Talk:Politics of Australia and Canada compared

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With reference to the welfare state section, Australia does not have a two tier health system. While the coalition government has encouraged the use of private health cover, the public Medicare system is not a second class health system.

With reference to the war and peace section, the last paragraph of a speculative nature.

Two-tier does not mean that the public system is inferior, it just means that there is both a private and a public system in operation. - SimonP 13:50, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)

Contents 1 Federalism 2 Monarchy/modern multiculural society 3 Canada and private health care 4 Aboriginals 5 Vice-Regal positions 6 NPOV

[edit] Federalism

The sentence: "In Canada, the British North America Act of 1867 thus created strong provincial governments that are in no practical way subservient to the federal government" Seems somewhat inaccurate. While it is true that Canada is quite decentralized now, the BA Act was designed to keep the provinces subsurvient to the federal government. Under John A. MacDonald the provinces were indeed kept under the guidance of the federal government. It was only later judicial review by British courts that would give interpretations of the BA as being more in favor of the provinces and effectively undercut the power that the federal government held.

This point is made much more clearly at the end of the "States and Provinces" section... but overall it appears somewhat conflicting.

[edit] Monarchy/modern multiculural society

I find the paragraph beginning

However, Canada has been more successful in reconciling the monarchy with a modern multicultural society than Australia

baffling. Apart from completely subjective nature of the statement, and the arguable implication that Jews are not an ethnic minority, what reason is there to look at vice-regal appointments only at a federal level? Even if having only white male representatives of the Queen did mean Australia is less successful in that regard, the statement is still only as true as saying Australian politics is dominated by the Lib-Nat coalition even though each state has a Labor government. JPD (whose governor is a Lebanese woman) 11:42, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Canada and private health care

I think the statement "In fact, Canada is the only industrialized democracy in the world that flatly prohibits private health insurance of any kind" needs to be qualified better. I understand that the Canada Health Act is one of the most prohibitive in terms of allowing Canadians to use private insurance for things otherwise covered by provincial health plans, even compared to countries like Sweden. But much of Canadian health care is private (pharmacy, dental, optometry, etc.) and if I wanted to I could buy private health insurance tomorrow (c.f. Blue Cross). Could anyone with a better grasp on this issue possibly provide some help here?

24.82.164.92 05:52, 3 June 2006 (UTC)skarredmunkey

[edit] Aboriginals

I think the Aboriginals section is a bit biased and no reference or examples are given. It's subjective.

"By contrast, Australia, under the leadership of Prime Minister John Howard, has paid scant attention to Aboriginal issues."

Some examples of what the Prime Minister is not doing should be cited, if not some sought of reference, because it's seems that the Australian government is paying attention in other area's mentioned in this section. Unsniffable/Opal Fuel.

"The current Liberal government has acted to abolish the self-governing panel ran by Aboriginals (ATSIC) citing corruption, not necessarily improving the quality of life for Australian Aboriginals, and empathises..."

This is ambiguous, is this saying that the Australian government abolished ATSIC to improve quality of life for Australian aboriginals and doesn't? Or that the result of abolishing ATSIC will not necessarily improve quality of life? Maybe this sentence should be restructured.

220.233.176.13 11:53, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vice-Regal positions

"Both Australian Premiers and the Canadian Prime Minister almost always choose members of their own party to fill the vice-regal positions." 'Huh? I don't know about Canada but a bit of research would show this to be untrue about Australia. 64.179.109.145 16:58, 27 September 2006 (UTC)Grahame

This is untrue about Australia. I deleted the whole sentence as I suspect the Canadian statement to be false as well. Jleonau 07:41, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

The Monarchy is not NPOV. for example "which model to replace it caused the referendum on the republic to fail" only republicans say that, and is not NPOV. Brian | (Talk) 04:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)