February 19, 2024

Ukraine, Gaza wars reveal how, for the West, it’s a jungle out there

The idea of a Western garden under threat from the unruly jungles of the rest of the world is at the heart of today’s global rifts. The Ukraine conflict basically pushed Russia out of the Western garden, just as the Gaza conflict revealed that Israel, as a Western outpost, can commit atrocities with impunity.

January 2, 2024

Decolonisation is our safeguard against genocide

To ensure Aboriginal Peoples’ freedom from genocide and ecocide, we need decolonisation.

November 23, 2023

Has Labor abandoned workers?

The traditional parties of compassion - Labor in Australia, Labour in Britain, Liberals in Canada and the Democrats in the US - have come under attack from the left and the right for abandoning workers.

January 26, 2023

90 seconds to midnight: what the Doomsday Clock means in 2023

We are now at the most dangerous moment in history. We face multiple existential crises that are not under control, but growing more acute, while failures of leadership become more damning.

We have no time to lose_._

January 25, 2023

Labor abandons public education

Nothing coming from Albanese and the Labor government offers any hope for public schools.

November 29, 2022

Will the Dreyfus-Dutton NACC blow up in Labor’s face?

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus knows he has deliberately put in place a weaker commission than he and Albanese promised at the election. His dirty deal serves Labor’s long-term interests. An ongoing activist commission might prove over-powerful, out of control, and a problem for a Labor administration.

March 22, 2022

A noose fashioned from one's own words

One of the habits I have always urged on young political journalists is of jotting down, and remembering statements made by politicians on general principles of accountability, responsibility and personal and public morality.

January 28, 2022

The Morrison government seeks to punish the ABC for doing its job

Governments around the world are targeting public broadcasters for daring to hold the powerful to account – the Coalition here is no exception.

December 19, 2023

The urgent need for shared commitment and an Earth System Treaty

Recently, on American television, political commentator, Anand Giridharadas, talked about the dangerous divide in American politics. To a more or less extent, a similar cultural divide exists in every part of the world.

October 25, 2023

Israel has “Form” and much of it is brutal

Albert Einstein once said that Palestinians (Jews, Christians and Muslims alike) lived in peace and worked together before the European Jews were sent to Palestine. He also said that if Jews could not co-exist peacefully with Arabs “then we have learnt nothing in 2000 years of civilisation”.

February 8, 2023

Population, growth and the environment: a response to Michael Keating

_Michael Keating’s response to the P&I article series on growth – GDP and population – is very welcome as it provides a condensed summary of what has befuddled Australian political economy in recent decades.

November 25, 2022

Noel Pearson and the job guarantee

Indigenous leader Noel Pearson’s _third Boyer lecture__, first broadcast on ABC on 18 November 2022, is worthy of much praise. It is titled ‘The first game changer: a job guarantee for the bottom million’._

January 12, 2022

Nature outcomes in 2021: the good, the bad and the sad

Australia’s natural environment won some significant skirmishes in 2021 but serious challenges for biodiversity and ecosystems remain.

November 20, 2021

Conservatives undermine push against sexual violence on Indonesian campuses

Hardline Muslim organisations insist Indonesia’s moves to curb sexual harassment will encourage adultery and sex outside marriage.

November 5, 2021

Free trade reckoning awaits Australia after Morrison's Glasgow copout

The PM was on the front foot in Rome and Glasgow, but his troubles with the rest of the world over Australia’s emissions target are just beginning.

March 29, 2025

Some thoughts on the recent Western Australian election

The recent victory of the Labor party in Western Australia was remarkable in a number of ways._

December 20, 2024

Exposing social cohesion's innate racism

In the wake of the deliberately lit fire in a synagogue in Melbourne on Friday 6th of December much has happened. It’s been categorised as a terrorist act, the Commonwealth government has established an anti-Semitism task force, claims of anti-Semitism have increased and, at press conferences, senior lawmakers and enforcers have called for restraint.

October 24, 2024

Teachers have a right to show solidarity with Palestinians

Gaza has been flattened by Israeli attacks. Ninety per cent of schools have been damaged, or destroyed. Two thirds of schools, 285 of them, have been completely destroyed. All universities have been destroyed. The United Nations has called Israel’s deliberate targeting of Gaza’s education infrastructure, scholasticide.

November 11, 2023

Amidst horror, the screeching metal of turnstiles haunts our conscience

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.

February 5, 2023

Netanyahu’s collective punishment of Palestinians

Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-right government’s reported response to the “terrorism” of the Palestinian who killed seven people at a synagogue in east Jerusalem on 27 January 2023 includes the likely collective punishment of the family of the attacker, such as loss of citizenship, house demolition and deportation.

October 29, 2022

There is no hope in a Voice to Parliament

The Voice to the Australian Parliament provides no hope and no future for First Nations imprisoned by ongoing colonialism. It will not work towards de-colonisation in Australia. In practice it will support colonial decision making which affects Aboriginal lives in the distant metropolis of Canberra.

March 22, 2022

Whither the Australian federation

In the absence of Commonwealth leadership, our federation is not working well. That comes at a cost to good government, and is impeding service delivery and any future reform agenda.

March 2, 2022

To challenge Putin avoid Australian aggression

_Scott Morrison frothing about Putin can be replaced by some acknowledgement of our part in a world order gone wrong.

November 6, 2021

Taiwan tension is latest stage of a precision-engineered plan

The US and its allies are trying to push Beijing into overstepping its own red lines in a long game that includes the Hong Kong protests.

October 14, 2021

How flimflam politicians cultivate a culture of business greed

The outsourcing of crucial government services to private operators in the name of efficiency has often resulted in a shameless chase for profit with taxpayers left counting the cost.

December 20, 2018

ANDREW GLIKSON. Crimes against the Earth: a deep time perspective.

“Dear Caesar Keep Burning, raping, killing But please, please Spare us your obscene poetry And ugly music “ (From Seneca’s last letter to Nero)

December 22, 2024

Maria Montessori: Feminist and educator

Born in 1870, the year of Italy’s nationhood, Maria Montessori was a social reformer. The general militarisation of life, the first great slaughter, the rise of Mussolini and the second slaughter, are only some of what she reacted and organised against. She believed her method - now universally known as the Montessori Method - would be instrumental in changing attitudes about education and for ways of being.

October 26, 2024

Lidia, I’m angry, too

A lot has been written in the past few days about Senator Lidia Thorpe and her courageous act of speaking truth to power when she confronted coloniser, King Charles, in the colonial halls of Parliament. Yet amidst the commentary, one voice remains absent: the voice of the criminalised community. As a formerly incarcerated woman, I want to tell you what Lidia means to me, because as a leader, she embodies loyalty, bravery, and an unshakable commitment to pursuing justice for our community. In Lidia, I see a leader who has never wavered in her support for our struggles—a fearless advocate who stands with us when few others will.

March 11, 2024

Four months since October 7

As I write, it’s exactly four months since October 7, 2023, when Hamas breached the border between the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and, with others following, Islamic Jihad or simply enraged civilians, embarked upon what was undoubtedly a killing spree. Yet in its aftermath, it is not too farfetched to assert that we in the watching world have been witnessing a catastrophe beyond any previous imagining. I wouldn’t be the first to declare that Israel’s brutally disproportionate response to the attack and the taking of hostages constitutes, for Gaza’s civilian population, a twenty-first century holocaust.

December 22, 2023

Doomed frigates: Australia, defence and the problems of procurement

It’s becoming a force of habit. Initially, grand plans and hopes for those in defence. A future weapons program in the offing able to add new capabilities. Much anticipation and the inking of signatures with the relevant manufacturer. Then, mounting costs, technical faults, the disappointment, and revision. In the case of the Future Submarine deal with the French Naval Group, an agreement worth $90 billion was sunk before it ever set sail, erased by the AUKUS security pact announced in September 2021.

November 15, 2023

The Sabra transformed

On October 7, when Hamas prosecuted its unholy massacre it did more than slaughter human victims. It punctured as well Israel’s image as a sophisticatedly-armed, righteous military power that over the years the world has come to share.

February 13, 2023

An economy that shrinks quantity and grows quality

Recent debate on this site about economic growth and environmental protection highlights the very narrow and limiting framing of mainstream economics, and points to the far more positive prospect that is available to us if we can broaden our vision.

February 2, 2023

Pell’s legacy haunts Australia’s Catholic bishops

But truth can set them free.

March 2, 2022

A national security yardstick on which the Coalition doesn't outshine Labor

The use of national security for political advantage is a perilous business.

October 31, 2021

Sunday environmental round up

While humans struggle to do the right thing for themselves and their fellow Earth travellers, animals act to save the world.

January 22, 2025

Yesterday's man is stuffing up

Trump Two is the world’s big story – will he fly high and take the dollar aloft – or crash and fry? Whatever, he’s shading the sun from the right-wing blusterer next door who isn’t doing well after three months. Duncan Graham reports.

October 22, 2024

Malicious intent: The war on Palestine, the Palestinians and everything Palestinian has been going on for over a century

It’s often said that faith moves mountains.

March 14, 2024

Things unsaid, people unseen

The irony was thick as lard. What an indigestible image for International Women’s Day. What an appalling advertisement for the Melbourne ASEAN Summit and its Australian host, a claimed world leader for gender equality.

March 13, 2024

The darkening prospect of mass destruction on earth

The ailing nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty requires ‘effective measures’ to regain its health, writes Dr Marianne Hanson, Co-Chair of ICAN Australia.

November 18, 2023

The P&I guide to whistleblowing

January 9, 2023

Not a voice but a shout

Many have argued that our civilisation may collapse before the end of this century. In contrast Aboriginal people have survived in this country for at least 50,000 years.

March 19, 2022

Wars do not merely make truth a casualty but kill off intellectual inquiry

The Australian National University officially announced the suspension of all ties and activities with Russian institutions on March 3.

December 3, 2021

Surge in independent candidates illustrates mistrust of the party system

A report into the state of Australian politics should serve as a wake-up call for the major parties — and anyone who cares about the nation’s future.

February 21, 2025

Gaza: The deafening sound of silence in Western political and media circles

Western governments and media remain silent on Israel’s genocide in Gaza while cracking down on those who speak out.

November 5, 2024

The Forever War won’t end until we face the State terrorists

At the Imperial War Museum in London, there’s a moving display about Nazis and the Holocaust, the ‘ultimate human evil’. Seeing it in May this year, I wondered if eventually there will be an exhibition of the Palestinian genocide.

October 29, 2024

A tribute to Susie Menadue

The phrase “Life is changed, not ended” is profound. Used by John Menadue in his t ribute last week to his wife, Susie, it speaks volumes for their shared trust that we are more than “dust”, flesh and bones, however mysterious that “more” may be. And that it is, possibly, a glimpse of that “more” that can most meaningfully connect and free us.

January 31, 2024

Shafted by etiquette: Gibran deploys western sarcasm in Indonesian election

Just a fortnight to Indonesia’s big 14 February election and the mood is shifting as more than 200 million electors realise the reality - they’re being played by the oligarchs like puppets.

October 21, 2023

Albo’s better days

Anthony Albanese pictured with the Australian parliamentary delegation meeting with the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in 1998.

March 22, 2023

To justify nuclear submarines as protecting trade routes is nonsense

We just need to look at the facts to see how foolish the assertion is that SSNs have the capacity to prevent disruption to our trade in the event of a war. Forty percent of our exports are to, and 20% of our imports are from, China. Throwing money at submarines weakens the national economy. Investment for war is a global and national negative.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal