Random thoughts and observations
There’s a lot of discussion in Australia at the moment about housing affordability. The latest idea is that interest payments should be tax deductible for first-home buyers. I don’t understand the constant focus on first-home buyers. A lot of other people struggle to buy housing as well. We bought our first home at Port Pirie [...]
Juliet had an interesting view on Kevin Rudd’s visit to a New York strip club. She’s politically neutral, but dislikes John Howard, so I thought it would be revealing to test her reaction to the news. She wasn’t surprised that a Christian politician would get drunk and touch up strippers. “He should have come to [...]
The Prime Minister John Howard came and went last week. I was honoured to briefly meet him, but felt somewhat deflated by the whole experience. Howard neither said nor did anything interesting. I didn’t expect him to triple somersault off a trampoline, but I did think he would make a significant announcement. That was not [...]
Up until the late 1970s the Labor Party and the Country Party were advocates of decentralisation. There was a commonly held belief that Australia’s population should not be too concentrated in the capital cities. In 1966 Gough Whitlam delivered a speech in which he said that decentralisation was necessary to cut down “the vast social [...]
I’ve heard mixed messages over the years about private patients being treated in public hospitals using their private insurance. The standard line is that they will be admitted and given a private room if one is available. When I worked for Alpine Health, the organisation actively encouraged private patients to use their insurance, to the [...]
