October 12, 2022

The Defence Strategic Review: AUKUS is the wrong submarine for Australian needs

Any new submarine for defending Australia should be built around our experience. Our needs are idiosyncratic. The Defence Strategic Review should find that Australias defence interests would be served only by a new submarine designed for Australias peculiar northern waters. If we cannot have submarines designed for our conditions, the platform should be removed from our force structure.

November 24, 2021

US-China tariff stoush fosters a protection racket. Australia is on the 'hit list'

The wrecking ball Trump took to the global trading system is still swinging, with implications for Australian trade and even the survival of the WTO.

October 10, 2020

Is this the least meaningful crisis defence?-This is not who we are!

When a crisis strikes its very natural to try and hide behind some sort of a defensive statement. Yet that statement needs to be meaningful and not just a fashionable clich posing as a moral fig-leaf.

March 17, 2025

Despite recent increases, JobSeeker still leaves people below the poverty line. Here’s why that affects us all

Over the past two years, there has been some progress in improving the JobSeeker payment. But payment levels remain below the poverty line.

March 2, 2025

Trump 2.0 and the crisis in Australia’s delusional middle power imagining

Politicians, media commentators and academics routinely assert that Australia is a middle power. They assume that while their country is not a great power, it has a loftier status than smaller states around the globe, enabling it to “speak louder than the latter and to exert some influence on the former”, as John Campbell once put it. In fact, Australia’s middle power imagining is delusional. This has always been the case, but Trump 2.0 is presenting Australia with a wake-up call about its middle power delusion.

December 27, 2024

Best of 2024: The military control of Australia

The Albanese government with their policy is likely to turn Australia into the 51st state of the United States, writes former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating.

October 28, 2023

How can you sleep at night Anthony?

Can you sleep at night knowing that your extremist Israeli mates have killed 3,000 children over the last three weeks? That is one child killed every 13 minutes in Gaza. And that doesn’t include the estimated 1,000 little souls laying dead under rubble that distraught fathers cant rescue. Can you hear the screams of the mothers and babies trapped under the bombs from America that you supported? By your silence, and maybe with your voice, in closed rooms, with that unfeeling geriatric friend of yours, Joe Biden.

February 26, 2023

China releases 12-point plan for peace in Ukraine

China called for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine so that negotiations can begin for peace and rebuilding. It called for respect for sovereign borders which seemed like advice to Russia to withdraw.

February 8, 2023

Nuclear submarines: from optimal to the best they can get

The announcement of the Australian Governments decision on the purchase of nuclear powered submarines is looming and it is timely to take a cold hard look at the facts rather than the inevitable spin. The more Prime Minister Albanese maintains this will be a momentous decision for Australia the more it should have been the subject of properly informed public discussion.

October 3, 2022

Learning to hate China how well have we learned the lessons

Toward the end of 2019, an article titled Lessons in how to hate China was published in Pearls and Irritations. Those lessons have been learned and learned well. Three years is a short time but the collective memory is also short. China is now the accepted enemy and the likelihood of war is spoken of more openly.

February 4, 2024

Open letter to Prime Minister Albanese on the urgent situation in Gaza and the freeze of UNRWA funds

IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, is inviting organisations and individuals throughout Australia to sign the open letter to the Prime Minister on Gaza and their freezing of funds to UNRWA.

December 15, 2023

COP out: apocalypse next

Without a large and rapid change in politics, not much in evidence, it now seems unlikely we can avoid climate apocalypse.

February 15, 2022

Now you see what its like in Ukraine

In massing large numbers of troops near the Ukraine Putin may have been aiming to show NATO and the West how Russia—and Putin himself in particular—has felt over the years as the Western alliance and NATO crept ever closer to Russias borders.

January 10, 2022

Uyghurs for sale: a rigorous analysis or strategic disinformation?

A private citizen has debunked a think-tanks claims of Uyghur forced labour. Media, human rights organisations and universities were MIA. Why?

October 19, 2021

The trials of Bernard Collaery and Witness K

Australia’s bugging of Timor-Leste’s Cabinet rooms and subsequent hounding of Bernard Collaery and a former intelligence officer was a display of mendacity, duplicity, fraud, criminal trespass and contempt of international law.

July 10, 2021

How accurate is western media on China?

One of the most important skills a journalist needs is the skill of research. Proper research and investigation even into the most simple of stories is vitally important, news should be accurate, verified and unbiased. However, when it comes to China, Western news is often very wrong. Sometimes erroneous but given the number of errors, this seems unlikely and certainly unprofessional.

February 3, 2024

Environment: Government inaction is killing our parrots

Australias parrots are increasingly threatened. Coal, gas, wind and solar supply the worlds surging demand for electricity. Methane emissions must be reduced rapidly.

March 11, 2023

Ocean discharge the worst plan for contaminated Fukushima waste water

As soon as within a month or two, Japan could begin dumping into the Pacific Ocean 1.3 million tons of treated but still radioactively contaminated wastewater from the stricken Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant.

December 11, 2022

Multinational tax integrity and tax avoidance by the fossil fuel industry: Part 2

This is the second instalment of a two-part series based on our recent submission to the Australian Government regarding tax transparency and the fossil fuel industry. The first part examined how transnational fossil fuel corporations are routinely engaged in accounting practices which enable them to avoid paying the Australian Government hundreds of billions of dollars in income tax. This second part provides recommendations for minimising these tax avoidance practices and recouping some of the wealth these corporations have extracted from Australia.

October 31, 2022

Four Corners: Australia becomes US nuclear spear carrier in Asia

Four Corners last night showed how Australia is becoming ‘a proxy’ or is it ‘a patsy’ for the US in a possible conflict with China. Our actions invite a Chinese response. Sometimes I wonder why the Chinese bother about a reset in relations when we behave so foolishly at the behest of the US. China is not a threat to Australia but our ‘dangerous ally’ keeps goading China to provoke a war.

March 18, 2022

Weekly roundup Saturday 19 March

Weekly roundup of links to articles, reports, podcasts and other media on current political and economic issues in public policy.

November 12, 2021

What the Asian media are saying: ASEAN, China powers up EVs, Japan's inequality

Our US/UK centric media largely ignores Asia. But important and interesting things are happening- Cambodia will host ASEAN later this month, security between China and the US, and a spicy controversy in Korea.

October 12, 2021

AUKUS nuclear submarines deal must be abandoned

Australia doesn’t need nuclear powered submarines, especially given the Australia’s long-standing support for the world’s nuclear non-proliferation goals.

March 19, 2018

PAUL BARRATT: Time to involve Parliament in decisions about sending the ADF into combat.

Today 20 March is the 15__th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the so-called Coalition of the Willing which was led by the US and included the UK, Australia and others. Far from making the world safer, and establishing Iraq as a shining beacon of democracy as its proponents proclaimed it would, the invasion has left in its wake violence, instability, the rise of ISIS (directly attributable to the invasion and occupation) and a permanent reshaping of the political order in the Middle East. We never undertook a Chilcot-type inquiry here, but one lesson is clear we cannot afford to leave decisions about sending the ADF to war in the hands of Executive Government which means, in effect, the Prime Minister.

March 29, 2025

Labor regains poll lead as election called for 3 May

After weeks of speculation, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has called the 2025 federal election for 3 May. This will be an election for all 150 House of Representatives seats and 40 of the 76 senators (a normal House and half-Senate election).

January 28, 2024

Australia's role in further collective punishment on Gazans

Israel has for years been determined to cut aid to the refugees both in Gaza and the West Bank.

January 15, 2024

The Chilcot Report: John Howard should be held in contempt by every thinking Australian

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard has visited on Australia the whole spectre of terrorism, through his craven and ill-judged support of the United States and its invasion of Iraq. Now we live perpetually with the spectre of terrorism and racial strife, visited upon us by his prejudices and lack of judgment.

October 6, 2022

Paul Keating on Australias national interest, Taiwan, and the absurdity of war

Australia is still trying to find its place in Asia, Paul Keating says, which explains why were so preoccupied with Taiwan and China.

March 25, 2025

Devaluing Australian citizenship

Public commentary on Peter Dutton’s possible referendum on a ministerial discretion to deprive dual nationals of their Australian citizenship has focused on whether or not this is just a thought bubble and whether or not it is politically wise to be holding yet another referendum. The real issue goes much deeper, to the merits of the proposal. Ministerial powers to remove Australian citizenship fundamentally devalue it. Dual nationals are the biggest losers.

December 10, 2024

Syria falls

I have yet to fully understand how the collapse of the Syrian government could happened at the speed it did happen: Syrian government falls in stunning end to 50-year rule of Assad family -AP, Dec 8 2024

November 11, 2024

“The lie in the soul”: True respect on Remembrance Day

While _official speeches commonly cite ‘democracy’_ among the causes for which Australians and our allies have always fought, we are free to wonder if that is not ‘the lie in the soul’ this Remembrance day.

October 13, 2024

Dutton and Netanyahu’s projection of good and evil

The leader of Australia’s Opposition, Peter Dutton, is aligning himself with a proposition about good and evil, civilisation and tyranny, that can only lead to the perpetuation of violence and the glorification of war, not its diminishment. The position of both men is dishonest, self-deluding and dangerous.

March 26, 2023

Australias climate targets could go up in smoke amid planned increase in coal, gas use: report

New research shows 116 new government-approved fossil fuel projects due to start before 2030 will emit 4.8 billion tonnes of emissions by then. That amount is vastly more than proposed reduction in emissions; clearly, Australias climate policies are not working.

February 20, 2022

The Commonwealth Department of Health has never really done health policy.

_As the Department of Healths policy capability has waned, central agencies have taken over more and more of the health policy workload.

February 17, 2025

The problem of God

In a recent post Eric Hunter asked: “Why doesn’t God save the world?” (P&I, 10 February 2025). It’s an interesting question, usually framed under the rubric of “the problem of evil.” Hunter prefers to believe in science rather than to believe in God. So why did he post about God in the first place?

February 14, 2025

The Gaza ceasefire is being sabotaged by Israel, by Trump, and by the media

The Gaza ceasefire (if you can even call it that) is already in grave peril.

January 15, 2025

America preying on our universities

The US is exploiting a privileged position in our society with formalised access to powerful means for shaping Australians’ attitudes to security. It purports to be ally and friend, but where’s the respect?

October 24, 2024

Prabowo Subianto, j'accuse

In a just world, Prabowo Subianto should not be Indonesia’s new president. He ought to be facing the full strength of the law in court, if not serving time.

November 17, 2022

Xi and Albanese: Can we again seize the opportunity?

The meeting between President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Albanese could result in an overdue improvement in relations between our two countries. But real improvements will take time and a lot of goodwill. Will Richard Marles be a stumbling block??

November 26, 2021

What the Asian media are saying: ASEAN, JI returns, ping-pong diplomacy

Xi Jinping’s appearance at ASEAN this week, a question mark over China’s naval power, concerns about Jemaah Islamiyah rebuilding, and more news from our region.

March 6, 2025

Minority government: what will it look like?

After the election Australia is likely to have a minority government with the independents, who will hold the balance of power, negotiating each issue on its merits. But democracy is best served if each independent states before the election which party they will support to form a government by guaranteeing supply.

March 1, 2025

People’s inquiry into campus free speech on Palestine to shine a light on repression

When power oppresses, civil society must hold it to account. Like media and the arts, university campuses in Australia have become sites of censorship and suppression of free speech on the question of Palestine.

December 8, 2023

Explaining the Gaza genocide: Settler colonialism in Palestine

In a settler colonial state, the indigenous population has to be physically erased because they are an ongoing reminder of the violence and injustice that occurred at the foundation of the political community. Their continuing existence constitutes a legal and political challenge to the states legitimacy.

November 20, 2023

Who do you serve? The non-trial of David McBride

Today I serve my country. And the question I have for you, Anthony Albanese is, Who do you serve? - David McBride

October 24, 2023

An open letter to Anthony Albanese

It is long overdue for the United States of America to assume its responsibility, hold Israel accountable and force it to respect international laws and resolutions and recognize the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.

February 27, 2023

Time for the West to rethink goal of total defeat for Russia in Ukraine

As the war drags on, sympathy is growing for Russia as the underdog fighting the behemoth North American and EU economies. The West would get more support for its cause in Ukraine if it is seen to be pushing for either a peace proposal or a fair compromise on Ukraine.

November 7, 2022

Why Labor cant be trusted with Australias security. It started with US Marines in Darwin

Basing nuclear capable B52 bombers at the Tindal airbase is an abrupt, unambiguous sign that our government believes it is Australias interest for China to feel threatened with American nuclear strike from our soil. At Americas pleasure.

March 3, 2022

Tsar Vladimir's scorecard - off to a bad start

Putins invasion of Ukraine is not working out as he expected and may yet turn against him internationally and even domestically. At this stage, we can only speculate but things are not going well for Tsar Vladimir.

April 5, 2025

Brexit for the US: Trump’s tariffs are the sign of a nation in decline

Pop quiz: which country is the world’s leading producer of soybeans? Instinct might say China, or perhaps Japan, given the traditional centrality of soy to East Asian cuisine.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal