Letters to the Editor
A response to Tess Nikitenko
June 5, 2025
I agree with Tess that the restrictions on accurate advertising, which would help potential clients in making wise choices of psychologists, are somewhat arcane and ridiculous. However, as a fellow trauma specialist with a Masters in Counselling and several other accompanying qualifications, when I developed a pamphlet of our services I was contacted by the Australian Psychological Society with an amazing draconian restriction. They informed me that as I was not qualified as a psychologist I was not permitted to use the term psychological anywhere in our pamphlet. To be clear, I was not saying that I or any...
Maggie Woodhead from Perth, WA
In response to: Why psychologists can’t clearly say what they’re trained to do.
Super and social benefits – why the inconsistency?
June 5, 2025
The superannuation changes proposed by Dr Jim Chalmers, if carried, would result in taxation on earnings of superannuation accounts holding over $3 million dollars in assets. The tax-transfer system in general is based on the household unit. The proposed changes would mean that a household with two superannuation accounts would be subject to a super account tax threshold of $6 million, whereas a household of two sharing one superannuation account would be subject to a threshold of $3 million. This is not how the welfare system, or the pension system, works. Centrelink is absolutely rigid about enforcing household...
Roz Averis from Adelaide, SA
In response to: Don't let rich old men tell you the planned super tax is terribly bad
Climate change is a human rights issue
June 4, 2025
Julian Cribb is right to frame the provisional approval of the North West Shelf Extension in human rights terms. The project will add another 4.3 billion tonnes of carbon emissions to the atmosphere in the next 45 years, substantially adding to global warming and consequent extreme weather events. This will have flow-on effects with respect to health and particularly food production, not least through seas flooding the major food producing deltas of the world. These include the Mekong delta in Vietnam which is a mere 84cms above current sea-level. If sea levels rise to between one and two metres...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Merchants of Death
Well done
June 4, 2025
What excellent observations about Richard Marles. Our deputy PM appears to be more interested in the accoutrements of the job than in thinking clearly about issues of international security. Appearing to be well-dressed is no substitute for respresenting his country. Step in to help him, Albo. He certainly needs it.
Phil Huhhes from Heidelberg
In response to: Marles’ tough guy tosh hurts Australia
Woodside grips government policy
June 4, 2025
Murray Watt’s rapid, if preliminary, North West Shelf decision has apparently prioritised the short-term profits of global gas giants, and the jobs of 330 local employees, over securing the survival of rock art which has survived 60,000 years before Woodside’s arrival, and which was under active consideration for World Heritage listing. It also overrides the threats posed to climate, and to future generations, by the methane that this project will emit. These, both detrimental to the national interest, suggest undue influence on government decision-making from Woodside. The 1980s entrepreneur, John Spalvins, had a plaque saying If you’ve got...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: Time again for stewards to do a moral health check-up
Blaming the wrong people
June 4, 2025
This article is true enough, but I cannot accept that the politicians are solely to blame. They (politicians) are elected and are beholden to the voters, at least in Australia. Politicians can try and educate the voter and make the best decisions for our future children, but the voters will rebel when they realise they are the ones who have to pay the price for a future that was not of their making with nothing to be gained from it. A child born today will be able to vote in the year 2043 and will be a...
Aale Hanse from Rverina
In response to: Merchants of death
Marles, the archetypal sycophant
June 4, 2025
It is hard for normal people to understand how Richard Marles, whose views would fit neatly into the right wing of the Liberal or National Parties, has not only found a home in Labor, but has risen to be our national deputy leader. This is a Labor Party with very little relationship to that of the Labor greats like Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating. Marles is a profoundly mediocre man masquerading as a leader and a statesman. He is neither of those things as his ardent prostration and servility before a religious bigot and inebriate like Pete Hegseth clearly...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Marles' tough guy tosh hurts Australia
Nasty theology
June 4, 2025
It seems to me that George Browning has gone far beyond a fair criticism of political Zionism (including Christian Zionism), and the violence and racism of the Israeli state and elements of the population, into what I can only call a sneering, generalised theological putdown of Jews, Judaism, and constant salience of Jewish memory of the ancient land across communities for centuries, including in Europe. There have been constant links across the centuries. And much more care should be taken into making assertions about Jewish belief in exclusivity, particularly in religious terms. It is highly disputed. All this in...
