Crispin Hull

It was not so much a pork barrel, but a hydrogen barrel, that was rolled out in the knife-edge marginal Queensland seat of Flynn this week.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten promised to set up a National Hydrogen Innovation Hub in Gladstone as part of a $1 billion plan to boost the emerging hydrogen industry.

It was good politics, combining local concerns about jobs and industry with broader concerns about global warming. It was also good science and business.

It was good politics because unlike most pork-barrelling it could not neutralised and matched by the other side, as for example the Townsville stadium in 2016 and the Cairns James Cook University hospital in 2019 and any number of roads, schools and other hospital expansions in marginal seats in the past. 

Continue reading “Shorten’s hydrogen barrel”

Here is an idea for how the ABC might deal with the inevitable round of cuts next Budget.

Continue reading “Solution to ABC budget cuts”

The health-insurance system (public and private) is slowly parting at the seams and the Government’s “reforms” due in April are more likely to make patients angrier rather than mollify them.

High specialists’ gap fees; the GP squeeze; health insurers’ profiteering and inefficiency; and the flight of people from private health insurance are the key problems, and they are all related.

Government policy, of course, must bear a lot of the blame. Interestingly, one policy – Lifetime Health Cover – which was designed to bolster private insurance, now appears to be having the opposite effect.

Continue reading “Health insurance system crumbling”

This year there is every prospect that democracy’s two biggest set-backs in the past two decades will be reversed – the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain and the US presidential election.

Britain is perhaps in a better position than the US. It loaded the gun, pointed the gun at its foot and pulled the trigger, but there is still time to put the bullet back in the gun before a grievous self-inflicted wound is caused. The US, on the other hand, has already endured two years of consequences and will have to endure its dangerously erratic pathological liar as President for yet another two years, unless a legal or congressional crowbar levers him out of the White House. Continue reading “Brexit and Trump likely to be undone in 2019”

The first few months of 2019 will be a dangerous time economically in Australia. A Government on the ropes will be out to buy votes and an Opposition sacred of blowing it at the last minute will be almost forced to match every bribe. And economically it is a bad time to pour money into voters’ pockets because the economy is going along reasonably well and does not need any stimulus. Continue reading “How to claw back the largesse handed to the wealthy”

As Hyundai demonstrated its latest pollution-reversing hydrogen car in London this week, it is worth looking at how the policy impasse on climate-change – caused by the actions of the troglodyte right of the Coalition – threatens Australia’s economic well-being. We first have to understand the troglodytes’ beliefs by following the money trail.

It is wrong to assume that they believe that the climate is not changing or if it is that humans are not causing it and therefore coal is okay to use. Rather it is the other way around. Their financial backers in the coal industry want to be able to continue to profit from coal, therefore the troglodytes must either deny climate change is happening or that coal has anything to do with it. Continue reading “The economic cost of climate troglodytes”

WHAT a fizzer. After sitting on the Ruddock report on religious freedom for six months the best the Government can come up with is to refer all five of the contentious matters to the Australian Law Reform Commission and agree to the other 15 totally innocuous ones. Continue reading “Religious freedom report: inconsistent, irrelevant and unnecessary”

A SURVEY on immigration published this week seems to fly in the face of all other indications showing that more Australians are objecting to high immigration.

This week’s survey reports that 52 per cent of respondents think Australia’s immigration intake is about right or too low. That seems to run counter to other polls and broader political concern that immigration is too high, including Prime Minister Scott Morrison saying that he had heard “loud and clear” that “Australians in our biggest cities are concerned about population. Continue reading “Immigration arguments the wrong way around”

RESULTS in the Victorian election last weekend will go a long way to guaranteeing that Liberal-turned-independent Julia Banks will retain Chisholm at the next Federal election, if she decides to stand.

How is that, one might ask. Chisholm will fall to Labor on a 3.4 per cent swing and Labor got a 6 per cent swing in the state election.

Well, it is all to do with Victoria’s Upper House, the Legislative Council, and the dirty deed Labor did on the Greens.
Continue reading “Labor stabs Greens and shoots itself in foot”

The ANI 2018 Annual General Meeting was held at the Australian Defence Academy on 19 November. Preceding the event the Vice Chief of Defence Force, Vice Admiral David Johnstone gave an illuminating presentation on the significant issues with which the Defence senior leadership are dealing. He then took questions from the members. Continue reading “The ANI 2018 Annual General Meeting”