Letters to the Editor
Daoism and diplomacy
October 24, 2025
Fred has explained well the subtlety of the Daoist philosophy which originated between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. It well illustrates the continuity and sophistication of Chinese civilisation over millennia. If Chinese culture is the great granddaddy, then the West is the wayward great, great, great, great grandchild that is yet to mature. The problem for the West is that we were the arrogant descendants of the primitive tribes roaming Europe in the Dark Ages when Chinese civilisation had been flowering for thousands of years and we retained the primitive instincts of fight or flight long after...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China, US or us? Australia’s Upper Path in the global minerals race
And Australia does same old, same old
October 24, 2025
We saw after the UN had identified more than 1000 Israeli actions that broke the [January 2025] ceasefire, Australia doing precisely nothing to recognise the offences. Now, with a widely-documented Israeli flip of the bird to the latest ceasefire conditions — and which contravenes, as usual, international law — we see Australia leaping into inaction. How soon will it be before our foreign minister issues a serious concern statement calling on Hamas to stop whingeing and get on with starving and dying from lack of aid as they are supposed to?
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: After ICJ ruling, can UN relief agency UNRWA resume full Gaza operations?
Handing over our lunch money
October 24, 2025
If you were unsure what gaslighting or coercive control was, you need only look at the Trump administration to receive a master class. Gaslighting: Trump declares at regular intervals, I am the peacemaker while funnelling billions to perpetuate a genocide that could not have happened without his ongoing support. I have created peace, he declares while still allowing Israel to starve and bomb innocent Palestinians because hostage bodies are still under rubble caused by his bombs. Coercive control: World leaders stumble over themselves to prostrate before Trump, to land a photo at the White House, believing that...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
Failure of water fluoridation
October 23, 2025
Clearly, the incorporation of dental health services into Medicare is long overdue. But Lesley Russell has glossed over the obvious question: “Why isn’t dental health better in Australia, one of the most extensively fluoridated countries in the world?” The answer is given implicitly in the scientific reviews by the Cochrane Library, the gold standard in impartial systematic reviews of medications and medical procedures. Cochrane’s latest report on fluoridation, published in 2024, reviewed 157 non-randomised studies. (There are no double-blind randomised controlled trials supporting claims of enormous benefits of fluoridation.) Cochrane found that fluoridation may reduce dental caries by...
Mark Diesendorf from BEROWRA HEIGHTS
In response to: Dental health – time for a small, cost-effective revolution
Sold out to capitalism
October 23, 2025
What we all need to learn from this latest round of arse-licking is that Trump is the end result when government sells out to capitalism. It has been obvious for a long time and Australian governments have foolishly followed the US lead like lemmings over a cliff. The Teals and the latest election result may well be an indicator that the electorate has woken up and had enough. With the LNP brawling among themselves, unlike the carbon tax and the No vote, they may not be able to get their millionaire/media mates together to win back their voters. ...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
The Americanisation of Australia
October 23, 2025
The insidiously overwhelming Americanisation of Australia is proceeding apace, but we cannot yet predict when our nation will be referred to as Southwest America (formally Australia) nor can we predict when China will be referred to as Northwest America (formally China). The increasingly despised and contemptible US has become a appalling moral wreck of a country, yet its drongo population has allowed Trumpian imbecility to worsen hourly without rejecting its administration entirely. Trump should never been elected.
Peter Bright from Tasmania
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
No one size fits all – a lesson for the West
October 23, 2025
A superb analysis of the dogged blindness of the West to the reality that their system is not only the only system, but potentially far from the best. But also a great illustration of the way history and culture determine what is best rather than having a system shoved down your throat which ignores that history and culture. This should be a text in every management and foreign policy course in the West.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: To avert war, the West must shatter the mirror by which it views China
Racism: Redux or just perpetual?
October 23, 2025
The most detestable characteristic of European Christian civilisation is its long-standing and almost genetic predisposition to a mindset of racial superiority. That is exercised serially on the chosen racial inferior people of the day. For centuries, it was the European Jews blamed for the death of Christ and thus to be removed or at the very least excluded from polite society. Then, during the long period of brutal and criminal imperialism and colonialism, it was the brown-skinned inhabitants of much of the rest of the world. We still inhabit that mean-spirited and vacuous space. That is easily demonstrated...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Islamophobia in Australian schools: What the Special Envoy’s report means for ed
Winter is coming in Gaza
October 23, 2025
Meg Schwarz makes a good point about women and the Board of Peace (what would Golda Meir think?) But I sense a lack of urgency with winter coming again in Gaza. Where are the six engined Antonovs which transported portable housing to Cambodia after the defeat of Pol Pot? Where is the move for a new prefabbed harbour on the Gaza coast better than the US constructed one 18 months ago which failed in a storm? Germany and China, for example, are good at modular housing and engineering; get them positively and urgently involved. Our government is contributing one...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Women are missing from peace negotiations, from strategic decision making
Labor's pusillanimity
October 23, 2025
This reminds me of what Cassius said to Brutus “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar). The problem is the whole West seems to be underlings to a clearly demented and power-hungry narcissist!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
Joining in the madness
October 23, 2025
Good article, Greg Barns! Would we have known about this outrage if we simply relied on the ABC to tell us? Thank you. Shouldn't we now also be asking why the ABC didn't embarrass the prime minister and ambassador by publicly boycotting the event? Once more the Australian Government's appeasement — like that of so many other governments — is simply endorsing the rogue régime this criminal now heads. This cannot end well. The prime minister and the ambassador, by their indulgence, are not only undermining their own standing in this polity but they erode our Commonwealth's dignified...
Bruce Wearne from BALLARAT CENTRAL
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this weekAlbanese and Rudd
Global warming still not scary enough
October 23, 2025
In spite of the fact that global ice melting is happening with shocking speed, future melting is unpredictable enough for it to be left out of key IPCC calculations. The sea level rise figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only reflect the expansion of warming water. AdaptNSW, a branch of the NSW Government, says, “include processes associated with the melting of ice sheets (and) NSW could (see) sea level rises of up to 2.3 metres by 2100 and 5.5 m by 2150”. It is not just the clear denial of people such as Barnaby Joyce preventing...
Lesley Walker from Naarm (Northcote)
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
We need a song
October 23, 2025
John Schumann is frustrated because the church doesn’t articulate a case against Trump. Fair enough, though he may be surprised at how many parish pulpits are careful to apply the gospel to Trump and all his works. My frustration is that the song writers have not given us some protest songs. We are so grateful to musicians who did so much to unite opposition to the Vietnam War. But where are the songs of protest against Trump and Trumpiness? John, please help.
Stephen Williams from Newcastle NSW
In response to: Muted response to Trump's appropriation of Christianity
Climate change: It's time to panic
October 22, 2025
Chas Keys was remarkably sanguine in addressing climate denialism. Along with the biodiversity crisis, climate change is the greatest threat the planet faces. Those who deny the massive evidence surrounding climate change, deserve public condemnation and ridicule because they threaten the quality of the future of our children and grandchildren, indeed their very existence. What Trump has done in the US in removing even the mention of climate change in some government departments, in abandoning the Paris Agreement, and bolstering the fossil fuel industries while throwing a spanner in the works of the renewable energy transition, is profoundly irresponsible....
