On 15 March 2018, the head of the Australian Border Force, Commissioner Roman Quaedvlieg was sacked. It was a curious case. Quaedvlieg had allegedly changed internal recruitment policy to help his girlfriend get a casual, low level administrative job at Sydney Airport and failed to disclose the relationship. Yet for such a high profile case,…
Every year, Australia sends two federal politicians for a three-month secondment to observe and work with the established Australian Mission to the United Nations but, in recent times, it has increasingly been used as a reward, or a “lap of honour”, or to remove a problem MP. This year, we will be sending two women…
Scott Morrison is Australia’s first Pentecostal prime minister. He is a member of the Horizon Church in Sutherland, which is part of the Australian Christian Churches network. He attends regularly. No one, including the author of this piece, would deny him the right to choose his religious affiliation or to apply his Christian beliefs in…
By John Haly How is it that recent parliamentary bloodletting over tax breaks and electricity pricing continues to detract from steady planetary exsanguination? Are we now to accept that farm tours, milk levies and infrastructure spends are to be the ready tourniquets for our Australian economy? The political focus on Tax breaks to increase wage rates…
More Dams for the Northern Food-bowls: Achievable Policies or Pre-Election Hype? Preamble to the Discussion of Australia’s Northern Development The 2013 federal election was another historic highpoint in federal LNP in place in Northern Australia. Northern Australia was almost wall to wall LNP territory between Brisbane and Perth. The exceptions were, of course, Lingiari (Northern Territory)…
Many of us were disenchanted with Malcolm Turnbull, but Scott Morrison is completely wrong about why. The majority of the population agreed with Turnbull’s previous statements about climate change, renewable energy, marriage equality, the Republic, the negative affects of overly-generous property tax concessions, the perils of political donations, the need for state-of-the-art communications etc. Our disappointment…
By Brian Morris Australia has already been described as a ‘soft theocracy’. The question is, despite the public showing less religiosity, will a more overtly Christian PM subvert the nation’s preference for secular values? Australia has continued to move steadily towards progressive policy – most notably to finally legalise same-sex marriage last year. But that came…
Every now and then The Australian Financial Review has an article that gives me a good laugh. Ok, it’s behind a firewall so I can’t give you a link but today’s article about Angus Taylor begins: “Energy Minister Angus Taylor has slammed greenhouse gas reduction policies as “corporate greed dressed up as saving the planet”…
By George Theodoridis It is a case -as it bloody nearly always is- of relevance deprivation and diminution, thanks mainly to the prodigious proliferation and ever burgeoning of social platforms and the largely bored hoi polloi, bored by celebrities who have nothing to offer but the empty, irrelevant minutiae of their lives. The celebrities, like the…
There is something peculiar doing the rounds in Australian food circles. The land down under, considered something of a nirvana of fruit and vegetable production despite horrendous droughts and calamitous cyclones, is facing a new challenge: human agency, namely in the form of despoliation of strawberries. The results have knocked Australia’s highly concentrated supermarket chains,…