Vale Susan Ryan

This ABC story says:

    Ms Ryan served as a minister in Bob Hawke’s Labor government, holding titles including special minister of state, minister for education and minister assisting the prime minister for the status of women.

    She was the first woman to hold the portfolio relating to women’s affairs, and the first female minister from the Labor Party.

    Key laws enshrining opportunity and rights for women were legislated on her watch, including the Sex Discrimination Act.

    She would later be quoted as calling the Sex Discrimination Act “probably the most useful thing I’ve done in my life”.

Continue reading Vale Susan Ryan

COVID suppression vs elimination: beware of hot air!

When I started this post on 17 July I wrote:

    Much of the last week the debate has raged as to whether our aim in tackling COVID-19 should be suppression or elimination. The debate has involved short memories, the loose use of language, and a false binary. Also the notion that every country should use the same strategy.

    PM Scott Morrison will tell you that ‘aggressive suppression’ is the way to go, and that ‘elimination’ would break the economy. He also said that we need a few people getting sick and dying to keep our minds on the job.

    Scotty from Marketing did not say it quite that way, but that is what he meant.

Continue reading COVID suppression vs elimination: beware of hot air!

Weekly salon 21/9

1. What is going on with Brexit?

Bloomberg tells us that Boris Johnson is engulfed by chaos over his plan to renege on a treaty with the European Union by rewriting the Brexit deal with the EU, by breaking his promise and international law in selling the Irish down the river.

What he did was to promise the Democratic Unionist party there would be no border down the Irish Sea, then signed a withdrawal agreement that entails exactly that, and now proposes a bill that would break the very treaty he had signed. Continue reading Weekly salon 21/9

China on my mind

In recent times China has been much on our minds. In this post I’ve collected a number of diverse articles and radio segments bearing on China and our relationship with China which seemed to me interesting. I’m not attempting to deal comprehensively with mess our relationship with China has become.

Visit of Premier Li Keqiang

That’s from an article Li Keqiang’s visit a good sign for the China-Australia relationship on 27 March 2017.

Premier Li Keqiang, second only to President Xi Jinping, spent five days in Australia to consolidate the relationship between the two countries. Continue reading China on my mind

Weekly salon 14/9

1. Barilaro blows himself up

That was the AFR’s irrepressible cartoonist David Rowe opposite Laura Tingle’s weekly column Crisis spins from COVID-19 to koalas in the premier state also published at ABC Online as The Nationals’ dummy spit over koalas is another sign of their ongoing struggle for relevance.

Continue reading Weekly salon 14/9

Weekly salon 6/9

1. Getting there

Happy Fathers Day as appropriate.

I have been reflecting a little on my intermittent output on this blog. Generally speaking in my life at present my priorities are:

      1. health and family
      2. work
      3. blogging
      4. the ALP and LEAN

    Then there are other matters to be fitted in, like time for friends, jobs around the house, decluttering (having lived in the same house for nearly 40 years) etc etc. Continue reading Weekly salon 6/9