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
Desperation is the driving force
October 22, 2025
Requiem for Gaza could just as easily be reimagined as Requiem for the Rules-based International Order. Desperation is the driving force. Here in the West we are beset by desperation on so many levels. There is the desperation of climate change, a looming development we do our best to ignore. There is the desperation of a debt-driven financial collapse, another looming development we are also doing our best to ignore. And there is the desperation of military inadequacy which the wars in Palestine and Ukraine have shown. In Israel, the desperation is fuelled by the above compounded by the...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Chris Hedges' Edward Said memorial lecture: ‘Requiem for Gaza’
Climate change is real alright, and it’s us causing it
October 22, 2025
Chas Keys poses an interesting question. If it’s not human activity causing the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re in more trouble than we realise. Not that we aren’t already facing enormous difficulties. The climate data being collected makes it abundantly clear the planet is entering the feedback climate loop peer-reviewed science has warned of since the 1970s. We’ve had half a century to validate we’ve fully evolved as thinking hominids. That we haven’t is confirmed by the depth of climate denialism across the world. Whether it’s compelled by greed, ideology or ignorance is immaterial, the outcome’s...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
Heath Robinson and Humpty Dumpty
October 22, 2025
I love Peter's reference to Heath Robinson in this article. I have always looked, after over 50 years involved with governments in Australia, at the similarity of much government policy formulation and implementation as an excellent simile with the wonderfully complicated structures that he was an expert in. Trump's plan — and it is a great exaggeration to call it such — not only has the imagination of Heath Robinson in its gratuitous complexity, but also encompasses Humpty Dumpty's propensity to invent new meanings for words.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: At best, a respite for Gazans
Palestinian dispossession
October 22, 2025
While the devastated landscapes may look similar, the difference between a post-nuclear Japan and Palestine could not be greater apart from the fact that US bases are still located on Japanese soil. The issue in Gaza is where to relocate the Palestinians because the Israelis don't want them on their “God-given” (including Jerusalem) land and the religious right need the return of the the Jews so they can benefit.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: It's too early to discuss 'what next' for Gaza
Bastardry on steroids
October 22, 2025
This article is a brilliant catalogue of the continuation of the centuries-long history of the atrocities committed by the allegedly Christian US in spreading the exact opposite of what it claims to stand for. Democracy doesn't get a guernsey anywhere in this history of invasion, subversion, theft and mass murder. But as the US empire deservedly crumbles, the rest of the world, excluding the European and Australian satraps, begin to resist. Russia, Iran and China look like helping the Venezuelan people to guarantee that this attempt at overthrowing an elected government will not succeed. More power to their...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump CIA intervention in Venezuela risks another US war of choice, experts warn
Science and stupefaction
October 22, 2025
At its base, the anti-climate change idiocy of Trump and those who share his scientific philistinism is inherently illogical, uninformed and plainly stupid. To say, as he often does, that the work of tens of thousands of highly qualified climate scientists is simply not believable carries some far greater implications, either about his purchase by the oil, coal and gas corporations or his utter incapacity for logical thought. The scientific method is now understood and supported by the vast bulk of humanity. That scientific method is common across literally all areas of human knowledge, with the notable exception of...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump is pushing allies to buy US gas. It’s bad economics – and a catastrophe for the climate
Lies, damned lies and statistics
October 21, 2025
This is the phrase that sprang to mind on reading Michael Keating's article on migration in Australia. While not really accusing him of lying, I would suggest he is cherry-picking data to support his case, which is basically to maintain high levels of population growth in Australia. According to the latest figures from ABS, population growth was 1.6% in the year to March this year, an increase of 423,400 people, of which net overseas migration was 315,900 or about three quarters. Yes, 1.6% is a lot better than the Third World rates of 2.5% we saw in 2023, but...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The migration debate in Australia
It's too early to discuss 'what next' for Gaza
October 20, 2025
It is far too early to even begin to contemplate what next for Gaza, which is now the theme of much well-intentioned commentary. There is barely a ceasefire, with Israel killing dozens of Palestinians over the past few days, and looking for every Hamas did it pretext to kill more. People are still starving to death, with the arrival of only limited food supplies. There are no functional hospitals. There are no foreign press to witness the carnage. And it is utterly unclear what the Trump plan now envisages. Now more than ever we should be applying all...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
Beyond delusional
October 20, 2025
Are we still entertaining the delusion that the suffering of the Palestinian people is over? Are we still believing that a ceasefire is intact when, as I write, Israel has just dropped scores of bombs on the Gaza Strip in violation of the barely two-week-old agreement? Are we still deluded that Trump and Netanyahu’s plan to create a new Miami in Gaza has changed into an altruistic endeavour? It is sheer denial to now write about reconstruction and rebuilding when Palestine is still being bombarded, innocent Palestinians are being torn apart by tank and drone fire and mothers are...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
A step in the right direction
October 20, 2025
I think Michael McKinley's idea has merit. This doesn't mean the politicians will buy into it... how after all, could anyone question their decision-making capability? They are the government after all. The article reflects the lack of independent strategic thinking at government level, which the government, on first reflex at least, will be likely to deny or ignore, but which, in my view is the case. Michael's idea may not be the final version of what is required, or of what may possibly evolve... but it is a step in the right direction.
Peter Kent from Melbourne
In response to: An immodest proposal for an ideal source of strategic policy advice
Another brick in the wall
October 20, 2025
John Frew's recent fine polemic reiterates much of the frustration described by the late Sir Ken Robinson. What gets measured gets manipulated and learning has degenerated into indoctrination. Even our red brick universities have degenerated into ideological battlegrounds and inculcated graduands are just another brick in the wall.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill, Brisbane QLD 4000
In response to: Counting what doesn’t count:
Delusional world
October 20, 2025
As proven by today's headlines, anyone who thought that Israel could be trusted to abide by a lasting peace is as delusional as the president who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for organising it. Israel won't stop until they alone own the land that “God” gave them, including Jerusalem.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Gaza has a ceasefire, now Palestine needs self-determination
Climate tipping points
October 20, 2025
It seems our governments lack the moral courage to do what the sciences, both physical and economic, demand to stave off Julian Cribb’s spine-chilling list of imminent climate tipping points. So, we, the people, must force the issue. If we can activate some social tipping points, people pressure might still help us rapidly spread the technologies, behaviours, social norms and structural reorganisation we need to delay the physical tipping points. If enough people start to demand, among other things, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies and divest from assets linked to fossil fuels, we may still move...
Lesley Walker from Naarm (Northcote)
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
The Apocalypse is coming
October 20, 2025
According to the Global Tipping Points Report 2025: “Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback... This is sickening news, not just because so much beauty and biodiversity is being lost, but also the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people who depend on coral reefs. The world is likely to hit 2°C warming between 2034 and 2052. According to New Scientist (28 May), the world could experience a year above 2°C of warming as early as 2029. The chances are slim, but it's only four years away. What happens at 2°C?...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Israel and the ICJ
October 20, 2025
To add to the argument of Paul Heywood-Smith, the prophet Jonah was sent to preach repentance to the people of the city of Nineveh (Mosul). The people did repent, a response cited by Jesus as exemplary. Nineveh was a long, long way beyond even the Euphrates River, which the blasphemous political readings of Judaism might fancifully assert is part of a God-given Israel. (And by the way, how does God caring so much for the non Jewish people of Nineveh square with the political chosen people interpretation of Jewish fundamentalists? Or with the numerous prophetic references in the Old...
David Moloney from Seaford
In response to: Israel’s response to the International Court of Justice
Popular action can overcome existential despair
October 20, 2025
Julian Cribb has, in recent articles, summarised with authority the dangers we now face with our oceans , with our forests , and with our water. His summary of imminent tipping points encapsulates the urgency of our predicament. David Spratt has highlighted the shortcomings of the National Climate Risk Assessment. Cribb details the risks of misinformation. Our future looks grim, but policymakers — disproportionately influenced by vested interests — seem reluctant to explain this clearly to the electorate. Popular scepticism continues to hamper effective environmental protection. Despair reflects the sense of an individual’s incapacity to generate change in...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Speak up, Australia
October 17, 2025
Appreciation to Wayne McMillan who, in praising Greta Thunberg, calls for Australians to “write to their politicians and wake them up from their moral and ethical slumber of inaction”. We may live in a democratic country but most of our politicians are captured by gambling, fossil fuel and other lobbying groups. We can’t sit back and allow these industries to pursue profit at all cost. Speak up Australia.
Amy Hiller from Kew, Melbourne
In response to: Is Greta Thunberg the lone voice for justice in our world?”
Killing with chooks
October 17, 2025
Mark Macdonald is perfectly correct that antibiotic resistance (ABR) is a major threat to the human future. Unfortunately, even with the generous allocation of word space in Pearls & Irritations, it is not possible to enumerate every case of purblind, human stupidity. Some have to be taken as read! That said, ABR is sure to kill an awful lot of people come the mid-century, especially if we continue to use antibiotics just to create heavier chooks and fatter pigs, while carefully nurturing the zoonotic pestilences of the future. Indeed, we could regard ABR as a byproduct of...
Julian Cribb from Canberra, ACT
In response to: Global collapse
Nothing to see here
October 17, 2025
Some Australian ministers are now saying the Palestine war is over, nothing to see there. So we can still ship weapons parts to Israel even though the IDF is supporting settlers attacking Palestinian farms in northeast Palestine. We can ignore the slow Hiroshima carried out by the US and Israel over two years. I see too that the RAAF had a surveillance plane in the Ukraine, which our government seemingly believes to be closer than Palestine, at a time when the government was asked to provide aerial assistance to Australians and others in the Sumud aid flotilla. Oh,...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Denial and amnesia: Is the global community ready to welcome Israel back?
No 'just peace' without due diligence
October 16, 2025
Peter Slezak demands sincere attention and a fair, just and strong response from our flaccid government leaders, Albanese and Wong. It has taken — what? — little more than 48 hours from the signing of the Trump Peace Plan (TPP) for the Netanyahu Government and the IDF to resume killing Palestinians with the same gratuitously offensive excuses that have been such a predominant feature of their entire genocidal campaign. We wait for Albanese and Wong to change from calling on Hamas to abide by the terms of the TPP and apply the same pressure on the Zionists' genocidal...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Time for a 'just peace' for all peoples in Palestine
Will we out Advance?
October 15, 2025
We are indebted to investigative writers like John Queripel, Anthony Klan and Michael West Media, to name a few, who provide forensic exposes of elite-funded Advance. As in the US, the funders of Advance are far from household names but are nevertheless deeply invested in policy areas, especially climate action. They, and members of the Coalition, claim they are fighting a “woke elite”. They attempt — sometimes successfully — to divide and distract by igniting spot fires around which bathroom to use or what books children should or shouldn’t read. Donor Gina Rinehart claimed earlier this year that...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Who are ‘Advance’ and what are they doing to our politics?
No more killing in Palestine
October 15, 2025
I note Ramzy Baroud’s article. I hope our faith in the ability of the Palestinian people to govern wisely is not dimmed by more reports of extrajudicial killings in Gaza, channelling Donald Trump in the Caribbean.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: From Gaza, Palestinians have reasserted their agency on the world stage
The big con from a lame government
October 15, 2025
Take the backdown on super after the approval of NW Shelf gas drilling out to 2070, throw in tightening of FOI for good measure, and community Independents have been handed a gift to mobilise for 2028. The only, but major, problem they'll have is disabusing aspirants that they will ever have $3 million, let alone $10 million in super. It will also be an uphill battle getting them to realise that, without tax reform, they will forever be stuck with crumbling public health, education, transport and privatised child and aged care where costs go up as quality goes down....
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Keating welcomes changes to taxation of super
FOI a problem for Labor
October 15, 2025
It is a truism of so-called Australian politics that accurate information for the public constrains political skullduggery. It is interesting to see that Labor, who have campaigned over the decades on ensuring an informed public, tend to change their tune when in government. My own experience is revelatory. In a recent role running a state charity, a consultant employed by the Department of Health engaged with that Department in an underhanded and possibly illegal conspiracy to take over that charitable body and used public funds to further that design. FOI was crucial in enabling that body to...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A deserved defeat for Albanese on freedom of information
Extremism and fanaticism of every kind
October 14, 2025
I hope that Amelie has an enriching experience at the UN and strongly support the intent of her work to eliminate extremism and fanaticism of every kind on social media. The most serious kind is that promoted by various regimes around the world, not the least of which are Israel and the US. The algorithms that allow this state-sponsored extremism are far and away the most dangerous. That is because the wealth and influence of these state sponsors vastly outweighs that of the many invaded and occupied communities and cultures around the world marginalised by the Western-created algorithms...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Disarming extremism in the algorithmic age
The abiding consequences of criminality
October 14, 2025
This is a careful and comprehensive analysis of why those invaded and bastardised by the West in the apocryphal name of spreading democracy remain unconvinced by the fraud!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The half-life of humiliation and the hunger for revenge
Neoclassical pseudo-science
October 14, 2025
Further to Evan Jones’ sensible defence of the political economy versus neoclassical economics, he quotes neoclassicist Warren Hogan Jr implying the positive role of the scientific method for the latter. I spent four decades as an actual scientist (studying the Earth) and more time digging into the horrors of mainstream economics. Hogan’s claim is laughable. Neoclassical economics is built on flagrantly unrealistic assumptions, such as that we can all predict accurate probabilities of all future possibilities, that we are selfish competitors and there are no social interactions (in fact, humans are highly social), and that there are no economies...
Geoff Davies from Braidwood NSW
In response to: Fifty years of political economics at Sydney University – what has it meant for
Eugene Doyle: Magisterial analyst
October 14, 2025
May I compliment you for your superior analysis of 7 October 2023? I have not read of movements of Hamas in Israeli territory before. Hamas killed Israeli soldiers while overwhelming military bases, and some were also killed when kibbutzim and Nova Rave were attacked. Yet, if the more than 3000 Hamas insurgents could overwhelm the IDF bases so comprehensively, so quickly, and if murder was their intention, surely many more Israeli deaths could have resulted. Similarly, the unknown thousands (?) of Palestinians also did not murder. They were all very inefficient killers. Likely, Hamas came to capture Israelis...
Keith Mitchelson from brisbane
In response to: 7 October 2023: What really happened? Part 1
Will Katz or Trump prevail?
October 13, 2025
Ziyad Motala deserves congratulation on his article, as a key piece of American commentary right now is from Donald Trump: “The war is over. But, sad to say, then we have Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz just now in a tweet: “Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarising Gaza and...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: The moral vacancy of American commentary on Gaza
Trump should never get the Nobel Peace Prize
October 13, 2025
Jeff McMullen eloquently presents the case that Donald Trump runs a violent country and is strongly inclined to violence himself. Thus, it is abhorrent that he should even be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, whatever his involvement in the Israeli/Hamas peace deal. By all means, give credit where credit is due — and some is probably warranted in this case — but a Nobel Peace Prize recipient should be a person of peace, not a warmonger. The fact that Trump renamed the Department of Defence as the Department of War says it all. McMullen spells it out....
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: These are fighting words
Global collapse
October 13, 2025
The Julian Cribb article made for an interesting read. I think there is one more factor he has left out. This is the potential loss of antibiotics in the future. This will mean a natural increase in the death rate unless alternatives are found. Everyday common diseases and surgery will become increasingly dangerous. If the world can get over the population peak later this century without major collapse, then there is still hope.
Mark Mcdonald from drysdale
In response to: Died of a delusion' – the fate of modern civilisation?
The Lord of the Flies revisited
October 13, 2025
The sheer racial infantilism of the Anglo-Saxon elites and their security service underlings put me in mind of Golding's Lord of the Flies. Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it's only us!, seems to summarise the childish brutishness of our so-called security services. They seem to spend their entire lives projecting their own vacuous and depraved predispositions onto racially less worthy opponents, that they have confected in their fevered imaginings. Their lives seem to reflect the barbarity of the playground as they look all around them and see themselves reflected back to them in all their childish fantasising. ...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: How anti-China witch hunts in Canada and the UK ruin lives
Subtlety and nuance versus arrogant stupidity
October 13, 2025
A very well put together and thought out article. The problem for the Yanks is that they have, over the last 30 years at least, lost the arts of subtlety and nuance entirely from their diplomacy. Asia, by contrast because of its need to appease the Western beast, has developed these arts to a fine degree. South Korea is an excellent example as are Singapore, Malaysia and China.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: South Korea's caution on US Iran aims
Deforestation a climate and biodiversity calamity
October 13, 2025
When it comes to deforestation, it's hard to decide which is the worse consequence: climate change or biodiversity loss. As Julian Cribb notes, the Earth’s depleted forests are becoming a major contributor to Hothouse Earth. Deforestation is driving climate change. Yet forests are the habitat for countless species. All too often, to lose the forest is to lose the species that depend on it. According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, deforestation is a key threat to 60% of Australia’s listed threatened species. At least 1100 native vertebrate animals are forest-dependent. Species threatened by deforestation include the koala, swift parrot,...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The Earth uncloaked – A catastrophe in slow motion
Retire our unfair superannuation system
October 13, 2025
Misha Schubert's essay should resonate with anyone who cares about equity and justice. As she so eloquently reminds us, care is predominantly provided by women. Its value is inadequately recognised: to a huge degree it is hidden and unpaid; when it is paid, the pay and conditions are poor. This is an important reason — but far from the only reason — for the alarming rate of poverty among older women. Changes to the nation's superannuation system will not, however, achieve more than minor improvements. Our much-lauded super system is in effect a revers Robin Hood scheme: it...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: Australia faces a looming crisis of older women retiring in poverty