February 14, 2020

DUNCAN GRAHAM. From blusukan to bland in five years

_There are some cheering on-line videos worth checking from 2015 when Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull visited Jakarta.

May 28, 2021

The Australian passport that can take you anywhere including an Aussie jail!

The Indian passport I had when I first came to Australia allowed me to enter a few countries only. I had to get it endorsed by the Indian Government if travelling to a country not included. While such restrictions no longer exist, as an Australian passport holder I am now not allowed to make the journey from India to Australia.

May 15, 2018

GLEN SEARLE, CRYSTAL LEGACY. A closer look at business cases raises questions about ‘priority’ national infrastructure projects.

Infrastructure Australia’s latest infrastructure priority list has been criticised for being “ too Sydney-centric” and for giving Melbourne’s East West Link, cancelled in 2014, “ high priority” status. The cancelled Roe 8project in Perth was removed from the list.

So how does a project get onto Infrastructure Australia’s list? This requires submission of a full business case, which then needs to be “ positively assessed” to be given priority status.

August 20, 2021

Liar, liar pants on fire

It is commonly believed if you are going to consistently tell lies you need either a good memory or a hide like a rhinoceros. These days neither seems to be necessary.

July 1, 2021

The difference between fake and genuine apologies

These days there are frequent apologies, non-apologies, refusals to apologise and extended qualifications of apologies with weasel phrases such as “this is not who we are” – despite the behaviour of the organisation uttering the words obviously being exactly who and what they are.

May 20, 2021

Australian engagement with the PRC: universities need more, not less

_The current global political environment in the Anglophone world is becoming increasingly suspicious of involvement of any kind with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). For students and staff in Australian universities the likely resultant disengagement is not simply wrong in principle, it is dangerously misleading.

May 19, 2021

The Paradox of Modern Liberalism

In the wake of the Federal Budget, we have heard lots about the Liberal Government’s new expansionary approach to public spending. There has also been some writing about a putative return to Menzies-type Liberalism. Treasurer Frydenburg is very encouraging of this. Indeed, perhaps with prime ministerial ambitions in mind, he has increasingly referred to his ideas and the spirit of Menzies himself.

May 13, 2021

Nothing could be Finer than to have a War with China in the Morning!

In the early sixties, in the midst of growing paranoia of the Red and Yellow Perils, portrayed by the Menzies Government as dagger-like arrows pointed at Australia’s heart, a TV variety show, perhaps Revue ’61 or In Melbourne Tonight, gave us comic relief with a parody on the Al Jolson song, ‘Carolina in the Morning’, which went, ‘Nothing could be Finer than to have a War with China in the Morning’__.

May 11, 2021

Is News Corp back onto weapons of mass destruction?

_Australians born in the last century remember how the ‘war on terror’ began in 2001. The same con trick is being tried on us again, for war with China.

April 20, 2021

Ending the revolutions: Easter rising and the partition of Ireland

For more than 90 years members of the Irish National Association, their friends and supporters, have assembled on Easter Sunday in front of the 1798 Monument at Waverley Cemetery to commemorate the men and women of the 1916 Easter rising in Dublin. This is an abridged version of the address given at that event on Easter Sunday 2021 by Dr Jeff Kildea, honorary professor in Irish Studies at the University of NSW.

April 9, 2021

Biden has a big job on his hands to convince the Chinese that the US has a functioning democracy.

The political systems in China and America are not what their leaders claim them to be. However, Biden has embarked on a campaign to prove American democracy can trump whatever China has on offer.

July 11, 2021

The battle of the two lines: media comments on the Communist Party of China

Ongoing celebrations in China of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) are crafted to build patriotism and national pride and are domestically focussed. Western press reports say that President Xi’s speech and the 1 July parade demonstrate that China is threatening the rest of the world by demonstrating its growing might. The truth as usual lies somewhere in between. Alternative views are edited out on both sides.

May 31, 2021

Dentist migration policy in Australia requires a new strategy

Are our dentist migration and assessment systems responsive enough to the Australian healthcare system’s changes and challenges? Do we have a robust oral health workforce planning system? In this article, we argue why Australia’s dentist migration policy requires a serious rethink.

April 16, 2021

Northern Ireland deja vu: They're burning buses again

_Since Easter, our newspapers and television screens have been showing us images from Northern Ireland we thought were a thing of the past: a bus being burned, children pelting police with rocks, young men in balaclavas hurling Molotov cocktails. A few years ago we would have taken no notice. But now these images seem incongruous – what’s going on? Didn’t the Good Friday Agreement fix the problem?

April 15, 2021

Who wants war with Iran? Not Australia

Iran has resented the US ever since the CIA and MI6 overthrew Prime Minister Mossadegh in 1953. For its part, the US has wanted vengeance against Iran ever since the Islamic revolution ousted their ally and Israel’s, Mohammad Reza Shah. Iran is the last of the seven countries listed in 2000 by the Neo-conservatives to have their governments overthrown as part of their Project for a New American Century.

April 13, 2021

Take a closer look - the art galleries among victims of the pandemic

There are many things so many of us have missed during lockdowns that it is difficult to make a list – or even start to develop one in ranked order – even though there has been plenty of time to think about it.

January 2, 2021

China and EU 'on verge' of major investment (BBC News Dec, 29 2020)

The EU and China are close to reaching a long-awaited business investment deal, according to media reports.

May 2, 2022

Polls don't suggest a hung Parliament

Three weeks out from the federal election is too long to be confident of predicting the outcome, though the polls suggest Labor has every reason to be more optimistic at this stage than the Liberal-National coalition government. But for weeks now we have had both sides - perhaps all sides including the minor parties - warning that we could be in for a hung parliament.

April 19, 2022

Tim Battin: Waiting for the result of the small-target tactic with baseball bats

_If the ALP cannot secure victory in the coming election, the result will expose the fallacies on which the small-target approach is based, and we should be ready for it with baseball bats.

April 14, 2022

This should be a climate change election

_Anthony Albanese and his colleagues could surely storm to victory if they enthusiastically acted on the arguments presented by climate experts.They would certainly attract the support of the millions of Australians who understandably fear the consequences of our current, disastrously inadequate approach to this topic.

April 5, 2021

The unfolding Covid disaster in PNG

Helping New Guinea with its disastrous Covid outbreak is not pure altruism on our part. The unbridled, indeed raging pandemic, known to have infected 100,000 already and likely to have infected a million more within a week or so, provides a perfect ‘incubator’ for wild type more infectious variants of the Covid to develop. We need to help our close neighbour in a way that prevents transmission of the New Guinea variant spilling into Australia. _

August 10, 2022

The United States, in decline but still able to kill us all...

The global dominance of the United States, in so many fields, from space, to science, to entertainment, to sport, to novelty in the development of the English language, has been taken for granted, is part of our fabric of Australian existence.

August 8, 2021

Bringing 'the Doc' to the masses - review of Gideon Haigh's new book

H. V. Evatt could be a massively polarising figure and that is more than unfortunate. It has closed many minds to what we should be celebrating and promulgating as true Australian values. Those values – not merely espoused, but judicially declared and enacted by and because of Evatt – are in evidence throughout Gideon Haigh’s new book on “the Doc”: The Brilliant Boy.

February 20, 2020

CLIVE KESSLER. Indefinite Incarceration of Unrepentant Jihadis in Australia?

_The sentences, some of them already further extended, of a number of militant Islamists convicted of terrorist conspiracy are about to expire.

April 15, 2021

Cracks form a year out from South Australian election

One year out from the next South Australian state election and Steven Marshall’s Liberal government is starting to lose its mildly progressive safe covid manager gloss as old and new scandals and blunders start to bite.

September 28, 2022

Whitewashing at Shinzo Abe’s state funeral

Be careful who you praise and the degree of zeal you do it with. The slain Shinzo Abe, shot dead in Nara on July 8, towered over Japanese politics. In doing so, he cast a lengthy shadow. In death, this shadow continues to grow ever more darkly.

April 8, 2021

This one will blow up on Scotty: Christine Holgate's unfair dismissal

For thirty years I have believed that, when it wants to, Australian public culture defaults to its misogynistic normal in justifying a woman be disciplined or punished for an event or outcome with which they may have absolutely nothing to do at all.

February 25, 2020

DUNCAN GRAHAM.The pachyderm on the patio

Kupang is at the bottom of West Timor. It’s the largest city in far eastern Indonesia. Imagine how Canberra would react if Jakarta allowed the People’s Liberation Army Air Force to station their armed jets just 830 km northeast of Darwin.

August 20, 2021

Have government responses to COVID-19 eroded freedoms?

Has it come to the point where it is imperative that we have a Bill of Rights as a bulwark against creeping arbitrary executive power and oppression as such protections as might exist are being steadily and stealthily eroded away supposedly for the public good?

February 14, 2021

Alas America, the outlook is difficult; but should not be aggressive

Ignorance of the world, along with a belief in American exceptionalism, combines with an obsession with a capitalism that is rapidly increasing inequity. That is the USA.

April 14, 2021

Hans Kung: a theologian for everyone

Hans Küng died last Tuesday aged 93. I had the honour of knowing him as a friend. He was a rare breed: a theologian who spoke to people of diverse beliefs and none.

May 20, 2021

Israel is making the same errors as Britain did over Northern Ireland 50 years ago

When I first visited Israel in 1976 after spending three years in Northern Ireland working on my second degree, I was struck by the similarities between the situations in the two countries.

April 24, 2022

The ANZAC story is inadequate as the basis for of a national identity

Anzac Day is upon us and there’ll be the usual effort to promote the notion that participation in WW1 is the basis of our national identity. I have serious problems with this concept.

December 31, 2020

Monthly digest on housing affordability and homelessness - Nov/Dec 2020

The following is the latest instalment of a monthly digest of interesting articles, research reports, policy announcements and other material relevant to housing stress/affordability and homelessness – with hypertext links to the relevant source.

July 20, 2022

These Untied States

In a recent New Yorker, Andrew Marantz paints a grim prospect of the United States becoming more like Viktor Orban’s Hungary, when a Republican President and Congress, a real possibility after the 2024 elections, use the full range of constitutional possibilities to maintain a government that does not represent a majority of the American population.

May 28, 2021

'Gas-led recovery': methane and the risk of mass extinction

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum” - Noam Chomsky (1998).

January 7, 2021

Joe Biden should end the US pretence over Israel’s ‘secret’ nuclear weapons

The cover-up has to stop – and with it, the huge sums in aid for a country with oppressive policies towards Palestinians.

January 31, 2021

Democracy’s Apostates

The inauguration of Joe Biden can be understood as the Solemn High Mass of democracy’s civil religion after Trump had tried to destroy it.

November 3, 2020

Shoot to thrill: the night operation to Shina village

Friday morning in Brisbane. Everything seems normal expect for that gleaming black Toyota Crew Van brooding across the street. Before time allows a second look, BAM!! Members of the Queensland Police Service’s Special Emergency Response Team (SERT) burst like shrapnel from the back of the unit.

August 26, 2022

China–US rivalry no new Cold War

Seventy-five years ago this July, the US diplomat George Kennan published his seminal essay in Foreign Affairs introducing the idea of ‘containment’. In _The Sources of Soviet Conduct_, Kennan advocated for a policy of containment against Soviet expansionism. As some in Washington prepare for a new Cold War with China, the Kennan-era template is being pressed into service again.

July 8, 2021

We should thank the unemployed for their service. They've been used to control inflation

I want to show you something. It has to do with our economy and it’s probably been invisible to you. The majority of journalists have no idea about it and few politicians would, either. But it affects everyone and it shouldn’t be something only economists know about.

August 5, 2021

A foreign policy built on shamelessness and hypocrisy

As US lectures other countries on human rights and press freedom, its military has been busy killing foreign civilians and its prosecutors are going after journalists, whistleblowers and ethnic Chinese researchers.

February 4, 2019

CLAIRE GIANGRAVE. UN panel probes Italy’s role in Church’s child abuse scandals

A United Nations Committee for the protection of minors questioned the Italian government last week about clerical sexual abuse in the country, expressing concern over laws that protect predator priests from criminal charges.

February 24, 2020

JOHN TAN. Jokowi, identity politics … and neoliberalism.

_President Joko Widodo is concerned by identity politics, which has been standard fare for neoliberal US and Australian election strategists for many years.

March 25, 2020

RICHARD WHITINGTON. Berejiklian ticking off the milestones on way to creating NSW history.

Next Monday marks the first anniversary of Gladys Berejiklian becoming the first female to be elected Premier of NSW, and the Liberals’ third straight victory.

January 17, 2018

JOHN TULLOH. The torment of the impossible Kurdish dream.

For all the promises, for all the sterling work they have willingly done in the fight against evil, for all the sympathy they have engendered, the Kurds will never achieve their greatest aspiration: their own homeland. The fact is the world doesn’t care. They are a people on their own to be exploited when it suits interests of the Middle East.

May 26, 2021

Intelligence agencies have helped precipitate the crisis in our relations with China (An updated post)

_In Max Suich’s outstanding series in the Australian Financial Review, on 16, 17 and 18 May, on how we got into the pointless confrontation with China there is no doubt that much of the ‘intelligence’ came from US sources and that our naive and China ignorant intelligence agencies tagged along and served up US intelligence dressed up as their own. But in the end the Australian Government is responsible for the mess.

July 12, 2020

‘The most ignorant and unfit’: What made America’s worst ever leader? (NYRB 3.7.20)

“Being president,” former First Lady Michelle Obama has said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.” In this moment, we may also need to acknowledge that presidents also reveal much about who we are.

July 17, 2022

NATO has an overriding institutional commitment to its permanent existence, if not expansion

This is a comprehensive, sobering review by Jonathan Cook who concludes that Washington’s greatest fear is that, as its economic muscle atrophies, Europe’s vital trading links with China and Russia will see its economic interests - and eventually its ideological loyalties - shift eastwards, rather than stay firmly in the western camp.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal