Crispin Hull

Tinker, tinker but no tailor

We got two tinkers when we needed a tailor. Labor and the Coalition laid out their “grand plans” for Australia this week but for the most part they tinkered around the edges of tax, housing, and cost of living instead of laying out a design to deal with the fundamental and structural inequities which have been building for more than a quarter century.

An education for us all

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is right: there should be some serious rethinking about the role of the federal Department of Education, which he says does not run one school.

There is a very good case to be made for the Federal Government to totally withdraw from the funding and administration of Australia’s primary and secondary schools and leave it so the states. It should just keep responsibility for universities and pre-schools.

Dutton PS smashing an asset for PM

Has it really come down to this – rich, talented, diverse Australia is having an election where the choice is between a few dollars off petrol and a pie-in-the sky nuclear-power plan, on one hand, and a few dollars off tax and medical bills, on the other?

Not quite. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese still has one major electoral asset – he is not Peter Dutton and does not have a Trump-Musk-Vance-like plan to run a chainsaw through the Federal Public Service and end efficient women-friendly working-from-home policies.

Understanding the Trump chaos

There is a constant to which virtually all of the destructive chaos emanating from the United States in the first two months of Donald Trump’s presidency applies. It can help us understand the madness.

Senate a key to minority choice

Life for a minority Labor Government after the election would be far easier than life for a minority Liberal Government, for one reason: the Senate and how it is elected.

Even if Labor loses a percentage point or two of the overall vote at the next election, it is very unlikely to lose any Senate seats, indeed it could pick one up.

A new (without US) rules-based alliance

Surely, the members of the 75-year-old post-war US-led alliances must understand that the US’s role in security and the rules-based order is over, and act accordingly. Some are.

President Donald Trump has betrayed Ukraine in a slurry of lies. He thinks he can force a Ukrainian capitulation without any security backup to his friend and ally in authoritarianism, Russian President Vladimir Putin. He can’t. If European nations want to put troops on the ground in Ukraine and Ukraine wants them, they can, whatever the objections of the Russian-US alliance.

Medicare exposes political hearts

Some months ago, I wrote that the original design of Medicare had a fundamental defect. Alas, Labor’s $8.5 billion injection – instantly matched by the Coalition – does not fully address it. A good start but not visionary enough. It is another example of Medicare telling us a great deal about Australian politics and Australian politicians, and it will do so again this election.

‘Forming’ or electing governments

We are racing headlong into an election that will almost inevitably result in a hung Parliament. And many would say we are going to an election far too quickly – hardly time for a government get its feet under the desk.

It is nearly half a century since an unelected representative of the British Crown sacked a government and Prime Minister (Gough Whitlam) elected by the people less than two years before and installed the Leader of the Opposition (Malcolm Fraser) as Prime Minister.

Major parties deepening the hole they are in

Hey, major parties, if you are in a hole – with your primary vote with a 3 in front of it, or even a 2 – why keep digging?

If the electorate thinks you are a lot of self-serving, bums-on-seats obsessives, what better way to validate the electorate’s view of you than by stitching up an electoral funding deal which is totally skewed in favour of the major parties?

American or Trump’s values, or are they the same

Australia can now either grimace and bear it for four years pretending nothing has happened; or face reality and question whether AUKUS and the US alliance more generally are worth it.

ANZUS and AUKUS were, from the start, purportedly based on “shared values”. Less than a month into the Donald Trump presidency can we put our hands on our hearts and say, “We share values with the US, and we will spill blood and treasure for those values”?

The acid question now is: to what extent are Trump’s values American values?

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