July 3, 2024

Australia’s obsession with the US is getting out of hand

Australia’s obsession with every little political twist or swing in the US seems to grow with each day, with the latest event to gain saturation coverage being the first presidential debate of the current American political cycle.

May 20, 2023

What have the Chinese ever done to you?

So, you want to go to war with the Americans, Aussie? What have the Chinese ever done to you?

July 30, 2024

Bangladesh's battle between democracy and autocracy

The brutal crackdown on student protesters revealed the totalitarian aims of the prime minister and the resilience of belief in democratic freedoms.

May 12, 2024

From ‘isolated’ Russia with love: Moscow festival unites filmmakers from the Global South and the West

At one of the world’s oldest film festivals, 240 pictures from 50 countries were shown in Russia.

April 20, 2024

Joining AUKUS not in NZ’s national interest

Helen Clark, o how I miss you. The former New Zealand Prime Minister – the safest pair of hands this country has had in living memory – gave a masterclass on the importance of maintaining an independent foreign policy when she spoke at an AUKUS symposium held in Parliament’s old Legislative Chambers on April 18.

April 10, 2024

The United States leaves a mess in Ukraine, moves on to China

The US State Department’s No 2 now admits the AUKUS joint submarine project between three of the Five Eyes is tied to Taiwan and mainland China.

September 3, 2023

Unease over New Zealand overtures to US in Pacific

New security-state documents show Wellington aligning its military with the rules-based international order while preparing Kiwis for war with key trading partner China, writes Mick Hall.

July 28, 2023

Greg Sheridan, Australian conservatives flirt with Orbans fascistic politics

Senior Australian conservative figures continue to attend conferences backed by illiberal Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) hosted its 2023 London Summit in late June, featuring Alexander Downer and Greg Sheridan as two of the five speakers. Australians must focus on connections between our Right and Hungarian fascistic politics.

July 26, 2023

Leaders still long to entice Nato Eastward

From Vilnius, Lithuania, NATO cast its eyes east to the Ukraine. For the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, there was a desire to look even further east beyond the Ukraine. He, some NATO members and invited guests, remain undeterred in their desire to bring NATO into Asia.

June 1, 2023

LGBTIQ+ persecution in Africa: Australias responsibility to protect

Atrocities dont happen overnight. They ramp up over time. The Nazi death camps, were preceded by at least a decade of smaller, selective and escalating removals of human rights for Jewish and LGBTIQ+ peoples. Similar patterns allowed for the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia - incremental and selective removals of minority rights built momentum and social licence for graver crimes against humanity. This is an important reason why the world must act now to stop criminalisation and abuse of LGBTIQ+ peoples in Africa.

September 30, 2024

Why Donald Trump could win the US election

How do we understand the appeal of Donald Trump to more than 45% of American voters? Here are some reasons why he could win the 2024 presidential election.

June 27, 2024

The ‘necessary evils’ of Australia’s allies

“At a public meeting in 1971, C.P. Ellis - head of the Ku Klux Klan in Durham, North Carolina - tore up his KKK membership card in what was basically an act of love.

August 5, 2023

The trouble with telling history as it happens

In the Ukraine War, scholar Serhii Plokhy has his own biases, which can get in the way of his professions fidelity to evidence.

June 13, 2023

Requiem for our species

The effects of the climate crisis intrude with increasing regularity into our lives and yet we do not act. We are as paralysed as past civilisations were when facing catastrophic destruction.

May 5, 2023

Worlds biggest democracy?

What would Australians, and much of the world, say if the Albanese Government arrested Peter Dutton and locked him up?

April 27, 2021

Afghanistan: drawing the curtains on the final act

The past month or two has brought back some imagery that’s haunted me for some time. Images that were part of footage taken by insurgents of my husbands smouldering crash site. It featured on news channels being watched in lounge rooms across the world well before any military official had the chance to even get to my front door.

September 8, 2024

Messing up the sense of the census

It’s hard to imagine how the government could have made a bigger mess of questions about gender identity and sexual orientation for the 2026 Census.

May 19, 2024

Book hero dies

A hero of mine has died. Bernard Pivot, who did more than any other French journalist to get people to read, on Monday (6 May) joined the extinct writers he loved. A TV presenter and producer, he was 89.

May 3, 2024

Myths about Ukraine: no.#1 - Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia

Russian claims to Crimea based on historical ownership, language or the illegitimacy of past decisions are weak. They provide no justification for its invasion and annexation or continued possession of Crimea.

September 9, 2023

Australia only has itself to blame for trade woes with China after siding with the US

Australia has no business playing the victim when the lines between strategy and economic interests have become increasingly blurred.

June 22, 2024

Australia and China are making the same mistake in Papua New Guinea

While Australia and China have very different approaches in PNG, both are in working primarily with political elites, while alienating the New Guinean public.

April 26, 2024

The court decides; doom to follow?

As predicted in Pearls & Irritations earlier this month, an appeal by the two losing candidates in the 14 February Indonesian presidential election has been trounced this week by the Constitutional Court.

September 20, 2023

64 Australian parliamentarians endorse diplomatic trip to free Assange

We believe the right and best course of action would be for the United States’ Department of Justice to cease its pursuit and prosecution of Julian Assange."

September 12, 2022

A new world order is emerging and Australia has some decisions to make

Australia’s world is changing. With the decline of US hegemony, a new world order is emerging led by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the BRICS and the Eurasian Economic Union. Will the Albanese government choose to realign with this new world order, or will it maintain its alliance with the fading hegemon of North America?

July 31, 2024

How economic bureaucrats make policies and remake the Chinese state

Yingyao Wang opens the black box of the Chinese bureaucracy to reveal the agency of the men and women who designed and redesigned Chinese economic policy.

May 29, 2024

Attack on Rafah ‘safe zone’ is abhorrent

The Israeli military has repeatedly bombed a designated civilian ‘safe zone’ in Rafah, injuring and mutilating many people and causing a rising number of deaths. Medical response capacity, after many months of targeted attacks on healthcare in Gaza, is severely limited; there is one functioning hospital in Rafah. Injured survivors of the attack may only receive the most rudimentary care, and may suffer greatly – now, and for the rest of their lives.

May 17, 2024

Nearly all major car companies are sabotaging EV transition, and Japan is worst, study finds

A damning new report has shown that nearly all major car companies are actively sabotaging the world’s efforts to avoid catastrophic global warming. The lobbying strategies being used by the world’s largest automakers are putting global climate targets at risk and threatening the electric vehicle transition, according to the new report released by InfluenceMap.

April 15, 2024

Does Australia owe Fiji $75 billion reparations for historical blackbirding?

In 2023, an American economics firm, Brattle, provided its reparation calculations to a symposium on Transatlantic Slavery Reparations chaired by international judge Patrick Robinson. Brattle calculated that the USA and slave-trading European countries owed the Caribbean and Americas US$130 trillion for wrongs done over a 400-year period.

September 10, 2023

UN says Afghanistan should be included in global climate talks

A top UN official**expressed concerns**that Afghanistan has been excluded from global discussions on climate change, despite being among the top 10 countries worldwide facing climate-related issues.

August 22, 2023

No justice without truth: What I said at ALP Conference

The central and tragic truth of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is that two peoples, the Jewish people and the Palestinians, have deep, centuries-long historical ties to a territory no larger than half of Tasmania. Both peoples want their political independence and to live in peace and freedom. It would be contrary to the great principle of equal justice on which the Labor Party operates to affirm a collective right of self-determination for either peoples, while denying it to the other.

August 14, 2023

"No war in China" campaigners may be foreign agents: NYT

Peace groups campaigning against a US war on China might be paid foreign agents, the New York Times alleged.

April 20, 2023

Mainstream press pounces when vassals speak truth to power

Leaders of France, Brazil and Mexico slammed for stating the obvious that is usually ignored by the Anglo-US media industrial complex.

April 9, 2023

Why Socialists need to talk about justice

Its not enough for socialists to point out capitalisms many faults we need to explain our positive vision of the future and how it lives up to our ideals of justice.

November 18, 2020

Joel Fitzgibbon and renewable energy in the Hunter.(Renew Economy Nov 17, 2020)

The New South Wales has made a new commitment to transform the now coal-dependent Hunter Region as a hub of new renewable energy and storage projects as part of its broad and ground-breaking plans to transition the states grid from coal to renewables. Joel Fitzgibbon is clinging to the past.

October 4, 2024

Lowy’s dangerous fantasy of a stable bipolar Asia

Lowy’s fudge doesn’t work – Australia has to choose between peace with China or following the US towards war.

July 7, 2024

Read history, talk peace

Russia is not Putin, though you’d hardly know it in current media coverage. Nor is it an autarky. On the contrary, for centuries Russia has interacted with both the East and the West, whose influences have shaped, and confounded, the country’s sense of identity.

June 25, 2024

Is peace political?

Since when did PEACE become a political statement??

September 29, 2023

The many lessons of the Ukraine war

_My talk, like the conflict in Ukraine, is a long and complicated one. It contradicts propaganda that has been very convincing. My talk will offend anyone committed to the official narrative. The way the American media have dealt with the Ukraine war brings to mind a comment by Mark Twain: The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.

September 9, 2023

What is Albanese hiding? Maybe its the experts vision of the climate hell ahead

A good way to scare people is to suggest your chief security body has written something so frightening that you cant possibly let anyone read anything about it.

July 25, 2023

Neither the US nor China seem intent on meaningful diplomacy

One side seems to prefer dealing with former leaders rather than current ones. The other likes to talk, while piling on coercive measures.

April 2, 2023

Global tensions: Peacemakers must trump warmongers

Chinas calls for calm stand in stark contrast to US provocations.

October 1, 2024

The Deep State is running the USA, not the President

It doesn’t matter who the president is, the Deep State is running the USA. If you want to interpret American foreign policy its all about power as the central objective - and hegemony. And they really believe they are doing the right thing. David Sacks and a panel from the All in Podcast speak with John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs about their views of what drives America.

August 22, 2024

'Gas Trojan horse': Coalition nuclear push slammed as fossil wedge aimed at renewables

The chair of Australia’s largest group of clean energy investors has described the federal Coalition’s push for nuclear power as a “gas Trojan horse,” and a political wedge intended to douse investment in renewables and prolong the use of fossil fuels.

July 11, 2024

Owing truth to the dead: Israel’s desecration of war graves

When does it stop? Australia’s close ties with Israel continue to hold despite the incessant slaughter taking place in the Gaza strip, with the connivance of any number of allies and arms manufacturers who have priorities that are somewhat different from the aim of preserving life.

May 21, 2024

Southeast Asia, China, and the Belt and Road Initiative: Still going strong?

Relations between great powers and their neighbouring regions are often fraught. The cases of the United States and Latin America, or the European Union and North Africa, come to mind. For instance, tensions related to immigration from Latin America and North Africa, has led to the rise of right wing populism in the United States and Europe, respectively. This has fuelled the rise of populist politicians such as Donald Trump in the United States and Marine Le Pen in France. In China’s case, economic engagement has helped to stabilise and strengthen its relationship with Southeast Asian countries, despite ongoing disputes in the South China Sea. One important facet of this engagement is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which China launched 11 years ago.

June 22, 2021

Australia's Covid vaccine rollout, Part 3. In June 2021 we are at the crossroads

The first week of June will be significant in Australias Covid story. Victoria had entered lockdown on Thursday 27 May after a case of community infection arrived via Adelaide. Another more dangerous variant would also appear. Australians would react with more heading out to get a jab, but not in sufficiently large enough numbers. Pressures were building for the government to dramatically change its vaccine strategy.

March 1, 2020

JOHN DWYER. Americans desperate thirst for affordable health care might just ensure they dont get it!

In this Presidential election year, poll after poll report that Americans number one concern is affordable health care.

February 23, 2020

ANDREW JAKUBOWICZ. Sinophobia goes viral in Australia.(ABC Religion and Ethics 20.2.2020)

_Hundreds of years of racism have merged in the Australian governments response to the Corona virus.

September 17, 2024

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal