John Menadue

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.

John's recent articles

DAVID BROOKS. The return of chastened America (New York Times).

Who should run the United States next? I vote for experience and the learning from past mistakes.

GARRY EVERETT. Who Is manipulating what?

Archbishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney, reportedly said recently: What Synodal Fathers (Bishops) are wary of, I think, is the way synods might be manipulated today, swept up by the fashions of the age. He is further reported as being of the view that at the recent Synod on Young People, the young people in attendance hunted in a pack and that they played to a very particular script.

ROSS DOUTHAT. The Two-Emperor Problem (New York Times, 24.11.18)

Generally, Donald Trumps Twitter beefs are an expense of spirit and a waste of breath. But a minority of them are genuinely edifying, and illustrations of his likely world-historical role which is not to personally bring down our constitutional republic, but to reveal truths about our political situation, through his crudeness and goading of others, that might be harbingers of the Republics eventual end.

RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The emergence of China can not be denied.

The recent APEC meeting in Port Moresby underlined the deepening competition between China and the United States in the Asia Pacific region. China has been expanding its influence in the South China Sea and beyond and with the United States,Japan,and regrettably Australia consulting on how it can check China's expansion.

JOHN QUIGGIN. Public Private Partnerships. The mirage.

In the UK Budget last week, the Chancellor, Phillip Hammond announced the end of the PF2 scheme, the Conservative government's replacement for the discredited Public Finance Initiative originally introduced by the Conservatives under John Major, but greatly expanded by Tony Blair's New Labour. This announcement is less than meets the eye in a couple of respects. Financing under PF2 had already slowed to a trickle. (The NSW Government should read this to understand what has gone wrong with the PPP venture at the Northern Beaches Hospital.....John Menadue)

ROBERT KUTTNER. The crash that failed.

Review of Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world by Adam Tooze, Viking. The historian G.M. Trevelyan said that the democratic revolutions of 1848, all of which were quickly crushed, represented a turning point at which modern history failed to turn. The same can be said of the financial collapse of 2008. The crash demonstrated the emptiness of the claim that markets could regulate themselves. It should have led to the disgrace of neoliberalismthe belief that unregulated markets produce and distribute goods and services more efficiently than regulated ones. Instead, the old order reasserted itself, and...

JIM KABLE. Oz not even a footnote to US victory in the Pacific.

One is constantly reading or listening to the loud declarations ofeternal friendship - blood-brotherhood in so many words - of our Australian federal politicians and their US counterparts, including military leaders, generals and so forth. But what is the truth to these vows of undying promises to be all the way with the US of A? Where can we determine the hollowness to these protestations (leading inevitably to our engagement in the imperial wars of that great and powerful friend in parts of the world which have little importance to us - certainly do not threaten us - or else...

IAN BURNET. Friends in Australia a message from Sutan Sjahir, the Prime Minister of the newly declared Republic of Indonesia, November 1945.

On 17 August 1945 and two days after the Japanese surrender, Soekarno and Hatta unilaterally declared Indonesias Independence and became the first President and Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia.

JOAN STAPLES: An Australian civil society success story.

Almost twelve months ago, I first wrote of threats to democratic advocacy from three foreign interference Bills. On Tuesday this week, the final most controversial Bill, the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform Bill, was passed with the support of civil society. The story of this transformation from horrified opposition to support for the Bill is a story of Australian civil society working together to influence legislation in a way rarely seen. It opens the way for future collaboration to proactively promote the strengthening of our democracy.

CHRISTIAN DOWNIE. Australian Energy Diplomacy.

In Australia, little attention has been given to the concept of energy diplomacy, including the way in which it might interact with foreign policy objectives.

WILL WILKINSON. Can Democrats Drain Trumps Gilded Swamp? (New York Times, 27 November 2018)

Democrats are now preparing to assume control of the House. This offers many possibilities for oversight and investigation. For one, the House Ways and Means Committee has the right to inspect the presidents tax returns, and Democrats are sure to swiftly call on the Treasury to hand over President Trumps tax records.

TERRY FEWTRELL. Seems Pope Francis is with the People

The latest letter from Pope Francis greatly empowers Australias Catholics to use their influence and puts heat on the bishops to allow the voices and wisdom of Australian Catholics to be heard seriously.

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.

FRANK JOTZO. Labors policy can smooth the energy transition, but much more will be needed to tackle emissions (The Conversation).

The Labor partys 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 to be accompanied by good policy in other sectors of the economy where greenhouse emissions are still climbing.

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] tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education and childcare, some people will want to use drugs to escape. Marcia Angell is a...

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.

MEDIA ALERT. APPEAL IN PALACE LETTERS CASE TO BE HEARD ON WEDNESDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2018

Professor Jenny Hockings long-running legal action against the National Archives ofAustralia, seeking the release of the secret Palace Letters about Gough Whitlamsdismissal, heads back to court tomorrow. Professor Hockings appeal against the FederalCourts ruling in March, which continued the Queens embargo over the letters, will beheard on Wednesday 28 November at 10.15 am in Court 1, Level 21, at the Federal Court ofAustralia, 184 Phillips Street, Sydney. The appeal will be heard by the Full Court of the Federal Court, before Chief Justice Allsop,Justice Flick and Justice Robertson. Professor Hockings case will be led by respected Sydneybarrister Bret Walker...

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

TRAVERS MCLEOD. Australia will rue its decision on global migration compact

Step up or step aside. This was former Indonesian foreign minister Hassan Wirajudas 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.

JOHN MENADUE. Saturday postings

We are changing our Saturday postings. We will continue to post hyperlinks to good listening and reading that we feel will be of interest over the weekend. We will also give timely notice of the contents of Geraldine DooguesSaturday Extra. Her program starts at 7.30 am, but our email has been going out on Saturday after noon. We will now be posting the Saturday content at 7am each weekend.

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?

With the rise of China our failures in Asia are even more serious

We are so used to being conditioned ,told and doing what Washington wants that we find it hard to make up our own mind on what is in our national interest in our own region. And our failure to think for ourselves is going to become even more critical with a new powerful player in our region, China. For the first time in our history we will have a regional power that will become more powerful than our outside protector, the US. China is already a larger economy.

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.

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 countrys political culture at least insofar as political campaigns go. In the exclusive interview below, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses how the major issues confronting the United States and the world at large were barely addressed by the majority of candidates of both parties.

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 Vigan 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 declaration of civil war by the churchs conservative wing. Vigan is a former apostolic nuncio to the US, a prominent member of the Roman Curiathe central governing body of the Holy Seeand one of the most skilled practitioners of brass-knuckle Vatican power politics. He...

ROD MITCHELL. A carbon price that curbs polluters and reduces inequality.

The federal governments 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.

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 a clear and growing consensus: Around the world, the so-called war on drugs is failing.

JOHN MENADUE. Health Reform Priorities

Health costs are rising through greater use of technology, ageing, lack of coordination and waste. Doctors provide many services that should be provided by others. Mental , indigenous and dental health have serious problems. Services are being delivered less equitably. There has been very slow progress, particularly in prevention of illness and disease .Our health system is provider not patient driven.

CAROLE CADWALLADR. Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller (The New York Review of Books).

At the end of January 2017, days after Donald Trumps inauguration, I sat in a busy Pret a Manger sandwich bar in central London, a stones throw from the mother of parliaments, and flicked through snapshots of Donald Trump on a mobile phone.

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.

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 Wests influence in the Pacific. China, so the narrative goes, isaggressively lendingto smaller nations who do not have the capacity to pay back the loans. Some commentators have even described such lending as debt-trap diplomacy, implying that lending forms part of an intentional strategy by the Chinese state to pressure Pacific island governments....Debt is a problem in the region and one that appears to be increasing in importance. But for most countries it is not debt to China...

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 intended to be temporary. The Department of Defence is no longer a war- fighting organisation. Its a business enterprise. War is being privatised.

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.

WILLIAM GRIMM. The Catholic Church's one foundation (UCA News).

The entire Church needs a new Reformation, a new turning toward Christ.

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.

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. Its to be hoped that we are witnessing the passing of those days as the welcome exchanges between John Menadue and Michael Keating in this revered blog might suggest. However, a genuine debate must go beyond the origins and the entrenched belief that privatisation is purely a matter...

KELLIE MERRITT. Stepping up to the war crease.

Unaccountable spin and double standards are the stuff of good bloke politicians. Its a skilful charade that perpetuates unchecked executive power and distances the parliament and public. Kellie Merritts husband Paul was killed whilst on operational duty in Iraq. She doesnt want to collude with the good blokes. Truth is often the first casualty of war and cricket.

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 bases.

JOHN MENADUE- Sacrifice is being politicised. Militarism is becoming the norm.

Remembrance is morphing into acceptance of conflict. The culture war about remembrance being waged by conservatives and the military is winning with little opposition.The never ending stories of Gallipoli, the Western front and Armistice go on and on. We are celebrating war on a scale that no other country does. Government ministers, Veterans Affairs, the Australian War Memorial and the media imbedded in the military complex cant contain themselves. Public occasions are invariably backgrounded by numerous flags and the military, often regardless of the subject at hand. So that we won't ask the hard question WHY we fight in...

PETER RODGERS. Morrison and Jerusalem - what a way to run a foreign policy!

Scott Morrisons revelation last October that he was thinking about relocating Australias Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem should go down as one of 2018s 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.

JOHN HANNON. What is good leadership? Lest we forget.

Cant 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 and humility, sounds nice, but it is not so simple to practise in reality, is it, as we face up to Remembrance Day and what it might mean for us today?

JOHN MENADUE. How the politically urgent pushes the important health issues aside.

Australians have some of the best health outcomes in the world measured for example by high life expectancy and low death rates, although that is not the case with Indigenous Australians.

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 a Plenary Council.

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 Melbournes CBD last Friday, it is difficult to argue against any plan to do more to fight terrorism in Australia.

MARC STEARS. Dont give up on politics. Its 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 on how we can break the cycle of power and greed to enable all peoples and the planet to flourish. The Sydney Peace Prize will be presented on November 15 (tickets here).

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 Camerons 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 Camerons intentions, while recognising his poor choice of words, was to defend China. What the defenders of Ross Cameron need to understand is that, despite his pro-China intentions, it does not justify his ignorance and the right to be racist.

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 Cochranes 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.

The Queen's representative in Australia sits next to Putin in France - what nonsense!!

PETER ARKELL. Choosing our head of state does not need to be difficult.

The Australian Republic appears to be coming back into the communitys discussion. The stumbling block for previous models seems to have been how the head of state will be chosen and even concern that we do not offend the Queen. Perhaps there is a solution that she would be pleased to step aside for.

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