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Let’s not reject forty years of cooperation and exchange with China. Australia has greatly benefitted from trade, investment, cultural exchange and collaboration over these decades. Now, as the United States and Europe threaten to raise tariffs, erect barriers to exchanges and prioritise security concerns, it is time to remember when we espoused multilateralism and openness. Continue reading »

Forty years ago, Medicare as we know it today was born. It was the reincarnation of the Whitlam government’s Medibank, introduced in 1975 but dismantled in stages by the Fraser Liberal government. Medibank was developed in the 1960s by health economists Dick Scotton  and John Deeble,, when disease prevalence was different and the politics of Continue reading »

“Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.”   John Lennon I don’t think anyone serious ever doubted that the Stage 3 tax package needed to be amended if the Labor Government of Anthony Albanese were ever going to be taken remotely seriously Continue reading »

Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s departure from parliament is a vulgar reminder about where Australian politics went grossly wrong, and where its vulnerable, already trimmed sovereignty went. In a January 23 Facebook post, former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced his decision to “leave parliament at the end of February to take on new Continue reading »

The likely nomination of Donald Trump as the Republican candidate for November’s US presidential election has many asking whether Australia should remain as committed to its close relationship with the US as it has been. Setting aside that a vocal minority has long questioned Australia’s commitment to the relationship, two matters make this time around Continue reading »

Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people. There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Continue reading »

Women in Gaza are giving birth in a health care system that is on the brink of collapse, with little access to prenatal or postnatal care.

The post “It Surpassed Tragedy”: The Horrors of Being Pregnant and Giving Birth in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

It’ usually the debt ceiling or the budget. This time it’s the border. Can this ritualized GOP stunt make Democrats pay this time? Generally, it’s always fair to assume that the American right wing is 100% hypocritical in all things. They do not practice what they preach and they preach a lot. So, I think we would all have thought that while they desperately want to give Donald Trump dictatorial power, it’s the last thing they would want to grant President Joe Biden. And yet as these negotiations over immigration have played out, it’s clear they want Biden to seize dictatorial powers as well, at least on that issue. I guess we can say that they have some consistency after all. After years of insisting that the congress must act to “protect the border” and browbeating the Democrats for their alleged failure to do it, they are now giving Joe Biden the green light to use executive orders the way Donald Trump used them. They once railed against such supposed usurpation of congressional prerogatives when a Democrat was in the White House but now they argue that they have no role to play and it’s all up to the president.

Thirty days hath September, April, June and November. Unless a leap year is its fate, February hath twenty-eight. All the rest hath three days more, excepting January, which hath six thousand, one hundred and eighty-four.

Well done, everybody, for making it to January 569th. I’ve been grateful for those extra days this month, as it’s given me time to get my head together for my 2024 shows, which begin in just over two weeks’ time with a run of dates with the fabulous poet (and human) Henry Normal. We start…

I’m fifty-six. I’ll be fifty-seven in less than a month. My hair is white, and my body’s not what it used to be, though in some ways it never was.

My parents were conservatives but I remember back in 1979, they thought Reagan was a bad idea. They were right, but he won, and I was 12 years old, just finished elementary school and about to go to boarding school, as my father had a job in Bangladesh, then the poorest country in the world.

Seventy-nine/eighty is when the world changed. It had been changing before: working class male wages in the US peaked in 86: there was the OPEC crisis, going off gold, stagflation, etc… But it was Thatcher and Reagan who locked in neo-liberalism, which was essentially a looting operation. Sell everything off, burn it all down, turn it into cash and damn the consequences.

The party's U-turn on the bankers' bonus cap comes just months after the party campaigned against scrapping it

As MAGAs pitch hissy fit over Taylor Swift and immigration Axios reports this morning that our Biden-led, post-pandemic U.S. recovery is outpacing other G7 economies: The largest federal investments in infrastructure and manufacturing in decades, championed by the Biden administration, contributed significantly. Growth in the U.S labor force also helped, Axios adds, “both due to more Americans choosing to enter the workforce and a surge in immigration.” Read that again. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (no, not that one) tells Axios: Meantime, House Republicans refuse to do productive legislative work for which you and I are paying them. The GOP-led House Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday passed two articles of impeachment against Alejandro N. Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, the New York Times reports, despite lack of evidence “of a crime or acts of corruption.” Republicans on the panel argue “that the Biden administration border policies he implemented ran afoul of the law.

Congress is using kids to hold Big Tech accountable. Kids will get hurt in the process. In a few minutes, the Senate Judiciary will start a hearing focused on “Big Tech and the Online Child Exploitation Crisis.” Like most such hearings, this will almost certainly go off the rails in a wide variety of directions that I […]

With the roll-out of iOS 17.4, Apple iPhone users in the EU will benefit from downloading apps outside of Apple’s official app store. This benefit, which is known as sideloading, will be denied to British customers for now. On the fourth anniversary of our leaving the EU, we ask the question: is this evidence that we […]

Though her family sometimes received food stamps and occasionally had their utilities cut off, Marcie Alvis Walker’s parents led her to believe that they were an average middle-class Black family. They encouraged her to pursue her dreams and told her that if she worked hard enough, she’d achieve them. The small catch was that Walker’s dream was an elusive one for any cash-strapped and undereducated Black woman: being a New York Times-bestselling author. Now, as a published non-bestselling author, she wishes she’d had a backup plan.

Though no one had said otherwise, my mother felt it necessary to regularly and relentlessly remind me and my siblings that there was more Black representation in the ’90s and early ’00s, when we all came of age, than there was when she did in the ’50s and early ’60s.

Pennsylvania Supremes condemn Dobbs While MAGA went gaga over Democrats’ secret plot “to turn Taylor Swift into an international pop star and the Kansas City Chiefs into a football dynasty so Swift could then date a Kansas City player and leverage the collective media coverage to get Joseph R. Biden, Jr. elected as President,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was throwing the Dobbs decision overturning Roe back in the U.S. Supreme Court’s faces. Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled on Monday that a woman’s right to reproductive autonomy is “fundamental” (WHYY): With four separate concurring opinions — three of which also dissented in part from the majority opinion — the 219-page decision in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. PA Department of Human Services is complex. However, the key — and unanimous — finding was that patients and abortion providers could challenge the state’s 1982 Abortion Control Act, which prohibits the use of Medicaid to cover funding for abortions.

Yours truly, of course, feels truly honoured to find himself on the list of the world’s 20 Best Econometrics Blogs and Websites. 1. The Stata Blog 2. Bruno Rodrigues 7. Eran Raviv Blog Statistics and Econometrics 9. How the (Econometric) Sausage is Made 14. Lars P Syll Pålsson Syll received a PhD in economic history in 1991 and a PhD […]