Keywords: Infrastructure
There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 02 December 2013
2 Comments
English batsman Jonathan Trott was pilloried in some media comments because he abandoned his team because he felt 'stressed'. We should be celebrating the fact that a high profile male sportsman finds that he can declare he has a stress-related illness and then seek help for it.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Fatima Measham
- 12 November 2013
23 Comments
I may have gotten extremely sweary on social media. Part of it was due to gut-deep fear for people to whom I am personally connected, but also generally for a country that runs in my veins. The other part of it was fury that the growing reality of extreme weather events is still being characterised as natural by climate change sceptics who have the luxury of speculating and refuting links outright.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 08 November 2013
3 Comments
From a liberal perspective the use of public money to fund free legal services to individuals is inherently undesirable. Even if the contracts are awarded under competitive tendering, the funding of the services is a distortion in the market. Ideally they should be left to the market to provide. And by definition they are less efficient than commercial organisations disciplined by a free and competitive market.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andrew Hamilton
- 07 November 2013
23 Comments
Whenever public funds are made available for frowned upon projects they are described as taxpayers' money. When I hear the phrase roll from critics' lips, I imagine taxpayers as prune faced and laser lipped, or like children watching with beady eyes as their mother cuts the cake, ready to howl if their slice of the cake is the smaller half by a crumb or two. Underneath the phrase usually lies a view of life in which the market is a sacred site.
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ENVIRONMENT
- Fatima Measham
- 04 November 2013
10 Comments
The bases of our arguments over climate change have been trodden so much that a moat has formed around us, leaving us stuck in our little island fortresses. We know thoroughly by now the content of our disagreement. But what are the things that do not require persuasion? Is it possible that we have values and interests that intersect? Adaptation may be that intersection.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Ellena Savage
- 25 October 2013
5 Comments
One person told me the story of going out to a gallery in a rural area and seeing the same man harvesting rice with a buffalo that they'd seen a few months earlier. When they asked the gallery owner if it was harvest time again, he was told that the man was not actually harvesting rice, he was just employed to look like he was. A spectacle for the tourists. Which I'm pretty sure is the most alienated labour possible.
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EDUCATION
- Frank Brennan
- 18 October 2013
'My sixth piece of advice is for all graduates and not just those of you who are religious. We all need to develop a comprehensive worldview, nurturing the sense of the transcendent in the human spirit, and holding together in tension ideals and reality, dreams and our shortcomings.' Full text from Frank Brennan's La Trobe Graduation Address, Health Sciences, 18 October 2013.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Adams
- 09 October 2013
11 Comments
Kiwirrkurra is 700km of bad roads west of Alice Springs. Renal failure forces many Indigenous community elders from important roles such as presiding over ceremonies and passing down knowledge to future generations. Many choose not to make the long journey into town for dialysis, seeing life away from country and family to be a fate worse than death.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 08 October 2013
After a successful federal election the Nationals are nestled in a comfortable governing relationship as the junior partner of the Liberals. They can laugh at all those critics who for so long have predicted their demise. But they are out of sight. They could make an important contribution to the diversity of the Australian party system, but although the surface picture looks rosy it is at the cost of greatly diminished independence.
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AUSTRALIA
- Michael Mullins
- 09 September 2013
17 Comments
There was cause for celebration on Saturday night for both the Coalition and Labor. The Coalition was able to claim a decisive victory in the Federal Election, and Labor defied expectations and remains viable. But not so for vulnerable people overseas who will lose their Australian foreign aid lifeline so that the Coalition can fund its election promises.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 06 September 2013
4 Comments
Two of the most important issues to have been given scant attention in the election campaign are ageing and property. Even less noticed is the inter-relationship between the two. The effect of ageing on property prices will be arguably the most important financial challenge facing Australian governments over the coming decades.
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AUSTRALIA
- Dean Ashenden
- 20 August 2013
7 Comments
Official Australia has a history of trying to conquer and develop the north. That long and frequently violent struggle now seems to be reaching a new stage. We like to think that the devastation of one population and culture by another is all in the past, but the apparent failure of Rudd and Abbott to notice that northern Australia is shared country suggests that there might be more to come.
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