Politics

The appalling allegations of racist behaviour towards Indigenous players at the Hawthorn AFL club are a stark and disturbing reminder of the latent racism that unfortunately seems to underlie the attitudes of some Australians and many institutions right across our society.

Shorten had flown to Brisbane for the first day of hearings at the royal commission into the robo-debt scandal. He had been relentless in his determination to expose the full extent of what he calls the ‘greatest failure of public administration and social security’. 

The most significant failure of global leadership by governments in recent times is the failure to act decisively and as a matter of urgency on climate change. Surely we have moved beyond the ignorant and irresponsible mumbling of the climate deniers with mounting evidence from across the world of the effects of climate change. The unprecedented heatwave in Europe. The unprecedented drought in China. The megadrought in the United States. Greenland’s collapsing icecap. Near-famine in several parts of Africa.

It’s seven hours’ flying time from London to New York, but there is a huge chasm between the pageantry of a past empire on one side of the Atlantic and the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on the other. Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s grim words belied the bright sunshine of her midweek news conference in the UN Plaza’s rose garden. ‘War in Europe,’ she said, ‘has cast a shadow over this meeting.’

As the government moves towards its first budget in October, uncertainties about our economic outlook are mounting. That’s partly because it is increasingly difficult to read the world economy, and there’s a growing belief that our interest rates must be getting close to a peak with the Reserve Bank of Australia’s increases. It’s also unclear just how long the impact of those moves will take to flow through.

Australia’s most ardent monarchist prime minister – not Tony Abbott or John Howard but Robert Menzies – would have been very impressed with the response of our avowed republican leader, Anthony Albanese, to the passing of our borrowed head of state, Queen Elizabeth II.

National cabinet met virtually this week with the chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, in attendance. Kelly was absent from the previous meeting, on August 31, which cut mandated Covid-19 isolation from seven to five days – a decision not supported by expert health advice. National cabinet’s decision that day, made without the benefit of documentation including the CMO’s views, was noted as unusual by journalists at the time.

The successful jobs and skills summit clearly established the significance to our future of improving our national productivity, yet it didn’t attempt to fill in the detail of how to achieve this. The government needs to adopt a clear objective to improve productivity – perhaps a simple target such as doubling the national rate of productivity growth by 2030, or even earlier.

Anthony Albanese is storming the Bastille erected by a sclerotic government more intent on its own maintenance of power and privilege than effectively advancing the national interest. The spectacle may not be as dramatic as that moment in French history that saw the old order swept aside in bloody revolutionary fervour, but its significance for Australia could be just as profound.

Our environment is in deep trouble. We are all suffering as a result. Elected officials at all levels behave as if tackling the problem is a luxury, an optional extra if time and resources are available after meeting the much more important challenges of growing the economy. We are not even treating the symptoms and there is no appetite to address the underlying causes.