December 29, 2022

Best of 2022: If I were the Minister for Health

_I would progressively wind back and eliminate the $14b pa taxpayer subsidy for Private Health Insurance and use that very large sum to fund the inclusion of dental care within Medicare and increase the funding to the states for expanded specialist services in outpatient clinics at public hospitals.

December 7, 2022

Medicare reform must not just be about more money to do the same things the same way

Medicare must now focus on how health services are delivered.

When it was established in 1974, Medicare funded the way health services were delivered at that time. That delivery system has not been changed much at all since then. After fifty years the way we deliver health care needs substantial reform and updating. Our health delivery system is in a mess.

October 13, 2022

The Keating conversation - both thought-provoking and original

Early this year the Ideas and Society Program at La Trobe University that I have convened for the past thirteen years invited Paul Keating to speak to our online audience on Australia and China. We invited Professor James Curran, a Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney, to act as interlocutor. We decided to hold the event after the federal election. Nothing was more certain than that Keating would speak outside the bipartisan consensus on Australias relations with China and that the tired and threadbare Morrison Government would seek to wedge Labor by claiming, preposterously, that Keating represented the real opinions of Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong.

March 19, 2025

Pine Gap – No price could ever be right

To the horror of the Australian defence and foreign policy establishment, Senator Jacqui Lambie had a characteristically sharp and to the point response to Donald Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on Australian steel exports to the United States.

March 9, 2025

Media paladins of Fortress Australia

You have to admire Australian media. While the rest of us are busy paying $8 for a flat white and wondering how to stretch a pack of IndoMie for a week, our intrepid journalists are fearlessly focused on the real threats – like Chinese naval ships operating in full compliance with international law.

March 1, 2025

High seas farce with Chinese characteristics

The melodramatic media story about the small Chinese naval flotilla exercising with “live” ammunition off the Australian and New Zealand coasts has run solid for more than a week. I’m beginning to suspect the Chinese military may have a sense of humour.

January 17, 2025

URGENT: Following ceasefire, Israel’s ban on UNWRA must be stopped

The long-overdue ceasefire in Gaza may be the beginning of a new chapter, and hopefully one that heralds freedom for the people of Palestine. It certainly will provide relief and respite, but we all know that the work of true peace building is only starting and the old work towards justice and liberation continues on just like before. Israel’s extreme apartheid regime and expansion politics still need dismantling and the Palestinian Rights movement will need our constant vigilance and ongoing support. In this light, Jews Against the Occupation ’48 is heeding the global call against Israel’s ban on UNWRA.

January 13, 2025

Trump is cutting the last threads of the tattered cloth of 'the rules-based international order'

What do Panama, Canada and Greenland have in common? Could Donald Trump be getting the US back to brass tacks, to a core strategy of dominating the Western Hemisphere? Possibly, and he may be blowing away the fraudulent rhetoric about rules-based international order, territorial integrity, international law and the crusade to expand democracies.

January 8, 2025

Weaponising antisemitism – BDS, antisemitism and the silencing of criticism of Israel

To be Jewish does not mean an automatic identification with the rogue state of Israel. Nor does it mean that Jews are automatically threatened by criticism of Israel, yet our media and Labor and Liberal politicians would have you believe this is the case.

January 7, 2025

Rumours of ASPI's death are exaggerated

When a review of Commonwealth funding of “strategic policy work”, together with the government’s response, was released just before Christmas, the howls from associates of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute were probably audible on the Moon.

December 9, 2024

Al-Tanf: The US stronghold in Syria and how it safeguards Israel

The US coalition’s mission against ISIS quickly transformed into a broader strategy to occupy parts of Syria, with the Al-Tanf base being crucial for securing influence and supporting Israeli interests amidst increasing local resistance.

December 1, 2024

Environment: Climate protesters blockade Newcastle’s coal port despite government bans

Draconian laws don’t discourage climate protesters. Hydrogen’s rainbow of colours. CCS continues to underperform. Clean energy investments increasing but so are investments in fossil fuels.

April 1, 2024

Whats next for China-Australia relations?

CGTN Radio host Liu Kun interviews Ambassador Tony Kevin, Ambassador Geoff Raby and Dr. Zhao Hai on Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yis recent trip to Australia and broader China-Australia relations.

November 20, 2023

Two-state solution wont deliver peace for Israel/Palestine. But this might

At the end of October, three weeks after the brutal Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers that killed around 1200 people, US President Joe Biden said that he still firmly believed in the justness of the two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. Two states for two peoples.

March 23, 2023

Chinas big foreign policy plays leave Australia in the cold

The Chinese Communist Partys 20th Party Congress in October last year may be seen with the efflux of time as a watershed event, not so much for the extension of Xi Pings tenure in the job, but for subsequent sharp policy resets.

November 5, 2022

Australia is addicted to fighting other people's wars

How do we explain that half the Australian community thinks we should go to war with China? After twenty years of conflict in the Middle East, will our addiction to war and our insouciance about its consequences finally catch up with us in an American war over Taiwan?

March 24, 2022

Our democracy is weakening-here's how we can stop the rot

Australians are living through the longest period of sustained democratic dissatisfaction in the nations history, according to theAustralian Electoral Study.

November 11, 2021

Dangerous liaisons: Australias involvement in nuclear war. Part 2

While never spelled out by our government, the nuclear deterrence pact means that Australia would ask the US to commit genocide in its defence.

October 3, 2020

Dromo(Klepto)cracy: The New Security World Order

Our society is opting out of debate through the machinations of a neoconservative credo that purports reason. Under the guise of the spectacle of freedom and democracy, such dogma exploits public disorientation following massive collective shocks to achieve control, by imposing economic shock therapy to affect change.

February 10, 2025

Australian electoral prospects

There is a marked immaturity in the reporting of opinion polls and other political developments in Australia at the moment. I see problems in two main categories.

February 2, 2025

Environment: One giant leap for mankind was nothing compared with today’s challenges

Facing the challenges of the energy transition sustainably and fairly. British Medical Journal jumps into the degrowth debate. Let’s all celebrate World Wetlands Day.

January 23, 2025

Under Trump, the US and China may be greater friends than ever

Much has been said about the impending trade war amid Donald Trump’s threats to implement new tariffs against China, Mexico and Canada. But while many fear this could exacerbate tensions between China and the United States, we could find China is not as impacted as first thought.

March 20, 2024

A terrorist state and a declining US empire wage genocide

Hamas is the excuse for the Israeli attack on Gaza. The real intent is to expel all Palestinians not just from Gaza but from the West Bank as well.

December 4, 2023

Humanity declares war on its children

After WWII, a good many people wondered why nobody had put a stop to either Hitler or Stalin, the two greatest butchers of history prior to the modern era, before they could accomplish their wicked designs.

January 20, 2023

Japans military build-up met with suspicion, alarm: Asian Media Report

In Asian media this week: Developing world rejects nonsensical Cold War; Japan moves from shield to spear; opinion against military build-up; court asked to review new penal code; vote-buying an investment in graft; and differing views of Xinjiang.

October 16, 2024

Dutton thuggery, coalition compliance

In the October 13 edition of P&I, George Browning gave substantial, comprehensive analysis as to why Coalition leader Peter Dutton is ‘dishonest, self deluding and dangerous.’ That appraisal is so important that I do not want to let it rest, not least because there are Australians who support the Dutton viciousness; and his colleagues like to repeat the claim that Australia holds the same values as the Israeli government. A government which is intent on slaughter in Lebanon and in Gaza, and continues its passion for destruction, murder, torture and famine.

October 8, 2024

A year of erasing a people

It has been a year of erasing a people, systematically, ruthlessly and unrelentingly. A massacre here and another there. 500 killed yesterday and ‘only’ 140 today.

October 10, 2023

Will a shocking hurdle defeat the Yes vote?

In a lead article published on the front page of The Saturday Paper on the 30th of September Rick Morton discussed the people who were planning to vote against the Voice. He remarked that focus groups conducted late last year revealed what he called a shocking hurdle blocking the path of the yes vote. Almost a third of all participants believed First Nations people had been treated fairly. Not just now, but since invasion.

November 15, 2022

How defence will ruin Australia

China has no interest in attacking Australia. But once America ensconces its B52 strike aircraft at Tindal, Australia perforce becomes a hot target for missile attack. Protection for Tindal will be an imperative, requiring Iron Dome technology, at vast cost without certainty. No financial provision exists for ballistic missile defence at Tindal.

March 15, 2022

NATO creeping towards Russia's borders is dangerous-(I told you so twenty five years ago)

A great security mistake is being made in Europe with the decision to expand NATO.(An extract from a speech in 1997)

December 5, 2020

Why New Zealand is ideally placed to broker a truce between China and the Five Eyes alliance (The Conversation Dec 2, 2020)

With tension escalating between China and members of theFive Eyessecurity alliance, most recently over aChinese tweetthat used a doctored image to attack Australia, New Zealand is arguably in a prime position to broker a kind of truce.

February 19, 2025

As expected, the RBA cut its cash rate – but played down the prospects for a series of follow-up moves

Well, they did it! The Reserve Bank of Australia Board decided, at its meeting conducted over the past two days, to cut its official cash rate by 25 basis points to 4.10%, after having held it at 4.35% since November 2023, and having raised it by 425 basis points over the preceding 18 months.

February 1, 2025

Interest rates should start falling now

Australian inflation is almost back in the target range of 2-3%. The Reserve Bank should begin to cut interest rates now. This will help avoid a recession as well as substantially reducing cost-of-living pressures on the one third of households with a mortgage.

December 4, 2024

Executive Council of Australian Jewry's Isi Leibler was a 'covert agent of Israeli intelligence'

When I began editing Quadrant with Peter Coleman in 1989, my co-editorship was soon overwhelmed by the most unpleasant controversy of my life, at least thus far_._

November 16, 2024

Act now: The case for UN membership for Palestine is overwhelming

John Whitbeck’s plea for sanity - UN Membership for Palestine Now, 14 November 2024, should not be put into the too hard basket. At present, of course, the State of Palestine has only non-member observer status, having failed in an application for full member status in 2011.

December 28, 2023

Palestine The name the Australian Jewish Association wants expunged

The AJA is seeking to suppress Palestinian identification with the country for political purposes from an exhibition entitled Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs.

October 14, 2023

Australian politics has reached a dead end

What the whole debate about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament demonstrated, with brutal clarity, is that Australia is a morally backward society.

March 25, 2023

China and the AUKUS submarine deal: unanswered questions

The challenge of 2045

Australia will have access to American nuclear submarines in the early 2030s and by 2045 will have been building its own. But it is not clear what problem will be solved when Australian long-range nuclear submarines are able to traverse the northern Pacific.

February 24, 2023

The "little Americans" that populate Australia

Greg Sheridan, in his opinion piece of Tuesday 21 February, provides yet another display of his spiteful, vacuous journalism his erroneous claims that I am not the progenitor of the APEC Leaders Meeting, and that my views on Australian strategic policy are eccentric and at odds with the US alliance.

December 4, 2022

NBN write-down confirms its national importance and Coalition failure

_The previous Coalition Government under the Minister for Communication Malcolm Turnbull promised: a cheaper, good quality NBN, faster delivered. It failed on all counts.

February 26, 2022

There will be no expansion of NATO to the East!

What would the United States do if it had a country on its borders that was a member of a threatening military alliance?

November 29, 2021

How Scott Morrison is trashing the Liberal brand

Scott Morrison’s personality and style has infected the whole government the sclerosis and the lack of flexibility on general positions is now built-in.

November 5, 2021

America's never-ending war on the world

Driven by its military-industrial complex the United States depends on continual war. As the War on Terrorism peters out a new enemy is invented China.

November 2, 2021

In the shameful persecution of Julian Assange, justice for one is justice for us all

The High Court ruling on Assange’s extradition will determine whether the British judiciary has trashed the last vestiges of its vaunted reputation.

March 24, 2025

Message from the editor

A week into the job and I am deeply impressed by the strength and vigour of the community John has built around Pearls and Irritations. So many of you have sent very generous messages and I feel very welcome, and busy!

December 29, 2024

John Menadue on Rupert Murdoch, the Last Mogul

We have a major problem with the damage that Rupert Murdoch has done to newspapers in Australia, and any self-respecting government should take steps to correct that as soon as possible.

December 21, 2024

No longer possible to defend the slaughter of over 40,000 civilians as 'Israel’s right to self-defence'

I know what antisemitism looks like and it is to desecrate the memory of my parents and the victims of real antisemitism when it is weaponised to silence justified criticism of Israel’s crimes.

November 8, 2024

The axis of genocide

The West, “will stand by the Israeli regime until they exterminate the last Palestinian”, says Mohammad Seyed Marandi, an American-Iranian academic. “They will allow the extermination of the people of Gaza. And then if the Israelis go after the West Bank, they will allow for that to happen as well. Under no circumstances do I see the West blocking extermination…”

October 15, 2024

As US puppets the Australian political class rejects international humanitarian law

One thing which was crystal clear from the vigils in Australia on 7 October 2024 was the almost complete unanimity between the Labor-Coalition political class at federal and state levels to only attend vigils solely commemorating the deaths of Israelis, while simultaneously completely ignoring vigils commemorating the deaths of Palestinians, or vigils commemorating the deaths jointly of Palestinians, Lebanese, Israelis and other people killed, such as UN aid workers, health professionals and journalists.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal