politics

Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 04:52
Joe Biden isn’t coming to Australia. The good news is he hasn’t had a senior moment and forgotten all about an appointment with another interchangeable ‘fella down under’. The bad news is that the United States’ increasingly poisonous domestic politics and crises take priority over everything else, including the long-term security of the Indo-Pacific. To Continue reading »
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 04:54
In the May 2023 Budget, Treasury caused a ‘big Australia’ furore by increasing its net migration forecast for 2022-23 from the 235,000 it published in the October 2022 Budget to 400,000. Net migration is the number of people, irrespective of citizenship or visa status, who arrive in Australia after being outside the country for more Continue reading »
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 04:56
Far more transparency is required about which ‘important public policy objectives’ Defence wants to subvert to its needs. Part two of a two-part series. Read part one. The Defence Department wants to exempt itself from some state and territory laws saying ‘unintended consequences’ of the laws have ‘constrained’ its activities. This follows news of a Continue reading »
Created
Fri, 19/05/2023 - 04:58
The Australian Government has announced a four-decades long deal to acquire American and British nuclear-powered submarines, at an indicative cost of $268 billion to $368 billion. This is an extraordinary timeframe and an extraordinary cost. The assumptions on which the deal has been constructed are ill-defined, and many of the assertions made to justify the Continue reading »
Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 04:50
In a recent Guardian advert pleading for readers to hand over money to the paper, leading columnist Marina Hyde declared: ‘My absolute favourite thing about the Guardian is not being told what to write.’ Hyde – or Marina Elizabeth Catherine Dudley-Williams, as she prefers not to be known – was, in fact, making ‘the most Continue reading »
Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 04:53
Last Monday, Minister for the Environment Tanya Plibersek and Minister for Emergency Management Murray Watt announced an intended spending of $236 million to upgrade the nation’s flood warning gauge networks. This is welcome news, but it must also be recognised that for flood warning to be truly effective we will need to pay more attention Continue reading »
Created
Thu, 18/05/2023 - 04:56
Many contributors have exposed the blatant ethical corruption of recent journalism that presages combat with a rampaging China.  Just as before, now again, there are ‘interested’ parties more than happy to be the beneficiaries of the click-bait journalism on display. Eisenhower cautioned against complacency towards the military-industrial complex. To this we can nowadays add too Continue reading »