Tag: Crispin Hull

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…

When NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro threatened to move all his members, including ministers, to the crossbench unless the NSW Government backed down on koala protection, Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian immediately called his bluff: do that and all National Ministers would be sacked and the Liberals would govern alone. There would be no change to koala protection.

In all, the Baby Boomers have had a pretty good run and a lot of them are only continuing that run because the lockdowns have saved their lives. It is time for repayment and to give the younger generation a (tax) break.

Another week and yet more examples of corporate greed and wrong-doing emerge. Big for-profit corporations are using JobKeeper funds as DividendKeeper and BonusKeeper. Facebook is making bullying threats over the Australian Government’s reasonable move to make it pay for content. Big business is urging the Government to scrap superannuation rises for wage and salary earners so it can pocket the money for profits, bonuses and dividends.

If Trump wins the Presidential election in November, it means only one of two things: that either he has succeeded in cheating at the election by stymying mail voting and undermining the election’s legitimacy, or that the American people have genuinely re-elected him despite his dangerously erratic foreign-policy forays; his destructive trade policies; his employment of toadies and cronies and his supplicancy to autocrats and dictators. Indeed, they would have endorsed those actions. Either way, the US would be neither a worthwhile ally nor a worthy one.

If Trump wins the Presidential election in November, it means only one of two things: that either he has succeeded in cheating at the election by stymying mail voting and undermining the election’s legitimacy, or that the American people have genuinely re-elected him despite his dangerously erratic foreign-policy forays; his destructive trade policies; his employment of toadies and cronies and his supplicancy to autocrats and dictators. Indeed, they would have endorsed those actions. Either way, the US would be neither a worthwhile ally nor a worthy one.

The Big Three pathogens – HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria – cause hundreds of millions of infections annually and collectively kill more than five million people a year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. The economic waste and human suffering is immense, but there is no scramble to get a vaccine or deliver treatments in the way that an eye on huge expected profits for selling a vaccine in rich developed countries is sending drug companies into a frenzy.