Keith Suter’s Global Insights
What on earth is going on?
Articles (11 of 27)
Archive Article: A Week Is A Long Time In Politics. June 26 98.
December 27, 2008 | A week is a long time in politics. Political history is full of stories of meteorites: meteors that have flashed through the skies, burnt out and then crashed to earth. Pauline Hanson is a meteor. For the past two years I have been warning that Pauline Hanson is one of the most significant politicians in Australia and that her popularity was not just a media exaggeration. I naturally feel vindicated by the Queensland State election. Now let me make another controversial prediction: Pauline Hanson will have a short career in politics. First, she has done a skilful job in mobilizing... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:44 PM Comment
Archive Article: Ageing Australia. 17th April 98.
December 27, 2008 | The Australian Minister for Family Services, Warwick Smith, announced last November that the Government would as a matter of priority commence the development of a National Strategy for an Aging Australia. That is a good decision. It is worth noting that New Zealand has already started on that track. Leading New Zealand businessperson Sir Ross Jansen was asked by his Government in 1996 to chair the Prime Ministerial Task Force on Positive Aging. The Task Force was asked to "...involve the people of New Zealand in developing a long-term view of the positive place of older people in our communities".... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:38 PM Comment
Archive Article: Alcohol Kills. 12th Sep 03
December 27, 2008 | Some lawyers make money suing the manufacturers of cigarettes. Will they eventually be able to make money suing the manufacturers of alcohol? The recent NSW Alcohol Summit was a welcome - if long delayed - official recognition of the dangers of alcohol. Perhaps Australia is now heading in the same direction as litigation over tobacco: an opportunity for the victims of the drug to sue the manufacturers because the manufacturers were aware of the dangers of their product but did not do enough to warn people about the dangers. There is now some scope for the victims of smoking to... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:35 PM Comment
Archive Article: Alcohol Kills More People. 11 Sep 98.
December 27, 2008 | Alcohol kills more Australians per year than were killed throughout the entire Vietnam war. In NSW alone, in a recent annual survey, 141 people were killed and more than 300 were seriously injured in drinking-related accidents. The idea of comparing the Vietnam statistics with alcohol came to me after reading a quotation from George McGovern, a former US Senator and the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 (when he was beaten by Richard Nixon at the beginning of the Watergate scandal). Mr McGovern has been fond of pointing out that 125,000 Americans die every year through alcoholism, more than twice the... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:28 PM Comment
Archive Article: An Ounce Of Prevention. 3 July 98.
December 27, 2008 | An ounce of prevention is better than a ton of cure. If prevention is so good, then why is the State Government so reluctant to finance it? Wesley Dalmar Child and Family Services is part of the Coalition to Support Vulnerable Families. The Coalition is running a campaign to encourage the State Government to invest in families at risk. The Coalition has called on the Government to spend an extra $20 million per year to boost home visiting services and respite care. In other words, there should be more attention given to preventative programmes. Wesley Dalmar is one of the... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:24 PM Comment
Archive Article: Anniversary Of Human Rights. 4 Dec 98.
December 27, 2008 | December 10 next week will be the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is the basic document of the global human rights revolution. The Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 with no votes against it. But there were some abstentions. The Soviet Union and its east European allies abstained because the Declaration contained the right to own property, South Africa opposed the principle that blacks were equal to whites, and Saudi Arabia opposed the principle that women were equal to men. An example of the global human rights... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:18 PM Comment
Archive Articles: Are We Getting The Right Statistics. 28th Aug 98
December 27, 2008 | We live in a world that is awash with statistics. But are we getting the right statistics? I don't mean that the figures are wrong - but that we may be getting right figures about the wrong issues? The Worldwatch Institute, based in Washington DC, is the world's leading environmental research organization. One of its publications is Vital Signs: The Environmental Trends that are Shaping our Future. Economic productivity is regularly reported but the state of the natural world rarely gets the same attention. For example, there is a great deal of attention to the world's oil production but far... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:12 PM Comment
Archive Article: Australias Foreign Aid Policy. 6 Nov 98.
December 27, 2008 | There is a great deal of debate over foreign aid from Australia to Third World countries. But there is very little attention given to the way that Third World countries pay more money back to the rich western countries than they get in foreign aid. In the early 1970s there was a dramatic increase in the price of oil, so that the oil producing countries in the Middle East suddenly acquired huge amounts of money. The money was invested in western banks, which then lent it to the Third World countries. Some of the loans were worthwhile but many were... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:08 PM Comment
Archive Article: Australia's Search For A Regional Identity. 7th Nov 03.
December 27, 2008 | How does Australia relate to Asia? This has been a standard theme in Australian politics for a long time - and there still seems to be no clear answer. I have just been reading an excellent book that sets out clearly the background to this issue. Rawdon Dalrymple is a former senior diplomat and a member of staff at Sydney University. He knows Australian foreign policy from the inside. He has written "Continental Drift: Australia's Search for a Regional Identity". This book is different from other books on Australia's foreign and defence policy because of its written from an insider's... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 6:03 PM 2 comments
Archive Article: Britain's Biological Warfare Programme. 25 July 03.
December 27, 2008 | The controversy over Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is simply the most recent in a long line of events in the troubled history of chemical and biological warfare. The world's first anthrax bomb was invented by the British and dropped on a Scottish island. If the rest of the project had been carried out, then parts of Germany would remain contaminated to this day. The story of Britain's anthrax experiments in World War II did not come to light until about forty years after the experiments had been conducted. To this day, there is some hesitation about visiting "Anthrax Island"... Full article »
Posted by: Amanda Foxon-Hill at 5:50 PM Comment
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