January 31, 2021

Beware walking into a dead end: Biden's foreign policy

It is easy for a president to promise a new era and a return to old values. But there will be few takers for the notion of US supremacy, even if the US is led by a decent, elderly man who prefers international cooperation on his terms to lies, threats and pomp.

January 7, 2021

The ALP - the Australian Liberal-lite Party

When Labor leader Anthony Albanese dumped his party’s franking credits policy, the mainstream media duly trotted out the “retiree tax” line. “Subsidies to wealthy superannuants to continue” doesnt have quite the same ring.

October 26, 2020

Sharp-edged but sophisticated diplomacy needs to underpin our defence strategy Part 1

The governments recent Defence Strategic Update suggests Australia faces the greatest threat to our independence since 1942. This demands a sophisticated diplomatic strategy, the development of a sound military strategy to deter an attack by a great power and careful analysis of how to design the right force structure to deliver it. This first article of three looks at the issues around diplomacy.

August 27, 2024

Ukraine, Russia and the West

It would be fairly uncontroversial to describe Ukraine’s recent military advance into Russia’s Kursk region as a deliberate provocation. Kyiv’s claim that it was intended chiefly to prod Moscow towards a negotiated peace, if true, appears to ignore Vladimir Putin’s tendency to stick to his guns in the face of embarrassments.

September 8, 2022

The Defence Strategic Review - we need to urgently reduce conflicts and global warming

_Cabinet needs to insist Marles return to Labors previous support for an independent foreign policy and recognise there is no guarantee an arms build-up wont lead to a calamitous war. Crucially, the Albanese government needs to give a clear priority to helping reduce conflicts and global warming that cause horrendous suffering to innocent people around the globe.

September 7, 2022

The Defence Strategic Reviewand the loss of our strategic autonomy to the US

Over the next two weeks we will be running a series of articles to focus on the Defence Strategic Review (DSR) which is headed by Sir Angus Houston and the Hon. Stephen Smith.

In becoming a US proxy, even patsy, we are on a risky and dangerous path.

August 18, 2022

The rise of China- the biggestshift in our international environment sinceEuropeans settled on this continent

We cannot simply rely on the US to keep Asia “safe” in future. Is our Prime Minister really aware of this?

August 11, 2022

The Chinese Ambassador and our ignorant and hostile media

We should be alarmed, if not ashamed, at how some of these journalists behaved and reported.

November 24, 2020

Agents of foreign influence. What about the Australian Strategic Policy Institute?

The Australia-China relationship has hit new lows, with Chinas ban on a range of imports threatening $20 billion of Australian exports. However, just in the past few days Scott Morrison has said Australia’s position has been wrongly interpreted as siding with the United States over China, and that his government would not make a “binary choice” between the superpowers.

November 24, 2020

Australia has made itself an outlier in its dealing with China

The Prime Ministers dash to Japan to meet the new Japanese Prime Minister the first foreign leader to do so should be welcomed. It is unusual in terms of diplomatic protocol for an established leader to visit a newly appointed leader, not the other way around, unless it is the US for which normal protocol seldom applies.

October 28, 2020

Aged care: Commissioners hand government a 'get out of jail' card with disagreement between Commissioners.

Observers of the Aged Care Royal Commission were witness to an unprecedented sight at its final public hearings last week when the two Commissioners disagreed publicly on the future governance arrangements for Australia’s failing aged care system.

October 27, 2020

We, and ASIO, should fear our own agents of influence

The Director General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, is proposing to write a letter to all parliamentarians warning them of the risk that some of the people blowing in their ear may be agents of a foreign power (ASIO code for China) or acting at the direction of spymasters in a foreign government (ditto).

October 7, 2020

China is opening the door. Will Australia walk through it? (AFR Oct 7, 2020)

The Financial Review’s interview with a top Chinese diplomat would have been approved at the top. The Morrison government is obdurate if it does not take up the gesture.

July 1, 2024

Will Senator Payman influence Australian Government decision makers?

Senator Fatima Payman is one of the youngest members of the Albanese Government. Until recently she was unknown to most Australians except in her home state of Western Australia. She first came to attention when she publicly challenged the Prime Minister to be more vocal about genocide in Gaza and this was followed by a Senate debate critical of her and the use of the term “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free.”

May 14, 2024

Gaza genocide protests by students shames the elites in the Western world

These elites in politics, business, media, and church have brought shame on themselves and us. Either covertly or overtly they have supported or wilfully ignored the genocide. History will be a very harsh judge.

May 26, 2023

Vale, Stan Grant

Stan Grant is always intelligent, insightful and provocative. He demonstrated this in his extraordinary farewell piece last Monday night on the ABCs Q+A.

November 2, 2020

Slaughter in France, abusive power, the significance of satire

Slaughter in Paris and Nice by Islamist extremists raises the issue whether it is worth risking discussion of actions taken in the name of a religion, let alone re-asserting the value of satire.

October 18, 2020

The altar boys at The Australian

The usually reliable NewsPoll last week delivered a bombshell as unexpected as it was unwelcome to its Murdochratic media proprietors

April 22, 2023

Environment: climate change colonialism

Wealthy developed countries worsen the climate and debt crises of poor countries and trample on the rights of their Indigenous peoples.

February 6, 2021

Government still comes up short

Governments were once terrified when budget night came around. Any increase in the price of cigarettes or a pot of beer, a wave of popular disgust would likely follow. Australians are coming around to the fact that governments are different now.

November 15, 2020

Morrison's faulty logic in opposing a net zero carbon emissions target.

Contrary to Scott Morrisons contention, we can usefully set a target date to achieve net zero carbon emissions without exact knowledge of the cost and how the target will be delivered.

October 4, 2020

Deregulation or better regulation?

Too often the public debate is around whether there should be less regulation, but typically regulation exists for a reason, and the issue should be how to regulate more effectively.

February 12, 2020

MACK WILLIAMS. North Korea. Has Trump lost the plot?

The stalemate between the US and the DPRK has dragged on past the Kim Jong-uns end of 2019 deadline.

August 15, 2024

History will judge us harshly

Australia’s foreign policy elite has held a romantic view of Israel which extends back to its birth in 1948. By internalising Zionist mythology, Canberra has afforded the Jewish state a latitude it rarely extends to others: the freedom to attack its enemies without mercy and in violation of international law. It does this by casting Israel’s actions as “self-defence” regardless of the provocations and aggression it has regularly initiated.

July 15, 2024

A descent into violence? Political polarisation in the US

Can the United States avoid a descent into political violence? Of the 52 cases where countries reached the levels of polarisation which now exist in the US, half had their status as democracies downgraded. The US is the only Western democracy to have sustained such intense polarisation over such an extended period. It really is in uncharted territory.

April 16, 2024

Pope Francis has abandoned transgender Catholics

In a recent official Declaration on Human Dignity, Dignitas Infinita, the Pope has endorsed a document that effectively outlaws sex change for transgender Catholics. The Declaration is both harsh and unrelenting in its tone, dismissive of new science and judgemental of those Catholics who in good faith make life choices contrary to the edicts of the Church. Nothing new here, but just another slap in the face for people who seek to live their God given lives as authentically and honestly as possible.

September 20, 2022

Republican Albanese imprisoned by royal protocol

I was arrested at a visit by then Prince Charles to Alice Springs in 1977 for handing out press statements on Aboriginal living standards. I avoided jail, but the less fortunate Albanese government has been imprisoned by royal protocol and constitutional custom.

July 16, 2022

The China threat industry and journalists who had never been to China, became sudden overnight experts

The Albanese Government seems unwilling to provide leadership to the community on how to understand the rise of China and as m__any qualified military analysts have pointed out, Australia now faces up to a twenty-year gap in our defence capability. So much for the threat.

June 16, 2022

The minimum wage decision, inflation and the low paid

_The Real Unit Labour Cost is presently 20 per cent lower than it was__in 1986 meaning the growth in productivity gains to employers has been substantially higher than the growth in real wages.

April 26, 2022

Australia is still in Fear of China

The former eminent Australian diplomat Sir James Plimsoll once described China as a big fact. It is big, and it is a fact, and we have to get used to it.

June 15, 2021

Blink and the boats will restart the Government says, but that is nonsense

The Government excuses its cruelty to the Biloela family by wrongly asserting that the boats bringing asylum seekers will start again .

Over the past 6-7 years, the Government has presided over the biggest labour trafficking scam and abuse of Australias asylum system in our history. As a result of that scam of asylum seekers coming by air there are currently over 27,000 unsuccessful asylum seekers living in the community.

December 22, 2020

Merry Christmas - 2020 - Really?

_We cannot wish people a Merry Christmas without taking some personal action. And the recipe for that action is central to the Gospel message of Jesus. We are called to be a commonwealth of peoples, not a conglomeration of self-interested individuals Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding.

November 29, 2020

The unsustainable theory of 'counter- insurgency warfare' in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Australias disastrous military campaign in Afghanistan has been based on the so-called strategy of counter-insurgency warfare COIN in the military vernacular. Yet for decades, COIN demonstrably has been an intellectually unsustainable theory.

October 28, 2020

Productivity maybe one good aspect of the Morrison-Frydenberg budget

Low interest rates and breaks for new investment will not encourage business expansion theres too much uncertainty but they may lift our productivity.

August 9, 2024

The military control of Australia

The Albanese government with their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States, writes former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating.

July 19, 2024

Israeli lawmakers vote against Palestinian statehood

“In essence, the Israeli Knesset voted to continue to wipe Palestine off the map,” said one critic.

June 27, 2024

The release of Julian Assange

It would be the political persecution of the 21st Century. A publicly orchestrated campaign of mobbing, libelling and black balling by the most powerful country on the planet of a publisher who, using novel technological means, enlivened a moribund fourth estate by linking, ever more closely, the leaking whistleblower and the scribbling journalist.

August 22, 2023

Why are government officials manufacturing false espionage threats?

Government ministers and senior officials are conditioning Australians to become frightened, very frightened.

May 23, 2023

An Open Letter to the Australian Government from concerned scholars regarding the AUKUS Agreement

We the undersigned are scholars of the humanities and social sciences and other disciplines with expertise in the following issues. We write this open letter to express our concerns regarding the Australia, United Kingdom, United States (AUKUS) trilateral security agreement. Specifically, our concerns relate to pillar one of the agreement, the joint development with the US and the UK of a nuclear-powered submarine (SSN) capability for Australia.

August 7, 2022

Hong Kong must not be swayed by the Wests demonisation of China

The spectre of geopolitical disruption is upon us. Hong Kong must not fall into the trap of pessimism. It must be ready to play defence as Western leaders seek to punish China for its success.

August 1, 2022

Could a second Trump Presidency leave Australia stranded?

Peter Hartchers recent piece on the ramifications of another Trump presidencyundermines his usual argument that Australia must join America in confronting China and prepare for war with it.

September 29, 2021

Paul Keating: I am not a defeatist who would sell the country out to another power

The Coalition is not only turning over control of our defence forces to the US, but shopping our foreign policy too.

April 6, 2021

Aged care - where sexism and ageism walk hand in hand

Double jeopardy: being female and being old.

December 22, 2020

Mainstream media either ignore or castigate youth

Youth have borne the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting recession. Hearing from young people is therefore more important than ever, yet their representation in the media is minuscule and dropping, according to a recent report. News Corps widespread use of damaging stereotypes about young people was also notable.

December 5, 2020

Five Eyes, one tongue and hard of hearing Australia and Asia in Chinas Century

Chinese diaspora are the ones facing the foreign policy abuse at the momentbut dont worry, racism is an equal opportunity affaironce your country falls from favourtheyll be targeting your mob next. ANU China in the World Annual Lecture 2020

December 3, 2020

Australia's Defence Policy Explained (Utopia)

So, under this scenario we’re spending close to $30 billion a year to protect our trade with China… from China?

November 18, 2020

NBN update. Lets not compound a history of poor policymaking by people who claim to be good economic managers

In years to come Malcolm Turnbull will be remembered as the communications minister who, under instruction from then prime minister Tony Abbott, demolished Labors 21st Century National Broadband Network. But another prominent politician had earlier inflicted enduring damage to any nascent aim of becoming an innovation nation and set us back as a player in an emerging digitally enabled world. Are we heading towards a repeat of this mistake in telecommunications policy?

August 17, 2023

AUKUS a cover for the Coalitions nuclear power agenda

The federal Coalitions dissenting report on a Senate inquiry into nuclear power claims that Australias national security would be put at risk by retaining federal legislation banning nuclear power and that the decision to purchase nuclear submarines makes it imperative for Australia to drop its ban on nuclear energy.

May 22, 2023

Who started the trade war with China?

There is a sharp contradiction at the heart of the Albanese governments attempt to stabilisetrade with China, whilst at the same time preparingfor war with China in support of the United States.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal