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."
The $49 billion National Broadband Network was meant to spearhead a digital revolution. Instead, the botched project risks becoming a poster child for government mismanagement.
Australia's biggest-ever infrastructure investment has turned into a political football, plagued by cost overruns and construction delays.
With the network years behind the original schedule and only about half finished, Australia has slumped to 50th place on a global ladder of internet speeds, behind Kenya and a string of former Soviet bloc nations.
Public frustration with the project is boiling over amid mounting criticism that politics is trumping policy across a host of areas from housing to energy and damaging economic prospects.
"We are really an example of how not to do it," said Paul Budde, a Sydney-based former adviser to the United Nations on the social and economic benefits of digital development. "We have ended up with the worst possible solution."
The network was conceived as a high-speed platform to increase economic output and beam state-of-the-art health and education services to remote corners of the country. The cost of failure is stark.
With a substandard internet backbone, it's tougher for workers to leave the major cities and ease pressure on house prices in Sydney and Melbourne. It becomes harder to boost productivity, which the RBA says must improve to avoid a decline in living standards.
Ian Martin, a telecommunications analyst at New Street Research in Melbourne, says the network will never generate enough revenue to recoup its cost and a writedown of between $20 billion and $30 billion -- about half the price of its construction -- is inevitable.
"It will never be a success financially, not in terms of ever getting the money back that's been spent on it," said Martin. "To do it as a nationalised government monopoly was clearly the wrong way to go."
Looking back at it, the NBN has become a story of state intervention, political ambition and a ballooning bill for taxpayers. It sparked a mixture of excitement and skepticism from the outset.
The Labor Party's communications spokesperson Michelle Rowland has taken aim at Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over the national broadband network rollout, pointing out that criticism of the network is now coming from his own side of politics.
Rowland pointed to statements made by Nationals Mallee MP Andrew Broad and former Liberal MP Fiona Scott, both of which were critical of the policy adopted by the government for the NBN rollout and followed by the NBN Co.
Broad, the lone Nationals MP on the joint standing committee on the National Broadband Network, gave an interview to The Guardian Australia in which he was fairly scathing about the rollout.
"You’ve got retailers blaming the service provider and then they get exasperated and they come into our office and you end up having to spend all your time having to sort it out," Broad said.
"We almost have a person full-time on mobile phone and NBN issues in our electoral office — which is ridiculous — that is not the role of an MP."
More here:
And finally for this week we have the Conversation weighing in:
Director of UWA Centre for Software Practice, University of Western Australia
The Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network (NBN) released its first report on Friday, just as most people on the east coast of Australia headed into a long weekend, complete with two sporting grand finals.
The release on a Friday afternoon, sometimes referred to by the media as the “Friday news dump”, is generally what governments do when they want the published report to gather dust.
In fact, its hundreds of pages actually included two reports from the one committee. The dissenting report, supported by its Liberal Party members, including the committee’s chair Sussan Ley, contradict many of the conclusions of the first, which was backed by the Labor Party members and Australian Greens, among others.
One ironic benefit of the report is that whatever your political view, there will be something that you’re likely agree with. But is that the way to create good internet policy?
What did the report say?
The report is from the latest committee, formed in September 2016, to inquire and report on the rollout of the NBN. It replaced the Senate Select Committee on the NBN that operated between 2013 to early 2016.
The report makes 23 recommendations. These range from recommending that the NBN cost and plan for a switch for all remaining Fibre to the Node (FTTN) connections to use Fibre to the Curb (FTTC), through to recommending that the government measure and report on “digital inclusion”.
Many of these recommendations are dismissed or ignored in the Chair’s dissenting report.
As political and business commentator Alan Kohler summarised in The Australian:
Like so much of Australian public policy over the past 10 years, the NBN has been hopelessly politicised, so that anything that comes out of any politician’s mouth on the subject can be ignored as most likely unreliable twaddle.
The challenges of the process
Given the political nature of the process and the desired outcomes, in my view, there is a bias built into the process from the start.
This is both in how facts are interpreted and presented in the report, and how groups, companies and individuals with specific vested interests use committees as a means of stating their claims.
The report claims for example that FTTC is a “future-proofed technology” whereas FTTN is not, but little evidence is given to back up the claim.
It appears “future-proofing” is simply a term for the fact that FTTC would theoretically cost less to upgrade than FTTN, but complete data is not offered.
In another case, the report discusses complaints made to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman about connection delay issues, citing a “slight decrease” in the number of complaints relative to the number of activated premises.
The decrease is not entirely insignificant: for example, complaints made about 0.98% of total new connections in quarter three of 2015-16 dropped to 0.56% in quarter two of 2016-17.
The rate of fault complaints about NBN services has also dropped slightly over time and is running at 0.15% of premises activated (2,460 complaints made out of 1,652,564 premises activated over time in quarter two of 2016-17).
Another key problem with committees of this sort is that during the time it takes to investigate, write and publish the report, events have overtaken the process.
The report recommends that the NBN cost a plan to substitute FTTC for FTTN. This has already happened after a fashion, with NBN Co presenting costing to the NBN Co board and to the government. The proposal was apparently rejected because it would have been too expensive and not kept NBN Co’s funding within the A$49 billion limit.
History repeating
Much of what is included in the report are issues that have been discussed by previous committees, but also more widely in the public sphere. We have seen the same topics, arguments, paucity of data and overreliance on anecdote time and again.
Given the government’s “Friday news dump”, a more general question to ask is whether making submissions to these committees is worth the time and effort?
I personally attended an expert session in Parliament held by the previous committee in early 2016. The same issues and questions were asked then and by and large the same types of responses were given. Nothing came of that and this report largely rehashes the same conversation.
As Alan Kohler remarked, public policy shaping the NBN has been marked by political motives and to a far lesser extent, economic or social ones. For that reason, data is not being given proper weight, and is often shaped to support a political perspective.
Given the situation, we are perhaps fortunate to have made the progress we have.
I note the PM is blaming the service providers and the NBN Co for the issues at present. That can only last so long before the rather smelly mess lobs all the way back to his office. Give it about another six months I reckon, unless things are made dramatically better.
Trump was having and OK week until he decided – on ideological / religious grounds – to defund contraception for millions of women. He really is a misogynist creap as far as I am concerned.
He has also remarked that he has a surprise for NK, but won’t say what it is! He really is an adolescent idiot with behaviour like this. No wonder his Secretaryof State looks like leaving.
This is really a very bad dream from which we all need to wake up!
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In Australia the SSM Postal Survey seems to be working and it looks like the lying nit-wits of the no case are going to lose based on the ABS turnout figures and polls. We will see mid-November.
Economically it rather looks like the snapping noises you have been hearing are wallets closing as retail spending plummets. The debt load seems to be starting to worry some!
We are also seeing the Australian Dollar fall a little in the last few weeks so that might help the exporting parts of our economy – which would be good.
Sydney house prices have declined for the first time in 17 months, the latest CoreLogic data reveals.
Home prices across Australia's major cities inched higher in September, with Sydney's rare dip weighing on the national index and offering more evidence that tighter lending rules were working to head off a debt-driven bubble in the sector.
Prices in Sydney eased 0.1 per cent in September, dragging the annual pace back to 10.5 per cent from 13 per cent in August.
Some bad ideas never die. After those who lived through the consequences of them are gone, the fallacious policies reappear, embraced by a new generation convinced it is smarter than its predecessors.
So it is with the United Nations. Last week, the international body opened for signing a treaty to ban nuclear weapons, which 122 non-nuclear UN member states adopted in July.
The point of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is to encourage the nine nuclear states – the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea – to follow the UN's lead, disarm and embrace a nuclear-free world. To mark the moment, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared that the only world that is safe from the use of nuclear weapons is a world that is completely free of them.
If we fix the banking system, we'll improve productivity and living standards.
Australia's banks are failing to meet their public obligations to drive growth and raise community welfare. This is a long-term problem. Public confidence in Australia's banks has steadily eroded since financial deregulation in 1983. The brand of the big four, especially CommBank, is now at its nadir.
What went wrong?
Business model
It seems Australian banks would rather earn a fast buck than support real, longer-term investments and jobs that better all Australians. Consider the loan book of major deposit-taking institutions:
About 60 per cent of new lending is for housing.
About 80 per cent of housing loans are to buy existing property.
About 60 per cent of new loans are to investors for negatively geared investments.
About 40 per cent of housing loans are interest only.
Low interest rates have made more or less all investments expensive
Print edition | Briefing
USUALLY, when asset prices boom, people get excited. As America’s stockmarkets scaled wild peaks in 1929 and 1999 they did so amid feverish enthusiasm. Search for such euphoria on Wall Street today and you will come back empty-handed. Look at underlying numbers, though, and it is at first hard to see why. Over the past 136 years the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE), a useful measure of how expensive stocks have become, has reached its current heights only twice before: during the dotcom bubble; and just before the Crash of ‘29.
Why does this remarkable surge not spur frantic enthusiasm—or for that matter deep trepidation? One reason is that in most market bubbles you can point to a particular type of asset which is seeing its price rise inexorably: tech stocks in the 1990s; houses in the mid-2000s. Today, though, America and much of the rest of the world are amid a bull market in almost everything: stocks, bonds and property are all strikingly expensive compared to long-term averages, and getting more so. When everything is going up, things are less exciting, and perhaps less worrying.
I find a surprising lack of optimism about the outlook for shares. The capitalisation-weighted S & P 500 is up over 11 per cent this year, excluding dividends.
Some would argue that only a few stocks are accounting for the rise, but the equal-weighted S & P 500 was up over 8 per cent year-to-date as well.
Everyone is aware that the economic expansion and the bull market have continued for a long time. Equities bottomed in March of 2009 and the US economy began to strengthen in June of that year, so we have been in a favourable period for investing for more than eight years.
The growing dead weight of Australia's five-year debt binge has only just started to drag on economic growth and jobs, according to modelling by the International Monetary Fund that further highlights the increasing financial vulnerability of households.
With the Reserve Bank of Australia holding the official cash rate steady at a record-low 1.5 per cent for a 13th straight meeting on Tuesday, the IMF's findings indicate that deliberately encouraging households to take on more debt delivers only a temporary sugar hit.
Based on a study of more than 80 advanced and emerging economies, the IMF finds that any positive effect of an increase in debt is "reversed" after three to five years.
Australia's record of 26 years without a recession flatters to deceive. The gaudy numbers mask serious flaws in the country's economic model.
First and most obviously, the Australian economy is still far too dependent on "houses and holes." During part of the typical business cycle, national income and prosperity are driven by exports of commodities -- primarily iron ore, liquefied natural gas and coal -- that come out of holes in the ground. At other times, low interest rates and easy credit boost house prices, propping up economic activity. These two forces have combined with one of the highest population growth rates in the developed world (around 1.5 per cent annually, driven mostly by immigration) to prop up headline growth.
Yet a significant portion of housing activity is speculative. Going by measures such as price-to-rent or price-to-disposable income, Australia's property market looks substantially overvalued.
The global crown for the longest stretch of uninterrupted economic growth is within sight for Australia. But it's limping to the line as policy paralysis weighs on the nation's prospects.
Twenty-six years without recession have put Australia within two years of overtaking the Netherlands' record growth streak and government, central bank and economist forecasts all suggest it'll take the mantle.
After all, the economy has a head start with 2.5 percent growth virtually baked in -- 1.5 percent from population gains that are among the developed world's quickest and 1 percent from resource exports feeding Asia's giant economies.
If the Reserve Bank is correct and the local economy will be growing at 3 per cent next year, someone forgot to tell the best forward-looking indicator there is, the sharemarket.
It's going nowhere and could do with some good news on growth that in theory should lead to an uptick in earnings, but the recent performance is at odds with the bank's upbeat economic outlook.
Australia's economy has grown faster than its developed-world peers over the past decade, uniquely avoiding a recession. That means its sharemarket has grown handsomely too, right?
Wrong. It's actually smaller today than it was on the eve of the global financial crisis, in 2007. In that period, the US stock market's capitalisation has grown by more than $US9 trillion. Closer to home, Australia's market has been surpassed by Asia-Pacific peers South Korea and India.
Not only is the contraction a disconnect with the economy, it also stands against an expanding pool of pension-fund capital, which has opted instead to invest abroad.
Was I the only one who reacted this way to the carnage in Las Vegas? A strong wish to not even watch, as the media once again reached saturation coverage of another bloodbath? As if all the world's locales were queueing up to feature in their own horror show.
The sense that this has become a kind of pornography – stirring but pointless – the blurry footage, the up close personal accounts, the inevitable banal life story of yet another male misfit. Does anyone else feel that this is just creating a learned helplessness in us as citizens? The idea that nothing can be done to either prevent or predict? "He seemed so normal." "We can't believe he's done this." These are testimonies not to aberration, but to how poorly we know those we live among, especially if they are men.
Global policy makers are becoming complacent during a moment of calm, doing too little to prepare their economies for a future downturn, the leaders of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank say.
As finance ministers and central bankers from 189 member countries prepare to descend on Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank and IMF, the institutions’ leaders, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde previewed the message they will be delivering in coming days.
“We should not let a good recovery go to waste,” Ms Lagarde said in a speech in Boston. “We know what can happen if we let the moment pass. Growth will be too weak, and jobs too few.”
Fractures are starting to emerge in the Australian financial system with pressure points rising from confusion around the type of loans many borrowers are sitting on which could have serious consequences for homeowners when interest rates start to rise.
An explosive report in recent days from investment bank UBS analyst Jonathan Mott concluded that one-third of borrowers with a so-called interest-only loan don’t realise they aren’t paying back any of the loan’s principal.
Monthly repayments on interest-only loans — which do not require payment on the loan principal for about five years — jump by about 50 per cent at the end of the interest-only period.
The competition watchdog will demand ESSO and BHP Billiton explain in more detail why gas supplies from its Bass Strait joint venture will decline sharply next year amid concerns the nation is "being held to ransom".
There are also calls for acting resources minister Barnaby Joyce to make public a study into offshore gas resources he has had for more than a month that could shed light on the venture's future.
The Turnbull government has so far blamed soaring gas prices on governments in Victoria and NSW for blocking or stalling on new gasfields, and in Queensland for allowing excessive LNG exports.
In recent years, the release of updated budget data has rarely been cause for celebration. Typically, the prime minister and treasurer of the day are forced to front the media and explain how the bad figures in the budget became even worse.
With the Turnbull government struggling in the polls and the marriage-equality survey causing rifts in the Coalition, it was probably a great relief for Treasurer Scott Morrison to be able to announce this week that the final bdget outcome for 2016-17 showed a reduced deficit.
But it's hardly a reason to break out the bunting: the deficit only reduced $4.4 billion from May's budget, and is just $3.9 billion better than was predicted in the 2016-17 budget. It is still nearly 2 per cent of GDP.
Polls may look bleak for the government, but it will start getting the credit if things improve on the jobs and wages front
Sunday 1 October 2017 08.05 AEDT Last modified on Sunday 1 October 2017 09.09 AEDT
It was a week of another lot of bad polls for the government, but it also brought good economic news and remains a very stark reminder that the next election will be a tough one for the Labor party to win.
Normally, commentary on polls is considered among the lowest form of political analysis since it tends to explain politics as a horse race, but having set the parameters himself, such commentary is expected with Malcolm Turnbull. When he challenged the then prime minister Tony Abbott in 2015, he said the government had “lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership.” The fact that this week the Turnbull government has lost its 20th Newspoll in a row now takes on greater significance.
Peer pressure is a powerful force, but not one that always leads to wise decision making.
Australia's corporate tax rate is again in the spotlight thanks to US President Donald Trump's ambitious tax plan announced last week to slice the US rate from 35 to 20 per cent.
Let's leave aside the issue of whether Trump will be able to deliver on this promise.
What has caused the rise in populism that's threatening the mainstream political parties around the developed world, including here?
Economists tend to explain it essentially in economic terms – the bottom has been given a rough deal for years, and finally is rising up – but other scholars see it much more in social and cultural terms: people objecting to being overrun by incomers. Immigrants, asylum seekers, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians.
In his new book for the Lowy Institute, Choosing Openness, Parliament's most accomplished economist, Dr Andrew Leigh, also Labor's shadow assistant treasurer, readily acknowledges the role of xenophobia in explaining why "openness makes us uncomfortable".
A new payments systems is "on track" to be able to deliver real time bank transfers and the ability to ditch BSB numbers from Australia Day.
While most people take a break over summer, banks will be putting the finishing touches on the biggest overhaul in the payments system in years.
The new payments platform or NPP is a $1 billion project to deliver real-time payments between customers of different banks, and the company to run the system says it will be rolled out to the public after Australia Day next year.
The Greens have called for the establishment of a national large-scale energy storage scheme, managed by the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Clean Energy Regulator, and supported by $2.2 billion in funding over a four-year period to build energy storage at grid level.
Launched in Adelaide today by Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt and senator for South Australia Sarah Hanson-Young, the policy called for a legislated national target of 20 gigawatts of energy storage technology such as large battery installations.
Such a system could deliver between 400 and 450-gigawatt hours of storage, which has the potential to power more than 100,000 homes for eight hours.
Rising mental health claims have triggered sharp losses on disability income policies for some of the country's largest insurers, raising concern from the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.
Industry sources told The Australian Financial Review the prudential regulator is doing "focused work" on the retail disability income insurance market, which is also known as income protection, over concerns these loss-making policies are dragging down the profitability of the entire insurance industry.
It is understood APRA is asking both insurers and industry bodies for detailed information as it seeks to better understand why there have been such heavy losses, and whether the response has been sufficient. APRA's Geoff Summerhayes has oversight of the insurance industry and would be expected to oversee the matter.
Low wage growth, higher electricity and gas bills and out-of-cycle mortgage rate increases have been blamed for a slump in consumer spending in July and August - the worst since 2010.
Retail spending slid 0.6 per cent in August after sliding 0.2 per cent in July.
Spending in cafes and restaurants and on takeaway food plunged 1.3 per cent in August to be only a little higher than it was the previous August, and lower per person after taking into account population growth.
Spending on household goods slid 1 per cent in August after sliding 2.1 per cent in July. Spending on food slipped 0.6 per cent, and spending on clothing 0.2 per cent after slipping 0.4 per cent. The only sectors where spending climbed were department stores, where spending climbed 0.7 per cent after sliding for three consecutive months, and "other retailing" where spending climbed 0.1 per cent.
THE Turnbull government is prepared to pay as much as $8 billion to take control of Snowy Hydro ahead of a multibillion-dollar expansion of the iconic scheme.
Federal sources have told The Daily Telegraph that Treasurer Scott Morrison was in negotiations with NSW and Victoria to purchase their shares of Snowy Hydro Ltd, which owns the major hydro-electric power generator.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the expansion in March.
The IMF warned yet again this week about Australia’s high household debt and the message immediately got mangled with reports of rising “mortgage stress” but the two are not the same. Household debt is an economic statistic, mortgage stress is an assumption and one that has so many flaws it needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Almost a million households are now facing “mortgage stress” says a new report from industry researcher Digital Analytics and that includes a rising number of some of the wealthiest postcodes in the nation.
But what is mortgage stress exactly? To the authors of this latest report it means there are 905,000 households where the ‘net income cannot cover ongoing costs’. To the Housing Industry Association it occurs where more than 30 per cent of household income goes on a mortgage.
A bungled transition from coal to clean energy has left our resource-rich country with an unwanted crown: the highest power prices in the world.
New Yorkers pay half as much as Sydneysiders to keep the lights on, despite Australia boasting among the world's largest coal and natural gas reserves, as well as ideal conditions for clean power generation.
It comes as a global survey of more than 12,400 executives from 136 countries finds that energy price shocks are the number one concern of Australian businesses.
There's a reason Australia has never had a space agency.
It's an opportunity cost. That is we've always reminded ourselves of all the other things we could buy for the price of going to 100 kilometres above sea level to the Kármán line, the internationally accepted border of earth and space.
But earlier this month, the Turnbull government said New Zealand's got one, we should have one, too.
Governments chipping in more for health, as individual Australians pay less
Government funding for health has risen, with individuals now funding a smaller proportion of health costs, according to a report released today by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
The report, Health expenditure Australia 2015–16, shows that $170.4 billion was spent on health goods and services in 2015–16, with $114.6 billion (67.3%) of this funded by governments.
This is up from 66.9% the year before and is the first increase in the proportion that governments contributed since 2011–12.
Consumers would support moves to categorise health-insurance policies into gold, silver and bronze, with many people still unsure even what is covered by basic hospital policies, a reform committee has been told.
As Health Minister Greg Hunt finalises changes intended to reduce private health costs and make the sector more transparent, his private health ministerial advisory committee has seen market research showing introducing new categories would be a winner with consumers.
Within weeks, Mr Hunt is expected to announce the new categories of cover — likely to include a cut-price offering known internally as basic bronze — and encourage members to shop around for the best policy.
Public hospitals can access 44 per cent more funding for patients if they bill their insurer, according to a new analysis that gives further impetus to moves by federal Health Minister Greg Hunt to restrict the practice.
As ministers argue over funding and the Commonwealth pursues health insurance reforms, private hospital operator Healthscope commissioned Ernst and Young to calculate the financial incentive for public hospitals to subsidise their operations.
The states are encouraging public hospitals to bill more than $1 billion to insurers every year, often for patients who had a right to be treated in the public system without charge, putting further pressure on insurance premiums.
Washington: US President Donald Trump on Sunday told his top diplomat not to waste his time trying to negotiate with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
In an extraordinary tweet that appears to put the President at loggerheads with his Secretary of State over a key US policy, Mr Trump indicated he had little faith in Rex Tillerson's diplomatic efforts to defuse the North Korea situation. Via Twiter, Mr Trump told Mr Tillerson he was wasting his energy.
I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
...Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!
Barcelona: Bloodshed and anger marred the Catalan independence vote in northern Spain on Sunday, as riot police stormed polling stations to seize ballot boxes, beating and firing rubber bullets at would-be voters.
Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau said hundreds of people had been injured in "police charges against the defenceless population". The Catalonia regional government's said more than 800 people required medical attention.
Ms Colau called for the resignation of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, saying he had "crossed all the red lines".
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has backed US President Donald Trump's combative rhetoric against North Korea, crediting him with bringing China to the negotiating table.
Ms Bishop said the careful and patient approach of Barack Obama had not worked and Mr Trump had at least "changed the debate".
Kim Jong-un's regime has repeatedly tested Mr Trump's resolve since he came to power this year, detonating a thermonuclear device and launching a number of test missiles. In response, the US President has promised "fire and fury" the likes of which the world has never seen.
San Juan: President Donald Trump is visiting Puerto Rico to reassure the island struggling to recover from a devastating hurricane.
One of the first people Trump met when he and his wife, Melania, touched down in San Juan on Tuesday was the city's mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, who has repeatedly blasted Trump as showing insufficient concern about the US territory's plight.
Trump, who has grappled with hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in the past six weeks, praised the federal assistance so far in Puerto Rico but also mentioned cost.
Barcelona, Spain: The Catalan government said on Friday that the official results of last Sunday's independence referendum showed it had passed overwhelmingly, setting up a potential showdown with the central government in Madrid.
Under their own laws, Catalan separatists had pledged to make the official vote result binding within 48 hours and unilaterally declare independence.
If Catalan separatists were to declare independence unilaterally, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy would most likely use emergency powers to take full administrative control of Catalonia, which could involve replacing the Catalan police force with Spanish police officers.
Washington: The White House has added further mystique to a cryptic comment made by President Donald Trump that it was the "calm before the storm".
"We're never going to say in advance what the president is going to do," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Saturday, adding that the comment wasn't a cheeky attempt to mess with the press.
On Friday, as President Donald Trump posed for a formal photo with his top military commanders and their spouses in the State Dining Room at the White House, he pointed to the leaders gathered around him and asked the small group of reporters standing before him: "You guys know what this represents?"
Manchester: Two topics dominated conversations at fringe events, parties and dinners at this week's Tory party conference: Boris Johnson and where-to for the centre-right beyond Brexit.
The first is a symptom of the second.
Theresa May's leadership appears all but over - it is a matter of when and the question of whom with no obvious replacement in the wings. It had been expected that May would be forced to stand aside around March 2019 once the gritty work of negotiating Brexit has been completed.
Barack Obama wanted three attributes of Australia for America. He wanted Australia's universal healthcare system, its gun laws and its compulsory voting system. These are three of the defining differences between the two societies.
A wise old Australian who had long lived in the US once told me of the 80:20 rule that applies to the relationship: the two countries are 80 per cent alike and 20 per cent different, but the 20 per cent is very different.
These three are a part of the 20 per cent. Of the trinity, the most prominent and urgent difference in recent years has been guns. "It was the first question that I was asked wherever I went in Australia," says the previous US ambassador, John Berry, "until Trump."
Within the Anglosphere, the ideological lines are being drawn sharply and Britain leads the way. Speeches from Tory leader Theresa May and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have raised the existential question: Are we returning to socialism?
The euphoria of British Labour, facilitated by Conservative Party traumas, has been on display. A slicker Corbyn told a rousing party conference his agenda is that of a “modern progressive socialist party that has rediscovered its roots and its purpose”.
The politics of the left has been in turmoil in the Anglosphere. Virtually all parties have moved to more radical positions tempered by different degrees of pragmatism: the ALP is among the most pragmatic and British Labour the most extreme.
More than half of Americans don't think Donald Trump is fit to serve as president, yet he has a clear path to winning re-election.
If Trump isn't removed from office and doesn't lead the country into some form of global catastrophe, he could secure a second term simply by maintaining his current level of support with his political base.
We have entered a new era in American politics. The 2016 election exposed how economic, social and cultural issues have splintered the country and increasingly divided voters by age, race, education and geography. This isn't going to change.
Wellington: A possible Labour-Green coalition has narrowed the gap with the ruling National Party in New Zealand's final election tally, strengthening their position ahead of talks with the small nationalist party which holds the balance of power.
The final September 23 election results released on Saturday showed National won 56 seats and Labour and Greens together took 54 seats, leaving them both reliant on New Zealand First's nine seats to meet the 61 seats needed for a majority in parliament in New Zealand's proportional representation system.
National lost two seats to the Labour-Green bloc compared with preliminary results - a development which Labour leader Jacinda Ardern said buoyed their position at the negotiating table.