The Policy Post

Transformation of a nation. In a little over 50 years, Australia changed from a dull, arid, insular monoculture into one of the most diverse nations on earth. It hasn’t been easy and it’s not over yet. I lived through it all, so it’s my story too.

How alien abduction explains Donald Trump. When given a choice between truth and a lie, vast millions of people unerringly choose the lie. What on earth is going on – and what does it mean?

It’s doing your head in: the hidden mental toll of all those crises. We live in a time of anguish: interest rates, cost of living, rents, mortgages, healthcare, the pandemic, the GFC, job insecurity, climate change. It’s having its consequences.

The increasingly unacceptable faces of capitalism. The corporate world has seldom been held in more contempt than right now. It goes far beyond Qantas and PWC to strike at the heart of the way global business functions.

Private health insurance: and the rort goes on. There’s a government review of health insurance. Here’s why you haven’t heard of it … and what needs to change.

What’s the Intergenerational Report really for? Projecting 40 years ahead is nonsense. The Intergenerational Reports have quite a different purpose – to justify what the government has already decided to do.

  Labor has one last chance to save public hospitals. But will they? Only the federal government has the capacity to put the hospital system back together. And a disaster unfolding in one state reveals what is already beginning in all the others.

  Neoliberalism is dead, killed by the GFC. A new, fairer era has begun. As Australia swings dramatically away from trickle-down economics, the rich are getting a smaller slice of the pie. Those in the middle are doing better – but not, yet, those right at the bottom.

  How long will you live? The promise of ever-longer lifespans is a new phenomenon that probably won’t last.

  It was the biggest health reform since Medicare. It didn’t work. In 2011, Julia Gillard introduced a new funding system to fix Australia’s troubled public hospitals. So why did it fail so badly?