Larry Stillman from Melbourne
In response to: Christianity: the antithesis of Zionism
Another reason why we should get a divorce from the US
June 3, 2025
“Piketty’s conclusion is that capitalism, if left unchecked, generates a concentration of wealth among a tiny minority and this has manifested itself in America. Piketty further argues that merit or hard work, the standard justification for inequality, has little to do with what has been defined as the 'new gilded age'. It has more to do with the nature of capitalism itself in which capital precedes labor, and where profit maximisation becomes the rational basis for human interaction and economic relationships. Piketty critiques the very structure and foundation of capitalism itself.” I’ve just paid $300 to a medical specialist...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: The US dual economy: trending toward the periphery
Unis adopting IHRA definition of antisemitism
June 3, 2025
The decisions [to adopt the IHRA definition] were made from above as might be expected in a corporation by the board and the chief executive and just imposed from on high. But isn't this what our universities have become? With government funding cuts — who can forget in particular PM Morrison's contempt for education? — universities are now corporate-like entities. Free and rigorous thinking and debate are incompatible with reliance on donors who want specific outcomes. In this context, the government is just another donor, wanting to satisfy its lobbyists and donors. The pro-Israel, Israel can do no wrong,...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Conflation and controversy over antisemitism definition
Antisemitism definition-2
June 3, 2025
Thank you Henry for drawing attention to the paradox inherent in the article you wrote. One of the starkest idiocies inherent in the panicked response of university administrators is the implicit invitation to consider Jewish students who oppose the developing genocide in Gaza as non-Jews thereby creatIng the notion that Jewish students demonstrating against the Netanyahu Government’s policy are somehow implicitly converted into “antisemites”! Reminds me of the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza from Jewish philosopher into pariah “non-Jew”, an interesting footnote being the Israeli rehabilitation of Spinoza as a great Jewish thinker by retrospectively reversing his banishment from...
Robert Richter from Victoria
In response to: Conflation and controversy over antisemitism definition
Antisemitism definition
June 3, 2025
I recently attended a performance of the “Armed Man” and for the first time noted the sequence of the music with a background montage of wars that have been fought all in the name of some God or other. The thing that struck me early in the performance was the Sanctus sanctifying the motive for war, the men sent to war believing in its sanctity and prepared to pay its price of sacrifice. Towards the end, the Benedictus offered neat rows of pure white crosses as a memorial to stupidity. Why do we persist in it?
Brian Robertson from Maleny
In response to: Conflation and controversy over antisemitism definition
Gaza – day of reckoning
June 3, 2025
My congratulations to Scott Burchill for his incisive and elegant condemnation of the monster that Zionist Israel has become, or has now exposed itself as being all along. There are different views on when Israel became such a nightmare state, and it really is not important now except to historians. The facts are that Zionist Israel now is the state that Burchill rightly condemns for its moral emptiness. It is unparalleled in modern history for its acts of cruelty, and that Israel has thereby lost its right to a future as a state. Retribution for its unparalleled cruelties awaits...
Tony Kevin from Canberra
In response to: Gaza – the day of reckoning is coming
New TAFE needed
June 3, 2025
Stewart Sweeny’s article should be microchipped and injected into the buttock (left or right) of every federal candidate before the next election. Tough times are coming, and we need to take measures that some will find tough. Eternal tinkering simply wastes national time, money and energy. Policy risks need coherent explanation, but first we must acknowledge their real-world existence, lest public policy debate continue its current path of infantile game playing and party bickering. TAFE is a prime example. Here we are amidst a world-wide technological/industrial/employment revolution of a magnitude not seen since the first coal-fired boiler began spitting...
