December 11, 2022

Kevin Rudd on The Avoidable War

Kevin Rudd lives in New York these days, but on November 18, he returned to his former hometown of Brisbane to speak about his most recent book, The Avoidable War: the dangers of a catastrophic conflict between the US and Xi Jinping’s China at Brisbane’s City Hall.

November 4, 2022

Is the Pacific Engagement Visa Australia’s first climate change humanitarian visa?

_The new Pacific Engagement Visa (PEV) has more similarities to a humanitarian visa than a labour supplementation visa – at 3,000 permanent resident places per annum, it could be Australia’s first climate change humanitarian visa.

July 4, 2021

Asia, say no to NATO: The Pacific has no need of the destructive militaristic culture of the Atlantic alliance

Something very dangerous happened a few weeks ago when the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) held its meeting in Brussels. In its communique after the meeting on June 14, it identified China as a “systemic challenge” to areas “relevant to Alliance security”.

January 12, 2025

Imagine

Children cry, while Israel lies

How is it the world is just standing by

Mothers cry, while Israel lies

surely as humans it’s our duty to try.

November 14, 2024

Craig Foster: “Refugees are not political footballs”

“Seeking asylum is legal. Refugees are tired of being used as political footballs,” said former Socceroo Captain and human rights advocate Craig Foster while umpiring a Refugee Soccer Match on Sunday.

November 5, 2024

Albanese’s limp self-defence aggravated the damage of Qantas allegations

And the National Anti-Corruption Commission loses its appeal.

October 6, 2024

Indigenous cultures show other worlds are possible

‘I think the natives held privately that in taking such pains to make things grow where already things grew of their own accord I was maybe a little mad…. As for myself, there were times when…. it came to me with considerable force that perhaps in this private opinion there was a deal of truth…’ - Jack McLaren, ‘My Crowded Solitude’, 1926.

February 20, 2024

Israel’s propaganda has ceased to convince or persuade even its friends

Israel’s citizens seem either blithely unaware of the world’s horror at the terror raining down on Gaza, or do not care. Whichever, the barbarity has stripped it of the significant moral advantage given by the Hamas atrocities of October 7, and have caused fundamental reappraisal of Israel’s standing among people once disposed to be sympathetic or admiring.

October 12, 2023

Pearls and Irritations refuses to follow the pack mentality of the mainstream media

A tonic for readers who are drowning in news about China, climate change and socioeconomic problems, but who are starved of alternative and critical perspectives.

October 5, 2023

From genocide to resilience: The Crimean Tatars' struggle for justice

For nearly five decades, the Crimean Tatars tirelessly campaigned to return to their historical homeland in Crimea. Yet, for many political analysts writing about Crimea today from a critical perspective, the historical facts remain sadly unknown.

December 6, 2022

Infatuated with US politics, does the media remember the third-largest democracy in the world: Indonesia?

Americans will get to the ballot box in late 2024. Such is our infatuation with US politics that by Guy Fawkes’ night we’ll have absorbed enough minutia to know more about their electoral system than ours. Does anyone in the media remember Indonesia?

March 3, 2024

Submarines then and to come

The multi-billion dollar expenditure on nuclear powered submarines as part of the AUKUS pact has attracted some attention. Perhaps it helps to provide historical context if it is remembered that Australia’s first submarines were of limited use in the defence of our shorelines.

January 23, 2024

As earth records hottest year, Coalition digs in against climate action and renewables

The science is in. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has overnight confirmed that 2023 was the earth’s warmest year on record: 0.16°C warmer than the previous record year (2016); 0.6°C warmer than the 1991-2020 average; 1.48°C warmer than the pre-industrial period.

December 29, 2023

The end of illusions

The fear that the world is falling apart is not new. It stretches back into antiquity. End of the world fears have manifested over thousands of years. For almost all recorded history, and no doubt beforehand, there have been wars, violence, greed, and cruelty committed in the name of some collective cause. For most of recorded human history, there has been slavery, hunger, famines, plagues, mass killings, genocides, human sacrifice, mass migrations, extraordinary poverty, mass illiteracy, wars of conquest, endless atrocities, tyranny and relentless exploitation of people and land.

October 23, 2024

Restoring universal health care in Australia

Listen to Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP) Founder, Bronwyn Kelly, interview Ian McAuley about the prospects for restoration of universality in Australia’s health care system.

January 4, 2024

Under the facade of journalism

How News Corp used fear, manipulation and division to campaign against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

December 9, 2022

Challenging the “Uyghur genocide narrative”

The “Uyghur genocide narrative” is falling apart and Jaq James, an Australian socio-legal research consultant is one of the main architects of the collapse.

October 28, 2021

Four Corners v Julian Assange: your ABC, their sneers

Who could imagine that a revered current affairs program could stoop to peddling slanderous allegations against an award-winning Australian journalist?

March 27, 2025

Hurry up and wait

One principle of American military affairs has been said since the 1940s to be “hurry up and wait”. That certainly applies to AUKUS, an agreement so urgent that in September 2021 Prime Minister Scott Morrison gave Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese only 24 hours to agree to it.

October 17, 2024

Small, smart and struggling

Where’s the torrent of cash expected to flow from Google, Meta and other overseas behemoths plundering Ozzie journalism? Here’s the _lates__t handwringing._

March 1, 2024

The Home Affairs security "GURU"

With the scalp of poor Mr Mike Pezzullo dangling from his belt, The Age/Sydney Morning Herald journalist Michael Bachelard continues to take a terrier-like interest in the Department of Home Affairs.

February 1, 2024

Labor overcomes a bad dose of stage (3) fright. Is this the change we have been waiting for?

“Would the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands. And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewellery.” John Lennon

October 20, 2023

Human and Environmental Health cry out for a revised “Water Trigger”

Environmental and some health organisations are requesting urgent legislative action to amend part of the EPBC Act of 1999, to include shale and tight gas so it can be applied to assessments of the Beetaloo shale gas development.

February 9, 2023

Environmental apocalypse? Don’t blame us

Like the environment itself, discussions of our collective future are becoming heated. They are also contradictory, polarised and - in my case, at least - increasingly pessimistic.

October 15, 2022

Iranian and Turkish moves to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation challenges US hegemony

The SCO can further its goal of challenging the wider Western-dominated ecosystem and prevent Washington from setting the global agenda.

October 8, 2022

Asian Media - Chinese car makers go electric

In Asian media this week, new child sex abuse allegations against Timor’s Bishop Belo.

Plus: India removes abortion rights discrimination; Facebook complicit in Rohingya ethnic cleansing; Chinese carmaker buys into Aston Martin; North Korea fires missile over Japan; Court’s arithmetic leaves Prayut in power; and Bongbong’s weekend getaway goes viral

October 26, 2024

Labor’s amendments to the Education Act fail to ensure full funding of Public Schools

The Labor Government‘s proposed amendments to the Australian Education Act fail in their goal to provide “a pathway to full and fair funding for all schools”.

February 18, 2024

New Zealand’s new government distracted by minor coalition partner interests

The Labour Party in Opposition in New Zealand describes the new National Party government as the coalition of chaos. Others call it the three headed monster. It appears that at least one of the monster’s minor heads is doing more talking than its leader.

December 17, 2023

Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry

The Atlas Network’s main goal has been to spot and train global talent in the ultra free-market libertarian field and connect it to the free-flowing money that the alliance functions to assist. They now have at least 515 partner organisations in over 100 nations. Secrecy is key for the corporations and plutocrats funding this model, structuring replicating “think” tanks and funding academics and spin doctors to sell what the backers can’t say. Atlas and partners hate attention. We must not let them hide.

October 7, 2023

Pumped hydro storage: the neglected, stifled no-brainer

Pumped hydro storage is the ideal complement to wind and solar electricity generation: versatile, modest in scale, cost and build-time, little environmental disruption, mature component technologies, few toxic chemicals, durable. Yet it is consistently overlooked in mainstream discussion in favour of gas-fired power stations, batteries and the nuclear zombie. It is also shackled by out-of-date regulations, short-sighted financial criteria and the business models of privatised entities.

December 30, 2022

Best of 2022: NSW police ‘Strike Force Guard III’ formed to silence threats to fossil fuel driven political order

In NSW a special task force, Strike Force Guard III, has been established to target environmental groups in a concerted state attempt to silence anyone they view as a threat to the prevailing fossil-fuel driven political order. Conditions imposed on activists are now more severe than those meted out to some perpetrators of domestic violence or members of bikie gangs.

December 24, 2022

John Menadue. Why I am still a Catholic: A repost from July 7, 2017

Cardinal John Henry Newman once said that there is nothing as ugly as the Catholic Church yet nothing as beautiful. It is hard to see that beauty at this moment. With sexual abuse it is time for sackcloth and ashes. Mysogyny is wall to wall. But I will hang on.

November 29, 2022

Personalised politics: the Liberals meet their Jonestown in Victoria

The Victorian Liberal and National parties’ political strategy of targeting premier Daniel Andrews was a dismal failure, underpinned by policies that seemed to fall into a heap of vacuity. Their failure means that Victoria has no credible or viable opposition.

March 17, 2021

Truth and Treaties: the ongoing legacy of the Uluru statement

The 27th of October 2017 was the most shameful day in Malcolm Turnbull’s tenure as Australia’s Prime Minister. It was the moment when he peremptorily rejected the Uluru Statement which had been addressed to the people of Australia five months earlier. He declared that the projected voice to parliament would not be ‘either desirable or capable of winning acceptance in a referendum.’ It was a stinging collective insult to the first nations’ leaders who had come from ‘all parts of the southern sky ’to draft the document.

February 28, 2025

Arts on notice: The clarion call of Tilda Swinton

At a time when the “cost of living” crisis undermines the wellbeing of millions — and when for besieged Palestinians in Gaza it rather represents a literal risk of being wiped off the face of the earth — focus on the realm of the arts can seem peripheral. So close attention to the recent acceptance speech of actor Tilda Swinton of her Golden Bear lifetime achievement award at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, may seem trivial in comparison.

February 22, 2025

A fantasy: The revolution that shook the world

It began with a whisper. A voice, quiet but clear, weaving its way through the fabric of Australian society, carrying with it a simple, but radical, idea: that power should belong to the people, not just those who sat in Parliament House. At the heart of this movement was an historian, and a woman of extraordinary vision.

February 11, 2025

The future from the river to the sea remains bleak

History did exist before 7 October 2023. It existed before 1948 and 1929 and goes back millennia.

January 21, 2025

Should we believe a Mediscare campaign?

For the last two and a half years the opposition under Peter Dutton’s leadership has avoided virtually any concrete policy commitments in the health area. What happened last time the Coalition won government, when Dutton became health minister?

April 4, 2024

Albanese government wedged on aged care

With a Medicare-style levy and changes to the treatment of family home both ruled out, the only choice left is more user-pays. But it will not be enough.

October 18, 2023

Our mutual obligations in a mutually dependent society

I am glad the article of Professor Trevor Parmenter “Rights are necessary but insufficient for the achievement of the full inclusion of people with disabilities” (P&I Sep 22, 2023) has been published. I am writing to say so, but as I send this off, I realize that I am involved in the very inter-dependent reciprocity that he has identified so well for us.

December 4, 2022

Family policy has fallen off the radar

In a single life span we have moved from a ‘we’ society to an ‘I’ society, as Robert Putnam puts it in his seminal study in the late nineties entitled Bowling Alone. The value of reciprocal responsibilities within our community has been upended by individualism and divisive tribalism. In this context the story of ‘the family’ is revealing.

December 4, 2021

Our democracy is damaged — only progressive independents can repair it

Voter trust in the major political parties is virtually non-existent — independent candidates can restore the grassroots values that have been abandoned.

November 9, 2024

The ABC must reinforce its commitment to unbiased reporting

Jonathan Holmes, a respected journalist and former host of Media Watch, with an impressive career spanning over 40 years including work as an executive producer for programs like Four Corners, Foreign Correspondent, and 7.30 Report, has shared his perspective on the challenges facing Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC with Michael Lester.

February 3, 2024

Restricting onshore student visa hopping – harder than it looks

Onshore student visa policy gets relatively little attention as it deals with people who are already in Australia, but it is critical to how the overseas student program operates.

October 16, 2023

The Pezzullo affair: Time to clarify APS values and responsibilities

Glyn Davis may have been ‘shocked’ by the Pezzullo revelations but, as several other observers have noted, many other people inside and outside the public service were not really surprised.

January 18, 2023

What ails Britain? Don’t mention Brexit

I’ve been asked to come out of blogging retirement, temporarily, to explain why Brexit has been at the root of Britain’s most serious problems since Brexit was decided in 2016 and which a growing body of commentators rate as a colossal mistake. Contrary to Boris Johnson’s repeated assertions, Brexit has not yet been done and can never be.

December 24, 2022

A 2022 Christmas reflection

I’ve just spent a week in Assisi – the home of Christmas cribs. At every turn there was a nativity scene – large and small, tasteful and kitsch, prayerful and gauche. By night, church facades were lit with truly spectacular scenes of Mary and the angel at the Annunciation and of the manger with Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus.

January 20, 2022

Oh what a lovely pandemic, if you can afford your own spaceship

The yawning gap between the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men and the people at the bottom has exacerbated the deaths from COVID-19.

October 21, 2024

Dialogue for Australia’s three voices

There is no doubt that the war in Gaza has placed Australia’s multiculturalism and social cohesion under strain.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal