Letters to the Editor
Assessment of the planet known as Earth
August 28, 2025
The Earth is sick. It is losing species to extinction at an accelerating rate. Its forests and grasslands are shrinking daily. Its environment exceeds safe limits in six of its nine key planetary boundaries. Irreversible tipping points are gaining strength – icecaps and permafrost melting, forests shrinking, coral reefs dying, ocean currents changing. This sickness has its roots in the planet’s dominant life-form – intelligent bipeds who have learned to exploit the planet’s natural resources. These beings have thrived over the last 12,000 years of exceptional climate stability, but in recent decades this life-form’s demands have grown to a...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The great dying
Impartiality and human values
August 28, 2025
In the dying days of the age of reason, we seem to cling to our belief that reason, disconnected from other human values such as ethics, common sense, intuition, humanism and a moral sense, is a sufficient guide to how we should act. Reason might, for instance, be said to dictate that both sides of any argument should be permitted expression and that to do so reflects impartiality. This implies that impartiality is a value that should predominate over others such as morality, law and humanity. The assumption underlying this approach is that both sides of any argument have...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The ABC's public comment guidelines: A 'crackdown' on management, not workers
Common sense in an incoherent land of fear
August 28, 2025
When reading John's articles, I often find myself admiring their pith and substance, but naggingly wondering whether that is because he so frequently accords with my own views. I comfort myself with the thought that common sense can be a relatively common antidote to ideological incoherence. China has, since 1978, consistently acted upon a foreign policy guided by their five principles of peaceful co-existence. They are mutual respect for each others' sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each others internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence. More than any other country...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: For 35 years after Vietnam, we had a self-reliant defence policy. We need it aga
Do these times suit Albanese’s leadership style?
August 26, 2025
While this is an excellent opinion piece, it seems to assume that time is available to continue with “business as usual”. Unfortunately, science and physics do not appear to have been consulted in arriving at this assumption. Both are now abundantly clear that not only is “business as usual’ no longer sustainable, but that the actions now required to maintain a future for Homo sapiens and all other life forms on this planet are nothing short of revolutionary. Significant changes that have advanced the species, such as abolition of slavery, female franchise etc, were not achieved by continuing...
Peter Keightley from Mount Martha Victoria
In response to: Kate McGeorge’s Albanese's politics of patience: Democracy needs mature leade
Yes I can, yes I can, said the Little Red Engine
August 26, 2025
As usual, Julian Cribb presents us with a truly vivid picture of the mess we’ve made of our short tenure on Planet Earth. Gifted the twin miracles of perception and self-expression, a garden of abundance and clean air and water to breathe and drink, we’ve allowed our basest nature to prevail. It gives meaning to the ethics of the early Christians who featured the seven deadly sins in their theology. I suspect they adopted them, as they read like a universal roadmap for any organised society. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder where we’d be if we’d stopped to think...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The great dying
Contraction of the human enterprise must start now
August 26, 2025
In Julian Cribb's article, water scientist Peter Gleick is quoted as saying: “The size of the world’s population, the nature of our consumption and economies and our use of energy and water resources have combined to threaten our very existence. This basically sums up why we humans find ourselves in a state of overshoot. Our impact on the Earth is simply too great, thus contraction of our population and economies must start happening now. This is not to say that all aspects of our economies have to contract. Technological developments that lead to decarbonisation must be encouraged, not least...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The great dying
Renewable food
August 26, 2025
The planet is “now dominated by two species, cows and humans”. That is Julian Cribb's stark illustration of the consequences of planet-wide over-consumption. The Potsdam Institute’s latest report describes how this gross explosion in animal life “has come at the price of massive degradation of plant life”. What is to be done? In his article “Why the world needs renewable food (14/7), Cribbs set out the three pillars of a renewable world food supply: regenerative farming, urban food (sustainably using water and other resources with in urban environments) and deep ocean aquaculture. Some Australian farmers have adopted regenerative...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The great dying
Chopping the logging myths
August 26, 2025
Thanks to David Lindenmayer for his excellent piece destroying the conveniently contrived myths which offer the justification for logging Australia's native forests. The article's message to words ratio is powerful. Yes, David, there is no rational justification for the ongoing logging of these forests, now almost all woefully miserable echoes of what they once were. The state of the forests is repeated in the numbers and health of the species native to this habitat. David has produced a brief yet concise piece that should be overwhelmingly persuasive to clear-minded people. It deserves to be mass-copied and dropped in...
Bruce Foskey from Blackwood, Vic
In response to: Cutting through the spin - Ten logging myths in the new ABARES report
Really? Will Australia act against Netanyahu?
August 26, 2025
Jack Waterford says in connection with ICC warrants out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would, for example, be arrested if he came to Australia. Really? Is Waterford that confident? I can't be the only one who isn't at all confident that would be the case. Given Australia's failure to take any concrete action to halt the genocide in Palestine, preferring instead to serve up word salads including, in this context, its belated plan to recognise Palestine, I can see that Australia's strongest action should Netanyahu land here would be to turn him back. Bravery has...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Peace in Gaza needs a full accounting by both sides
Trust, a commodity in short supply
August 26, 2025
A good article by James. He attributes to Michael Steele the most optimistic statement about trust that could possibly be made without prompting guffaws. Steele said: The core of our alliance for the last 80 years has been trust, and [Trump] has broken that trust. A more perceptive observation of US foreign policy goals and processes is attributable to Henry Kissinger when he said to be America's enemy is dangerous, to be its friend is fatal. He also said that America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. To say that we have ever trusted the US...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australia and Taiwan caught between Trump and Xi’s great-man fantasies
Active forest management makes fire risk worse
August 26, 2025
Peter Sainsbury notes that while the world’s forests still act as a net carbon sink, their capacity to do so has fallen by 75% in just two decades. Some, such as the Bolivian Amazon and Canadian boreal forests, are now even net sources of carbon. The main cause of deforestation in North America and Asia is wildfire, while in Latin America and Southeast Asia it is permanent agriculture. In Australia, deforestation continues through land clearing for cattle and sheep grazing. In 2024, the Australian Conservation Foundation exposed 50 cases in one week, including the bulldozing of “20 rugby fields’...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Environment: Humanity’s big success: turning forests from saviours to spoilers
Labor and Coalition ignore anti-racist Jewish views
August 26, 2025
Excellent and timely article by eminent Indigenous Australian Gregory Andrews. Sir Isaac Isaacs (Australia’s first Jewish and first Australian-born governor general) carefully and expertly demolished racist Zionism in the brilliant, 61-page booklet entitled “PALESTINE: Peace and Prosperity or War and Destruction? POLITICAL ZIONISM: Undemocratic, Unjust, Dangerous” (January 1946). For details of this and other eminent anti-racist Jewish opinion Google “Jews against racist Zionism” from which one discovers the wisdom of numerous anti-racist Jewish writers from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn and including numerous anti-racist Jewish Australians (most notably today the humane and anti-racist Jewish Council of Australia). Sir...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Never underestimate the power of the mining lobby
August 25, 2025
Once again, we blame China for our own inadequacies. Sinophobia never gets its fair share of headlines. Just because they were smart enough to see this coming, we get upset China is only doing what is common for the mining companies in particular, and global bussiness in general: manipulating the market to maximise profit to their advantage What market forces you may ask. OPEC etc? In the case of China, they have ensured their own supply needs with a profit thrown in, while sucessive Australian Governments give our wealth away for some election funding and a few...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: China’s critical minerals chokehold sparks Quad action
Isaac Isaacs' legacy
August 25, 2025
Gregory Andrews outlines Sir Isaac Isaac’s opposition to political Zionism, a stance that has divided the Jewish community over many years. Writing shortly after World War II, Isaacs foresaw the ongoing conflict: “any attempt to establish Jewish dominance [in Palestine] would inevitably lead to bloodshed.” Isaacs was a staunch defender to Britain. “[A Jewish state would] threaten not merely the prestige but the integrity of the Empire,” he wrote, also noting that the region experienced a “marvellous transformation” under the British mandate. Historians would likely disagree at just how marvellous the British were after defeating the Ottomans, seizing the...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Start by calling Trump what he is: a dictator
August 25, 2025
The best way Australia can defend the International Criminal Court is by complying with its decisions. Another way is to face some reality. Calling Donald Trump the worst president America has ever had is akin to calling Adolf Hitler Germany’s worst ever chancellor. True, both were elected by popular and fair vote, but once in power, all semblance of democratic process was demolished and what those in power wanted, those in power got. Moreover, they are not alone. Israel and Iran are nations divided, while poor old Russia, North Korea and China are countries under authoritarian regimes that...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: Australia must defend international criminal court
Sir Isaac Isaacs
August 25, 2025
Gregory Andrews may not be aware that at the time Sir Isaac Isaacs opposed a Jewish state, the political background was that Palestine was under the British Mandate and so supporting the creation of a Jewish state meant being disloyal to the mother country. His civic conviction was part of a political debate within the Jewish community that pitched British loyalists against those who supported the establishment of a Jewish state. That debate largely died once the British Mandate ended and Israel was created.
Harold Zwier from Melbourne
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Full text of Trump’s February diktat about the ICC
August 25, 2025
Greg Barns makes a clear call. It is worth viewing Donald Trump’s February diktat against members of the ICC. A total of 125 nations are ratified parties to the ICC, while the US, Russia, China, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen and Israel are among those who are not. As the ICJ has also delivered advisory opinions on the war in Palestine, Australia must stand up for both the ICC and the ICJ, action their decisions, and protect their judges and staff and their families from actions of the US, especially as our own Hilary Charlesworth is a judge on...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Australia must defend the International Criminal Court
Exemplifying intelligent progress
August 25, 2025
An excellent article, setting out a lot of facts about China's progress in clean energy that Western mainstream media never mentions, except when it can be attacked using some perversion of logic and common sense. What is little known is that China has in recent years planted in excess of 13 billion trees on nearly five million hectares of previously degraded land and has a goal of planting 70 billion by 2030. It is also re-claiming deserts as productive lands and leads the world in solar and wind power as well as electric vehicles. It makes sound common...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Shared vision, greener together: China and Australia unlock opportunities in eco
Aggression and unintended consequences
August 25, 2025
And just think how stupidity and determination to be the boss caused all this. China was, and is, more than happy to continue to supply any country with the rare earths that they refine, so long as they refrain from breaching China's five principles of peaceful co-existence. They are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence. These are the last commitments the West are prepared to make after 500 years of ignoring them around the world in pursuit of...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s critical minerals chokehold sparks Quad action
Gaza's civilian toll deliberate?
August 25, 2025
The overwhelmingly obvious question regarding these appalling statistics is whether it is deliberate or collateral damage as the Israelis claim. The best comparison is with the civilian death toll in the USSR in World War II, which was an intentional act to create lebensraum in the East for the German people. In total, 27 million people were killed in the USSR by Germany; of those nine million were military casualties and 18 million were civilians. That means two-thirds of those killed were civilians from a deliberate campaign of genocide against civilians. The Nazi war machine was an elaborately constructed...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Israeli data shows 83% of Gaza war dead are civilians: Report
I hope you die before you get old
August 25, 2025
I've been rewriting this song since I've reached a mature age and been taunted by the derogatory word boomer. Still fiercely against injustice in the world, I'm in a choir of mostly women over 65. We sing a lot of raunchy songs, many protesting against injustice. I've rearranged a few words to enjoy my present rage and I've changed the iconic I hope I die before I get old to I hope you die before you get old for those who blame others for their own inadequacies.
Diana Rickard from Tumbling Waters NT
In response to: Still talkin’ ’bout My Generation
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