December 31, 2022

New Foreign Policy article warns of the dangers of CIA fomented mass protest

A new article by Douglas London in Foreign Policy warns of the dangers of the US CIA involvement in fomenting civil unrest.

April 1, 2022

Time to talk peace terms with Russia

On March 7, Russia stated three aims for its invasion of Ukraine: official Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea, and recognition of the independence of pro-Russian separatist regions in Luhansk and Donetsk.

November 2, 2024

Albanese’s refusal to heed warnings about Australia’s media is now swamping his re-election chances

Some events of recent weeks have been a reminder of the phenomenon the ancient Greeks called hubris. The Greeks thought of hubris as a character flaw in a leader that led to delusional overconfidence and complacency that blinds a leader and results in a tragic fall.

November 14, 2023

Time for Labor to focus on those who are hurting

It was only in March this year that The Sydney Morning Herald claimed in a series called Red Alert that Australia “faces the real prospect of war with China within three years that could involve a direct attack on our mainland”. There were no grounds to believe this then and even fewer after Anthony Albanese’s recent visit to China which both countries described as providing a “positive” outcome.

November 6, 2023

Australian judges are failing to protect society from violent extremism

Victoria’s leading Neo Nazi left the County Court in Melbourne on Friday with the judge’s message, “Good luck with the future, Gentlemen” ringing in his ears, laughing at the judge’s assertion that he and his co-offender have good prospects for rehabilitation. They greeted reporters outside the court with the observation that they were innocent, followed by “homophobic and antisemitic slurs.” They departed with another Roman Salute and “Heil Hitler.”

October 14, 2023

While Australia votes, India-Pakistan cricket is downstream of politics

On 14 October, my attention will wander between three unconnected stories as they unfold in real time. I will be in New Zealand on that general election date. Polls indicate the Labour government will be replaced by a centre-right coalition. But the peculiarities of the electoral system make election results and the outcome of post-election negotiations between the major parties and potential allies teasingly uncertain.

October 2, 2023

Here’s how you can make a decision on the Voice

On October 14, we can change our Constitution to recognise the original inhabitants - now one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australia. Their suffering stems from the autocratic decisions made about and for them by Colonial and Australian governments. But how can we decide which way to vote? Here is a decision-making model that can help.

October 16, 2022

The Strengthening Medicare Taskforce: No panacea, but great promise in technology driven care

As the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce considers how to ensure access to care is modern, patient-centred and easy, it should not under-estimate the possibilities that technology-driven care has to offer.

October 15, 2022

Australia’s modern Stanford Prison Experiment

Is Workforce Australia a modern-day Stanford Prison Experiment?

October 10, 2022

Technological revolutions and the need for human interaction

Vast technological revolutions have improved people’s lives to a phenomenal degree. Do I dare to think about what my life would be like without these positive developments?

February 24, 2022

PM's playing of China card trashes national interest.

_Geopolitics Recent rhetorical pyrotechnics reveal the dissolution of any prudent, rational, bipartisan dimension in the Morrison government’s China policy.

October 7, 2021

Plenary Council: Time to test the full range of issues facing the church not just in Australia but France.

The rubber has hit the road at the Plenary Council, but there are still nine months to go before resolution.

December 20, 2024

Decriminalising drugs: "Open secret that most of the NSW Cabinet now support major drug law reform"

As Francis Hodgson Burnett said more than a century ago “at first people refuse to believe that strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done – then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.“ This is the spirit that is needed with drug policy. _

November 29, 2024

Australia’s school system: winners and losers?

In a school system so deeply segregated along class and cultural lines it is not hard to identify the losers. But the question is whether there are any real winners?

November 7, 2022

TOMBS - Off-market buybacks: time to end regulatory capture

The budget announcement of plans to align the treatment of off-market buy backs with on-market buybacks, despite virtually no details being given, has provoked squeals of complaint from vested interests. Tax-driven off-market buybacks (TOMBS as we have called them) have been around since 1997, and the rationale for the allowance of this unfair tax rort has never been publicly explained by the relevant regulators.

October 28, 2021

Faltering forum: time to euthanise the ASEAN nag

If ASEAN crashed in the Melbourne Cup the on-course vets would be ready with the needle and green tarpaulin. But this bag-o’-bones is such a dud it would have been scratched.

September 19, 2014

Richard Butler. ISIL. Ask the right questions.

Any assessment of what, if anything, countries outside the region should do about the seizure by ISIL of substantial portions of Syria and Iraq, should be based on the answers to three basic questions: what is the significance of this event; whose fight is it; what can be done about it, effectively.

On the principle that you will only get the right answer if you ask the right questions. It is important that these three questions be the right ones. They appear to be.

February 26, 2025

What the Bankstown Hospital nurses’ affair teaches us

Like heated milk boiling over in a saucepan, the sad Bankstown Public Hospital nurses’ affair has brought to a public head a long-simmering debate, rarely mentioned in polite company, about the extent and legitimacy of Zionist Israel’s interference in Australian political and public life and in our most vital community institutions like national broadcasters or health systems . This is a debate, however awkward, that Australia needs to have.

January 2, 2025

Can China lead the global energy transition?

China’s economic growth has been under downward pressure for both cyclical and structural reasons. In late September 2024, the Chinese Government began to take decisive action to boost aggregate demand, and it has also been promoting what it calls “quality productive forces” in order to nurture new drivers of economic growth.

March 29, 2024

The real reason Labor is rushing through immigration powers

The government’s new deportation legislation is both radical and at the same time addresses two issues that have been around for at least 30 years. But is it good law and why the urgency?

January 8, 2024

The social contract and The Voice

Now that the dust has begun to settle, we can look at the referendum result with a little more clarity. Those of us who supported the Voice saw with some dismay how the initial widespread support in favour of a yes vote began to wither away. yet we should not be fooled by the headlines that the referendum result was a resounding defeat – it was far from that.

November 10, 2023

High court launches full frontal assault on indefinite immigration detention

Mandatory immigration detention is a policy that has caused indiscriminate harm, including death, and permanent incapacity. It has been rightly described as our national shame. On Wednesday November 8, the High Court of Australia found indefinite immigration detention constitutes punishment, making the relevant legislation unconstitutional.

October 22, 2023

Greater sunrise and the new Timor-Leste – China Comprehensive Strategic Framework

Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos Horta has been pressing the Albanese government to somehow enable Woodside Petroleum to go forward with the development of the Greater Sunrise Gasfields and the processing of the gas on Timor-Leste’s south coast. He says that his country could turn to China if Australia doesn’t help. On September 23, 2023, Timor-Leste’s Prime Minister Gusmão signed a Comprehensive Strategic Framework with China, thus increasing the pressure.

October 17, 2023

100 years of ethnic cleansing: Quo Vadis Palestine

Israel has spoken of “erasing Gaza”. Don’t turn away. Stop. And think about what that might mean.

February 13, 2023

Shocking Inequity in NSW school outcomes and funding

The latest NAPLAN results show shocking inequalities in school outcomes between highly advantaged and disadvantaged students in NSW.

November 22, 2022

Greed and a spoiled society: workers are not the problem

Of course The Australian republished Andy Kessler’s ridiculous Wall Street Journal column, “The decline of work in a spoiled society.” Those News Corp bedfellows continue to miss that they are at the core of the problem.

November 17, 2022

Reinventing the NDIS

What was in the minds of the originators of the NDIS, of the nature of disability? How did they see the role of the NDIS within existing social, health, and economic, environments?

November 26, 2021

Policy wreck: we're being told two contradictory stories about NSW trains

Stories about Gladys Berejiklian’s private life or bureaucratic fights might sell papers, but they distract from grave problems in transport policy.

February 8, 2024

Technology regulation for the public good

While global governments ponder on how to regulate ever evolving new technologies, it may be useful to draw a parallel view of two crucial developments of the last 130 years: radioactivity and digitalisation.

February 6, 2024

How are we making a contribution to the peace process?

November 13, 2023

The care economy: Ageing is not a disease - who knew?

Becoming an Elder in many societies is a process of active shared engagement across the generations, and holding a meaningful and honoured place in one’s community. Sadly, that time-honoured community cultural process has been pretty much eradicated in modern westernised, market-driven systems of ‘Aged Care,’ such as dominate the Australian ‘market.’

October 16, 2023

Dutton’s Pyrrhic victory

Certainly, Dutton has demonstrated that disinformation, division and some outright lies can confuse and motivate large sections of the community.

February 1, 2023

Legal but not in reach: The state of abortion in Australia

Australia’s position as America-lite, a little sibling stumbling along the line between voracious neoliberalism and violent abnegation of its own history, comes into distinct relief every so often.

December 28, 2022

The predictable resurgence of fascism and nazism on both sides of the North Atlantic and its consequences

The Origins of Fascism and Nazism: the Great Depression

Fascism and Nazism were the products of the Great Depression. The deteriorating economic situation had disastrous effects on the quality of life and well-being of the popular classes and undermined the credibility and legitimacy of democratic systems and governments in the United States and Europe. Fascism in southern Europe and the United States, and Nazism in central and northern Europe and also in the U.S., capitalised on the resulting discontent. These movements acquired significant influence on both sides of the North Atlantic, ultimately governing several countries of Western Europe.

December 13, 2022

Muzzling Milligan: free speech for some, but not for others

The latest attacks on ABC journalist Louise Milligan show that ‘cancel culture’ is alive and well at The Australian and Sky News, aided and abetted by the federal opposition’s shadow communications minister.

October 24, 2022

The AFL, racism and neoliberal corporatist sporting cultures

In the last days of September around the biggest event on the sporting calendar for most Australians, the AFL Grand Final, a leaked report raised the harrowing, but hidden, history of racism at the Hawthorn Football Club.

January 6, 2025

Social and affordable housing: Whacking a wicked problem

Australia’s housing crisis is caused by three factors: Supply, Supply and Supply. Supply of Land. Supply of Materials. Supply of Labour.

February 1, 2024

Medicare turns 40: since 1984 our health needs have changed but the system hasn’t. 3 reforms to update it

Forty years ago, Medicare as we know it today was born. It was the reincarnation of the Whitlam government’s Medibank, introduced in 1975 but dismantled in stages by the Fraser Liberal government.

November 23, 2023

Birds of a feather - Hamas and Israel

March 25, 2023

The Voice: Newscorp’s dangerous zero sum games

As the wording of the Voice referendum question is released, the Murdoch media’s “news” drives resentment with propaganda as constant as drums of war. The pounding message for its audience is that every development is a zero sum game, one that only defrauds this “conservative” base.

March 2, 2023

Federal housing minister needs policy renovation

Federal member for Franklin, Labor’s Julie Collins, is the Minister for Housing and Homelessness. Her current plans to fix the housing crisis look like putting a Band-aid on a broken leg. And breaking the other leg for good measure.

February 18, 2023

Jim Chalmers’ value-added capitalism requires upheaval of old age paradigm

Treasury, along with all economic institutions, must replace their ageist definitions and assumptions about older people and become part of the solution, not the assault.

Quelle surprise! We finally have a Treasurer who is an independent thinker, and more surprisingly he is thinking out loud. Jim Chalmers is rethinking capitalism to restore some basic values. But the frenzied reaction of economic journalists illustrates how hard it will be for Chalmers to shift the stubborn neo-liberal ideas of the economic establishment towards ‘a new, values-based capitalism for Australia’, within a new ‘wellbeing’ framework where ‘our private markets create public value’. Such an ambitious plan will require new thinking across society’s entire spectrum.

January 27, 2023

Albanese Government makes good start for the dispossessed, but much more to be done

In 1996 Paul Keating said, “when you change the Government, you change the country”.

October 7, 2022

We won’t recognise the annexation

Does any country buy Israel’s self-righteousness – it doesn’t recognise the annexation of the four provinces – at a time when Israel is trying to persuade world leaders to recognise its own annexations.

March 24, 2025

Zionism, anti-Zionism, and the role of psychological coping strategies

As both the actively enabled genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the sanctioning of those who protest it continue, the associated psychological challenges likewise continue unabated. It is not only the international `rules-based’ order which is subverted (with all the political, legal, social, and economic dimensions that entails). When any pretence to a moral order is also subverted, the psychological scaffolding by which we navigate existence is at risk as well.

February 27, 2025

What US wants for Ukraine must serve as a warning to Taiwan, Australia and others

So, US Secretary of Defence Hesgeth has made it clear that what most of us knew three years ago will come to pass.

February 18, 2025

The government hasn't exactly been doing nothing

With a Federal Election looming, Australians will soon be asked to make a choice about which party they want to lead the nation — whether in majority or minority government — for the next three years.

February 7, 2025

Public schools bear the greatest burden of disadvantage

A new research paper published by Save Our Schools shows conclusively that public schools bear the greatest burden of disadvantage, but are not resourced to overcome its effect on learning outcomes. Public schools have to do a lot more with far fewer resources than Catholic and Independent schools.

November 28, 2024

Ending 'Dog Days' stagnant living standards

Over the past decade, Australia has endured its worst stagnation in living standards since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has lost its way in terms of economic policies that can restore prosperity, says Ross Garnaut in conversation with Michael Lester.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal