I did a show yesterday on China’s censorship and human rights record. A few people have told me that in Australia, we can say what we like and do what we like. Really?
Why is KRUDD spending $60 million on Internet censorship?
Why did a Gold Coast teenager get arrested and charged for wearing a “blasphemous” [...]
Tonight’s guests - Katherine Szuminska & Matthew Landauer - are the founders of OpenAustralia.org, a recently-launched site which makes politics more transparent.
Based on the British site TheyWorkForYou, OpenAustralia.org scrapes Hansard and makes it much more accessible. You can find out who your local MP is and then subscribe to email alerts whenever they say [...]
America - your tax dollars have been well spent. What can you buy with one trillion dollars? No-bid contracts:
Nearly Four Decades Later, U.S. Oil Companies Return to Iraq
Four oil companies are in the final stage of contract negotiations to regain drilling rights in Iraq — thirty-six years after they lost them. Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total [...]
I’m very excited to see that OpenAustralia, the local version of TheyWorkForYou is online and in beta testing. Congrats to everyone involved. It’s something I’ve been wanting to see happen in Australia for years.
Reading through the site and its’ associated blog tonight, I discovered a couple of interesting points about transparency in Australian politics, [...]
Today I got to chat with another person I admire - Stephen Mayne. As I’m sure most of you will know, Stephen is the founder of Crikey.com.au. These days he is also running a video podcast “The Mayne Report” where he takes his video crew into Annual General Meetings for some of Australia’s largest companies [...]
On Twitter this afternoon I made a crack about how the two-party system we have in Australia is, I believe, fundamentally broken. Someone asked me how I would improve it. This is what I came up with on the fly. This isn’t something I’ve given any thought to previously, so it’s probably full of holes [...]
More evidence that it doesn’t matter which one of the major parties is in power, the same game is played:
The narrow terms of reference were drafted to prevent any inquiry into the role played by Howard and his ministers. The inquiry was asked to report on “the arrest, detention, charging, prosecution and release of Dr [...]
Australia slipped two places to be ranked only the 27th most peaceful out of 140 countries on the Global Peace Index 2008, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, while neighbour New Zealand is fourth.
The USA ranked 97th, below China, Cuba and Libya.
I wonder who much coverage this will get in the MSM. Are you, [...]
I have been hearing a bit lately about “Senator On-Line“, Australia’s first internet based political party. The way it works is this: is a SOL candidate gets elected to the Senate, they will put up a website for every Bill being presented to the Senate, covering the arguments for and against the Bill, and then [...]
When I had Matt Marks on the show recently talking about politicians using Web2.0 to engage their audience, I wish I’d seen this example. Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett (who was my guest on the show back in February 2005) has a video on his Facebook profile where recent G’Day World guest Julian Burnside QC [...]
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