Category: Opinion

I am almost (although not quite) beginning to feel sorry for Scott Morrison.

Since his unlikely victory at the polls in 2019, his prime ministership has been one damn thing after another – bushfires, Covid, predatory ministerial staffers and compromised ministers, vaccine issues – and underlying it all, and exacerbated by the pandemic, the continuing problems in aged care. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which reported in March this year, did not tell us much that was new, but it gave his government plenty to work with.

Overall, from the vantage point of April 2021, Australians are in a self-congratulatory mood about the national response to COVID-19.

Are we being realistic, or a touch hubristic? Infection rates have been kept very low, but then, we had a lot going for us – Australia is an island, our settlement pattern is relatively low-density, and the population is younger and healthier than in many European countries.

I was walking home from the shops the other day, when I encountered a man using a leaf blower to eject leaves from his driveway onto the road. The leaf blower was an electric one, so at least the noise was not as deafening as the petrol-driven ones produce.

While the ACT has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic well, it is unusual for a week to go by without the ACT’s most prominent health institution, the Canberra Hospital, being in the news. The headlines are often negative: costs are higher than in other jurisdictions, emergency waiting times have proved hard …

As we walked in Namadgi National Park towards the end of last year, the terrifying dryness of the bush was everywhere apparent. Everyone in the group was thinking the same thing – please, may there not be a fire.

The remarkable thing about the COVID-19 pandemic was not that it happened, but that no country on earth, with the possible exception of Taiwan, was prepared for it. This was despite the fact that medical scientists and public health professionals had been telling us for a long time that a pandemic was on the way.

It’s time to take the environment seriously, and I don’t mean climate change. Climate change is a significant threat, but it can be tackled only at the global level, with each country contributing its agreed share of emissions reductions.

At about the same time, in 1992, the government’s inquiry into ecologically sustainable development (ESD) released its final reports. The ESD inquiry, while wide-ranging, was focused on specific economic sectors. Despite the previous work of the National Population Council, population rated only a brief overview as one of a number of ‘inter-sectoral’ issues

The relationship between church and state has always been uneasy. In the policy world, there are many points of intersection and, often, friction between secular and religious values. As Western societies become progressively more liberal, we can expect this friction to increase, as we see in the current conflict between …

This Labor fiefdom desperately needs an effective opposition to jolt the governing party out of complacency.

While many have questioned her leadership skills, few can doubt Theresa May’s Prime Ministerial  fortitude. In the strange schemozzle that is Britain’s exit from the European Union, she, at least, is determined to ‘make a success of it’ – if her party lets her stay the course.

Believing one is more virtuous than one’s opponents is the deadliest of political traps.

We could learn from China’s boldness. Instead, we show no signs of even thinking about our future.

Not really, but we do need think carefully about how to harness, and regulate, machine intelligence.

Despite greatly increased effort in recent years, the policies of Australian governments towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders continue to fail on many levels. According to the latestClosing the Gap report, while there have been advances that promise much, particularly in early-childhood education, there has been little progress in other areas. School …

On the face of it, the Murray-Darling basin plan has all the hallmarks of a “good policy”. It has a clear objective: to cap extractions from the river system, so as to ensure the basin’s long-term ecological, social and economic sustainability. It’s backed by scientific evidence and has considerable public …

One of my most esteemed teachers, the late L. J. “Len” Hume, said to me once that he enjoyed his job, “provided they leave me alone”. He was referring to the freedom academics then had (in the 1980s) to develop their own style of teaching, scholarship and research, free of …

A friend was telling me how her neighbour had proposed that a group of home owners in their street should sell up together, so a developer could put high-density housing on the land. Luckily, in this case, the zoning did not permit it. But the pressure to go after the …