Letters to the Editor
The conflation, thus confusion, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism
August 14, 2025
Anyone who's studied philosophy would know that Zionism is a matter of policies intended to create and maintain a Jewish state (definition of Jewish is a rabbit hole); antisemitism is the hatred and fear of Jews for merely being Jews. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people should be repudiated on all occasions – one of Zionism's major policies is the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish people, which puts the lives of Jewish people on a level with the policy of ethnic cleansing. I'm not Jewish myself, but some of my ancestors were — putting policies like ethnic cleansing on...
Wesley Parish from Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
In response to: The Segal report and the universities
Mere words don’t feed
August 14, 2025
For almost two years, our government has watched the Palestine people bombed, crushed, torn, starved and shot, and it has moved our government to do the sum total of nothing. Footage coming out of Gaza from heroic journalists made clear that all this destruction was in the cause of a Greater Israel. The intent of the Israeli occupation was not hidden – it was crystal clear. We all knew that Israeli talk amounted to committing genocide on the Palestinians to steal resources, and expand into Syria and Lebanon. Our government pontificates that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Dates are 'luxury' – and other ways Israel hinders aid trucks from reaching star
Rights come with responsibilities
August 14, 2025
Julian Cribb's statement in his article, “Most poignant of all is the fact that parents, everywhere, seem content to ruin their children’s future for the sake of their own present comfort, convenience and luxury. Their claim to 'love their children' is a false narrative, contrived to exculpate their own childlike self-centredness” is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. As a school teacher, for more than 20 years, I’ve seen this exact sentiment play out in all its variations. Its consequences on the ground in the classroom never ceased to astonish me. I can’t tell you the amount...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: The great human brain fade
Reef – or grief?
August 14, 2025
As the government’s 2035 emissions reduction target looms, Imogen Zethoven nominates the Great Barrier Reef as its litmus test. With global warming at 1.5 degrees for 2024, ocean temperatures have become an existential threat to coral. The Reef may recover if action is taken urgently to reduce or remove its threats within the next few years, as outlined by the International Coral Reef Initiative. Underpinning this protection must be a substantial reduction of fossil fuel use, and the establishment of an independent authority overseeing legally enforceable national environmental standards. If we — and many others — can take...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The Great Barrier Reef is the litmus test for the forthcoming 2035 emissions red
The defusing of political anger
August 13, 2025
It was with a sense of resigned dismay that I read the prim statement about Gaza in the Sidoti interview you posted on 13 August: Well, so far we’ve not used the term genocide. This is an issue that we’re looking at. I take it that we refers to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, of which Sidoti is the commissioner. It reminded me of something that Arundhati Roy said some years ago about NGOs, which are meant to act independently of governments. Her comments apply with even greater force to inter-governmental...
Peter Blunt from Siem Reap
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?
Low fertility and national happiness aligned
August 13, 2025
Thanks to Noel Turnbull for directing attention to the annual UN-backed World Happiness Report. It's worthwhile going to the bottom of the table and comparing the ten unhappiest with the ten happiest at the top. Just as happiness appears to be associated with a cold climate, unhappiness could be loosely associated with a hot one. Nevertheless, a closer association can be found with fertility rates (the number of children per woman). With the exception of Israel, (2.92), all the happiest countries have fertility rates between 1.43 (Costa Rica) and 1.97 (Iceland). Apart from Israel, all are below replacement (2.1)...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Are you happy?
Cut the Yanks loose!
August 13, 2025
As Michael intimated, I feel the US economy has been bankrupt (in more ways than one!) for some time. The US has proven that it does not want any other currency to be elevated (eg oil sales in euros instead of US dollars). However, I feel the world will experience instability until a form of international currency that is not dependent on the American dollar (or any other country's currency) is generated. The dollar would then float and settle to a level that was sustainable. Until that time, the US can print money that devalues dollars held by other...
Doug Foskey from Tregeagle
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Bear witness: Remembering heroic Anas al-Sharif
August 13, 2025
Heroic Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was recently martyred in Gaza with four other journalist colleagues and left us a final inspiring message: “Yet I never stopped telling the truth as it is, without falsification or distortion – so that God may bear witness over those who stayed silent, accepted our killing, and did nothing to stop the massacre our people have endured for more than a year and a half”. Similarly, the key imperatives from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and indeed from all genocide and holocaust atrocities are “zero tolerance for lying”, “zero tolerance for racism”, “bear witness” and...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: ‘I entrust you with Palestine’: The final testament of Anas al-Sharif
Opinions and headlines
August 13, 2025
This article reinforces my opinion that it is full of opinions, not facts, and what we know about opinions is that everybody has one. As fast as one opinion is given, many others appear. For example, on Tuesday, the RBA interest rate cut went in the space of one interview from a bonus for homeowners with a mortgage, to a problem for people with savings in the bank. Then it went to inflation, which wasn't said to be the problem, it was productivity. Again, the talk went from being a win for the government to a RBA vote of...
Bob Perace from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Our image reflected back to us
August 13, 2025
The Israeli state has learned well the lessons of the US and British experiences of war. They have learned from all the aggressive wars, that the US and before it the UK have launched since the beginning of the information age, that control of the narrative is vital if they are to get away with mass murder. The principal problem in doing that is either capturing or killing those who tell the truthful stories of the crimes as they are committed. Hence the deliberate, calculated assassination campaign against those truth-tellers. The UN, controlled as it is by the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Tributes, condemnation pour in over slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza
At last, a legal fightback
August 13, 2025
The corrupt, criminal and scandalous Zionist Government and its many co-conspirators around the world have developed the technique of using the law to bury critics of their genocidal activities. Because they are so well funded by US taxpayers and various complicit Jewish oligarchs around the world, they have used threats of lawfare to silence the Western world. Thank God, we are now beginning to get some courageous people who are prepared to use the law to fight back against this silencing of dissent and exposing the mass murder being perpetrated daily in Gaza and the West Bank. It...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australian Jewish Association accused of hate campaign: Landmark legal action launched
The long hand of building your kingdom
August 13, 2025
Jack Waterford's article on the complexities of security and protest, as usual, is a great read. I thought that Burgess had a vested interest in scary threats to get more funding. Fear facilitates funding, though I was scared of the mention of Mike Pezzullo having another go. Thanks Jack and P&I.
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: The long hand of your country of origin
Tools for fighting disinformation
August 13, 2025
In 2023, Lucy Hamilton, writing in Pearls and Irritations, revealed that Advance Australia, a conservative lobbying group, has links to the US-based Atlas Network, described as a front for fossil fuel corporations that “blocks climate action and attacks democracy globally. An anonymous whistleblower on Advance’s email list claims its latest goal is to “raise $450,000 by August 31” to campaign against net zero in Australia over the next “two-three years.” The International Panel on the Information Environment, in Facts, Fakes, and Climate Science, warns that “powerful actors … intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change”, eroding...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry
Twelfth opportunity
August 12, 2025
The twelfth opportunity would be to stop scaremongering over the Port of Darwin which was leased as an economic opportunity and remains an economic opportunity though the expansion is being hamstrung by uncertainty. China and other countries in general have enough hardware surveilling the world to not require a person with binoculars and a mobile phone to report ship movenents out of Darwin and what brand of wipes the American Marines are using.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Eleven opportunities for Australia
Palestine recognition
August 12, 2025
The Australian Government’s conditional proposal for the recognition of Palestine is untenable for both reasons of principle and practical reasons. “Hamas” (like the ANC in South Africa) took part in armed resistance of an oppressive regime as years of failed negotiations presided over by Western Governments facilitated the ongoing oppression. How is a peaceful transition to occur without Hamas involvement? If members of Hamas are to be excluded from involvement in the negotiations for the establishment of the government of Palestine, why are not the members of the genocidal Israeli regime similarly excluded? Exclusion of “Hamas” confers a...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Labor needs a leader who listens – Chris Minns isn't that person
August 11, 2025
Premier Chris Minns has become a liability to NSW Labor. His refusal to listen — whether to his own MPs, unions, or the party’s grassroots — shows a stubborn arrogance that has no place in a Labor leader. As John Menadue observed, Minns is “out of step with the values of the Labor movement and the principles of democratic participation. His championing of heavy-handed anti-protest laws, with penalties of up to two years in jail and fines of $22,000 for peaceful demonstrators, betrays Labor’s proud history of standing up for civil liberties and the right to dissent. Senior...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: NSW Premier and the right to protest
What happens if we shift the paradigm?
August 11, 2025
This is only the latest in an endless series of articles on what government needs to do to fulfill its raison d’etre, facilitating the improved well-being of the nation. Few ever question the paradigm that was adopted globally in the 1980s that replaced the once-clearly understood role with one that says the public sector is best seen as a profit-making business competing for customers’ dollars. Few ask what turned the problems of the last quarter-century into seemingly intractible ones that are implied as permanent features of our supposedly best-ever economic system. I’m talking about what George Monbiot termed...
Terry Constanti from Annandale NSW
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
Australia soon to become a nuclear waste dump
August 11, 2025
Finally, after all the chatter about the cost of AUKUS, delivery, manning, deployment etc somebody is talking about what has been my concern all along: the radiation effect and nuclear waste disposal. I seem to recall reports of beached Russian nuclear submarines rotting away and polluting the Arctic seas and also reports of higher levels of nuclear-related deaths of submariners worldwide. I am concerned that with the usual practice of secrecy on US and UK bases on Australian soil, we will quietly become an unregulated nuclear waste dump for the world, probably without the benifit of cheap storage...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: Lessons for Australia
ASIO mistakes
August 11, 2025
Paddy Gourley makes some excellent points in his analysis of ASIO chief, Mike Burgess’ annual Hawke Lecture. But he is too kind in his assessment of Burgess’ account of ASIO’s historic performance. Burgess’ account of the Combe/Ivanov Affair is at best misleading. Burgess quotes then prime minister, Bob Hawke, saying after the event: There was no question in my mind that we had to be tough, decisive and immediate in our reaction. Any pussy footing around… could have been seen as… soft on the threat of Soviet espionage… I knew it was a sort of make-or-break situation. And...
Paul Malone from Ocean Grove
In response to: Mike Burgess on the ASIO soapbox again
It never was a secret plan
August 11, 2025
It was always a plan to occupy Gaza since day one of the Six-Day war. Are Jeruselem and the Christians safe from the next phasę of the Israeli plan? This plan was written around the 13 century BCE.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide. SA
In response to: Israeli military plans to occupy Gaza City in major escalation of war
Trump's cuts to science are philistine acts
August 11, 2025
The quote “Truth is therefore the aim of science; science is the search for truth from Karl Popper encapsulates the scientific method which he believed would protect future generations from assaults on the truth. Unfortunately, neither Donald Trump nor Robert Kennedy Jr have any notion of the principles underlying science and, consequently, have done irreparable harm to the American people. The cancellation of US$600 million in funding to the company Moderna for development of an mRNA vaccine against bird flu, and then another US$500 million for 22 more projects developing mRNA vaccines, are philistine acts. All because Kennedy thinks...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Trump and Kennedy are destroying global science. Even Einstein questioned facts
Head in the sand politics
August 11, 2025
When politicians of all persuasions spend all their time and our money passing laws to stop the general voting public telling them how they feel (protesting), this is what you get and it's not democracy. I think it's nothing to see here, look over there: politics.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: From Hiroshima to Gaza: Eighty years of failing to contain violence
Fantasy in Tel Aviv and reality in Gaza
August 11, 2025
What is being deliberately spread by complicit Western mainstream media as the truth is the output of a well-oiled and US-funded Israeli PR campaign designed to keep the ugly truth from us. But even within Israel, alternative voices are telling the truth. That truth is that Israel faces an existential crisis, both within its military and its economy. The IDF has suffered vastly more casualties than the Israeli and world public are being told. A figure of 10,000 dead is widely agreed by external military analysts. over 100,000 reservists have failed to turn up when called up and hundreds...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Israeli military plans to occupy Gaza City in major escalation of war
The Jewish resistance
August 11, 2025
Millions of decent Jews around the world have struggled with the conflict between their belief in the state of Israel and the daily atrocities that state is committing against the Palestinian people. Like billions of other people around the planet they are repulsed and nauseated by what is being done in their names. That demonstrates unequivocally the vacuity of the use of the valid problem of antisemitism to cloak these crimes against humanity in the garb of self-defence. I thank these doctors for joining the world community in abhorring these crimes and seeking their immediate cessation.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: How we at Physicians for Human Rights Israel decided that the Gaza war is a geno
We're there: The shame of leaving it too late
August 11, 2025
The genocide continues and still all we get from our government is words, words totally ignored by the Israeli Government and its supporters. No action. No BDS. No recognition of Palestine. But our PM says recognition of Palestine is only a matter of time. What a meaningless comment. It's not time, but what happens in time that is important. What is Anthony Albanese waiting for, what has to happen, in that unspecified length of time, for him and his government to formally recognise Palestine and its people? Is he waiting for the genocide to be complete? Or is he...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: As Netanyahu moves toward full takeover of Gaza, Israel faces a crisis of international credibility
People who live in glass houses...
August 11, 2025
Australians are often quick to condemn the human rights record of other countries. I suggest before doing that, they should first read the 30 July, 2025 letter of the Northern Territory Paediatricians to the chief Minister of the Northern Territory as one example of the inhumane treatment of fellow Australians, in this case the incarceration of Aboriginal children, detailing their poor physical and mental state when the first come to the notice of our justice system. On reading that letter, it's not hard to justify calling Australia a country with an entrenched and systematic racism problem. To those who...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Call for national action to prevent 'torture' or death of incarcerated First Nat
Who is reviled by whom?
August 11, 2025
An extremely well-argued article, but just one small caveat. The reference in the sentence Putin’s Government is perhaps second only to Benjamin Netanyahu’s as the world’s most reviled litigant, depends very closely on the definition of the world that is adopted. Make no mistake if we are genuinely talking about the whole world, rather than just the 15% segment that is the West, then the most reviled litigants are easily the US as number one, followed by its satrap Israel. Russia, for the other 85% of humanity, doesn't score anywhere near the top as is demonstrated by that...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The Russians’ lost plot: will they find serenity or are they dreaming?
Australia must be excluded from any say on Palestine
August 11, 2025
Two main points. First, it is well past time that Australian media commentary about 7 October 2023 take into account what the Israeli media itself noted in 2024, that the so-called “Hannibal Directive” was issued to Israeli forces, resulting in hundreds of cannon shells and missiles fired from gunships and tanks, making it impossible to determine how many Israeli casualties on that day were inflicted by their own forces. Second, it is important that the Australian Government be held accountable for its many-stranded elements of complicity in genocide, and be excluded completely from having any say or playing...
Peter Henning from Melbourne
In response to: Justice for Palestine: Why Hamas must be involved
Our future is waiting in the wings
August 11, 2025
For the last 2000 years, advancements in warfare have altered the state of war and without much pushback. Nuclear is just another progressive armament. As destructive as nuclear has been demonstrated to be, its effectiveness is limited. A technology that has greater power and effectiveness is the digital world. Nah. Nuclear is the least of our problems. We have much greater threats to our future staring us in the face.
Aale Hanse from nsw
In response to: Eighty years with the bomb: How long can our luck continue?
No need to increase the GST
August 11, 2025
Despite all the rhetoric, there is no need to increase the GST. Indeed, there is no need to panic about improving our tax system, overall. However, there is one area of taxation that could do with a massive shake-up, and doing so could solve a lot of problems. Foreign companies — especially mining companies — must be forced to pay their fair share for the right to use our nation's people, resources and infrastructure to make a profit. Despite making huge profits, many such companies have paid no Australian tax for decades – and we know how they do...
Tom Orren from Wamberal
In response to: The GST — past, present, future — and always tense
Taking care of the amputated children of Gaza
August 11, 2025
Most of us are feeling helpless to reach out to the Palestinian children and their families. I would love to donate to help the children who suffered amputations and require prosthetics. I am aware that we would not be able to deliver and provide the prosthetists to Gaza, but we can start to organise financially now so we can act on it as soon as we get an opportunity. I would appreciate if you could bring that up with John Menadue and people following Pearls and Irritations who are feeling helpless to help.
Selma Terzioglu from Melbourne Bonbeach Victoria
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Medibank was radical, Medicare is its reincarnation
August 11, 2025
John Deeble is one of my heroes. He and Whitlam did a radical thing in introducing Medibank. So I was disappointed with the use of Medicare throughout this article. I remember clearly after only a few years of Medibank, Malcolm Fraser's Government gleefully destroyed it, for ideological reasons and following the wishes of the AMA. They changed it to Medibank Private, just another health insurance company. A good, essential thing was cruelly snatched away. If you couldn't afford private health insurance, tough. You paid for healthcare, or went without. It was devastating for many Australians. I remember clearly...
Deanne Perry from ACT
In response to: Vale John Deeble - an architect of Medicare
Understanding the 'war' in Gaza
August 11, 2025
1. Why does Hamas not surrender unconditionally and return all hostages? 2. Is there still any actual armed or other resistance by Hamas militants? (if so, where do they get the ammunition?) Why is a “ceasefire” needed if there are no armed, fighting Palestinians? 3. Has any evidence been given by IDF for (repeated): • murdering food/aid seekers • bombing of civilians. 4. How much opposition is there in Israel (by Israelis) to genocide, as opposed to just return of hostages? 5. How much opposition is there within Israel to West Bank attacks by settlers and...
Bede Doherty from Naarm/Melbourne
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
The Indian Ocean Zone of Peace
August 11, 2025
Let’s look back after Gareth Evans’ article, at the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace proposal by Sri Lanka in 1964 which was endorsed by the UN. I recently found a 1984 letter to me by then aviation minister, Kim Beazley. The letter puts the Forces Posture Agreement with US and UK nuclear armed submarines operating from Rockingham in a new light. Beazley said the then federal government was committed to an IOZP. He was involved in lobbying in Washington for continued US participation in the UN Ad-Hoc Committee on Indian Ocean Arms limitation. Warship visits, under the IOZP, he...
Geoff Taylor from Perth
In response to: Eighty years with the bomb: How long can our luck continue?
Perpetrators posing as victims
August 11, 2025
War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not colour his crime with the pretext of justice: Voltaire John nails it again. I, too, was a lifelong member of the ALP but can no longer be a member of a party without a conscience!
les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Towards a one-state solution
August 11, 2025
I commend Kym Davey for making the case that Hamas should participate in future negotiations for a Palestine state, but what has been entirely absent from the discussion is, what state, where? Since 1948, the amount of land that Palestinians occupy has shrunk from 45% to less than 15% today, and Israel is determined to occupy and annex the rest. As Craig Mokhiber, the former New York director for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: “The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter...
Stefan Moore from Sydney
In response to: Justice for Palestine: Why Hamas must be involved
Obliteration was always, and remains, the aim
August 11, 2025
Everything John Menadue writes of the genocide in Gaza is true. I would add only a couple of things. First, as 7 October 2023 didn't come out of nowhere, neither did the Nakba. In 1948, Israel grew out of several terrorist organisations and its early prime ministers came from within those organisations, ie they were terrorists. I couldn't find a quote I remembered from Moshe Dayan on a TV show to the effect Israel was taken at the end of a gun and will be kept the same way but, in searching, found three others from him showing...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Long live the alternative media, especially P&I
August 11, 2025
Re John Menadue's criticism of the media in his article on the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza... Since 1999 I wrote letters to and was regularly published in The Age. Those letters included some about Israel going back over the years. That changed on 7 October 2023. Initially, letters on the nascent days of Israel's genocide went unpublished. All reporting was biased in favour of Israel and actively against Palestine. As time has gone on, it became impossible to ignore what was happening and reports filtered through and letters appeared. As an avid reader and writer of...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
It's not only the ABC
August 11, 2025
By all means, criticise the ABC for its low-quality journalism. There are exceptions, but it's never been the same since the Liberals got their hands on the ABC board. However, we have to remember that our traditional, legacy media are no better. And not only on China. They all take their news with an American bias, and sometimes a UK bias. It is also US and Euro-centric. Our knowledge of countries outside those blocks is all but non-existent if we haven't been dragged into a war there. Alternative and new media does so much better. But the problem...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Australia needs better China coverage. This ABC story just gave us less
Who's got Dibbs on the paranoia?
August 8, 2025
Some of our more devoted Anglophiles have made substantial careers in Australia out of taking the British Empire's view of the rest of the world as threatening to the empire. That view was adopted by the new American empire which succeeded the collapse of the British in the early part of the last century. Most of these Anglophiles were attracted to the Conservative and often racist side of Australian politics. Paul Dibb fitted comfortably into this 18th century mould when associated with Beazley, who, even though in the ALP, shared the attachment to much of the US and...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Layered perversion of Australia's defence policy
Choctaws and Samaritans
August 8, 2025
Re Paul Heywood-Smith’s article: US House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson has just visited Northwest Palestine and declared that it should be called Judea and Samaria. If we follow the current state of Israel's logic based on ancient history, then Samaria belongs to the Samaritans, not to the Jewish state of Israel. Judaism stems from when Eli in the 11th century BC led a split in the people of the man Israel aka Jacob, leaving the Samaritans in Samaria. The Samaritans were not deported to Babylon by the Assyrians, unlike the Jewish people. What would be Johnson’s reaction...
Geoff Taylor from Perth
In response to: Palestine recognised
Anti-racist Jews threatened by Zionist McCarthyism
August 8, 2025
Excellent article by Professor Henry Reynolds. Australians are subject to massive “antisemitism hysteria”. Antisemitism occurs in two equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish antisemitism and anti-Arab antisemitism (including Islamophobia) but these three key terms (and indeed about 80 pertinent terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism”. Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicates that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 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. However, in Australia (as...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: The Segal report and the universities
Democracy or police state?
August 8, 2025
What the court system did was not legalise the march but słow the steady march towards a police state. Any attempt by the NSW premier to change that, by giving the police even more power, will bring us one step closer to a Trump-style dictatorship.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Watermelons in the rain
If AI reduces the working week, fine
August 8, 2025
I can't think of anything better than a reduction in the working week and an associated Universal Basic Income. People are working much too hard and there are too few people left to care for children, the elderly and the ill. It would be nice to have a world where children are brought up largely by their parents (doesn't have to be just the mother beyond the breast-feeding stage) and not shoved into before school care at 7.30m and collected at 6pm and then out-of-school-hours care for the entire school holidays. It would be nice to have elderly parents...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The end of jobs?
Thank you for your voices
August 7, 2025
To all signatories to the open letter to Mr Albanese, thank you. Perhaps the combined weight of your importance and words will put an end to this country’s unforgivable reluctance to do the right and just thing. As an average Australian citizen I have also written to our prime minister and foreign minister advocating the return of the hostages, the recognition of Palestine, the cessation of all war/weapons-related trade with Israel to no avail. To see Australia’s politicians hand wringing, waiting for when the moment is right is not only disgusting, it is ethically and morally wrong. Palestinians...
Lesley Armstrong from Bathurst NSW
In response to: Open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese MP from Australian former diplomats
China's different road
August 7, 2025
At its most fundamental, the US problem with China is that it has chosen a different road to economic security which the US has finally realised is working better than their model. The US model is untrammelled capitalism with vast expenditures on the military to retain hegemony over the world. The Chinese system is socialism with Chinese characteristics. In the last 40 years, the wage of the average industrial worker in China has risen 130 times (not 130%). In that same period, the wage of the average US industrial worker has risen about 4 times. China has...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Is the ‘China threat’ real or trumped up?
Power without purpose
August 7, 2025
Governments in a West declining in importance in an emerging multipolar world seem to see, at some basic level, that their time in the sun is now ending. The problem is they have no idea of how to respond to that reality. So they are reduced to gesture politics and to acting as though nothing has changed at a geo-political level. Australian Governments of the past couple of decades are a good illustration of that, actually dealing with the clearly identified problems that we face at political, economic and geo-political levels with gestures that will meet with daily media...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Roundtable will fix nothing unless we can all park our self-interest
Diplomacy and civilisation
August 7, 2025
It is encouraging for all Australians who truly value whatever remains of our civilisational values, after decades of pathetic abasement of those values before the otiose criminality of the US, to see a group of eminent retired diplomats show their despair at the failure of our leaders to actually honour those values. I admire their desire to speak out against failure to confront Zionist pressure to support genocide!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese MP from Australian former diploma
Spooks and the need for fear
August 7, 2025
Paddy demonstrates a realistic view of the self-promotion of spooks. They are the least accountable public organisations as they cover their activities with a cloak of national security more often than not to prevent the public from seeing the vast waste of public funds involved. Burgess deals in generalisations and vaguely worded, but titillating, assertions without ever being required to produce for the public paying for this any substantive evidence. It is the position many public servants envy. Much public money and no accountability for its use or misuse. The estimates of savings that he suggests ASIO achieves...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Mike Burgess on the ASIO soapbox, again