Category: Opinion

In October 2020, Douglas Shire Council approved its Interim Wonga Beach Foreshore Management Plan which provides for resident-only beach driving permits for almost the entire 10.5 kms of this Great Barrier Reef Marine Park shoreline between 8am and 6.30 pm every day….

The announcement by the NSW Government that it will abolish stamp duty and replace it with an annual property tax proves that bold tax reform is possible beyond merely giving big socially destructive income-tax cuts to the wealthy.

In a week when opinion polls were shown not to have done very well in the US, research into why the polls got it wrong in the 2019 Australian election was published – basically, it was the human factor.

So much of the Trump mischief was done by Trump acting alone that it can equally be undone by a President also acting on his own. And to that extent, the Democrats’ probable lack of a majority in the Senate will not matter on some issues.

When Joe Biden gets a clear majority of the vote and Electoral College on Tuesday, a side question will be whether Donald Trump goes willingly or has to be militarily crowbarred out of the White House before inauguration day. Either way he will go.
The real issue is whether Biden and his Vice President, Kamala Harris, can reverse not only the excesses of Trump but replace the whole rotten dysfunction of the American polity that set in with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

Crispin Hull questions the future of the Labor party, based on recent results in the ACT and New Zealand, and the impact this may have on the Queensland election results.

He argues that Labor must promote the future of the renewable energy, its associated job creation and profitability, as a new generation of informed, planet-concerned voters come on to the roll.

The Chinese Government has now put Australia on notice that it will source whatever increasingly smaller amount of coal it needs, from any other source than Australia unless Australia bends to its political will.

This week’s budget was an abdication of the fundamental reason for government: to do the things that must be done collectively, and cannot be done by individuals acting alone so as to nurture and protect people and society.
Essentially, the Government chucked unaccountable billions of dollars in tax cuts and concessions to business. The message was: do what you like with the money as long as you create jobs. Not a care or message as to what sort of jobs or what is to be achieved by them. Just jobs for jobs sake. Dig holes and fill them in and we’ll give you an investment allowance for a hole-digging machine and another investment allowance for a hole-filler-in machine….

CRISPIN HULL Ominously for conservatives and the religious right, Joe Biden was silent during this week’s debate about whether he would “pack” the Supreme Court…

Remember when political parties were condemned for being “poll-driven”. If only they were poll-driven (rather than donor-driven) now. We would have good population, climate, energy, tax and defence policies, as various publications in the past week or so reveal…