Ideas@ The Centre 9
Vol. 3 No. 9 (March, 2010) Freedom quote of the weekIf you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law.
— Winston Churchill
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Rudd attempts to regain foreign policy credentials with Yudhoyono's visit
| 12 Mar 2010
The four-day visit by Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd achieved little in terms of concrete agreements beyond a ‘secret’ deal on people smuggling. But the real value of Yudhoyono’s visit for the Rudd government was political.
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The hard part: an alternative plan for hospitals
| 12 Mar 2010
The dust has settled from the release of the federal government’s public hospital plan, and most commentators agree that ‘local hospital networks’ will only increase the size and complexity of the health bureaucracy.
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Right concerns, wrong policy
| 12 Mar 2010When opposition leader Tony Abbott presented his parental leave scheme to a surprised public and bewildered parliamentary colleagues, the criticism could not have been more scathing. Shaun Carney at The Age summed up Abbott’s plans as a ‘half-arsed, impractical policy’; a Sydney Morning Herald editorial denounced it as a ‘a new form of middle-class welfare’; and the Business Spectator editor Alan Kohler went even further to call it ‘the mother of all policy blunders.’
