January 7, 2021

Most viewed posts 2020: Father Glen Walsh paid a heavy price (Sep 9, 2020)

The revelations never end about priests and brothers, of monsignors and bishops with their secret sexual lives, masturbating, buggerizing, sodomizing and raping boys and girls – protected by an amoral hierarchy and a few corrupt members of the upper-echelons of various police forces.

May 30, 2020

JENNY HOCKING supports Pearls and Irritations.

I am a long-time reader, contributor and supporter of Pearls & Irritations.

October 18, 2020

James Murdoch, Rebellious Scion (NYTimes Oct 10, 2020)

Increasingly uncomfortable with News Corp’s politics and profit motives, Rupert’s younger son chose chickens and sheep over Fox, and insists he doesn’t watch ‘Succession.’

February 27, 2025

Police and synagogue attendees shaken to the core by democracy

Social cohesion is supposedly the order of the day. Our rights are being steadily eroded in its honour. One would hardly imagine that a religious institution would host a political figure for whom fear and division are lifeblood. Yet, on Thursday, 20 February, Emanuel Synagogue hosted Peter Dutton.

October 25, 2024

Vale Susie Menadue

Life is changed, not ended. Diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease over two years ago, Susie Menadue died peacefully, surrounded by her family on October 24, aged 79.

February 13, 2024

Climate chaos: world overheats while Europe faces a new Ice Age

_The hottest January ever recorded_ in human history has passed, with barely a nod from governments worldwide and international media. For a full year, the Earth has now exceeded the +1.5 degrees danger level set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. And 2024 may be hotter still, US scientists are warning.

January 26, 2024

Towards an unliveable planet: Climate’s 2023 annus horribilis

The heat and extreme climate records of 2023 shocked scientists. So where are we heading? Given current trends, the world will zoom past 2°C of warming and the Paris climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5-2°C.

November 5, 2023

Bill Hayden warned that becoming a US supplicant carried unacceptable risks

Bill Hayden rescued and resuscitated the Labor Party as a national force as certainly as I am standing before you today. We may see the likes of Bill Hayden again, but I doubt it. At Bill’s initiative, in 1983 he put into place a review of ANZUS, suggesting that Australia presenting as a sycophant or supplicant would carry unacceptable risks, where our interests would simply be subsumed by Washington_._

December 18, 2022

Penny Wong should go to Beijing for the 50th Anniversary

On 21 December, it will be exactly 50 years since a joint communique establishing diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China was signed in Paris by each country’s Ambassador. To mark the event, it would be normal practice for a ministerial visit in either direction to occur. China is big on commemorative occasions. It does them well.

October 15, 2024

Australia’s shame

_Open Letter to Antonio Guterres on the Australian Government’s failure to publicly defend the office of the United Nations Secretary General.

December 2, 2023

Unconscionable profits

The Canadian private equity fund Brookfield’s bid for Origin Energy has the sole aim of delivering unconscionable profits to investors. But the rest of us have to know we are in the company of the masters of the universe and click our heels whenever we are given the cue from their obedient investment banks.

October 22, 2023

The outside world must walk Israel back from the abyss. It cannot be part of the choir of incitement

A former Israeli adviser and a former Palestinian adviser say individual member states must push harder for an end to the wanton destruction.

December 29, 2022

Best of 2022: Last week, a NSW court jailed me for 15 months for a peaceful climate protest. Hear my story

If you are reading this, then I have been sentenced to prison for peaceful environmental protest. I do not want to break the law. But when regular political procedure has proven incapable of enacting justice, it falls to ordinary people taking a stand to bring about change.

February 13, 2022

Changes at Pearls & Irritations

From Tuesday 15 February Michael West Media and Pearls & Irritations will be going separate ways.

March 22, 2025

Kim Beazley bombs out

March hasn’t been one of the better months for Kim Beazley, the former Hawke and Keating Government minister, leader of the federal ALP and governor of Western Australia and now chairman of the Council of the Australian War Memorial.

January 20, 2025

Gaza ceasefire deal: Hamas, Egypt and Qatar pushing for Marwan Barghouti's release

Imprisoned Palestinian leader tops list of political prisoners whose potential release is being discussed.

December 9, 2024

The end of pluralism in the Middle East

A truly seismic change in the Middle East appears to be happening very fast. At its heart is a devil’s bargain – Turkey and the Gulf States accept the annihilation of the Palestinian nation and creation of a Greater Israel, in return for the annihilation of the Shia minorities of Syria and Lebanon and the imposition of Salafism across the Eastern Arab world.

November 12, 2024

Australians pierce the foreign policy propaganda of both major parties

A Resolve Political Monitor poll published in today’s Sydney Morning Herald makes clear that the Australian community at large possesses a contrary view to the foreign policy priorities of the Albanese government and its predecessor under Scott Morrison.

March 2, 2024

Palestinians in Gaza massacred, starved and raped

The Australian government remains silent, continues to call Israel “our friend”, and rewards Israel’s war machine in a new contract with the Israeli arms firm Elbit. The Federal Government sends more troops to the Middle East while starving Palestinians in northern Gaza are massacred as they desperately seek food for their families, babies in Gaza are dying of starvation and dehydration and the IDF sexually abuses and rapes Palestinian women prisoners.

November 17, 2023

Does Israel have a right to exist?

Israel’s membership of the United Nations was approved in 1949. Unlike other states, it was approved conditionally upon Israel complying with Partition Resolution 181 as to the limits of the Israeli State, and UN Resolution 194, allowing the return of refugees. Israel has complied with neither condition. It refuses to define its borders and is today governed by an Apartheid regime that has murdered over 4,500 children in Gaza in the space of one month. Israel’s membership of the UN must be illegal. It should be expelled from the community of nations.

October 3, 2022

The Defence Strategic Review: National strategy or weapons shopping list?

Governments don’t hold inquiries to get unwelcome answers. The Defence Strategic Review is no exception. So what does the Albanese government want it to achieve?

October 4, 2021

Magical thinking: nuclear submarines and Australia’s Maginot Line of the imagination

The relationship between defence policy and the nuclear powered submarines has generated a lot of magical thinking.

November 7, 2024

Trump victory makes AUKUS a further danger to Australia

Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, has called on the federal Labor government to withdraw Australia from the AUKUS military pact.

February 20, 2024

Arab governments fiddle while Palestine burns

The Arab response to the unfolding Palestinian catastrophe has been underwhelming. Palestinian intellectuals, journalists, activists, and the wider Palestinian public have had no illusions as to what to expect of the US political and military elites. They did, however, expect more of Arab governments.

February 19, 2024

It will soon be too late for Gaza

Within two weeks the remaining people of Gaza, herded into Rafah, will all be dead, either from disease, starvation, or murder, an Australian medical specialist told me on Friday. Humans can’t survive in these conditions. What is Australia doing? he wanted to know.

February 2, 2024

The decision of the International Court of Justice

By way of introduction let me quote Richard Falk, noted international law professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Falk: the decision by the ICJ “marks the greatest moment in the history of the [Court]”.

December 11, 2022

Wong warns US: Indo-Pacific does not want great power competition

“US policy needs to be based on a clear understanding of what the rest of the Indo Pacific wants. We need to demonstrate we have interests we want to nurture beyond security interests.”

November 16, 2021

Public policy making is failing in Australia. Here's how to fix it

Federal and state governments are falling short of basic standards of evidence in legislating policy, according to new independent research.

March 5, 2025

Ukraine deal: Beware of Americans bearing gifts

Witnessing the extraordinary cage fight this week between Volodomyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump in the Oval Office provided an eye-popping glimpse into what is normally kept behind closed doors when world leaders meet to nut out matters of great consequence.

February 6, 2025

Lone soldiers, lone wolves: Are IDF returnees a security threat?

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of studies and literature on foreign fighters and the risks they pose to their home countries focuses on jihadis, with a smaller smattering of pieces on far-right individuals seeking combat experience in Ukraine.

March 21, 2023

The geopolitics of peace in a post-Western world

We are in the midst of an extraordinarily dangerous and destructive hot war in Ukraine, and there is now daily talk about the prospects of a US-China war in Asia, perhaps over Taiwan. We cannot afford a continuation of the current war, and we cannot afford a war between the US and China. That would be the end of civilisation.

February 27, 2022

Environment: Destroying wetlands increases methane emissions

We’re destroying wetlands and their methane is killing us. Big Oil can’t be trusted but nor can the EU’s climate commitments. Boomers leave their great grandkids a tenth of what they enjoyed.

March 18, 2025

Government refuses to articulate 'frankly terrifying' security risks

The Albanese Government has jammed itself by trying to not talk about the greatest threat to Australia’s future, but has now opened itself to the charge of playing politics with security issues.

