Malcolm Turnbull is promising a change in leadership style from Tony Abbott, but that alone won’t be enough to qualify as government for the 21st century.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
The Abbott government resisted the disruptive changes of the 21st century. To succeed, the Turnbull government will need to shed this reactionary mindset and embrace inevitable change.
Some argue that morality is everywhere, or maybe nowhere, in our brain.
Martin Deutsch/Flickr
There’s no single region in the brain responsible for all moral decision making. But neuroscience research has shown specific brain regions are involved when we’re faced with moral dilemmas.
Weapons and flames: this ‘dream car’ design by teenagers doesn’t include any safety features.
Bridie Scott-Parker
Teenagers are more interested in gadgets and flashy desig in their first car than they are about safety features. So how do we make them think safety is important?
It seems to be an extremely difficult task for a party leader, even as prime minister, to stamp their authority on the party.
AAP/Sam Mooy
Since 2007 Australia has not really had prime ministers of sufficient calibre. Instead, we have had an incessant struggle for power by those who believed they had the goods.
Iraqis have taken to the streets recently to demand their government tackle the corruption endemic to its political system.
Reuters/Ahmed Saad
Is serious reform to stamp out political corruption in Iraq even possible given inevitable opposition from those with a vested interest in the status quo?
Federal Minister for Communications Malcolm Turnbull (right) lends a hand rolling out NBN fibre at Queanbeyan, near Canberra, in June 3.
AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Two years on from the Coalition’s promise of a national broadband network that would be faster, cheaper and delivered sooner than Labor’s plans, what have we got?
Teaching ‘the student’ and teaching ‘the brain’ is the same thing.
from www.shutterstock.com.au
Beyond the creation of some lucrative learning tools, talking about “the brain” in education doesn’t mean much as teachers can’t measure what’s going on up there.
Workplaces should try to eliminate situations where bullying can occur, rather than put responsibility on workers to behave nicely.
www.shutterstock.com
Like cancer, bullying will affect a majority of employees during their working lives, as a victim, witness, or perhaps as the alleged bully. And like cancer, there’s no silver bullet to cure bullying.
Few other world leaders are as enthusiastic as Tony Abbott in endorsing coal as ‘good for humanity’.
AAP/Dan Peled
Australia’s failure to lead on climate action marks a stark shift in political priorities in the past decade. The government is all about immediate economic returns whatever the long-term costs.
Ready to rumble?
Image sourced from Shutterstock.com
For more than a decade the coal industry’s favoured response to climate change was carbon capture and storage, or CCS. CCS is still the main defence, but the absence of functioning projects is making it ever more threadbare.
Deciding whether or not to support academic BDS action should not be reduced to being ‘for or against’ injustice.
Takver/flickr
All too often, the debate around the BDS movement is lost in a cacophony of anti-Semitism accusations and the focus shifts to Western institutions instead of Palestinian rights.
Independent oversight will be a crucial new ingredient in the Queensland government’s vow for stronger domestic violence action.
Dan Peled/AAP
We’ve heard promises to act on domestic violence too often before. But a new Queensland plan offers public accountability measures – which could finally turn rhetoric into real action.
Federal Attorney-General George Brandis wants to remove green groups’ blanket eligibility to challenge environmental approvals in the courts.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
The government plans to change the law so green groups don’t automatically qualify to mount legal challenges against environmental approvals. That would make it much harder for green watchdogs to act.
Deja vu? Anti-carbon tax sentiment has been around for decades.
AAP Image/Paul Miller
El Niño has arrived, it’s getting stronger, and it’s not about to go away soon. And already there are rumblings that this could be a big one.
While Adam Goodes is the public face of the debate, almost any Indigenous Australian can speak of the day-by-day experience of a lack of respect for who they are.
AAP/Paul Miller
What can the new Speaker do to restore the Australian public’s faith in the office – and in MPs more broadly – after Bronwyn Bishop’s resignation due to a series of lavish entitlement claims?
Replanting forests is one way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This is a site in China.
CIFOR/Flickr
No matter whether it’s targets or quotas, “merit” is always held up as the stalwart gold standard. But can we judge merit without bias? And is merit really the right measure for ability anyway?