November 10, 2019

DAVID SOLOMON. Whither Labor

Labors post-election post-mortem demonstrates conclusively that Scott Morrisons victory was no miracle. It also shows why so many people thought it was.

January 20, 2019

HENRY REYNOLDS. When will it end?

Three days after the Abbott government was sworn in on the 18th of September 2013 the new defence minister Senator David Johnston made a statement to the media. He told the Sydney Morning Herald that he wanted the military to be battle ready for future conflicts in the unstable Middle East and south Asia. After 14 years of involvement in overseas conflicts the defence force had a strong fighting momentum that should not be lost. He planned to maintain and augment our readiness for future fights in the unstable region stretching from Pakistan to the Middle East. This was the area that we might need to go back into at some point in the future.

June 25, 2018

ROSS DOUTHAT. '#Me Too' comes for the Cardinal (New York Times)

The first time I ever heard the truth about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., finally exposed as a sexual predator years into his retirement, I thought I was listening to a paranoiac rant.

May 25, 2018

ANNE HURLEY. auDA has great opportunity to reinforce its role in our digitally-enabled future, but needs to understand that disunity is death.

Having watched with interest the unfolding debate over the future of auDA the organisation charged with managing the Internet domain name space here on behalf of the federal government I was delighted to recently be invited to join its new Consultation Model Working Group. auDA has drawn together a group of 16 members, which includes a broad range of people with knowledge and expertise in the running of the Internet in this country over many years.

January 30, 2016

Another face of the refugee crisis.

What beautiful photos of refugees - our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/frederic-seguin-refugee-photos_us_56a1439ce4b0d8cc10993c79?ir=Worldion=australia

September 18, 2019

IAN McAULEY. Reclaiming the ideas of economics

Against all evidence there is a widespread belief that the Coalition is more competent in economic management than Labor. In part this is because it has appropriated the language of economics to suit its own ideological agenda.

November 28, 2017

TERRY MORAN Back in the Game Part 1 of 2

The policy pendulum is swinging away from a consensus on the primacy of light touch regulation of markets, the unexamined benefits of outsourced service delivery, a general preference for smaller government, and a willing ignorance of public sector values and culture because theyre not always compatible with efficiency as viewed by Treasuries.

Replacing this consensus is an increasing acceptance of a larger role for government, including involvement in service delivery, more effective regulation and bolder policy initiatives.

January 13, 2019

PETER BROOKS. If specialists cannot be fair in their fee charging - should we not be supporting a Royal Commission into medical fees

Well done John Menadue for starting 2019 off with something that must strike at the heart of all Australians- out of pocket medical expenses. Some of the highest in the world and showing no sign of slowing and driven by let’s be honest - greed on the part of some of our most highly paid doctors. Despite comments over the last few years from some of the Colleges saying that they do not support the significant fees charged by some doctors (and remember it is not a small minority), little has changed. Comments from the Colleges have stopped and out of pocket expenses continue to increase. Australians are opting out of health insurance, placing strains on both the public and private systems. How long should Australians put up with this behaviour from the medical profession which seems hell bent on destroying the golden goose (uncapped fee for service i.e. charge what you think you can get away with) that has funded their lifestyle.

December 4, 2018

ALLAN PATIENCE: Capitalism has run amok!

If the 2007/08 Global Financial Crisis wasnt sufficient evidence that something is deeply pathological within the contemporary capitalist system, then Ken Henrys at times truculent, at times ruminative responses to questioning before the Financial Services Royal Commission should provide food for thought. He pinpointed some serious defects that have grown like virulent cancers across the finance industry in this country. The economic blinkers blinding our big bank officials are being stripped away and they dont like what they are at last being forced to acknowledge. The Royal Commissions work has revealed in lurid detail, that contemporary capitalism in Australia has run amok.

December 29, 2015

What is the driving force behind Jihadist terrorism?

In this article, (link below) Olivier Roy identifies the patterns of radicalism which have led to terrorism. He describes these patterns

Frustration and resentment against society seems to be the only psychological trait they share.
The majority of the radicals come from second generation Muslims born in Europe
Many have histories of petty delinquency and drug-dealing.
It is clearly a youth movement.
Very few of them have a history of militancy, either political or religious.
There is an unusually high proportion of converts.
The more recent pattern is the recruitment of young women to marry jihadists.
The main motivation of young men joining jihad seems to be the fascination for a narrative.
The revolt is expressed in religious terms.
Radicals have a loose or no connection with the Muslim communities in Europe.

Olivier Roy suggests that the aim of policies should be to accentuate the estrangement of radicals from the Muslim population and to dry up the narrative of Islam as the religion of the oppressed.

February 21, 2019

OISN SWEENEY. Lessons from the Murray-Darling disaster run deeper than water.

Environmental mismanagement runs deeper than the ecological tragedy gripping the Murray-Darling Basin. Recent policy decisions around native forest logging in NSW follow the same pattern of ignoring science and favouring extractive industry over the public interest.

July 24, 2019

SARAH ANN WHEELER, EMMA CARMODY. Was the Governments irrigation cash splash worth it? (The Advertiser)

One of us was born on a fifth-generation irrigated dairy farm in NSW; the other in a country town in the Murray-Darling Basin.

July 9, 2019

GEOFF RABY and IRVIN STUDIN. Can Australia think for itself?

Some years ago, in his usually provocative way, Kishore Mahbubhani published a polemic, Can Asians Think? It was his push back against the uni-polar moment and the perceived arrogance of the Washington Consensus. Asia was capable of working out its own policies for its own circumstances. There was no one size fits all. In this essay, Irvin Studin, Editor-in-Chief of Global Brief, turns this around to declare Canada Must Think For Itself.

January 14, 2019

MUNGO MacCALLUM. The pugnacious potato has done it again.

Having unleashed his innumerate megalomania to destroy Malcolm Turnbull, with the unintended consequence of almost certainly scuttling his government as collateral damage, Peter Dutton has now derailed Scott Morrisons attempt to mend the fractured relationship with the Pacific.

March 1, 2018

JEFFREY A. BADER. Seven things you need to know about lifting term limits for Xi Jinping

At its annual meeting beginning on March 5, the Chinese National Peoples Congress appears poised to adopt a recommendation by the Communist Party that the two-term limit for president and vice president be eliminated. The change is of course not an expression of a preferred governance norm for longer terms, but rather a dramatic shift designed to permit President Xi Jinping to stay in power after his second presidential term expires in 2023.

November 6, 2018

No clever answers! Finding the right questions about dental care in Australia

The significant impact that dental disease makes to the financial and social burdens of preventable chronic illness in Australia is rarely acknowledged, although there is substantial evidence of the inequalities in access to dental care. Dental care is not seen as an essential part of health care as if the mouth is not seen as part of the human body. This situation will not change unless and until answers are found to a series of crucial questions.

September 30, 2019

JACK WATERFORD. The judiciary is a part of government too (Canberra Times 27-9-19)

Australian politicians given to complaining that unelected judges are usurping the functions of ministers and of parliament would do very well to study this weeks British Supreme Court ruling holding the prorogation of the British Parliament by the Queen at the prime ministers request to be null and void.

June 24, 2018

The negative coverage of Islam in Australian media and particularly by the Murdoch media

CLIP

April 6, 2018

EDMUND CAMPION. On Cardinal Gilroy At The Sydney Institute.

A few days ago, I told a friend that Gerard Henderson had just asked me to speak here tonight, to give, what he called, a personal reflection on Cardinal Gilroy. You should say, said my friend, that you once wrote a book, A Place in the City, the first sentence of which is, It wasnt much fun living in the same house as Cardinal Gilroy. True. But I wasnt there for fun. I was there, half a century ago, to be a curate in the cathedral parish.

December 11, 2019

IAN McAULEY. Reclaiming the ideas of economics: Capitalism

Economics and public policy are influenced by a nineteenth century model of capital, and therefore of capitalism, that is no longer fit for purpose.

October 17, 2019

MICHAEL KEATING. What's Wrong with The Economy?

The headline economic news this week is that the IMF has revised down its forecast for the Australian economy. That should not have come as a surprise; it has been obvious for a few years that the Australian economy is not growing well. The underlying reason is low wage growth, and the real issue is why and what to do about it.

May 12, 2019

Vocational education in an election climate: it's time to be bold

The Labor Party is being bold, putting reformist policies before the voter. It has proposed a comprehensive inquiry into post-secondary education. If it gets to undertake that inquiry, I hope it will keep being bold and be prepared to restructure rather than just fiddle with a system that was shaped in the 1970s in very different labour market conditions.

October 16, 2017

PENNY WONG. FutureAsia - Engaging with China (A speech to the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Canberra, 16 October 2017)

Last month, my friend and colleague Chris Bowen, the Shadow Treasurer, delivered a major speech to the Asia Society in Sydney. In it he outlined Labors approach to Asia.FutureAsiawill be a whole-of-government framework underpinning our efforts to deepen and broaden our engagement. As the Shadow Treasurer said, Asian economies are changing, and Australia isnt keeping up.

June 24, 2019

MAX HASTINGS. Boris Johnson: brilliant, warm, funny and totally unfit to be PM (Daily Mail 11.10.2012)

_For 20 years I have known London’s mayor as a god-medal egomaniac. If he gets into No. 10, I’m on the first plane out.

July 18, 2018

ALISON BROINOWSKI. A law to end all wars?

Hamlet was depressed about the laws delay. To this day, legal processes take a notoriously long time, and international ones take even longer. International lawyers, and the world, have been waiting at least since 1998 for the crime of aggression to be activated.

September 20, 2018

MICHAEL SAINSBURY. Scott Morrison smashes shortest Prime Minister records.

Is Scott Morrison really on his way to a full half-term? As Liberal MPs flee the parliament and by-elections mushroom, the Member for Cook has already failed to earn the distinction of Australias fastest prime ministership. But will he vanquish the record of Arthur Fadden? Michael Sainsbury reports.

October 3, 2017

BOB CARR. Australia declares rhetorical war on China.

This year Australia declared rhetorical war on China.

The words being used by Australian leaders are the harshest any time since diplomatic relations commenced in 1972, with the exception of comments at the time of Tiananmen. The tone is harsher than that of any other US ally, including Japan.

March 15, 2019

LOUISA MENADUE. Striking For Our Future.

On the 15th of March, I was one of the thousands of students from Australia who participated in school strikes for climate. Students from 105 countries worldwide are striking for climate because climate action is imperative. So many seem to view climate change as something far away that will have little effect on their lives, and for those of you old enough, maybe it is. However, for those of us with our lives still ahead of us, the climate crisis will devastate the world we live in. We have twelve years to stop the climate from worsening, and that requires a drastic change in the way we treat mother earth. Our current policies are killing the earth, and there is no planet B.

May 23, 2019

MARILYN HATTON. Will the Australian Catholic Church face "the elephant in the room"?

Australia could lead the way on reform of Church governance. The scrutiny of the Royal Commission and work arising from the 2020 Plenary Council has equipped the Australian Catholic Church like no other in the world at this time.

April 22, 2018

IAN McAULEY. Strong employment growth, until you look behind the figures.

The ABS monthly employment data released last Thursday shows that since the Coalition was elected five years ago the Australian economy has generated one million additional jobs. Does this indicate success of the Coalitions policies?

November 6, 2019

JOHN MENADUE. Democracy or oligarchy .

Our political contest used to be between Left and Right, Labor and Conservative. That has changed with growing anger that power is now rigged in favour of a largely unchallenged and powerful oligarchy. Our democratic system including our traditional parties are just not properly responding .Voters are fleeing the major parties and particularly Labor.

February 20, 2018

BERNARD KEANE. Amid denialism on company tax cuts, the ABC lets us down.

The ABCs censorship of Emma Alberici in response to pressure from Malcolm Turnbull comes at a time when the national broadcasters mainstream media competitors are also increasingly failing to properly inform Australians.

December 8, 2019

TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI. Our Leaders Fiddle While Australia Burns

As homes and communities go up in flames, Australian politics descends into new depths of silly-season absurdity. Enough is enough. It is time for Australias leaders to face up to the nations greatest security threat.

November 20, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. What silent majority?

The best thing about the same sex marriage survey (apart, of course, from the entirely predictable numbers) is that it finally and conclusively disproves the myth of the silent majority the conservative fantasy that somehow, somewhere, there is a great mass of Australians who are against all progressive change but have never actually said so.

December 16, 2019

MARK BUCKLEY. Three Amigos

_It is like the band getting back together again, when all the large white men with blonde-ish hair all came to power, sort of in the same time frame, voted for by actual people, and now all claiming a MANDATE. They all speak a form of English, although it is understood that the meanings that they attribute to many words in common usage are skewed, or at odds with community expectations. These are indeed depressing times.

December 4, 2018

JOCELYN CHEY. Xi Jinping V. Allah

Protests are growing around the world over the forced detention and re-education of the Muslim Uighurs in Chinas far west Xinjiang Province. It is important to frame our response in terms of our commitment to the protection of civil and political rights. The Uighurs are not terrorists as Beijing propaganda has painted them.

November 6, 2018

Three Religious Elephants

Is religion on the way out?

March 3, 2019

JACK WATERFORD. Murdoch becomes a paper tiger (Canberra Times 2.2.2019)

If Labor wins the next election Bill Shorten may be the first Labor prime minister since Arthur Calwell 55 years ago to act as if he was completely indifferent to the existence, the views or the personality of Rupert Murdoch, or his many media organs, in print or online.

October 14, 2019

GREG BAILEY. For A New Enlightenment

It has been pointed out numerous times that neoliberalism, the prevailing orthodoxy of governance, grew off the carcass of neo-classical economics. That this intellectual paradigm has failed is obvious to most people except for politicians in the Anglo-Saxon world and the EU. A new paradigm that brings together rigorous rationalistic thinking based on empirical evidence is needed to bring economic thinking back to where it should always be: in the service of the society/environment as a whole.

June 18, 2018

JENNIFER DOGGETT and LOUISA GORDON Out-of-pocket costs for healthcare are a problem for all Australians

Editor: Jennifer DoggettAuthor: Louisa Gordon (introduction by Jennifer Doggett)on: June 13, 2018In: Co-payments, health financing and costs, Healthcare and health reform

Out-of-pocket health costs (OOPs) are a major challenge facing the Australian health system. Australians pay for a higher proportion of total health care in OOPs than do citizens of almost all OECD countries. In fact, OOPs are the third largest funder of health care in Australia, after Commonwealth and State/Territory Governments.

May 17, 2018

TIM WOODRUFF. A budget for inequality, worsening health outcomes and decreased productivity.

As a financially comfortable part-time medical specialist, I will be in the group receiving the highest tax cut immediately, whilst my daughters working full time at much lower income will receive about one third of that. Its of even more concern that, in seven years time, the major beneficiaries of the government plan will be those on incomes like that of politicians, receiving eight times more in reduced tax compared to low income earners.

January 15, 2019

RICHARD KINGSFORD. The catastrophic fish kill on the Darling River decades in the making

The plight of the Darling River shocked the nation last week, when up to a million fish were killed by lack of oxygen, accompanying the disruption of a blue-green algal bloom on a forty kilometre stretch of the river near Menindee, southeast of Broken Hill. This followed a similar kill of tens of thousands of native fish in December.

October 10, 2019

The establishment strikes back at the deplorables. Part 2: The Ukraine connection

We come back to the Russia collusion narrative. A lot of it seems to have had Ukraine connections, so much so that Ukraine was Ground Zero of that story. The primary motive of the Poroshenko administration would have been to spike Trumps candidacy in order to prevent any rapprochement between the US and Russia. Apparently Ukrainians outside government have volunteered some information to the US Justice Department on this.

June 17, 2019

JERRY ROBERTS The Religious Right is wrong and dangerous

I_srael Folau is arguing that he is entitled to act in an offensive manner because he adheres to a set of childish superstitions about heaven and hell that most of us grow out of when we work out the Tooth Fairy and begin to have doubts about Father Christmas._

October 31, 2018

ROY GREEN. Pricking the balloon of crony capitalism

The Queensland Supreme Court has dismissed Aurizon Networks application for judicial review of a draft decision by the Queensland Competition Authority on rail access, with costs awarded in favour of the QCA. Former QCA Chair and now Chair of the Port of Newcastle Professor Roy Green comments.

October 21, 2019

RICHARD BUTLER Spaghetti Americana: US Middle east Policy

Trumps agreement on the telephone with Erdogan that Turkey could go ahead and invade Kurdish Syria was a disaster; local and, geo-political.

October 7, 2019

JACK WATERFORD. Thin pickings from big bikkies

Britains war on organised crime is failing, and its probably the same here

Some fresh and depressing evidence for those who, like me, fear that federal law enforcement is a good deal less effective and efficient than it could be, because of the way its resources are configured, led, and under the close and very unaccountable supervision of ministers and bureaucrats.

September 26, 2020

Sunday environmental round up, 27 September 2020

Despite presidents and SUV drivers doing their bit for oil, the industry is going down the drain. China steps into the global climate action vacuum. Dr Fauci calls for a new relationship with nature to reduce the likelihood of more emerging infectious diseases. WH Auden praises the USA.

December 18, 2019

RICHARD ECKERSLEY.-Your money or your life? Putting wellbeing before GDP

Some countries are now giving priority to wellbeing over economic growth, but are they going far enough fast enough?

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal