Imagine being Tony Blinken, and facing the arduous responsibility as US Secretary of State to rule the globe! This seems a daunting task, but fortunately, Blinken doesn’t have to strain his brain too much because he has a manual already written to instruct him. This manual is called The Grand Chessboard. It tutors you to Continue reading »
Economy
It’s time we reckoned with what it means to become a corporatocracy. Our governments exist to enact the desires of their corporate masters. Some of these politicians, like Madeleine King, appear to do so with alacrity, while others appear lost in the perceived demands of party and pressure groups. The end result will be an Continue reading »
12½ years ago I wrote, in a column published in the Fairfax (now Nine) mastheads, that “the surest way to gain acceptance for policy proposals that former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry might have called ‘frankly, bad’ is to wrap them in a ‘security’ blanket”. That is, I went on, “if you want a government to Continue reading »
The way that the government has permitted the opposition and the Murdoch media (and even the ABC and Fairfax media) to push it around on issues such as climate and immigration policy raises the question: Does modern Labor have any moral bottom at all? Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is an excellent negotiator. He won’t be Continue reading »
The disparity is vast and immoral. Emotional language touches souls, but in Indonesia it should also grab economics and politics. The new government could demand reform. It wont. We’ll call her Siti. Real name usage might threaten the uni graduate’s fragile job as an English teacher at a government school. She earns less than Rp Continue reading »
With a couple of minutes Googling, your favourite Martian could be well informed on the role of government in the Australian economy from the moment of the arrival of the British colonialists. It’s been big. Colonial and other governments have not only provided legal and economic frameworks within which private organisations can work, they’ve done Continue reading »
The commentary that surrounds the Federal Budget is a noise of dissatisfaction and ‘negative bias’. The reality is that the ‘power of constant attack’ will make it harder to co-operate together, in bipartisan fashion, on crucial matters. Is there another way? My cousin has written of the courage and fortitude of our farming forebears. They Continue reading »
There are some things in our ‘shrinking nation’ that are not shrinking. There are the obvious ones that have dominated the news – petrol prices, rents, the indexation of HECS/HELP debt, the cost of living in general, and, appallingly, domestic violence. And there are the ones that have been creeping up ever since COVID – Continue reading »
Is capitalism capable of long term meaningful reform? This is perhaps the most import of issues to address, given that environmental disaster is becoming an inevitability under the present watch of capitalism. When reading the recent articles in P&I by Michaël Keating on the need for a different approach to understand the impact of technology Continue reading »
Twenty-three years ago, a Chinese-Australian solar scientist moved from Sydney to Wuxi to build China’s solar panel manufacturing industry from scratch, using technology developed in Australian universities. Shi Zhengrong became the world’s first clean energy billionaire, nicknamed “The Sun King”. China went on to dominate global solar panel manufacturing and, thanks to a mix of Continue reading »