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Keywords: Trade

  • INTERNATIONAL

    In the shadow of SIEV-X

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 01 November 2021
    38 Comments

    Two decades ago, an Indonesian vessel given the name SIEV X sank with loss of life that should have caused a flood of tears and a surge of compassion. Instead of being seen in humanitarian terms, the deaths of 353 people became a form of rich political capital, placed in the bank of opportunism to be amortised at a federal election.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The promise of alchemy

    • David Rowland
    • 01 November 2021
    8 Comments

    Ben Jonson is one of the great English Renaissance playwrights but he can also be challenging for the modern reader. When I first came to Jonson some years ago, I attempted a comedy from 1610, The Alchemist. I soon felt out of my depth. Conceding defeat, I put the book aside and told myself that there would be some ‘other time’. This year in Melbourne, with the theatres closed, the streets largely deserted, and travel restrictions firmly in place, that ‘other time’ arrived.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Nuclear submarines surface questions of government spending

    • Vincent Long Van Nguyen
    • 28 September 2021
    12 Comments

    The Australian Government’s decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines has brought to the surface once again big questions around how governments should spend money, particularly during a pandemic. The Government has ditched a $90 billion plan for French submarines in favour of even more expensive boats from the United Kingdom or the United States.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australia’s nuclear submarine trade-off

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 20 September 2021
    31 Comments

    Defence is a costly business, and few branches of defence are more costly, and questionable, than a country’s submarine capability. Since 2009, Project SEA 1000, the name for Australia’s Future Submarine program, has fascinated strategists and defence planners.  In 2016, this resulted in an agreement with the French submarine company DCNS (now called Naval Group) to build an un-designed attack class vessel. Other contenders in the competitive tender — Germany and Japan, for instance — had existing models. 

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    New Yorkers remember 9/11 twenty years later

    • Jim McDermott
    • 14 September 2021
    3 Comments

    Giovanna Slon was just beginning her third year at Fordham University in the Bronx when a plane hit the World Trade Center on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. ‘At 8:47am, my R.A. bangs on my door and tells me “You have to get up. There’s something happening.”’   

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Clive Palmer, COVID, and the WA Border

    • Frank Brennan
    • 09 September 2021
    5 Comments

    Clive Palmer is one Australian wanting to smash border restrictions during this time of pandemic. He is threatening to go back to the High Court seeking recognition of his right as an Australian citizen to travel freely between the States. In particular he claims the right to enter Western Australia where he has significant mining interests. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Unmarked graves in Canada raise questions about Australia’s stolen children

    • Celeste Liddle
    • 12 August 2021
    9 Comments

    Across the Pacific Ocean, in Canada or ‘Turtle Island’ as it is also known by many of its Indigenous inhabitants, a horror has been unfolding. It started at a the former residential school in Kamloops, British Colombia where, via the use of ground penetrating radar technology, the remains of at least 215 Native Canadian children were found buried in mass unmarked gravesites. This school ran for 85 years, was part of compulsory government programs to forcibly assimilate these children, and was administered by the Catholic Church.

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  • ECONOMICS

    Why inflation isn't higher

    • David James
    • 12 August 2021
    4 Comments

    The biggest mystery of the financial markets is why, when the monetary authorities have been printing money with their ears pinned back, is inflation for the most part not a problem? What happens with inflation is crucial to the short-term survival of the whole system. Global debt, which is running at well over 300 per cent of global GDP, is only sustainable because interest rates are exceptionally low (the base rate in Australia is only 0.1 per cent). And interest rates are low because inflation is not a problem.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Prison time for perpetrators but justice eludes victim of modern slavery in Australia

    • Rebecca Dominguez
    • 02 August 2021
    4 Comments

    Last month, a man and a woman were sentenced to between six and eight years in jail for intentionally possessing and exercising the right of ownership over a slave between 2007 and 2015 in Mount Waverley, Victoria. After arriving in Australia from the Tamil Nadu province in India on a 30-day tourist visa, the woman’s passport was taken from her and she was forced to cook, clean and care for the couple’s three children on an average $3 per day. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The complexity of epidemics

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 22 July 2021
    9 Comments

    It is refreshing to find a work that is exploratory and invites its readers into a world more complex than they had imagined. Such a work is a recent book by Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    The rift with China: a time for harmony

    • Joseph Camilleri
    • 15 July 2021
    17 Comments

    The souring of relations with China is driven not just by prime ministers, foreign and defence ministers, or even by Cabinet. It is the product of converging interests with immense reach and influence.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Western withdrawal from Afghanistan marks the beginning of an uncertain future

    • Justin Glyn
    • 13 July 2021
    5 Comments

    The atrocities committed in the Taliban siege of Mazar-i-Sharif in the late 1990s have not been forgotten. Nevertheless, the ‘progress’ brought by the invading forces — after twenty years’ hard fighting against the forces which they themselves had previously armed and trained against the Soviets — is equally debatable.

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