It is time for us to use the words Occupation, Illegality and Apartheid. We are applying these words to an occupying power truculent and implacable in its determination its occupation will never end, committed to a creeping annexation to deliver it a permanent hold over Palestinian land and Palestinian people. … Twenty years ago it Continue reading »
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Productivity growth will be less than projected in the Intergenerational Report, the budget deficits will be worse, and the Government should be setting the scene for raising more revenue. Last week the Albanese Government released its first Intergenerational Report (IGR) – the sixth in the series. By definition, the projected future growth of the economy Continue reading »
China’s economy is slowing down. Current forecasts put China’s GDP growth in 2023 at less than 5%, below the forecasts made last year and far below the high growth rates that China enjoyed until the late 2010s. The Western press is filled with China’s supposed misdeeds: a financial crisis in the real-estate market, a general Continue reading »
Like Paul Keating, Australians should be angry. Australia’s security is at risk. No other nation is so foolish, so self- delusional, so divorced from the basics of statecraft, nor so feckless with its citizens’ security in pursuit of America’s objectives. Shouldn’t we be white hot with rage at this government’s abdication of sovereignty? Australia’s security Continue reading »
Sam Roggeveen’s Echidna Strategy rightly challenges Australia to act as a diplomatic powerhouse, not a military one. Sam Roggeveen’s basic storyline in The Echidna Strategy – that the China threat is grossly exaggerated, and that Australia should not, and need not, rely on America for our security protection – is causing predictable conniptions in our Continue reading »
The 13th of September 2007 was an important day in the history of Australian diplomacy although few people have heard of it. That was the occasion when veteran Aboriginal activist Les Malezer addressed the U.N’s General Assembly as the Chair of the Global Indigenous Caucus and introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. Continue reading »
The future is already upon us. The forty-year Intergenerational Report (IGR) is a divertissement. The population, participation, and productivity template of Treasury economists (3Ps framework) is inadequate and unsuited to the already changed world. As is the obsession with growth. How far out does it seem reasonable to project? In terms of climate, Australia is Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Bloc steps up challenge to old world system. Plus: Xi and Modi agree to ease border tensions; West loses ‘plebiscite’ on rules-based order; three-way ‘alliance’ confronts China, North Korea; US media support new China narrative; Biden to visit New Delhi but skip Jakarta; new Thailand PM a Thaksin confidant. The Continue reading »
“For me, indigenous recognition won’t be changing our constitution so much as completing it.” – Tony Abbot, 2015. When on the 7th of February 1788 the British claimed the eastern half of Australia they left us with two abiding problems. They assumed that the First Nations were not in actual possession of their own homelands Continue reading »
The morning of the ALP National Conference on 18 August, ABC online news led with two ‘Bad China’ stories. One about whether China is building an airstrip on a contested island, the other likely to cause great discomfort and anxiety to Australians because it showed the level of China’s spying on Australia via hundreds of Continue reading »