Bipartisanship on the wrong issue – asylum-seeker policy; Chalmers’ essay – is it really just mainstream economics?; and, after 50 years, Medicare needs resuscitating. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy. Australian politics More on the Voice, including Continue reading »
Public policy
Michael Keating’s response to the P&I article series on growth – GDP and population – is very welcome as it provides a condensed summary of what has befuddled Australian political economy in recent decades. Problem one is his seeming complete unfamiliarity with post-growth scholarship: the problems it identifies, the causes of the problems, and the Continue reading »
Australia’s oceans, Greenland’s Ice Sheet and Antarctica’s sea ice are all feeling the heat. One million species are on the edge of extinction. No wonder life scientists are taking to the streets. Australia is in hot water Although the global warming that has occurred over the oceans is lower than the warming over land, about Continue reading »
Treasurer Chalmers has the radical idea that economics is about human well-being; NSW Labor moves to the right of Coalition; and in spite of fires and floods, Australians have poor knowledge of climate change. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues Continue reading »
… as Louis Armstrong famously croaked. Well, perhaps: The temperature’s going up. The rich are getting richer. Wetlands are disappearing. Gas is officially green. 2022 sixth hottest on record It’s hard not to keep telling the same old stories but keeping an eye on the global temperature is rather like keeping an eye on your Continue reading »
The Voice – up against Dutton and the Greens on a unity ticket; surely there is no case for Stage 3 tax cuts; and the Liberals’ election post-mortem. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy. Many say that Continue reading »
Tell it like it is, António: ‘climate disaster, death sentence, insanity, inconsistent with human survival’. Thank goodness for chocolate and birds. Was any progress made at the last COP meeting in Egypt? Were there game-changing, climate-action breakthroughs or was it simply more talk culminating in yet another failure (Greta Thunberg’s ‘Blah, blah, blah’)? Tom Athanasiou, Continue reading »
Richard Barnes laments the wilful blindness of many elites who go snow skiing while turning a blind eye to the causes of the high country’s dying landscape. Barnes says he mostly agrees with author Jeff Sparrow that the current economic system is to blame. Let me count the ways. This list of the top-10 errors Continue reading »
For those of us focused on sustainability, we wonder what it would take for a progressive government to wake up and smell the evidence. In other words, how close to collapse does Australia and the world need to be before the government (including its public service) decides it should take the issue seriously? Would you Continue reading »
Patrick Lin, professor of philosophy at California Polytechnic State University and director of the university’s Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group, has been selected as a member of National Space Council’s Users Advisory Group (UAG). According to an announcement from the White House, the UAG “will provide the National Space Council advice and recommendations on matters related to space policy and strategy, including but not limited to, government policies, laws, regulations, treaties, international instruments, programs, and practices across the civil, commercial, international, and national security space sectors.” The National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Kamala Harris, “is charged with providing objective advice to the President on the formulation and implementation of space policy and strategy.” The UAG includes people in the aerospace and defense industries, various researchers and educators, and others. It is headed by retired U.S. Air Force General Lester Lyles. You can see the full list of UAG members here.