The countries where it’s not safe for Australians to travel have multiplied, but not because of COVID. They include the places where we fought the war on terror. Twenty years ago Australia joined the US ‘coalition of the willing’ to invade Iraq. One reason for doing that, our leaders said, was to remove Saddam Hussein’s Continue reading »
politics
One of the most hated aspects of the Morrison government was the secrecy. Over and again, we continue to shock to revelations of hidden wrongdoing long after their defeat last May. It was a crucial aspect of the Coalition government’s efforts over a decade to diminish our democratic structures, shifting us towards competitive authoritarianism, and Continue reading »
In Australia, public universities face a crisis that threatens the future of this country. It is not a crisis of funding. Nor is it yet a quality crisis, although members of the Association of Australian University Professors (AAUP) are attuned to seeing standards slip and young colleagues brutalised by the Australian Higher Education System (AHES). Continue reading »
US and British arms industry companies and their little mentioned but crucial support cast of Taiwanese military, lawmakers and government official counterparts are opposed to China-Taiwan reunification, because the current situation acts as their ATM, generating billions of dollars in profit. The recent visit to China by former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou – the first Continue reading »
P&I Editorial: Conflicts of interest at the heart of AUKUS and the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) – including the principal author of the DSR benefitting from US State Department funding designed to build support for AUKUS and the US alliance – demand independent investigation. Australia’s independently-led Defence Strategic Review will shortly be released to the Continue reading »
Like so many Australians, I am very worried by our commitment to AUKUS. I agree strongly with many other critics that we have been placed in peril by our government’s submarine agreement with the US and the UK. As John Menadue wrote on 1st April “The AUKUS alliance has forever changed Australia’s sovereignty. Foreign policy Continue reading »
Martin Guzman explains the role of power in sovereign debt crises and restructurings.
Since the global financial crisis there has been a fundamental change in the operation of the Australian economy. Since World War Two, the majority of the benefits of economic growth have flowed to the bottom 90 per cent of income earners. However, as shown in Figure 1, between 2009 and 2019 the top 10 per Continue reading »
The minister for Home Affairs and the department have been given extraordinary powers, including significant power to hurt and oppress others. For good or ill, the legislature has authorised and permitted their determined cruelty to asylum seekers over many years, their beliefs about stripping citizenship from our nationals, deporting our home-grown criminals and establishing the Continue reading »
In a recent article in The Conversation, Professors Stephen Duckett and Fiona McDonald and Ms Emma Campbell suggest “restrict[ing] Medicare access to GPs who agree to bulk bill all patients, while allowing those who don’t bulk bill to rely solely on out-of-pocket payments”. While there is much to commend this proposal, it is not without Continue reading »