November 3, 2020

US Election: keep an eye on the swing states

The swing states to keep your eyes on are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, and, of course Florida. All were won by Trump in 2016; if he falls in two or more of these states the chances are that Biden will be take the presidential prize.

July 17, 2022

Radioactive portents on a burning earth

According to Fermis Paradox, the failure to date to achieve radio communications between Earth and extraterrestrial civilisations can be attributed to the short-term self-destruction of technological civilisation by means of contamination of air, water and land by lethal substances, and the creation of deadly weapons. In the 20-21st centuries this includes saturation of the atmosphere by greenhouse gases and proliferation of radioactivity. Lost in the 24 hours media news cycle is a crucial development inherent in the evolution of life on Earth since at least 66 million years ago.

March 20, 2018

The Nuclear Ban Treaty Embeds the Nuclear Taboo

The non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 is largely explained by the strong moral taboo. There have been many occasions when they could have been used without fear of retaliation but were not, even at the price of defeat on the battlefield, as in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Norms, not deterrence, have anathematised the use of nuclear weapons as morally unacceptable. The force of the norm is buttressed by operational disutility: the very destructiveness of nuclear weapons robs them of military or political utility. Their lethal destructiveness constitutes an existential threat to all human beings, not just to the leaders, soldiers and citizens of the countries fighting a nuclear war.

May 10, 2022

Our health system: The dream and the reality

How would it be to have a health system which delivered timely high quality care to everyone, with such a system emphasising that prevention of illness and promotion of health at every level to improve health, as well as potentially increasing productivity? How would it be to have a society which recognised that poor health is frequently a result of structural inequalities in that society?

October 24, 2020

'Fratelli Tutti': Papal dreams or Vatican diversion? (Global Sisters Report Oct 19, 2020)

The encyclical aims to promote a universal movement toward fraternity and social friendship grounded in compassionate love, following the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37)….How do we make sense of this in a church that does not regard women as equal?

July 15, 2022

Will Timor Sea oil and gas go begging?

The Attorney-General dropped the case against Bernard Collaery on July 7. Dreyfus’ announcement has greatly improved our relationship with Timor Leste and opened the door for smoother negotiations between Australian oil and gas companies and the Timorese government. That relationship is now oiling the wheels for further explorations in the Timor Sea but the wheels are turning slowly. Few investors are looking to oil and gas. Few buyers are planning long term hydrocarbon contracts.

September 5, 2022

Our primary care system needs a philosophical and structural revolution (part one)

_It is totally appropriate to use the word crisis when describing the current state of Primary Care in our country. Our General Practitioners are increasingly giving voice to their frustration with the structures and strictures within which they are expected to deliver health care to Australians. Their disillusionment is infectious with recent studies reporting that only 9-15% of graduating doctors are contemplating careers as GPs.

June 11, 2022

Jimmys story

Looking back it is hard to believe, at 36, I could have been so nave. Despite having lived overseas for nearly half my life and having travelled extensively through Europe and both North and South America, I was largely innocent of the dark side of human behaviour. It wasnt until I returned to Australia and started in the Corrective Services Industry that I was baptised into the degrading sub-culture of prison work which is designed to break people, rather than rehabilitate them. Even now, stories surface from time to time telling of the atrocities that prisoners - Aborigines, in particular - suffer within the penal system. As an ex-prison guard, I know, only too well, just how true those tales are.

December 19, 2020

Living in End Times: Denialism, Pentecostalism and Climate Science

Are we living in End Times? We are according to the Pentecostal eschatology to which Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Minister Stuart Robert, and some other Coalition MPs apparently subscribe.

November 28, 2020

Skewed responsibility: Australian war crimes in Afghanistan

TheInspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry was always going to make for a gruesome read and that was just the redacted version.

May 20, 2022

Keith Mitchelson: Just go away and die

For over three years the world has grappled with Covid-19. Australia was well served by doctors who convinced governments to listen to medical science. But the politicians have resumed control and science, all science, is being silenced.And not just on Covid but more importantly in climate change

July 25, 2020

Millionaires who pay no tax and Australia's richest and poorest postcodes revealed (ABC 18.7.20)

Seventy-three millionaires paid no tax in 2017-18, while Australia’s richest people live in Sydney’s Double Bay, on average earning more than 13 times the nation’s poorest, who live in central-west Queensland.

July 20, 2018

MALISE RUTHVEN. God on Our Side.(New York Review of Books)

A comment by a young Muslim man who had studied at an American university sets the tone for the impressively far-ranging Crusade and Jihad. The bottom line, he tells William Polk, “is that no Muslim ever tried to enslave or slaughter your people. You might think of the attack on the World Trade Center, 9/11, as a counterattack. It was terrible and most of us are ashamed of it, but just rememberit killed about 25 hundred people whereas imperialists killed at least 25 million of our relatives and tried to destroy our way of life and our religion. Do you care about that?”

August 9, 2021

Commemoration is the second casualty of war

The Australian Government is very, very slow to address veterans’ problems witness the tardiness on the veterans’ suicide issue yet it is always quick off the mark to dream up some new commemoration of conflict.

October 17, 2020

Interests, Not Altruism, Drive China's New Climate Ambition (Seirra Club Oct 5, 2020)

In a surprising and widely praisedstatement, President Xi recently announced that China would significantly increase its carbon reduction goals.

September 12, 2022

Albanese wont rescue the Governor General from his impossible position

The Governor-General (GG), David Hurley, is in an increasingly invidious position, and sooner rather than later will feel impelled to resign. He may not yet see it this way and will in any event be preoccupied with the Queens funeral and the transition of the King. But the prime ministers intervention on Wednesday night to kill off a $24 million plus leadership scheme was designed to protect both Hurley and his office from the ignominy of being a subject of debate in both houses of parliament. How long he can, or will avoid this, has to be open to question.

March 22, 2018

JULIAN CRIBB. When oil spells murder.

A worldwide spate of legal actions against governments and fossil fuel companies is changing the political context of the climate debate more profoundly than anything yet. Yet it may still not be enough to rescue humanity from the other nine existential threats that confront us. Five new groups dedicated to human survival illustrate a new trend towards global consciousness of the peril in which we stand and action to mitigate it.

March 15, 2020

JERRY ROBERTS. Alan Jones charges into the cash fight

The Senate Economics Legislation Committee Report on the Government’s cash-ban bill is a dismal whitewash of our banking cartel that betrays the fine work performed during the inquiry by Senators Alex Gallacher and Rex Patrick.

February 20, 2020

KERRY BROWN and EMMA LUO. Degrees of espionage(Chatham House/The World today 13.2.2020)

Fears are rising in countries…that China is wielding undue influence through its supposed infiltration of universities and institutions and by its spying on companies and government.

August 21, 2022

Dismantling global white privilege: Book by Chandran Nair-Equity for a post-western world

One of the few uplifting political trends of the past decade has been the growing strength of movements for gender equality and, even more surprisingly, the demand for racial justice. But a higher-level structure of discrimination governs both racism and sexism: The global dominance of a white power elite in virtually every arena of human activity.

February 5, 2020

JOHN MENADUE. We are paying to protect an industry that no longer exists( A repost)

We see it almost every day in the media; rent-seekers extracting benefits for themselves through political influence and lobbying at the expense of the broader community. It has very little to do with markets.

May 8, 2022

Voting season sees clichs bloom

Elections are spring rains bursting dormant seeds into carpets of weeds. Common varieties include sun-intolerant promises and herbicide-resistant lies. The most tenacious is Diurnarius proverbium, commonly known as journalistic clichs.

February 24, 2020

ROSEMARY O'GRADY. Anthropology and Perspective

One of the rare pleasures of working to salvage documentation of a vandalized archive is that, sometimes, a damaged jewel surfaces amidst the rubble.

January 30, 2020

EMILLIAN KAVALSKI and NICHOLAS ROSS SMITH.Putins reforms may model Deng Xiaoping.(SCMP 27.1.2020)

After 20 years, Putin may be looking to protect his legacy by negotiating a controlled power handover in Russia, retiring from day-to-day administration while keeping a firm hand on policy direction as Russias father figure much as Chinas Deng Xiaoping did

April 12, 2022

The hero and villains of Ukraine

While the West stands for freedom, it does not stand up for its friends! NATO is prepared to fight Russia, but only to the last Ukrainian!

February 11, 2020

JOHN TAN. Australia joins the RCEP: Challenges and opportunities ahead.

_Australia has joined the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which will come into being in 2020; 15 countries just to the north; a huge potential market of nearly half the worlds population and over a quarter of the worlds GDP.

January 29, 2020

PAUL MALONE. The Australian media and the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspector who led the team investigating the alleged Douma chemical weapons attack in Syria in April 2018 has gone public saying that his investigation team had serious misgivings that a chemical attack had occurred.

August 26, 2022

Could Trump become US President again in 2024?

However unpalatable the thought, It is time to start getting our heads around the fact that Trump may stand and may well regain the US presidency in November 2024.

September 9, 2022

Environment: Pacific wants Australian support for strong climate action

Pacific nations want climate action not military bases. Emissions and temperatures keep rising and forest fires keep increasing.

March 10, 2020

BEN DOOLEY,MOTOKO RICH and HISAKO UENO.-Anger in Japan over virus begins to focus on Prime Minister(NYT 7.3.2020)

_For nearly a month, as the coronavirus has threatened the health and economy of Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been almost invisible.

May 24, 2021

History clarifies and history challenges for the Catholic Church

It was a strange conversation. A friend who was, at that time, an American archbishop had congratulated me on an academic promotion. He slapped me on the back in his customary gung ho way and said: You are a smart guy, a theologian, but remember that I have something you dont have.

January 16, 2021

How Steve Bannon tried to destroy Pope Francis (Counter Punch 3 Jan, 2021)

_At the outset, I cannot emphasize enough the tremendous value and insight provided for the framing of this reportage by What We Dont Talk About When We Talk About #MeToo by JoAnn Wypijewski, an important anthology of sex crime journalism offering an essential lens for analyzing our neurotic social mores about sex, crime, public hysteria, and justice. Its important chapters on the Boston clergy abuse scandal gave me the backbone to write the following report

January 28, 2020

HAGAI El-AD. Netanyahu Exploits the Holocaust to Brutalize the Palestinians (Haaretz23.1.2020)

Netanyahu didn’t invent the idea of leveraging the Holocaust for political gain. Yet he is taking even that low to new depths, stripping Palestinians of basic human rights in the name of the survivors of the Holocaust

April 15, 2022

Keeping them honest: A book review

This book Keeping Them Honest: the case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms puts solidly the case for a Commonwealth Integrity Commission known in the trade I’m told as a CIC.

April 2, 2020

ROBERT MICKENS. A priest-centered Church, confused and unprepared.

In the past five or six decades, Catholic bishops in almost every part of the world have stood by, paralyzed, watching helplessly as the number and quality of priesthood candidates have continued to dwindle.

July 26, 2022

Humphrey McQueen: Abe, Kishi and Kodama

Like grandson: Like grandfather

April 5, 2022

Ray Edmondson: Coalition jobs for the boys and girls before the "Caretaker Period" start with the AAT!

Public institutions need the guidance of expert boards, and appointments to them should be well considered, transparent, merit-based and non-political. In many countries thats normative and taken for granted. But not in Australia. Under the Coalition government the boards of some of our great institutions have been thoroughly politicised.

August 21, 2022

Alpha Ngai: Panda Power

Soft power was academically identified by the US political scientist, Joseph Nye, in 1990. It is a prominent aspect of how America projects itself internationally. Chinas soft power is rather less developed and today it faces determined resistance. Yet, panda power is one form of Chinese soft power that has proved to be remarkably effective and resilient.

October 24, 2020

End our national crisis: the case against Donald Trump (NYTimes Oct 19, 2020)

Donald Trumps re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.

May 17, 2022

Has Labor timidity hobbled its right to exercise power?

One of the more amazing elections of the past 50 years was in 1974, less than 18 months after the Whitlam government took power at least in the House of Representatives. It did not have a majority in the senate and was often frustrated there, in part because of the crossbench numbers of Democratic Labor Party foes of Labor since the 1956 Split. The DLP was led by Vince Gair, a former Labor Queensland premier, a fairly good one really who had been expelled from Labor with some of his ministers, including Bob Katters dad, for daring to defy an AWU official.

December 7, 2020

Overwhelming support for war powers reform (Australians for War Power Reform Dec 2, 2020)

83.3% of Australians want Parliament to decide whether our troops are sent into armed conflict abroad, according to a nationwide Roy Morgan opinion poll released recently.

June 11, 2022

Why isn't anyone talking about trust?

Why has there been no discussion of how levels of distrust influenced voters decisions in the recent election? There has been wide speculation on why there were such low levels of votes for the Coalition and, to a lesser degree, the ALP as first preferences. Theres also been lots of discussion about the successful rise of votes for independents and Green voters. Although these results suggest major shifts in voting that could undermine the long-term pattern of clear victories by major parties, to a need to depend on other representatives votes to achieve governance, nobody is talking about a trust deficit.

October 23, 2019

ANDREW GLIKSON. "The emperor's new clothes: Greta Thunberg versus the climate contrarians"

It is not an accident that fascist philosophies and movements willfully ignore human-induced global warming leading to the Sixth mass extinction of species, the largest since 56 million years ago. The nature of denialists is manifest in their venting of hate on the 16 years-old Gerta Thunberg, the voice of a generation destined to face the global warming calamity perpetrated by sections of humanity.

June 10, 2022

In Asia Media this week, Albanese in Jakarta, the US-China stance, Thailand legalises pot, Biden's economic framework

In Asia Media, Albanese wins enthusiastic coverage in Jakarta; new Indo-Pacific leaders work on US-China stance; Myanmar brings back hanging for dissidents; experts analyse Bidens new economic grouping; Thailand legalises pot.

April 30, 2022

The crisis of representative democracy

The model of parliamentary democracy which the modern world inherited from Britain is obviously not working properly any more, because the major parties today dont stand for coherent and reliable policies which reflect fundamental social divisions and opposing interests in our society.

June 9, 2022

Anglicans, ANZAC and the nation

There has been a change in the way we understand the ANZAC tradition.Since 1945, the literature on ANZAC has led us to think of its ‘classical’ and ‘stoic’ sources as a ‘secular’ national religion. Darren Mitchell’s important Sydney University PhD Thesis ‘Anzac Rituals’ (2020) more reasonably demonstrates its British imperial religious ethos.

March 11, 2021

Exporting hydrogen the last throw of the dice for brown coal

Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylors backing for the Victorian-based hydrogen export plan, which he described as a significant project, defies financial credibility.

February 3, 2020

DAVID SHEARMAN. The Unrelenting Desire to Export more Coal

Australia has become the climate change pariah of developed countries which are trying to deliver a fair share of emissions reduction.

September 14, 2022

Is Hong Kong experiencing a Teacher Exodus? Time to correct the record

Is Hong Kongs world class education system really seeing an exodus of teaching staff? Are reductions in staffing levels linked to political crackdowns and the COVID 19 Pandemic? Not so fast. Lets correct the record.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal