The Policy Post

Survive or perish? Bob Brown on the greatest choice facing humanity. Bob Brown’s Eureka moment came in 1973, when he and a local dairy farmer went chasing thylacines in the Tarkine wilderness of north-west Tasmania.

How the GP crisis happened – and why it will get much worse. For most of the last 25 years, there has been a war of attrition against Medicare. Nowhere are the effects more crippling than in general practice.

Rednecks on the run: how Australia transformed itself. The bookies don’t think much of Peter Dutton’s chances of becoming Prime Minister. Shortly after the last election, Sportsbet put the chances of a coalition victory in 2025 at $3.10. That’s probably generous.

A new arms race and nuclear Armageddon: UN chief’s grim warning. “Humanity,” said António Guterres in Hiroshima, “is playing with a loaded gun.”

Factions have crippled Tasmania’s ALP. Now the paramedics are here. Factional warfare has cost the Tasmanian ALP its two most popular and credible politicians; its parliamentary leader and state president; a state election; and two federal seats.

What’s gone wrong in mental health? For the past 50 years, governments have taken money and resources out of the mental health sector. Now, we have a ballooning crisis that disproportionately affect women, the poor, the young, and homosexual men and women.

Treatment, not prison: Australians now firmly reject the war on drugs. Many powerful interests – police drug agencies, mafias, bikie gangs, law-and-order politicians – base their business models on continuing the war on drugs. Voters, though, have a different idea.

Climate change is already turning Australians into refugees. But it's only the beginning. Over the next couple of decades, hundreds of thousands of people will have to find somewhere else to live.

The loneliness of the long-distance health reformer: Stephen Duckett on politics, bureaucracies and the pandemic. Anyone who still thinks Australia’s health system is fit for purpose really hasn’t been paying attention.

Thousands dying. A whole economy in chaos. Hospitals in pandemonium. Why won’t our governments do their bloody job? Almost everyone now knows that living-with-Covid isn’t working. Everyone, that is, except the people we have elected to run the country.