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A lobby group representing the $600 billion property industry is determining state housing policy in NSW. On the 29th April, when the NSW Government’s Transport Oriented Development (TOD) State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP) changes were gazetted, the Property Council’s media release praised the government but complained it wasn’t enough. They also stated that: “The Property Continue reading »
Politicians are increasingly using the word to justify bad policy initiatives and fend off criticism of their decisions. I doubt if you’re waiting with bated breath for next Tuesday night’s federal budget, but since it’s the big set-piece event of my year I’ve started limbering up. I’ve set my bulldust detector to ping every time Continue reading »
It’s almost 40 years since Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. A year earlier she’d ordered the Indian army to storm Sikhism’s holiest site, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, after extremist separatist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had taken refuge there. Over three bloody days in June 1984, Operation Blue Star led to Bhindranwale’s Continue reading »
Like the previous Vietnam generation of baby boomers, US university students are waking up to the atrocities their government commits or helps its client states to commit around the world. In a classic scene that has become a popular internet meme in the first Matrix movie, Morpheus, the rebel leader, offers his protégé Neo the Continue reading »
“Nothing Australia does – with or without AUKUS – will make any difference to the collective capacity to either deter or defeat China in the next decade, which is the time frame that counts. That means the only prudent choice for Australia’s military strategy is to prepare to defend ourselves from major powers such as Continue reading »
Heralded as the largest this century, the pro-Palestinian student demonstrations in the US and globally are putting into stark relief the systemic failure of Western media and Governments to accurately and responsibly report on the Gaza conflict. As they did during the Vietnam war years, it is students who have refused to accept the way Continue reading »
Australia is one of six western countries that are complicit in the ‘genocidal erasure’ of the Palestinian people by continuing to supply Israel with arms, according to Dr Ghassan Abu-Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon and newly elected rector of Glasgow University. Israel’s relentless bombing campaign has systematically destroyed all of Gaza’s 11 universities plus more than 400 Continue reading »
Over the last few years, I have wondered about what drives the relentless Western animosity towards China. It seems a very logical question to ask if one wants to understand the world today. But you will be hard pressed to find this explained in commentary provided by the Western media. What one gets is screaming daily headlines, Continue reading »
Ill health, perhaps especially mental ill health, is generally seen as a personal issue, requiring diagnosis and treatment. But at the population level, mental health problems have a profound message for our societies and their futures. We need to pay it more heed. A new international review has concluded that rates of emotional problems such Continue reading »
Australia once thought of itself as a country of opportunity and innovation – economically and socially. Like most countries self-beliefs, the thought was not always matched by reality. Indeed, it would arguably be better to see Australia as a land of lost opportunities with many of those losses being biggest and most damaging in recent Continue reading »