Allan Patience
Recent articles by Allan Patience
11 April 2025
It’s time to rethink socialist principles amid the ruins of neoliberalism
Socialist principles are an unloved entry in the contemporary lexicon of Western political thought.
19 March 2025
Is Dutton a 'strong' leader? Is Albanese a 'weak' leader?
Peter Dutton portrays himself as a strong leader, capable of standing up to bullies abroad while contrasting himself to weak leaders at home. His stentorian posturing is underpinned by a grimly reactionary imagination. Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese quibbles and stalls as he tries unsuccessfully to fend off Trump's tariffs, plaintively offering up access to Australia’s rare minerals as a bribe to get the transactional Trump on-side.
13 March 2025
Is Peter Dutton the tip of a Trumpist foreign policy for Australia?
In 1951 Australia turned to its newfound “great and powerful friend” America, consummating the move by signing the ANZUS treaty. ANZUS remains seriously misunderstood by most Australians, especially among the ageing ranks of conservative aficionados in Australia where it has the status of a holy cow. This is despite the fact that the treaty is only an agreement to “consult” if ever Australia’s security is threatened. It is no guarantee that the US will come to Australia’s defence, whatever threat may arise.
2 March 2025
Trump 2.0 and the crisis in Australia’s delusional middle power imagining
Politicians, media commentators and academics routinely assert that Australia is a middle power. They assume that while their country is not a great power, it has a loftier status than smaller states around the globe, enabling it to “speak louder than the latter and to exert some influence on the former”, as John Campbell once put it. In fact, Australia’s middle power imagining is delusional. This has always been the case, but Trump 2.0 is presenting Australia with a wake-up call about its middle power delusion.
27 February 2025
Australia’s hard culture and Great Replacement Theory
Racism has always been at the core of Australia’s hard culture. A hard culture is one which entrenches meanings of exclusiveness (or uniqueness), resistance to change, hostility towards outsiders, and acceptance of the status quo as normal. Any deviance from the status quo is seen as perverse, undermining “respectable” cultural beliefs.
17 February 2025
The problem of God
In a recent post Eric Hunter asked: “Why doesn’t God save the world?” (P&I, 10 February 2025). It’s an interesting question, usually framed under the rubric of “the problem of evil.” Hunter prefers to believe in science rather than to believe in God. So why did he post about God in the first place?
6 February 2025
Strong leaders versus inspiring leaders: Australia's current dilemma
It’s said that what the world needs today are strong leaders whom social media and associated propagandists insist are the only ones who can bring order back into a dangerously chaotic world. Their strengths, it is claimed, outweigh their shortcomings. In Australia, attention is turning to Peter Dutton, who according to his supporters, is the epitome of a strong leader.
28 January 2025
The unravelling of Australian society
Australian society has never really been a cohesive entity. In the past its various socio-economic, religious, ethnic, cultural, and political factions have simply hung together largely through a sense of xenophobia about the outside world (read Asia) rather than a commitment to national unity based on shared values and mutually beneficial interests. But today xenophobia is compounding into fear and loathing on the campaign trail and in the interstices of a society that is in danger of unravelling.
11 January 2025
The disruptions to come: Australian foreign policy in the Trump era
As the Trump presidency looms across America and the world, Australia faces major foreign and security policy challenges on three fronts: (i) How would a Dutton government respond? (ii) How would a renewed Albanese government respond? (iii) How would a minority Labor government respond?
23 October 2024
On the gravy train: Venality and a misplaced sense of entitlement are corrupting democratic institutions in contemporary Australia
Crikey’s recent revelation that some 170 politicians and media commentators have had overseas trips fully or partly funded by particular interest groups, shines a spotlight on a deeply embedded problem in our political and media institutions. Coalition figures appear to be the most frequent beneficiaries of this duchessing.
18 October 2024
The hollowing-out of governance in contemporary Australia
Despite claims to the contrary, Australia is not a well governed country. At all levels of politics, in businesses large and small, and in the wider society, governance systems right across the country have been hollowed-out.
7 October 2024
Australia's unfinished multiculturalism
Large-scale immigration programs have contributed substantially to Australia since 1947, bringing much needed skills and demand into the economy. They have also helped make Australia a more culturally sophisticated country. In the 1970s, the oppressive policies of assimilation and integration were replaced by the policy idea of multiculturalism. Today, Australian politicians boast that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. Their boasting is baseless. A combination of crass political opportunism and policy neglect mean that Australia’s unfinished multicultural project is floundering.
7 September 2024
Good teachers: how to ensure they remain within the system
The American poet e.e. cummings once observed that good teachers provide a mirror for their students, reflecting back to them valuable attributes that hitherto they’ve not been able to recognise for themselves. This precious pedagogical gift is treated with indifference — even contempt — by far too many Australian politicians, bureaucrats, opinionated media aficionados, and parents.
9 April 2024
The crimson thread of racism festers in the darker interstices of Australian culture
In 1890 Henry Parkes spoke of “The crimson thread of kinship running through us all.” He believed this “crimson thread” – evocative of blood – united all white people in the Australian colonies and bound them to Britain. The federation he was advocating for Australia was to be exclusively white and eternally British.
4 April 2024
The disintegration of party politics in contemporary Australia
The world today is disastrously misgoverned by a paranoid generation of ageing political leaders. Theres not a statesman among them, let alone a stateswoman. Meanwhile, the once dominant mainstream political parties are retreating into their bunkers, fearful of the exposure of corruption that has remained hidden in their ranks, terrified of malevolent media moguls, and scared of losing the support of big-monied backers whose identities they conceal. They are blind to the emerging generations of young people who are fed up with how the old generation is wrecking their futures.
14 March 2024
Australias middle power self-image is undermining the countrys security
Australian governments routinely assert that the country is respected as a middle power in regional and global forums. Meanwhile scholars increasingly agree that the middle power concept is more fantasy than reality. In Australias case, the uncritical assumption of the middle power self-image, by many politicians and commentators, is undermining the countrys security.
9 January 2024
Trump is not the only issue, America is too
The Chicken Littles wallowing in the Augean stables of the Murdochracy are obsessing about whether or not the sky will fall if Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump is unquestionably a squalid creature personally, morally, politically. However, he is by no means the whole story.
23 October 2023
Its time for all good Australians to come to the aid of a new political party
Not long before his untimely death, Malcolm Fraser was canvassing possibilities for a new political party. He was absolutely right to note that the existing parties had lost their way. Its time to take up Malcolm Frasers cudgels, to think againand seriously about creating a new political party. A new party would need to do what the existing parties are failing to do: to make the government more representative of, and responsive to, the needs of the electorate at large, and to bring Australia back from the brink of populist authoritarianism.
14 October 2023
Australian politics has reached a dead end
What the whole debate about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament demonstrated, with brutal clarity, is that Australia is a morally backward society.
13 September 2023
Albanese: The overseas Prime Minister
Prior to his mostrecent overseas trip to Jakarta, Manila, and New Delhi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been abroad a dozen times. Not bad for a government thats been in office for just on eighteen months.The next few months will see him flying off again for half a dozen more summits, head to head meetings with foreign leaders, and meetings with other official and ceremonial types. Hislatest trip first to Jakarta was to unveil his governments policy on closer trade and security ties with the ASEAN states. How necessary are these trips? How may their success or otherwise be reliably...
6 September 2023
Nail in the coffin: Australia has run out of luck
Once an early experiment in democracy, Australia has declined into a quagmire of unrepresentative governments at state and federal levels. Power games are played obsessively by most members of a narrowly-recruited and self-serving political class whose only interest seems to be staying in power. Politics is not a vocation for these leeches on the Australian body politic, it has become their business.
27 August 2023
The political cynicism of Peter Dutton and the death of conservatism in Australia
The unplumbed depths of Peter Dutton cynical politics should be a matter of deep concern to genuine political conservatives across Australia. Whoever those people are (at present they appear to be in hiding), its time they distanced themselves from what the Liberal Party is becoming under Duttons leadership.
20 August 2023
Albanese and the ALP, running scared
Hard core supporters of Australias alliance with America in Australia, the USA, and in the UK were no doubt thrilled by Anthony Albaneses full-throated defence of the AUKUS deal at the ALPs national conference in Brisbane. It was as much playing to them that his speech was directed as it was to the conference delegates and Labor supporters at home.
13 August 2023
The moral emptiness of Albaneses politics
These days the politics in the Australian parliament is little more than puerile game-playing, echoing what goes on endlessly and tediously in the undergraduate political clubs in our universities. Its all about organising and winning the numbers. It lacks an ethical core, resulting in the country being paralysed by the politics of ennui and hopelessness. Prime Minister Albanese seems all at sea when it comes to changing this depressing political culture.
7 August 2023
White Australias moral backwardness
White Australians like to think of themselves as an egalitarian and frank people, despising pretentiousness, while basking in a reputation for larrikinism and mateship. But this is all a front, papering over a culture that is deeply racist, excessively masculinist, and incorrigibly populist. Indeed, from its very beginnings, white Australia has been a morally backward society. And there are no signs that this is abating. Its moral backwardness is disgustingly on show in the No campaign against the forthcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
4 August 2023
Morrison is a symptom, not the cause, of the decline in Australian politics
In focusing on Scott Morrisons shocking record in government, and/or on his pathetic and self-pitying response to Commissioner Holmes Robodebt report, we must not lose sight of the fact that Morrison is symptomatic of a great deal of what is so terribly wrong in contemporary Australian politics. He is not the cause of what is wrong. The focus on Morrison is deflecting attention away from the increasingly worrying conduct of the Albanese government and the alarming rate at which Australia is being entrapped into American militarism in the region.
12 July 2023
The Albanese Governments craven desire to bolster the alliance with Washington
When will Australians realise, as Paul Keating has been unerringly consistent in arguing, that they are part of the cosmopolitanism and complexity of Asia, and not a Western imagined community presided over by a fast declining America?
27 June 2023
A new politics is coming, ready or not
Prime Minister Albaneses commitment to the bogus AUKUS deal stands in stark contrast to the ethical leadership of the late Simon Crean. At the time, Mr Creans opposition to John Howards craven commitment to the Iraq war was a rare and beautiful exception to the tradition of old politics in Australia. Can the country find leaders who will free us from the old politics forever?
16 June 2023
The generational divide in Australian politics is widening
Opposition to the AUKUS deal among rank and file Labor supporters and similarly aligned voters is increasing by the day.
22 March 2023
The myth of Australian sovereignty
As AUKUS propagandising gathers pace, the Australian public is being softened up to believe that whatever else the arrangement entails (and that still mostly remains a mystery), there will be no compromising of Australias sovereignty none whatsoever. History teaches us that such reassurances can be dangerously hollow.
16 March 2023
Paul Keating excoriates AUKUS as exercise in security policy stupidity
There are few who think as clearly, who are as articulate, and who are prepared to speak out in the face of incredible stupidity in Australian politics as Paul Keating. And, as he made clear in his address to the press club this week, AUKUS is nothing if not an exercise in security policy stupidity.
9 March 2023
Unbalanced and unwise: Labor and the politics of warmongering
Where does Albanese stand when it comes to the latest attempts by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to manufacture a new wave of anti-China hysteria in Australia? Is he amenable to the beating of the drums of war? Or does he have the intelligence to resist this dangerous nonsense? The omens are not good.
10 August 2022
Its time to clean up the mess that is Australias higher education system
In recent Pearls and Irritations posts, James Guthrie, Adam Lucas and Alessandro Pelizzon have signalled the need for a Royal Commission into higher education in Australia. Their advocacy could not be timelier.
4 August 2022
Can Australia become a confident, independent country?
Caroline Bouvier Kennedys arrival as Americas ambassador in Canberra has thrilled Australians who think of her as American royalty. However, her appointment is small comfort for those Australians concerned about the future of the countrys alliance with the USA.
26 July 2022
The Turnbull and Morrison governments and the breakdown in Australias relations with China
The breakdown in relations between Canberra and Beijing during the years of the Turnbull and Morrison governments illustrates the emptiness of Australias claims to be a middle power in regional and global affairs.
27 December 2021
History repeats: Billy Hughes on Japan and now Scott Morrison on China
Our leaders are uneducated on history. They're repeating mistakes that had catastrophic consequences for Australia in the Pacific in the 20th century.
15 November 2021
School curriculum overhaul needed for Australia to find its place in Asia
The failure to properly resource Asian studies in Australian schools and universities is a problem for Australia's long-term security.
1 November 2021
It's time for good independents to come to the aid of the country
Its beginning to dawn on the Coalition that it's perilously close to losing government. Labor MPs are also terrified by the thought of failing to win government.
29 September 2021
AUKUS confirms Australia as a forever colony
Since World War II, almost all independent states in South-East Asia have been shaped by successful anti-colonialist movements. Australia stands alone in the region, marked by a dominant political culture fixated in a colonial mind-set.
15 August 2021
Is Australias grand experiment in multiculturalism failing us all?
One of the greatest public policy innovations in Australias political history has been the large scale immigration programs commenced in 1947 under the Chifley government. The Menzies government grudgingly inherited the policy on the understanding that all immigrants would be assimilated into the community as New Australians. (Meanwhile, Prime Minister Menzies preferred to think of himself as British to the bootstraps.)
28 July 2021
Allan Patience: Is the Australian federation in danger of balkanisation?
The Morrison governments dishonesty about obtaining sufficient anti-COVID vaccines and its reluctance to provide the nation with dedicated quarantine facilities threaten the cohesion of the Australian federal system. Is the historical shift of power to the federal government reversing as state premiers do their own thing in response to the immense public health crisis now confronting the nation?
29 June 2021
Now is the time for all good women to come to the aid of the country.
About their forthcoming book,Enough is Enough, Kate Thwaites and Jenny Macklin state: the underlying problem of men's attitudes towards women, of men believing it is their right to assault or harass women, remains. For this to change, men will have to give up some of the harmful ways in which they use power - in the parliament and in our community.They are right! In the federal parliament this means more women in more powerful positions arguing for major reforms that are now needed as never before.
22 May 2021
From multicultural Australia to cosmopolitan Australia?
One of John Howards more petty acts was to belime the idea of multiculturalism. Subsequent political leaders have been less cynical about the term. Malcolm Turnbull even boasted that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. However, Howard did succeed in relegating multiculturalism to being a lower order issue on the countrys public policy agenda.
16 May 2021
Is the end nigh for the Australian public university?
The Morrison government has declared war on Australias public universities.They are accused of being hotbeds of post-modern rabble rousing andan unbearable burden on taxpayers. Government ministers and employers complain that graduates are not work-ready. The remarkable thing is the supine response to date from the universities themselves to these baseless and gratuitous insults.
8 May 2021
Scott Morrison. Politics and Pentecostalism 101
Scott Morrisons personal religion is entirely his own business. However, given recent public statements about his beliefs, by himself and in the media, it is legitimate to ask about Pentecostalismin Australia and its relationship, if any, to politics and politicians.
8 April 2021
PNG: the colony Australia tries to forget
Australias ham-handed history of colonialism, in what today is the independent state of Papua New Guinea, began in 1883 when Queensland pre-emptively annexed the southeastern corner (Papua) of the great island of New Guinea in the name of the British Crown. (The British were not amused).
20 March 2021
On the death of PNGs first PM, Sir Michael Somare
The death of Sir Michael Somare, first Prime Minister of PNG, has occasioned an outpouring of national grief and heartfelt obituaries for the Father of the Nation, the Chief. That he was, and remains, widely respected, even loved, across the country is beyond dispute. However, it is disturbing that the posthumous record presently being confected in the media and various halls of power has some of the hallmarks of a personality cult. A balanced account of Somares time in PNGs politics is overdue.
14 November 2020
America is a foreign county for Australians
Scott Morrison: The great thing about the United States, it is a great democracy and it does have great institutions and we have a deep and wide relationship with the United States which is incredibly important to Australia. We are both like-minded and [a]like in so many ways our values, our partnerships, economics, security This is a myth.
4 November 2020
Charlie Hebdo: free speech or provocation?
Terrible events in France a teacher beheaded, stabbings of innocent bystanders, and the shooting of a Greek orthodox priest are recent examples of a clash of cultural identity systems that remain stubbornly alien to each other. It appears that hopes for a cosmopolitan world in which cultures converse amicably and learn from each other are fast fading as angry populists and fundamentalists take centre stage.