Letters to the Editor
It's too early to discuss 'what next' for Gaza
October 20, 2025
It is far too early to even begin to contemplate what next for Gaza, which is now the theme of much well-intentioned commentary. There is barely a ceasefire, with Israel killing dozens of Palestinians over the past few days, and looking for every Hamas did it pretext to kill more. People are still starving to death, with the arrival of only limited food supplies. There are no functional hospitals. There are no foreign press to witness the carnage. And it is utterly unclear what the Trump plan now envisages. Now more than ever we should be applying all...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
Beyond delusional
October 20, 2025
Are we still entertaining the delusion that the suffering of the Palestinian people is over? Are we still believing that a ceasefire is intact when, as I write, Israel has just dropped scores of bombs on the Gaza Strip in violation of the barely two-week-old agreement? Are we still deluded that Trump and Netanyahu’s plan to create a new Miami in Gaza has changed into an altruistic endeavour? It is sheer denial to now write about reconstruction and rebuilding when Palestine is still being bombarded, innocent Palestinians are being torn apart by tank and drone fire and mothers are...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
A step in the right direction
October 20, 2025
I think Michael McKinley's idea has merit. This doesn't mean the politicians will buy into it... how after all, could anyone question their decision-making capability? They are the government after all. The article reflects the lack of independent strategic thinking at government level, which the government, on first reflex at least, will be likely to deny or ignore, but which, in my view is the case. Michael's idea may not be the final version of what is required, or of what may possibly evolve... but it is a step in the right direction.
Peter Kent from Melbourne
In response to: An immodest proposal for an ideal source of strategic policy advice
Another brick in the wall
October 20, 2025
John Frew's recent fine polemic reiterates much of the frustration described by the late Sir Ken Robinson. What gets measured gets manipulated and learning has degenerated into indoctrination. Even our red brick universities have degenerated into ideological battlegrounds and inculcated graduands are just another brick in the wall.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill, Brisbane QLD 4000
In response to: Counting what doesn’t count:
Delusional world
October 20, 2025
As proven by today's headlines, anyone who thought that Israel could be trusted to abide by a lasting peace is as delusional as the president who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for organising it. Israel won't stop until they alone own the land that “God” gave them, including Jerusalem.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Gaza has a ceasefire, now Palestine needs self-determination
Climate tipping points
October 20, 2025
It seems our governments lack the moral courage to do what the sciences, both physical and economic, demand to stave off Julian Cribb’s spine-chilling list of imminent climate tipping points. So, we, the people, must force the issue. If we can activate some social tipping points, people pressure might still help us rapidly spread the technologies, behaviours, social norms and structural reorganisation we need to delay the physical tipping points. If enough people start to demand, among other things, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies and divest from assets linked to fossil fuels, we may still move...
Lesley Walker from Naarm (Northcote)
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
The Apocalypse is coming
October 20, 2025
According to the Global Tipping Points Report 2025: “Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback... This is sickening news, not just because so much beauty and biodiversity is being lost, but also the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people who depend on coral reefs. The world is likely to hit 2°C warming between 2034 and 2052. According to New Scientist (28 May), the world could experience a year above 2°C of warming as early as 2029. The chances are slim, but it's only four years away. What happens at 2°C?...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Israel and the ICJ
October 20, 2025
To add to the argument of Paul Heywood-Smith, the prophet Jonah was sent to preach repentance to the people of the city of Nineveh (Mosul). The people did repent, a response cited by Jesus as exemplary. Nineveh was a long, long way beyond even the Euphrates River, which the blasphemous political readings of Judaism might fancifully assert is part of a God-given Israel. (And by the way, how does God caring so much for the non Jewish people of Nineveh square with the political chosen people interpretation of Jewish fundamentalists? Or with the numerous prophetic references in the Old...
David Moloney from Seaford
In response to: Israel’s response to the International Court of Justice
Popular action can overcome existential despair
October 20, 2025
Julian Cribb has, in recent articles, summarised with authority the dangers we now face with our oceans , with our forests , and with our water. His summary of imminent tipping points encapsulates the urgency of our predicament. David Spratt has highlighted the shortcomings of the National Climate Risk Assessment. Cribb details the risks of misinformation. Our future looks grim, but policymakers — disproportionately influenced by vested interests — seem reluctant to explain this clearly to the electorate. Popular scepticism continues to hamper effective environmental protection. Despair reflects the sense of an individual’s incapacity to generate change in...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Speak up, Australia
October 17, 2025
Appreciation to Wayne McMillan who, in praising Greta Thunberg, calls for Australians to “write to their politicians and wake them up from their moral and ethical slumber of inaction”. We may live in a democratic country but most of our politicians are captured by gambling, fossil fuel and other lobbying groups. We can’t sit back and allow these industries to pursue profit at all cost. Speak up Australia.
Amy Hiller from Kew, Melbourne
In response to: Is Greta Thunberg the lone voice for justice in our world?”
Killing with chooks
October 17, 2025
Mark Macdonald is perfectly correct that antibiotic resistance (ABR) is a major threat to the human future. Unfortunately, even with the generous allocation of word space in Pearls & Irritations, it is not possible to enumerate every case of purblind, human stupidity. Some have to be taken as read! That said, ABR is sure to kill an awful lot of people come the mid-century, especially if we continue to use antibiotics just to create heavier chooks and fatter pigs, while carefully nurturing the zoonotic pestilences of the future. Indeed, we could regard ABR as a byproduct of...
Julian Cribb from Canberra, ACT
In response to: Global collapse
Nothing to see here
October 17, 2025
Some Australian ministers are now saying the Palestine war is over, nothing to see there. So we can still ship weapons parts to Israel even though the IDF is supporting settlers attacking Palestinian farms in northeast Palestine. We can ignore the slow Hiroshima carried out by the US and Israel over two years. I see too that the RAAF had a surveillance plane in the Ukraine, which our government seemingly believes to be closer than Palestine, at a time when the government was asked to provide aerial assistance to Australians and others in the Sumud aid flotilla. Oh,...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Denial and amnesia: Is the global community ready to welcome Israel back?
No 'just peace' without due diligence
October 16, 2025
Peter Slezak demands sincere attention and a fair, just and strong response from our flaccid government leaders, Albanese and Wong. It has taken — what? — little more than 48 hours from the signing of the Trump Peace Plan (TPP) for the Netanyahu Government and the IDF to resume killing Palestinians with the same gratuitously offensive excuses that have been such a predominant feature of their entire genocidal campaign. We wait for Albanese and Wong to change from calling on Hamas to abide by the terms of the TPP and apply the same pressure on the Zionists' genocidal...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Time for a 'just peace' for all peoples in Palestine
Will we out Advance?
October 15, 2025
We are indebted to investigative writers like John Queripel, Anthony Klan and Michael West Media, to name a few, who provide forensic exposes of elite-funded Advance. As in the US, the funders of Advance are far from household names but are nevertheless deeply invested in policy areas, especially climate action. They, and members of the Coalition, claim they are fighting a “woke elite”. They attempt — sometimes successfully — to divide and distract by igniting spot fires around which bathroom to use or what books children should or shouldn’t read. Donor Gina Rinehart claimed earlier this year that...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Who are ‘Advance’ and what are they doing to our politics?
No more killing in Palestine
October 15, 2025
I note Ramzy Baroud’s article. I hope our faith in the ability of the Palestinian people to govern wisely is not dimmed by more reports of extrajudicial killings in Gaza, channelling Donald Trump in the Caribbean.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: From Gaza, Palestinians have reasserted their agency on the world stage
The big con from a lame government
October 15, 2025
Take the backdown on super after the approval of NW Shelf gas drilling out to 2070, throw in tightening of FOI for good measure, and community Independents have been handed a gift to mobilise for 2028. The only, but major, problem they'll have is disabusing aspirants that they will ever have $3 million, let alone $10 million in super. It will also be an uphill battle getting them to realise that, without tax reform, they will forever be stuck with crumbling public health, education, transport and privatised child and aged care where costs go up as quality goes down....
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Keating welcomes changes to taxation of super
FOI a problem for Labor
October 15, 2025
It is a truism of so-called Australian politics that accurate information for the public constrains political skullduggery. It is interesting to see that Labor, who have campaigned over the decades on ensuring an informed public, tend to change their tune when in government. My own experience is revelatory. In a recent role running a state charity, a consultant employed by the Department of Health engaged with that Department in an underhanded and possibly illegal conspiracy to take over that charitable body and used public funds to further that design. FOI was crucial in enabling that body to...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A deserved defeat for Albanese on freedom of information
Extremism and fanaticism of every kind
October 14, 2025
I hope that Amelie has an enriching experience at the UN and strongly support the intent of her work to eliminate extremism and fanaticism of every kind on social media. The most serious kind is that promoted by various regimes around the world, not the least of which are Israel and the US. The algorithms that allow this state-sponsored extremism are far and away the most dangerous. That is because the wealth and influence of these state sponsors vastly outweighs that of the many invaded and occupied communities and cultures around the world marginalised by the Western-created algorithms...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Disarming extremism in the algorithmic age
The abiding consequences of criminality
October 14, 2025
This is a careful and comprehensive analysis of why those invaded and bastardised by the West in the apocryphal name of spreading democracy remain unconvinced by the fraud!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The half-life of humiliation and the hunger for revenge
Neoclassical pseudo-science
October 14, 2025
Further to Evan Jones’ sensible defence of the political economy versus neoclassical economics, he quotes neoclassicist Warren Hogan Jr implying the positive role of the scientific method for the latter. I spent four decades as an actual scientist (studying the Earth) and more time digging into the horrors of mainstream economics. Hogan’s claim is laughable. Neoclassical economics is built on flagrantly unrealistic assumptions, such as that we can all predict accurate probabilities of all future possibilities, that we are selfish competitors and there are no social interactions (in fact, humans are highly social), and that there are no economies...
Geoff Davies from Braidwood NSW
In response to: Fifty years of political economics at Sydney University – what has it meant for
Eugene Doyle: Magisterial analyst
October 14, 2025
May I compliment you for your superior analysis of 7 October 2023? I have not read of movements of Hamas in Israeli territory before. Hamas killed Israeli soldiers while overwhelming military bases, and some were also killed when kibbutzim and Nova Rave were attacked. Yet, if the more than 3000 Hamas insurgents could overwhelm the IDF bases so comprehensively, so quickly, and if murder was their intention, surely many more Israeli deaths could have resulted. Similarly, the unknown thousands (?) of Palestinians also did not murder. They were all very inefficient killers. Likely, Hamas came to capture Israelis...
Keith Mitchelson from brisbane
In response to: 7 October 2023: What really happened? Part 1
Will Katz or Trump prevail?
October 13, 2025
Ziyad Motala deserves congratulation on his article, as a key piece of American commentary right now is from Donald Trump: “The war is over. But, sad to say, then we have Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz just now in a tweet: “Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarising Gaza and...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: The moral vacancy of American commentary on Gaza
Trump should never get the Nobel Peace Prize
October 13, 2025
Jeff McMullen eloquently presents the case that Donald Trump runs a violent country and is strongly inclined to violence himself. Thus, it is abhorrent that he should even be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, whatever his involvement in the Israeli/Hamas peace deal. By all means, give credit where credit is due — and some is probably warranted in this case — but a Nobel Peace Prize recipient should be a person of peace, not a warmonger. The fact that Trump renamed the Department of Defence as the Department of War says it all. McMullen spells it out....
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: These are fighting words
Global collapse
October 13, 2025
The Julian Cribb article made for an interesting read. I think there is one more factor he has left out. This is the potential loss of antibiotics in the future. This will mean a natural increase in the death rate unless alternatives are found. Everyday common diseases and surgery will become increasingly dangerous. If the world can get over the population peak later this century without major collapse, then there is still hope.
Mark Mcdonald from drysdale
In response to: Died of a delusion' – the fate of modern civilisation?
The Lord of the Flies revisited
October 13, 2025
The sheer racial infantilism of the Anglo-Saxon elites and their security service underlings put me in mind of Golding's Lord of the Flies. Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it's only us!, seems to summarise the childish brutishness of our so-called security services. They seem to spend their entire lives projecting their own vacuous and depraved predispositions onto racially less worthy opponents, that they have confected in their fevered imaginings. Their lives seem to reflect the barbarity of the playground as they look all around them and see themselves reflected back to them in all their childish fantasising. ...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: How anti-China witch hunts in Canada and the UK ruin lives
Subtlety and nuance versus arrogant stupidity
October 13, 2025
A very well put together and thought out article. The problem for the Yanks is that they have, over the last 30 years at least, lost the arts of subtlety and nuance entirely from their diplomacy. Asia, by contrast because of its need to appease the Western beast, has developed these arts to a fine degree. South Korea is an excellent example as are Singapore, Malaysia and China.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: South Korea's caution on US Iran aims
Deforestation a climate and biodiversity calamity
October 13, 2025
When it comes to deforestation, it's hard to decide which is the worse consequence: climate change or biodiversity loss. As Julian Cribb notes, the Earth’s depleted forests are becoming a major contributor to Hothouse Earth. Deforestation is driving climate change. Yet forests are the habitat for countless species. All too often, to lose the forest is to lose the species that depend on it. According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, deforestation is a key threat to 60% of Australia’s listed threatened species. At least 1100 native vertebrate animals are forest-dependent. Species threatened by deforestation include the koala, swift parrot,...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The Earth uncloaked – A catastrophe in slow motion
Retire our unfair superannuation system
October 13, 2025
Misha Schubert's essay should resonate with anyone who cares about equity and justice. As she so eloquently reminds us, care is predominantly provided by women. Its value is inadequately recognised: to a huge degree it is hidden and unpaid; when it is paid, the pay and conditions are poor. This is an important reason — but far from the only reason — for the alarming rate of poverty among older women. Changes to the nation's superannuation system will not, however, achieve more than minor improvements. Our much-lauded super system is in effect a revers Robin Hood scheme: it...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: Australia faces a looming crisis of older women retiring in poverty
Cultivated China phobia
October 13, 2025
Colin Mackerras is very civilised in his refusal to comprehensively criticise the cultural failings of Australia with respect to China. His criticisms are restrained but very clear in their noting of the all-embracing nature of those failures. He could have further noted that, despite the decades since the abolition of the White Australia policy, the virulent racism that underlay that policy remains just below the surface of daily life. Our overweening beliefs in the superiority of white cultures over all others has been a clear driver of the willingness of even much of the Left to willingly swallow...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Lack of China capability can only do harm to society: Our current situation is a disgrace
Absurdities and atrocities
October 13, 2025
Voltaire got it right when he wrote that, Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. The absurdity in this case is to believe that legitimate criticism of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people constitutes antisemitism. Then you would also have to believe that any criticism of the policies of any country means that you are by definition anti the people of that country. Yet, no reasonable person believes that, as it would make free communication impossible. However, Zionists, unlike any other political group, are entitled to make such a claim about Israel, and the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,”
Van Jones and the Merchant of Venice
October 13, 2025
One is inclined to think of the duke's lines in the Merchant of Venice when reflecting on the common Western prejudice and racism in the comments of Van Jones. I am sorry for thee: thou art come to answer. A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch. Uncapable of pity, void and empty. From any dram of mercy. Seems to sum up the views of US elites pretty succinctly!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Van Jones and the moral vacancy of American commentary on Gaza
Netanyahu didn't 'do' Gaza. Israel did.
October 13, 2025
It is important to remember that Benjamin Netanyahu did not come from nowhere. He is a born and bred Israeli, a sabra, and is merely the latest in a long line of ethnic cleansers who have been running Palestine since its partition in 1947. The history of Israel is one of continuous dispossession and murder. Something has to change so everything can go on as before. This quote, from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, is exactly what this article is warning against. Netanyahu might make an easy target for change. He is proudly visible, unrepentant and boastful....
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: How the West will package the genocide after Netanyahu
Prospect of sea-level rise is terrifying
October 13, 2025
David Spratt notes that the recent National Climate Risk Assessment underestimates projected sea-level rise. It suggests a one-metre rise by the end of the century, but evidence now suggests, because of tipping points, it is likely to be two metres and possibly much more. Just looking at the last Interglacial, for instance, when temperatures were a mere 1°C above pre-industrial levels, sea levels were 5-10 metres above those of today. The State of the Cryosphere report spells out why even 2°C warming is too high. 2°C will result in extensive, potentially rapid, irreversible sea-level rise from Earth’s ice sheets...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable comm
Graffiti is a hate crime, by anybody
October 13, 2025
Simon Tatz refers to the Bali bombings, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse, all terrible things, and all completely irrelevant to this topic. What is not irrelevant, as I mentioned and which he and many others choose to ignore, is the long list of extremely hateful, racist and deplorable statements by members of the Israeli Government, both current and previous. So, confected outrage, double standard or hypocrisy? Maybe all three. He seems to imply I, and others, have no experience of prejudice, racism, etc. and have no right to comment. I have every right, as we all...
Jerry Cartwright from Perth
In response to: Graffiti-is-a-hate-crime-too
Stark contrast
October 13, 2025
Last night (12 October), on SBS World News they showed Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting a refitted facility for the returned hostages after their horrendous ordeal at the hands of the Hamas terrorists. I could not help but note the contrast between that hospital and the bombed and under-supplied, under-staffed sometimes tent hospitals in Gaza seen on the nightly news and wonder how can this ever end. It is only one tit-for-tat atrocity from starting it all again.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Childhood on hold: Growing up too soon in Gaza and beyond
Singapore does it right
October 10, 2025
Singapore has been getting it right for many decades now, standing up for yourself, not unnecessarily making enemies and dealing with all on an equal basis. If we could only stop learning our lessons on power, diplomacy and geopolitics from the dying empire and get with the rising one!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A masterclass in agency: What Singapore can teach Australia about China
Security through diplomacy
October 10, 2025
Security for Australia within Asia is really quite simple. Join BRICS and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. We already have membership in the New Development Bank and the Reserve Contingent Arrangement. This will integrate us into the region which will dominate the world this century. Membership of all these guarantees our security in the region. Then all we have to do is navigate the US covert and criminal efforts, as in 1975 with Gough, to overturn our government and bring us back into being another bitch for the US!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australia’s next big bet lies East, not West
Shark nets save lives
October 10, 2025
Graeme Stewart is absolutely right on shark nets. My long career as an environmentalist has convinced me that sharks don’t want to eat you. But attacks do happen – with terrifying results. It concerns me that nets are a blunt instrument that catches other sea creatures as well as sharks. But it also concerns me that people are killed by sharks. The current orchestrated campaign against nets claims they don’t work and even that nets attract sharks. Professor Stewart has cut through this debate with an excellent summary of the scientific evidence – which clearly shows that shark nets...
John Dengate from Sydney
In response to: Shark nets do protect human life
Graffiti is a hate crime too
October 10, 2025
Jerry Cartwright thinks pro-terrorist graffiti is a trivial matter. Imagine if, after the Bali bombings, similar messages supporting those who killed many Australians were sprayed around our cities? Perhaps Cartwright would find it confected outrage if messages supporting domestic violence and killing of women were painted near his home, or support for child sexual abuse. Would that elicit confected outrage too? Here's a truth bomb – it's only people who will never experience antisemitism, Islamophobia or racism who dismiss vilification as trivial.
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Confected outrage
Evolved thinking needed to solve human problems
October 10, 2025
Militantly begging the authorities to do something about the widespread mess the species finds itself in is as ineffective as scapegoating them or happily acquiescing to the blue-sky tokenism they always offer up as solutions. This mutually convenient dance between the governors and the governed has been with us since the beginnings of our so-called sapience and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Let us be clear, we will not solve the problems of our world with the same psychology that created them. An evolved and radical adaptation of our thinking is urgently needed, but highly...
Andrew Stretton from Fingal, Tasmania
In response to: Is Greta Thunberg the lone voice for justice in our world?
A not-so-easy Community Independent Senate seat
October 10, 2025
In his article on the possibility of Teals getting Senate seats, Bob McMullan crunches only one of the two lots of vital numbers – votes. He ignores or doesn't appreciate the three-step process of getting an MP elected. First, local people decide they want a better MP than the one they've got. They form a group to discuss what sort of person this might be and what they want of them. Second, they advertise for a candidate and choose whom they think will meet their aspirations. Third, they recruit as many volunteers as they can to get the message...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Could the Teals win Senate seats in an expanded parliament?
Palestine peace plan
October 10, 2025
Sawsan Madina is dubious about the peace plan for Gaza. But at least for now, the daily carnage stops. The interview on ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday 9 October with the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel showed that she cannot see that Israel’s actions over the last 70 years of continuing Nakba might be partly responsible for the rise of Hamas as a group using terror tactics. Haskel simply does not support there being a state of Palestine and criticised all those who do. The UN has been totally sidelined, with Trump able to say recently that it was...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: A time to redouble our efforts for Palestine
Deceit upon deceit...
October 10, 2025
As they say, history is written by the victors. If it were a Palestinian writing, rather than Stuart Rees, they would have started the story of deceit a couple of years earlier. It gets a bit repetitive because he leaves no stone unturned, but it's still worth reading Peter Shambrook's Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939 which details how Britain promised the Arabs an independent state, including Palestine, after the war, in exchange for an Arab alliance with Britain against the Ottomans in World War I. Remember ... this came before the Balfour Declaration. It's also worth noting...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: A century of deceit: Towards a new understanding of the colonisation of Palestin
Conservatism versus freedom
October 9, 2025
The US loves to lecture the world on the indispensability of its political system which supposedly encapsulates freedom and democracy. That system is deliberately designed to be extraordinarily vulnerable to manipulation by their wealthy elites. Two hundred years of efforts to prevent a high standard of public education, to enable the control of the bewildered herd as those elites describe the people, has rendered the US more susceptible than any other country to irrational fears and created panics. The efforts of the Orange Donald are simply a part of that 200 years of social manipulation. McCarthyism was just...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Shadow of McCarthyism looms over controversial firing of Texas professor who taught about gender identity
Balance, schmalance!
October 9, 2025
An incisive analysis of the fraudulent use of the idea of balance to avoid addressing the herd of elephants in the room. Just as with the Nazis in Warsaw, the current unquestionable genocide in Gaza by Israel is incapable of defence as international law has spoken with clarity and certainty. One would have thought that a journalists association would understand that. Apparently not!!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Cancelling Chris Hedges: What price balance?
Recognition of older women
October 9, 2025
As an older woman, Misha’s story really hit home. The older women facing retirement today with little or no super are the same women who gave up their own lives and careers to raise families, care for others and hold communities together. Women constitute the highest percentage of carers, they always have. Their sacrifices made life easier for everyone else, particularly men. They’re now being left behind. We need workplaces that support younger women with children now, fairer pay and super for all and affordable housing for older women. Most of all, we need to value care —...
Meg Schwarz from Macclesfield
In response to: Australia faces a looming crisis of older women retiring in poverty. Here’s wha
New Delhi: Population exceeding resource limits
October 9, 2025
Julian Cribb mentions a number of megacities, including New Delhi. I visited the city in 1969 and found it a pleasant place in contrast to various poverty-ravaged cities within the country, most notably Calcutta, now Kolkata. There, half a million slept on the streets at night, often with only a dirty newspaper for a pillow. In contrast, New Delhi was free of the chaos that bedevilled other cities in India. Back then, 56 years ago, New Delhi's population was 3,381,000 people, less than a tenth of what it is today, namely, 35 million. It is anticipated to be 39...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: World water in crisis
Confected outrage
October 9, 2025
Someone painted God bless Hamas on a billboard, and all the usual suspects were screaming from the rooftops and tearing their hair out, calling in the federal police (who, I'm sure, have more important things to worry about). If it had said God bless Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich or Netanyahu? All are either under sanction, convicted criminals or wanted for war crimes. Do you think there would have been an outcry as we have seen over this? As happens with all graffiti, paint over it and forget it.
Jerry Cartwright from Perth
In response to: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/10/october-7-not-to-a-day-to-abuse-protesters/
Wheat from the chaff
October 9, 2025
The best president the US never had, the late Adlai E. Stevenson II, offered one of the best descriptions of journalism: An editor is a someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill QLD 4000
In response to: Journos as heroes and villans - 'The Hack' reviewed