December 18, 2016

JAMES O'NEILL. Dangerous delusions in Australian foreign policy.

Our media just does not get it.

It is not disputed that there are significant US military bases in Japan (Okinawa), the Philippines, Guam, South Korea, Afghanistan and Australia, among other places. … Strategic planners are unable to point to a single instance of China interfering in the freedom of navigation of civilian shipping.

November 5, 2014

John Faulkner. Tribute to Gough Whitlam

The Honourable (Edward) Gough Whitlam, AC QC

Senator John Faulkner

State Memorial Service

Sydney Town Hall

5 November 2014

Dying will happen sometime. As you know, I plan for the ages, not just for this life.

As those words show, Gough Whitlam always thought and planned on a grand scale.

In the past fortnight Australia has reflected on what Gough meant to, and achieved for, our nation.

His government, cut short though it was, transformed our country in ways that still endure, four decades later.

May 4, 2015

Walter Hamilton. Constitution Day in Japan

Last Sunday was Constitution Day in Japan. The national holiday memorializes the historic fact that, in 1947, for the first time Japanese embraced the principle that sovereignty resides with the peoplenot an emperor or a shogun, but the people.

This is no ordinary year for thinking about Japans post-war Constitution, given that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe wants to fundamentally change it to provide his conservative government scope for military adventures. The basic laws existing renunciation of the use of force to settle disputes he considers outmoded, because a neighbour like China is not similarly constrained.

January 18, 2017

IAN WEBSTER. Protecting young people from our favourite drug - alcohol.

Marketing of alcohol is out of control. 20% of those watching major sporting events on TV are under the age of 18 years.

March 3, 2015

John Menadue. Here we go again more mission creep in Iraq.

We seem unable to learn from the history of past centuries and decades as we plan to send another 300 Australian troops to Iraq to train forces fighting IS.

To show his patriotic fervour Tony Abbott needed eight Australian flags as a backdrop for his announcement yesterday. I don’t recall seeing a Prime Minister wrapped in so many flags!

For centuries foreigners like the Greeks, Romans and British, thought that they could subdue Iraq to their wishes. In the process, the fragile country of Iraq has been subject to imperialism, resource exploitation, despotism and religious rivalry. The most recent calamity inflicted on the long-suffering Iraqi people was at the hands of George W Bush, supported by Tony Blair and John Howard. We were told that the invasion of Iraq was to expand freedom and democracy in Iraq and free that poor country from Saddam Hussein. Not so frequently mentioned was access to the fifth largest oil deposit in the world as Rupert Murdoch told us.

September 15, 2019

ABUL RIZVI: Morrisons Mixed Messages on Migration

A string of immigration related articles in The Australian on 5 September 2019 and on 7 September 2019 again dutifully conveyed the Governments mixed messages on immigration policy without asking a single question about the inherent inconsistencies and loss of control over Australias visa system. The Government continues to promote three very separate messages on immigration to three separate constituencies.

April 5, 2017

MICHAEL THORN. Cricket Australia throw Aussie kids to the Lion

Alcohol and sport sponsorship is a toxic marriage, an ill-fitting and dangerous partnership. Like sport and tobacco sponsorship before it, it is anachronism; a throwback to a less enlightened era.

April 28, 2015

James Hogan. An Unspeakable Wrongness

And so, it has come to pass. With a dreadful inevitability, Indonesian Law has taken its course, and the sentences passed so long ago on Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran have been carried into execution. Some will wonder at our capacity to mourn these men and their fellows when we struggle to find compassion for other, more deserving victims. Others will take an even harder line, noting with approval the completion of a fine evenings work, a message sent regardless of the tariff. Yet if recent months have shown us anything, it is the growing recognition in our community that Death has had its day, and that the time has come to take a stand for life, whatever the chances of success.

April 23, 2018

JULIE P SMITH. Live sheep exports are not worth the moral cost.

Growing up near Midland on the outskirts of Perth during the 1960s and 1970s, I endured the weekly stench from the local abattoir. It was the price we paid to get meat to population centres. My first job was in the local meat processing plant, working with people described as “salt of the earth, working class”, who had historically toiled in appalling conditions because they had no choice.

Pressured by unions over postwar decades, Australian governments eventually stepped in to enforce decent standards for work and wages. Compelled by those who saw the immense cruelty involved, animal welfare laws were also imposed. Meat industry employers objected to red tape and higher labour costs, but community standards were enforced, most operators complied, and the worst operators eventually left the business.

December 21, 2016

PETER DAY. Grandpas favourite Shepherd

This Christmas child won’t give you discounted goods … rather he’ll invite you to be humble, other-centred.

February 15, 2017

PETER GIBILISCO. Where are the public intellectuals like Hugh Stretton.

The worst kind of bad social science, Stretton argues, purports to select the things to be explained, and the ways of explaining them, without resort to values and valuation

August 13, 2017

TONY SMITH. After the high hopes of Garma, disappointment sets in.

Last weekend, Indigenous leaders gathered at the Garma festival in north east Arnhem Land. The coverage on NITV showed a distinct slide from initial politeness and hope to disappointment and anger.

August 7, 2018

IAN WEBSTER. Drug Reform Series- Drug policy and justice

In the final analysis, drug policy based on prohibition fails to meet the test of fairness and justice in the lives of those most directly affected.

June 25, 2018

MICHAEL KEATING. Tax Cuts, the Economy and the Next Election

Last week the Government got its personal income tax package through the Parliament. The Government estimates that these tax cuts will cost the Budget $144 billion over the next decade. The Government has not, however, provided us with convincing evidence that the nation can afford this generosity and how it proposes to pay for these cuts while still returning the Budget to a sustainable surplus.

August 3, 2018

JOHN MENADUE Drug reform series

From next Monday Pearls and Irritations will be posting fifteen articles on the need for drug reform.

February 26, 2016

The benefits of migration.

In this article in fivebooks.com, Ian Goldin speaks about the benefits of migration although those economic benefits are often widely and differently dispersed. He points to the disconnect between the benefits of immigration and often the political downsides where some communities feel disadvantaged. He notes that the business community often calls for more migrants and refugees when politicians are moving in the opposite direction. Ian Goldin is Professor Globalisation and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

April 19, 2015

Trevor Boucher. International Tax : Some Constraints

I certainly would not want to be seen as an apologist for multinational company groups in the current debate on what to do about profit-shifting tax avoidance activities of groups like Google and Apple.

But there are some significant legal/technical obstacles in the way of solutions.

Like other countries, Australia taxes each company in a group on the basis of where it is resident. An Australian resident is liable here on its worldwide income, but a foreign resident is taxed by Australia only on income with an Australian source. Put simply, profits have a source where the activity that generates the relevant income is located.

December 28, 2024

Will Australia act on Israel team's participation in Tour Down Under?

Some readers may recall an earlier article Israel and the Tour Down Under, published on 4 January. The article addressed the then forthcoming Santos Tour Down Under due to take place from 12 - 21 January. The cycling event, established in South Australia in 1999, is an annual event and part of the UCI (Union Cycliste International) World Tour.

April 26, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. The bank's PR gloss and descent from heaven.

The banks project their image by employing a large number of business economists that we see and hear regularly in our media. A few do but seldom do these economists venture into any comment that would politically embarrass their employers let alone tell us what is really going on in the organisations that employ them. It is mostly all PR.

And some of the ‘regulators’ or supervisors on retirement from Treasury and the Reserve Bank of Australia, take very senior governance and executive positions with the very same banks that they formerly ‘regulated.’ That regulation was with a very light hand!

June 20, 2017

RICHARD WOOLCOTT. The rise of China and the reaction of the United States

It has been stated that the Chinese are the new kids on the block and are getting a beating from the United States,because of China’s alleged behaviour in the South China seas.

December 9, 2014

Tim Colebatch. The Abbott budget is hard to sell.

The Abbott governments problems began long before the 201415 budget, but now the budget is at the heart of them. It has failed to win support from the voters, and failed to win support from the Senate.

Why? I think there are two reasons. The first is that its measures, taken together, fail the test of fairness. Thats well known, and the opinion polls show the publics reaction.

The second is not well known, but it may have been grasped intuitively by many Australians, which is why the governments appeals to national interest have fallen flat. In short, the sum of the governments actions is not to reduce the budget deficit, but only to rearrange it.

August 4, 2014

Frank Brennan SJ. A Jesuit Bicentenary

Everyone knows that we Jesuits have had a rocky history. We were fabulously successful in educating the European elite for quite some time. Things went off the rails badly in the eighteenth century. We lost out to the Vatican Curia over the dispute about accommodating some Confucian and Hindu traditional rites in prayer and liturgy on the missions in China and India. We fell out of favour with the imperial court in Portugal, then in France, and then in 1767 in Spain. By then many Jesuits were on the run throughout Europe. The Portuguese were particularly upset with our defence of the locals living on the Reductions in South America. We had some sort of notion that the locals owned the place, not their colonisers. Ultimately the courts of Europe prevailed on Pope Clement XIV who published the brief Dominus ac Redemptor on 21 July 1773. Having listed the many shortcomings of the Society of Jesus, he decreed:

February 7, 2017

TERRY LAIDLER. 'Catholic Clericalism'

I heard the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, a man I counted as a good friend many years ago when I too was a Catholic priest, speaking to Fran Kelly on RN Breakfast yesterday [https://tinyurl.com/rn170207]. Rightly, in my opinion, he identified clericalism as important among the cultural factors that contributed to the appalling scale and nature of abuse among Catholic clergy revealed by the Royal Commission. But I wonder if he really understands what clericalism is.

June 20, 2018

PETER MANNING. Liberals on another planet

It disturbs me a great deal that it was the Federal Council of the Liberal Party that called by a large margin for the privatisation of the ABC. Not the rambo Young Liberals. Not a local branch in Sydneys southern Shire or Northern Beaches. Not a state Branch gone troppo. But the full Federal Council.

March 6, 2017

JOHN MENADUE. Failed Leadership in Church and State!

From my experience and observation good leadership is about creating disequilibrium and a process to galvanise the group to change. Without disequilibrium there will be no worthwhile change.

March 14, 2017

ALAN PEARS. The solution to Australia's gas crisis is not more gas.

Eastern Australia has plenty of gas. The problem is that most of it is being exported at prices lower than some Australians are paying. And the price volatility resulting from the present shambles is making life difficult for some Australian industries.

July 2, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. The Greens remain political amateurs.

Lee Rhiannon is undoubtedly the disrupter, but in a sense the public fracturing of the Greens is largely the fault of her leader, Richard di Natale.

October 29, 2014

John Menadue. Australian business is too risk averse

In August this year the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, Glen Stevens, told a Parliamentary hearing that Australian companies were being too risk averse by focusing on sustaining a flow of dividends and returning capital to shareholders rather than investing in future growth.

Research by Credit Suisse shows that non-financial companies in the ASX increased dividends by $5 billion in the twelve months to June 2014 and cut capital expenditures by $7 billion in the same period. This month the Boston Consulting Group in a new report said that Australian companies paid out twice as much in dividends as their global peers in 2014. It also commented that Australian companies have been increasingly paying higher and higher dividends over the last four years and therefore investing less over time in their businesses.

August 8, 2018

KEITH HAMBURGER. Drug Reform series punishment alone is not the answer.

Australian prisons are severely overcrowded. Much crime is drug related. Some 75% of prisoners have a substance abuse problem. The majority of prisoners are not rehabilitated by their prison experience as evidenced by high recidivism rates, particularly for First Nation people. A holistic, whole of community response is required founded in restorative justice and justice reinvestment.

September 24, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. At last our national daily has finally come clean.

The Australian has now abandoned any pretence that the current plebiscite has anything to do with same sex marriage and instead embarked on a holy war to maintain, and if possible enhance, religious (by which it really means Roman Catholic) privilege.

January 29, 2016

Niall McLaren. A case for 'armed neutrality'

In its short history, Australia has been among the most aggressive nations on earth, regularly engaging in wars that, on any objective basis, have nothing to do with us. These military adventures cost us dearly in men, material and credibility without ever showing the slightest evidence that they improve our security. Malcolm Fraser argued that we graft ourselves to foreign military powers in the hope that they will come to our aid in an emergency but that this has never benefited us. At present, our military is fully enmeshed with the American war machine at all levels, to the extent that Australian officers serve in command posts in US sectors. However, there is no reason to believe that the US would ever go against its interests in order to rush to our defence.

January 24, 2017

Karl Rove's Prophecy.

