This blog is totally independent, unpaid and has only three major objectives.
The first is to inform readers of news and happenings in the e-Health domain, both here in Australia and world-wide.
The second is to provide commentary on e-Health in Australia and to foster improvement where I can.
The third is to encourage discussion of the matters raised in the blog so hopefully readers can get a balanced view of what is really happening and what successes are being achieved.
Quote Of The Year
Timeless Quotes - Sadly The Late Paul Shetler - "Its not Your Health Record it's a Government Record Of Your Health Information"
or
H. L. Mencken - "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Here is what is found on their web-site today - 31/08/2019.
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Australian Digital Health Agency Board
A new Australian Digital Health Agency Board was announced on 3 April 2019. This page was updated on 24 April 2019 at the commencement of the new Board’s term.
Australian and the world’s healthcare systems face a range of security threats due to malicious activity as cybercriminals attempt to access sensitive information stored in the systems.
The warnings on the vulnerability of healthcare systems to criminal activity come from global security firm FireEye in a report just released.
According to FireEye the healthcare vertical in Australia, and worldwide, faces a range of threat actors and malicious activity as, in some cases, criminals seek to monetise personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI).
On security incidents occurring in healthcare sectors FireEye reports that between Oct. 1, 2018 and March 31, 2019, its Threat Intelligence systems observed multiple healthcare-associated databases for sale on underground forums, many for under $2000.
“Actors buying and selling PII and PHI from healthcare institutions and providers in underground marketplaces is very common, and will almost certainly remain so due to this data’s utility in a wide variety of malicious activity ranging from identity theft and financial fraud to crafting of bespoke phishing lures,” FireEye’s report notes.
FireEye also says that, in some cases, nation states carry out intrusions to steal valuable research and mass records for intelligence gathering purposes - and disruptive threats like ransomware have the potential to “wreak havoc among hospital networks and impact the most critical biomedical devices and systems”.
To move beyond compliance with current regulations and address the ever-changing threat landscape, FireEye says organisations in the healthcare sector should utilise threat intelligence to understand these threats continue to evolve - and minimise risks appropriately.
Based on FireEye’s observances of threat activity across the healthcare vertical, the security firm says the threats facing healthcare organisations can be grouped into the following:
Theft of Data
Financially motivated threat activity represents a high-frequency, high-impact threat to healthcare organisations.
Cybercrime actors may conduct focused intrusions into specific targets that house or have access to valuable patient records and data, or carry out opportunistic targeting of poorly secured organisations and networks.
In comparison to cyber crime activity, cyber espionage campaigns pose a lower frequency but still noteworthy impact risk to healthcare organisations, particularly those in some subsets of the industry. Much of what FireEye has observed from such threat actors—particularly those with a nexus to China—appears to driven by an interest in acquiring medical research and collecting large data sets of information, potentially for the purposes of fostering intelligence operations.
In our 2018 M-Trends report, FireEye observed that healthcare was the third-highest industry to be retargeted following an incident.
Disruptive and Destructive Threats
Disruptive threats driven by extortionist cyber criminals and nation state actors continue to present a threat to continuity of operations for healthcare providers and others in this space.
Both targeted activity such as ransomware delivered post-compromise, and less frequent but widespread nation-state-originated threats like WannaCry can pose threats to poorly secured infrastructure.
Similar to operational technology networks within critical infrastructure, security organisations within healthcare providers face difficulties in maintaining visibility of threats targeting these systems.
FireEye stresses that, looking forward, the increasing number of biomedical devices used for critical functions within hospitals and healthcare providers presents a growing security challenge.
I found this a very interesting summary of the threat environment and it sure makes it clear there is a lot to keep people both alert and alarmed about. The repeat attack rate was interesting I thought…
More than that we have this where the Chinese threat is rather highlighted in the same report.
The global healthcare sector, including Australia, faces increasing cyber threats and malicious activity from Chinese groups, a new report warns, with medical research a key target.
FireEye, a global intelligence-led security company with a Sydney base, has released a report outlining three of the most commonly used threats against healthcare organisations: data theft, cyber espionage and disruptive and destructive threats.
One key finding of the report is that Chinese groups feature prominently in these attacks.
“Since 2015, we have observed China-based threat actors conducting intrusions into healthcare organisations to steal patient personal information, likely to identify, track, and potentially exploit targeted individuals of interest to the Chinese government,” Charles Carmakal, vice president and CTO strategic services at FireEye, said.
“We have also observed the theft of cancer and anti-ageing medical research by Chinese nationals that are employees, contractors, or visiting researchers of targeted medical research institutions.
“We expect the Chinese government will continue to steal medical research data from organisations across the globe to improve the healthcare of Chinese citizens.”
Mr Carmakal said healthcare organisations in Australia faced a variety of threats from state-sponsored and organised criminal threat actors.
He added that disruptive attacks, most notably ransomware operations, would increasingly become a bigger problem for Australian organisations. Mr Carmakal said that ransomware operators often conducted multiple intrusions a week and were often paid six-figure ransoms per victim.
“Over the past year, we’ve observed a financially-motivated threat actor advertising stolen data from Australian healthcare organisations,” he said.
“The actor advertised 128,000 records that included personal information and payment card data for $US1500 and 11,700 records of employee information for $US500.
“We expect to see an uptick in disruptive ransomware incidents in Australia, as financially motivated threat actors opportunistically target organisations across the globe.”
Mr Carmakal added that while China-based threat actors would continue to steal data from Australian healthcare organisations, the intrusions would likely be targeted and specific as opposed to the broad theft of data observed in prior years.
“In general, China-based threat actors are focused on espionage as opposed to destructive attacks,” he said.
President Trump has gone off the reservation in the trade war last weekend with his latest tariff impositions on China and seemingly is heading towards a forced collapse of the global trading system which will be bad for all of us, but especially for medium trading powers such as Australia. He really needs to be stopped – but I am not sure how. Nothing he is doing at this point seems to be good for Australia.
Brexit rumbles on and it is hard to know where it ends at this point. Boris J. is closing down parliament for weeks on end and there is widespread fury at his action
ScoMo has now done a year as PM and we a now waiting to see how the next couple of years play out as he tries to navigate all the global tensions and a softening economy and stalled wage growth as home. I suspect it will not be easy to say the least! We sure need steady hands on the tiller at present!
The public service needs to better represent the needs of the vast bulk of Australians rather than just the rich and poor, who are represented by lobby groups, and it must improve its expertise by opening itself up to the private sector.
As well, senior bureaucrats offering advice must always be mindful it is their minister, not them, taking the political risk, and therefore they should ultimately do what the minister wants, Scott Morrison says.
In a speech to be delivered Monday to a public-sector function in Canberra, the Prime Minister will outline six areas of cultural change he wants to see implemented, which in some cases, he says, will require challenging conventional wisdom.
Mr Morrison's speech, which builds on performance improvements he has demanded since the May 18 federal election, also precedes the completion of the review into the public sector led by businessman David Thodey.
Ok but not OK: Iceland bids farewell to a glacier for the first time
By Seth Borenstein
August 19, 2019 — 7.35am
Okjokull glacier, Iceland: It was a funeral for ice.
With poetry, moments of silence and political speeches about the urgent need to fight climate change, Icelandic officials, activists and others bade goodbye to what once was a glacier.
Icelandic geologist Oddur Sigurdsson pronounced the Okjokull glacier extinct about a decade ago. But on Sunday he brought a death certificate to the made-for-media memorial.
After about 100 people made a two-hour hike up a volcano, children installed a memorial plaque to the glacier, now called just "Ok," minus the Icelandic word for glacier.
The glacier used to stretch 15 square kilometres, Sigurdsson said. Residents reminisced about drinking pure water thousands of years old from Ok.
I’m starting to wonder if the trouble with our politicians is that they’ve evolved to do politics but not economics, making them unfit to cope with the economic threats we now face.
On the one hand, they’ve been able to leave the management of the economy to the independent Reserve Bank, whose tinkering with interest rates – up a bit, down a bit – has successfully kept the economy growing for 28 years.
On the other hand, the pollies have been locked in a decade of unprecedented political instability where, since the demise of the Howard government in 2007, no prime minister has been safe from attack – from their own side.
The Coalition has a 51-49 per cent two-party-preferred lead over Labor, the Newspoll published in The Australian newspaper shows.
AAP
The Coalition’s lead over Labor has slipped, the latest Newspoll shows.
The coalition has a 51-49 per cent two-party-preferred lead over Labor, the poll published in The Australian newspaper shows.
It shows a two-point drop in the two-party-preferred vote for the Coalition since the electoral surge in July, which saw the Government increase its lead over Labor 53 to 47 per cent.
Popular support for the Coalition has dropped two points to 42 per cent while Labor’s primary vote jumped a point to 34 per cent in the latest survey of 1623 voters.
The problem with being on the wrong side of reality is that you can get tangled up. Which is what happened to poor Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack last week when he got annoyed at “people in those sorts of countries pointing the finger at Australia and say we should be shutting down all our resources sector so that, you know, they will continue to survive”.
He added, generously, that they will “continue to survive because many of their workers come here and pick our fruit”.
Maintaining the Australian conservative line that global warming is crap when you’re among people who see it as an existential threat must have been challenging. The Deputy PM, speaking as Acting PM, failed that challenge, as did the entire Australian delegation to the Pacific Islands Forum.
But his use of the word “survive” is interesting and not exactly the party line, and the notion that there is a choice between the survival of Pacific island nations and Australia’s resources sector even more so.
Defending a large country with a small population has always been Australia’s biggest strategic challenge. That we have successfully done so has been due to luck, great and powerful friends, our unique continental-island geography and the military technological edge we have enjoyed historically in our near region.
But we may not remain a lucky country for much longer if US military power and our geographical and technological advantages continue to erode. We need to be smarter and more strategic in how to defend ourselves, starting with a better appreciation of the critical importance of northern Australia to defence and national security.
This is the essential conclusion of a path-breaking report on the future security of Australia’s north by the influential Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Its author, John Coyne, mounts a compelling case for an overhaul of our disjointed, siloed and piecemeal approach to defending the north.
The nation’s top financial regulators are now in lock step on climate change.
Subject to the usual materiality considerations, exposure to the world’s increasingly volatile climate is seen as a serious risk worthy of inclusion in financial statements; no longer can it be airily dismissed with a few generic lines in the corporate sustainability report.
The Australian Accounting Standards Board helped lay the platform last December, saying in a practice note that companies “may need to consider” formalising disclosure of climate and other emerging risks in their accounts.
The risks included potential, acute or chronic natural disasters, change in climate patterns and shifts in government policy.
“Existing and potential investors, creditors, insurers and customers are all increasingly demanding more specific information about a corporate entity’s exposure to, and management of, climate-related risks,” the AASB said.
Paradigm shifts tend to happen slowly, and then all at once. That’s the lesson I’ve taken away from the recent market turmoil. As I wrote last week, the surprise is only that the upset didn’t come sooner.
Pundits may have pegged the worst Dow drop of the year to fresh bond yield curve inversions in the US (a historic predictor of downturns) but the underlying signs of sickness in the global economy have been with us for a long time. The question was when the markets were going to put aside the complacency bred by a decade of low interest rates and central bank money dumps, in the form of quantitative easing, and embrace this new reality.
Consider that since January 2018 every major economy except India’s has seen a deterioration in its purchasing managers’ indices. PMIs are one of the best forward-looking indicators of economic conditions for the manufacturing sector, which is a bellwether for overall economic activity. The slowdown in the eurozone has been dramatic — particularly in places such as Italy and Germany, where the economy is now officially shrinking.
Penny Wong became one of Australia's most respected public figures by combining a fascinating personal story - gay, Christian and Eurasian - with an almost preternatural calmness that she can dial up to passionate outrage seemingly at will.
In the wake of last week's Pacific leaders summit in Tuvalu, Wong demonstrated another reason for her political success: the ability to cloak pragmatism with cant.
After helping drive minerals-dependent Queensland into the arms of the Coalition at the election, Labor's foreign affairs spokeswoman on Sunday endorsed an industry that many of the inner-city elite who worship her regard as evil.
Generational progress can no longer be taken for granted
By Danielle Wood
August 18, 2019 — 11.37pm
Baby Boomers are awful, right? The big houses, the franking credits and the gratuitous advice about young people’s breakfast choices. At least so says Twitter, the most Millennial of social media platforms. So are these cross-generational salvos just another manifestation of young adult angst, or are young people justified in feeling aggrieved?
Generation-on-generation progress in living standards has been the happy dividend of Australia’s strong economic performance since the Second World War. On average, children could expect to be substantially healthier, wealthier and better housed than their parents at the same age. This generational progress can no longer be taken for granted.
The wealth of households under 35 has barely moved in 15 years. And poorer young Australians have less today than poorer young Australians did 15 years ago. In contrast, wealth for older households has grown rapidly. A household headed by someone 65-74 now has on average $1.3 million in assets, up from $900,000 for a household of this age group in 2004, helped by the housing boom and growth in superannuation assets.
Washington | US-based Australian chief executives Lachlan Murdoch and James Gorman have joined some of the world's biggest companies in a pledge to scrap the decades-old view that the main purpose of business is to put shareholders' interests first.
Mr Murdoch, chief executive of Fox Corp, and Morgan Stanley chairman James Gorman, put their signatures on the landmark Monday (Tuesday AEST) declaration by the the US Business Roundtable.
The statement, spearheaded by JPMorgan Chase &Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, says the purpose of a corporation is to serve all of its constituents, including workers, customers, investors and the broader society.
"While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders," the group said in the statement.
Australia's inverted yield curve has given false readings on predicting a recession at least five times in the last 30 years and should not be so heavily relied upon by investors as an indicator of negative growth.
The inverted yield curve - where the official cash rate yield (now at 1 per cent) is higher than the 10-year bond yield (now 0.92 per cent) can often point to a recession because when investors pile into long-dated bonds it means they are becoming more risk-averse about the economy.
Last week the US saw the yield on its 10-year bond fall below that of the 2-year bond yield, causing a widespread stockmarket sell-off on Wall Street. In Australia, the 10-year bond is just 15 basis points off falling below the two-year bond, which could spark another stockmarket sell-off here.
Working families are being squeezed as the cost of essential goods and services including hospital visits, property rates and education climbs at twice the rate of inflation, prompting calls for stronger competition in government-dominated sectors.
An analysis of Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) data since the Coalition took office in 2013 shows the biggest price rises in areas directly controlled by federal, state and local governments despite a string of policies aimed at keeping a lid on the cost of living.
The head of the RBA has told the government it's now up to them to prevent a dangerous economic slowdown.
Since the final quarter of 2013, the overall consumer price index has increased 10.4 per cent, while the cost of government-administered or controlled goods and services jumped 23 per cent.
Bonds, oil, copper and gold are all telling us a consistent message: beware climbing recessionary risks in the US and, by extension, in the global economy.
Sharemarkets? Not so much.
During the worst of the recent near-panic over inverting yield curves and trade escalation, the S&P/ASX 200 equity index fell by 6.4 per cent from its July peak. A hefty fall, but not a whiff of a collapse. And its sprung back quite handily since. It's a similar story on Wall Street.
Moreover, Aussie and US stocks remain well higher this year, both up 17 per cent in price terms.
Compare this to economic bellwether assets, such as bonds, gold, oil and copper. The first two have soared as scared investors have sought the relative safe haven of government securities and precious metal. The second two have plunged as a global manufacturing recession has intensified through the year amid an escalating trade war.
In other words, "stock returns have decoupled from the growth signal from other assets in 2019", as Macquarie analysts recently put it.
Gold aficionado, central bank critic and best-selling author Jim Rickards reckons Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell faces an "impossible situation", arguing gold may rise to $US10,000 an ounce over the next five years amid strains in the financial system and as US rivals accumulate the precious metal.
A long-time critic of the embrace of unconventional monetary policy, Mr Rickards said the Fed boss faced a tough task in trying to balance the need to normalise US rates to prepare for the next recession without steering the world's largest economy into a slowdown.
He said there is only a 35 per cent chance of a recession in the US over the next year, thanks to the Federal Reserve's change in monetary policy direction in July when the central bank cut rates by 25 basis points to 2-2.25 per cent.
The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) board discussed methods of pumping more money into the economy amid growing concerns over trade tensions between China and the US, and fears of a local downturn.
The minutes of its July meeting reveal the board reviewed the use of "unconventional monetary policy measures" by other countries in response to the global financial crisis, suggesting it was preparing to implement quantitative easing measures if required.
The rare step could include purchasing government securities, providing longer-term funding to banks to support credit creation, purchasing private sector assets and foreign exchange intervention to stave off the threat of recession.
Education department officials as well as national security and cybersecurity experts will meet university representatives on Wednesday to thrash out guidelines governing collaborative research, amid government concerns over growing Chinese encroachment.
Senior sources said the government was especially concerned with collaboration in such areas as artificial intelligence, quantum physics and some engineering disciplines.
In addition, the government worries that the access China has secured to the sector may have enabled the massive data breach at the Australian National University in late 2018, and only discovered in June, which resulted in two decades of student and staff date being accessed.
After weeks of growing pressure on universities from the government and its security apparatus over growing Chinese influence, the meetings in Canberra are designed to give the university sector the clarity which it has been demanding.
Australia has accepted an invitation from the United States to join a coalition of countries protecting oil tankers and cargo ships from attack by Iran in the Straits of Hormuz.
"This destabilising behaviour is a threat to Australia's interests in the region," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Wednesday morning.
"The government has decided that it is in Australia's national interest to work with our international partners to contribute. Our contribution will be limited in scope and it will be time bound."
The Morrison government has been warned that older Australians' chance for a "dignified life" will be undermined unless its review of retirement incomes take on some of the nation's most politically poisonous policies, such as including the family home in the pension assets test.
The Actuaries Institute, in a report on Wednesday, said everything from the age at which people could access their superannuation to the creation of a universal concession card for all retirees had to be considered now, before the nation's finances deteriorated due to demographic change.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is expected to release the terms of reference for the review, which was recommended by the Productivity Commission as part of its investigation of the superannuation sector, by year's end.
Universities have hit back at intensifying concerns about their growing reliance on China, defending their significant enrolments of international students and research collaboration projects with Chinese researchers.
Following tense and sometimes violent confrontations between pro-Hong Kong students and pro-China counter-protesters on university campuses, the sector has faced renewed criticism for its management of increased Chinese Communist Party influence on campus.
Responding to the concerns, senior figures in higher education have highlighted the financial benefits of international education and said they were protecting themselves and students against the risks. They are also working with security agencies to safeguard against risks in collaboration on sensitive research.
Buying government bonds of less than 10 years in duration could be where the smart money heads, given the Reserve Bank of Australia's warning that it could engage in quantitative easing through buying government securities.
Central banks around the world have been engaging in quantitative easing in the effort to try to get interest rates down, increase the money supply and power economies.
Some central banks have bought other assets such as mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds, while the Bank of Japan has bought equities.
In Australia, Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe told a parliamentary hearing earlier this month that the bank was "prepared to do unconventional things if the circumstances warranted it."
The university sector fears the government could be pressured by the United States to crack down even harder on its collaboration with China, following a series of measures being proposed by US Republicans, one of which directly implicates Australia.
As government, university and national security officials began two rounds of meetings in Canberra on Wednesday to thrash out a set of guidelines governing collaboration with Chinese institutions, the Group of Eight, which represents the nation's most prestigious universities, said it did not want to see the US measures being applied in Australia.
Group of Eight chief executive officer Vicki Thomson declined to comment on the content of Wednesday's meetings but indicated the sector was willing to work with the government and national security agencies to iron out concerns.
"We wouldn't like to see the same level of overreach in Australia as is being proposed in the United States,'' she said.
Up to 1.3 million households in Victoria are at risk of blackouts during heatwaves this coming summer if no extra power generation is secured and two power plant outages last longer than expected, the Australian Energy Market Operator has found.
Failures at AGL Energy's Loy Yang coal power plant and at an Origin Energy gas plant in Victoria pose a "significant risk" of blackouts of up to four hours if repairs last longer than their scheduled date in December into the summer, AEMO said in a report on Thursday.
Democracy is a messy thing. Shareholder democracy may be even messier.
For nearly a half-century, corporate America has prioritised, almost maniacally, profits for its shareholders. That single-minded devotion overran nearly every other constituent, pushing aside the interests of customers, employees and communities.
That philosophy was rooted in an idea that has an air of nobility about it. Shareholder democracy was the name given to investors asserting themselves in corporate governance. The idea was that investors would wrest control of companies from entrenched managers, letting the actual owners set their corporate priorities. But what we really got was something else: an era of shareholder primacy.
That may have a chance - a chance - of changing now that 181 chief executives have lent their signatures to a new "Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation" that was published by the Business Roundtable this week. The statement from the leaders of companies including JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Amazon and Walmart affirms that the nation's largest companies have a "fundamental commitment" to all their stakeholders: putting employees, suppliers and communities on a pedestal that once belonged only to shareholders.
The corporate regulator has accused global financial companies of flogging billions of dollars of risky derivatives via Australia, in a "regulatory arbitrage" that has caused $2 billion in losses to a million investors, mostly in Asia.
A whopping $22 trillion of "contracts for difference" and "binary options" has flooded through 65 Australian licensees in the past year, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission said on Thursday, as it moved to restrict the products.
The volume of money pouring into Australia has doubled in the past year, in a direct response to regulatory crackdowns in Europe, Japan, North America and China, the regulator said.
"Regulatory arbitrage is a concern," said ASIC commissioner Cathie Armour. "We are concerned if an Australian licensee is bringing detriment to clients, wherever they are located."
Investors should be worried about the music stopping
Investors are underestimating and under-pricing the risks diminished market liquidity could pose in the next downturn.
Satyajit Das
Aug 23, 2019 — 6.31am
Several factors are roiling world markets right now, from fears of a possible US recession to erratic policymaking, trade tensions and general uncertainty.
But the unusual size of the moves -- regularly on the order of 1 per cent to 3 per cent -- is being heightened by something else: the struggle to find someone with whom to trade.
The decline in trading liquidity is evident in several metrics. Volumes have declined. Since 2007, average daily trading in US Treasury bonds (measured as a percentage of market size) has fallen by over 60 per cent.
Trading in traditionally less liquid corporate and high-yield bonds has shrunk by similar amounts. The number of small trades (under $US1 million) has grown, suggesting a lack of partners for larger deals.
Biarritz | Prime Minister Scott Morrison jets into France on Saturday night (Sunday AEST) to mix it with the world’s big fish at the G7, but his prized one-off invitation comes at an awkward time: the annual confederacy of leading democracies is primed for a make-or-break meeting that could resolve or deepen the West’s existential crisis.
He'll have to sidestep trans-Atlantic tensions and the internecine European stand-off over Brexit. And he will need to navigate tricky sessions focused on climate change targets as well as taxes on tech companies – issues that could put him at odds with many leaders in the room.
His host, French President Emmanuel Macron, sees his mission as no less than the rescue of the international order, which is riven by trade tensions, frayed alliances and abandoned agreements and treaties – all exacerbated by a global economic slowdown and by US President Donald Trump's unwillingess to offer the sole superpower's guarantee of a stable, predictable system.
The threat of blackouts in Victoria has sparked alarm from some of the nation's biggest businesses with Coca Cola Amatil boss Alison Watkins comparing the situation to challenges it usually faced in developing countries.
