Ken Baldwin Australian National University Andrew Blakers Australian National University Matthew Stocks Australian National University The Australian renewable energy industry will install more than 10 gigawatts of new solar and wind power during 2018 and 2019. If that rate is maintained, Australia would reach 50% renewables in 2025. The recent demise of the National Energy Guarantee saw the […]
Rod Tiffin. If the Liberal leadership upheaval was a Muppet show, as Scott Morrison described it, Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Stokes have been revealed as its Statler and Waldorf. Muppets fans will remember the two cantankerous old men who heckled from the sidelines. The media moguls did not heckle publicly, but their behind-the-scenes barracking was […]
Once again, we are battered by bad news of the possibility of widespread malpractice in another major sector, as Prime Minister Morrison has announced a royal commission into aged care, with allegations of price gouging by some pro-profits, chronic understaffing, appalling wages for staff, and poor nutrition for many of those in aged care. Coming […]
Michael Yore. It is time for Australia to reassert the value of housing as a basic human right”, proclaims the 2018-2019 Social Justice Statement from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference. And quite rightly! A strong human rights perspective correctly guides and colours the entire statement on housing and homelessness in Australia with the statement basing […]
Memoir of Fr Kevin Mogg, inspired by the Second Vatican Council In An Enabling Life: Father Kevin Mogg. A Collection of Reminiscences, Anne Tuohey and several contributors have captured key aspects of the history of the Catholic Church as it struggled to cope with the huge migrant flows after the Second World War and then […]
Bruce Duncan. Sounding surprisingly like an evangelical revivalist, Prime Minister Morrison in Albury on 6 September highlighted the need for love in our country, for every Australian, and that this set the value base for his own thinking and presumably for policies of his government. No one in Albury objected to the ideal of love […]
Henry Reynolds University of Tasmania US slave owners wrote and spoke about liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. Similar hypocrisy, buried in the foundations of settler Australia, has escaped comparable scrutiny. The nature of the early settlements is so well known that it is frequently taken for granted. But for the first 50 years […]
Bruce Duncan. The events around the removal of Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister of Australia have caused dismay and anger right across the country, not just because of the internecine politics involved but because the malcontents have undermined efforts to face the terrible threats posed by global warming and climate change. Our new prime minister, […]
Andrew Glikson. In a key paper titled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene“, published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Science on 6 August, a group of 17 climate and environment scientists issued a stern warning to humanity about the future of advanced life on Earth. The paper states: We […]
Peter Whiting. With the Victorian elections due in November, the timing of the recent announcement of a “visionary’ $50 billion underground rail loop for Melbourne is not entirely surprising. It follows a similar ‘visionary’ proposal for a city-to-airport link at an envisaged cost of $15 billion. It is a sad reality that infrastructure spending on […]
