June 7, 2016

JOHN AUSTEN and LUKE FRASER. Urbane transport policy. Part 3 of 3

This article is the third in a series about transport. The first two dealt with topics raised by the Prime Minister; mass transit, 30-minute cities etc and noted some challenges for the Commonwealth.[i]

Urbane Transport policy. Part 1 of 3

Urbane transport policy. Part 2 of 3

The articles draw on public information - the basis for the community trust necessary for effective democracy. Unfortunately, some information has reduced trust. Restoring that trust begins with the top tier of Australian government - the Commonwealth - and depends on how a future Government approaches land transport.

June 6, 2013

Doctors scared Maggie Thatcher. John Menadue

Excuse me for dropping names but at a round table discussion with Maggie Thatcher in the late 1980s that I attended in Sydney she was asked “Now that you have fixed the work practices of the miners and the printers in the United Kingdom what are you going to do about the restrictive work practices of the doctors?” She replied. “I will leave that to the last session in my last term as Prime Minister” She never got around to it. And neither have we in Australia.

April 2, 2014

Mack Williams. Abbot's visit to Korea not all about trade!

As Tony Abbott’s first time to South Korea (ROK) as Prime Minister this visit carries much more importance than the mercantilist hype in which it has been cloaked. It will certainly will be seen through a much larger prism by his hosts – and their brothers across the border. The Korean peninsular is of fundamental strategic importance to Australia as the only place in the world where the national interests of the all major powers intersect and the potential for conflict remains so high. The mozaic of all these interests is extremely complex, demanding close and continuing interest of the highest order and very sensitive management on our part - as the Prime Minister and his team should have learned from the instant and robust reaction not only from China but also the ROK to his incautious remarks about Japan being Australia’s best friend in the region. This visit offers him the opportunity to appreciate this kaleidoscope of challenges at first hand.

December 21, 2015

Laurie Patton. Data Retention: How not to introduce complex legislation.

One of my first tasks shortly after joining Internet Australia (nee ISOC-AU) was to front the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS). Our appearance at the hearing into the (Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015) came at the end of a long day of mostly opposing submissions.

With our president and the head of our policy committee sitting beside me I boldly told the committee that the Data Retention Bill was “fundamentally flawed” and had clearly been drafted by lawyers who didn’t understand how the Internet actually works. How prescient those comments have proven to have been.

April 3, 2014

Kieran Tapsell. Facing prejudice.

Piedad Bonnett, El Espectador, Colombia 5 November 2013 http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/una-injusticia-historica-columna-466919

Summary: Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the German enigma code in the Second World War. He was subsequently convicted of the crime of homosexuality, and given a choice of being chemically castrated or imprisoned. He chose the former and then committed suicide. The Queen has recently “pardoned” him posthumously.

When, in 1952, the British mathematician, Alan Turing was threatened with choosing prison or oestrogen treatment to “cure” his homosexuality, the freethinking atheist, who openly admitted his sexual preferences to investigating police, risking public derision, chose what was in effect chemical castration that left him impotent, deformed his body and caused him serious psychiatric problems.

November 21, 2015

John Menadue. Minimising IS will take a while.

We have had a lot of apocalyptic talk about IS – we are at war, it is a death cult, it threatens civilisation. Unfortunately these exaggerations don’t help a measured and holistic response. These exaggerations play into the hands of terrorists who hope for our over-reaction and the promotion of fear.

We know from experience that terrorism ebbs and flows over the years in intensity. We must be ready for the long haul.

April 14, 2014

Simon Rice. Racial vilification, social values and humility

I have spent a professional lifetime trying to get people to know about (let alone respect) anti-discrimination law, and suddenly everyone knows about ‘ section 18C’. For all the wrong reasons.

A right reason for knowing about 18C would be because it is offers guidance on what can fairly be said and done on the basis of race. A wrong reason would be because it is characterised as an unwarranted limit on ‘free speech’.

November 26, 2013

China's new rules. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

China’s unilateral declaration of an “air defense identification zone” in the East China Sea is the most serious escalation of its territorial dispute with Japan since the large-scale mob attacks on Japanese property in China just over a year ago.

China’s Ministry of National Defense has declared that as of two days ago new rules govern the entry of aircraft into the vast zone that encompasses the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands, with all over-flights now requiring prior notification.

December 21, 2015

Laurie Patton. Malcolm Turnbull: NBN killer?

The ABC Online News headline on the 14th of September 2010 was pretty blunt: “Abbott orders Turnbull to demolish NBN”. In the article itself then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is quoted as saying: “The Government is going to invest $43 billion worth of hard-earned money in what I believe is going to turn out to be a white elephant on a massive scale”.

Fast forward five years and the cost of the Coalition’s NBN is now put at $46-56 billion, with many experts maintaining that this significantly understates the likely real cost. Confusion and disagreement reign as to how long it will take to complete our much needed broadband rollout.

May 28, 2013

Fear and Trust. Guest blogger: Michael Kelly SJ

It was Arthur Augustus Calwell, Federal Leader of the Australian Labor Party before Gough Whitlam, who believed that fear was the most potent political weapon. He ought to know: he lost three elections because of it.

The political correlative to fear is another emotion – the appeal to “trust me”. Creating or eroding trust is the common task and challenge of individuals and institutions in Australia, home to the most testing and suspicious populace in the world.

May 14, 2014

John Menadue. The Budget: Robin Hood in reverse.

There was a real risk that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey believed their windy rhetoric of the last two years about debt and deficits. Having won the election they have had to face the reality that they have been grossly exaggerating our economic problems.

The real risk was that Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey would act on their own exaggerations and savagely attack the economy. Fortunately, the Budget tells a very different story. In terms of managing the macro-economy, the government has got it about right in the budget. It hasn’t cracked down in the way many feared.

December 19, 2016

ROSS BURNS. After Aleppo.

The international community remains hopelessly divided and in many cases incapable of assessing the real dynamics of the conflict in the face of its gut-wrenching humanitarian dimensions.

September 30, 2016

GILES PARKINSON. Uhlmann’s bizarre prediction of “national blackout” if we pursue wind and solar

The ABC is supposed to have a ban on advertising. But even if it was allowed, money couldn’t buy the sort of advocacy the fossil fuel industry and incumbent energy interests are receiving this week from the network’s chief political correspondent, Chris Uhlmann.

On Thursday, we took Uhlmann to task for the way he reported the blackout event in South Australia, and his suggestion that the state’s large portfolio of wind energy assets were at fault.

Later that day, Uhlmann doubled down, in an article on the ABC website, and then on a major piece to camera on the flagship 7pm TV news. The result, presented as “analysis” and to the layman as a collection of “facts”, was more than the fossil fuel industry could ever wish for.

October 31, 2016

Royal family are even more secretive than MI5.

Jenny Hocking has been researching and publishing some vital information about the dismissal of the Whitlam Government by Sir John Kerr . In that research, she has been denied access to the papers. She is taking legal action in the Federal Court against the National Archives to release correspondence between Sir John Kerr and the Queen. (See ‘ The Palace Letters’)

In The Times, Ben MacIntyre writes about the secretive nature of the British Royal Family. See his article below from The London Times of October 28, 2016. John Menadue.

September 26, 2013

Is it class warfare or an appeal for fairness? John Menadue

It depends on your point of view. Conservatives and the wealthy often see attacks on their privileged position as class war. Others see it as the pursuit of justice and fairness.

Let’s look at some who have recently spoken about class warfare.

Andrew Forrest said that the Mining Super Profits Tax was class warfare.
Christopher Pyne said that asking privately funded schools to reveal financial details was class warfare.
The education activist, Kevin Donnelly said that the Gonski Report was class warfare.
Some business representatives have described the new Fair Work Act as class warfare.
Both Mathias Cormann, and journalist Robert Gottliebsen, described government reforms to reduce tax concessions for high income earners as class warfare.
Peter Dutton, the new Minister for Health said that reducing the tax concessions for high income earners in private health insurance was class warfare.
Piers Akerman said that the government’s attempt to reduce abuse under the Medicare Chronic Disease Dental Scheme was class warfare.

But some senior ALP members have also joined in the fray.

July 12, 2013

Tony Abbott - one-liners won't work. John Menadue

Sorry if I keep repeating myself, but Tony Abbott keeps repeating his one-liners about stopping the boats. He provides little explanation about how or why his policies will work today.

He tells us that John Howard’s policy stopped the boats and he will do the same. But John Howard’s approach was over a decade ago. Since then the situation has dramatically changed.

Certainly under John Howard the boats did largely stop, although asylum seekers continued to arrive by air at the rate of about 4,000 persons per annum. Furthermore if we look at the broader picture of asylum seekers around the world at that time we see that the number of asylum seekers fell between 2001 and 2004 as a result of a more peaceful Afghanistan and Iraq. Boat arrivals started arriving again from 2004, mainly because of the state of emergency declared in Sri Lanka and then the withdrawal of the Sri Lankan government from the cease-fire with the Tamil Tigers.

April 19, 2016

Mark Gregory. What the government doesn’t want you to know about the NBN

The Coalition’s National Broadband Network (NBN) plan is in trouble and the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull should heed the mounting calls for Coalition NBN plan to be dropped before the nation’s digital future is harmed irreparably.

In June it will be three years since Turnbull, as Minister for Communications, launched the Coalition’s NBN plan, extolled its benefits and introduced the slick, catchy and ultimately misleading slogan “Fast, Affordable and Sooner”.

October 3, 2015

Ranald Macdonald. The ABC and a Call to Arms.

A CALL TO ARMS –Why this Country needs you to act. That is the title to my talk today and my exhortation to you all.

The latest figures show over 400 ABC staff already “removed” from the ABC, as we edge towards its 500 target.

The recent change in Prime Minister-ship has NOT changed expectations at the ABC or at SBS. The situation continues to be dire. I will try and explain why.

October 2, 2015

Frank Brennan. Border control gulags have had their time

What are the chances of Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten agreeing by Christmas that it’s time to close the refugee processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island? Turnbull and Shorten already agree that the boats coming from Indonesia should be stopped. The boats are now being stopped, if need be, with turnbacks, which neither side of politics now questions.

Now that the boats have been stopped and will remain stopped no matter who is in government, there is no reason to maintain the facilities on Nauru and Manus Island. The conditions in these facilities are not only harsh, they are cruel. These facilities no longer serve any useful purpose. They cost a fortune. They are wreaking havoc with the local community as well as with the traumatised detainees. They have outlived their intended purpose. They are gulags which rightly tarnish Australia’s reputation.

January 13, 2016

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 health care expenditure.

Perhaps that’s an overstatement, but the point made by Swan and by most of the ten other clinical experts who appeared on the program is that we just don’t know how much waste there is in health care because we lack the processes for evaluating the effectiveness of various interventions.

September 7, 2015

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 have been referring to another conservative leader, our own Tony Abbott.

His cabinet this week is expected to approve what he reportedly is keen for, namely to extend Australia’s involvement in Iraq to the Syrian battlefield. This would mean joining a small US-led coalition force of air power targeting Islamic State (IS) or Daesh, as Mr Abbott calls it. It fits in well with his frequent mantra about anything related to national security, no matter how far away it is.

June 13, 2015

Robert Manne. Human Rights Commission and Gillian Triggs.

Current Affairs

The Australian government and The Australian are at it again, attacking Gillian Triggs. I re-post below an article by Robert Manne from earlier this year. John Menadue

Readers of John Menadue’s blog will be aware that a vile attack is at present being launched against both the Human Rights Commission and its President, Professor Gillian Triggs.

The Australian has been the media orchestrator of the campaign, led by its editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, legal reporter, Chris Merritt, and its reactionary columnist, Chris Kenny. The Australian has clearly been orchestrating the campaign in close collaboration with the Abbott government. Last week the Prime Minister recovered from his near-death experience to label the most recent report of the Human Rights Commission a political “stitch up”. His Attorney-General, the once-liberal George Brandis, has more or less admitted that as a consequence of this report he has called upon the President of the Human Rights Commission to resign.

March 2, 2016

Building Australia’s white elephant – cheap buy for white knight Telstra

Tony Abbott gave Malcolm Turnbull instructions to undermine the NBN. As Minister for Communications it is apparent that that is what Turnbull did. As Prime Minister he could have reversed the damage to NBN. But he chose not to. In the following blog published by Paul Budde, he points out that both Infrastructure Australia and PwC express major concerns about the value of the investment in the NBN if at some time in the future the Australian government decides to sell it.

November 22, 2014

John Menadue. Undiplomatic, politically partisan – and wrong!

Julie Bishop has decided to take on the President of the United States over his comments to an audience at the University of Queensland on the state of the Great Barrier Reef.

It shows immaturity to jump in so quickly to defend what I think is the indefensible by attacking others without any real basis.

It is also an example of how the Liberal Party sees the alliance between us and the US, not as an alliance between our two countries, but as a special relationship between the Liberal Party of Australia and the Right Wing of the Republican Party in the US. Such behaviour does great damage to Australia’s long term relationship with the US

June 27, 2016

ALISON BROINOWSKI. Process or Policy

Three governments are currently consulting their constituents. Two are offering them a significant choice about future foreign policy: one is not. The US asks delegates to decide between a President Donald Trump who would expel Hispanics, bar entry to Muslims, and flatten parts of the Middle East, and a President Hillary Clinton who would take a tougher line against states which challenge the US. The UK has asked citizens to decide if Britain should separate from the European Union and, presumably, tie itself more tightly to the US. Australian leaders are asking voters almost nothing about what foreign policy initiatives would differentiate Prime Minister Turnbull from a Prime Minister Shorten.

August 26, 2015

Stuart Harris. Who are we backing in Syria?

It would be a serious mistake for Australia to respond positively to the US request, that we presumably invited, to join in airstrikes on Islamic State (IS) in Syria. Such action would probably be against international law, and in any case be ineffective, while increasing IS recruitment and failing to resolve the undoubted problem. Like US policies towards Syria, it also lacks clear strategic objectives. IS, while certainly brutal is the armed opposition to the also brutal and corrupt Assad government, the overthrow of which ostensibly remains the prime target of US effort. More importantly for Australia, the civil war raging in Syria, with its multiple competing domestic and international interests, has increasingly developed into an intense Sunni versus Shia sectarian civil war. Whose side are we backing? Despite political concerns about Australia’s domestic security, nothing could be worse for our multicultural society and its security than an action likely to stir a sectarian conflict among our Moslem citizens”.

April 14, 2017

Trump is Ignorant of History and So is His Chump Sean Spicer

This article by Middle East expert, ROBERT FISK, was first published in The Independent on 12 April 2017.

Fisk comments ‘Gas, cruise missiles, barrel bombs, Hitler and the American media. Mix them all up and I suppose you get Trump’s new policy in the Middle East.’

October 2, 2024

A five-minute scroll

Today our five-minute scroll on X was filled with Julian Assange’s first public appearance before the PACE hearing, a parliamentary hearing on his detention and conviction on 1 October 2024.

October 12, 2016

ROBERT MANNE. Oh, No Jim, No Jim, No Jim, No

As readers of John Menadue’s blog might be aware, I believe that Australia ought, on the one hand, to find homes in the next months for the 1,700 or so refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island who we are allowing to be destroyed in body and spirit and, on the other, retain the policy of naval interception and return to point of departure so as to avoid a return to the situation of 2009-2013 when 50,000 asylum seekers reached Australia by boat and 1,000 or 1,200 drowned.

Accordingly, my position on the question of how Australia should now respond to the asylum seeker issue is close to Father Frank Brennan’s and, roughly speaking, equidistant between the position of two other panellists on Monday night’s Q & A, the legal idealist Professor Jane McAdam, and the military realist, the architect of the Operation Sovereign Borders policy, General Jim Molan. While however I disagreed with several of Jane McAdam’s ideas, I was appalled and angered by both the tone and content of several of Jim Molan’s remarks.

December 2, 2014

John Menadue. The scholarship is the real issue.

Freya Newman has been placed on a two year good behaviour bond with no conviction recorded for accessing the computer system of the Whitehouse Institute of Design concerning a ‘scholarship’ awarded to Francis Abbott.

Overwhelmingly the media coverage has been about Freya Newman and very little about the substantial issue, the ‘scholarship’.

The substantial issues seem quite clear. They have not been publicly disputed.

The Whitehouse Institute is a private tertiary body.
It awarded Francis Abbott, the then Opposition Leader’s daughter, a scholarship which saved her family more than $60,000 in fees.
The scholarship was not advertised.
Its existence was never made public.
The Institute insists it was offered on the basis of academic merit, but has offered nothing to substantiate this claim.
The Institute’s chairman was a substantial donor to the Liberal Party and has confirmed that he ‘probably’ recommended Ms Abbott for the scholarship.
Tony Abbott did not disclose this benefit as part of his parliamentary obligations.

Just imagine if the daughter of Kevin Rudd or Bill Shorten had been awarded a $60,000 scholarship in such circumstances. The English language would not have been adequate to describe the criticism they would have received from Tony Abbott and Julia Bishop. The Murdoch media would have gone almost into meltdown over such a scholarship. The Australian would have called for either a judicial enquiry or a royal commission. It would have been as relentless as it was on Julia Gillard’s union connections.

February 18, 2015

Ian McAuley. The speech that Tony Abbott almost delivered to the National Press Club.

Was this a spoof?

There are ‘claims’ that the following speech appeared on the websites of the Liberal Party and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on the day that Tony Abbott gave his speech to the National Press Club, but it was taken down as soon as it was found that the Prime Minister was delivering a different speech - presumably one prepared entirely in his own office.

September 30, 2016

Is there finally light at the end of the fibre-optic cable?

Over the past two weeks we’ve seen what many of us have been longing for – signs the Government has realised its national broadband network strategy is not working out as planned.

November 3, 2016

JOHN TULLOH. U.S. finally starts to ease its Cold War punishment of Cuba

It is astonishing that an impoverished speck on the rump of the most powerful country in the world has managed to intimidate it for more than half a century. Cuba, only 144 kms off the coast of Florida, has had to suffer Uncle Sam’s unforgiving wrath because it became a Communist regime, locked up opponents and did not hold free elections. Tough trade and travel embargoes were imposed by Washington. Residents of the land of the free for decades have been banned from going there and woe betide if you were caught with one of Cuba’s famed cigars. But in recent years there has been some forgiveness. If Hillary Clinton becomes the next U.S. president, she has promised to end the embargo. However, the last word will not be hers. It is Congress which has that authority and it is showing no sign of softening its stance.

January 13, 2014

Asylum seekers - Tony Abbott and I share a Jesuit education. John O'Mara

Like many Australians, I look on the way the Abbott government is handling the matter of asylum seekers with ever increasing dismay. Tony Abbott’s mantra “stop the boats”, is unprincipled, contrary to signed UN agreements and impractical. It is hard to erase the pre-election memory of the Western Sydney interviewee..”I’m going to vote for Abbott, because he’ll stop the boats “.

What dismays me most is that Tony and I shared an educational experience at the hands of the Jesuits and then a friendship that reaches back almost 40 years.

March 30, 2013

Hazaras in peril. John Menadue

There are an estimated 50,000 persons of Hazara background living in Australia. Many of their relatives and friends are being intimidated and killed regularly in Pakistan. It is not surprising that they are fleeing and paying people smugglers to get to safety in Australia or elsewhere.

The Hazara are a Shia group who have traditionally been persecuted in Afghanistan. Their physical appearance also makes them ‘different’.

For decades, Hazaras have fled to Pakistan for safety and reside mainly in the Quetta area of NW Pakistan. That has now changed with the Hazara in Quetta being specifically targeted by militant Islamist groups.

November 3, 2016

BRUCE ARNOLD. Testing the body politic? Lobbying by the pathology industry.

Pathology testing in Australia is big business, getting bigger as the population ages and we rely on high-tech medicine for intractable ailments. Advocacy by commercial interests and government pathology service providers shapes public policy. It potentially affects elections rather than just the national budget. It matters. It is inadequately recognised and less understood.

What we know about lobbying by the pathology industry in the 2016 election is how little we know. Our ignorance matters, because it tells us something about the realities of a liberal democracy in 2016. It also matters because we need an informed public discourse about health policy and health costs.

September 23, 2015

Tom and Rosie support the Syrian Refugees.

Two young students from “Prouille” Dominican School at Wahroonga have raised nearly $4,500 for Syrian refugees. It started as a street stall in front of their house. It led to community support. It is a lovely story - worth reading. See link below. John Menadue

https://unhcrpersonalchallenge.everydayhero.com/au/help-the-syrian-refugees-with-tom-and-rosie

June 27, 2016

KAITLIN WALSH. Don’t trust anyone over 30. The division that transcends race, gender and religion – and why a #SSM plebiscite could become our #Brexit

The increasing vitriol between the Boomers and (mostly) Gen Y has singed more than a few nose hairs in recent years. You’d be well advised to approach any discussion between active combatants with full hazmat gear. And now the #Brexit has brought matters to a head.

March 1, 2015

We should expect more.

In this article in The Guardian, Richard Flanagan, the Booker Prize winner, refers to the increasing ugliness in Australian public life. He says ‘Writing my novel “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” I came to conclude that great crimes like the Death Railway did not begin with the first beating or murder on that grim line of horror in 1943. They began decades before with politicians, public figures and journalists promoting the idea of some people being less than people’. He makes the case that the brutality and cruelty we now see has been developing for years. I think it really began with the Howard Government in 1996. To read this article, see the link below. John Menadue

April 11, 2015

Alcohol is a bigger problem than ice.

In the Herald Sun on April 8, 2015, Jeff Kennett, the former premier of Victoria, said that it was time to stop the promotion of alcohol. See link to article below.

In this article he says ‘If it is good enough to ban the advertising of tobacco products, if it is good enough to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory, surely if the serious about family violence, the road toll, our crime rate, it is time to ban the promotion of alcohol. … The time has come to do what we have done for tobacco - ban all advertising of alcohol products and ban all sponsorships by alcohol companies.’

February 26, 2016

John Menadue. Our humanitarian program.

Some issues have no place in partisan politics, they may be topics that are politically charged, but they are not ideological battlegrounds – they are about the personal and the human. Our stance on refugees and on protection is such an issue. It is an area that has been supported by the left and the right, and in darker moments, disowned by both. It is an issue that is deeply tied to our national psyche and yet heavily influenced by the words of our national leaders. Our treatment of refugees has revealed the best in us and defined some of our worst moments. Of late, it has come to be our Achilles heel, damaging our international reputation and corroding our national debates. But the voices of our better angels may again be gaining strength.

June 22, 2014

Cristian Martini Grimaldi. St Francis of the East

Cardinal John Henry Newman said ‘There is nothing on this earth as ugly as the Catholic Church and nothing so beautiful’. We have seen a lot of the ugliness recently. The following story tells us something about the beauty. John Menadue.

The prestigious Ho-Am Prize 2014, known as the Nobel Prize of South Korea, has been awarded to Father Vincenzo Bordo. This is the first time an Italian has received this accolade. A missionary with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Fr Bordo was honored for his services to the homeless, to elderly people living alone and young people on the street, through a series of programs he created.

April 20, 2016

John Austen. Grattan Institute on transport projects: a better mousetrap?

In ‘Road to riches: better transport investment’ the respected Grattan Institute joined commentators, independent authorities and lobby groups in advancing ideas on transport ‘investment’. Like others it proposed publication of assessments for public spending; a better mousetrap to ensnare politically motivated proposals.

The report proposed a three stage process for government transport ‘investment’:

Spending only after publication, by tabling in parliament, of a benefit-cost assessment;
Spending on all proposals that pass such an assessment;
Independence of spending from Grants Commission processes.

There is merit in the ideas. There also are pitfalls.

November 3, 2016

JEFFREY SACHS. The fatal expense of American imperialism.

In this article, Jeffrey D. Sachs says

“the United States … is squandering vast sums and undermining national security. … today the United States has similarly over invested in the military and could follow a path to decline if it continues the wars in the Middle East and invites an arms race with China.”

See link to full article below.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/10/30/the-fatal-expense-american-imperialism/teXS2xwA1UJbYd10WJBHHM/story.html

Jeffrey Sachs is University Professor and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. This article was first published in the Boston Globe on October 30, 2016.

February 6, 2014

John Menadue. Cutting back government spending - does it include middle-class and corporate welfare?

Tony Abbott told his listeners recently at Davos that small government was the best form of government.

The Minister for Health, Peter Dutton, has said that waste must be reduced in our health sector.

The Minister for Social Services, Kevin Andrews, has told us that our welfare system is unsustainable and has appointed Patrick McClure to review welfare in Australia.

And the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, has established a Commission of Audit to look at ways to reduce ‘big government’ with priority to reducing government outlays. He said that the age of entitlement had to end. But for whom! He said ‘it is .. essential that the Commonwealth government lives within its means and begins to pay down its debt’. We know of course that by any international measure we do not have a debt problem but let us pass on that for the moment.

June 17, 2016

GREG WOOD. FTA’s and Australian democracy and future governance.

Andrew Robb’s response to concerns that Australia’s recent spate of free trade agreements were being negotiated in secret was to claim that trade negotiations have always been conducted that way. That comment contains a splinter of truth but a plank of misinformation.

Once, not lately, trade ministers routinely informed Parliament on Australia’s aims, progress, and problems in important trade negotiations.

More importantly, trade negotiations were much narrower in scope, solely concerned with the tariffs and quotas affecting trade in physical goods. The international trade agenda expanded in the WTO Uruguay Round. The ambit of Australia’s FTAs is wider still and commonly includes commitments on our foreign investment policy, investor state dispute resolution (ISDS), labour mobility and intellectual property law. Their broad scope now goes to the heart of national policy, law, governance and culture, and carries far reaching legal and societal implications.

August 20, 2014

Michael Keating. Government Concedes and Declares Victory

For months the government and its various spokesmen in the Australian have been warning us that the nation faces a catastrophe if the Budget does not pass the Parliament intact. Essentially we were told that there was ‘no alternative’ if economic progress and certainty were to be maintained. Indeed Paul Kelly, to the considerable delight of many in the business community, waxed eloquent in the Australian about how the country risked becoming ungovernable if the government did not get its way.

February 18, 2015

Peter Day. Life is sacred, but ....

The “other" is no longer a brother or sister to be loved, but simply someone who disturbs my life and my comfort … In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business! (Pope Francis)

I had the misfortune recently of watching the Four Corners investigation into live-baiting in the greyhound industry – trainers were filmed using live rabbits, piglets and possums to instil the blood lust in dogs in order to improve their chasing/racing skills.

September 17, 2015

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 successful integration.

Australians have welcomed the announcement from our government that Australia will accept 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees with a focus on resettling women, children and families who have sought refuge and are in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. This means that this coming year Australia will resettle 25,750 refugees, including these 12,000 additional refugees from Iraq and Syria.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal