Blogotariat

Marie McInerney reports: A Canadian Aboriginal project looking to map the resiliency of Aboriginal men who have lived with HIV and AIDS for ten years or more posed just one research question: “How are you living well with HIV?” Art Zoccole, CEO of...

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It is the worst nightmare and best of wet dreams for Australian racists – jailed Aboriginal men converting to radical jihadist Islam.

Australia’s indigenous peoples have for years been the lowest of the low in the eyes of the colonial settler state and those who benefit from the dispossession of Aborigines. About 226 years in fact.

If there has been one constant theme running through the ruling class Australian nation narrative it has been racism against Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, a racism born as justification for the genocide unleashed on indigenous Australians to win their land.

I’ve been working for quite a while now on a book which will respond to Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson an adaptation of Bastiat for a modern US audience that was issued just after 1945 and has remained in print ever since. The planned title is Economics in Two Lessons. In my interpretation, Hazlitt’s One Lesson is that prices are opportunity costs[1]. My Second Lesson is that, in the absence of appropriate government policy, private opportunity costs (market prices) won’t reflect social opportunity costs.

The Natural Capital Agenda looks like an answer to the environmental crisis. But it’s a delusion.

By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 24th July 2014

In what may become known as his ‘Archduke Ferdinand moment’, the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, swore to protect the remains of thirty eight Australians by putting fifty Australians in mortal danger. ‘The silliest strategic move since Lone Pine,’ said the Adelaide military historian, Trevor Wilson. Antony Beevor, author of The Second World War, compared it, unfavourably, to Anzio. ‘We did not send in eight thousand policemen to retrieve six thousand dead soldiers from Anzac Cove,’ said Rob McLachlan, the famed Bathurst-based Gallipoli scholar. ‘We Scots-Canadians call that throwing good money after bad.’

More than 25 NSW feminist women’s refuges have lost their funding, with their buildings being handed over to religious or other charities. Wendy Bacon reports.

Bravo to the New South Wales Greens. Here is part of a press release Senator Lee Rhiannon and other Greens NSW parliamentarians have released, arguing that there can only be a ceasefire with the end of the blockade of Gaza and the Occupation of the Palestinian Territories.

Three weeks since the attack on Gaza began, and one week since the ground invasion began the Greens NSW say that any ceasefire deal between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza must include an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and to the blockade of Gaza.

Further on Greens NSW Upper House MP David Shoebridge says:

Students from UNSW's Sunswift team break the electric car world record for speed over a distance of 500km/h.

Greens leader says conservative forces behind Abbott determined to kill renewable industry, and “appeasement” will not save the sector, but ambition might.

In spite of the unprecedented budget backlash the Abbott government remains determined to ape America’s hard right neo-con policy agenda. But when the US government finds that it is unable, (or unwilling), to protect its citizens from the ravages of high unemployment, sub-living wages, homelessness, toxic food, unaffordable healthcare, crippling education costs, rampant crime and wholesale environmental destruction, one has to seriously question whether it is a model worth replicating.

By Leith van Onselen From The AFR comes some interesting analysis from Moody’s estimating that allowing property investors to deduct rental property losses against unrelated wage and salary income – known as “negative gearing” in Australia – has added some 9% or $44,000 to the typical Australian home value: The report said that negative gearing […]

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If Tony Abbott wants to cripple Australia's renewable energy industry, as many suspect, he can do so without doing anything at all. That's because the removal of the carbon price could make long-term financing unfeasible, even if the renewables target is unchanged.

One of the tragedies of Australia's large scale renewable energy industry is that it has an excellent policy in place. But such is the level of uncertainty about the future of that policy, the industry cannot move forward.