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Pleasers and doers: the push and pull of being a political warrior
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Pleasers and doers: the push and pull of being a political warrior
As the federal government gets more involved in disability, aged care and mental health, the tensions between ministers and public servants are likely to increase.
By Don Russell
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All political careers end badly. This is an utterance often made, but I can attest to how it is more of an iron law than a piece of whimsy. Either the electorate will reject you or your colleagues will betray you, or if you try to anoint a hand-picked successor you will find your successor repudiates you. Even if you manage to leave on your terms, you are still likely to be seduced by delusion and go back into the burning house for the final incineration that you thought you had cleverly side-stepped. There are few exceptions. Those who escape ten
Australia can’t, and shouldn’t, compete directly with China on the funding of hard infrastructure.
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December 23, 2020
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Looking back on 2016, Australian academic Tim Winter observed that “it seemed as though the world was united by infrastructure, or to be more precise, its possibilities for future making.”
By 2017, however, the Australian government’s Foreign Policy White Paper was pointing out that rather than knitting the world together, the infrastructure financing race would begin to destabilize the Indo-Pacific. It argued that the region was already beginning to see “increased competition over regional economic integration, including in the financing of infrastructure projects.”