All Recent FutureChallenges Posts

The political order of liberal democracy is incapable of rising to the challenge of global environmental catastrophe. Australia’s experience under John Howard suggests that it is time to think radically and embrace a post-democratic approach, says David Shearman. read more  

Winston Churchill once noted, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” But have the pressing problems facing us today — looming peak oil, climate change, the still-strangled credit markets — given other forms of government an edge […]

The interrelationship between climate protection and political systems continues to gain more and more attention in the public arena. The Boell Foundation started a debate on it, based on a paper by Peter Burnell. read more  

Research suggests that trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, when specifically applied to “traditional” or indigenous knowledge, genetic material and plant and animal life, have a detrimental effect on biodiversity. The 2001 Doha Declaration suggested that the TRIPS Council look at the “patent-ability or non patent-ability of plant and animal […]

Nothing in Australian politics has caused so much controversy since the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) in 2000. What is it? The recent announcement of a blueprint for carbon tax by Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Although the tax will not become effective until July 2012, the opposition […]

Re-socialization the Arab Spring The Arab Spring did not start with political claims. The Sidi Bouzid events were sparked by socio-economic factors, and it was only when Ben Ali killed many protestors[1] that the social uprising took on a regime-change objective. With hindsight, however, all the other events of the […]