AUSTRALIA’S unemployment rate, 6.4 per cent, is at its highest in more than a decade. Suddenly, politics became a whole lot more real, but not necessarily tougher, for the Abbott government.
Topic: News
Brainstorming for a think tank
Today we had 29 people gathered together at the Ship Inn, South Bank to talk about the meaning of progress and future projects for the Australian Institute for Progress. The start of something big!
Becoming a parent is a privilege, not a workplace right
IT is the clear responsibility of an employer to intervene in a worker’s decision to have a child. They must remove all impediments to a parent’s return to work, including holding open a job, and preserving previous pay and conditions. Oh yes, and throw in free childcare.
If these do not happen, it must be discrimination.
This is the world inhabited by the Australian Human Rights Commission. Start with a privilege, make it a “right’’, and convince government to pass laws to shift costs to the employer and taxpayers. Great work. The ACTU would be proud of you.
Abbott must keep calm and cut power prices
THE British government in 1939 created the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On” to prepare Brits for German attacks during World War II. The Abbott government should adopt it, and take heart.
Of course, the slogan belied the preparedness to assemble the immense power brought to bear by the Allies in 1944 against the fascist forces.
The Abbott government has to go on the attack. It is under siege from Red, Green and Yellow forces, which are unlikely to relent in the near term.
Piketty split – why soaking the rich won’t help anyone
It’s not Joe Hockey’s “leaners” Australians need to fear, it’s the new breed of economic “levellers” who believe that to make an economy work better you just need to dial down levels of inequality.
The equality industry conveniently overlooks progress
PROGRESS is found in human ingenuity, and concomitant success and failure. Strangely, reference to progress rarely appears in public debate, or in the literature.
One reason is that egalitarian ideology has displaced progress. It seems that for some, there can be no progress until we are equal.
Anti-social media
If you want to know how the left in Australia thinks, then check out Twitter. It will also explain the slow degradation of Australian political reporting into gotcha exposes and personal slurs.
‘Top gun’ barristers do not own judicial appointments
WHO would make the best chief justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland? Judging from the unseemly row over the appointment of Tim Carmody, not a knockabout barrister appointed by a boy Attorney-General.
Tim “I don’t claim to be the smartest lawyer in the room” Carmody is presently the Chief Magistrate of Queensland. Thick as a brick? Hardly. Carmody was appointed Senior Counsel in 1999, served as the Queensland crime commissioner from 1998 to 2002, as a judge of the Family Court of Australia from 2003 to 2008, and as commissioner for the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry, which reported last year.
There is no rule book to determine the criteria for choosing a judge, only a process. The responsibility for the appointment rests with the Queensland cabinet, on the recommendation of the Attorney-General.
Pilger’s Utopia feeds an industry going in circles
NATIONAL Reconciliation Week finishes today. The Aboriginal industry can put away its ideological bunting for another year. Only those paid to do so, and the ideologically committed, will continue the dreary business of, among other things, reading out a welcome to country message.
‘’I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to their elders past and present.’’
Why do otherwise intelligent people do this? No one believes it, it does no good, and it perpetuates the myth that land is everything. Land is a platform for the brilliance of humans to perform upon. Without skills and willpower, it comes to nought. Unless, and until, the Aboriginal industry learns this, the blighted lives of the smallest part of Aboriginal Australia, those sitting in the dumps of Aboriginal settlements such as, Utopia, in the Northern Territory, will never change.
Fund, fund, fund — ’til somebody takes it away
THE establishment of the (projected) $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund poses two big questions for public policy: Why have a future fund in anything, and why medical research in particular?
Government future funds come and government future funds go.
Who is to say the Medical Research Future Fund won’t go the way of others?
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Historically Australian interest rates have been higher than US rates. Makes sense - which currency... would you rather hold. So why would you expect Aussie interest rates to dive when US interest rates are holding up. #InterestRates #RBA #housing https://data.bis.org/topics/CBPOL/tables-and-dashboards
