Mark Moran The University of Queensland. If you set out by dinghy from the northern-most inhabited part of Australia, you will make landfall fairly soon in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Boigu Island, part of Queensland, is the most northerly island in the Torres Strait. With its own Australia Post outlet, it is less than ten […]
Julie Lawson RMIT University, Hal Pawson UNSW, Laurence Troy UNSW, Ryan van den Nouwelant Western Sydney University. Australia needs to triple its small stock of social housing over the next 20 years to cover the existing backlog and newly emerging need. That is the central finding of our new research report on the housing infrastructure needs of low-income […]
Peter Whiting. At the UN’s COP24 climate talks currently under way in Poland, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described climate change as “the most important issue we face”. The address by Sir David Attenborough was unequivocal in its alarm, fearing the collapse of our civilisations, and recognising climate change as a “man-made disaster of global […]
Peter Sainsbury. The report ‘Global Warming of 1.5C’ was published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in October 2018. Although the report does not say so, the evidence it presents renders the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change redundant. It asks the wrong question, and its goals and strategies are now revealed to […]
Allan Patience. Within this question is an assumption (which is all too plausible) that Australia has done – and still does – very little to contribute to the making of a world that can live at peace with itself. The grim truth is that for most of the history of European intervention on this continent, […]
James O’Neill. A new ABC report, quoting from a previously classified document, reveals that the Australian government decided in early 2002 to join the American-led Iraq War, but failed to disclose that to Parliament or the public. A newly declassified document, originally compiled by Dr Albert Palazzo of the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Studies Centre, […]
Mark Howden Australian National University and Rebecca Colvin Australian National University A landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commissioned at the breakthrough 2015 summit that brokered the Paris climate agreement, outlines what’s at stake in the world’s bid to limit global temperature rise to 1.5℃. The report, released today, sets out the […]
Editorial Peter Whiting. Regrettably, many of us have by now become inured to those frequent advertisements asking us to sponsor an animal under threat of extinction. Even more sadly, we do not respond with quite the same generosity as of old to similar requests to support children in distress in countries torn apart by war, […]
John Menadue The government has thrown in its lot with climate sceptics, the loony right, which includes the Murdoch media and the coal miners. We have a government with no policy on climate change at all. The responses by the Prime Minister, Deputy Prime Minister, and Ministers for the Environment and Energy to the latest […]
Tony French. That’s the concluding line in the 2018-2019 Social Justice Statement of the Australian Catholic Bishops, titled A place to call home – making a home for everyone in our land. Clearly, that is a sentiment with which we can readily agree. But there is less ready agreement in its implementation. And this tension […]