The Australian Energy Market Operator warned on Thursday more than a million Victorian households could face blackouts this summer if power plant repairs at key facilities ran behind schedule without replacement supplies being secured.
The move reignited political divisions over energy policy and prompted sharp warnings from industry that greater certainty was required to bring stability to the energy network as the owners of the power plants - AGL and Origin Energy - issued fresh assurances both would be up and running by mid-December.
If futures markets are right, by February next year the RBA cash rate will be at 0.5 per cent. If that makes you feel a touch uncomfortable, join the club. But what exactly is the cause of this unease?
This week a banking executive expressed, with remarkable clarity, why so many of us are troubled by the Reserve Bank's apparent determination to extend monetary policy to its absolute limits.
The typical inheritance is now worth around $500,000 - an estimate that doesn't even include superannuation - and beneficiaries are usually in their late 50s.
Inheritances are tax-free and mostly serve to make the rich richer, according to the Grattan Institute, which says Australia is an outlier among OECD countries in that it “actively subsidises” inheritances via superannuation tax breaks and the special treatment of the family home in the age pension assets test.
All this makes death taxes a likely point of debate as part of the government’s forthcoming review of retirement incomes.
Although the terms of reference have yet to be announced, the Actuaries Institute has waded in early, calling for serious consideration of a universal death duty.
The head of one of Australia's top universities fears the country is veering towards a new White Australia mindset amid the escalating debate over Chinese influence on campus and in the wider community.
Sydney University vice-chancellor Michael Spence said some voices were dangerously close to arguing anyone who supported the Chinese government had no place on a university campus.
"That's just frightening as well as kind of dumb," he told the Herald.
Debate over China's influence has raged over recent weeks, triggered by federal MP and former soldier Andrew Hastie saying that China's ambitions threatened to erode Australia's sovereignty and freedoms.
With our official interest rate heading ever closer to zero, there’s much talk that the Reserve Bank may be forced to join other central banks in resorting to “unconventional monetary policy,” including QE – “quantitative easing”. But how likely is this? What might it involve? Are there alternatives? And would it be good or bad?
These questions were debated by Dr Stephen Kirchner, of the United States Studies Centre at Sydney University, Dr Stephen Grenville, a former deputy governor of the Reserve now at the Lowy Institute, and Lyn Cobley, boss of Westpac’s institutional bank, at a meeting of the Australian Business Economists in Sydney this week.
But let’s start with what the Reserve’s governor, Dr Philip Lowe, said on the subject to the House’s economics committee earlier this month.
A recent research paper by the Centre for Independent Studies bells the cat on the growing reliance of Australian universities on full-fee-paying international students. It’s a reliance built at least in part out of necessity.
Government funding to Australian universities hasn’t kept pace with what these once lofty institutions receive in other parts of the world. In real terms there have been cuts to funding per student and to research funding in recent years. This, however, isn’t a focus of the CIS study.
Additionally, because undergraduate student places were uncapped back in 2010, there has been a growing number of students studying at university. When per student funding goes down in real terms, the growth in numbers because of the uncapping of places exacerbates the fiscal shortfall.
But the decision to rely on overseas students doesn’t end there. Australian universities effectively are being used by governments as a backdoor visa program to pump new money into the economy (the sector is our third largest export industry) and to enlarge the skilled population base paying taxes, to ensure national economic growth prevents us dipping into a technical recession.
This week the US Business Roundtable, their version of the Business Council of Australia, published what it called a Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation, signed by 181 CEOs, including Lachlan Murdoch, the chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation, and co-chairman of News Corp, the publisher of this newspaper.
On its surface, it was a momentous event, overturning 57 years of corporate orthodoxy, which has held that the only purpose of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders.
According to this week’s statement, corporations are now there for all of their stakeholders, and they were listed in this order: customers, employees, suppliers, communities … and shareholders.
Some are saying it was a PR stunt, or that shareholders will kick up and not let it stand; only time will tell on that score. The fact is that shareholders own the company and appoint the directors, and they might not take kindly to being relegated to last on the list of stakeholders, so if it’s not a stunt there could be a stoush.
