After considering Opposition criticisms, this article concludes that this Budget reflects Labor’s competent economic management. However, a more ambitious tax reform agenda is needed to adequately provide all the services that Australians expect. Labor’s macroeconomic strategy Essentially Labor faced a difficult balancing act with this budget. The challenge was to improve the cost of living Continue reading »
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“[T]here was the man in his 50s, forgotten in a room, having had both legs amputated. He had lost his kids, his grandkids, his home . . . and he’s alone in the corner of this dark hospital, maggots going out of his wounds and he was screaming: ‘The worms are eating me alive please Continue reading »
In the movie Apocalypse Now, Robert Duval’s character, Colonel Bill Kilgore, reflectively observes that, despite the smell of victory, ‘Someday this war’s gonna end’. So too, the war in Gaza is going to end. The only questions are how and when. Despite growing external pressure, the current Israeli cabinet is only inclined to end the Continue reading »
Western leaders like to talk about values, shared values, common values. They talk about this a lot. America itself is obsessed with two things: conflict resolution through violence and moral preening. Nowhere is this contradiction more glaringly on display than in the genocide being committed in Gaza. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) says Continue reading »
This past Budget week had the most intense focus on immigration levels that I can remember (and I’ve been watching immigration policy in Budget week for over 35 years). It confirms that immigration levels will be a dominant issue at the next Election. But debates about immigration levels can be a mixture of substance as Continue reading »
Doubling down is a term used to describe a high-risk manoeuvre that blackjack players make when they decide to double their potential losses to receive just one card from the deck. In conservative politics it’s a move typically made to send a signal to political associates and supporters that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Continue reading »
At last weekend’s Victorian Writers Festival three authors – two of them also bookshop owners and one of them an author and enthusiastic supporter of bookshops – talked about books and the threat to reading. Ann Patchett and her husband own Parnassus Books in Nashville Tennessee. Lauren Groff, another novelist and her husband Clay Kallman, Continue reading »
An unnecessarily conservative budget from the government and a pathetic response from the opposition, how we are so generous to Western Australia, the Coalition and nukes, the disgrace of McBride’s jail sentence. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic and political issues. Because of Continue reading »
When the taxi driver in Eritrea’s capital city, Asmara, realised I was Australian, he would not accept payment, and instead, spent the duration of the trip telling me of Eritrea’s national debt to Fred Hollows. Fred had performed eye surgery on Eritrean and Ethiopian freedom fighters as they battled and eventually overthrew the military dictatorship Continue reading »
American elites are squandering the country’s global standing and political capital defending the indefensible with Israel’s genocidal war. When you not only defend but actively enable genocide and the mass murder of children, all norms and standards in human decency go out the window. That’s what’s happening to the ruling and media elites in the Continue reading »
After aircraft failures and employee complaints, Boeing could face charges over two fatal crashes.
This upcoming election has consequences. In 2020, we saw then-President Donald J. Trump refuse to concede after losing reelection to Joe Biden, serving as an exclamation point on a term that was marred with turmoil, crises, and outright lies. As we head into 2024 with Trump as the Republican nominee, I worry about the possibility of a second term, which will no doubt further erode our country’s values. It seems like every time I look at my phone, I see headlines about Trump’s many court cases, his ugly campaign promises of violence, and texts from my very real long-distance girlfriend pressuring me into moving in with her. So let me be clear: if Trump wins in November, I’m going to have to move to Canada to be closer to my long-distance girlfriend, Lisa.
Check out this sneak preview for the eagerly-anticipated Steven Moffat-written & Julie Anne Robinson-directed Doctor Who episode "BOOM."
It’s almost quaint now to look back at the shock we all felt at presidential candidate Donald Trump attacking the judge presiding in the Trump University fraud lawsuit as biased because he was Latino and Trump was talking about building a border wall. Most Americans assumed that it would be impossible that such a disrespectful and, frankly, racist person could be elected in the 21st century but as it turned out that was just a preview of many such attacks to come. (That lawsuit eventually settled for $25 million) Because Trump is such an inveterate lawbreaker, he has been the subject of many legal cases over the years and biographers and armchair psychologists have speculated that his strategy has always been to publicly denigrate the judges and the prosecutors in these cases due to his father’s admonition that one must always fight with everything they have. But it’s just as likely that he’s following the advice of his mentor, the odious attorney Roy Cohn who has been called “one of the most reviled men in American history.” If anything it was Cohn who pulled Trump out from under his father’s shadow.
Declan Kearney attended the first Global Anti-Apartheid conference on Palestine in South Africa last weekend
No, not Lieberman Only a fraction of American adults are stock investors, but it’s a large fraction (61%). Many of the more heavily invested will be cashing dividend checks while claiming the economy has gone bust under Joe Biden. So it goes. The news has yet to trickle down to others that, yeah, people’s lives are improving under Joe Biden, as Michael Tomasky wrote this week: Politico and Morning Consult asked respondents a series of questions about all the major economic legislation Biden has signed. Majorities know little or nothing at all about the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS act, the American Rescue Plan, and the Inflation Reduction Act. And get this: While 40 percent said Biden has done more than Trump on infrastructure, 37 percent said Trump had done more. In January, NBC found that Trump has a 22-point advantage over Biden on the question of whom voters trust more with the economy—up 15 points from the same poll in 2020. […] It’s largely a media problem.
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Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
The former party leader told Byline Times that Labour will not 'not sign up' to Conservative budgets if the party wins the next general election – a contrast to 1997