keywords: Political Finance
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 10 December 2020
1 Comment
The world’s financial markets are afflicted by a deep irrationality that imperils their very existence. On the surface, finance looks logical enough with its numbers, charts, mathematics, forecasts, ‘modelling’ and so on. But this only masks the fact that the system itself has been working on underlying assumptions that are either contradictory — such as that you can ‘deregulate’ finance when finance consists of rules — narrow minded or absurd.
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INTERNATIONAL
For decades, the UN issued non-binding resolutions and condemnations regarding Israel’s colonial expansion over Palestinian territory. As Israel gears towards implementing its annexation plans, which will see around 30 per cent of territory from the occupied West Bank falling under Israeli sovereignty, Palestinians stand to continue the cycle of territorial loss, internally forced displacement, and a deterioration of what remains of their rights.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 04 February 2020
3 Comments
A shift is afoot in the west's financial markets that represents the most important economic change since the emergence of the new financial instruments in the 1990s that ultimately led to the global financial crisis. It is likely to result in a new way of thinking about money, which will change the substructure of developed economies.
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INTERNATIONAL
- Gillian Bouras
- 03 September 2018
10 Comments
Collars and ties, or lack of them, can have a specific political application. In 2007 Robert Mugabe, fearsome Zimbabwean dictator, was invited to an EU summit in Lisbon. The Anglican Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, cut up his clerical collar on television and vowed to replace it only after Mugabe had gone.
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AUSTRALIA
- Jack Maxwell
- 29 July 2015
5 Comments
Political donations give privileged access to powerful public officials to those who are wealthy. But public funding does little to reduce parties’ reliance on private money and radical control measures can fall foul of the Constitution. A 2013 High Court judgment finding that a ban on donations infringed the constitutional freedom of political communication.
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AUSTRALIA
- John Warhurst
- 09 May 2014
9 Comments
The Independent Commission against Corruption in New South Wales continues to provide stunning insights into the compromised relationship between the major political parties and government in that state. It has moved on from Labor to the Liberal party and from political lobbying to political donations. But the essence of the story remains the same. Casual self-interest reigns, and the culture of political life at the top-end is corrupted.
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AUSTRALIA
With the expiry of a five-year ban, former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar
Ibrahim today regains his freedom to contest a Malaysian general
election or internal party election. He is undoubtedly the darling of the foreign press, but many Malaysians doubt his commitment to multiculturalism.
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AUSTRALIA
- Andra Jackson
- 15 December 2020
5 Comments
With all the congratulations that have been going around following Melbourne achieving zero COVID-19 cases there is one group that has been entirely overlooked. These particular people remain in a prolonged form of hotel quarantine, unable to mix with the general public. They are refugees and asylum seekers brought to Australia under the now defunct Medevac legislation from Nauru and Manus Island.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 08 October 2020
39 Comments
Recent weeks have seen the deaths of former NSW Liberal Premier and federal Finance minister, John Fahey, and former Labor federal minister, Senator Susan Ryan. They were both exemplary public figures who not only made a major contribution to Australian public life but did so in a way that drew praise from all sides of politics.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 01 April 2020
4 Comments
The world-wide chaos caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus has underlined a lesson that was only partly learned in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In a more interconnected world the understanding of system-wide risk needs to be much better than it is.
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ECONOMICS
- David James
- 03 March 2020
10 Comments
We live in an era of hyper-transactionalism, whereby most of what we do is subject to the exchange of money and market pricing. Whereas in the past much of humanity was bound to a political system, now most of us are bound to a globalised monetary system.
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RELIGION
- John Warhurst
- 25 February 2020
7 Comments
Approaches to governance are in flux within church agencies, sectors, dioceses and at the national level, either driven by the demands of state regulations or in response to the challenging new situation the church finds itself in. There is so much change going on that it is difficult to follow.
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