Letters to the Editor
Albanese's politics of patience
August 25, 2025
Thanks for a more considered assessment of the current leadership, Albanese style. If only more politicians could behave accordingly. Might I offer an observation of a failure here and a solution? Rushing, even on the evening of his election, Albanese promised committed action on the Voice for Indigenous Australians. Unfortunately, he used a political, a numbers based, binary process which divided the nation. Had he chosen a process of dialogue and consideration as another nation,Ireland, did, he could have achieved much more;but he thought like a numbers man, a politician. Ireland on the other hand, changed two matters...
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: Albanese's politics of patience: Democracy needs mature leadership
Gaza crisis and the Australian Catholic Church
August 25, 2025
It is hardly surprising that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is silent on the genocide in Palestine. Why should the ACBC speak up for those half a world away when it failed to do so for Australia's Indigenous population? Support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Yes; support the Voice to Parliament referendum, No. The Catholic Church has some wonderful moral leaders. A handful are ordained, most are not. Many who identify as Catholic, with the best of that tradition, no longer practise the Catholicism of the members of the ACBC. What remains of ACBC moral leadership is negligible...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The Gaza crisis and the Australian Church
Is Leunig's cartoon antisemitic?
August 25, 2025
Harold Zwier's piece quotes a comment by Dvir Ambramovich, deriding the idea that the Jewish community would take aggressive, retributive action against those who criticise Israel. Abramovich was wrong then and he is still. Its assault alone on art galleries, writers festivals, universities, media outlets — the list is endless — is proof enough that the mainstream Jewish lobby employs its outsized reach to intimidate and suppress, quite effectively, any dissenting view of the behaviour of Israelis.
Daniel Saks from Daylesford, Vic
In response to: Leunig cartoon: Antisemitism or valid political comment?
Bush Summit baloney
August 25, 2025
Murdoch media/Gina Rinehart’s Bush Summit is part of stage II of a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign. The prime minister should not dignify the campaign or lend it credibility by his attendance. Murdoch/Rinehart et.al. won stage I of the campaign by delaying responsible climate action for 40 years despite losing their factual argument (“Climate change isn’t real, see, it was cold last week”) to actual science. (Big Tobacco) Stage II, “we can’t afford to address climate change” and “renewables don’t work” and “windmills are ugly” (Uglier than coal mines?) has been running for a few years now. I wonder...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: 'Who will look after the elderly?' Bush Summit is back, and so is Gina Rinehart’
Tax reform – what about resources taxes?
August 25, 2025
I have not closely followed the discussions of tax reform so maybe I missed it, but Michael Keating’s article presented itself as somewhat comprehensively covering the possible areas of reform. While I consider myself to be well short of his economic knowledge, I was surprised to find no reference to taxing the resource sector for its ability to extract huge resource-generated profits at minimal benefit to our national budgetary position. Having been in Norway last year and observed them gloating about the benefits of their sovereign fund, I despaired again about our failure to emulate such an approach....
Stan Rosenthal from CARNEGIE
In response to: The economic reform roundtable and taxation
Leunig's intention with his cartoon
August 25, 2025
In his critique of Leunig’s 2012 cartoon, Zwier refers to it as a parody — satirising or mocking — of Niemöller’s 1946 poem. For me, the 2025 immediacy and personal nature of Leunig‘s words was palpable – not a parody, but rather an adaptation true to the original intent of Niemöller’s poem. It spoke to me about the progressive… how can I say it, moral shrinkage that occurs, the lack of courage, sense of being overwhelmed and the impotence in us, preventing us from speaking up for truth. Leunig’s very personal observation is evident in his choice of pronouns...
Susan Germein from Sydney
In response to: Leunig cartoon: Antisemitism or valid political comment?
Same old, same old
August 25, 2025
I took the trouble to look up who was at the roundtable and noticed it was the same well-paid people who either have benifitted from the mess we are in or those who want to benefit from the mess. Not one without media training„ Nice to be with you Sarah„ No-one to point a finger. Let's say education, housing, health etc are in this mess because of a failed experiment of commercialising them. Health is on the brink because of the profit before care model and private hospitals for those who can pay extra and ramping for the...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
Israel claiming 'democracy' is moral blasphemy
August 25, 2025
No quibble at all with everything that Raghid Nahhas wrote – but I think he understated the heinous appropriation of a term generally approbative of a regime by the Zionist + IDF cabal to deflect criticism of their genocidal rampage. The definition of democracy has no reference to the actions of a state in regard to any other state. By claiming Israel's democratic status — which I assume is valid under the strict definition — Benjamin Netanyahu is employing a very limited political definition as a shroud to cover the iniquitous activity of the pack of inglorious bastards of...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Israel, the 'only democracy in the Middle East' – How to win elections and erase people
Our only Jewish governor-general?
August 25, 2025
While Isaac Isaacs was the first Jewish governor-general, during my lifetime we had Zelman Cowan. This fact does not change the intent or importance of the article, but is a glaring error that should have been picked up before publication.
Peter Grayson-Weeks from Beauty Point, Tasmania
In response to: Australia’s only Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
High time we told the US to get lost
August 22, 2025
Bravo to Fred Zhang for a brilliant article which is very much to the point. It is high time we told the US to get lost. This is a nation that parrots itself as the world's greatest democracy but, in reality, does not give a rat's about democracy and never has. It didn't care about it when it put the 3/5ths compromise in its constitution, it didn't care about it when, along with the UK, it destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953 for oil, or indeed, in 1956 when it egged on the Hungarians for months. They amazingly overthrew...
Wes Mason from Gisborne
In response to: Pay up, shut up, speak up against China, or we won't get the subs (some wise Ame
Russell’s authorship
August 22, 2025
In all likelihood, the statement on the Middle East dated 31 January 1970 was indeed drafted by Bertrand Russell. It has his characteristic clarity including typically succinct formulations such as ‘The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that the country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state, and What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Russell personally signed a copy of the statement, which is now held at the Bertrand Russell Archives,...
Tony Simpson from Cornwall
In response to: Fifty-five years on, Bertrand Russell’s words are worth returning to
Leunig cartoon: antisemitism or valid political comment?
August 22, 2025
I am no particular fan of Leunig, but I found Harold Zwier's assessment of Leunig's four-frame cartoon self-serving and symptomatic of the sad conflict within global Jewry related to the genocide in Palestine. As a non-Jew, I took it that Leunig spoke for all of us (aside from Bibi, his war criminal associates and and his youthful conscripted footsoldiers.) Zwier's self-indulgent intellectual doodle and its perceived antisemitism is a another crutch for his guilt-avoidant mates. It is a pathetic distraction from the mass murder for its two million victims and it shows no sympathy for them. Not...
Donald Clayton from Bittern 3918
In response to: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/leunig-cartoon-antisemitism-or-valid-political-comment/
10-fold MSM undercounting of 680,000 Gaza deaths
August 21, 2025
Ralph Nader’s reportage on the undercounting of Gaza deaths is now on the US Congressional Record. From data reported in the leading medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere by a succession of expert epidemiologists (Dr Zeina Jamaluddine et al., Dr Rasha Khatib et al., Professor Devi Sridhar) 64,260 Gazans died violently by Day 269 of the Gaza Massacre (30 June 2024) and hence 136,000 Gazans died violently by Day 569 (25 April 2025) with a “conservatively estimated” four times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths from violence and deprivation by 25 April...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Open letter to journalists on the vast undercount of deaths and serious injuries
The politics of profligacy
August 21, 2025
Humanity’s greed for material comfort seems unbounded, for the most part, by any sense of a need for boundaries. Our population grows ever larger, and those alive want a sense of comfort and provision that is as good as, or better than, that they grew up with. Understandable, at the individual scale, but unsustainable and a poisoned chalice for those who follow. Julian Cribb paints a compelling picture of how humanity is hell-bent on self-destruction. Much attention has been given to the climate threat because this is both existential and imminent, but — as Cribb reminds us — we...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The great waste
Federal taxes do not fund federal spending
August 21, 2025
... My starting point is that Australia needs to raise more tax revenue. ... budget will continue to be in deficit ... by an average of 1.2% of GDP. This is a structural deficit which is a major risk to economic sustainability... This deficit needs to be corrected and sooner rather than later. Either taxation has to rise or expenditures need to be cut... Such advice is provably incorrect; the recommendation is the very essence of socially destructive neoliberalist austerity. There was a time when the statements above were true, but not now. In gold-pegged days (pre-1971) an...
John Bloomfield from Roselands NSW
In response to: The economic reform roundtable and taxation
Shining for me, but not for thee
August 21, 2025
To act with impunity as if the voices and needs of the other don't matter, or don't matter as much, seems to me to be at the heart of the mess we in the West now find ourselves in. Two examples spring to mind, these being NATO's eastward expansion and Israel's absorption of Palestine. Both relied on the notion of exceptionalism to justify unilateral action. In neither case were the opinions of the other given equal weight. That light on the hill would seem to be shining for me, but not for thee. To remove oneself from the...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: The city on a hill
TAFE and the commercialisation of education
August 21, 2025
Neil, thank you for your welcome piece written from within the deterioration of educational integrity of an important post-secondary sector! Thank you. Such insider insight tracing educational decline in TAFE is helpful to sharpen our vision of the related spectacular decline within the sector of what are now called universities! To investigate how TAFE was demeaned in public policy will mean revisiting the question of why Institutes of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education were reformed by amalgamation with, and hence required by legislation to take on the labels of, universities? Are we to make the sad conclusion that...
Bruce Wearne from Ballarat Central
In response to: The quest for 21st century australian productivity [and] TAFE
And yet...
August 21, 2025
Well written! Thank you, Patricia, for adding to our perception of a political reality which is also our own. And yet our ambassador and foreign minister attended the inauguration on our behalf! Ever since coming to the conclusion that they shouldn't have done so, I've wondered how we Australians should justify such a signal of non-compliance with the Trump 2 delusionary insurrection. The best I can come up with is to say we have too much respect for the US under its own constitution — which assumes the rule of law and proscribes insurrection — for us to indulge...
Bruce Wearne from BALLARAT CENTRAL
In response to: Understanding Donald J. Trump
Neutering the Zionist lobby's pernicious Influence
August 21, 2025
Greg Barns' article should be compulsory reading for every chief editor and vice-chancellor. Capitulation to the threats routinely delivered by the Zionist lobby industry, that demand kowtowing to standards of expression that support what are likely crimes against the International Rule of Order by the highest authorities in the world, is, quite simply, complicity. Those who cringe in cowardly acquiescence to the utterly discredited definition of antisemitism delivered as the metric by the Segal report and reinforced by the flustercluck of Zionist protagonists from Netanyahu downwards to the sludge we have here in Australia that surface like a...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Universities, free speech and the High Court
Recognition of Palestine matters-II
August 20, 2025
In answer to Margaret Callinan’s comment on my article, the current debate is not about recognising Palestine as a nation, but about recognising it as a state. There is a difference. The Australian Government’s recognition proposal limits the borders of the state of Palestine to Gaza and the West Bank. That is what is wrong in principle and a colonialist imposition.
Jeff Kildea from Sydney
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
Outside interference-II
August 20, 2025
In response to my article, Simon Tatz writes, The only resolution is one determined by the Palestinian and Israeli people. That was my point. Please reread my articles.
Jeff Kildea from Sydney
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
Uni codes of conduct versus academic free speech
August 20, 2025
Excellent article by Greg Barns. A science academic for four decades, I strongly objected to Codes of Conduct constraining academic free speech, and 25 years ago published a detailed critique entitled “Current censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities” that concluded “We should publicly insist that universities that constrain free speech are not fit for our children”. As illustrated by the shocking Bendigo Writers Festival censorship debacle, free speech-constraining codes of conduct are now in place in Australian universities and threaten academic free speech and Australia’s $40 billion per annum education export industry. The Big Eight universities and numerous other...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Universities, free speech and the High Court
Forensic examination of Western duplicity
August 20, 2025
This is one of the most perceptive and revealing examinations of the vast gap between our vaunted values and our real world practice that I have seen anywhere. Her analysis is couched in academic discourse and logic, but with the vital addition of the other human attributes that must exist together with it if reason is to be brought back to any objectively observable reality. I am grateful to Pam for her clarity of thought and her willingness to deal objectively with the differences between who we claim we are and who we actually are! She unflinchingly examines the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Requiem for liberalism: Palestine and the exposure of Western ideals
A narrower lens in a time that demands breadth
August 20, 2025
As a long-time reader and occasional contributor, I have valued Pearls and Irritations for its breadth, politics, policy, economy, climate, defence, religion, arts, Asia, Palestine-Israel, the United States and more. That diversity gave the publication a unique richness and influence, connecting Australia’s domestic challenges with international realities. Since the change of editor in March, there has been a clear and signalled shift. The site has given greater space to foreign affairs, defence and the moral dimensions of global conflict, especially Gaza, AUKUS, and shifting power balances. These are important issues, but the narrowing has sometimes come at the cost...
John Frew from Woolooware
In response to: Requiem for liberalism: Palestine and the exposure of Western ideals
Head v heart
August 20, 2025
As I write, I hear the garbage truck on its weekly run and I think would I really be wanting to be ringing Canberra because my bin wasn’t emptied, because the trees on the street need pruning or about the pothole out the front? The answer is no. Therefore I conclude that the biggest productivity gains, miles of duplicated red tape gone, would be to remove one level of government and logically that must be the state government. But in my heart, I'm a South Australian and there is nothing I like better than beating a Victorian.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: australia-has-120-health-workforce-policies
Israel: grant all Palestinians all human rights
August 19, 2025
Excellent analysis by Paul Heywood-Smith. However, crucial to any Palestine-Israel “settlement” is irrevocable application to all Palestinians of all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notably (1) “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”, (2) “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind…”, and (3) “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. Pre-war, Indigenous Palestinians represented 50% of the subjects of Israel. However the Occupied Palestinians (5.6 million pre-war, with only 4.9 million now alive) are...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: The response to recognition
The deadliest measure
August 19, 2025
Fiona Colin is absolutely correct in identifying deliberate, concerted denial as one of the gravest threats to humanity. After more than quarter of a century of research into the science underlying the human predicament, I have concluded that, of the 10 catastrophic threats to humanity, misinformation is the most dangerous. More so than climate, nuclear bombs or famine, because it precludes action on any of the threats. A species that cannot face the truth, cannot survive the outcome of its own self-deception.
Julian Cribb from Canberra, ACT
In response to: Cognitive dissonance
A leopard does not change its spots
August 19, 2025
Further to Jack Waterford's recent article regarding PwC's atonement, it is worth reiterating the thoughts of the late US supreme court justice, Thurgood Marshall: The Ku Klux Klan hasn't gone away. Its members have just stopped wearing the white robes and capirotes because the material became too expensive.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill Brisbane QLD
In response to: Finance’s bleeding hearts think PwC has suffered enough
Australia is moving away from US
August 18, 2025
Bruce Wolpe needs to catch up. Many Australians realised some time ago that Australia needs to distance ourselves from the US. The US has become unreliable and fickle. It is not just Paul Keating saying that we need to engage more with Asia. Take notice of the reader comments in mainstream papers plus in various podcast and you will see that that is exactly what is already happening. One comment that is becoming more persistent is that Australia should revisit AUKUS with a view to considering an alternative. There is a strong view that AUKUS is not the direction...
Peter Sheehy from Blackheath NSW
In response to: The US has changed. Australia hasn’t. It’s time to talk about where the relation
Whitlam dismissal
August 18, 2025
As the years pass, those who thought the rumours surrounding the Whitlam dismissal were most likely a bit paranoid are having to rethink. Decades of US regime change and wars provide a devastating insight into their modus operandi and it ain’t pretty.
Pamela Curr from Brunswick
In response to: 1975: The Whitlam dismissal’s smoking gun
Disruptive doctoring
August 18, 2025
Tony Lawson’s piece invites new approaches to productivity challenges in the health sphere. I invite readers to view this news from China. It certainly promises productivity gains, but there will be a need to discuss the ethical and other concerns that such an approach poses.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
At least 242 journalists killed: Inaction is complicity
August 18, 2025
Excellent article by Dr Jeremy Webb. The recent Zionist murder in Gaza of journalist Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues has sparked outrage around the world. Thus the UN: “The secretary-general calls for an independent and impartial investigation into these latest killings. At least 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Journalists and media workers must be respected, they must be protected and they must be allowed to carry out their work freely. Likewise Free Palestine Melbourne (that helps organise huge Sunday Rallies for Gaza): “Killing journalists, nurses, and civilians will not erase the...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Where is the outrage? Israel's systematic mass assassination of journalists
Narrative reform is what we need
August 18, 2025
What we need is reform of the way we report taxation. All the major projects in Australia have been financed by public money of one form or another and continue to be. When there is a disaster like a bush fire, flood, drought etc we expect a prompt response in the form of rescues, handouts, fire-fighting equiptment, boats etc. That has to be financed somehow. The taxation debate is usually driven by those who can most afford to pay and benefit most from not paying a share. Like most economic debate, the interchanging of dollars and percentages...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Economic reform and the productivity slowdown
Was this written by Russell?
August 18, 2025
In all likelihood, the letter was not written by Russell but by Ralph Schoenman who dishonestly presented it as written by Russell. On this see Bryan Mabee's book, Confessions of a Philosopher.
Thomas Mautner from Griffith A.C.T.
In response to: Fifty-five years on, Bertrand Russell’s words are worth returning to
Stand with Mary
August 18, 2025
Thank you, Peter. I stand with Mary. I am old, I do not know/trust how to use any social media so I cannot contact her to give her my support. But you and Pearls and Irritations are enabling me to do that. Thank you, Pearls and Irritations as well.
Judith Gamper from Kambah ACT
In response to: Stand with Mary
Outside interference
August 18, 2025
Jeff Kildea admits to being “an outsider with no skin in the game”, yet nonetheless feels qualified to profess his criticism and solutions to the centuries old geopolitical and religious conflict in the Middle East. The most important lesson I learned from my visits to the region (Israel and the occupied territories) was from a local who, in essence, said: you don’t live here, you don’t live with war, terrorism, threats every day, be it from right-wing settler extremists or Hamas terrorists. If you want to decide our future, then live here. This was said by a left-voting...
Simon Tatz from Newport
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
No heroes among these leaders
August 18, 2025
One by one, Australia, Britain, France and Canada say they will recognise the Palestinian state in September. They are not being brave or moral. Their governments have been complicit in the genocide. But their leaders have enough sense not to go down in history with their names etched in eternal infamy. Ain't that the truth?! But aren't these belated words their own type of infamy? Watching after their own backs rather than any genuine concern for Palestinians and Palestine. Only caring about genocide when it might hurt them at the polls. Those marching for Palestine have no reason...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Our bravest journalists today are all working and dying in Gaza
Recognition of Palestine matters
August 18, 2025
I agree with the author that recognition of Palestine provides no tangible benefit to the people of Gaza. But I do not agree that it is wrong in principle. I believe recognition acknowledges that the century-long Palestinian struggle is legitimate and puts a moral imperative before us to do more to bring about justice. Israel declared itself a nation without specifying its borders and has been accepted as a nation by most other countries regardless. I see no colonialist imposition in recognising Palestine as a nation since that's how Palestinians see themselves already. Of course, borders remain problematic and...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Recognition of Palestine: A neocolonial, feel-good gesture
Albanese’s missed chance at moral leadership
August 18, 2025
Prime Minister Albanese’s recognition of Palestine is an important step, but it has come far later than it should have. Albanese has long been on the record as supporting Palestinian rights, co-founding the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in 1998 and acknowledging that peace depends on a two-state solution. Yet when he became prime minister, that conviction gave way to caution. For many months of the Gaza war, as civilian deaths mounted and hospitals were destroyed, his government argued that the “right conditions” were not yet in place. Those conditions, tragically, never appeared. Instead, the world watched as children in...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: Albanese’s recognition of a Palestinian state implements a long-held Labor ambit
Population growth is now a menace
August 18, 2025
Julian Cribb rightly cites Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits as a major challenge to our survival that even good people choose to ignore. Back in the 1970s, thanks largely to Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, people rightly saw overpopulation as a major environmental issue. Most of my contemporaries limited the number of children they had to two, or at least felt guilty about having a third. Then a combination of misplaced feminist rhetoric plus the Catholic Church conspired to discredit the movement, not helped by coercive birth control policies in India. ...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The great human brain fade
We don't need another envoy
August 15, 2025
We don't need another highly-paid headline-grabing divisive envoy. What we need is to prosecute the media outlets, journalists and shock-jocks who are applying these labels in a racist way. If the race relations laws are not fit for purpose, then they need to be fixed and quickly. Also there should be a penalty for blocking up the court system with expensive defence of frivoulous claims. I suspect they are tax-deductible, otherwise why go to the expense?
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
The cancer from the US and Britain
August 15, 2025
Here is an example of a real pathogen about which we definitely do know the origins. The pathogen is virulent and deadly as it has brought about death on a previously unimaginable scale throughout the 20th and now in the 21st centuries and across the planet. The pathogen was first developed deliberately in political laboratories in the UK and the US early last century and was released to infect the world. The name for the pathogen was developed by its creators and became a by-word for its use as a weapon of war. Propaganda was the name and it...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
A duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders
August 15, 2025
As Robert Graves put it, Truth loving Persians do not dwell upon a trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. School children in France are not taught about the battle of Agincourt. The Black Hole of Calcutta is taught one way in the UK and another in India. When Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, she was unaware that the South had been defeated. John Howard complained about the black armband of history that attempts to set the record straight about the modern history of Indigenous Australia. Popular history has become little more than a national hagiography. How far the...
John Tons from Flinders University
In response to: White House to vet Smithsonian exhibits to ensure they 'align with Trump's interpretation' of US history
Humanity’s never-ending absurdity
August 14, 2025
In Julian Cribb’s well-annotated piece on the self-generated vortex Homo sapiens sits at the lip of, he attributes a laughing-out-loud quote to one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers. It doesn’t matter if Einstein didn’t say it; it underlines humanities boundless pushing of the envelope. It summons a scenario of Mrs God asking God what he’s doing in the shed that has kept Him late for dinner the last five nights. He proudly described His creation of Earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air and the creatures that walk upon the land. When he explains...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The great human brain fade
China's internal critics open and transparent
August 14, 2025
According to the negative Nancies in the West, the author of this article should be in serious trouble for his criticisms of government in China. Of course, that view has not been true for nearly 50 years as China encourages vigorous debate about directions and issues, so long as it is constructive. That truth, of course, can be ignored in the interest of promoting anti-China memes.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s consumption weighed down by weak expectations
Cognitive dissonance
August 14, 2025
Cribbs describes a bleak future, a “loss in human cognitive ability”. We may well have reached a point “where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let alone do anything purposeful to correct it”. Science historian Naomi Oreskes writes that as early as the 1950s, scientists were warning about the dangers of human-made climate change. By the 1970s, the scientific community was highlighting the potential impacts of human activities on global temperatures. ExxonMobil scientists projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to .02 degrees of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The great human brain fade
Courage missing in action
August 14, 2025
Conservative Australian Governments have been purchased by the big largely overseas gas extractors and in the case of Labor have been, at least in recent years, scared witless of them. Unlike the Norwegians who have built the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world, by ensuring gas and oil companies pay for the resources they have extracted, Australia has allowed itself to be either bought or frightened into handing over the patrimony of the Australian people to rapacious multinational companies with hardly a whimper. Now there is a surprise!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Albanese is crying poor, but we’re losing billions a year from untaxed gas
When the education system can't learn about itself
August 14, 2025
As a 70-plus individual in rapid decline, I find believable and interesting that all this is happening at a time of comercialisation of the education system, with record school and university attendance, and a preoccupation with data collection. I left school after year 11 and our large technical school barely had enough students to fill a year 12 mixed class. The class sizes would be envied today and only the best went on to university. Now most go on to higher education and university and we have a shortage of tradies and truck-drivers. Taxi-drivers are completing university in...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The great human brain fade
Opposition obduracy to recognition of Palestine
August 14, 2025
Chris Sidoti's commentary on the much-belated and pitifully weak statement of intention to recognise the State of Palestine by the Albanese Government is, in the existing circumstances, restrained almost to the point of a fault. Whacko-the diddle-oh for a baby step forward for Albanese and Wong, even though it contains restraints and limitations that make it only one step above tokenism. Have they not noticed that as the international community becomes more restive, the Netanyahu and IDF activity has expanded into an orgy of both highly targeted and also random bastardly killing? We are getting into the area...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?