July 4, 2021

Timor-Leste, Witness K, Bernard Collaery, Howard and Downer

This is a tale of greed, denial, delusion, racism, power, loyalty, ethics and courage. Dressed in black are Howard and Downer, in white are Witness K and Collaery. The tale takes place in the subterranean world of spies, spooks, spivs and secret trials.

May 2, 2021

Covid-19 Vaccines: Australia on the side of wealthy countries and Big Pharma

The Covid-19 vaccination program is becoming an ethical discussion of the difference between national vs global, private vs public, and whether to co-operate or to compete. It is also about who pays and who benefits.

December 1, 2020

Lobby Land -Dan Conifer. Queensland integrity watchdog backs review of lobbying laws.(ABC 7.30,28 Nov. 2020)

_The ABC’s 7.30 program this week highlighted the regular, high-level access Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Government has given to a select group of lobbyists. The politically connected lobbying firms represent multi-million and multi-billion dollar companies hoping to influence government decisions.

November 29, 2020

Australia's unnecessary involvement in various wars

Our Prime Ministers and other senior Ministers must bear the greatest responsibility for atrocious decisions to involve us in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. They have shown repeatedly that they are not up to the task.

November 8, 2020

The real originator of fake news is Trump

We always knew that Donald Trump would be a bad loser. It is not in his genes to accept defeat by not-so-sleepy Joe Biden with good grace, or even bad grace.

October 1, 2024

Climate and environment: both sides of the coin are tarnished

The most important role of government is to protect its citizens. In Australia this is usually taken to mean military defence, alliances with other countries and considerable expenditure. However the governments of many countries including ours have not yet grasped the fact that we are facing defeat in the current battle against the advancing threats of climate change and environmental demise.

July 16, 2024

NATO and the deadly strategy of neoconservatism

For the sake of America’s security and world peace, the U.S. should immediately abandon the neocon quest for hegemony in favour of diplomacy and peaceful co-existence.

April 30, 2024

A silent coup in plain sight: AUKUS and the universities

An invitation: imagine a country wherein, as a matter of policy orientation, its 41 universities have abdicated one of their principal founding roles – to be dominant sites of secular critique practised by people capable of living what they teach and committed to taking aim at the unequal, imperial, antidemocrática present. Imagine, too, that this abdication included the the need to be always self-critical and self-conscious. Finally, imagine that it was transactional: that, by their own disclosures the abdication was in exchange for becoming, explicitly and without shame, industrial brothel-keepers to the nations fevered national security imaginary. This is the frightening reality of the Australian university sector under AUKUS.

August 28, 2023

Fatal mistake: Intergenerational report misleads on climate risks

The Australian Governments public analysis of climate risk, our greatest threat, is dangerously misleading. The Intergenerational Report 2023 (IGR) is a prime example. By dumbing down the implications of climate change with simplified economic models, the IGR and similar reports are institutionalising the global failure to face climate reality.

August 14, 2023

The ALP is selling our Sovereignty to the United States: Will ALP delegates resist?

The Governments abandonment of Australian sovereignty to the US through AUKUS and the Force Posture Agreement (FPA) enmeshes Australia in US war plans and endangers the peace in our region on which our national prosperity relies. It is up to the ALP rank and file members attending the National Conference, 17-19 August, to stand up for Australias national interest. Will they defend Labor values?

May 3, 2023

North Korea: same old, or another ticking bomb?

Continued missile testing by North Korea invites the question, why do they do it? Its tempting to regard it as just what they do, but is that all there is to it? Is it urgent but not important? What about the response?

September 9, 2022

The Defence Strategic Review: Will it question the China phobia that currently holds sway?

Hardly a day goes by without an Australian politician, commentator, or member of the security establishment reminding us that China poses a clear and present danger. The messaging, consistent and unrelenting, provides the backdrop to the Defence Strategic Review recently announced by the Albanese Government.

August 26, 2022

Gough, Rupert and the London job.

_“The prime minister was spotted at the media empires Holt Street offices on Wednesday, when, were told, Albo, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marlesand Foreign Affairs MinisterPenny Wongmet News Corp cochairmanLachlan Murdoch and senior editors of the media empires Australian mastheads”.(SMH 26 August 2022)

July 31, 2022

Why the ACT is miles in front

_You might not immediately see the correlation between the average Australian politician and the sportspeople who advertise the products of Nike, but the ACT Government is very much living the “Just Do It” mantra.

June 19, 2022

Greg Barns: Julian Assange and the Albanese Government - Enough is enough!

Now is the time to end a dangerous threat to basic freedoms and the rule of law. The Albanese government has a critical role to play in ensuring that outcome.

December 10, 2020

Christian Porter's Federal Integrity Commission is a complete flop

Recently, a team from Transparency International and Griffith University released an important report. The report, Australias National Integrity System: A Blueprint for Action, proposed that an entirely new and comprehensive governmental integrity system be developed in Australia. Plainly the report picked up on the fact that public concern with the abuse of public power for private or political gain has been escalating significantly. Instances of governmental corruption have attained a level of crisis federally and in states.

February 5, 2020

ABUL RIZVI. Duttons Trifecta of Border Protection Failures

For years now Peter Dutton has boasted of his border protection achievements. But a brief examination of the details of his boast shows that while he has excelled in gratuitous cruelty, dog-whistling and wasting taxpayers money, his actual border protection record is weak. He has given us the trifecta of weak borders, inhumane treatment of genuine refugees and a reputation as racists.

July 31, 2024

Crying antisemitism drowns out the real problem

Zionism has become for some people a sort of ethnic superiority which denies equal claims to recognition by Palestinians. If we are unable to talk about this within the Jewish community we are doing a great disservice to both Palestinians and Israelis, writes Dennis Altman.

April 29, 2023

Environment: How good are we at capturing carbon?

Effective carbon capture is needed to stay under 2oC but need does not guarantee supply. A national park in Wales is regenerating culturally and ecologically. Helping you to know your cirrocumulus from your altostratus.

August 30, 2022

Senator Barbara Pocock: The unwelcome delegate at the Jobs Summit - Corporate Power

_The massive shift in power to corporate Australia started with the election of the Howard Government in 1996 and continued under subsequent Labor governments.

August 1, 2022

Nuclear submarines - disaster impending

_Australias decision to acquire nuclear-propelled submarines will be staggeringly expensive and is unfit for the purpose of defending the country. It is prone to reinforce Chinese suspicions that we are determined on joining the United States in containing it.

July 27, 2022

Deceiving cabinet colleagues on submarines? Surely not

Which Australian Defence Minister convinced the Hawke Cabinet to create a submarine production industry at Port Adelaide with no commercial prospects, its product being of only marginal benefit to our defence, with zero local construction expertise, at extraordinary cost to taxpayers yet available economically elsewhere - while obscuring the finding by his Department that submarines suffer critical limitations in defending Australia?

July 13, 2022

The human catastrophe in Yemen. What a contrast to our media focus on Ukraine

_In the last five years, an estimated 377,000 people have died in Yemen mostly from hunger, lack of health care and unsafe water. In Ukraine?

April 17, 2022

We can be friends of the US without being vassals

A manifesto for a new incoming foreign minister.

September 26, 2021

AUKUS: We are moving fast from being a country with the self-respect of true independence.

The main British objective under their appalling political leadership seems to be to find something meaningful to do after the Brexit debacle… Joe Biden could not even remember Scott Morrisons name.

August 18, 2021

Biloela and Assange: compliance with governments, not justice

In Australia, to utter the words High Court assumes a sense of justice. In the UK, claims about British justice imply adherence to principled conducted influenced by law. But in both countries, judges and lawyers have been displaying not passion for justice but compliance with revengeful governments.

July 26, 2021

Dutton's and Pezzullos citizenship hypocrisy

The in-coming ministers briefing prepared by long-standing Departmental Secretary Mike Pezzullo was inevitably going to be more significant for what it didnt highlight than what it did.

February 25, 2021

Japanese Ambassador rapped over the knuckles by Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

But did he get the message?

January 17, 2021

Public schools are as good as private schools

The widely held myth that private schools deliver better results than public schools has taken another blow. A new study of NAPLAN results shows that public schools do as well as private schools despite the large resource advantage of private schools.

January 2, 2021

Our national anthem is a joke. Tinkering won't fix it.

_For those whove come across the seas, Weve boundless plains to share. The blackest satire in the entire rigmarole. Endorsed by both sides of politics, the plains of Manus Island, Christmas Island and Nauru are scarcely boundless. As for sharing, forget it mate. If youre a new chum, especially an African or a woman in a headscarf, youre on your Pat Malone.

November 10, 2020

Armistice Day: Old Bones, Young Soldiers, Long Wars.

One hundred and two years after the first Armistice Day, as we survey the vast war cemeteries in our minds eyes, we may glimpse there a stark truth: then, as now, those who choose war go on to make old bones; too many of those who fight them go on to make neat little rows. That reality should haunt us all today.

March 25, 2020

KERRY BREEN and KERRY GOULSTON.- Update: An apolitical response at last to the Covid 19 crisis.

Last week we explored why government responses to the Covid 19 crisis seemed to be tardy and we argued for an expert apolitical group to lead the response.

September 6, 2023

A good start to urgent climate change abatement: end native forest logging now

The native forest logging industry is a fundamental danger to Australia’s natural environment and an utter disaster for climate change policy.

April 3, 2023

Penny Wongs double standards

Why is Australias Foreign Minister Penny Wong vocal about Australian-Chinese journalist Cheng Lei, jailed in China, but silent on Australian journalist Julian Assange, jailed in the UK?

June 20, 2022

The Outlook for Living Standards: Part 2

Yesterday Part 1 of this article assessed the impact on living standards from surging prices relative to wage growth, and rising interest rates. Today, Part 2 will consider what the new Labor Government can do to lift the rate of wage growth relative to prices, and tomorrow Part 3 will consider how best to respond to the two principal drivers of the increased cost of living fuel and energy costs and housing costs.

September 30, 2021

Fumio Kishida, the colourless new Japanese PM

One incident more than any other tells us what we need to know about the just-elected leader of Japans ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the rather colourless Fumio Kishida.

November 18, 2020

A grog ban in Indonesia!

Hard hit by the pandemic, Indonesia is in recession. The government is desperate to revive the economy and draw overseas investors, particularly into the tourist industry which earned almost AUD 20 billion a year before Covid-19. So not the ideal time to tell potential travellers that prohibition is proposed.

November 10, 2020

Scott Morrisons ambit claims on US President-elect Biden unlikely to have much impact

At a time when Australia needs to work to rebuild past diplomatic friendships with the US and China, Canberra seems to be going out of its way to further irritate both countries. It is Australian state-level diplomacy at its most ham-fisted.

September 9, 2024

Nuclear won’t cut it: CCA says Australia must go all in on renewables to meet climate targets

Australia will not reach net zero emissions by 2050 under the federal Coalition’s nuclear power plan, according to a comprehensive new report that puts the shift to 100% renewables at the centre of all plausible pathways to meet the global climate target.

August 3, 2024

A world call to action on the multiple crises now enfolding humanity

Humanity is facing its greatest emergency, a crisis consisting of many, interlinked, catastrophic risks, the Roundtable on the Human Future has declared.

May 20, 2024

Restraining Russia through friendship

The late historian Paul Schroeder offered insights into how to bring Russia into a collective security arrangement.

May 12, 2024

Cartoon Commentary

April 9, 2024

Accountability for the deaths of innocent people applies to Australia too

The death of young aid worker Zomi Frankcom in Gaza last week was a tragic reminder that we have all failed to stop this unrelenting violence against the innocent. Many Australians have been horrified that the six months war continues, because governments fail to uphold international law and even our own leaders have hidden from their obligations.

July 25, 2022

This is real foreign influence as Crocodile Dundee would say - the Australian American Leadership Dialogue

_Paul Keating says AALD is a sort of a cult thing thats gone on for years and I dont know what the Americans put in the drinking water.

July 23, 2022

Bob Ellis: The Duchessing of our PM

_Duchessing as a term and the concept it embraces, derives from the early experiences of the British Labour Party.

July 11, 2022

Once were mates or a relationship reset?

Prime Ministerial visits from New Zealand usually pass unnoticed but not this one.

January 12, 2021

How will Biden's strategy on South Asia differ from Trump's?

US president-elect Joe Bidensforeign policywill be very different from that of President Donald Trump. Biden has vowed to bring back US global leadership, value international diplomacy, restore US alliances and promote democracy and human rights abroad. He intends to undo the dramatic and in his view deleterious changes that the Trump administration made to US foreign policy.

January 8, 2021

Asian language learning in Australia was a disgrace 40 years ago. It is now much worse.

_An important issue we worked on in the Department (of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs) was foreign language learning. We set the pace in the early 1980s, with not many supporters. I felt quite lonely.

November 3, 2020

The Afghan Homilies of Saint Peter Cosgrove

Who is one of the most admired public figures in Australia today? John Howard, Tony Abbott? No. To pursue that line would make this into a comedy piece. It’s Peter Cosgrove.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal