Federal Politics And The Economy With Richard Denniss; Exploring The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art; Victoria’s Proposed Digital Health Record With No Opt-Out

Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director of The Australia Institute, returns to discuss his latest piece in The Monthly on the failures of federal and state COVID-19 policy and Richard tells us what the real causes of inflation and rising interest rates are. There’s no risk to the economy of a wage-price spiral, rather a profit-price spiral.

Dr Damian Smith, art historian, curator, and art critic, speaks about a new book he edited, The Geoff Raby Collection of Contemporary Chinese Art (La Trobe University Press). Dr Geoff Raby AO was Australia’s Ambassador to China between 2007 and 2011, and donated 174 contemporary Chinese art works to La Trobe University. Raby arrived in Beijing in the 1980s where he first encountered the emerging contemporary art scene and soon became an avid collector. Damian talks about the artists, art works, and artistic themes featured in the collection, as he shows the diversity of contemporary art practice in China and how it reveals cultural insights into 21st century China.

Tania Wolff, President of the Law Institute of Victoria and Lizzie O'Shea, Chair of Digital Rights Watch sit down with Amy to delve into the Victorian government's proposed digital health record with no opt-out provision – the Health Legislation Amendment (Information Sharing) Bill 2023, which passed the lower house last week. Additional concerns around cybersecurity, privacy, data misuse, and that it will not be subject to Freedom of Information laws are yet to be addressed. We last spoke about this issue with Juanita Fernando and Fiona Patten in 2022.