Opinion on politics and social policy
from
across the board
I’m on Steve Austin’s ABC radio program tomorrow along with former Queensland Labor A-G Cameron Dick. Not sure what we are going to talk about, but there’s a good chance public service cuts will be on the list.
I’ve been wondering how Campbell Newman has reached the conclusion that 20,000 […] Continue Reading…
What is the anthropocene?
That’s the term Jim Cruzen coined to describe the tiny span in our plantet’s history that has been shaped by human activity. Scratching the soil, playing with fire, seeing if water can be moved or blocked, the stuff that led to civilisation.
This started long before recorded […] Continue Reading…
Newscorp’s proposal to split into a TV and Entertainment company and a Publishing group seems to misunderstand what convergence means. In the digital world a newspaper is a television station and vice versa.
I’m limiting myself in how I use of the word newspaper, because it implies that a print […] Continue Reading…
There is zero chance of a bipartisan solution to asylum seekers unless the government adopts the opposition’s policies. Any analysis that says otherwise is day dreaming.
What the offer from the government is about is an attempt to pivot off the deaths of 100 or so asylum seekers in Indonesian […] Continue Reading…
Agence France-Presse has just launched a fascinating tool that maps international diplomacy using twitter accounts of the foreign policy elites. As much as it is an accurate measure the ediplomacy hub suggests that Australia’s diplomats aren’t looking in the right places.
Australia’s diplomats appear to be parochial, shunning huge parts […] Continue Reading…
Dr Joseph Toscano may be an anarchist, but he’s interested in some collective action on Fairfax. The plan is to get enough Australians to invest $100 in Fairfax shares that they can stop Gina Rinehart buying or controlling it.
I’m not sure how he thinks this works. To effectively control […] Continue Reading…
Why did Australia’s representatives insert wording into the Rio + 20 statement that weakened the world’s committment to ending these pernicious subsidies?
And why aren’t we party to the group of countries that is trying to achieve fossil fuel subsidy reform? NZ has raised their voice, but Australia remains captive […] Continue Reading…
In the early nineties one joke went “How do you start a small business?” The punchline “Give Warwick Fairfax a large one.” It was a reference by the privatisation and near destruction of the Fairfax media group by the twenty-something great-grandson of the founder.
The culprits have changed, but the […] Continue Reading…
What Fairfax announced today was obvious 13 years ago – the traditional newspaper model has been broken for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean that the alternative model is going to fill the role of the fourth estate as well as the existing one.
Not that the fourth estate […] Continue Reading…
Once in a while, I forward an article in its entirety. Besides I am in
France and their keyboards drive me nuts. Below are two book reviews by
Jenny Goldie, reprinted with permission. Some of you may be familiar
with her clear thinking and writing from other National Forum articles
and activism on […] Continue Reading…