MALCOLM Turnbull’s government grows more Trump-like every week. Last week’s health-insurance announcement and this week’s energy announcement illustrate the point. [click to continue…]
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WE ARE about to witness the most spectacular own goal on the conservative side of Australian politics since Malcolm Fraser called the early 1983 election and lost. There is enough polling evidence now to presume that the marriage plebiscite has been an utter miscalculation by the conservatives on several fronts. They thought they could defeat marriage equality. They will not. [click to continue…]
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FIVE hundred years ago this month, Martin Luther, placed (some say defiantly nailed) his 95 Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle church in what is now Germany, thus sparking the Protestant Reformation and changing the tide of human history. [click to continue…]
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RESEARCH published (but not widely published) this week has the potential to change the practice of the art (or perhaps science) of politics. Francisco Perales, of the University of Queensland, was looking at the marriage plebiscite, but his work has much wider application. [click to continue…]
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THE chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, has always championed competition as the friend of the consumer. In the past few years he has been especially critical of state-owned utility monopolies and privatisations that lead to monopolies and structures that hurt consumers. [click to continue…]
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MARRIAGE is like bankruptcy, childhood, insanity or being under sentence, and that is why I will be answering Yes in the absurd, unnecessary and costly statistical survey asking people whether they think people of the same sex should be able to marry. It is also why people of religious convictions whose religion holds that marriage is to be only between a man and a woman should do the same. [click to continue…]
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THERE’S one thing you can expect from the High Court when it interprets the Constitution: the unexpected. For example, it has permitted the same-sex plebiscite despite some of Australia’s best legal brains saying that that was unlikely. [click to continue…]
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YOU can’t stop progress, the saying goes. But former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has turned that on its head this weekend, arguing that, “You can’t stop regress.” He argues Australia should build a new coal-fired power station to “keep the lights on”. [click to continue…]
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UNTIL this week President Donald Trump had not fully signed up to the losing quadrella of folly marked by all Republican Presidents since Eisenhower: tax cuts for the rich; less regulation of markets; austerity for middle- and lower-income people; and indefinite war. [click to continue…]
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(Edited and corrected 23 August 2017.)
THERE is a strong possibility of a major debacle over the result of the marriage-equality plebiscite in November. [click to continue…]
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