August 26, 2022

Many jobs summit ideas for lifting wages don’t make sense – upskilling does

Treasury’s issues paper for the jobs summit says fair pay and job security “strengthen communities, promote attractive careers and contribute to broad-based prosperity”.

July 16, 2022

Environment: Four actions to help the oceans help us

Our seas are already seriously threatened and more dangers are emerging but four marine strategies will deliver for human health, the environment and the economy. A circular economy in the food and agriculture industry will dramatically reduce biodiversity loss.

June 6, 2022

Is criticism of Israeli settlement policy anti-Semitic? Israeli nationalists insist it is

_Calling out China for its persecution of Uighurs is not to be a Sinophobic racist. Calling out Myanmar for its crimes against Rohingya people is not to be anti-Buddhist. Calling out Saudi Arabia and Egypt for their murder and suppression of dissidents is not to be Islamophobic or anti-Arab. And calling out Israel for its sabotage of the two-state solution and creation of a de facto apartheid state is not to be anti-Semitic.

August 20, 2021

After Kabul – a great opportunity for Australia

Our “great and powerful friend’, the United States of America, has suffered another humiliating defeat, this time in Afghanistan. In fact, the USA hasn’t won a single war in which it has participated for more than 75 years - since the WW2 conflict with Japan, concluded in 1945.

January 2, 2021

The smoko continues

In April 2012 the late Greg Dodds and I posted an article on this blog ‘The Australian Century and the Australian smoko’. We argued that while we responded well to the opportunities in Asia for over a decade in the 1980s, we went on ‘smoko’ from the mid-1990s. There was widespread complacency and fear of Asia was promoted. The result has been two decades of failure by business, universities, schools and the media in equipping ourselves for the region. That complacency is still with us and the fear of Asia and particularly China is cynically promoted by Scott Morrison.

December 16, 2020

We need to “pivot” away from the military thinking of the past

“_These are anxious times. Not since early 1942 have Australians felt so in need of allies yet been so unsure of their major ally…. Canberra is eagerly, even desperately, looking for new protectors." These comments come from Hugh White, and are quoted in Friends, Allies and Enemies: Australian Foreign Affairs. Do we need a Security Partner?? That question is explored in this article.

October 1, 2024

The wrong trousers: focusing on the real AUKUS issue

The AUKUS agreement is controversial. It covers advanced military technologies whose future is contested by experts. There is also a vigorous discussion over whether the agreement has compromised Australia’s autonomy on strategic policy making and implementation. Yet this latter debate completely misses why AUKUS is at risk of failure.

September 18, 2024

AUKUS: defending the indefensible

The proponents of AUKUS appear to be rattled. Their defence of the worst deal of the century is threadbare.

September 14, 2023

Wilful ignorance drives civilisation collapse

In May 1971, I published a full-page letter in The Australian addressed ‘To Those Who Shape Australia’s Destiny’. It was signed by 730 Australian scientists including Sir Mark Oliphant and Sir Macfarlane Burnett.

July 21, 2023

Will Port Adelaide, Fremantle or Port Kembla be the Australian Chernobyl?

While most discussion of the AUKUS Agreement has focussed on the geopolitical implications for Australia’s standing in the world, the escalation of the risk of war and the crippling cost of the nuclear submarine purchases when less expensive and more sensible non-nuclear options are available, little has been said of the risk to the civilian population posed by these nuclear-powered submarines (or other nuclear-powered naval vessels) in Australia’s home ports.

April 7, 2023

Easter Message: Power, control, autocracy, Empire...

…. not the path to a life of harmony and peace.

The 1924 Hibbert Journal published what appears to be the earliest printed version of a very well-worn joke with the final punchline: “a gintleman with a face like your honour’s can’t miss the road; though, if it was meself that was going to Letterfrack, faith, I wouldn’t start from here.”

August 31, 2022

Children and the justice system

Only five years after the landmark Royal Commission on Institutional Abuse exposed the shocking abuse of children and young people across this nation over decades, one is tempted to say plus ça change.

July 9, 2022

Anthony Albanese on China - What next? The Taiwan conflict

_The large Chinese diaspora that helped Labor win office in the hope of better relations with China could switch its support to less hawkish Teal candidates likely to contest Labor seats at the next election.

April 30, 2021

Boris Johnson's shady deals and its links to former Chief Advisor Dominic Cummings

You do not need to stray far from the suburbs of Australia’s largest cities to know that if you poke a stick at a King Brown snake it will strike. So, when Downing Street officials learned that Boris Johnson was launching a less than discreet campaign of media spin against the prime minister’s former friend and most senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, they shuddered.

January 19, 2021

Seditious assault on Congress. Why is Christianity so grafted to corrupt politics?

The link between the Christian right and Trump has nothing to do with Christian discipleship. Trump provides the evangelical right with the closest thing they have found to a theocratic state and in return Trump gets a strong voting bloc.

December 31, 2020

2020 and beyond. Comeback, but to what?

Scott Morrison’s government has been spruiking its life and economy saving program named Comeback on television and digital platforms. This means comeback from the unexpected changes imposed on individuals and the economy in 2020 by the COVID virus. But comeback to what?

December 4, 2020

Wars, just like Bruce Springsteen, are ‘born in the USA’

‘Defence’ for Australia has usually involved being shanghaied - often willingly - into other nations’ inappropriate, politically motivated wars. Our alliances are increasingly dysfunctional and inappropriate in our region.

July 7, 2024

Environment: banks still bankrolling fossil fuels

Big banks keep providing big money to fossil fuel companies but it’s time for the Global North to invest for the future and pay its historic climate debt to the Global South. Diminishing Sagebrush is threatening the USA’s Greater sage-grouse.

August 13, 2023

Australian foreign policy is traditionally hitched to the US – but the rise of China requires a middle path for a middle power

Few nation-states have been shaped by their underlying physical geography and location in the world quite as much as Australia.

July 20, 2023

Robo Debt shows we need an Independent Inquiry into AUKUS

The Royal Commission into Robo-debt has provided significant insights into how a cavalier government can ignore fundamental processes of good governance by ignoring accepted standards of decision making to pursue its ideological agenda.

July 3, 2022

Everything is being weaponised in a ‘disinformation war’

Leaders of Japan and other nations are warning of a need to be aware of a hidden battlefield in the media and social media, The west has an unshakeable lead in hybrid warfare, leaving other regions struggling to be heard. Three new books point to a host of other areas that are being or could be weaponised, including the distribution of vaccines.

August 18, 2021

Time for facts on Afghanistan, not platitudes and propaganda

Facing the all too predictable chaos left behind by yet another unnecessary Australian military adventure, the prime minister mouthed insulting platitudes about ‘freedom’ and sought propaganda value about no member of the military dying in vain. Such remarks display historical ignorance as well as insensitivity.

July 22, 2021

The idiocracy of America. It is perilously close to becoming a failed state

The hilarious 2006 film “ Idiocracy” offers a vivid depiction of American politics. The movie is classified as a sci-fi comedy, but it is more like a searing documentary. It almost perfectly describes America’s crisis of survival today. The American people, and the people of the world, deserve better than an American idiocracy.

June 8, 2021

Government rorting is now the Australian way of doing business

Australia has moved to a deeply corrupted system of doling out consultancy contracts to mates by pure discretion, in circumstances which in the classic Morrison style are compulsively secretive, and vague in sums and contract terms.

May 18, 2021

Darkness in a propagandised state risks war with China.

_Our distorted perspectives, our ignorance, is now more dangerous than the situation leading to the Vietnam War in the 1960s. We have experienced a sudden end to immediate knowledge of Asia including China We are vulnerable thus to pandemics of media misinformation.

May 4, 2021

A moral responsibility to get Australian's home

Almost 40,000 Australians are trapped abroad because of the Covid-19 epidemic. Many have been trying to return for more than a year. Many in countries with raging epidemics, such as India and Brazil are in real danger of personal infection. Many new viral ‘variants’ are more infectious and can cause serious disease in younger populations than was the case with the first generation of SARS-2-Cov.

November 12, 2020

Morrison's Trumpist Dilemma: A Credible Revisionist Narrative is Impossible

The Morrison dilemma then, in the face of all the damning evidence, is how to create a revisionist narrative to gloss over his love-in with Trump, a herculean task requiring all kinds of miraculous shape-shifting, chameleonism, burning of bridges and scuttling for refuge under rocks and hollow logs.

September 6, 2024

Urging Chinese Australians to find their voice in 2024/25

The Chinese in Australia have lost our voice. In contrast the Jews, not even a tenth of us in numbers, have a very strong voice. They even got six of our ex-PMs to sign a letter condemning the 7 October 2023 HAMAS attack. Is it not time, for Chinese Australians to find our Voice in 2024?

June 26, 2024

The Sun sets on the American empire: Dead-end in Ukraine

Like Gaza, Ukraine is one of the great tragedies of the post-Cold War period. Like Gaza, it is the result of a deadly game pursued by great powers intent on inflicting maximum damage on each other, seemingly oblivious of the costs.

June 11, 2024

World War III and our failure to defend against climate

In World War III the enemy is not an array of tanks, shells and soldiers, but a collection of beliefs damaging to the earth’s future. The enemies are the minds and actions of those with the cult of neo-liberalism and greed acting through the power of huge industries, the enemy within.

September 6, 2023

Power meltdown: putting Australia’s energy transition back on track

We know Australia’s got a problem when a cautious, technical, energy market operator says: “Imminent and urgent investment is needed, or the reliability of the NEM [National Electricity Market] will be at risk.” More broadly, Australia’s energy transition is at risk. But the federal government has the challenge and the opportunity to get things back on track.

June 27, 2023

Malignant obsessions distract us from the collapse of human civilisation

The real drama played out in the North Atlantic last week wasn’t the latest hubristic exercise in “frontier tourism”, but the current sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly rise, recorded on the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice, June 21, 2023.

April 14, 2023

We are being groomed for war with China

Orchestrated components are coming together to enable the US to recruit Australia in future wars of choice. Our media must begin to ask questions about the crude but successful ways the Australian people are being groomed to provide passive or enthusiastic consent.

September 14, 2022

Prince Philip and Gough Whitlam: the story The Crown forgot. A socialist arsehole- A Repost

_As Gough Whitlam put it- ‘I am the first prime minister since Sir Robert Menzies who … has been able to survive a second visit from Prince Phillip’. The long-standing consort described Whitlam as ‘a socialist arsehole’

June 11, 2022

Early lessons from the 2022 election

The famous American writer, economist and political activist, John Kenneth Galbraith said in 1967:” This is a year when the people are right and the politicians are wrong”.

August 4, 2021

President Biden, Chinese Communists and a very old division in the Church

The knives are out for President Joe Biden as a Catholic. Some commentators have drawn the comparison between how some (most?) US bishops are reacting to the President for his approach to legislation on abortion in their country and the controversy in the early Church called the Donatist controversy.

June 15, 2021

Denial as policy, the Tamil Biloela family.

In a school playground, a little boy responds to being caught doing something wrong: ‘It wasn’t me sir’, or ‘It was those other boys’, or even ‘ I would never do such a thing.’ His ducking for cover matches the denial of responsibility characterising the Morrison government, not only regarding their cruelty to the Tamil/Biloela family.

June 3, 2021

The hunt for man-made coronavirus is counter productive

We are recently informed by the Wall Street Journal, quoting an unidentified source, that three Chinese scientists who were working in the Wuhan Virus Laboratory became ill with a Covid like illness in November of 2019. Ah Ha! Surely they must have been working with the responsible virus in the laboratory, got themselves infected and then spread the infection into the local community. As we had not heard of such events previously the Chinese must have been hiding this crucial information.

May 31, 2021

The rich are getting richer and richer - what is Labor planning to do about it?

While Federal Labor is disappearing into a fearful huddle desperate to avoid any suggestion it would ever try to make Australia a more equitable place, the rich are getting richer and richer.

May 28, 2021

Encouraging COVID complacency is a dangerous political game

Targets have been repeatedly missed and vaccination rates in Australia are disappointingly low. In addition to vaccine hostility and hesitancy, we now have vaccine complacency: ‘Why bother? – the closure of the border is keeping us safe.’ And the Morrison Government’s recent messaging is reinforcing, even encouraging, this complacency. _

December 18, 2020

The 2019 Federal Election: was there a level playing field?

The multifarious attempts at voter suppression in the 2020 US presidential election might prompt Australians to be grateful for the quality of our electoral administration. Uniquely, Australia has had since the 19th century a tradition of professional electoral administration, with administrators taking pride in an electoral roll as comprehensive and accurate as possible.

December 6, 2020

Joe Biden Has Problems. The World Has Solutions.

From the founding fathers to Silicon Valley, the U.S. has a long tradition of borrowing the best ideas from around the globe.

November 23, 2020

Australia-Japan and the Morrison/Suga Agenda. Do we share the values of Yoshihide Suga?

_Most members of the Suga (and Abe) governments of 2012-2020 belong to rightist, cult type historical revisionist organizations committed to restoring the emperor’s role to its pre-war centrality.

November 9, 2020

A lament for the passing of the Trump era

Turning on the ABC radio news each morning over the past four years was one of anticipation. While we slept, what had President Trump been up to? Would the latest be something daring, unusual, unorthodox, audacious, provocative, laudable, outrageous, nasty, hilarious, sensible, absurd, ignorant or a combination of all of them?

September 9, 2024

The shadow of empire: how the dream of global dominance undermines American democracy

The notion of American exceptionalism — that the United States is uniquely destined to lead the world due to its superior values and capabilities — has been deeply embedded in the national consciousness for generations. This belief, cultivated by political, business, and intellectual elites, frames the US as a force for good, a beacon of liberty and democracy that must guide the world. Yet, this self-image, so central to the American identity, has also become a source of dangerous rigidity, blinding the nation to the realities of its own decline and the limitations of its power.

June 17, 2024

Negotiate now, or capitulate later: ten incentives for Ukraine to make peace with Russia

As the Ukrainian war appears to be nearing its conclusion, the question is what a peace could look like.

June 6, 2024

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing

War may good for absolutely nothing. But the spectre of war is great for business if you are part of the “military industrial complex”. And if that spectre can be painted in the shape of China, then that’s hitting the jackpot.

August 27, 2023

Environment: Sleepwalking into our fiery future

Not enough action to preserve our forests and not enough action to prevent bushfires. Less than twelve years before we hit 1.5o of global warming.

June 28, 2023

From war to peace

In the Soviet-era film of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel “War and Peace” there is a haunting scene, brought to mind by recent events in Russia.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal