April 21, 2020

IAN McAULEY. A little more coronavirus arithmetic

Heres a little help in understanding that magic figure the R value.

October 24, 2019

BRUCE CHAPMAN. Drought Policy: A Different Way

It is said that little is certain in life except death and taxes. In contemporary Australian public policy debate we can add another inevitability: that during terrible droughts governments will spend large amounts of taxpayer resources to address farmers legitimate anxieties concerning the effects.

June 20, 2019

ELENA COLLINSON. Anthony Albanese and the Peoples Republic of China: an overview (Australia-China Relati ons Institute, UTS)

Following the Australian Labor Partys (ALP) federal election defeat on May 18 2019, Bill Shorten stepped down as leader of the party. Anthony Albanese, a long-term ALP frontbencher, became the ALPs leader-elect on May 27 after an uncontested leadership ballot, and was formally endorsed as Opposition Leader on May 30.

October 1, 2018

MICHAEL KEATING. The Medium-Term Economic Outlook

The last decade has been characterised by economic stagnation in almost all the advanced economies. But President Trump and Prime Minister Scott Morrison are now promising a rosy future, with the US and Australian economies supposedly returning to past rates of growth. If the two leaders are right that will make an enormous difference, affecting many issues ranging from the mood of their electorate to the future capacity of their governments. But personally I remain sceptical that a return to a sustained higher rate of economic growth is likely, for the reasons given below.

January 16, 2018

GEOFF RABY. Where have all the grown-ups gone on China policy?- A REPOST from June 23 2017

Malcolm Turnbulls glib talk of frenemies does nothing to help the urgent debate over how we handle the rising power of China.

January 16, 2016

I stand at the door and knock.

Popes Message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees

January 17, 2016

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In the Bull of indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy I noted that at times we are called to gaze even more attentively on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Fathers action in our lives (Misericordiae Vultus, 3). Gods love is meant to reach out to each and every person. Those who welcome the Fathers embrace, for their part, become so many other open arms and embraces, enabling every person to feel loved like a child and at home as part of the one human family. Gods fatherly care extends to everyone, like the care of a shepherd for his flock, but it is particularly concerned for the needs of the sheep who are wounded, weary or ill. Jesus told us that the Father stoops to help those overcome by physical or moral poverty; the more serious their condition, the more powerfully is his divine mercy revealed.

March 7, 2019

MACK WILLIAMS. Bolton's Syria "Fix" ?

The international focus on the failed Hanoi Summit and affairs Korean has diverted attention from the looming issues in Syria as the IS caliphate disappears. Media commentary around the shrinking IS presence on the ground in Syria and the significant numbers of foreign IS fighters and families has also overshadowed the urgent problem for the US of what to do now in Syria.

November 30, 2017

BRUCE WEARNE A Suggestion to the Ruddock Committee

The discussion of Freedom of Religion in relation to proposed changes to the Marriage Act should not avoid analysis of how the current Act refers to a wedding ceremony’s monitum. The Marriage Act decrees that the Monitum must be announced when a marriage is conducted by one authorised to do so. But how now will a new “monitum” function under the proposed changes to the Act? How will the Acts view of the wedding ceremony be configured?

November 3, 2019

JOHN KERIN. Dairy markets and regulation?.

The dairy industry has been subject to plenty of government enquiries and more are in train,but is anything going to come of them?

November 15, 2018

ANDREW GLIKSON. Which planet is the media living on?

While extreme weather events are being reported almost daily on news bulletins, only rarely is it conveyed that these events constitute the manifestation of advanced global warming and a fundamental shift in the state of the atmosphere. Rarely do major ABC TV forums, such as The Drum, The Insiders, Q and A, Four-Corners, the 7.30 Report, Breakfast, Matter of Fact and other programs include climate scientists to discuss the trends and consequences of climate disruption, mitigation and adaptation. In a recent interview with the ex-PM on the ABC Q&A program, the climate has hardly been mentioned. Given his statement (on the 12th August 2010) Now our response to climate change must be guided by science. The science tells us that we have already exceeded the safe upper limit for atmospheric carbon dioxide. We are as humans conducting a massive science experiment with this planet. Its the only planet weve got question could have been raised.

April 15, 2019

GREG BAILEY. Reflections on Five Years of Political Theatre and Nihilism (Part 2)

For the last three decades the Australian public has been told there will be massive changes which they will have to run with or just suck it up. Now, after five and a half years of floundering and negativism by the government, the people are waking up to what these changes have produced. Such changes have been substantially helped along by the governments promotion of the market as the arbiter of all things and all interrelations, changes exacerbated by the impact of digital technology and its individualising tendency. For its absence in attempting to properly guide these changes, this period of governance will be long remembered.

December 16, 2019

BRUCE THOM. The whereabouts of climate change adaptation

Since the late 1980s climate change adaptation has received limited consideration by the Australian Government. Mitigation continues to dominate the national discourse.

August 12, 2018

ANDREW GLIKSON. Last call on climateevidence for a demise of the planetary life support system.

In a key paper titled Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Science (6.8.2018), a group of 17 climate and environment scientists (Will Steffen, Johan Rockstrm, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber) have issued a stern warning to humanity with regard to the future of advanced life on Earth (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115)

October 30, 2018

JAMES ONEILL. Australia and its Israel Embassy: What are they thinking?

According to recent media reports, the Liberal candidate in the Wentworth (Sydney) by-election, former diplomat David Sharma said he was open to the idea that Australias embassy in Israel could be shifted from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In a separate tweet he went further and said Australia should consider recognising Jerusalem as Israels capital. The ostensible reason is that it would be following the lead of the United States.

December 22, 2019

MILES LITTLE.-Democracy? What kind?

‘We have two Australias: Election results show a growing divide within the nation. So read a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, May 25th, to an article by Matt Wade.

November 10, 2019

AWM redevelopment - Green lights all the way despite widespread opposition

Due process has been missing in action with the proposed Australian War Memorial demolition and expansion. Wide-ranging and serious concerns from many people have been dismissed, as AWM Director Dr Brendan Nelson continues to be given green lights in his quest to have the Memorial display yet more of the machinery of warfare. One wonders whether thats the sort of commemoration the World War 1 diggers would have wanted.

January 24, 2016

Brad Chilcott. I donated a kidney to my son. Don't tell me not to make it 'political'.

In early December, I went into surgery to give my eight-year-old son Harrison my left kidney. He heard me groaning in recovery as the anaesthetist put him to sleep a few hours later so that he could receive it. The operation was the first of my life and Harrisons 13th. Hed experience his 14th general anaesthetic two weeks later when surgeons removed the vascular catheter that had been used to connect the dialysis machine into his heart three times a week for the five months leading up to the transplant.

October 7, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. The failings of our corporate sector- and not just the banks and insurance companies.

Our politicians are rightly receiving a hammering for their failures . We really do need to restore public trust in our political system. I have suggested a national summit after the next election on democratic renewal, different in subject but similar to the economic summit that Bob Hawke called in 1983.

But to restore public trust our business sector must also clean up its act . There are too many second rate business executives doing a third rate job. They should ‘stick to their knitting’ instead of running to the government for help or blaming the trade unions.

In the end it is not companies that perform well or badly. It is people. They must be held accountable,particularly directors and senior executives

December 19, 2019

RORY McGUIRE.-Canberra isn't a bubble. It's a vacuum.

As the climate argument meanders slowly through the science it is becoming more apparent that the “Canberra bubble” is a misnomer. “Canberra vacuum” better describes the thinking related to our national capital’s climate change policy.

April 6, 2017

WAYNE McMILLAN. David versus Goliath: reform and reinvention (Part 2 of 2)

What Sally McManuss is saying is correct, I agree with her conclusions about what has happened to workers over the last 30 years and what is becoming intolerable now in 2017. Across Australia in 2017, little or no wage growth, increased working hours, increases in casual jobs, a decrease in full time meaningful work, rising increases in household debt and rising inequalities in income and wealth is the bleak future facing Australian workers and their families. In the public sector, outsourcing and privatisation have meant an erosion of working conditions and rates of pay for workers. What can be done to rectify this alarming trend?

May 1, 2019

GRAHAM ENGLISH. Virtue signallers, the left wing, and the politically correct

I try to follow the advice of one of my old teachers that if you cannot write as well as Jane Austen or one of the greats you can at least aim to be intelligible. Avoiding clichs and popular catch phrases is always a good start.

July 7, 2019

MARK BUCKLEY. Tony Abbott Will Never Be Prime Minister (Again)

One of my daughters, a wise young head, when describing certain individuals of less than stellar intelligence, uses the phrase he (or she) will never be Prime Minister. It is a curiously descriptive phrase, because it says everything about limits, of intelligence, of ambition, of drive, of the ability to think conceptually, to radiate warmth, to believe in service to our community .

November 25, 2019

The Greens cruelled Australias last best chance for climate action 10 years ago

Ten years ago, on 23 November, PM Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull had worked together to draft a compromise environmental policy for Australia that both could live with. That fleeting moment of bipartisan unity was sabotaged by Andrew Robb and Tony Abbott from the Liberal Party and the Greens. Since then, the different sides have dug ever deeper trenches in a bitter political struggle that has reduced climate action to a wedge issue. The need is for transformative action but governments remain trapped in piecemeal and manifestly inadequate reforms.

October 25, 2018

JERRY ROBERTS. Globalism meets economic nationalism. Don't write off Trump or Morrison.

The most interesting political action worldwide is happening in Europe and right now the focus is on Italys coalition government of left and right standing up to Brussels rules. Similar forces are at work in the United States of America. Are these working-class pressures building up in Australia? I hope so but we will learn nothing about them from the Wentworth by-election.

July 25, 2020

Sunday environmental round up, 26 July 2020

The NTs moratorium on seabed mining expires soon. Invasive animals and plants are a serious and growing threat to the environment and humans. Japan moves away from funding overseas coal-fired power but inadequate climate action renders CO2 removal from the atmosphere more likely.

September 5, 2020

Sunday environmental round up, 6 September 2020

COVID is increasing deforestation but the Australian government moves rapidly to put fast-tracked development above the environment. Computer geeks start monitoring the sources of CO2 emissions and Indigenous groups use the law to challenge governments to protect their lands and lives. Sharks mount a media campaign to improve their image.

July 4, 2020

Sunday environmental round up, 5 July 2020

Disgraceful behaviour at home and in the United Nations allows Australia to meet its Kyoto greenhouse gas emissions targets, while our overall environmental performance scores high and low. Corruption and money laundering exposed at the root of the illegal trade in wild animals, and climate change affects deer migration patterns in the USA. Fossil fuels harm your pocket as well as your health.

October 17, 2019

STEPHANIE DOWRICK. It's indifference to poverty - not refugees - that profoundly affects our "security"

We have a government led by a former Minister for Immigration that’s obsessed with playing power games around the idea of security: who has it, who threatens it, and most especially - who should define and control it. But while those games grind on, true insecurity is being lived daily by hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Australians lacking security in housing, safety - and food.

October 31, 2017

KEVIN PEOPLES. The Dangers of a Feminine Touch

The Catholic Churchs misogyny is one of the cultural causes for its sexual abuse scandal. It is impossible to believe that any female bishop, or any woman assisting her bishop as a consultor, on hearing rumours or allegations of the raping of young children by priests, would have readily accepted priestly denials or agreed to move the accused to anther parish. Could a woman admit publically she was not particularly interested in the issue?

February 21, 2019

DAVID WALLACE-WELLS. Time to panic (The New York Times).

The planet is getting warmer in catastrophic ways. And fear may be the only thing that saves us.

October 21, 2016

BINOY KAMPMARK. Des Ball: The man who sank the myth of controlled nuclear warfare

The late Professor Des Ball of the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre came as close as any on being a public intellectual on nuclear strategy.

While some of his counterparts in the United States felt that using nuclear weapons was feasible and sound, Ball, who died last week, issued his pieces with mighty caveats and sensible qualifications.

Controlling the process of deploying weapons of mass extermination in an active theatre, far from being deemed obscene, was lauded by advocates. Human sense will always prevail, somehow.

November 15, 2018

Lazard hails inflection point as wind, solar costs beat new and old fossils (Renew Economy)

Lazard hails inflection point as wind, solar costs beat new and old fossils.

October 8, 2017

DUNCAN MACLAREN. Catalonia is not Scotland and Vice Versa

Scotlands independence referendum campaign, described by an academic, objective source as one of the best examples of participative democracy in Europe, was completely peaceful apart from triumphant Unionists who were followers of the Orange Lodge attacking forlorn Yes voters on the day after the referendum which the pro-indy side narrowly lost. In Catalonia, before and during the referendum, blood was spilt by police drafted in from the other parts of Spain by the Madrid Government in scenes reminiscent of the repressive tactics used by Franco. The all-seeing social media and even serious TV channels showed elderly women bleeding because of the brutality. Not a good look for an EU member country which has only been a democracy for 42 years. But what are the differences between the Catalan and Scottish desires to be an independent state?

December 19, 2015

Tony Doherty. Removing the wrapping and ribbons from Christmas.

Do you know the story of the birth of Jesus?

What a silly question!

At this time of year, it is impossible to escape it.

Children remind us in their charming Christmas plays. Shopping centres play carols until we could scream. Television programmers dust off their 1950s biblical dramas. Churches decorate cribs the odd donkey even appears in more adventurous parish churches.

But how much of this story comes from the four gospels?

October 24, 2019

The markets school Modi: India needs reform (Policy Forum 22-10-19)

The Indian governments tinkering has not been enough to enact real change Prime Minister Modi must listen to the market and undertake a serious structural transformation, Ramesh Thakur writes.

October 16, 2019

LAURIE PATTON. Telstra should stop whinging and help fix our dud NBN

Earlier in the week Telstra chair, John Mullen, conceded that the company must accept some of the blame for our flawed National Broadband Network due to its recalcitrance back in 2007/2008 when it submitted a bid that didnt meet the requirements of the government tender to build a nationwide network. As Mr Mullen also observed, whether we like it or not, the NBN is here to stay. Having admitted that it failed to submit a genuine bid back then the least Telstra should do now is help fix the NBN.

November 1, 2017

FRANK BRENNAN. A mate's take on Rudd's call to arms.

Kevin Rudd is back. Last week he was blitzing the country with a whirlwind book tour, having flown in from New York where he continues his post-prime-ministerial life as President of the Asia Society. He is promoting volume one of his autobiography entitled Not for the Faint-hearted. I caught up with him at Australian National University where he met in conversation with Stan Grant in front of a large crowd.

December 16, 2018

MICHAEL KEATING. Slow Wage Growth and Its Implications for the Government's Economic and Fiscal Forecasts

On Monday the Government will release the mid-year update of its economic and fiscal outlook. The Government hopes that the announcement of a return to budget surplus in 2019 will underpin its claims as an economic manager in the run-up to the May election. Clearly, however, that projected surplus will depend upon the assumptions employed, and it is contended here, and in advance, that we should be very suspicious of the most critical element in the government forecasts the wage forecast.

August 30, 2018

JAMES FERNYHOUGH. Climate change action off the agenda under Morrison government.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor has unveileda new energy policy focused exclusively on reducing electricity prices, in a strong signal the Morrison government will abandon all efforts to lower carbon emissions.

August 28, 2019

On the Middle East, Tim Fischer was a man of courage and integrity

Tim Fischer belongs to a unique generation of politicians we are farewelling fast; a generation such as Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. A generation which whether you agreed with their ideology or not you could not but respect.

September 6, 2018

HOWARD DAVIES. Was the financial crisis wasted?

As the 10th anniversary of the start of the global financial crisis approaches, a wave of retrospective reviews is bearing down on us. Many of them will try to answer the Big Question: Has the financial system been fundamentally reformed, so that we can be confident of preventing a repeat of the dismal and destructive events of 2008-2009, or has the crisis been allowed to go to waste?

September 19, 2018

SUSAN RYAN. Ladies in Red.

In the late 1970s, federal Labor, still in opposition after Whitlam, was struggling. New polling research enabled me to advise national conference that Labor would not regain office unless it increased its support among women voters. If women had voted Labor in the same proportion as men had, Labor would have won every election since World War 2 , with the possible exception of the Chifley loss in 1949.With these findings, measuring the gender gap in polling analysis was introduced, and has remained there ever since.

December 3, 2019

ABUL RIZVI. A Cruel Government Setting Regional Migrants Up for Exploitation and Failure

On 16 November 2019, the Governments much touted new regional migration visas took effect. One of these is a five year provisional visa that requires the migrant to be nominated by a state/territory government. To secure permanent residence, the provisional migrant must live and work in the relevant region and earn at least $53,900 per annum for a minimum of three financial years. If state/territory governments actively participate in this visa, they will be collaborating with the Commonwealth to set up many of these migrants for exploitation and failure.

December 15, 2019

STEPHEN LEEDER. Is the Climate right for Discussions about how to Adapt?

Whatever the cause of our changing climate natural variation or human-made we should invest in adaptation.

October 30, 2018

CARMEN LAWRENCE. Waste in the Commonwealth/State divide in education

In the seemingly never ending debate about the best way to fund our schools, relatively little consideration is given to the effects of the declining influence of state governments and the increasing exercise of power by the Commonwealth. However, in our discussions in the panel which reviewed school funding in Australia the so-called Gonski review - state-commonwealth relations were, inevitably and necessarily, pivotal to our deliberations. It may come as no surprise that the recommendations that flowed from that analysis have been largely overlooked and relegated to the too hard basket.

November 26, 2019

NOEL TURNBULL. The Earth gets its day in court

Last month the Earth got its first day in court in cases against ExxonMobil lodged in New York and Massachusetts in which it was alleged, among other things, that the company misled the public about its product.

November 10, 2019

NOEL TURNBULL. The political limbo rock - how low can you go

One of the best ways to determine how history will judge a politician is not to tot up what they achieved but to try to evaluate the depths they sometimes sank to as they pursued their careers.

May 20, 2020

PETER DRYSDALE. Return to prosperity depends on mending China ties (AFR 20.5.20)

The global economy has taken a huge hit as the worlds major economies shut down economic activity in turn to fight the spread of Covid-19.

October 11, 2017

CHRIS BONNOR. A rare opportunity to fix schools

A little news item can tell a big story. This week the Guardian reported on a survey that revealed that Australian parents want schools to teach more social skills. It raises many questions: whose job it is anyway, what will fall off the curriculum to make space, how will we know if it works? But in one sense it is certainly timely: right now the Gonski 2.0 Review is giving us a once-in-a-decade opportunity to have our say about what schools should and shouldnt do.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal