September 16, 2024

How do they sleep at night?

“I think it’s important to recognise that probably the three things that characterise Israel and the Israeli Government are arrogance, brutality and stupidity. And those are the three elements that guides them in their actions. Their arrogance is they think Palestinians’ lives are not important. They think Palestinians are nothing which is what racist regimes think about the ‘other’. Their brutality, like I said from day one, they’ve demonstrated horrific brutality and cruelty towards the Palestinians. And their stupidity is when you get to know them closely and you are behind the scenes, when you take a look at the details and you just take a look at the lack of their foresight, you can see just how stupid they are.” – Miko Peled, Israeli dissident and peace activist

September 5, 2024

Israel’s 'red lines' over Netzarim and Philadelphi corridors in Gaza

Why won’t there be a long term ceasefire in Gaza any day soon? In spite of the murder of 16,500 children, the most in any modern day conflict, and the injury of 94,000 people, 70 per cent of whom are women and children, it does not end. Add to this horrific loss of human life, the starvation of all the residents, the complete destruction of vast swathes of infrastructure, and the deliberate obstruction and destruction of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

September 15, 2023

Chinese voters' disillusionment over Labor and AUKUS

When Labor and the Liberals share similar strategies regarding China and national defence, why should Chinese-Australian voters stay loyal?

May 18, 2023

Harbinger: US allies low priorities amidst America's poisonous politics

Joe Biden isnt coming to Australia. The good news is he hasnt had a senior moment and forgotten all about an appointment with another interchangeable fella down under. The bad news is that the United States increasingly poisonous domestic politics and crises take priority over everything else, including the long-term security of the Indo-Pacific.

July 14, 2023

Nothing superficial about scientific-base to effective teaching

John Frew has some erroneous views about the students, teachers and principals in Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn that must be corrected.

September 14, 2024

Population growth, capitalism, the environment and context

As Andrew Taylor and Supriya Mathew point out in a recent article in P&I, the current indications regarding population growth are that it will shortly begin to decline in the majority of countries during this century and has already done so in the wealthier (first world) countries. This forcefully raises the question of whether this automatically presages improvements for the environment.

September 9, 2024

The democracy metanarrative

In its strategic competition with Russia and China, the United States has constructed a metanarrative based on democracy versus authoritarianism (i.e. good versus evil). Such a narrative harks back to the political thinking of the first half of the 20th century which saw the fighting of two world wars.

May 16, 2024

How can Australians elect parliamentarians who work for them?

Can Australian citizens break away from the decaying major parties to elect independent MPs that will fight for their constituents, not sectional interests? Former Senator Margaret Reynolds interviews founder of Australian Community Futures Planning, Bronwyn Kelly, in this must watch P&I podcast.

September 20, 2023

Remember Brexit? Australians will regret voting No on the Indigenous Voice

Australians have been able to witness the voter remorse that can arise when a nation votes on a specific question of policy in a referendum that has the potential to set their country on a new course. Referendum questions with that level of significance dont come along very often for democratic nations but when they do the cost of getting them wrong can be far bigger than we might expect.

August 1, 2023

If not now, when? The fiction of the two-state solution

If Palestinian leaders cant sort out their differences and unite now, when Palestine is at the precipice of disaster, then when?

June 30, 2023

Unsettling

What does the word settler mean to you? We read it often in reference to Palestine-Israel. The recent horror of murder and violence in the Occupied areas of the West Bank (Palestinian Territory) needs to be explained; and not with vague and rhetorical reporting which too often suggests that the illegal Jewish settlers are once again targeted by Arab madmen.

September 8, 2024

The US made the Dutch an offer they couldn't refuse

Hold on to your mobile phones, civilians, this is gonna get rough. If you thought the Sopranos and Corleones were intimidating, check this out.

June 30, 2024

Caring for creation: making the transition to renewables

Ever since the Leader of the Opposition’s statements on nuclear reactors, along with many, my heart has ached.

May 19, 2023

Have accounting cosmetics driven dumb housing policy? - Weekly Roundup

Young people are doing it tough; How accounting cosmetics have driven dumb housing policy; and Dutton blows the dog whistle. Read on for the Weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy.

June 10, 2022

Why we need a new Mabo case

The Sunday Age on June 5th carried an article by Justin McManus who had been on Murray, or Mer Island, to witness the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the High Courts Mabo judgement. Discussions conducted during yarning circles concentrated on finding a way forward from the 1992 decision. McManus reported that both Malcolm Mabo, Eddies son, and Kaleb Mabo, his grandson, believed that issues arising from the High Court decision remain unresolved. Kaleb explained that possession of the land came with strings attached..Its still attached to the Commonwealth government and what he had found in his grandfathers writings was that his end goal was to see the Torres Strait be independent from the rest of Australia and I think that is where the fight is moving forwards.

August 29, 2024

Historic plenums path to modernisation

Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) was born in Guang’an, Sichuan province, 120 years ago. By the age of 74, the man who had witnessed nearly the entire 20th century changed China’s trajectory and indirectly shaped the world as we know it today.

July 13, 2024

China and the Communist Party of China

Prompted by Wanning Sun (P&I June 9, 2024), I have just read Yu Yang’s excellent work Private Revolutions. Wanning observes that according to western media the Chinese population is mostly imagined as a monolith and faceless crowd: divided into those who are victims of a repressive Chinese regime, or heroic individuals who dare to defy the system. This is a fallacy.

August 16, 2023

A super power has taken over an island. Is it Taiwan or Australia?

Our automated monitoring service has picked up a conversation about a superpower taking control of an island in Asia-Pacific

August 5, 2024

The ill-starred consequences of America's Chinese chip war

An interesting new article in the prominent American journal, “Foreign Affairs”, by three academics from Georgetown University, argues that “Washington should place less emphasis on slowing down China and more on improving its own innovative prowess.”

May 17, 2024

Want to save public hospitals? First, stop being stupid

Under-funding is not the main reason for the crisis in Australia’s public hospitals. A far bigger problem is systemic stupidity.

September 11, 2023

Australia Post loss another death-knell for essential services

Australia Posts $200.3 million loss for 2022-23 is only the second in its corporate history. It also confirms that, with Christine Holgate gone, Australia Post is once again being set up to fail to justify removing its community service obligation and possible privatisation.

August 21, 2023

Japan's dangerous demonisation of North Korea

Japan is a member of the Quad - the grouping that claims it is working for a free, open, prosperous and inclusive Indo-Pacific region. But in its relations with North Korea, Tokyo is not working for anything free, open, prosperous and inclusive.

September 29, 2024

US makes WA vital for fighting its wars and a target for its enemies

Successive Australian governments have allowed the United States to carry out a program of militarisation in Western Australia (WA) which has made it a vital US war-fighting base and thus an inevitable target for retaliatory strikes should hostilities commence, for example, between the US and China. Much of this militarisation has been carried out behind a cloak of secrecy, without any public or parliamentary debate. This raises the question of how much the WA public and Australians generally, know about this US military build-up, its implications and the serious hazards it poses.

August 12, 2024

Students count cost of epic fail

Successive federal governments have propelled a ‘backdoor privatisation’ of Australian universities. It’s shameful.

July 6, 2024

Brereton’s NACC cloaked in military-grade secrecy

Monday marked the first anniversary of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. This deep dive into the NACC’s first decision discovers secrets upon secrets, and the military seemingly at every turn.

June 28, 2021

What has Australia gained from the crisis the pandemic represented?

This time last year, I was arguing that Morrison would be judged at the next election not by his success in managing the pandemic, but by his success in reviving the economy. I think it is largely his fault that he is now about six months behind schedule in leading Australia out of the pandemic, and that this has reduced his political opportunities. Had he done as well as, say, Israel or Spain in organising vaccines - and he could have - he could be thinking of an election towards the end of this year. It looks as if he must now look to the first half of next year.

October 2, 2024

Tasmanian Holocaust Centre must reflect the horror of genocide in Palestine

In the past 5 years both the Morrison and Albanese governments have provided funding to enable each state and territory to build, or expand on an existing, Holocaust museums or education centres. The Tasmanian government announced last year it had secured $2m in Commonwealth funding to build a centre at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart.

September 13, 2024

Young people no longer see Labor as the party of protest

The response to a piece I wrote for the SMH/Age recently has been very interesting in a number of ways. It has also been very revealing. I have been called a “dog”, been accused of rewriting history and of “letting the side down". Every one of the responses had ignored the basic premise of my article. I wrote about the generational change in my family and my friend’s families that has seen young people abandon Labor and turn to the Greens in frustration. It’s not that they are necessarily attracted to the Greens; it is that, for young people, there is no alternative.

August 19, 2024

Why organised crime puts its money on online gambling

Illegal online casinos are used by criminal gangs to launder billions in profit garnered from transnational crime.

July 26, 2024

Beware the Big C - Consensus

Throughout most of the western world it has been expected political behaviour that the party in power will try to massage its policies so it can get agreement with the major opposition party so as to gain acceptance in Parliament and reduce conflict.

June 25, 2024

Getting serious about fixing Australia's lack of media diversity

When I arrived in Melbourne from Scotland in 2004 to edit The Age, I was shocked that the country only had two major media owners.

August 13, 2023

The empire breaks down

The West’s decline is no triumph, but nor is it a tragedy. It’s just the latest reminder that all organising systems, even empires, are transient, that success always brings complacency, but that the best of human civilisation is renewed and transformed even as the old order fades away.

July 10, 2023

Teacher training report reflects a superficial understanding of education

A well-publicised report on teacher training from Ross Fox, the Director of Catholic Education of Canberra, runs the risk of inferring that a science of learning that works for a private school system that has no students with severe behaviours, will work for schools that have a high proportion of these student.

April 22, 2022

The extradition of Julian Assange 'to a country that conspired to murder him'

It was a dastardly formality. On April 20, at a hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court, Julian Assange, beamed in via video link from Belmarsh Prison, his carceral home for three years, is to be extradited to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 based on the US Espionage Act of 1917.

July 10, 2024

The Age hits a low pursuing discredited narratives about Oct. 7 attack

Melbourne tabloid The Age has done its already sagging reputation no favours by running, as an exclusive, an article that claims to detail what it calls the “denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors” – Israelis who were attacked by Hamas – with the centrepiece of the article being an interview with an Israeli reservist – who was interviewed twice in 2023.

May 6, 2024

Thai police graft highlights bigger issues

There is no bigger news on the current Thai political scene than corruption among the top echelons of the police force. At issue is the tussle between Thailand’s two senior-most cops, Pol Gen Surachate Hakparn and Pol Gen Torsak Sukvimol, both accusing each other of being on the take. Their high-stakes feud would normally be a run-of-the-mill story for the infamously shady Thai police but this case has become a mirror and microcosm of structural graft that is corroding the highest corridors of politics, economy, and society.

July 27, 2023

What really sucks about aging

Its like arriving at a bus station at five minutes to midnight, in the middle of a bustling city, dressed only in your undies. Thats my friends rather odd male-centric take on reaching seventy years of age. But lets go with it - for now.

May 2, 2023

Getting public service on an even keel key to better government

It may not be widely appreciated that door knocking religious proselytisers can be kept at bay by insisting they partake in discussions on public administration in exchange for whatever divine light is being diffused. Its not that religion and public administration dont mix; its that public administration is so tedious for all but those triple vaccinated against boredom.

April 11, 2023

Albo is in denial. He seeks protection and reassurance

Instead of thinking through and independently acting in Australias best interests, Prime Minister Albanese has followed in the footsteps of his discredited predecessors and outsourced defence and foreign policy to the US.

April 26, 2021

America needs to re-invent its police

The George Floyd case triggered a new wave of protests in the American Black Lives Matter movement, but the cause and the protests have been there for years.

July 25, 2024

Hollow liars: the day ANU called ACT police on its students

The ANU used so many resources that day, so much money, manpower and time dedicated to shutting us up. Whilst they were forcefully defending their own complicity with all the resources available to them, Israel was dropping bombs on a refugee camp. The VC was more concerned with our tents than those that were being obliterated in Gaza.

July 4, 2024

Socialist America, state capitalist China

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. So is a graph or chart.

June 4, 2024

Can Scott Morrison be trusted in America?

Try to imagine for a moment a time not long past when Scott Morrison was Australian Prime Minister and Joe Hockey was the Australian Ambassador to the United States. A former Labor Party leader - say Paul Keating, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd or Bill Shorten - has written a book for an American audience and wants Ambassador Hockey to graciously host the book’s launch at the embassy in Washington DC. Guests include Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

June 27, 2023

Interested in Australias future? Help to shape it here

Australia21, the nations not-for-profit Think Tank for the Public Good is seeking a new home.

June 24, 2023

In Lakemba, an answer to one of Palestines secrets is found

Late April, at my sons decree, we went to the Ramadan Night Markets in Lakemba. A visit that would lead to a decades-old mystery being solved. A story that sheds light on the displacement and pain we have experienced since our world was torn apart by Zionism 75 years ago.

April 24, 2023

Vale Sir Les Patterson

The passing of my distinguished predecessor, Sir Leslie Colin Patterson deserves a tribute.

April 18, 2021

Out of this war, ready for the next?

Afghanistan has joined Australias list of lost wars, and its our longest. The Prime Ministers tears on announcing it may have been for that, or for Australias 41 dead, 249 wounded, estimated 500 veteran suicides, and innumerable cases of PTSD, at a cost of A$10 billion.

January 1, 2021

Governments everywhere are ignoring the fact that climate change is just one of 10 human-made threats to our survival

Human extinction in coming decades looks increasingly certain, unless we can somehow, quickly engineer, radical transformative change in the way humans everywhere, live and relate to the planet.

August 10, 2023

Some of these people seek Armageddon": An encounter with Norman Finkelstein

Like his mentor Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is effectively banned from entering the Palestinian territories by Israeli authorities. This constitutes a very exclusive club: Jews welcome in Ramallah but not in Tel Aviv.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal