THE idea of four-year fixed terms has been around a fair while, and is not especially Bill Shorten’s. That is perhaps why Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull agreed to discuss it. More importantly, the fact the two leaders are talking about constitutional change is a response to growing disquiet that the system is not working as well as it should and a growing yearning for a bit more cooperation in politics. But the fixed four-year term is a bit like a loose thread on a machine-sewn garment: if you give it a tug a whole lot more thread comes away. Continue reading “The Constitution: It is broke; let’s fix it”
Month: July 2017
Without dog whistles, Abbott is right on two scores
Tony Abbott’s conservative manifesto correctly questioned Australia’s high immigration and the build-in-Australia conventional submarine program, but there was some dog-whistling in the arguments. On immigration, the dog whistle was a xenophobic call for a slow down so present immigrants could get time to settle in and assimilate. On the submarines, he wanted an off-the-shelf one, but he thought it should be a nuclear one, which would be the thin edge of the wedge for a nuclear power industry that would in turn undermine renewables. Continue reading “Without dog whistles, Abbott is right on two scores”
Turnbull should stare down the reactionaries
ONE morning this week I did an agile, exciting and even innovative traverse of the R. G. Menzies Walk on the northern side of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin. What a progressive Menzies was. Menzies, who founded the Liberal Party (not the Conservative Party, as we were reminded by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull this week), certainly did not hold the view that government spending was prima facie bad and spending on aspirational things was self-evidently bad.
Political system needs repair work
HUMAN nature does not change much. Politicians are as idealistic, selfish, greedy, altruistic, competent, incompetent, foolish, smart and gifted as they ever were. So the explanation for Australia’s decade of political dysfunction must lie elsewhere. Continue reading “Political system needs repair work”