Julie Macken
Julie Macken has worked for many years as a senior writer with the Australian Financial Review. She was a consultant to then-shadow minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett, before managing the traditional media for Greenpeace Australia Pacific. She was director of Communications for the NSW Greens successful 2015 state election campaign and currently works as a Justice and Peace Facilitator at the Justice and Peace Office of the Sydney Archdiocese. She has just finished her PhD on the question of why the Australian state treats asylum seekers as it does.
My published book, Australia’s schism in the soul; colonisation, asylum seekers and a nation’s failure to mourn
Julie's recent articles
27 September 2025
Interview that described the hell Gaza has become
I am sure I am not the only person who stopped what she was doing early on Tuesday morning to listen the most anguished interview I have ever heard on radio.
2 June 2025
It is time to take our indifference to the Gaza horror seriously
It is time to take our indifference seriously. I remember having a heated discussion with classmates when I was in my first year of high school. We had just had a history lesson on the rise of Nazi Germany and the murder of over six millions Jews, intellectuals, and communists. We were arguing about how many Jewish people we could have “rescued” from the gas chambers and what we would have done if we had been alive then, how we would never have let that slaughter happen.
23 May 2025
Time to end the silence
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Martin Luther King Jr.
17 March 2025
It is time to put the nation on the couch
Imagine if we took the psychological health of our nation seriously. Not the health of individual citizens — though that is vital — but rather if we took the mental health of the nation seriously. What would it look like and is it even possible to do that, to understand that a nation has a psyche that can be healed and hurt? And if so, how would we address ourselves and each other as we lie down on the analyst’s couch?
23 January 2025
Reimagining public housing: the transformative potential of Centrelink’s Voluntary Work Program
The current housing crisis is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of transforming homes into investment vehicles. And it has been decades in the building. The only thing unique about the present crisis is that it is now destabilising both the major political parties – in that sense the housing crisis is now a political crisis. The impending federal election campaign will no doubt reveal a raft of proposed political fixes that may or may not exacerbate the crisis.
30 August 2024
That time when Canada cancelled its nuclear submarine order
Back in 1987, when no one knew that the Cold War was just about to end, the Canadian Government signed up to build 10 nuclear-powered submarines. That submarine program lasted for all of two years before being cancelled in 1989. No nuclear Canadian sub ever even began construction, let alone getting put in the water.
15 September 2023
Side stepping the politics of cruelty
Anyone who has spent time in a National Labor Conference will understand the way ideas, propositions, policies and platforms swirl and merge and disappear, only to reappear in a whole other form just hours later, often without anyone quite tracking the process. The most recent Conference held in Brisbane was a study in this form of political morphic resonance, particularly in relation to the demand for a royal commission into immigration detention.
12 June 2023
In Australia, reality bites back
Australia is fast approaching a reckoning with its past, its present and the state of the nation’s soul. And if the last month is any indication to go by, we will be found wanting.
15 March 2023
Time to change the story on war
Last week we witnessed some extraordinary interventions by two mainstream media mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in pursuit of both headlines and an agenda. The three part “Red Alert” series begins with a paragraph that could have been found in Edward Bernays book, Propaganda:
28 August 2020
Australian charities are struggling with demand: the Coalition will rue turning its back on them (MWM Aug 22, 2020)
The charity sector is struggling in the face of unprecedented demand from those the Coalition refuses to help. There are now fears that many charities won’t survive. But if they go down, a big chunk of Australia’s social safety net will go with them, as will large numbers of jobs. Julie Macken reports.