March 7, 2025

The AUKUS chickens are coming home to roost, already

In its response to AUKUS with its objective of militarily confronting China in the South China Sea, we should not be surprised by Chinese naval vessels sailing around Australia to pick up some intelligence or at least showing us their growing naval power.

March 3, 2025

Dutton unplugged? Bolt for the long grass... More Dutton stuff-ups!

The next federal election looms ahead menacingly. This is when the metal hits the meat and we have to make hard decisions or become just the burnt bits on the edge of the Democracy Sausage Sizzle.

February 24, 2025

Back to Russia with love – détente is a win for everyone

One key fact was absent from virtually all of the reporting around the astonishing events of this past week. It was scarcely mentioned in stories about the Munich Security Conference, the call between Presidents Trump and Putin, the freezing out of the Europeans, the jaw-dropping statements by US Defence Secretary Hegseth, the ending of cherished plans to expand NATO into Ukraine, and the historic face-to-face meeting between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Riyadh. The missed central point: Russia has, in effective terms, won the war where it counts – on the battlefield. That more than anything is driving the calculus in Washington.

January 17, 2025

The day after the ceasefire: Boycotts, sanctions and divestments must intensify

After 15 months of the most horrific live-streamed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has been forced into an interim ceasefire. How long it will last is anyone’s guess but Israel’s contempt for any restraining agreements doesn’t offer much hope.

January 7, 2025

In defence of free speech about genocide in Gaza

Early in the New Year, acclaimed journalist and former SBS news anchor Mary Kostakidis posted a statement on her X account in the hope it would bring to a close legal proceedings brought against her in the Australian Human Rights Commission by the CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia, alleging that social media posts on Israel’s genocidal acts in Gaza allegedly violated the country’s Racial Discrimination Act.

March 1, 2024

Traitors in our midst: Australia’s foreign interference laws are a political ruse

Leaving aside the issue of whether ASIO’s announcement that there is a ‘traitor in our midst’ is simply a ploy to get more funds in this year’s Federal Budget (something you can never rule out) why hasn’t ASIO and other security and law enforcement agencies in this country pursued the two greatest practitioners of so called foreign influence - the United States followed by Israel?

October 18, 2022

US National Security Strategy: dogma for a misconceived crusade

_American National Security Strategies (NSS) are a bizarre hegemonic specie. The latest version is saturated with more than usual hyperbole. The Biden Administration’s obsession that the defining characteristic of international reality is an ontological dichotomy between democracy and autocracy distorts the Strategy’s perspective.

October 5, 2022

War Memorial pressured into recognition of Frontier Wars

A watershed moment for Australia as the War Memorial, caught in a confluence of events, is pressured to announce its plans for recognition of Australia’s brutal Frontier Wars.

February 9, 2022

Peng Shuai returns serve on the media beat-up merchants

The tennis player’s story was distorted by the media. But we won’t hear any apologies from the blame-China brigade.

November 4, 2021

What Asian media are saying about COP26

In the Asian media, COP26 isn’t all about net zero plans and phasing out coal — our region is just as concerned with the potential potholes.

October 16, 2024

'The fabric of nature Is unraveling,' warns new report on wildlife population decline

“This is not just about wildlife,” an expert said. “It’s about the essential ecosystems that sustain human life.”

March 27, 2024

Anatomy of a Genocide

After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.

March 16, 2024

“I told you so”: No Aussie subs in 2030s, total reliance on the Yanks

The sweetest words in the English language: I told you so.

February 27, 2024

The world is watching

In a small dark and windy lane in Leith in Edinburgh I got into a conversation with an artist painting a bright yellow mural of a young woman on a wall. The artist told me she was painting Bisan, a young journalist, who opens all her posts with - “Hey everyone, this is Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive”. On my regular treks to the tram stop I watched over several days as the mural was finished in the wet, windy and cold Edinburgh weather.

January 25, 2024

Humanity’s new era of “global boiling”: Climate’s 2023 annus horribilis

For climate change, 2023 was an “unprecedented” year, “absolutely gobsmackingly bananas” and “scary” and “frightening”. And that was what climate scientists said! The UN Secretary General called it the year in which humanity crossed into a new climate era — an age of “global boiling”.

January 10, 2024

The US, the ICJ and Gaza

US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the South African application “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal