Journalism and other writing
Wages are stagnant and inequality is rising, so maybe Karl Marx got it at least half right after all: capitalism, if left unbridled, carries the seeds of its own destruction.
We know the other half of Marxism is wrong: that after the working class rises up a utopian dictatorship of the proletariat will emerge. Three 70-year experiments tell us that all you get is a dictatorship – and repressive ones at that.
Continue reading “Labour’s lost share of the cake”Please, Prime Minister, can we follow the US military into battle this time. We blindly and foolishly followed them into war in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, imagining, quite wrongly that it would improve our national security. But this time, for once, it would be intelligent to follow the US military in its global war against the climate crisis.
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By CRISPIN HULL
Labor’s excruciating navel-gazing and entrail-picking review this week of its May election loss makes a couple of good points – Bill Shorten was unpopular and Clive Palmer bought a lot of votes – and misses another crucial point – fake news and misinformation are beyond combatting.
Continue reading “Populism and fake news are here to stay”Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s knee-jerk dismissal of one of his backbencher’s tax proposals was a wasted opportunity and a hypocritical one at that.
The well-respected moderate Western Australian Liberal backbencher Senator Dean Smith proposed that payroll tax – perhaps the most insidious anti-jobs tax ever invented – and property stamp duties be abolished and in their place the GST be widened and/or increased slightly and that a modest land tax be introduced.
Continue reading “Lost chance to fix tax”Unsurprisingly, a survey of Australia’s federal politicians published this month did not directly mention the free flow of information, or lack of it, among the attributes of our democracy that they like or dislike.
But indirectly, they rated it as the most important thing to help restore trust in Australian democracy because three-quarters of them want tougher caps on both electoral spending and political donations.
Continue reading “FYI: get rid of big donations”
Terry Snow’s well-intentioned and generous gift of $20 million to Canberra Grammar School nonetheless highlights the major anomalies of education funding in Australia.
The Coalition Howard Abbott Turnbull and Morrison Governments’ blinkered ideology and Labor being hopelessly wedged has meant that far too much education funding is going to private schools which already educate their children very well, while public and the non-elite Catholic schools struggle for money that would greatly improve the education of their students.
Continue reading “The not-so-private health and education”So we have good globalisation and negative globalism, according to Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
He is right, up to a point, about the benefits of globalisation.
The IMF warned this week of the dangers of contracting international trade. Since David Ricardo in the early 19 th century it has been basic economics that trade, especially international trade, is “a good thing” because it is a “win-win” in which both parties benefits.
Continue reading “Globalism is in national interest, despite Morrison”
This week’s events in two of the world’s leading democracies reveal that humans have not quite evolved enough. They also exemplify the tension between the two main survival methods of early humans as they roamed the savannah thousands of years in groups of 50 to 100.
Continue reading “Anglospheric apoplexy a threat to us all”
This week I travelled at 300km/h on the very, very fast train from Madrid to Barcelona. It covered the 625 kilometres in three hours, an average of 208km/h. This included four or five stops on the way.
The train goes to and from the centre of each city every hour in the main part of the day for $65 with more legroom than Qantas business class, free wifi and a quality dining car.
Continue reading “Lessons from the fast train to Barcelona”
After next year, the Federal Parliament will be the only one in Australia with a terms of three years. And so this week the chair of the House Social Policy and Legal Affairs Committee, Andrew Wallace (LNP, Qld) announced a public “roundtable” of constitutional experts to look at the issue in November.
It is very well-trodden ground over more than 40 years that hitherto has hit a series of brick walls. The usual stumbling block has been the Senate.
Continue reading “Senate makes four-year terms harder”