The beginning of the end for China’s one-child policy?
John Garnaut has a piece in the Fairfax press claiming that China’s one child policy may be on its way out: CHINA’S sometimes brutal one-child policy is expected to be loosened next year, as policy...
View ArticleGuest Post: Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize
Guest poster MH reflects on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, including its implications for the prospects for democracy in China. — RM. Late on Friday it was announced that Chinese...
View ArticleDive! Dive! Dive!
It seems that the Very Serious People are determined to make one of my predictions for 2020 come true before 2011 is out, and bring on a full-blown public panic a mature and reasoned discussion about...
View ArticleASIO gets wider remit, to furious debate…only kidding
Bernard Keane at Crikey – and, disappointingly, few others – have noted the Greens’ irresponsible and outrageous questioning of why ASIO should get a massively expanded remit without any serious...
View ArticleRobots now cheaper than Chinese labourers
It seems that the giant IT assembler Foxconn is seeking an alternative to paying its workers more (as discussed on this earlier thread). They’re planning to automate more, using industrial robots to...
View ArticlePower shifts East?
It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the ‘resolution’ of the US debt ceiling crisis was belatedly greeted with the proverbial tumble on equity markets. The proximate cause may have been...
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A crisis of political economy
President Barack Obama recently told members of Congress and the public: If we don’t come to an agreement, we could lose our country’s triple-A credit rating, not because we didn’t have the capacity to...
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Australia in the Asian century
Last Wednesday in a speech to the AsiaLink and Asia Society Lunch in Melbourne Julia Gillard (transcript here) announced that the government has commissioned a White Paper on Australia in the Asian...
View ArticleMore foreign policy: US Marines and tripwires
There’s been lots of discussion of what the de-facto basing of up to 2,500 US Marines at a training area in the Northern Territory means. There’s been blather about Guam, Okinawa and Chinese missile...
View ArticleInternational action on climate change – what’s happened?
As Brian’s post on the “new hockey stick” shows, the public policy implications of climate science haven’t changed a lot over the past few years. If we don’t all act, we are screwed. In fact, we may...
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