December 7, 2024

Whistleblowing, truth and the price of courage

Michael Lester in conversation with Kieran Pender, senior lawyer for the Whistleblower Project at the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), discuss recent high-profile whistleblowing cases in both public (e.g. East Timor) and private (e.g. CBA) sectors.

December 5, 2024

“The elephant in the room”: the refugee status determination process

Having befriended and worked closely with many Asylum Seekers for the pasts 14 years I have no hesitation in highlighting a key problem with the recent Migration Bill changes. It is the uncritical assumption that the refugee status determination process is professional and fair and sensitive to changing realities. That assumption is simply not true.

November 30, 2024

The Future Fund must be a fund for the future

Like all policy instruments, the Future Fund was created to manage the challenges the country was facing at the time. The government has every right and reason to adjust and adapt the mandate to manage very different political and economic challenges today.

October 25, 2024

Thank goodness for Lidia Thorpe

Calling Lidia Thorpe “un-Australian”, as occurred in Canberra on 22 October, is to be reminded that being “Australian” is to grovel to British royalty, to curtsy, genuflect and pay homage and allegiance to an anti-democratic institution, to a man who has wealth, position, entitlement and power due to birth, and birth only.

March 15, 2024

Aged Care funding taskforce fails to do its task

There is no argument that funding for aged care has to increase or that equitable funding requires that those with higher means pay more. The recommendations of the Aged Care Funding Taskforce fail to provide solutions on both counts, for older people needing care and their carers, providers, taxpayers, or government.

February 27, 2024

A call for university action against Israeli scholasticide

Palestinians are known as one of the most educated people in the world. They have accomplished this as a key strategy in their resistance to dispossession and displacement. The scholasticide committed by Israel is not accidental but a pillar of the genocidal acts taken against Gaza. As a group of concerned scholars from South Australian universities, we have issued a call for our universities to take action against Israeli scholasticide, the deliberate destruction of education systems, education infrastructure and educators.

January 27, 2024

Wattle Day: A natural choice for Australia Days ideals of diversity and resilience

In 2018, I wrote about Australia Day and Wattle Day for The New Daily. While in 2024 some crazy drums still beat to PC tunes, the federal government has lowered the temperature. Soon we will be able to have a rational debate which may lead us to September 1, Wattle Day, which could become the natural and national day which we all embrace. To a historian of Australian nationalism, a painter of wattles and a seventh generation Tasmanian, it seems an inclusive solution.

December 4, 2023

Duttons border protection rhetoric is nothing like his border protection record

Peter Duttons border protection rhetoric has contributed to a remarkable improvement in the Coalitions public polling. He will ride that rhetoric to the next Election.

March 6, 2023

Politics, not science, fuelling debate about the origin of COVID-19

Last week 4.8 million people contracted Covid-19 and 39,000 died as a result. The pandemic rages on around the world with, globally, cumulative cases of 675,565,574 and 6,873,798 deaths documented.

February 6, 2023

Commonwealth-State cooperation is essential for healthcare reform

The recommendations of the Strengthening Medicare Taskforce released last week, like almost any serious health reform in Australia, require joint Commonwealth and state action.

October 6, 2022

Truss misrepresentations on China

While the campaign for the UK prime ministership was more about domestic issues than foreign policy, China still made fleeting appearances. Prime Minister Liz Truss had long pushed for a more hawkish approach to China, commenting in the past about the need for the United Kingdom to avoid dependency on the Peoples Republic.

February 20, 2025

We may be short of leaders, but we’re not short on false prophets

With this year’s federal budget supposedly brought forward to 25 March, the seasonal peak in business bulldust has come early. Last week, Canberra kicked off an annual ritual little noticed in real-world Australia, the call for “pre-budget” submissions on what the government should do in its budget.

November 2, 2024

What’s this American democracy crap?

For the worst part of 250 years, the United States of America has been a plutocracy. With 800 billionaires in a population of 345 million, the enemy is not ‘the One Percent’ but a 0.01%

February 10, 2024

Are democracies truly democratic?

In most democratic western countries, certainly in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, politics manifests as a duopoly.

January 25, 2024

Dutton calls the media for his next steps

November 30, 2023

New Zealand's new coalition government turns back the clock

The new National Party led government for New Zealand will be New Zealands first cabinet coalition of three parties. Their joint agreement, hammered out during a month of difficult negotiations, will reverse a number of reforms introduced by the outgoing Labour Government and cut public service staff to approach 2017 levels.

February 28, 2023

The never-ending Brexit story an end perhaps?

In what many hope will be the final chapter of the seemingly never-ending Brexit story, British prime minister Rishi Sunak announced on Monday the Windsor Framework, a political agreement in principle with the European Union to resolve their differences over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP), that part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement designed to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

October 23, 2022

Gas export tax would help to fix Australia's energy crisis, says Dr Ken Henry

The dire state of Australia’s domestic electricity market,and our lack of investment in renewables, has been a mess of our own making, former Treasury secretary Ken Henry has said.

March 21, 2025

Queensland's autocratic ALP premier and Australia's only Communist Party MP: The St Patrick’s Day bash

History and politics buffs should either be made aware, or be given cause to remember, that in Brisbane, on St Patrick’s Day 1948, Australia’s only Communist Party MP, Fred Paterson, was almost murdered by a Queensland policeman, almost certainly at the instigation of someone higher up.

January 15, 2025

Child support: a 'wicked' public policy problem

Two generations of children have grown up since the Child Support Scheme (CSS) was introduced in June 1988 with the promise of “putting children first” when their parents’ relationship breaks down. Yet, the CSS is beset with many of the same problems that led to and surrounded its establishment.

December 14, 2024

Albanese drops the ball on rugby league diplomacy with PNG

In his acceptance speech after Labor won the 2022 election, Anthony Albanese promised to look after disadvantaged and vulnerable citizens. During the cost of living crisis over the past two years he told people he felt their pain and had their backs.

November 25, 2024

In defence of public education

Over the last 10,000 years or so societies have evolved from relatively simple and loosely structured groups of people to the complex entities of the present nation-states (and even a nascent world society), but in this time period the human being, as an organism, has not changed significantly. So, what has changed?

November 4, 2024

What the insurance experts say about Queensland's climate plans

The new Queensland Premier, David Crisafulli, has made some moderately progressive comments about climate and nuclear energy but they are, when considered in the context of the latest Zurich-Mandala Climate Risk Index, insignificant compared to the scale of the problems the State faces.

March 25, 2024

Complacency can be deadly

Downplaying the seriousness of the Covid-19 sequelae known as “Long Covid” is a serious mistake.

February 28, 2024

A little support instead of billions on toxic cruelty

We must speak to people who require assistance and listen to their needs instead of speaking over them. In the case of Australias refugee policy, we wasted billions on toxic cruelty when we could have done much better by cooperating internationally and supporting people humanely.

November 26, 2023

Publish or Perish: Escaping the hamster wheel of academic research pursuits

Recently, the issue of Publish-or-Perish has come back onto the Australian science policy agenda, with the Chief Scientist, Dr Cathy Foley, saying that existing narrow research metrics are creating a Publish-or-Perish culture, perversely incentivising researchers to publish iteratively, chasing publication volume and citations rather than quality research.

March 5, 2023

SSNs: a second-best solution for defence?

Defences defeat on the French Submarine was an extraordinary victory for a small group of dedicated professionals. Defences counterattack with the nuclear submarines under the aegis of AUKUS reeks of the same old problems.

November 18, 2024

The failure of the Left

If you are like me, you are fed up with the so-called educated ‘Left’ who are not at all educated in the underlying causes of humankind’s current problems and the solutions to them. You will also be fed up with people believing that when we elect Left or Centre-Left parties, the world is on track to solve its problems, and we can live happily and equitably in the meantime.

November 8, 2024

Josef Stiglitz and national productivity: the need for a new TAFE

When Nobel economists Joseph Stiglitz recently said that Australia’s future prosperity is tied to us acting to become a “Knowledge Economy” there was subdued muttering of the “Fee Free TAFE” mantra from a few Labor federal parliamentarians. This was followed by multi-party total inaction. Could it be that our federal political leaders, who have been so negligent in allowing our TAFE system to slide into its current overall state of decrepitude, are now too embarrassed to even talk about it?

February 11, 2023

Peruvian coup: the Australian connection

Pedro Castillo, the Peruvian president, overthrown in a coup 7th December 2022, and then sentenced to 18 months imprisonment, clearly represented a threat to some significant forces.

November 17, 2022

Denying trafficking not the way to protect the Asylum system

Hannah Dickinson from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) has penned an article in this Journal that is full of distraction and denial of the massive labour trafficking scam that started in 2014-15. That approach does nothing to help genuine asylum seekers nor help the over 70,500 unsuccessful asylum seekers currently living in Australia with no rights and no protections.

April 3, 2025

Israeli practices exacerbate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza

The Gaza Strip has witnessed catastrophic humanitarian crises during the genocide committed by the Israeli occupation. The war has caused widespread destruction of infrastructure, leading to the near-total collapse of the healthcare system and essential services.

March 5, 2025

The next pope?

Popes have been in the news lately. The excellent book and film Conclave give us a sneak preview of what happens in the election process, and Pope Francis’ illness has kept the whole business in the news.

December 2, 2024

Pedalling for Israel is peddling genocide

Unfortunately the Australian Friends of Palestine Association’s campaign to ensure that an Israeli team is not registered for any events in the International Cycling World Tour 2025 and especially in the South Australian Santos Tour Down Under has not met with success.

December 6, 2023

Henry Kissinger the Caligari of the American Empire?

Bloody subverter of world peace, or its champion? Since his death on 29 November 2023, Henry Kissinger has been excoriated and praised in almost equal measure. His critics are more focused and vehement.

February 6, 2023

Chalmers places indefinitely growing productivity at heart of economic strategy

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ essay in The Monthly, Capitalism after the Crisis, was the first real opportunity we have had to get a glimpse of his philosophy as an economist rather than a politician. I sometimes forget how academic Chalmers is, being a PhD, when we rarely see him in such academic settings.

December 9, 2022

Nothing agitates the Anglosphere more than young women in power

There is nothing which agitates much of the Anglosphere media more than a young attractive woman in power. The latest example of the phenomenon is the treatment of 37-year-old Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin.

February 4, 2022

US created Ukraine mess, now it must repair Russia relationship

Western media accounts of the current Ukraine crisis are forgetting the US’s role in the 2014 coup, which forced the then-president to flee.

February 6, 2025

Trump's decision to withdraw American support for WHO is a huge mistake

It only took a week for Donald Trump to have America looking like Belarus as a dictator, helped by totally subservient politicians, put governing in the hands of unqualified, unintelligent loyalists. As one commentator asked this week “When did brains go out of fashion!”

December 17, 2024

Cartoon commentary

January 29, 2024

Australias biggest handicap: believing our own bullshit about our military

One of the many things Australians should consider as they contemplate our nationhood on the day set aside for this purpose is our glorious tradition of being not very good at fighting wars. We boast of our military traditions, our baptisms of fire and of our long traditions of unquestioning obedience and eager anticipation of the needs of various great and powerful friends.

January 10, 2024

Corporate murder: the Australian companies behind Gazas destruction

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organisation of some note, recently released a list of companies profiting from Israels current campaign in Gaza, including its operations in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria between October and December 2023. The list of nasty participants is impressive and familiar.

November 15, 2023

Cruel and mendacious: Its not the Voice that failed

No one who cares about basic human rights, or a sense of honour and of honouring, should be remotely intimidated by the sickening success of Duttons typically self-serving, cruel and mendacious campaign. The Voice did not fail. Australians failed the Voice.

October 22, 2024

Israel-Gaza war, justice and hope: the 'sublime ideal' of inalienable dignity

Distinguished moral philosopher and public intellectual Raimond Gaita (FAHA), Professor, University College London, and Melbourne Law school, discusses his approach towards a moral understanding of the Israel Gaza war based on the ideas collected in the book ‘Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other writings’, (Edited by Scott Stephens), Melbourne University Publishing, Paperback edition October 2024.

January 13, 2024

Lessons for Survival Day from America

As Australia approaches that time in January again, we see the unedifying picture of Peter Duttons team driving his post-referendum Base into a flag-waving orgy of aggrieved patriotism. Similarly in the USA, compulsory patriotism is part of the Atlas Networks plan to control the future of America through directing the next administration.

December 12, 2023

Rebuilding Employment Services will take more than a few virtuous words

Pearls and Irritations weekly roundup this week commented on the paucity of analysis regarding the House of Representatives Select Committees report Rebuilding Employment Services. This is not surprising given the number and complexity of its recommendations. However, it is hard to pin down many specifics in the report other than the current system is useless.

February 18, 2023

T20: blessing or curse to cricket?

Several developments in recent times suggest that T20 is a potential danger to cricket.

February 3, 2023

Did China ban online education?

According to Australian news sources, 40,000 Chinese students are being forced to rush back to Australia incurring many thousands of dollars in costs, face difficult times finding accommodation and its all Chinas fault.

October 8, 2022

United States and Russia: Dangerous export of democracy and dictatorship

Earlier this month, the Department of State circulated to our embassies around the world its report on Russian efforts to sway elections and exert political influence in more than two dozen countries over the past ten years. According to the study, Russia has covertly given at least $300 million to political parties and politicians in order to shape foreign political environments in Moscows favour.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal