Editorial. Australia has made little progress in recent decades to alleviate childhood poverty, according to Brian Lawrence, speaking on 17 October at an Anti-Poverty Week event, sponsored by Catholic Social Services Victoria. He said wages for many people were too low to lift children out of poverty. Mr Lawrence has drafted submissions and appeared at […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Reviewed by Bill Frilay. Chris Patten has written a very interesting memoir on his multi-faceted life in politics, coupled with observations on his contemporaries and the issues of the day. Indeed, a full life. Brought up Catholic (of Irish descent on his father’s side) middle class in West London and educated in the Catholic school […]
Larry Kaufmann. A few days after many people throughout the world celebrated what would have been Nelson Mandela’s 100th birthday on 17 July 2018, Barack Obama delivered the annual Mandela lecture in Johannesburg . Yet even as he highlighted Mandela’s affirmation of the common humanity of people, the Israeli government was busy passing a law […]
Peter Rodgers. With the two-state solution in the morgue, governments around the globe will need to consider anew the unpalatable realities of this long-running conflict. As millions around the globe contemplated New Year resolutions on 31 December 2017, Israel’s ruling Likud party came up with one of its own. Its Central Committee overwhelmingly endorsed a […]
John Menadue. Pauline Hanson usually votes for the wealthy end of town. She’s done it again. Upper income earners will be the biggest beneficiaries over the next seven years with the recent tax cuts. Average total earnings for employees are about $62,000 a year. Moving to a flat marginal tax rate of 32.5% for incomes […]
Joseph A Camilleri. Australia’s handling of its relations with China is rapidly descending into farce. Geoff Raby’s excellent piece in Pearls and Irritations (30 April) makes abundantly clear the principal factor at work, namely a nostalgic attachment to the US-led regional and global order of earlier years. This is the mindset that drives our security […]
Bruce Duncan. Aid, church, and community groups have been aghast at Prime Minister Turnbull’s announcement in February to spend $3.8 billion to expand arms production seven-fold in order to make Australia one of the top ten global arms suppliers, up from number 20 on the present table of arms producers. He argued that this will […]
