Research
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Traditional media still the oneThe Federal Government's plans to repeal the cross-media ownership laws are due before Cabinet in the next few weeks. There is little doubt they will get the tick of approval and then slide through parliament - thereby ensuring greater concentration of media ownership and a loss of diversity in Australia's media. The Australian media is already heavily concentrated by OECD measures and the government proposal would only make it worse. Removing th... -
Cheating our way towards KyotoIn the last minutes of the 1997 Kyoto conference on climate change, Australia extracted a vital concession by insisting that countries be allowed to include emissions from land clearing in their greenhouse accounting. The Government knew that land clearing had declined sharply since the accepted base year of 1990, so even before the ink was dry, Australia's emissions had fallen by 5 to 10 per cent. The shift of government research funding from re... -
Minority groups target of vilificationThe Howard Government's vilification of indigenous communities and their culture is another in a long line of morally repugnant diversionary tactics employed by a Government devoid of ideas and scrambling to retain the interest of the electorate. When the history of this Government is written, the events in recent times should be placed side-by-side with the shameful exploitation of refugees, the wicked fear-mongering that followed the Wik decisi... -
Equality of Opportunity: Levelling the Playing FieldWe drew out the broad elements of an active social strategy targeted at the major barriers to social mobility ”” children's early development, public infrastructure deficiencies and inequalities of access to employment, health, education, training and housing. If it is to gain public acceptance, such a strategy would need to be preceded by a campaign of public education. The campaign would have three aims. First, it would explain why the proposed... -
Farming the wind getting bad pressCommunity opposition to wind farms is heavily influenced by a network of anti-environmental activists, some with links to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries. This helps to explain why apparently independent local opposition groups reproduce the same misinformation and distortions about wind power. The truth is that most wind farm opponents don't like the look of them and don't want them in their backyards. Fair enough (although you have to wo... -
Has the government been selling out Australia's children?Corporate chains - which now own around a quarter of centres in Australia - offer the lowest quality of care on all indicators surveyed, in some cases markedly lower than that provided by community-based centres. Beyond tightening up the centre accreditation processes, as announced recently, the government should consider offering capital grants to new community-based centres. Parents are more likely to enrol their children in higher quality cent... -
How to give all Australians an equal start in lifeSocial scientists have sought to measure the degree of upward income mobility (the ability of low-income people to rise up the ladder over time) and found that some nations perform better than others on this criterion. Looking back over recent decades, Australia emerges as a more mobile (less "sticky") society than the United States, Britain and Germany. This may be because successive Australian governments embraced more social activism than the... -
How a minister buckled in the face of a mob of localsThe Howard Government has made a mockery of the environment and heritage portfolio, turning it into little more than a pork-barrel buffet. But who would have thought that things would stoop to the level where the federal Environment Minister would use environment laws against the environment. This is precisely what occurred on Wednesday when the minister announced that he was using the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to b... -
Call the carers to accountWith evidence now appearing to suggest that the quality of care in corporate childcare centres is markedly lower than elsewhere, the Government will need to act to discourage any further domination of long day care in Australia by the corporate chains until it can be shown that the quality of the care they provide is comparable with the community-based and independent private centres. -
Why we should give a FCUK about advertising standardsOur state and local governments have also been cowed by the cultural and economic momentum of the marketing industry and their squadrons of boosters and lickspittles in the media. In the relentless drive to attract advertisers' dollars into supporting public facilities and events, the guardians of public morals have lost their way, blinded by the glitter of corporate culture. But it is time to call a halt and demand that "community standards" be...