In The Australian today:
"According to Anthony Albanese, the sacking of three department heads and the announcement that a fourth would step down amounts to treating the public service as "political playthings".
23 Sep2013
16 Sep2013
Libs can deal with fringe Senate
In The Australian today:
"Elections should be the storm before the calm. But 2007 and 2010 broke that pattern. Now, pundits say, Tony Abbott's hopes of orderly government will be spoiled by a fractious Senate. And though the final result remains uncertain, there is a clamour for changes that would make it more difficult for small parties to win Senate seats through preference deals."
"Elections should be the storm before the calm. But 2007 and 2010 broke that pattern. Now, pundits say, Tony Abbott's hopes of orderly government will be spoiled by a fractious Senate. And though the final result remains uncertain, there is a clamour for changes that would make it more difficult for small parties to win Senate seats through preference deals."
09 Sep2013
A lost search for silver linings
In The Australian today:
"History, it is often claimed, is written by the victors. Yet from Thucydides on it is the defeated who have most readily sought its solace. "As their overwhelming experience is that everything occurred other than as planned," explained the great German intellectual Reinhart Koselleck, himself a veteran of Paulus's army at Stalingrad, "it is the losers who feel the most desperate need to understand how that could have happened."
"History, it is often claimed, is written by the victors. Yet from Thucydides on it is the defeated who have most readily sought its solace. "As their overwhelming experience is that everything occurred other than as planned," explained the great German intellectual Reinhart Koselleck, himself a veteran of Paulus's army at Stalingrad, "it is the losers who feel the most desperate need to understand how that could have happened."
06 Sep2013
What ails Treasury cannot be fixed with a night of the long knives
In The Australian today:
"To reform our economy, an Abbott government needs an effective Treasury. That requires addressing problems whose roots stretch back to the Whitlam years. But solving them is not a question of returning to the past, nor can those solutions be viewed in isolation from broader reforms to the public service."
"To reform our economy, an Abbott government needs an effective Treasury. That requires addressing problems whose roots stretch back to the Whitlam years. But solving them is not a question of returning to the past, nor can those solutions be viewed in isolation from broader reforms to the public service."
02 Sep2013
Something rotten in our public sector
In The Australian today:
"According to Kevin Rudd, we mustn't put all our eggs in the one basket. Come Saturday, the Australian people will at last have a chance to tell him un oeuf is enough. But getting rid of Labor's fiscal mess will be far more challenging than throwing out a rotten egg."
"According to Kevin Rudd, we mustn't put all our eggs in the one basket. Come Saturday, the Australian people will at last have a chance to tell him un oeuf is enough. But getting rid of Labor's fiscal mess will be far more challenging than throwing out a rotten egg."
31 Aug2013
Slowdown threatens the developing world
In The Australian today:
"With the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers looming, financial markets are again in turmoil. Paradoxically, the jitters come not from the risk of crisis in the US but from fears that a strengthening economy will lead the Federal Reserve to scale back on "quantitative easing" and eventually increase interest rates."
"With the fifth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers looming, financial markets are again in turmoil. Paradoxically, the jitters come not from the risk of crisis in the US but from fears that a strengthening economy will lead the Federal Reserve to scale back on "quantitative easing" and eventually increase interest rates."