June 26, 2024

Securing a brighter future for Australian children and families

In 1969, then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam stated, “We are all diminished when any of us are denied proper education. The nation is the poorer—a poorer economy, a poorer civilisation, because of this human and national waste.” Although Whitlam was talking about tertiary education—this was part of his policy speech when his government abolished university fees, a major reform that had hugely beneficial outcomes across the entire country and economy—his words ring even more true when applied to early childhood education and care (ECEC).

May 25, 2024

Poisonous immigration debate treats women like grazing cattle

What kind of population does Australia need? Jim Chalmers recently informed us that Australian citizens ought to have more babies. Commentators on various blogs and fora have returned to dwelling on Australia’s “ carrying capacity” as though this is a farm and we are grazing cattle. Peter Dutton, in his Budget Reply, stated his intent to cut immigration.

May 1, 2024

The Wakeley church stabbing and the dreaded ‘other’

I remember watching a timid singer walk on stage and when he opened his mouth to introduce himself, out came a French accent. The audience mewed and cooed in awe. The next contestant tenuously stepped onto the stage and started to speak. Her accent was Chinese. The audience’s reaction was completely different. Racism manifests in strange ways. Halting English from one accent gets a thumbs up but another accent – not so much. I think it’s called selective racism.

July 21, 2023

How power bleeds between politics and the big four

The Mandarin and Crikeys revolving door list: The PwC tax leak scandal has renewed focus on the close links between politicians, public servants and consultancy firms. Sometimes that relationship takes the form of a revolving door when former consultants are hired as public servants or elected to political office or when former politicians and bureaucrats are hired by the major consultancy firms.

June 4, 2023

China The Middle Kingdom

The Chinese character for China, denotes China as the middle kingdom and understandably so:

June 2, 2023

Money, influence and the orange pass

As a long-ago holder of an orange lobbyist Parliament House pass (referred to as a gold diggers pass, in contrast to the true blue pass of staffers or the yellow press pass for the press gallery), I read the latest kerfuffle about lobbying, political donations, influence peddling and political insider trading with an element of quiet resignation.

July 12, 2021

Tim I Gurung -Hongkongers should learn from how Britain treated the Gurkhas

Britains recently adopted policy to grant Hongkongers with British National (Overseas) passports a pathway to citizenship in the UK seems to be a pretty generous offer. Indeed, many Hongkongers have already taken advantage of it.

November 14, 2020

Time To Release The Magic Pudding of International Education From The Covid-19 Freezer!

International education had become the quintessential Magic Pudding that not only kept regrowing no matter how much we feasted on it, but became bigger every year! At least, until Covid-19 put it into the freezer!

October 2, 2024

Supermarket pirates: The Coles-Woolworths racket

There are few economies on the planet more concentrated in terms of vital services and markets than Australia. The players and actors are few and far between, be they in banking, insurance, supermarkets, the media or the aviation market.

September 17, 2024

A new hope

Australia can graduate from a ‘dig it up and ship it out’ quarry to a leader in the global transition to clean energy. Our vast array of minerals-in-high-demand processed with our low-cost clean energy can secure prosperity for generations of Australians.

August 22, 2024

Managing the economy: sharpening a blunt instrument

Conceptually, managing the economy is simple: if inflation is rampant, suck money out; if recession is raging, pump money in.

August 17, 2024

Climate Policy remains a dirty deal for children

The most recent Climate Analytics Report indicates that Australia is playing a major role in sustaining elevated global emissions, threatening the goals of the Paris Agreement. We have not set targets for the phase-out of fossil fuel exploration, production and export and we continue to approve new gas and coal developments. I express my dismay.

September 29, 2023

Australia: High five for government inquiries designed to avoid action

Chat GPT cant tell me which nation now has the most government inquiries running. But it says that common law countries the Five Eyes, basically tend to set up more of them than most. Australia must be high in the five.

September 7, 2023

Will Closing the Loopholes protect 'gig economy' workers?

One of the most important aspects of the governments Fair Work Amendment (Closing Loopholes) Bill is the detailed provisions covering gig workers. Those provisions account for 100 pages of the 284-page bill.

September 3, 2023

Life at 80 is not about vegetating away

Each morning that I awake and feel OK, I feel glad to be still alive.

August 20, 2023

The ABC of university governance: an evaluation

What is the ABC of university governance? Public universities are uniquely orientated as research and innovation and teaching and learning institutions and, unmistakably, are fundamentally concerned with academic governance. Therefore, the ABC of university governance comprises three key dimensions: Academic (A) governance; Business (B) governance, and Corporate (C) governance. These dimensions, respectively, focus on scholarship, performance and conformance.

August 19, 2023

The ALP can improve democratic representation

The need for major governance system change in Australia is becoming more obvious daily but this is not obvious to the party in power federally and in five states, the ALP. Therefore, it is useful to reflect on this so that more ALP members begin to encourage their politicians to act accordingly. A preparedness to act is sure to be welcomed by the voters. It would result in much more democratic representation and the end of poor policy making.

May 3, 2023

Robodebt, a failure? Depends how you look at it

The horror stories revealed by the Robodebt Royal Commission have prompted commentaries that have criticised Robodebt as an ethical or moral failure, a legal failure, a failure of common sense, a failure to apply the laws of mathematics, a failure of the hollowed-out public service and a failure of leadership. However, there is an aspect of Robodebt that was a staggering success: its vivid portrayal of the worldview of the people responsible.

February 12, 2020

MINGMING CHENG. We depend so much more on Chinese travellers now. (The Conversation 12.2.2020)

_The travel bans dramatically escalate the potential economic impact of the novel coronavirus.

September 28, 2024

Israel’s genocide in Gaza is once again exposing the lethal, planet-warming emissions of wars

One of the most graphic depictions of the environmental costs of war was when 700 of Kuwait’s oil fields were set ablaze during the first Gulf War, leaking an astounding 11 million barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf and creating a smoke plume stretching 800 kilometres. Nearly 300 oil lakes developed inland on the desert’s surface, contaminating the soils for many years.

July 12, 2024

Eyes to see

It’s easy to turn a blind eye when the victims are Other, but what if the victims are us? What does it mean to ‘face away from what it means to be human’?

April 20, 2024

The Bishop

We must always condemn violence. There must be no tolerance for brutality, and we must take action to diminish violence whether it is tied to family violence, a chronic lack of support for crucial mental health work or to sectarianism. The stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel on the weekend during his church service, days after the Bondi stabbing, demands Australia focuses on solving the causes.

September 14, 2023

Side stepping the politics of cruelty

Anyone who has spent time in a National Labor Conference will understand the way ideas, propositions, policies and platforms swirl and merge and disappear, only to reappear in a whole other form just hours later, often without anyone quite tracking the process. The most recent Conference held in Brisbane was a study in this form of political morphic resonance, particularly in relation to the demand for a royal commission into immigration detention.

September 12, 2023

A commuters rebuttal to the shuttle, or why the Bankstown metro is a mistake

There is little to celebrate in the Minns government commitment to the conversion of the Bankstown line to a metro basically a train to nowhere but high-rise hell. Opposition to it from locals and community groups was dismissed by the greedy and the aspirational as NIMBYism, but our reasons lie in its genesis, and the dishonesty and ideology that progressed it.

September 5, 2023

Australia should push for negotiated solution in South China Sea

Weve all heard the rules-based order catchphrase a lot and Australia has historically been a great supporter, championing the major international institutions at the time of their establishment.

May 15, 2023

Can Labor remain a winner simply by being less worse?

It would be a fatal mistake for Labor to think that it represents the values and aspirations of its primary constituencies. It doesnt. It is just that it misrepresents them slightly less than the coalition.

November 14, 2020

Review of the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Framework

Just two years on from the implementation of new laws to control advertising for misleading and deceptive therapeutic goods, the scheme is in tatters. Having failed to halt a wave of wrongful conduct and in the face of growing numbers of complaints the TGA has given up on systematic enforcement.

September 6, 2024

Gaza happened because we forgot Korea

History didn’t start on 7 October. True that. To get a deeper sense of why the shocking destruction in Gaza is happening, we have to revive the forgotten war that the US waged against North Korea in the 1950s. In many ways, it was the template for all that followed.

June 15, 2024

Dutton's petrostate and the global far right

It is very difficult to predict the future fortunes of the global populist nativism that has been threatening democratic projects around the world. Far-right parties continued to gain ground in the European Parliament elections. Trump is overtly embracing the authoritarian themes set out in the Project 2025 roadmap, while his Republican allies pursue extreme policy outcomes. Whether voters notice or care remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that Peter Dutton’s recent posturing exposes his deep transnational connection with that movement.

May 17, 2024

Polly Waffle policy

Some readers will remember the Polly Waffle snack bar. This favourite was a hollow crunchy biscuit tube, coated with chocolate and filled with fluffy marshmallow. After a significant break in production, the Polly Waffle has been re-introduced to the Australian market. Many of us waited with bated tastebuds to sample the resurrected Polly Waffle.

September 1, 2023

Religion and social policy network welcomes the Statement from the Heart

The Statement from the Hearts affirmation of the spiritual sovereignty of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their ancestral ties with the land is welcomed with gratitude by the Religion and Social Policy Network of the University of Divinity. RASP is humbled by the audacious generosity extended to the non-Indigenous Australian people through the forgiveness and renewed co-existence offered to us through the Statement. In the face of disproportionate levels of incarceration, the devastating alienation of children from their families, and the theft of country never ceded, we do not merit this forgiveness.

June 28, 2023

The degradation of the University

Like other large public and private sector organisations, universities have now been pervaded by the activities and influence of consultants. This represents a degradation of the social and educational role of the university as well as a determined shift towards the privatisation of knowledge.

April 8, 2023

John Kerin: Obituary from a staffer "The best policies are the best politics"

John Kerin’s contribution to the success of the Hawke-Keating government has been grievously understated and uncelebrated.

August 27, 2022

Trust in the powers that be

Remember the Cold War I years, when Capital Hill in Canberra became a huge hole, at the bottom of which was a space designated as a bomb shelter?

June 10, 2023

Day of triumph, day of shame

It was a day of triumph and a day of shame for The Age newspaper, the once-great Melbourne daily. On Friday June 2, 2023, with justifiable pride, the newspaper trumpeted its victory over the defamation suit brought by Ben Roberts Smith, VC. On the same day, the newspaper announced that it would trial a reduction in the frequency of its editorials.

April 1, 2023

NSW election: time for ODMOBS

Congratulations to the new Premier and his team. Top of the agenda is for NSW to secede from the Federation. Let the other States pay a share of the $380 billion for the submarines. Let them risk being part of AUKUS. West Australia is the wealthiest State in the nation. It can certainly carry the AUKUS costs without NSWs contribution, so its not like we dont care about the rest of the country.

November 4, 2020

Australia-China ties are at their lowest point in history, former ambassador says (ABC Nov 4, 2020)

A former Australian ambassador to China has called on the Federal Government to rethink its relationship with Beijing amid what he calls “the greatest power shift that has occurred in modern history”.

July 27, 2024

Are we missing out on the music of literature?

A reading survey of three years ago found that a quarter of Australians never read a book – or listen to one.

June 20, 2024

The 2024-25 NSW Budget - Whither the social housing crisis?

The NSW social housing system is in crisis, with more than 58,000 applicants on the waiting list. Another 90,000 households are eligible but have not applied, perhaps because they realise that the prospects of being assisted are slim.

May 18, 2024

Banned books, manifestos and a better way of reading

At last weekend’s Victorian Writers Festival three authors – two of them also bookshop owners and one of them an author and enthusiastic supporter of bookshops – talked about books and the threat to reading.

May 8, 2024

Being young is getting worse, but we are not sure why, or what it means

Ill health, perhaps especially mental ill health, is generally seen as a personal issue, requiring diagnosis and treatment. But at the population level, mental health problems have a profound message for our societies and their futures. We need to pay it more heed.

September 28, 2023

If you are proud of the Constitution, vote Yes

In 1996 I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Centenary of the 1895 Bathurst Peoples Constitutional Convention.

June 20, 2023

The ageing challenge: navigating the pandemic, technology, and identity politics

Ten years ago, I wrote a book titled In Praise of Ageing. I found there is strong evidence that our attitude to life influences our longevity. But the obstacles we face today make slouching towards Bethlehem seem like a walk in the park.

June 13, 2023

PwC, existentialism and the nation state

Now is the time for the Nation State to reassert its control over multinational entities.

April 14, 2023

Vale John Kerin: an authentic hero of our time

The first Hawke Cabinet has been described, correctly, as the most talented since Federation. As a Minister outside the Cabinet I could observe it closely.

August 25, 2024

Bangladesh on the spot

If the interim government formed after the departure of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina holds a fair election, the people will find out if political Islam is a dispensation they wish to vote for.

December 23, 2020

The public has no realistic idea of what to do about climate change and nor does the environmental-progressive movement

Yes, the public is way ahead of the government re climate change.

October 27, 2020

Morrison courts danger with his male supremacist budget

While many have described the 2020 budget as designed for men (Ross Gittins, Blokey budget reflects core values, SMH, 21 October 2020), it goes deeper than that. This budget was not crafted from thoughtlessness; its intimidating outcomes were intended.

July 7, 2023

Weekly Roundup: Linda Burney asks us to take the next step in reconciliation

Alan Finkel guides us on our national path to green energy; Linda Burney asks us to take the next step in reconciliation; and an introduction to our newly-minted National Anti-Corruption Commission. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal