February 3, 2022

Russia knows better than to actually invade Ukraine

Russia has much to gain from threatening to invade Ukraine, but Putin has never overplayed his hand before and is unlikely to do so now.

September 18, 2021

The deputy sheriff rides again with AUKUS

The AUKUS deal will cost us a lot of money, a substantial loss of sovereignty, a lowering of our reputation in the world and the potential to get dragged into a war we should avoid. But we will get our tummy tickled by our great white fathers.

March 17, 2025

A message from the new editor, Catriona Jackson

It is day one for me as editor and I want to express my thanks to editor-in-chief John Menadue and board members Michael Keating, Mike Gilligan, Joe Camilleri and Jocelyn Chey for placing their trust in me.

February 6, 2025

Niger, stolen billions and the uranium-fuelled lights of Paris

This story is about vast quantities of uranium, stealing squillions of dollars, how to screw desperately poor people and what an outstanding job the mainstream media does in keeping us all blithely ignorant of this.

January 3, 2025

Do Palestinian lives not matter?

2024 has been an incredibly difficult year for me. As someone of Palestinian background, I have witnessed the ongoing genocide against my people, including the unimaginable pain of seeing babies and children being slaughtered in front of our eyes. The silence from the so-called international community is both heartbreaking and incomprehensible.

December 16, 2024

Stand with the Hibakusha to end nuclear weapons

Honour, remember, act, and support the atomic bomb survivors.

December 14, 2024

South Korea's martial law fiasco: legitimation crisis in the imperial vassal state

In the wake of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s 6-hour coup, Western pundits have opined that this was an affirmation of South Korean democracy’s robustness and resilience, its institutional maturity and strength.

April 5, 2024

David McBride versus Four Corners

On Easter Saturday, a friend and I drove down to Mullumbimby to hear Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride speaking at the Mullumbimby RSL. The previous Monday, I had watched the Four Corners program about David McBride, called Rules of Engagement. My friend hadnt seen it, so we listened to it on the iPhone as we drove along. There was one heavily ironic moment in Rules of Engagement when ABC journalist Dan Oates says he hates it when journalists make themselves the centre of the story.

December 18, 2023

Agreeing and disagreeing: Australias critical deficit in China knowledge

The recent Beyond the Mainstream Media essay series spells out the urgency for Australia to come to grips with our deficit in China knowledge. China is not going to decline or disappear, and the frictions and problems that remain in our bilateral relationship impact all of us in many different ways. We must find ways to get on with all our neighbours.

March 31, 2023

Investigating the terrorist attack on Nord Stream is a matter of Germanys sovereignty

Who was behind the terrorist attacks on Nord Stream?

March 29, 2023

AUKUS gets awkward Down Under

A controversy threatens to blow the alliances nuclear submarine deal out of the water, writes Maddison Connaughton in a new article for Foreign Policy.

February 5, 2023

Australia's Taiwan nightmare

Australia has been persuaded, enticed and strongarmed into taking gravely dangerous decisions. But Australia is a sovereign state and its fingerprints are, ultimately, all over the formation of its terrible abdication of national independence.

December 19, 2022

Half a century: Australia, China and the United Nations

On December 21 it will be fifty years since Australia established diplomatic relations with China. The anniversary has already been marked by several events across the country. It is also prompting some reflections in the media. Many draw comparisons between 1972 and 2022, noting that in both years there were significant shifts in Australian foreign policy.

November 22, 2022

What caused the Anthony Albanese China change? Better advisors?

To say that the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, has been poorly advised would be an understatement. For reasons best known to himself he picked up and ran with a posse of advisers from the corrupt and inept Morrison regime. A big mistake.

January 25, 2022

Australians live high on the proceeds of stolen land, but we have ways to atone

We’ve been offered a real path towards healing. The Makarrata holds out to us all a chance for truth-telling, understanding and reconciliation.

January 27, 2025

The campus under siege

Suppression of critical voices through the instrumentalisation of religious fanaticism in university systems remains a powerful tool for maintaining the status quo, writes Sadaf Shabbir.

January 20, 2025

Confidential letter to Trump on AUKUS

Dear Donald, I know that you are a great deal-maker, but you will be seen as even greater if you do as I suggest. Australia is already providing $4 billion to the United States under the AUKUS deal without any guarantee that Virginia class nuclear submarines will ever be provided to it. I suggest that this amount be doubled or even tripled to even $12 billion.

February 29, 2024

The coming of the fear

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they dont want to hear. George Orwell (Eric Blair)

December 8, 2023

Amendment of the Climate Change Act will offer a future for young people

Since the industrial revolution, the health damage done to young people by fossil fuels, from the boy chimney sweeps to the household gas cooker amounts to negligence. Do we care?

November 29, 2023

Why ASIS should be abolished

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service was established in 1950 to conduct spying overseas and morally repulsive covert operations. It had a slow start, but in the 1970s it sent three staff to Chile to help the CIA overthrow the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende.

October 21, 2023

Environment: Oceans to the rescue: 7 watery ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Oceans could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by a third. Toxic materials from abandoned and currently operational metal mines are polluting half a million kilometres of rivers and their floodplains. What do you know about Tassie Devils?

December 21, 2022

AUKUS and the threat of war with China

We are on the verge of an almost irrevocable historical choice to assist United States plans for an existential nuclear threat to China in the event of major conflict between the US and China.

December 15, 2022

US B-21 tempts the Australian security establishment

The United States does not need it. No air force does. But the lesson of the dazzle from the B-21 Raider Stealth Bomber is that what the US develops and acquires Australia must have. Such a lesson ought to be unlearned as quickly as possible, but there is little chance of it with individuals such as Richard Marles in the defence portfolio.

October 25, 2022

Drug decriminalisation is not (yet) legalisation

The ACT has decriminalised the possession of small quantities of some prohibited drugs. The Liberal Opposition in the ACT says this radical reform will lead to more crime in the Territory. It will be chaos. The AFP worries that they will be busier. So why is this a move in the right direction that should be followed across the country?

February 25, 2022

Tsar Putin on the warpath

There are no simple explanations for the causes of Putins invasion and what will happen.

February 14, 2022

An unholy mess: discrimination tangles up schools as well as everyone else

Faith-based schools demand respect for their religious sensitivities, but turn those sensitivities on or off depending on their best interests.

January 28, 2022

In the Asian media: worrying population numbers for China

Elsewhere, a diplomatic rift ends, the blind spot in the climate change debate, an anti-corruption mystery, and insects on the menu.

January 11, 2022

Hong Kong's date with destiny in 2047 set to arrive early

The National Security Law brought in by Beijing in response to violent protests paves the way for an acceleration of the economic and political integration of Hong Kong into China.

October 28, 2021

Morrisons 2050 carbon neutral 'plan' is deceptive and damaging

The slew of new gas and oil projects in Australia amounts to a pre-emptive strike to force the widespread use of carbon capture and storage.

October 18, 2024

King Charles of Australia to revisit the scene of his earlier crime

With the active support of Prince Charles, now King Charles, John Kerr planned the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975.

February 5, 2024

The edge of war, our battle for truth

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984.

March 18, 2023

AUKUS: Submarines on the never never, or castles in the sky?

AUKUS has landed well, sort of.

February 9, 2022

Putin and Ukraine: the beginning of a wider war?

The only rationale for NATOs existence is that Russia is a threat. Since the Cold War ended, the alliance has found no alternative reason to be.

January 21, 2022

Long-term immigration detention has again become a pointless exercise in cruelty

The Howard government released long-term detainees into the community, but the current Coalition government refuses to do so for political reasons.

January 20, 2022

The torture of asylum seekers has twisted our perceptions of right and wrong

A whistleblower on the horrors of Manus Island laments the passing of an Australia that was welcoming, kind and caring.

January 16, 2022

Living with Covid: lessons from the Spanish Flu pandemic

We are all sick of Covid and the disruption it has wrought. But the pandemic will not be over until it is over. Glib slogans won’t alter that reality.

January 13, 2022

Don't tangle with Border Force? Lessons from the Djokovic mess

_Only the wealthy stand a chance of overturning the arbitrary rulings of Border Force officials. Ordinary detainees and their visitors stand no chance.

January 5, 2022

AUKUS tilts the balance: Australia looks more and more warlike

Australia cannot go down the nuclear-submarine path and claim that it follows the UN Charter and that its armed forces are only for self-defence.

August 14, 2021

Technological magic by Morrison and Taylor wont help in the Australian response to the IPCC report.

The Australian Government seems to think it can solve climate problems through technological magic . It hides a failure of moral leadership.

December 24, 2024

Killing one innocent soul is the same as killing all of humanity: Jewish and Muslim teachings against cosmocide

The below is an excerpt from my essay, “The Sin of Cosmocide,” for Renovatio, the literary magazine of Zaytuna, the Muslim liberal arts college in Berkeley, Ca. It underlines how both Jewish and Muslim spiritual teachings forbid the killing of innocents who are guilty of no crime, and equate this deed to killing all humankind — what I term cosmocide.

November 20, 2024

The Labor Government is morally moribund and scornful of international law

To mark the anniversary of the beginning of Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, Jews Against the Occupation ’48 wrote to Prime Minister Albanese, Foreign Minister Wong, and Defence Minister Marles. We have received no reply.

October 26, 2024

The foundation stones of reconciliation, truth telling postponed again

The failure of last year’s referendum still troubles the country. The focus on the Voice to Parliament took attention away from the far more consequential question of truth telling, while paradoxically displaying how much it is still needed.

October 23, 2024

Thorpe unmasks the coloniser who visited genocide on Australia's First Nations

Both Charles and Camilla are having their gilt edged fault lines exposed on their Australian tour. We should be thankful for Lidia Thorpe’s courage and outspokenness.

February 12, 2024

When open justice is an optional ingredient

I had been assuming that Julian Assange, whose case comes up for adjudication in the British Courts soon, was a shoo-in for being Australias prisoner of conscience of the decade, but a late entry into the competition is Michael Pezzullo, who appears to have been condemned by an Australian Star Chamber convening in secret, without the public having any satisfactory explanation of what he is said to have done wrong.

March 10, 2023

AUKUS: A greedy pup

It seems that poor old Albanese has been sold a very greedy—though only virtual—pup. Think of the comparison with another Labor PM, Ben Chifley. Albanese doesnt come out of it very well.

November 8, 2022

The PM gushes enthusiasm for closer military ties with Japan. China sees it differently

From the start there was little in PM Albaneses CV to suggest familiarity with foreign policy, Thanks to a recent interview with him in The Australian we discover he knows even less.

October 25, 2022

Extraordinary intervention by Jeffrey Sachs at the Athens Democracy Forum!!!

Watch Professor Jeffrey Sachs describe the US as “the most violent country in the world” and then get shockingly shut down at the Athens Democracy Forum.

March 9, 2022

Ukraine, India, China and Australia:a Khaki election?

Prime Minister Morrison seems to want to fix in concrete what he says he and we should most fear—a Russia-China alliance of autocracies. He treats similar responses to the Ukraine crisis by China and by our fellow Quad member India very differently. Could the coming election be the reason?

February 17, 2022

RICHARD MOORE AND MELISSA CONLEY TYLER. How do we get Australia to be a strategically coherent actor?

The prize of strategic coherence is to have Australia’s overarching policies, programs and key agencies pulling broadly in the same direction in pursuing its international policy.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal