March 9, 2024

Environment: Cryptocurrency using as much electricity as Sub-Saharan Africa

Renewables are about to supply the annual increase in electricity usage globally but cryptocurrencys power demands are surging. Most industrial fishing vessels are untracked, including those around Australia. Climate change has already caused 4 million deaths.

March 8, 2024

Achieving the Two-State solution in the wake of Gaza war

Peace can come through the immediate implementation of the two-state solution, making the admission of Palestine to the United Nations the starting point, not the ending point.

December 22, 2023

Christmas 2024: Why is peace so elusive?

With apologies to Charles Dickens and a Christmas Carol.

March 12, 2023

Albanese and the subs: a looming "Goat Rodeo"

Details of the proposed AUKUS submarine deal to be announced next week in San Diego are leaking out all around the world. It seems that it will be much more complicated and expensive than intended at the outset of the path to the Holy Grail of an optimal solution. Already there are ominous signs that the three countries cannot even harmonise their rush into PR to launch the program.

January 19, 2023

New Zealands Prime Minister Ardern resigns

Jacinda Ardern who has led New Zealand with intelligence, kindness and humanity is leaving the stage. Her last day as Prime Minister will be February 7.

November 26, 2022

Environment: How to feed 10 billion and predict the next Covid

The global population is now 8 billion but the vast majority make little contribution to global warming. The search is on for ways to feed 10 billion sustainably in 2050.

October 21, 2022

Australias fear of China: renewed trust a matter of dialogue and respect

Fear of China is currently dominant in Australias public discourse, as reflected in recent opinion polls, surveys, and mainstream media. Fear of China is of course not new in Australia. It was a driver of Federation at the end of the 19th Century and the first act of the new Federal Parliament was long recognised as The White Australia Policy.

March 13, 2022

Russian, Western and Ukrainian perspectives on the crisis

It is sometimes said of the war in Syria that there arent even any bad ideas for resolving the conflict, let alone good ones. The war in Ukraine is quickly approaching a similarly intractable state. This is how it looks through Russian, Western and Ukrainian eyes.

January 4, 2022

A continuing pandemic puts more than economic recovery at risk

One cannot pretend that Morrison has been unaware of both the health and political risks. His apparent policy paralysis therefore seems inexplicable.

October 20, 2021

Good governance in six logical and easy steps

A statement of public interest should be obligatory for major government decisions. Heres why.

August 21, 2021

Beijings delta barricades an echo of 1970s Berlin

It feels as if COVID-19 is lapping at the city gates. Nanjing is locked down for mandatory testing of its entire population. Wuhan, where it all began, is under severe restrictions. Stories of outbreaks are coming from different parts of the country Chengdu in the far south-west, Dalian in the north-east, Tianjin near Beijing.

March 25, 2025

Voters starting to turn away from Dutton as the election nears

There are signs that voters are turning towards Albanese and Labor and away from Dutton and the Coalition.

November 29, 2024

A necessary reckoning of bloodletting in Gaza

The premeditated bloodletting in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and many other largely forgotten parts of the world speaks hauntingly of the normalisation of death and destruction, largely for cruel, self-serving and illusory reasons.

March 7, 2024

How have we come to this? Othering is humanitys original sin

Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think. Hannah Arendt

March 7, 2024

The 8th of March is our Womens Day

It is the once-a-year day when the media wants content on how women are fairing. That is not a spelling error but my description of the limited equality that women have gained over the last half century. The following is my perception, now in my mid 80s, as I have been actively involved in feminist equality, on what has been both gained and failed to be gained over the years since 1972.

January 29, 2024

I am sorry: A letter to the Children of Gaza

Dear children of Gaza, I am sorry. The world sees your tears. It hears your cries. It sees your bodies piled in the rubble. The world Witnesses but still it continues. We hear about your dreams and aspirations; to learn to travel; to visit your beaches with clear blue water; or play in playgrounds with swings and slides; to become astronauts, teachers and doctors, and every day we see how those dreams are no more.

October 23, 2023

Blindly supporting Israel, the West abandons the values it claims to stand for

Leaders of the US, Britain, Australia and Western countries, instead of learning from history, are failing to bear their responsibility for the creation of an Israeli colonial regime in Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people. Despite the massacres, ethnic cleansing, aggression, wars, occupation and gross violations of international law committed by Israel since its inception, Western countries, especially the group of Anglo Saxon countries of the so-called Five Eyes, whom I call the Five Eyes plus Israel, continue with their policy of blind support to Israel, giving it a green light to continue its policy of illegal occupation with impunity_._

March 22, 2022

Ukraines tragedy and its implications

My observations (and worries) about the escalating war in Europes biggest breadbasket and largest country by area (after Russia).

November 16, 2021

Our White Man's Media again hides important Australian news about China

China has just signed two major LNG contracts with US companies at the expense of Australia. There has been little mention of it in any Australian media.

October 14, 2021

News Corps climate pivot perpetrates a new fraud and draws us closer to climate catastrophe

Not only does News Corp’s new climate change campaign come after years of spreading climate misinformation, it is also simply replacing its last fraud with another.

October 13, 2021

Paul Keating's Indonesian vision has been undone by his successors

Paul Keating’s successors failed to build on the promise and possibilities offered by the 1995 security pact with Jakarta and the chance won’t come again.

March 7, 2025

If you wanted to tell a story about a hopeful new world, I wouldn’t start from here

We need to tell a new/old story. Humans are social creatures of a shared story. We tell ourselves into being who we are by the stories we share. From First Peoples’ Songlines, rhythmically repeated and updated to incorporate the latest world developments, to Harry Potter novels and The Matrix movies, we remember and become the stories we believe in.

February 9, 2025

‘Before, during and after’: Deception at the heart of Australia’s anti-corruption commission

In two month’s time, 10 years would have passed since the Robodebt scheme was introduced into Australia via a flawed cabinet submission in April 2015 and the federal budget of that year. Robodebt was described in a 2023 BBC article as a “costly failure of public administration” within which “extensive, devastating and continuing” wrongdoing was perpetrated on Australian citizens.

January 26, 2025

Anti-semitism ‘rise’ obscures more slaughter in Gaza

Australian political leaders and their mainstream media backers are in moral outrage mode. Anti-semitism they say is rife, infectious, getting worse and must be stamped out. At first sight these claims seem plausible. They are made in response to the burning of a synagogue, a child care centre, to a Jewish community leader’s home being torched and to anti-Jewish slogans being painted on public buildings and Jewish places of worship.

December 20, 2024

Rare earths: a conundrum for our responsibility to care for country and kin

The increasing global demand for rare earth elements (REE) is driven by clean energy technologies. The electric vehicle in particular, is a strong driving force. The un-ceded sovereign lands of hundreds of First Nations - now colonised and called Australia - hold at least four per cent of the world's rare earth element reserves.

November 13, 2024

Australia's settler-colonial view of Israel's genocide

“Australia’s colonial history is full of [such] genocidal punitive massacres. But somehow the Australian government couldn’t see the similarity when they declared their full support for Israel’s right to defend itself.”

October 15, 2024

The deafening silence in the eye of the hurricane

In the eye of the hurricane is a moment of calm and silence, before wild chaos and destruction resume. Symbolically, the world now stands in such a place.

April 3, 2024

Our highest national security priority

The purchase of nuclear submarines via AUKUS is turning into an openended nightmare in terms of cost that will deliver nothing positive for Australias security. Meanwhile, the need for action both on disarmament and on nuclear risk reduction has never been more pressing. Even at the height of the Cold War, the metaphorical hands of the Doomsday Clock have never been at 90 seconds to ‘midnight’, writes John Hallam in an open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

April 2, 2024

Who pays the piperuniversities dance to the AUKUS tune

When AUKUS was announced, the ANU was quick off the mark to cash in.

February 13, 2024

Shock as warming accelerates, 1.5C is breached faster than forecast

If there was shock and awe last week when the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that global average warming over the last twelve months February 2023 to January 2024 had exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (C), it was likely because too many people had succumbed to the predominant but delusional policy-making narrative that holding warming to 1.52C was still on the cards.

October 25, 2023

Anthony Albanese: Australias lobbyist for the US Imperium

Australian sovereignty should have been something of a pub joke prior to AUKUS. After it, it has become a dead letter. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albaneses sole purpose during his visit to Washington is to be the countrys uncritical undertaker, ensuring that remains of independence are buried, even as the minerals are extracted.

October 16, 2023

The Poisoned Waterhole

The Great Australian Silence Continues

February 4, 2023

Environment: Life scientists endorse civil disobedience

Australias oceans, Greenlands Ice Sheet and Antarcticas sea ice are all feeling the heat. One million species are on the edge of extinction. No wonder life scientists are taking to the streets.

March 20, 2022

The tale of two airlines, Iranian Air IR 655 and Malaysian Air MH 17 and double standards

While in Iranian territorial waters, USS Vincennes fired two surface-to-air missiles to bring down the Iranian plane with the loss of all 290 on board on 3 July 1988. The captain and crew of the Vincennes were later awarded medals. Vice President George H W Bush insisted he would never apologise for the United States I dont care what the facts are.

February 3, 2022

Climate catastrophe now inevitable without emergency action

By relying on consultants for policymaking, the government avoids making any serious contribution to the global effort to minimise temperature rise.

January 22, 2022

The Peng Shuai affair: the West's reaction should be laughed out of court

The use by China critics of a tennis player’s broken relationship with a senior party official to paint the regime in Beijing as evil is absurd.

March 19, 2025

Is Dutton a 'strong' leader? Is Albanese a 'weak' leader?

Peter Dutton portrays himself as a strong leader, capable of standing up to bullies abroad while contrasting himself to weak leaders at home. His stentorian posturing is underpinned by a grimly reactionary imagination. Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese quibbles and stalls as he tries unsuccessfully to fend off Trump’s tariffs, plaintively offering up access to Australia’s rare minerals as a bribe to get the transactional Trump on-side.

January 11, 2025

US in bipartisan retreat from globalisation – Asian Media Report

In Asian media this week: Biden insults close ally in protecting US interests. Plus: Indonesia becomes full member of BRICS; Myanmar resistance gaining wider control; Survival now Pentagon’s Pacific strategy; Yoon hiding behind barricade of buses and barbed wire; Jakarta launches free meals program.

January 9, 2025

Australian broadcaster targeted by pro-Israel group, charged with 'hate speech'

Yet another journalist – this one the prominent Australian broadcaster @MaryKostakidis – is formally charged with “hate speech” crimes. She was targeted by a pro-Israel group, led by a dual citizen of Israel and Australia, for the crime of reporting on Nasrallah’s speeches, writes Glenn Greenwald.

January 3, 2025

Making China-Australia trade 2.0 smarter and greener

A news notification popped up on my phone on the morning of 13 December. This story in news.com.au reported that “BYD Shark 6 ute named News Corp Australia’s 2024 Car of the Year.”

December 30, 2024

Goodbye democracy: Labor’s rank and file of no consequence

In the 2022 federal election, Labor members in the supposedly safe seat of Fowler were not allowed to choose their candidate. Instead, head office parachuted star performer Kristina Keneally into the seat and were rewarded with a huge “up yours” by voters. The seat was lost with an 18% swing against Keneally, a punishment which prompted a senior Labor member’s comment, “I bloody hope we’ve learned that imposition from on high is deeply resented”.

November 7, 2024

Western Democracy is not the only option

We in the West have a propensity noted by the rest of the world, to be rather self-congratulatory about our political and economic systems and our accompanying wish to pressure the rest of the world to try to be more like us.

October 17, 2024

"Reveal government secrets on AUKUS and Gaza war"

Grassroots anti-AUKUS campaign, Labor Against War, has called on the federal Labor government to reveal the secret political undertakings it has said it has made to the US government as a condition for the continued pursuit of nuclear-powered submarines.

October 8, 2024

Israel and Iran: Orwell's 'memory hole' and the origins of the present situation

The propensity of the West, and Israel for that matter has been to impose a forced forgetting on the rest of the world. Each event that occurs in the present day is taken as a beginning and not a consequence of what went before. We have willingly adopted Orwell’s “memory hole” as our way of simplifying events and allocating blame to those we have chosen as the less than worthy scapegoat inferiors for our own failures.

December 26, 2023

Gaza and the unspeakable

How long will it take for the many Jewish Israelis who support the current destruction of Gaza to see that what is unspeakable about the Holocaust lurks in their government and states actions there? Whatever valley-flower of moral cause it might put before the world, always of its own choosing, this is the fact we can see with our own eyes and know when Netanyahu speaks: there is no limit.

October 31, 2023

America: a wounded hegemon

Amid the pomp in Washington did the Australian Prime Minister sense the enormity of the moment? As he paid homage to the hegemon could he feel the facade crumbling to reveal Americas slipping power?

February 18, 2023

Sunblock for Planet Earth

How best to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: stop burning coal, eat less meat or block out the sun? The first and second look preferable to the third to me.

February 7, 2023

An AUKUS mnage trois

As the government offers new hints at the optimal path for the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines, the questions about the viability of the project mount. The political pressure to out-muscle the Coalition on national security, if thats what is driving the Labor governments enthusiasm for this impending car-crash, should not be allowed to undermine the national interest.

January 3, 2023

Amidst horror, the screeching metal of turnstiles haunts our conscience [xmas]

We tramped along streets of rubble and twisted girders of metal in Gaza these had been a home, a school and even a hospital. From one heap of rubble, a sobbing Granny ran up to me it was winter and bitterly cold. She was camped in a hollow in the bombed out ruin of her family home, where she had been the only survivor from a family of 21 people. She grabbed and hugged me and begged me to tell the world what was happening in Gaza. I made a promise to her that I would.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal