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Over a meal with church members and local party officials in a small village outside Xian in China, a local asks after Lù Kèwén (Kevin Rudd). He had heard that Mr Murdoch was being very tough on him! This unsurprisingly is the only mention of Australian politics the whole week. But they were surprised to learn that yet again Australia was likely to lose its only Mandarin speaking PM. They have no idea of the alternatives.
Throughout the election campaign, both major parties have pledged to address 'cost of living' pressures. But a quick comparison with the economies of other industrialised nations confirms that Australians have nothing to complain about. If prices rise by 5 per cent but incomes rise by 10 per cent, households are better off, even if the cost of a petrol reaches a new pinnacle.
View this week's offering from Eureka Street's award winning political cartoonist.
You are excited at voting but dismayed at the choices you're going to find on the ballot papers. You are not alone in this - nearly one in five eligible voters aged between 18 and 24 have not bothered to enrol to vote. Why don't people trust democratic process to change the things they think should be changed? One reason is that the kind of politics we have is devoid of any great moral clash of ideas.
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.
Kevin Rudd says we need a 'new politics' or a 'new way'. Tony Abbott says we'll only get a new way by electing a new government. What is missing in both statements is the recognition that what we actually need is a new kind of economic democracy: a reconfiguration of our economic prioritising away from individualism towards the common good, and towards the participation of all rather than the exclusion of many.
Although community organisations are often a burr in the saddle of a managerially minded government, they are important because they represent a humane vision and because they can reflect back to government an intimate experience of what is happening to the people whom they serve. Their advocacy, even when unwanted, keeps governments in touch with human needs.
'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.
As the China boom fades Australia is experiencing a delayed version of the GFC, without the banking crisis. Until now we've been reasonably well served by both sides of politics, in terms of macro-economic strategy. Now we require a way of dealing with more mundane economic issues like productivity and efficiency. Neither side has many good ideas about how to achieve the required structural shifts.
In 64 BC, the brilliant orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero decided to run for the highest office in the Roman Republic. His younger brother Quintus, who possessed a penchant for the most outrageous acts of cruelty, penned a detailed memo outlining what his older brother needed to do to win the election. The current Australian federal election campaign would appear familiar to the Cicero brothers.
97-108 out of 200 results.