The recent crisis at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with the sacking of managing director Michelle Guthrie and the resignation of board chair Justin Milne, is best understood by realising that neither were friends of the national public broadcaster, writes Alex Bainbridge.
United States President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh probably never expected he would become a central target of the #MeToo movement for his misogynist behaviour in his university years.
Minister for Families and Social Services Paul Fletcher announced on September 26 that the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) had reached the milestone of registering its 200,000th participant. That same day, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the final figures for the 2017-18 federal budget showed the budget deficit had been reduced to $10.1 billion, with "the single biggest saving [being] the lower than expected numbers of participants entering the NDIS.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made a disingenuous pitch for “unity” and “honesty” in response to Byron Bay Council’s decision on September 20 not to celebrate Australia Day, in deference to the hurt it engenders to Indigenous peoples.
There’s another blue in the Liberal Party — and this time it is about quotas and the bullying culture towards women.
How much bigger has Australia’s economy become since 1994? The answer, per head of population, seems to be: close to 50%. That’s not in current dollars, but adjusted for inflation. So can “Australia” (read: the big end of town) afford to raise the rate of Newstart payments — currently at a base rate of $273 a week for a single person — for the unemployed?
The NSW government looks to be on the skids after a 30% swing against the Liberals in the September 8 byelection in the rural seat of Wagga Wagga. Independent Joe McGirr won the seat which had been a Liberal stronghold for 61 years.
In case you didn't have enough, here's 13 reasons for throwing out the NSW Coalition in the state elections next March.
The Australian Labor Party’s parliamentary caucus' decision to vote up the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP-11) has created a backlash. The secretary of Hunter Workers (formerly the Newcastle Trades Hall Council) Daniel Wallace has resigned from the party, saying he 'finally realised that the shortcuts taken by the ALP usually lead to detours which lead to dead ends'.
The intention of zero tolerance is to reduce harm by reducing drug taking. But the reality is that zero tolerance does not work and that people will continue to use drugs.
Talk has once again resurfaced about extending police powers and militarising police forces after a violent brawl outside a pub in Collingwood, Victoria, earlier this month. But many are asking just how far governments are willing to go in sacrificing freedoms for an ill-conceived notion of being “tough on crime”.
