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When America sneezes the world catches cold. No wonder crowds are demonstrating against Wall Street. Successive economic crises reveal that we have forgotten the economic lessons learned after the Great Depression. I am one of the dwindling number of Australians who was alive at that time.
There is nothing radical about fixing a carbon price. While our politicians and pundits quibble, the rest of the world is already implementing its commitments. Gillard's greatest challenge in selling her carbon scheme is in normalising it in the public mind.
Unless countries are prepared to implement draconian birth-control policies like China's, realistically there is no alternative but to prepare for a world of 9 billion people. But the increase in global population need not provoke a catastrophe.
There was a liberal use of corporal punishment in my school. We were seen as a loutish bunch of lads who needed a firm hand. It did nothing to help my education. You don't create a smart and confident Australia by taking to people with a stick.
While Catholic bishops in the Philippines have opposed modern forms of birth control, the public paralysis this has engendered over sexual health care has led to high rates of abortion. The Philippine Catholic Church can thus be seen to be at odds with its ministry for the poor.
Independent Senator Nick Xenophon has said the 'unsustainable' $1 per litre milk price will force farmers off the land and ruin Australia's dairy industry. Economists ridicule this sentiment. Low milk prices are the market god's gift to consumers.
Ireland's election was all about how to repay the country's debts. One hundred and fifty predominantly well-educated and skilled young people are expected to emigrate each day over the next two years; not only because they have no jobs, but because they have no hope.
Irrigated agriculture systems, like electric grids and city roads, trigger a government's duty of care to the human communities that they sustain. Particularly when they were built with the blood, sweat and tears that went into building our Murray-Darling Basin irrigation communities.
On the most important issues facing the nation, indeed the world — climate change — we have had a Prime Minister who vaguely recognises the problem but resists doing anything about it, and an opposition leader who trivialises it to a question of tax.
There was a massive loss of confidence in Labor's policies. The Australian electorate saw through the triviality of what both major parties were offering. Gillard would deserve her party's full support in leading a Labor Government in a hung parliament. This may be the making of her as a great prime minister.
Some commentators have latched on to Benedict's encyclical Caritas in Veritate as a new 'third way' between socialism and capitalism. This is a remarkably bad idea.
A new round of Sydney-Melbourne rivalry has broken out, this one over which has the most dysfunctional train system. It's time Australian cities looked to public transport models that work, such as that of Zurich.