The outcome of US-led conflicts in Ukraine and West Asia will have a profound impact on the developing world order. Washington has already lost the former, and its major adversaries are vested in making sure it loses the latter too. Republished from The Cradle, 2 January 2024 Geopolitical analysts broadly agree that the war in Continue reading »
politics
In all our lives we get to a point where we have to draw lines in the sand. Sometimes those lines are in the relationships we forge, and sometimes they are in the movements we occupy. Many criminalised people struggle with drawing those lines. For many of us, our boundaries and lines haven’t been respected Continue reading »
Climate experts have issued a grim warning for Australians this summer, predicting that 2023 will be the hottest year on record. While the Australian government has recognised the threat of climate change and has committed billions of dollars in disaster relief and the energy transition, the challenges and opportunities they present are unlikely to be Continue reading »
Australia has just completed major reviews of two of its largest public expenditures – the NDIS and Employment Services. Each program manifests problems predicted by two lesser-known economic theories: the Jevons Paradox in the case of the NDIS and Goodhart’s Law in the case of employment services. Neither were mentioned in either review. Today I Continue reading »
Josh Burns, Labor MP for Macnamara, in Victoria, has been visiting Israel. During this visit he did not even follow his own party’s weak calls for a ceasefire. He said there must not be a ceasefire in Gaza. We live in Macnamara and the following poster appeared at the Sunday rally protesting the obscenity of Continue reading »
Western nations are always ready to proclaim their system of governance as superior, particularly in regards to China, dismissed as being authoritarian. Increasingly however, ‘western liberal democracy’ finds itself under scrutiny with trust in government falling. Growing numbers feel alienated, believing that the democratic system has been taken over by elites with little or no Continue reading »
Among the superstitious political elites in Japan, recent events like the earthquake, the plane collision at Haneda and the arrest of a lawmaker in a major political slush fund do not bode well for Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, already unpopular. AUKUS can be another nightmare for Fumio Kishida, albeit external in nature. The decision for Continue reading »
The final months of 2023 pierced our sense of hope and threw us into a kind of mortal sadness. Israel’s escalating violence has killed more than twenty thousand Palestinians to date, wiping out entire generations of families. Horrifying images and testimonies from Palestine have flooded all forms of media, stirring a deep sense of anguish Continue reading »
Terrorism is a global problem, we could talk all day and night about whether a terrorist is a freedom fighter, an oppressed person struggling for recognition or a cold-blooded murderer but whatever the reasons, everyone must agree; innocent people deserve protection from terrorists. China had a terrorism problem and acted – in doing so, they Continue reading »
Henry George (1839 – 1897) was a remarkable, self-taught radical American political-economist who developed a theory of land taxation, which evolved to become, in essence, a programme for applying a single, substantial annual tax on all land – but not on improvements to the land such as buildings – while abolishing all other taxes. George Continue reading »