“The point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” warned UN secretary general António Guterres as the 25th climate summit (COP25) opened in Madrid two weeks ago, and the multitude of delegates from more than a hundred countries presumably understood what he meant. But they ignored it anyway. The ‘point of no return’ […]
In a recent survey of potential adult migrants worldwide, 47 million said they would most like to move to Canada. There are only 37 million people in Canada. The same goes for Australia: 36 million would like to move there; only 25 million do live there. Most of these would-be immigrants are going to be
I happened to be in Canberra last Friday, speaking to a room full of journalists at the National Press Club, when the news came in, halfway through lunch, that Australia had a new prime minister. The moderator pointed out that the year is already two-thirds gone and it is “only three prime ministers till Christmas”
Nothing is perfect, and that definitely includes health care. On the 70th anniversary of the first full-coverage national health care system that is ‘free at the point of delivery’, Britain’s National Health Service, English people have been marching in the streets demanding better funding for the NHS, and Donald Trump naturally got the wrong end
Public-spirited businessman Moutaz al-Hayat is flying 4,000 cows into Qatar from the United States and Australia to boost milk supply in his country, which is being blockaded by most of its Arab neighbours in the Gulf. It will take sixty flights, and is definitely not cost-effective. But that may not be his biggest problem. Ninety-nine
“Passing the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) is as important to me as another aircraft carrier,” said former US defence secretary Ashton Carter two years ago, as the negotiations on the huge new free trade organisation were nearing completion. Given that the United States already has twice as many aircraft carriers as all the rest of the
US president-elect Donald Trump announced on Monday that he will cancel the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” on his first day in office (20 January 2017). That will kill the TPP off for all 12 countries that agreed on it just over a year ago: as Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, the TPP would be meaningless without
16 February 2014 It’s Abrupt Climate Change, Stupid This is not how it was supposed to happen. The standard climate change predictions said that people in the tropics and the sub-tropics would be badly hurt by global warming long before the people living in the temperate zones, farther away from the equator, were feeling much
10 December 2013 Australia and East Timor By Gwynne Dyer And now for something completely different: a spy story that isn’t about Edward Snowden’s disclosures and the US National Security Agency’s surveillance of everything and everybody. This one could come straight out of a 1950s spy thriller: a microphone buried in a wall, a listening
14 August 2013 Australia: Race to the Bottom By Gwynne Dyer The Australian boat people are getting to be a problem. The first few million just got off the boats from Britain, pushed the Aborigines off the good land, and declared themselves the real Australians. This latest lot of boat people, though… they don’t even