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P&I Guest Writers
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ALEXANDER KAUFMAN, CHRIS D’ANGELO. Federal Climate Report Predicts At Least 3 Degrees Of Warming By 2100 (Huff Post).
The White House’s decision to release the report over the holiday weekend is likely to bury the sobering new findings. Continue reading »
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FRANK JOTZO. Labor’s policy can smooth the energy transition, but much more will be needed to tackle emissions (The Conversation).
The Labor party’s energy policy platform, released last week, is politically clever and would likely be effective. It includes plans to underwrite renewable energy and storage, and other elements that would help the energy transition along. Its approach to the transition away from coal-fired power is likely to need more work, and it will need Continue reading »
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MARCIA ANGELL. Opioid Nation. (NYRB 6.12.2018)
In this article, Marcia Angell reviews four books on pain-killers, doctors ,drug overdoses and the drug companies. She concludes that alcohol and tobacco have far more serious health consequences than opioids.Opioids at least have the redeeming feature that they have a medical use as painkillers . She comments. “As long as this country [the US] Continue reading »
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TONY KEVIN. The Kerch Strait gambit
A Kiev-provoked Ukraine/Russia naval clash near the Kerch Strait, Crimea, threatens to derail the Argentina G20 Summit (30 Nov -1 Dec) and to worsen US-Russia bilateral relations. NATO allies are lining up behind a false Ukrainian narrative. The war in Eastern Ukraine could escalate now. Continue reading »
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MEDIA ALERT. APPEAL IN ‘PALACE LETTERS’ CASE TO BE HEARD ON WEDNESDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2018
Professor Jenny Hocking’s long-running legal action against the National Archives of Australia, seeking the release of the secret ‘Palace Letters’ about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal, heads back to court tomorrow. Professor Hocking’s appeal against the Federal Court’s ruling in March, which continued the Queen’s embargo over the letters, will be heard on Wednesday 28 November at 10.15 am in Court Continue reading »
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ANDREW GREENE. Australian Defence Force’s Iraq war secrets revealed in newly declassified report (ABC News)
A secret Army study has detailed the widespread logistical problems faced by Australian forces in Iraq 15 years ago. ‘The Howard government had decided early in 2002 to begin planning the Iraq War, a year before John Howard announced Australia’s involvement….But it could not admit this to the public or even the ADF Continue reading »
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TRAVERS MCLEOD. Australia will rue its decision on global migration compact
“Step up or step aside.” This was former Indonesian foreign minister Hassan Wirajuda’s warning to Australia and Indonesia, as Co-Chairs of the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons, and Related Transnational Crime, in January 2016. Continue reading »
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JEREMY SALT. Yes, What About Yemen? (American Herald Tribune, 13.11.18)
After the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, many are asking ‘But what about Yemen?’ Yes, indeed, what about Yemen, but what about Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia? What about Egypt in 1956, what about Iran in 1953 and what about Palestine from 1917 to the present day? Continue reading »
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PETER VARGHESE. Australia and India: Navigating From Potential to Delivery.
In July I submitted to then PM Turnbull a report he had commissioned on an India Economic Strategy out to 2035. Continue reading »
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C.J. POLYCHRONIOU. Noam Chomsky: Moral Depravity Defines US Politics (Truth Out).
The US midterm elections of November 6, 2018, produced a divided Congress and essentially reaffirmed the existence of two nations in one country. But they also revealed, once again, the deep state of moral and political depravity that prevails in the country’s political culture — at least insofar as political campaigns go. In the exclusive Continue reading »
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ALEXANDER STILLE. The Sins of Celibacy.
This article was published by The New York Review of Books on the 25th of October 2018. On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a Continue reading »
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ROD MITCHELL. A carbon price that curbs polluters and reduces inequality.
The federal government’s non-response to climate change has run its course and events are rapidly overtaking its startled members. And now, after years of resistance, Woodside, BHP and Rio Tinto have done an about face and are calling for a price on carbon. Continue reading »
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HELEN CLARK. Another decade lost to the global war on drugs (The Hill, 20.11.18)
In my experience as head of my country’s government and previously a health minister, as a former senior official at the United Nations, and more recently as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, I’ve found debates on drug policy tend to be divisive and passionately ideological. On one point, however, there is Continue reading »
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CAROLE CADWALLADR. Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller (The New York Review of Books).
At the end of January 2017, days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, I sat in a busy Pret a Manger sandwich bar in central London, a stone’s throw from the mother of parliaments, and flicked through snapshots of Donald Trump on a mobile phone. Continue reading »
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ADAM WAKELING. Tokyo Trial: how an Australian judge sentenced a Japanese leader to death (ABC NEWS).
“Accused Hideki Tojo, on the counts of the indictment of which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East sentences you to death by hanging.” Continue reading »
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ROHAN FOX, MATTHEW DORNAN. China in the Pacific: Is China engaged in “debt-trap diplomacy”? A repost from November 12 2018
Recent media coverage has touted the rise of Chinese aid and lending as a threat to Pacific nations’ sovereignty and to the West’s influence in the Pacific. China, so the narrative goes, is aggressively lending to smaller nations who do not have the capacity to pay back the loans. Some commentators have even described such lending as Continue reading »
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GARETH PORTER. America’s permanent-war complex. (The American Conservative, 15.11.2108)
What President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex” has been constantly evolving over the decades, adjusting to shifts in the economic and political system as well as international events. The result today is a “permanent-war complex,” which is now engaged in conflicts in at least eight countries across the globe, none of which are Continue reading »
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Decoupling the US from Asia (ANU East Asia Forum).
Maybe US Vice President Mike Pence didn’t mean to fire the opening shots in a new Cold War with China in his 4 October speech at the Hudson Institute, but the global policy community can be forgiven now for taking the proposition seriously. Continue reading »
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WILLIAM GRIMM. The Catholic Church’s one foundation (UCA News).
The entire Church needs a new Reformation, a new turning toward Christ. Continue reading »
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TONY KEVIN. The diplomatic disaster that was APEC Port Moresby
There is still a lot we do not know about how and why the APEC Summit just ended in Port Moresby was such a diplomatic disaster, from which APEC may not readily recover anytime soon. Continue reading »
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ERIC SIDOTI. Let the Privatisation Games Begin
Privatisation has been the source of ongoing debate in this country since at least the 1980s. For much of the intervening years though to question the virtues of privatisation – and the accompanying sanctification of competition and choice- has been treated as economic heresy. The threat of political excommunication strangled policy development. It’s to be Continue reading »
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RICHARD TANTER and BUSINES INSIDER INDIA. Darwin, the Marines, and touring the American empire of bases
The idea of ‘US imperialism’ may be seen as a fiction of the ideological left, or as an overblown presentation of the presence of a few US bases in different countries. But the US military does indeed operate on a global scale. Australia is far from a unique position in the US empire of military Continue reading »
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PETER RODGERS. Morrison and Jerusalem – what a way to run a foreign policy!
Scott Morrison’s revelation last October that he was thinking about relocating Australia’s Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem should go down as one of 2018’s crassest comments. For the PM was not “thinking” at all. Casting the possible relocation as shock therapy for the non-existent Israeli-Palestinian peace process is a fraud. Continue reading »
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JOHN HANNON. What is good leadership? Lest we forget.
Can’t we see parallels in leadership today, both in the Church and in society, where it can easily get more enmeshed in its own self-importance and self-interest, than in the rights and the good of the ordinary people, whom they are meant to serve, rather than command, control and oppress. Leadership by example, in service Continue reading »
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GARRY EVERETT. A tale of two processes.
Last year I participated in a community consultation about increasing the water supply in south east Queensland. It was a very satisfying experience because of the process and skills of the consultants. This year I was invited to participate in a different kind of process. The Catholic Church has instituted a process for decision-making called Continue reading »
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GREG BARTON. Morrison wants Muslim leaders to do more to prevent terrorism, but what more can they do? (The Conversation)
With the simple statement “more needs to happen”, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was emphatic. In the wake of the terror attack on the crowded streets of Melbourne’s CBD last Friday, it is difficult to argue against any plan to do more to fight terrorism in Australia. Continue reading »
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MARC STEARS. Don’t give up on politics. It’s where the fight for the fair go must be won (The Conversation).
This article is the third in the Reclaiming the Fair Go series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation to mark the awarding of the 2018 Sydney Peace Prize to Nobel laureate and economics professor Joseph Stiglitz. These articles reflect on the crisis caused by economic inequality and Continue reading »
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JIEH-YUNG LO. Ross Cameron sacking shows we won’t tolerate racism any further.
In typical fashion, Andrew Bolt through his blog at the Herald Sun mounted a defence of Ross Cameron’s sacking from Sky News Australia. Instead of recognising its racist connotations directed towards Chinese people (and people of Chinese origin for that matter) Bolt went on by saying Ross Cameron’s intentions, while recognising his poor choice of Continue reading »
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PETER STANLEY. PM Hughes said ‘I bid you go fight for White Australia in France’- WW1 as the war for White Australia
Peter Stanley reviews Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The War for White Australia, 1914-18 Australians’ racial anxiety towards Asia in general and Japan in particular in the decade before 1914 made Australians’ political leaders prepared to underwrite an imperial war in the hope of securing British support for the security of White Australia. Continue reading »