out that in 2013-14, we spent $5 billion more on roads than was raised in road revenue. He described how the Australian Automobile Association keeps adding into ‘road revenue’ other vehicle related taxation that is really general tax revenue - GST from motorists, fringe benefits tax, luxury car tax and passenger motor vehicle customs duty.

October 15, 2018

RICHARD ECKERSLY. Getting to the heart of democracys decline.

The crisis in democracy is much discussed these days, but almost entirely in political terms that ignore its deeper causes. In this sense, the mainstream news media can be considered enemies of the people, peddling fake news.

February 17, 2019

JACK WATERFORD. The silence of public service lambs used by a panicking government. (Canberra Times 16.2.2019)

One can take it as read that public servants do not like being used and abused by ministers, and verballed for partisan political purposes. Particularly when an election is due and the indications are that a new lot of ministers will soon be in charge.

_But public service leaders of gumption and character are supposed to have defences and protections against such ill-use. The failure of some to invoke them invites questions about their fearlessness and their independence.

April 19, 2016

Brian Lawrence. Bracket creep and income tax priorities in the May 2016 Budget

The May 2016 Budget will frame a political narrative about rising average incomes over recent years and the budgetary measures that will ensure that the trend will continue in the next year and beyond. This will occur despite the impact of cuts in Government expenditure over a range of services and cash benefits.

There are two past Budget documents that summarise this kind of narrative in average living standards over the past two decades:

May 11, 2019

PETER SAINSBURY. Sunday environmental round up, 12 May 2019

A new petrochemical and plastics hub is being developed in the USA based on locally mined unconventional gas, while the carbon dioxide produced by Australias exports of coal and natural gas greatly exceed our domestic carbon dioxide emissions. In better news, authors of a recent scientific paper have looked at climate change and loss of biodiversity together and come with proposals that will benefit both.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal