Public Policy
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Climate change and politics as usual: A government missing in action
Successive governments’ failure to act on climate change means it is now the greatest threat to Australian and global human security. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media-Why cleaning up the government and media is women’s work
We let powerful global institutions control the narrative, and it’s up to women to put a stop to it. Continue reading »
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The climate apocalypse: Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?
If OECD countries don’t phase out existing coal by 2030, they will be facilitating global collapse. Continue reading »
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Sunday environmental round up.
Principles of degrowth for a post-capitalist world. Continue reading »
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Local residents fight for critical birdlife habitat on the Great Ocean Road
Ten to 20 million years ago, the Southern Ocean and its ferocious winds sculpted the iconic limestone cliffs and caves that frame the rugged beauty of Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. Continue reading »
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Conservative media undermine successful pandemic policy in NZ
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused great pain not only for those suffering and dying from the infection. Continue reading »
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A food for special medical purposes for cancer patients?
Yet another example of a major discrepancy in consumer protection in the regulation of therapeutic claims made for medicines compared to therapeutic claims made for food. Continue reading »
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Lessons for Australia from an extreme storm season in the US
Social vulnerability and the lack of coordination in disaster planning have been exposed by extreme storm events in the USA. There are lessons for those preparing to mitigate increasing intensity of similar events in Australia. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media. A short history
Is White Man’s Media fair? Or is White Man’s Media coloured by its own prejudices? Continue reading »
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The Age demeans itself as well as the Victorian public health team
The most disturbing aspect of The Age’s disappointing editorial yesterday is its undermining of the state’s public health messaging and compliance efforts. Continue reading »
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It’s time to change the Covid narrative from getting to zero to harm minimisation
Now is the time to adopt a new narrative for living with COVID-19 by replacing getting to zero with minimising the harm. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media: Asia’s a place you fly over
By ignoring Asia, the Australian media is contributing towards the creation of more insular and parochial but less understanding country. Continue reading »
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Blessed are the rich in securing vaccines
Australia is among the rich, western countries siding with Big Pharma to thwart the widespread manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines. Continue reading »
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The shameful global vaccine apartheid in 10 images
The single biggest moral and scientific failure during this global crisis is vaccine inequity. Continue reading »
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Trading Covid freedoms in NSW
Among the wreckage caused by a near two-year pandemic, with far to go, is the idea and ideal of “freedom”. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media: How the Western media hegemony operates
In a formal democracy, particularly one with a global empire to uphold, public opinion is too important to be left to the people to think for themselves. Continue reading »
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Gladys Berejiklian, deep in farce yesterday, threatening chaos today
Faced with a Covid crisis, the NSW government has failed to lead when its people needed it the most. Continue reading »
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The gas-led recovery repudiates Australia’s IPCC commitments
In promoting gas, the government is rejecting our IPCC commitments to achieve carbon neutrality and inviting others to follow suit. It is looney and dangerous stuff. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media: it’s the white person’s media
The media thunders forth from its citadel of truth against the infidels. Those chosen to comment on things Chinese are seldom people who have worked in China but hawks who spout the conservative line Continue reading »
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Wilcannia and Covid, a disastrous, discriminatory, failure by Australian and NSW Governments.
The small town of Wilcannia, on the Darling River in outer western New South Wales, has a predominantly Indigenous population of 549, more than 60 of whom now have Covid. At 11%, this is the highest rate of Covid transmission per capita in the state, three times higher than the Sydney hotspot LGAs. Wilcannia has one of the Continue reading »
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Australian Strategic Policy Institute rorts Wikipedia
In an important but shocking article in Michael West Media (MWM) on 21 August, journalist Marcus Reubenstein has exposed a pernicious practice by which supporters of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) have assiduously removed all negative criticism of ASPI from Wikipedia’s ASPI page, and added fawning praise of ASPI which renders the page, in Continue reading »
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Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness – July/Aug 2021
The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media: anxious and aggressive
It is useful to recall how so much Western media coverage, from Hong Kong, of the deeply intimidating, three-month shut-down of arterial roads in 2014 and the unremitting violence of the 2019 multi-month insurrection was, in each case, dominated, first, by a constant retelling of narratives supplied by the activists and secondly, by intense coverage Continue reading »
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Crocodile tears by Morrison over plight of Afghans
The Taliban advance was swift; that was the point at which the Australian evacuation of at-risk personnel and their families should have begun. . Hiding behind ‘intelligence’ is a poor excuse. US intelligence relating to Afghanistan has been as bad as their intelligence on Vietnam. Continue reading »
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Covid-19 Infections, Vaccinations, Lockdowns, and the Economy
The Morrison Government is desperate to end lockdowns, not least because of what they see as the damage the lockdowns are doing to the economy. Continue reading »
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The Americanisation of Australia’s agriculture labour market
Minister Littleproud will know that like their counterparts in the USA, farmers in Australia have become increasingly accustomed to using asylum seekers and the rapidly growing cohort of unsuccessful asylum seekers for cheap and easily exploitable labour. Continue reading »
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Bad laws, not lawyers, lead to injustice: a response to Stuart Rees
On 19 August, Pearls & Irritations published a piece by Stuart Rees titled “Biloela and Assange: compliance with governments, not justice”. While I generally agree with Stuart, there was a misconception at the heart of his piece. Continue reading »
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Sunday environmental round up.
Almost half of all children globally are at Extremely High risk of suffering harmful consequences of climate change and other environmental shocks. Frogs and pollinators are at the sharp end of the loss of biodiversity. Fast fashion: first world behaviour with third world environmental and social consequences. Third world?? – bah, who cares? Continue reading »
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Stakeholder voices in health policy
Formulation of COVID policy, as with other aspects of health policy, has involved stakeholders voicing their opinions about what’s in Australia’s best interest. Or at least, that is how their lobbying is framed. Continue reading »
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White Man’s Media: controlled from afar and against the national interest.
The ownership and direction of a majority of the media, in Australia, is based in London and New York. They have no intrinsic interest in Australia and its welfare as a nation but only as a source of revenue and, as a piece of what they see as the western cause. They influence our foreign Continue reading »
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