The neocons stayed put in the State Department and other positions closely linked to the Obama White House, where they became allies with the liberal hawks in continuing spreading democracy by overthrowing regimes. Americas mainstream news and opinion purveyors, without demurring, accommodated the architects of reality production overseen by Dick Cheney. This did not end when Obama became president, but in fact with seemingly ever greater eagerness they gradually made the CIA/neocon-neoliberal created reality appear unshakably substantial in the minds of most newspaper readers and among TV audiences in the Atlantic basin.

August 13, 2017

JEAN-PIERRE LEHMANN. The Empires continue to strike back as international order continues to collapse

…as the international order continues to collapse. The best check is a return to a liberal, rules-based, multilateral order.

November 22, 2017

IAN MACPHEE. A deeper view of the Rohingya crisis than media provide.

Since writing my blog on 13 October in defence of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (whom I will now only term Daw Suu) external media has continued its criticism of her for not condemning the military for its brutal attacks on Rohingya people in Rakhine state on the border of Bangladesh. As I stressed then, I have no doubt that Daw Suu would be as appalled as most people about the rapid military action of which she would have had no knowledge until it occurred. But, had she condemned the brutality she would have risked being displaced by the military and unable to achieve anything for the rest of Myanmar.

June 6, 2017

Specialists versus generalists: A commentary on John Menadue and Peter Brooks

John Menadue and Peter Brooks have mounted powerful critiques of private specialist medical practice in a series in Pearls and Irritations. The nub of their positions is the high fee structure in (private out-patient) specialist practice is out of kilter with community expectations.

March 20, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. Gas bags and hydro hype.

So Turnbull gave his orders: ensure that there will be enough gas held locally if there are crises. And the bloated gas bags were only too happy to concur, at least a couple of them were, which was enough to secure Turnbull bragging rights. But what was missing was just how this process would be implemented, and more particularly, what it would cost.

September 19, 2019

ANDREW GLIKSON. The ALP and the great moral challenge of our generation

There was a time when leaders fell on their sword if they were defeated in battle or lost their core beliefs. Nowadays they would not resign their privileged positions to take a stand against even the existential danger posed to advanced life on Earth, including their own civilization. While large parts of Earth are burning, neither do some parliaments, preoccupied as they are with minor political squabbles, declare a climate emergency.

April 9, 2018

HENRY REYNOLDS. Brendan Nelson and the War Memorial - what about the Frontier Wars?

On Friday the Director of the Australian War Memorial Brendan Nelson announced plans for a massive redevelopment of the institution which would cost up to $500 million.He hoped to receive the required funding in next years budget and he is likely to be given what- ever he asks for having already received strong support from both sides of politics. He also explained there would be an opportunity for the public to provide input into the project.

November 28, 2016

JENNY HOCKING. The Palace Letters Case: A Matter of our National History

Professor Jenny Hocking writes that the release of the palace letters will now be determined by an Australian Court and according to Australian Law - not by the Queen ‘a foreign monarch’ in the words of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

August 9, 2018

CHRIS PUPLICK. Drug Reform series -The evidence for drug policy reform is clear.

Australias drug policy regime is ruining peoples lives and causing more misery and cost than it saves. A new approach is needed, one that is evidence based and recognises the personal, social and economic benefits of policies other than mere prohibition and law enforcement. With good leadership and open-minded public debate, we can do better.

November 1, 2016

PHIL GLENDENNING. We Need To End Australias Refugee Shame. Now

Human beings are never a means to an end. They are an end in themselves. Emmanuel Kants words in the seventeenth century echo down the centuries in stark contrast to Australias treatment of asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Island. The recent Four Corners program, The Forgotten Children gave Australians an all too rare opportunity to hear from the refugee children of Nauru themselves, and to see for ourselves what is being done in our name.

Two days ago a young asylum seeker rose early, turned on his computer and read that the Government was preparing to ban all post-July 2013 boat arrivals from ever entering Australia under any circumstances. He went to his bathroom and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. He is one of the 30,000 asylum seekers in the community without rights or resolution to his case.

November 13, 2018

DUNCAN GRAHAM.Jerusalem and a Free Trade Agreement with Indonesia

Now heres the weirdest thing about the way we handle policy with the neighbours:

Canberra politicians are proven fumblers and bumblers when dealing with big Muslim_-majority_ Indonesia. Yet at the Australian National University just a ten-minute bike ride across the lake are some of the worlds foremost experts, able to inform, advise and caution.

Instead we have policy on the run when Scott Morrison edged the idea that our embassy in Israel might shift 70 kilometres inland from the Mediterranean_. Unsurpisingly he was caught in the slips._

The PMs office has instant access not only to government think-tanks, but also leading academics. They speak slang garnered in kampongs while doing doctorates. They__ve savoured durians_, recite__d dawn prayers__, sweated through nights of wayang magic._ In brief they can feel the nations pulse.

Last century Cornell in the US_, and Leiden in the Netherlands__, were_ the specialists on the archipelago to our north. Now Melbourne University, Monash, the ANU and to a lesser extent Murdoch in Perth and Flinders in Adelaide have taken over.

Does no-one in Parliament House have scholars on speed dial? A quickie, mate … whaddya reckon? The boss might give Ambassador Chris Cannan a new pad in Jerusalem. Good idea or what?

Had the calls been made the profs would have been of one voice: Are you joking? Indonesians will go spare … they back Palestine all the way_. Youll blow the whole Free Trade Agreement_.

May 27, 2018

FRANK BRENNAN. Close the camps now and stop the posturing.

Both the Turnbull government and the Shorten opposition are committed to ‘stopping the boats’. Tony Abbott’s mantra is now the political orthodoxy on both sides of the political aisle in Canberra. Labor knows it has no chance of winning an election unless its commitment to keeping the boats stopped is as firm as the government’s.

The political difference is no longer over stopping the boats. Both sides are committed to takebacks and turnbacks, usually to Indonesia, provided the practices of the Australian Border Force and defence forces are safe, legal and transparent. The political brawl is about keeping refugees on Nauru and Manus Island without a permanent solution, and the claim that this is a necessary precondition for keeping the boats stopped.

October 17, 2016

JAMES ROSE. From Tampa to now: how reporting on asylum seekers has been a triumph of spin over substance.

Spin designed to dehumanise and demonise asylum seekers.

This year marks the 15th anniversary of one of the most divisive national election campaigns in Australias recent history: the Tampa affair.

Coming just weeks after the September 11 terror attacks, the pitched battle between John Howard and Kim Beazley drew heavily on fear and panic. The divisions of 2001 are not only still with us, but they are far deeper today.

The September 11 terrorist attacks in the US were given a sharp-knife twist here in Australia. The country was still entangled in the issue of the MV Tampa and its cargo of more than 400 desperate asylum seekers. And there was a public outcry over the events surrounding the interception of the SIEV-4 and its 223 asylum seekers some of whom, politicians claimed, had thrown their children overboard.

The way the media frames public debate on asylum seekers and their impact on Australia was forged in this time. Three key strategies helped achieve this.

May 21, 2017

LYNDSAY CONNORS. The Tangled Education Web Part 1 of 2

Gonski 2.0 appeared to be a gift horse but over the space of little more than two week it is looking more like a Trojan horse.

August 19, 2018

STEPHEN GRENVILLE Who has been best for Australia: Trump or Obama? (Lowy Institute, 14.08.18)

US President Donald Trump comes in for widespread criticism, but he has at least one well-placed Australian defender. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer says that for Australia, Trump has been better than Obama. On the whole, Trump has been good for us. This is seriously misguided.

September 16, 2019

MUNGO MACCALLUM. Proud to be dumb.

David Littleproud has a somewhat unwieldy title Minister for Water Resources, Drought, Rural Finance, Natural Disasters and Emergency Management. But, keeping it simple, he is happy to live up to his name: he knows very little, and is bloody well proud about it.

September 17, 2019

GARETH EVANS. Emotion, reason and nuclear disarmament

I first came to Hiroshima in 1964 as a twenty-year old student, and it was one of the most formative experiences of my life. Nothing had quite prepared me for the experience of standing at the epicentre of that first nuclear bomb strike, and being overwhelmed by the almost indescribable horror of what had occurred here just two decades earlier

January 12, 2018

CAROL SUMMERHAYES. At a tribute to Graham Freudenberg.- A REPOST from June 8 2017

Graham revealed in his memoir that he wrote his first speech in Brisbane in May 1945, aged 10, at the time of VE Day, and delivered it to his mother. In 1946 he scored a job with ABC Radio reading scripts of school broadcasts I learned a lot about the use of English written to be spoken. He didnt know then that this experience would be life-forming: his speeches over the years stand out as words meant to be heard as well as to be read, a different sort of writing altogether.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal