Friday, September 16, 2005



Leaders are people who leave their footprints in their areas of passion.
-Jonathan Byrnes

There should be a continued discussion well beyond the trivialities of parliamentary question time and the revolving news cycles. I hope this book will help concentration on what might really be going wrong with Australia and how, as it turned out after the mid-sixties and the mid-seventies, we might again get the chance to set things right. Looking for Leadership: Have Australians become more conservative over the past decade? Australia in the Howard years

Eye on Politics & Law Lords:
Australia is one of the easiest countries in which to start and run a business, a new World Bank report has found.

The Doing Business report ranks Australia as the sixth most business-friendly country of the 155 studied, based on assessments of a range of regulatory benchmarks related to business operations, including start-up, paying taxes and access to credit.


World Bank says Australia a top place to run a business [Doing Business ; Mobile phone retailer John Ilhan of Crazy John's still heads Australia's wealthiest young entrepreneurs, entertainers and sports people, with a fortune of $300 million What's it like to be crazy rich? ; Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world You are Different. So is Jozef Imrich ]
• · In a hot summer's night in December 1964 I was about to write the last chapter of a book on Australia. The opening sentence of this last chapter was: 'Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.' The great irony: How ironic then that Horne's irony was totally overlooked! ; Horne's irony was lost on Australia
• · · Tim Dunlop: The biggest signal of an extremist government isn't the policies they put forward, it's the way that they try to implement them. Sunrise, sunset ; When John Howard speaks from the Australian heartland - rather than to it - the competition finds it hard to get a word in edgewise Relaxed and comfortable ; Should housing provide a tax haven or a haven for people? The real purpose of housing
• · · · The Premier, Morris Iemma, has refused to rule out raising taxes to help rid the State Government of its growing budget deficit Deficit rings the tax rise alarm ; Do we have the technology to build a better legal system?; John Braithwaite Markets in Vice, Markets in Virtue Sydney: Too much talk about tax reform in Australia focuses on just one small headline-grabbing aspect: the cutting of personal tax rates. What about the on-going and increasingly abusive tax avoidance and evasion that is undermining of the integrity of the tax system Avoiding the issue: countering the termites in the Australian tax system
• · · · · A dirty joke inside the government The Aristobureaucrats ; Just Following the Law ; The organisational culture within Australia’s Department of Immigration appears to have little regard for human rights. Tom Davis, an ex-insider, says it didn't have to be that way Why I quit the department
• · · · · · Former Labor leader Mark Latham says he doesn't plan to ever speak again to his political mentor Gough Whitlam Enough Rope ; Mark Latham's habit of projecting his own bad motives onto others is about to unfold spectacularly Mark Latham: Bitter loser or brave tell-all?; A case for political maturity