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 …
19 February 2013 Prisoner X and the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight By Gwynne Dyer Ben Alon, Ben Allen and Benjamin Burroughs are dead. So is Benjamin Zygier, an Australian Zionist who moved to Israel in the 1990s and became an Israeli citizen. He then adopted the curious custom of flying back to Australia at …
28 August 2009 Leftist Triumph in Samoa By Gwynne Dyer At last the tide has turned. After centuries of huge advances by the rightists, those who drive on the left finally have a victory to celebrate. On 7 September, Samoa will stop driving on the right and start driving on the left. Naturally, those who …
7 April 2008 The Underpants of the Olympic Flame By Gwynne Dyer If I were the Chinese bureaucrat responsible for guarding the sacred Olympic Flame, the place I’d worry about most is Australia. It was there, just before the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, that a student pretending to be an Olympic athlete ran up to …
1 February 2008 Climate Change: Panic in the Trenches By Gwynne Dyer It’s an old joke: everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. The same, unfortunately, is true for the climate. They ARE talking about it. They were at it again in Honolulu last week, discussing mandatory, internationally binding commitments on …
18 November 2007 Australia’s Climate Change Election By Gwynne Dyer John Howard has been prime minister of Australia for eleven years, and by normal political standards he has done almost everything right. The country is having an unprecedented economic boom thanks to China’s limitless demand for Australian natural resources. Unemployment is at a 33-year low, …
28 September 2007 Climate Change: Evasion Replaces Denial By Gwynne Dyer When denial fails, try evasion. Almost all the climate change deniers, even President George W. Bush, now allow the forbidden phrase to pass their lips, but that doesn’t mean they have really accepted the need to do something about it. The preferred tactics now …