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HOUSING: Australia has the least affordable housing

Australia has the highest priced housing relative to household incomes in the English speaking world, according to the 7th Annual Demographia International Housing Survey: 2011. In Australia’s major housing markets, median house prices are 7.1 times median household income, a level exceeded only by Hong Kong at 11.4. The annual survey rates city and national housing markets as follows: • Affordable, 3.0 or less. • Moderately affordable, 3.1 to 4.0. • Seriously unaffordable, 4.1 to 5.0. • Severely unaffordable, 5.1 and over. The report says that, historically, most Western world housing markets had affordable markets of median housing prices being…

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FEMINISM: Australia Post honours four radical feminists

HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY

Hearing that four last-century feminists, Germaine Greer, Eva Cox, Anne Summers and Elizabeth Evatt, were to be honoured by having their faces on Australian postage stamps is like finding an unused 45 cent stamp – annoying because one needs another 15 cent stamp to make it usable. That is reflective of the achievements of these ladies – they identified problems but articulated inadequate solutions. I’ve described the quartet as “last-century” because women have moved on and are no longer keen to identify as feminists. In an MSN poll, the vote was three-to-one against having Greer on a stamp. The most…

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ENVIRONMENTALISM: Greenpeace co-founder has second thoughts

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Canadian environmentalist, Dr Patrick Moore, who helped found Greenpeace, says he left the organisation because it became “increasingly senseless as it adopted an agenda that was anti-science, anti-business, and downright anti-human”. In a hard-hitting article for The Vancouver Sun (January 7, 2011) he said he joined Greenpeace “before it was even called by that name”. Moore went on to play a key role in blocking American and French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and helped launch campaigns against whaling, baby seal hunting, driftnet fishing, and toxic-waste dumping. He said: “Our campaigns were highly successful at changing opinions and energising the…

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CANBERRA OBSERVED: Prime Minister Gillard’s mishandling of WikiLeaks

Uncategorized

As the political year draws to a close there remains a great deal of confusion about the direction of the Gillard Government and no small doubts about its hopes of longevity. And the doubters appear to be just as numerous in the Labor ranks, including the very people who installed Julia Gillard as leader. Only…

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EDITORIAL: China: absolute power corrupts absolutely

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It was about 130 years ago that the great British historian, Lord Acton, penned the line: “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” These sentiments summarise the problem which Australia and other countries have in relation to the emergence of China as a global economic and political power. Since Mao Zedong’s Chinese…

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TAIWAN: WikiLeaks rattle Taiwan’s external relationships

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Taiwan is on tenterhooks as WikiLeaks releases reveal more information than the government would care for about the two relationships that define Taiwan’s strategic outlook – those with China and the United States. So far, WikiLeaks have exposed, among other things, the locations of the four undersea communication cables that link Taiwan to Hong Kong and also information about the triangular relationship between Taiwan, the US and China. As described in the leaked record of conversation between former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Beijing is sub-rational about Taiwan, which it regards as a…

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