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Keywords: Petition

  • AUSTRALIA

    Chinese Australians are no political wallflowers

    • Tseen Khoo
    • 07 September 2016
    3 Comments

    The Chinese Australian Forum witnessed the traction that One Nation had regained, and the re-emergence of Pauline Hanson as senator. This spurred them to mobilise against the rising prevalence of racist hate-speech against Muslim communities. Informed by previous experiences of One Nation coming to prominence in the 1990s, the CFA launched a #saynotoPauline campaign. It is one example of inter-community collaboration that is crucial in building momentum for broader anti-racist activity.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Market economics not the solution for human services

    • Roland Manderson
    • 12 August 2016
    14 Comments

    There is a joke about a man looking for a coin under a streetlight: he had dropped it elsewhere, in the dark, but was looking under the streetlight because he could see more clearly there. In the same way, the thinking behind the Productivity Commission inquiry into increasing competition, contestability and informed user choice in human services is fundamentally flawed. The complexity and interconnectedness of human services is too challenging for market economics to properly address.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A closer look at the AFP's shady Labor raid

    • Justin Glyn
    • 01 June 2016
    14 Comments

    It has puzzled me that the constitutional implications of the AFP's raid on the offices of the official opposition and one of its senators two weeks ago has not been explored in more detail. The uncomfortable fact is that the leaks about which NBN Co is complaining are not damaging because they relate to competition nor to national security, but because they expose cost overruns and reflect badly on the government of the day - the same government which holds all the shares in NBN Co.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Banking royal commission is popular, not populist

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 May 2016
    7 Comments

    The evidence of misbehaviour by banks has become public at a time when the underlying ideology has also been criticised. The inherent unlikelihood that an economy based on individual greed will benefit the whole of society is now patent. It is seen as much more likely that unregulated competition for material gain will lead to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthy and powerful. Evidence now suggests that inequality hinders the economic growth it was presumed to nurture.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes (in Latin) on a football scandal

    • Brian Matthews
    • 10 February 2016
    2 Comments

    Eslingadene/Isendene/Essendon was its quiet and bucolic self when Richard Green, one of its respectable citizens, farewelled it in the 1850s, migrated to Australia, settled near Melbourne and, honouring his home village, called the area Essendon. Like its northern hemisphere namesake, Essendon does not appear in the Domesday Book, but Macbeth-like vaulting ambition, disjoined from care and humanity, has enrolled it in a modern Doomsday register and stained its name ineradicably.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Complicity in Turkey's wilful forgetting of the Armenian Genocide

    • Michael Mullins
    • 27 April 2015
    11 Comments

    The British commanders used the Australian troops who landed at Gallipoli as cannon fodder. The Turkish Government is doing something similar with the Australian visitors whom it is welcoming with open arms, in that it is using them to help smother the memory of the Armenian Genocide, which also occurred 100 years ago this week. In connection with Genocide, Pope Francis said recently that ‘concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it’.  

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Intergenerational fairness goes beyond economic competition

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 05 March 2015
    14 Comments

    'Intergenerational' goings on are stirring public consciousness. On Thursday, Federal Treasury publishes its five-yearly Intergenerational Report. It provides a framework within which legitimate questions about winners and losers can be addressed, by including action on climate and narrowing wealth and international cooperation, rather than viewing society as merely the playground of competing individuals.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Harper Review's new world of public service for profit

    • Julie Edwards
    • 28 November 2014
    8 Comments

    Professor Ian Harper's Competition Policy Review could lead to radical change in the public services in which our governments invest over $184 billion (or 12.1 per cent of GDP) each year. Time-honoured public service values that include citizenship, fairness, justice, representation and participation, are threatened when services are seen as products that can be broken up and sold on the market. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Medibank Private is not the government's to sell

    • Michael Mullins
    • 03 November 2014
    12 Comments

    There has been a rush to purchase shares in Medibank Private since the Federal Government's sale offer opened last Tuesday. Past sales of government owned corporations such as Telstra have produced windfall profits for cashed up Australians able to invest. But what about the rights of the policy holders who were told they were members with ownership of equity in the company?

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    I am Gaza, I am bleeding

    • Lyn Bender
    • 15 August 2014
    9 Comments

    In the last month, an estimated 2000 Palestinians including 400 children have been killed and 10,000 injured.  Much of Gaza is reduced to rubble and rendered uninhabitable. It was a 30 degree day in Gaza as our small band of around 20 kept vigil in the cold night rain at Melbourne’s Federation Square. A Muslim girl recited a poem, ‘I am Gaza I have a dagger in my heart. I am bleeding’.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Move over Lance Armstrong, the Budget is coming

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 08 May 2014
    13 Comments

    Heightened competitiveness does not foster interest in the common good but creates a narrow focus on the interests of the individual. The use of drugs in cycling illustrates the point. Doing what it takes meant taking competition out of the game by excluding competitors from the possibility of winning. In Australian politics the cult of competitiveness has led to a rigged competition in which the national interest will not be served.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Push for boycott ban reveals economic double standard

    • Fatima Measham
    • 16 April 2014
    6 Comments

    A review of competition laws is allowing the Government and industry groups to push for a ban on environmental boycotts. It is a strange protectionism that portrays industries as victims, defenceless against the barrage of readily available information. It appears the free flow of information cannot be so free as to disrupt capital, and the only legitimate choices within a free market are ones unimpeded by ethics or conscience.

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