Neil Hauxwell from Moe, Vic
In response to: Beyond the sensible centre
US incapable of winning a war against China
June 3, 2025
Great analysis covering the stupidity of strengthening an alliance with a country assisting and abetting Nazi regimes in Israel and Ukraine. Just one additional point about it. Even though we know the neoliberal crazies in the US want to invade China and to drag us and any other cretins willing to follow them in this enterprise, the fact is that such an invasion is an impossibility for the US. To do so, it needs a vast armada of specific kinds of merchant vessels to carry a vast army and tens of millions of tons of war supplies across the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Chinese jet shoots down France’s best fighter. NZ and Australia should pay atten
Not Christian, just Caesar in vestments
June 3, 2025
David Rosen misses the most glaring point: these men were not Christian in any meaningful theological or ethical sense. Their project was never about embodying the teachings of Christ — humility, mercy, justice, care for the poor, love of enemy — but about seizing state power to enforce a rigid, patriarchal, nationalist ideology under the guise of religion. Jerry Falwell and his allies didn’t resurrect Christianity; they replaced it with a political identity masquerading as faith. What triumphed in the so-called culture wars wasn’t Christ – it was Caesar in vestments.
David O'Halloran from Hobart
In response to: Jerry Falwell and the Christian culture wars
Not all Americans own shares
June 3, 2025
A lot of articles appear in the media about the effect of tariffs on the stock market. But the majority of Americans don't own shares of any note. However the majority holds down jobs which are now under risk. GM and Ford are closing a number of manufacturing plants due to the effect of tariffs. The chief executive of Harley Davidson motorbikes has rebuked Trump. Amazon is said to be moving its headquarters overseas. Tesla and Musk have almost become blacklisted. Delivery and truck drivers are laid off due to lack of products being shipped to America. Travel and...
Ian Bowrey from Hamilton South
In response to: "China's calm response to US' impulsive tariffs gets noticed"
In the thrall of Israel
June 3, 2025
Henry Reynolds is a very clear thinker and spells out the case for Palestine's future. The chance of Australia's political elite — that small bunch that operates within Albanese's shadow — responding unequivocally in Palestine's favour is unlikely. It is in the thrall of Israel's international posturing. The American press shows many of their federal politicians are likewise beholden to that country and Murdoch is repeatedly reported to have connections of a sort. His media reporting does not suggest otherwise. All this leads to actions and reactions by Australian politicians who see themselves answerable to foreign influencers rather...
Ian Bowrey from Hamilton South
In response to: A defining moment in the future of Palestine
Faux ideology
June 3, 2025
Jenny Hocking is spot on with her denunciation of the National Party. That group lost its ideological bearings when it changed its name from the Country Party. Back in those days, the members looked like farmers and acted in their interests and of their communities. To expand their political influence, they rebadged themselves as Nationals and sought to gain seats in the urban areas. To avoid conflict with the Liberals, they worked out a more aligned Coalition. Instead of looking to the future and the need for water in their country areas, they support coal mines, gas and...
Ian Bowrey from Hamilton South
In response to: The Coalition splits – maybe not.
Gas export controls
June 3, 2025
One of the issues consistently raised with the approval for the North West Shelf extension is the impact of the use of the gas in the importing countries. This impact is generally ignored. What I would like to see is something akin to our position on the export of uranium which is contingent on the uranium only being used for certain purposes. If a broadly similar position was adopted for our gas exports, we should, for example, only export to countries that have a credible pathway to net zero by 2050 (IPCC endorsed?), and failure to adhere to the...
Brian Bycroft from Evans Head NSW
In response to: Green light for gas: North West Shelf gas plant cleared to run until 2070
Murray Watt's grasslands opportunity
June 3, 2025
On the same day Peter Sainsbury’s article on endangered grasslands appeared, a critically endangered Leadbeater’s Possum was spotted for the first time in Kosciuszko National Park. The Biodiversity Council says this rare sighting highlights the need to conserve large areas of high-quality habitat, even where key species haven’t been detected before. As Sainsbury points out, the biodiversity of the world’s grasslands supports over a billion people and stores a third of the world’s terrestrial carbon — second only to forests — playing a key role in mitigating climate change. Yet, grasslands face mounting threats. The World Resources Institute warns...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Freshwater systems and grasslands, forgotten nature and climate heroes
Climate truth
June 3, 2025
I'm beyond disappointment when it comes to your news bulletin. Time and time again, your reporters push false and misleading information. You trumpet that you endeavour to uncover and report the truth. Every time you publish an article on climate change you not only do the opposite of reporting the truth but you push the false narrative of the WEF and UN. That's where your articles border on crimes to news publishing. To continually print the weaponised narrative on climate change/crisis you do truth and humanity a disservice. If you have a investigative reporter that has a...
Sean Basham from Bunurong Country, Victoria
In response to: https://johnmenadue.us14.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8074bf8ebb1d809ea8da4b14a
The cost of the WA vote is plain for all to see
June 3, 2025
Following swift public approval of the North West Shelf extension, one can only assume that the decision was taken well before the election was called, when Labor was behind in the polls and needed the WA vote. It’s not just our environmental laws that need repairing, it’s our electoral laws, donations and truth in advertising. Having a large majority and a weak Opposition does not bode well for any real change or any real improvement. Fight on David, perhaps Albanese will come to realise that a large majority doesn’t come with a guaranteed third term.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: the-north-west-shelf-isnt-just-another-gas-
It's time to end mainstreaming
June 3, 2025
It's time to admit that mainstreaming mental health patients into public hospitals has failed. Part of the reforms to mental health services in the 1990s and 2000s, mainstreaming was supposed to be a recognition that mental health patients deserved care and support in the general hospital stream. It was intended to break down stigma. What it has done is left patients untreated in emergency departments for too many hours. In 2012, while working as an agency nurse, I treated mental health patients in EDs. They then had often been there for two days. Now it's four days and beyond...
Jennifer Haines from Glossodia
In response to: The great mental health experiment.. and why it went so wrong
Good practice in defence procurement
June 3, 2025
If only Australia would crib the defence document produced by the US Congressional Research Service in March, ignoring though its belligerence towards China. Pages 41-5 especially. It notes that project cost blowouts are often the result of failure to do an analysis of alternatives, and a business case (neither done for AUKUS), but projects become “too big to fail”. Building subs in the US has a labour deficit due to the US economy’s switch from manufacturing, it says, and notes the depth of the resource and supply chain needed to build subs. The US has had to set up...
Geoff Taylor from Perth
In response to: New Zealand cribbed Australian defence documents
Would you buy a used climate policy from him?
June 3, 2025
Peter Dutton and his backers portrayed the prime minister as weak. The Labor campaign portrayed him as an everyman: the slightly daggy dog lover. David Pocock has exposed the real Anthony Albanese; the sly dealmaker and faction manipulator who won the west for Labor by selling out generations of his fellow Australians to the interests of tax-shy fossil fuel corporations. Only anyone who still hangs up a Christmas stocking would believe the deal with Woodside and the Cook Government hadn’t been sealed before the voting booths opened. Pocock’s revelations also expose the straight out lies we’ve knowingly been...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: Labor's climate talk a lot of hot gas
Skullduggery vs science
May 30, 2025
Re Samantha Hepburn’s article: The Swiss village of Blatten was flattened by a collapsing glacier the day Murray Watt approved the North West Shelf gas project. The hanging glacier in Chile no longer hangs. The Manning River very recently reached its highest flood level ever. Whole villages in the Pacific face extinction by flooding. There have been terrible bushfires in the US, Portugal, Canada and Australia. Where are you coming from Mr Watt? In WA, we have just seen the science on pollution damage to the rock art from the existing gas plant deliberately manipulated by, or through,...
Geoff Taylor from Perth
In response to: Green light for gas: Northwest Shelf gas plant cleared to run until 2070
Scrap DIV 296 super tax
May 30, 2025
Tell the government to scrap the DIV 296 Super legislation. Replace it with a new one that sets the limit of all TSB — Total Superannuation Balance — to a maximum of $3 million. Any excess must be taken out, or face a heavy penalty at personal tax rate of 49.5% + Medicare Levy. After all the Liberal Party, under John Howard and Peter Costello, legislated unlimited accumulations of super balances with the most generous concessions.
Alex Teoh from ACT
In response to: Don’t let rich old men tell you the planned super tax is terribly bad
Israel and Netanyahu are only partly to blame
May 30, 2025
I cannot at all understand the insistence of Western leaders and influencers in focusing so much blame on Israel and Netanyahu for the horror of Gaza and the plight of the Palestinian people … when they know damned well that this holocaust is being controlled by the Americans and can thus be stopped or moderated b them at any time. And of course, the statehood question can also be resolved for the Palestinians by a stroke of the American pen. Clearly, they prefer to dump it all on Israel (despite the effect this is having on the global...
Howard Debenham from Maroochydore, Queensland
In response to: Why Australia should recognise Palestinian statehood
Helping young people with mental ill-health
May 30, 2025
Most mental ill-health, whoever experiences it, is preventable. That means that it does not have to happen at all. It is not in most cases genetic or neurological in origin, but is instead caused by ambient determinants – anything from bullying to financial and employment distress to lack of hope in a desirable and sustainable future to childhood abuse and trauma, which in all of its foms accounts for an exceptionally high incidence of problems throughout life. None of this is usually considered, and prevention usually means waiting until somebody needs help, which isn't prevention at all, but at...
Stephen Lake from Moss Vale NSW
In response to: Three ways to support young people with mental ill-health
Incorrect designation
May 29, 2025
I would have thought that Ms Broinowski would ensure her facts were checked before commenting. Bezalel Smotrich is not the defence minister, but finance minister. Katz is the defence minister. Both equally vile. Ed: This has been corrected.
Ralph Renard from Melbourne
In response to: Palestinian Genocide
John L. Menadue… 90 years old… Australia's next PM
May 29, 2025
Our John Laurence Menadue might be 90 years old… but right now we need him as our prime minister, and our minister for defence and our ministers for at least half a dozen other ministries. Give him all those jobs. What an open-minded, intelligent, experienced and extremely well-educated Australian he is.
James Scammell from BOWDEN, ADELAIDE, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5007
In response to: Our retreat from Asia has become a rout
Our retreat from Asia has become a rout
May 29, 2025
John Menadue has written correctly and persuasively about Australia's failure to engage with Asia, and about our failure to try to understand the region. The fact is that Asian studies, and, in particular, China studies, have gone backwards over the last two decades. He lists various attempts at progress, and there is no point in repeating them. But he is absolutely right to criticise the failure of these efforts and absolutely right that it is time to do something about it. The reasons for these multiple failures are complex. But I believe the main one is the deeply-rooted Sinophobia...
Colin Mackerras from Capalaba, Queensland
In response to: Our retreat from Asia has become a rout
Comment on John Menadue's article
May 29, 2025
This article is very well written. I think US influence is very pervasive and instituitionalised. In 2023, The Age published two separate reports stating the Oz government has approved several US generals and admirals and CIA operatives to be based here. I did not read of any public comments or reactions. Under their watchful eyes, any major policy changes in the interest of Oz will be very difficult. Most of our citizens have poor Asia literacy, let alone proficiency in Asian languages. I suggest changing our history syllabus (50%) to cover all the major civilisations and religions (Western/Christianity, Chinese,...
Cjeng Toh from Keysborough
In response to: Our retreat from Asia has become a rout
And not a word about West Papua
May 28, 2025
The Jakarta Post editorialises bravely by recalling how Indonesia's vibrant democratic tapestry has been woven of our blood and tears. But the weaving of that tapestry is still going on with the blood and tears of West Papua. We have a regional problem to face, namely how we define the TNI's ongoing West Papuan operations even while the 27 years is being celebrated, even as we are told an ominous revision of the TNI Law comes into force focusing upon the expansion of military operations other than war. Is the Jakarta Post expecting us, as regional friends, to...
Bruce Wearne from Ballarat Central
In response to: Indonesia remembers the coming of democracy, 27 years later
ACTU statement is just more words
May 28, 2025
In the 1930s, trade unions took a stand and banned the shipping of war materials to Japan. Those shipments stopped. We are still shipping war materials to Israel. Why not now, instead of the same weasel words like we support the tw0-state solution favoured by our government? And just about anybody, apart from the government of Israel which screams never at every opportunity? Have you just been too gutted by successive Liberal governments? Or you don't want to embarrass Albo? These religious maniacs need to be stopped, now!
Jerry Cartwright from Perth
In response to: ACTU statement on Gaza May 2025
Their silence is deafening
May 28, 2025
The recent federal election presented me with a most unwelcome and unpalatable less bad choice. Dutton's Coalition had little appeal, and Albanese's Labor not much more. But, being a life-long supporter of the left, I held my nose and voted for my local Labor candidate. I wish her, and the government of which she is a part, well. And then there is Palestine. By refusing to condemn Israel for the most recent ethnic cleansing in that blood-soaked land, Albanese and and his cabinet have made Australia, and by extension all Australians, complicit in what is happening over there....
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Australia still doing little as the Gaza genocide gets worse
City v Country: Libs v Nats v Australia
May 27, 2025
Why but for the purpose of re-election should the Coalition ever have existed? The L/ NP has, in most instances, been in minority government. Generally there is a difference on many levels between Australians from the country and Australians from the city similar to the difference between weather in the country and climate in the city. The ongoing climate wars show no signs of abating. It is similar to the difference between the quarter-acre blocks and the farm fiefdom. Several recent election results are a classic example, with the LNP drifting or being driven to the Nats' views...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Not many splashed in the short-lived teacup revolt
Double standards
May 27, 2025
I love your work, Henry Reynolds, and I agree with your assessment of the depraved injustice Palestinians have been subjected to. I do however, disagree with the sentence Moscow’s annexation of the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine is an international outrage, because as a historian, surely one must be aware of what led to this situation. Hint, Henry, have you not heard of the US-initiated Maidan Coup, the subsequent discriminatory language and social service laws against Ukraine's ethnic Russian community, the refusal of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians to be overnight treated as second-class citizens and the subsequent eight-year siege of the...
Dieter Barkhoff from Box Hill, Victoria
In response to: A defining moment for the future of Palestine
FOI application for Gaza correspondence
May 27, 2025
Ghaith Krayem needs to be reassured that many non-Muslims support him, and incidentally, despite huge efforts to blur the picture, we are not anti-Jewish. But many of us are shocked that a state presumably founded to realise Jewish values in practice has gone far beyond a reasonable response to 7 October 2023. It seems as if Israel is now prepared to Hannibal the remaining hostages, who could have been freed under the early 2025 ceasefire, which it abrogated. I feel sure large numbers of people have written to the prime minister and foreign minister about the continuing massacre, but...
Geoff Taylor from Perth
In response to: The cost of conscience in post-October 7 Australia
Coalition's predicament an opportunity to regroup?
May 27, 2025
Thanks Jack for the excellent insight. Andrew Hastie is likely to be a significant figure in the future for conservative leadership. He concedes that the future of the Liberal Party is not assured. The Nats are a bit more solid based, but are similarly affected by divergent views. The Independents didn't surge this month but they are a consolidated phenomenon, representing those who would vote Liberal or Nats if those parties had evolved. Is it time for a reformation of a progressive, modern New Liberal-National Party, leaving the Trumpist conservatives and SkyTV mob to regroup with the...
Dave Young from North Queensland
In response to: Not many splashed in the short-lived teacup revolt
Deforming education
May 26, 2025
Of course, education in Australia needs reform. For one thing, if public education funding matched the revenue that goes to private schools (fees plus government subsidies), private schools could not claim the superiority which they need to survive. Also, fewer parents would feel the need to pay for private education. Not only would this level the educational playing field, but it would have a downward effect on the cost of living. I mean, who needs to fork out an extra $5000 a year, per kid, for the same education? As Liz Kirkby used to say, Public schools should be...
Tom Orren from Wamberal
In response to: Ready for real education reform?
Antisemitism and genocide
May 26, 2025
Every politician (except The Greens) and every university chancellor and vice-chancellor should be compelled to read John Menadue's article Weaponisation of ‘antisemitism’ hides primitive savagery of Palestinian genocide every day before breakfast. They should also have to read Senator David Shoebridge's statement, this isn’t about a political stance – this is about when you see a genocide happening in real time on your phone and on your TV, when you see thousands of children being killed, when you see starvation being used as a weapon of war, you have this, I think, basic human responsibility to do everything you...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Weaponisation of ‘antisemitism’ hides primitive savagery of Palestinian genocide
Don't forget demand in trying to fix housing
May 26, 2025
While not disagreeing with any of the five solutions to solving the housing crisis, I find it extraordinary that the issue of demand was not addressed. And yet, Australia has experienced significant demand in recent years because of very high population growth. About four-fifths has come from net overseas migration which even exceeded half a million in 2023. The other aspect of demand, natural increase, is still over 100,000 but decreasing gradually. The maths is simple really; divide your total population growth by 2.5 (average number of people per dwelling) and that's how many new homes you need that...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Australia is forecast to fall 262,000 homes short of its housing target. We need bold action
At last...
May 26, 2025
Dear John, I want to thank you for your great piece in P&I. I, too, am horrified by Anthony Albanese's silence and was confused until I found out that his lawyer Leibler is head of the Zionist Federation of Australia. That itself should constitute an charge of undue influence and have him stand down. This is what I wrote. I was the first woman to sit on the National Asbestos Advisory Committee way back in the early 1980s. Interestingly, I could not get it published in the MSM. Take care.
Melody Kemp from Balmoral Brisbane
In response to: Weaponisation of anti Semitism..
Another world court system
May 26, 2025
I never thought I would say this but the world needs another level of courts wielding an appropriate level of punishment. We need a court system that rules on the inappropriate use of significant words and labels. In the case of the US, it would start with the misuse of the words united and democracy, two words that seldom apply to America. Other examples would be worldwide the misuse of the words antisemitism and holocaust. I would seek a ruling on the use of Christianity and quotes from Old Testament in the same sentence.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: The US Supremes, not its critics, are trashing the rule of law
Response to Sustainability, yes, but also a Plan B
May 26, 2025
In response to Geoff Taylor's letter on nuclear energy and his argument that the spread of generation is limited, I feel one must remember Australia, for many decades, relied on centralised coal power. Personally, I feel nuclear is unjustified due to waste management and costs. However, I feel there needs to be some changes to accommodate our needs with renewable energy. I feel the transmission network could be installed underground at a level that allows normal farming above. The costs are higher, but I feel with greater use, the costs would drop. The advantage is that bushfire is less...
Doug Foskey from Tregeagle
In response to: Sustainability, yes, but also a Plan B
Long-contested histories in Middle East
May 26, 2025
Full credit to John Menadue for this article. I found another short one that helps explain the geopolitical history of the region. Its history is long and confusing and heavily bloodstained. This article offers some context: Philip C Almond, 'Was Jesus a Palestinian?', The Conversation, 22 November 2024.
Ian Bowrey from Hamilton South
In response to: weaponisation-of-antisemitism-hides-primiti
Harmony and goodwill are the only options
May 26, 2025
Alex Lo draws attention to the economic dilemma in which our region finds itself: trade imbalances with China and the belligerence of Beijing. The focus on trade growth presumes a growth in consumerism. However, he fails to mention the growth of environmental instability this, often superfluous, consumption is creating. The three basic economic needs, food, clothing and shelter, become impossible goals in the region, or globally for that matter, as an overheated atmosphere drives a degree of climate change humanity hasn’t faced since the end of the last glaciation. The balance of trade shuffling Lo calls for is...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: Closer ASEAN ties can help China counter US militarisation ofregion