July 23, 2018

FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Woe to the shepherds (Homily, 22.07.18 at St Michaels Church, Kaleen)

Sometimes the lectionary throws up a reading from scripture which just hits you in the face given whats been going on in your world the previous week.

August 8, 2018

IAN DUNLOP. A Parliament Without Trust or Legitimacy Must Go

The insults hurled by David Leyonhjelm at Sarah Hanson-Young recently put parliamentary discourse in the gutter. Leyonhjelm was roundly condemned, but not by our leaders. A limp slap across the knuckles from Turnbull and Shorten, then on to more pressing matters, hoping it will all go away.

June 19, 2017

Submission on foreign policy white paper - filling the void.

The election of Donald Trump has unsettled the global order. He will be the first US president to have no experience of governmental or military leadership. In his campaign statements he challenged the Western consensus on international issues, ranging from US alliances, national security, and nuclear weapons to trade, immigration, and climate change. In whatever ways he implements or moderates these policies, uncertainty and volatility will prevail from January 2017 onwards.

September 27, 2017

RAMESH THAKUR. APLN Group Statement on Nuclear Threats

On Tuesday 26 September 2017, 55 AsiaPacific political, diplomatic, military and civil society leadership figures, who are members of the AsiaPacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (APLN), signed a statement urging that nuclear crises are best resolved diplomatically, not militarily; and that internationally negotiated deals to resolve nuclear crises should be respected by all parties.

September 27, 2018

ANATLOE KALETSKY. The US Will Lose Its Trade War with China.

In handicapping the US-China conflict, Keynesian demand management is a better guide than comparative advantage. In principle, China can avoid any damage at all from US tariffs simply by responding with a full-scale Keynesian stimulus.

August 27, 2017

EMMA CARMODY. Murray, Darling, what's all this 4 Corners fuss about?

This article examines the contents of a recently aired 4 Corners episode, Pumped, which included allegations of water theft, corruption and regulatory capture in the Murray-Darling Basin.

September 19, 2017

TONY SMITH. The farcical appeal to family values

Some opponents of marriage equality have resorted to spurious arguments about family values. The record of arch-conservatives on war, overseas aid, asylum seekers, Indigenous affairs, the social safety net, free market capitalism, the working poor and the monarchy suggests that the reference to family values is a hollow and hypocritical rhetorical device.

January 19, 2014

Pearls and Irritations - one year on. John Menadue

I launched this blog in January last year. To date there have been 285 posts, just over 5 a week.

I hope you have found some pearls and been irritated from time to time. Thank you for your support.

I have enjoyed putting together stories that I believe are important for Australias future.

I now prefer blogging to speeches and interviews.

A feature of the blog has been the support of guest bloggers. This has introduced a range of people with interesting ideas and views. As a result, the blog is becoming more like an e-magazine.

April 19, 2017

PETER BROOKS. Specialists gaps and anaesthetists.

The article from David Scott and Peter Seal (’Medical specialists - maintaining a high standard and duty of care’) is not an unexpected response from the organisation they represent the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists. However one is minded of those words of Adam Smith who said of craft groups People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

March 11, 2015

Spencer Zifcak. The Martin Place Siege

I first came across Man Haron Monis, the Sydney siege gunman, in early 2013. The High Court of Australia had just handed down an important new decision on the breadth of the protection the Australian Constitution provides for freedom of expression. The facts of the case centred upon offensive letters sent to the parents of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The issue was whether sending offensive letters through the post to the private addresses of parents could properly be regarded as an exercise of constitutionally protected free speech. The person who sent the letters was Monis.

October 16, 2016

MUNGO MacCALLUM. Brandis vs Gleeson.

Our Attorney General George Brandis states as an unviolable credo that a barrister must give fearless and impartial advice at all times.

This is a legal ideal, and perhaps one that he believes in, but the fact is that he, like all his predecessors in the office, faces an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

Certainly he is a lawyer, and a very important one: he is the first law officer of Australia. But he is also predominantly a politician; a senior government minister. And as such, he has an obligation to both prosecute and defend the decisions of the cabinet and the party room, even if indeed, especially if he disagrees with them.

August 24, 2018

ALEX MITCHELL. Before ScoMo, Scott Morrison was our No 1 pin-up bogeyman

In 2014 I was asked to write a profile of the Lefts pin-up boy and its chief bogeyman.

October 15, 2020

Misinformation about Covid-19. Don't listen to Donald Trump or Alan Jones.

_Here is the big so important question. As we prepare to ease some restrictions, will we, in contradistinction to many communities in other countries, embrace the long-term behaviours that must be normalised to allow us to live as safely and productively as is possible in a Covid-infected world? We need to look closely at the efforts of those in many countries for their track record is dismal.

August 24, 2018

JOHN WHITE, PETER FARLEY, DAVID GILLETT, CHRIS STOLTZ.- Wasted Capital in Major Project Development.

The establishment of the Australian Public Service (APS) Review Panel is a powerful opportunity to examine the state of play of project development at the federal government level and kick-start a positive step change in performance. This will apply pressure to state governments and business to achieve similar step changes in performance.

March 13, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. Will Malcolm Turnbull seize the opportunity?

One Nation also copped a hiding, largely as a result of the Faustian bargain on preferences struck between Barnett and Pauline Hanson and her sinister adviser, James Ashby.

June 21, 2017

CHRIS BONNOR AND BERNIE SHEPHERD. PART ONE: Losing the game? Do we now have another chance to lift school equity and achievement?

Amidst this weeks flurry of activity over the Gonski legislation we seem to have forgotten serious problems, both old and new. In this first of two parts Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd consider the problems we still need to solve. In the second part theyll indicate the new emerging problems we dont even recognize. Losing the Game, their new publication with the Centre for Policy Development, has just been released.

September 27, 2018

QUENTIN DEMPSTER. ABC: Frontrunners to replace Justin Milne emerge (the New Daily, 27.09.18)

The Morrison government is to appoint a new ABC chairman immediately as fallout continues over the sacking of managing director Michelle Guthrie.

December 20, 2013

Cracks in the Church Dyke at the Royal Commission. Guest blogger: Kieran Tapsell

On 19March 2010, after the Murphy Commission in Ireland found that there had been widespread cover up of child sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a Pastoral Letter to the People of Ireland. The Murphy Commission had some harsh things to say about canon law and the requirements of secrecy, and found that the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated the cover up. Benedict ignored this criticism, and attacked the bishops for failing to use the long established norms of canon law to dismiss these priests. His letter wrote the script for a second cover up: hide the involvement of six Popes, who, since 1922, had ordered, maintained and confirmed the first cover up: see https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/blog/?p=980 .

April 11, 2017

MAUREEN BRIAN. Easter Radical Awareness

In a recent ABC interview with Richard Glover and her co-author Monsignor Tony Doherty about their recently published book Attachments, Ailsa Piper presents us with the challenge to become aware of the thing that comes at you. Two chance encounters over this fourth week of Lent have given me pause to reflect that to live a life of unpredictability is to become immersed deeply in the Paschal Mystery, and that the paradoxes inherent in that Mystery can be daily experiences.

February 5, 2019

STEPHEN LONG. Hayne's findings shouldn't be a shock; the banking scandals were decades in the making (ABC News 4 Feb.2019).

How did it come to this?

How did we arrive at a situation where banks and financial houses slugged dead people with fees?

August 27, 2017

FREYA HIGGINS DESBIOLLES. The politics of public monuments: It's time Australians looked at what, and whom, we commemorate

Recent events in the US have seen Confederate Civil War monuments pulled down and painful histories revisited. Comparing these acts to those of the Islamic State terror group, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill evocatively called this an Orwellian war on history and a Year Zero mentality on the march. O’Neill also took aim at Australias Yarra Council for its recent decision to no longer celebrate Australia Day on January 26. This is a result of ongoing calls from Indigenous groups to change the date of the national day. This is because it marks the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay and is thus, in their view, invasion day. O’Neill is wrong. It is not a matter of erasing history but a question of whose history is told. In Australia, it has been called the the Great Australian silence, following W.E.H. Stanner, as we stubbornly refuse to tackle these issues.

February 15, 2017

Resource Gaps Between Advantaged & Disadvantaged Schools Among the Largest in the World

Disadvantaged students in Australia are being denied equal opportunities to learn because they have less access to qualified teachers and material resources than advantaged students. The gaps in access to education resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools in Australia are among the largest in the world.

June 27, 2017

ALISON BROINOWSKI. Our mission creeps into Southeast Asia

We should not have to resort to speculation about what our troops are doing either in Syria or in the Philippines. But the mere mention of Islamist terrorism now generates an armed response.

July 2, 2019

PAUL BARRATT. What are we to make of Irans nuclear program?

Irans nuclear program, never out of the news for long, is on the front pages of the world with President Trumps insistence that his belligerence towards Iran is driven by a desire to ensure that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons. The facts are that there is no reason to believe that Iran has made any moves even to acquire a nuclear weapons option since 2003, that Iran has good reasons to maximise the independence of its nuclear electricity program, and that until the United States ripped them up, there were robust arrangements in place to ensure that Iran didnt acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

December 3, 2017

IAN MCAULEY. The finance sector: a drag on the real economy

The royal commission into the finance sector is more about detecting misconduct in individual institutions than exposing the ways in which the sector has misallocated investment funding and caused other economic distortions.

August 20, 2019

China policy drowning in empty rhetoric time for an informed public debate

China is in the news and rightly so. If its not events in Hong Kong, its the China-US trade dispute, or tensions in the South China Sea, Beijings expanding influence in the South Pacific, the prospect of a Chinese military base in Cambodia, Chinas treatment of the Uighur minority, or Chinas massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For Australia, this is a time for uncomfortable soul searching.

June 6, 2018

MICHAEL PASCOE. The Australian governments hypocritical stance on PNG corruption.

Its illegal for Australian entities to bribe foreign entities, but apparently were perfectly happy to take dirty money from bribed foreigners and consort with corrupt leaders.

Malaysias prime-minister-in-waiting, Anwar Ibrahim, called us out on Friday, expressing a view that Australia has been completely dishonest about ousted leader Najib Razak, and complicit in Malaysian corruption.

June 27, 2018

TONY KEVIN. Turning a sows ear into a silk purse? Maybe. Australias new package of national security laws

The Australian parliament is about to pass a complex package of national security laws aimed at strengthening Australias protections against espionage, sabotage, (covert) foreign interference and (overt) harmful foreign influence on Australian political life. The real target is China, but Russia makes a convenient public scapegoat drawing on current US/UK precedents. The draft laws which now appear to have bipartisan support are significantly improved from the first government drafts released for public comment in December 2017. Nevertheless they take Australia in an illiberal direction.

September 10, 2020

Media in the Asian Century. Tit for tat for journalists.

And did anyone in Canberra get the chance to tell Peter Dutton and Christian Porter that raiding some Chinese journalists, hardly deep-cover agents, might invite retaliation in kind? Was the lure of building an ALP-linked Chinese influence case, with Professor Chen Hongs earlier work for Bob Hawke thrown in, simply too much to resist?

July 30, 2019

CHARLES LIVINGSTONE. The Crown allegations show the repeated failures of our gamblingregulators (the Conversation 30 July 2019)

Regulatory failure has been a hot topic in Australia recently. Royal commissions into the financial and aged care sectors have revealed major regulatory failures.

The harm done by these oversights has been significant. Regulation is not just red tape. It protects the interests of those who put their faith, money, and in some cases, loved ones, into regulated institutions.

October 25, 2017

GEORGE RENNIE. Senate crossbenchers take the first steps on lobbying reform - now to ensure it succeeds.

The suite of codes, statements and laws governing lobbying are failing Australian voters. Yet, for decades, the two major parties have been unwilling to meaningfully improve them. But, having recognised the seriousness of the problems with lobbying and corruption in Australia, the Senate crossbenchers along with lower house independents have finally begun the process of deciding how lobbying reform should occur. Into this space, the Jacqui Lambie Network has released a policy that has become the starting point for negotiations on one of Australias most important policy challenges.

August 24, 2017

RAMESH THAKUR. Debating the Burqa

Brandis was wrong to harangue Hanson. A debate on banning the burqa in Australia is required and should address three questions: its origins in religious edicts and cultural practices; the current practice in Western liberal democracies; and the practice in Islamic countries.

January 30, 2014

Insults in our region continue

Sometime late last year, the Australian government made the seemingly innocuous decision to revert, after 18 months, to calling the Southeast Asian nation of Myanmar by its British name Burma. One of Tony Abbotts growing list of regional insults.

July 3, 2017

LOUIS COOPER. Trump and Trudeau - the troubles at the 49th parallel deepen

Given the problems with the Trump White House, Trudeau gives every appearance of being a strong, smart leader on the Canadian and world stage.

July 2, 2017

RICHARD BUTLER. Dangerous Dysfunction

US foreign policy is being conducted in an incoherent and dysfunctional manner and key military decisions have been delegated by the President to the Pentagon. Trump, however, is threatening further military action against Syria based on the charges that, in the last similar instance, were deemed to be false, including by his own intelligence agencies. The possibility of conflict with Russia over Syria is growing. What role does the Australian government see for us in such a circumstance?

September 25, 2019

PATRICK COCKBURN. The Drone Strikes on the Saudi Oil Facilities Have Changed Global Warfare (Counterpunch 24-9-19)

The devastating attack on Saudi oil facilities by drones and missiles not only transforms the balance of military power in the Middle East, but marks a change in the nature of warfare globally.

August 14, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. Conservatives like Malcolm Turnbull set the gold standard in scare campaigns.

After following politics and elections for over 60 years, it is quite extraordinary to see the Liberal Party still complaining about Labors Mediscare campaign. Malcolm Turnbull speaks in a continual and personally abusive way about lies and liars. In this case it is the well funded lie campaign on Medicare.

August 23, 2017

PHIL ODONNELL. A Tale of Two Churches

Threats by Catholic bishops to dismiss employees who marry same sex-partners reveal not only a lack of compassion, but also a deep gulf between the authoritarian and conservative concerns of the church hierarchy and the pastoral and justice concerns of many of its priests, religious and parishioners.

August 10, 2018

GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND

A regular collection of links to writings and broadcasts covered in other media.

September 14, 2017

WARWICK ELSCHE. From as far away as Australia it is difficult to assess Americas Trump administration.

Reading as widely as possible and watching American news reports helps but does not altogether solve the problem. Indeed, many Americans, far closer to the action are finding themselves similarly baffled.The President of just eight months has, in his own words, given us a picture of a truly remarkable occupant of the worlds top office.

August 9, 2018

JOHN MENADUE. National Parks and the new squatters

The new squatters on public land are being given a leg-up, as they were in the 19th Century, to seize and occupy public land. By deliberately underfunding National Parks developer-friendly governments are putting commercial interests ahead of the public interest.

Our early wealthy and powerful squatters forced indigenous people off the land they had occupied for tens of thousands of years. The new squatters are taking over more and more of our public land national parks, botanic gardens and public reserves.

There is currently an attempt by a latter-day squatter, aka developer Gap Bluff Hospitality Pty Ltd to in effect destroy the peaceful enjoyment of the Sydney Harbour National Park by developing a series of quite inappropriate features for weddings, bucks and hens parties and student formals.

August 1, 2020

Sunday environmental round up, 2 August 2020

Sombre statistics about the murder of environmental activists but better news about the economic as well as environmental and human benefits of protecting large areas of land and sea. Ongoing coal consumption may incinerate the Paris Agreement targets but that doesnt wont stop Australia exporting it as long as possible, even if Australia itself is rapidly transitioning to renewables. Gas is no better.

May 6, 2019

MUNGO MacCALLUM. ScoMos campaign is going back to the future -- quite a long way back.

John Howard has been exhumed as the great grey hope and is being paraded among the marginal electorates to enthuse the faithful and woo the undecided assuming, that is, that they know who he is, or at least was.

June 20, 2019

MARK BEESON. The US Lobby and Australian Defence Policy, Vince Scappatura, Monash Publishing (a review)

One of the most enduring features of Australias foreign and strategic policies is the close relationship between this country and the United States. A number of other countries such as Britain and Japan also claim to have a special relationship with the US, but no country has worked more assiduously to turn that rhetoric into reality. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a country that has made greater sacrifices of blood and treasure than Australia has on behalf of its American ally and notional security guarantor.

September 21, 2017

GEOFF MILLER. North Korea: see you, and raise.

Trumps apocalyptic speech to the UN, combined with Mattiss comments, are designed both to daunt Kim Jong Un and to alarm China and Russia into putting more pressure on him.

February 25, 2019

PETER MANNING. The unknown thoughts of Chair Ita

If Ita Buttrose, AO OBE is appointed ABC Chair of the Board in the next few days it will represent yet another opportunity for her to show her extraordinary talents at confronting difficult media challenges and coming out a winner.

June 21, 2018

JOANNE McCARTHY. Bishop breaks ranks on church report into child abuse royal commission (SMH 21/6/2018)

_Bishop of Parramatta Vincent Long Van Nguyen has broken ranks with the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference to join reform groups and politicians calling for public release of a church report responding to the child abuse royal commission.

May 25, 2018

JIM COOMBS. Best Things In Life.

The stars belong to everyone: The best things in life are free. Or they ought to be. The last week of Budget Hysteria, made me think, Is money all there is to life? That seems to be what the government and opposition believe is all we care about.

February 10, 2016

Frank Brennan SJ. The Taxpayers Liability for Long Term Detention on Nauru (and Manus Island)

As the Commonwealth Government contemplates what to do with the Bangladeshi woman in the recent High Court asylum case and her baby born in Australia, it will be relevant to consider the possible civil liability of the Commonwealth for its participation in her detention on Nauru for six months at a time when the Commonwealth Parliament had not specifically authorised the Executive Government to take action or make arrangements co-operating in such detention with a refugee processing centre (RPC).

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal