Guest author Neil Westbury
Neil Westbury was a member of the Gilbert independent Review Panel that examined Woolworths proposed establishment of a Dan Murphys store in Darwin_._
Michael Whitney
Michael Whitneyis arenowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG).
Ned Manning
Ned’s plays have been produced in Australia and overseas. His plays are performed and studied in schools throughout Australia.
Ned was the first Australian playwright to write about the Stolen Generation when he wrote Close to the Bone with his students at the Eora Centre for Aboriginal Visual and Performing Arts in Redfern. Close to the Bone toured NSW and has had a number of productions throughout the country. His follow up play on the same subject, Luck of the Draw, was the first play written by a white writer to be produced by Queensland’s Indigenous theatre company, Kooemba Jdaraa.
As an actor, Ned has appeared in some of Australia’s most loved film, television and theatre productions including: Looking for Alibrandi, Offspring, The Shiralee, Bodyline, Aftershocks, The Sullivans, Home and Away and Neighbours. He played the lead role in the 1980’s cult classic, Dead End Drive-In.
His most recent performance was in the Foxtel series Mr Inbetween in 2021.
William Gregory
William Gregory holds a Bachelor Degree with First Class Honours in Politics and International Relations. His interests are in Australian foreign policy and history, international political economy, and US-China relations.
Chris Ray
Chris Ray is a freelance journalist whose writing on the Syrian war has appeared in Australian, US and UK publications.
Richard Heller
Richard Heller is Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Newcastle, Australia and Manchester, UK. He was Director of The Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle, and consultant physician at the John Hunter Hospital. Then as Professor of Public Health in Manchester he set up the Universitys first online masters degree. He founded and coordinated Peoples-uni to build Public Health capacity in developing countries at low cost, through online learning. His recent open access book is The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education.
Iyanatul Islam
Iyanatul (Yan) Islam, PhD (Cambridge), is Professor (Adjunct), Griffith Asia Institute, Brisbane, Australia, a Distinguished Fellow at the South Asian Network on Economic Modelling (SANEM), Dhaka, Bangladesh and a former Branch Chief, ILO, Geneva, Switzerland.
Josh Trindade
Josh Trindade is a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne’s Indigenous Knowledge Institute. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.
Adam Triggs
Adam Triggs is a senior research manager at the e61 Institute, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting fellow at the Crawford School at the Australian National University
Fred Zhang
Fred Zhang has worked across major, community, and industry media outlets in Australia for a decade. He has a keen interest in multicultural communications and strategic public engagement.
Stan Grant
Stan Grant is the Vice Chancellor’s Chair of Australian/Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He was formerly ABC’s Global Affairs and Indigenous Affairs Analyst.
He is one of Australia’s most respected and awarded journalists, with more than 30 years experience in radio and television news and current affairs. Stan has a strong reputation for independence and integrity and has interviewed international political and business leaders, including our own prime ministers and senior ministers.
Rifat Kassis
Rifat Kassis is a Palestinian human rights and political and community activist. He is an author and speaker. He has been arrested and imprisoned several times by Israel.
Born in Beit Sahour to a Palestinian Christian family, he founded in 1991 the Palestinian section of the international child rights organisation, Defence for Children International (DCI) and in 2005 he was elected President of the international movement. In October 2008, he was re-elected President for another term. In 2014, he concluded his work as General Director of Defence for Children International Palestine and moved temporarily to Jordan to lead the Lutheran World Federation program there.
Ray Kerkhove
Dr Ray Kerkhove is an Associate Professor (Adjunct) with the School of Education, University of Southern Queensland (Toowoomba). He is an independent historian, working with First Nations organisations, councils, museums, universities and heritage bodies. He has written a dozen books, 21 peer-reviewed articles and scores of heritage reports, mostly on Indigenous history.
Christopher Raja
Christopher Raja was born in Calcutta. He is the author of a memoir, Into the Suburbs: A Migrant’s Story (UQP, 2020), a play The First Garden (Currency Press, 2012), and a novel, The Burning Elephant (Giramondo, 2015). Christopher has been twice shortlisted for the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s Book of the Year award. He was the 2021 UTS Copyright Agency New Writer’s Fellow, and his memoir was Highly Commended in the National Biography Award 2021. https://www.christopherraja.com/
Andrew P. Napolitano
Andrew P. Napolitano Hard-hitting legal/political news from a man who knows and respects the Constitution and the importance of defending individual freedoms.
A daily discussion of news from the perspective that government is the negation of liberty, and the individual is greater than the state. Judge Andrew P. Napolitano is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995, when he presided over more than 150 jury trials and thousands of motions, sentencings, and hearings.
JudgeNap is nationally known for watching and reporting on the government as it takes liberty and property.
The Judge is the author of nine books on the U.S. Constitution, two of which have been New York Times Best Sellers. Learn more at JudgeNap.com
Frank Chen
Frank Chen Reporter, Political Economy A graduate from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Frank was previously with Asia Financial, Asia Times and Hong Kong Economic Journal.
Mark L Wahlqvist
Professor Mark Wahlqvist AO, BMedSc, MB, BS, MD (Adelaide), MD (Uppsala) , FRACP, FAFPHM, FAIFST, FACN , FTSE is a physician who has held appointments in internal medicine , public health, endocrinology, clinical nutrition, and food and nutrition science , variously at universities and research institutes in Australia, Sweden, Indonesia, China and Taiwan. . These have involved cross-cultural, migration, indigenous and international health in community, professional, academic, non-government, national and international organisations, and settings. Awards have been widely received internationally and from Australia, Britain, the USA, Sweden, Indonesia, China, and Taiwan. The initiation of several paradigm shifts in biomedical science and health care have included nutritional biology as extensively ecologically dependent, operationalised when dysfunctional as Ecohealth Disorders (EHD). Peer-reviewed publications number some 500, but around a thousand in all. His belief system is one of connectedness, animate and inanimate, for personal, community and planetary health.
Matty Silver
Matty Silver is a relationship counsellor and sex therapist in private practice and a sex commentator. Over the past six years she has written for several magazines and for Fairfax publications - such as The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age - followed by a regular blog for The Huffington Post Australia. She is the President of ASSERT NSW, the Australian Society of Sex Educators, Researchers and Therapist –This text refers to the paperback edition.
Robert Breunig
Professor Robert Breunig is the director of the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy.
Susan Thornton
Susan Thornton is a former US diplomat and Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Centre.
Lee Jones
Lee Jones is Professor of Political Economy and International Relations at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London and Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory.
MK Bhadrakumar
Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat for three decades in the Indian Foreign Service with multi-year assignments in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. MK writes extensively on the geopolitics of Eurasia, China, West Asia and US strategies. He is a columnist at The Cradle, writes a popular blog called Indian Punchline, and is a syndicated columnist worldwide.
Priti Gulati Cox
Priti Gulati Cox is an artist and the creator of the Sidewalk Museum of Congress outside the office of Kansas 1st District Congress member @rogermarshallmd in Salina, Kansas, where Stan and Priti live.
Federica Marsi
Federica is a journalist with more than five years of reporting experience from the Mediterranean region and a knowledge of four languages including Arabic. Focusing primarily on issues related to migration, extremism and security, she has filed dozens of articles from Greece, Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, among others. Her work includes a front-page investigation into Lebanon’s transnational mass-surveillance operations for leading pan-Arab newspaper The Daily Star, an in-depth report on sexual exploitation in Greek hotspots for Al Jazeera English and a series of six videos on the living conditions of Syrian refugees in Lebanon featured in the Huffington Post.
Marcus Strom
Marcus Strom is former President of MEAA Media, the journalists union, a former Labor Press Secretary and is a member of the ALP.
Shahar Hameiri
Shahar Hameiri is Professor of International Politics and Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland and Research Associate of the Second Cold War Observatory.
Meg Schwarz
Meg Schwarz holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Counselling and Psychotherapy and brings over 35 years of experience championing social justice, advocacy and consumer engagement. Based in South Australia, Meg has dedicated her career to working alongside diverse communities, including refugees, people with disabilities and individuals with complex trauma backgrounds.With a strong passion for equality and human rights, Meg specialises in fostering meaningful communication, empowering voices through advocacy and creating inclusive spaces for dialogue. Her skills in stakeholder engagement, strategic communication and community development have earned her recognition as a trusted and compassionate leader in her field.
Timothy Welch
Tim Welch specialises transportation, infrastructure and urban modelling with a focus on the use of big data and technology. Much of Dr. Welch’s research is applied with a focus on equity and climate change. His past work has included analyses of public transportation performance and connectivity; evaluating the efficacy of policies aimed at mitigating climate change; developing models to measure housing value and other fiscal impacts of transportation infrastructure investments; and investigating the travel behaviour influences of the built environment.
Val Noone
Val Noone is a writer and activist whose 1993 book, Disturbing the War, is a detailed study of peace work within the Melbourne Catholic Church during the Vietnam War when church life was dominated by the pro-war and anti-worker Santamaria movement. He is a fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. In 2013 the National University of Ireland awarded him the degree Doctor of Literature for his contribution to Irish Studies in Australia.