July 15, 2018

KATHRYN KELLY. Armed Neutrality for Australia?

The talks between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un give some reason for a glimmer of hope for the Korean Peninsula, but given Donald Trumps predilection for middle of the night tweets, that could come unstuck at any moment. The international situation continues to be uncertain, with China and the US still facing off over the South China Sea and war in Syria continuing. US power is waning and there is an urgent need for Australia to rethink our security strategy for the future. I think its timely to revisit the concept of armed neutrality.

May 12, 2019

PHILIP GIRALDI. Pompeo Lies, Cheats and Steals (But Hes Still a Good Christian) (American Herald Tribune 4.5.2019)

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently recounted to an audience at Texas A&M University that when he was head of the Central Intelligence Agency he was responsible for lying, cheating and stealing to benefit the United States. Like we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.

April 17, 2019

ANDREW CHUBB. Chinas assertive maritime policy is older than Xi (East Asia Forum)

The toughening of Chinas policies in the South and East China Seas is widely regarded as a defining characteristic of Xi Jinpings foreign policy. But while it is true that the PRC has become more assertive in its maritime disputes under Xi, China had already been on such a trajectory since 2006. Many changes in Chinas maritime dispute behaviour under Xi may be better understood as continuities.

May 24, 2018

CLIVE KESSLER Mahathir, Anwar and the Islamic threat.

Malaysia’s recent national elections either announced a new dawn or they simply mark the beginning of another dark and difficult time in the country’s much-contested political story.

December 19, 2019

DAVID SOLOMON. Religious freedom.

Just 10 days after the Sydney Morning Herald/Age revealed at the end of last month that the major religious groups had rejected the draft Religious Discrimination Act circulated for public comment by the Morrison Government, the Prime Minister made public a new draft, that will go a long way towards meeting their demands. Its purpose and content would be better understood if its title were the Religious Protection and Licence to Discriminate Bill.

August 30, 2018

MICHAEL SAINSBURY. Payne can give proper attention to Asia that Bishop failed to do- (Crikey)

Australias new Foreign Minister Marise Payne has plenty to learn from Julie Bishops significant missteps and indeed non-steps in the same role.

July 5, 2018

EVATT FOUNDATION EDITORIAL. Aspiration & Inequality

Many Australians no doubt winced last week when the Turnbull government claimed to represent aspirational voters. In case anyone didnt recognise the ghost of former Labor leader Mark Latham, this week Treasurer Scott Morrison recalled his signature image: the ladder of opportunity.

October 5, 2018

CHRIS MILLS. The next BIG thing: renewable water.

When cattle and sheep are dying in vast number across Eastern Australia, how sane is it for the driest inhabited continent in the world not to capture and redirect wastewater and stormwater from our cities and towns into food and beverage production? Energy is a major component of the cost of treating and moving water. Renewable energy sources can become an essential component of responding to the effects of climate change and climbing temperatures.

January 31, 2016

Evan Williams. Film review: 'The Big Short'

An opening title informs us that The Big Short is based on a true story. That usually means that the film we are about to see has only a tenuous connection with reality, that most of it is invented and the events depicted may not have happened at all. Is anyone suggesting that the Global Financial Crisis, the subject of this scarifying comedy from director Andy McKay, may not have happened, that the millions who lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses, or saw their families shattered by the crisis were victims of some strange delusion? Well, of course not. McKays film is a viciously funny and horrifically convincing account of how the GFC came into being, driven by the base instincts of crooked bankers and cynical financial go-getters.

September 14, 2018

RAMESH THAKUR. Why Serena Williams owes a triple apology.

CANBERRA Serena Williams, a deserved legend in her own lifetime, owes a public apology to Naomi Osaka, match umpire Carlos Ramos and the worlds tennis fans. She was the perpetrator, not the victim, of unprovoked abuse. Women should be among the first to recognize and condemn blame-shifting from the perpetrator to the victim. Attempts to confuse her on-court behavior with historical injustices to women and the everyone else does it fallacy are an aggravating, not an extenuating, circumstance. Far from advancing, her apologists damage the cause of womens rights and racial equality.

February 12, 2018

The roads club is having a great spend.

Overspending on roads may be already damaging national productivity as well as adding to debt burdens of future generations.

October 5, 2017

MICHAEL WEST. Why are we still pursuing the Adani Carmichael mine?

Why, if Adanis gigantic Carmichael coal project is so on-the-nose for the banks and so environmentally destructive, are the federal and Queensland governments so avid in their support of it?

Adani employs the lobbying firm Next Level Strategic Services.. The director of this lobbying firm is Cameron Milner,who was Bill Shorten’s Chief of Staff, former ALP State Secretary in Queensland and who helped run the last election campaign of the Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszcuk. The co-director of the same lobbying firm is David Moore who ran Campbell Newman’s successful 2012 election campaign

June 23, 2019

DUNCAN GRAHAM Roaming for relevance

_Politicians hunting the grey vote stalk retirement villages and pensioner clubs.__Handy because electors mustered in dining rooms and community halls lean to groupthink. Dissidents dont do well in confined spaces where theyre condemned to stay mum or risk exclusion._Wrong spots. Hucksters should stake out the hills and river banks where independent thinkers and determined doers thrive and allegiances can be shifted the backblock campgrounds.

April 19, 2018

JOHN STAPLETON. Abbott and Turnbulls Assault on Freedom of Speech.

The Abbott and Turnbull governments have mounted the greatest attack on freedom of speech in Australian history.

April 14, 2019

GREG BAILEY. Reflections on Five Years of Political Theatre and Nihilism (Part 1)

Retrospective reflections are now beginning on what might be the heritage of the five and a half year long Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. In advancing such reflections attention should not just be focussed on the political infighting within the government, and between it and the opposition. Consideration should also be given to what has occurred outside of, or in spite, of government in defining Australias governing culture and the cohesion of its society.

October 2, 2018

JOHN MENADUE Morrison and Trump are experts in fake news

Scott Morrison keeps telling us that he stopped the boats. As I have said many times that is just not true. It is fake news. But the lie has been so uncontested by the media for so long it is hard to nail the lie.Perhaps being careless in the first place the media now finds it hard to admit error

Our public life whether it be about refugees or climate change has been so debased it is becoming hard to sort fact from fiction .

December 19, 2016

MUNGO MacCALLUM. Malcolm Turnbull's end of year report card.

It may well be that even if Turnbull has the will and nerve to try and move his ministry … finding convenient places to accommodate them without serious disruption will prove impossible.

December 6, 2016

SAM HURLEY. Outsourcing doesn't help our neediest citizens.

Outsourcing of employment services has failed to make significant headway on better outcomes for the most disadvantaged clients.

July 7, 2019

NOEL TURNBULL. The depths of hypocrisy

The defining characteristics of Australias right wing cultural warriors whether in the Liberal Party, the Murdoch media or the usual think tank suspects are their breathtaking hypocrisy and the very real threat they pose to the liberal values so many have fought to inculcate in society.

December 18, 2017

DES CAHILL and PETER WILKINSON. Clericalism, celibacy and child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Australia

The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was published on 15 December 2017. Among its 409 recommendations was one which is proving controversial, namely, the introduction of voluntary celibacy for diocesan priests. There are compelling reasons why the Commission chose to urge a change to a long-held tradition.

June 10, 2019

MARTIN WOLF. The looming 100-year US-China conflict (The Financial Times)

Donald Trumps unnecessary fight for domination is increasingly being framed as a zero-sum game.

November 7, 2017

RICHARD BUTLER. The showdown between principles and interests.

The conflict between principles and interests now afflicting the US polity is stark. Participants from all sides of the political mainstream know that Trumps presidency is proving disastrous and that they will need to act to rectify this. For now, the Republicans are continuing to prefer the pursuit of their partisan interests to acting to rescue the system of principles and institutions vital to the Republic; which are repeatedly jeopardized by Trump and his rampant egocentricity. Much is at issue for the US and globally.

January 9, 2020

Bushfires and the Culture War. Part 1

The bushfire culture wars have already begun. For some the current crisis is apocalypse now, for others its just an extreme example of business as usual on our incendiary continent.

April 14, 2019

ABUL RIZVI. New regional visas - a recipe for exploitation and destitution.

The Governments new regional migration arrangements make it easier for potential migrants with lower skill levels and limited English to access temporary residence via low paid jobs in regional Australia. At the same time, the government is making it significantly more difficult for these people to secure permanent residence. This is a recipe for more exploitation and the potential to add to a growing underclass of destitute people who have no access to any form of social safety net.

October 21, 2016

PAUL DALEY. Why Australia Day and Anzac Day helped create a national 'cult of forgetfulness'.

Australia Day and Anzac Day are months away.

But Im getting in early. Its beyond time Australia cast off these sturdy cultural crutches that both, somehow, define national birth, so we can discover who and what we truly are.

Australia Day, celebrating British invasion in 1788, and Anzac Day, marking Australias involvement in the failed invasion of the Ottoman empire in 1915, are but relatively recent, fleeting moments of note among innumerable others in our 60,000-year continental human history.

May 6, 2019

RICHARD FLANNAGAN. I'm willing to go to jail to stop Adani and save our beloved country. Will you stand with me? (The Conversation)

In this anti-Adani rally speech, novelist Richard Flanagan says the fight against the Carmichael coalmine defines the fight against the climate crisis

January 20, 2019

JOHN KERIN. Free Trade (sic), Theory and Experience (Part 2)

As with most economic theories about the optimal way to proceed, there is a difference between theory and results. For example, do company tax cuts necessarily mean that companies will invest in new production? If demand is suppressed will they use them to invest? Will they spend them to invest abroad, spend on mergers, pay off debt, or pocket them? This is to be expected because of changed situations and the behaviour of many actors. The same applies to trade theory.

January 1, 2018

STEPHEN LEEDER. Social causes of illness are not immutable: they are amenable to change.

Modifying our own behaviour in health-promoting directions is sensible but for sustainable, nation-wide change we need to take action of a different kind.

August 13, 2018

Truth telling and cultural amnesia (Culture Heist)

Truth telling was the theme of this years Garma festival, held in northeast Arnhemland on the first weekend of August. Its also a crucial element in the Statement from the Heart made by the indigenous National Constitutional Convention at Uluru last year but rejected by the Turnbull government.

August 26, 2019

ALEX COBHAM. We Could Eliminate Extreme Global Poverty If Multinationals Paid Their Taxes. (Truthout 18-8-19)

International tax rules have reached a crossroads. The reform programannounced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) this summer represents the last chance for the Organisations club of rich countries to find an approach that can curtail the rampant tax avoidance of multinational companies.

October 31, 2017

ROGER SCOTT. Personalities and Millstones in Queensland

Personalities are increasingly significant in political contests, particularly as voters in all countries are abandoning the dominant parties. Politics in most Australian states are firmly controlled by capital city interests. Queensland has been slightly different, in this as in so many other ways.

October 1, 2017

BOB DOUGLAS. How will we change the human story?

What do we need to do to make it likely that our children and theirs will inherit a flourishing, rather than a collapsing human world? Our politicians must surely be starting to realise that large numbers of Australians are thoroughly fed up with the fact that the wellbeing of all (not just some) humans, and the health of the planet have become second order and neglected issues because of a widely shared ideology of endless, indiscriminate growth, unfettered markets, rampant individualism, small and impotent government and a key focus on competition.

June 14, 2016

MICHAEL GRACEY. The simmering shame of aboriginal ill-health.

Indigenous people have experienced miserable health outcomes compared with other Australians for decades. Efforts going back to the 1960s brought some improvements but these were not enough to remove the inequalities. The federal government was prompted to try to resolve this impasse by establishing the so-called Close the Gap Strategy in 2008. This brought fresh hope that this international embarrassment would be removed from Australias report card. Indigenous people welcomed the initiative but medical experts questioned whether the massive changes the Strategy set as targets could be achieved, as planned, within a single generation. It seems that the reservations about the feasibility of the Strategy were well founded. When the seventh annual Close the Gap report appeared in 2015 the then Prime Minister Abbott admitted that progress was far too slow and that the findings were profoundly disappointing. When the 2016 report was published the situation was still unsatisfactory and Prime Minister Turnbull limply commented that the results were mixed. There was no statement of determination from him that his government would do all in its power to put things right. Surely that wasnt too much to expect.

May 28, 2019

JERRY ROBERTS Mining, taxation and Australia

Turning points in political history are few and far between. Election 2019 was not one of them but the failure to instal the mining tax in 2010 was just such a pivotal moment. One of the consequences of that failure was Labor’s fiddly set of tax polices rejected by voters on Saturday 18 May.

November 14, 2019

GARETH EVANS. How not to conduct Australian foreign Policy: Suez 1956

Dr Robert Bowkers new monograph, Australia, Menzies and Suez: Australian Policy-making on the Middle East Before, During and After the Suez Crisis (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade, 2019), leaves me in awe of his stamina and capacity to absorb punishment.

September 24, 2018

JOHN FALZON.Morrisons mantra is choice. But what real choice do the poor and homeless have?

Everyone was walking past, refusing to meet her eyes. She wasnt asking for somewhere to live. She wasnt even asking for something to live on. All she was asking for was just enough to buy some breakfast. But everyone just kept walking past and the angrier she got the wider the berth they gave her and the faster they moved past her.

April 16, 2019

HAL PAWSON and BILL RANDOLPH. On housing, theres clear blue water between the mainparties (The Conversation, 12 April 2019)

Labors bold stance on housing tax reform and investment makes this one of the likely policy flashpoints in the coming election campaign. How does the Coalition governments housing record stand up to scrutiny? What would be in prospect in a third Liberal-National term? And exactly what is Labors alternative pitch?

July 11, 2019

FINTAN O'TOOLE. Brexit Britain is wallowing in dangerous talk of national humiliation (The Guardian 15.6.2019)

The UK can only feel humiliated by the EU if it expects to be superior. This poisonous idea should be banished.

August 15, 2018

MICHAEL McKINLEY. Crony capitalism and corruption in our midst.

Revelations of corruption and actions that look suspiciously like corruption shock us but they shouldnt: look for corruption in Australia as in many western democracies and you will never be disappointed. Its as common as other national institutions - the barbecue or the Akubra indeed, its been normalised.

June 26, 2019

MARK BUCKLEY. Peter Dutton Brings Us All Down (To His Level)

Just when you thought that Tony Abbotts being dumped from the nations parliament was going to necessarily lift standards, Peter Dutton picked up his baton and ran with it.

April 17, 2019

DUNCAN GRAHAM Last post for the old guard?

Have Indonesias oligarchs performed their final farewell tour? More than two decades after the fall of second president Soehartos authoritarian New Order government a commoner has retained the presidency.

October 5, 2018

MAX HAYTON. Jacinda Ardern stands for kindness and collectivism.

The New Zealand Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, challenged the forces of isolationism, protectionism and racism in her speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

January 9, 2020

Second rate leadership. Part 1 of 4

Australia is now a confident, wealthy nation that has the right to expect its leaders to rise above the second rate.

September 4, 2019

TESS NEWTON CAIN. Australia shows up in Tuvalu and trips over (East Asia Forum 30-8-19)

On 13-16 August 2019 the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum held their 50th meeting. The theme, as chosen by their host and current chair Tuvaluan Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga, was Securing our Future in the Pacific. The leaders meeting of 2018 provides context for what transpired in 2019 and why it is significant.

November 12, 2018

IAN McAULEY. Watch for Morrisons next round of economic impression management.

Before Christmas the Government will produce the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Its a fair bet that it will reveal a small cash surplus for this year, giving Morrison an opportunity to brag about the Coalitions economic expertise. But this will be a distraction from serious deficiencies in Australias economic structure.

September 29, 2019

GEORGE BROWNING. Zionism the ugly truth

Alex Ryvchins article Zionism and the big lie. How Soviet anti-Semitism shaped contemporary anti-Zionism, published through the ABCs Religion and Ethics site, is too cute by half. Of course the strong critique of current Israel (which likes to call itself a Zionist State) has a history, but it is primarily fuelled by the reality that contemporary policies of the State of Israel cruelly subjugate the Palestinian people.

January 10, 2019

JONATHAN WEISMAN. American Jews and Israeli Jews break up

The events of the past year brought American and Israeli Jews closer to a breaking point. President Trump, beloved in Israel and decidedly unloved by a majority of American Jews, moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, with the fiery evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress consecrating the ceremony.

May 25, 2018

JAMES FERNYHOUGH. Revealed: Australias richest professionals and the suburbs they live in

If youre a surgeon living in one of the opulent suburbs on the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, then congratulations: you are a member of the highest paid group in Australia.

January 18, 2018

TED TRAINER. The Catalan integral cooperative ... the Simpler Way revolution is well under way!

Many would agree it is now abundantly clear that a just and sustainable world cannot be achieved unless consumer-capitalist society is basically scrapped. It involves levels of resource use and environmental impact that are already grossly unsustainable, yet growth is its supreme goal. The basic form the alternative must take is mostly small, highly self-sufficient and self-governing communities in which we can live frugally but well, putting local resources directly into producing to meet local needs without allowing market forces or the profit motive or the global economy to determine what happens.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal