December 1, 2023

Im an extremist!

A week ago today, I and several hundred other members of Rising Tideand were paddling around the entrance to Newcastle Harbour preventing the export of coal from the worlds largest coal port. The event was incredibly well organised and extremely safe for everyone involved. It lasted from Friday until Monday but the actual blockade was from 10am on Saturday until 4pm on Sunday.

December 16, 2022

Varoufakis details vision for ending 'Global Empire of Capital' to avert catastrophe

Creating a new international economic order “sounds like an impossible dream,” said the former Greek finance minister, but “not more impossible than the principle of one person, one vote, or of the end of the divine right of kings once sounded.”

March 19, 2025

Does Jesus need a barber? The question is a trap

Western media usually tags Indonesia as having more Muslims than any other country. That’s statistically _true_ – but lesser known is that 11% of the 284 million don’t follow Islam. The constitutionally secular republic has more Christians than Australia.

March 1, 2025

Yellow Peril! Red Peril! 'We cannot hide anymore'. Chinese warships in the Tasman Sea

The Western media went into overdrive this past week to work the laconic Kiwis into a mild frenzy over three Chinese naval vessels conducting exercises in the Tasman Sea a few thousand kilometres off our shores. What was really behind this orchestrated campaign?

January 21, 2025

Public vs. private schools: The illusion of collaboration

Carolyn Blanden’s recent contribution to Pearls and Irritations,"Public and private schools are partners in educating all Australian children." presents a counter-argument to my essay “The silent crisis killing public education”, January 9, 2025. She offers a vision of harmonious collaboration between public and private institutions. I suspect that the author misses the point of my argument: the presence of students with severe behavioural challenges is a significant, though not exclusive, reason parents are choosing private schools over public. I will address some of the evidence she presents to support her vision of ‘harmonious collaboration’.

January 17, 2025

An Australian endangered species – Owner builders

High house prices are usually reckoned to be a product of supply, demand and the self- interests of the finance industry. This piece sets out a case for a fourth factor – post de-regulation regulatory stupidity. I have illustrated issues with examples from Gippsland in Victoria, but I suspect that the problems are nationwide.

November 19, 2024

Health and Human Security: a sense of control over one’s life

It is time to think more broadly about security than the narrow military concept about which there is endless debate.

January 30, 2024

Reflections on 'Australia Day'

I worked last Friday, as I have done every 26th January since 1994, when then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett (I was living in Melbourne at the time) ordained that the Australia Day holiday would be observed in Victoria on the 26th January, rather than on the Monday nearest to that date, as it had previously been for many years.

March 15, 2023

Opportunities foregone in AUKUS submarine decision

Rex Patricks analysis of the governments AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine decision (Michael West Media 14 March 2023) illustrates the one-sidedness of this insane deal. Patrick also sets out a rational and cost-effective alternative to the expensive and inappropriate nuclear subs which serves to highlight some of the significant opportunities lost by the wasteful and ill-considered over-spend.

January 5, 2025

Overreach and technocratic control in Australian University reform

Announced by the incoming Labor government, the University Accord process and review is being touted as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the role and funding of Australia’s 40-plus universities. With 1.5 million students enrolled, including 500,000 international students, and generating $35 billion in revenue, universities have been struggling in the wake of COVID-19.

February 3, 2024

Ant nest theology

Consider an ant nest in far flung outer Siberia.

February 1, 2024

Indonesians likely to vote for change

Indonesia, Australias largest neighbour, will go to the polls on 14 February 2024 to elect a new President. Some 160 million eligible voters are expected to turn out in the largest single-day contest.

January 15, 2023

Can the United States provide an off-ramp for Putin?

If you believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked, then perhaps you should read no further. And, if you believe that Vladimir Putin will allow the United States and Europe to bring Ukraine into the Western security orbit, then once again you should read no further.

March 18, 2025

Timor-Leste and its Australian critics: A credibility gap exposed

Damien Kingsbury’s recent piece, Timor-Leste appears to abandon sustainability, recycles tired tropes from Australian academics bent on safeguarding Canberra’s interests in the Timor Sea.

January 29, 2025

At last the eerie silence on schools funding has ended

With a federal election looming, leaders of two political parties have now announced plans to deal with the protracted under-funding of Australia’s public schools.

January 10, 2025

Setting ASEAN glue

ASEAN preference for resolute neutrality will attract increasing pushback from major foreign players who have less respect for the concept.

January 3, 2025

Policymakers confused about compost

Food waste collection services have dominated the discussion around landfill emissions recently. With a lot of things happening in the organic waste sector, I have recently mapped and met with many small-scale composters around Australia, to get an idea of the contribution that decentralised organic waste processing could make towards landfill reduction targets. The pattern emerging is that rural communities take to composting quite well, while the number of composting communities in Sydney and Melbourne is quite small. Brisbane, however, is quite surprising.

February 11, 2024

Is a new Korean war in the offing?

In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbour to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously prone to making wild assertions, created quite a splash and set off a chain reaction of media fear-mongering. In Carlins and Heckers assessment, [W]e believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. They add that if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is convinced that engagement with the United States is not possible, then his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using [his nuclear] arsenal.

February 10, 2024

A US Doctrine of Vengeance: Who has the right to punish?

The campaign to punish enemies of the USA and Israel shows that states which argue from strength have no wish for justice merely revenge.

November 10, 2022

Who benefits from the ABCs rural journalism?

As part of the ABCs financial deal with tech giants Google and Facebook late last year itcommitted to investing the revenue inregional and rural Australia. Brian Burkett, Emma Mesikmmen and Lisa Waller analysed ABC Rurals radio programming around the recent federal election to find out who benefits from the ABCs rural journalism.

November 4, 2021

A long march: China's unfinished business on Taiwan reunification

_Modern-day gunboat diplomacy largely ignores the historical circumstances and emotive aspects of the divide of Taiwan and China.

March 21, 2021

Politics should be about transformational leadership

Our Prime Minister has shown he is incapable of anything other than transactional leadership.

October 31, 2020

The Australian Honours System: Abolition or Reform?

_In the last few years, each six months when the office of the Governor-General reveals the names of new recipients of Honours under the Australian system, now 45 years old, widespread criticism erupts briefly but is soon forgotten. Now, halfway towards the next set of announcements might be the time to re-start a longer debate.

February 24, 2025

The physical hazards of nuclear energy

The debate about the economics of nuclear energy versus renewable energy has distracted politicians, the media and members of the public from the physical hazards of nuclear energy. The three principal hazards are its contribution to the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the risk of nuclear accidents, and the impossible task of managing nuclear wastes for 100,000 years. This article offers a concise review, drawing attention to some issues that are not widely known, including a fourth hazard, radiation exposure of the unborn child. I write wearing the hat of a physicist.

January 2, 2025

Leadership lessons: ‘Look back in anger’ or ‘look forward in hope’

Students of leadership might shake their heads in disbelief at the recent re-elevation of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States of America. What comes to mind, is a play written in 1956 by John Osborne, called ‘Look Back in Anger’ giving rise to the phrase ‘angry young men’.

October 30, 2024

Jason Clare is wrong on net migration and student caps

In a speech at the Australian Education International (AEI) conference, Education Minister Jason Clare is reported to have told the audience that student caps will help with “the government’s ambitions to get immigration levels back to pre-pandemic levels, including international student numbers”.

April 1, 2024

Yemen's Indian Ocean checkmate

Ansarallah has single-handedly disrupted global shipping power dynamics. Yemen is launching attacks against Israeli-linked vessels deep into the Indian Ocean to cut off the last waterway route to the occupation state.

March 28, 2024

Nightmare of deportation: Labor tries on Duttons racist jackboots

The latest Migration Act amendments reflects the fact that Pezzullos protges are still running the Department of Home Affairs. They are actively papering over the mess that their own indefinite detention decisions created. A sharp new broom is needed to clear out the departmental debris.

January 21, 2024

On the tyranny of the short term

What has become very apparent in public policy over the past twenty years is the extent to which the short-term is given precedence over the long-term. Both major political parties live to win the next election, and the mainstream media joins in rapturously because it treats politics as a binary competition that is most sensationally conceptualised in the short-term.

March 1, 2023

"The gift of bombs": Wandering thoughts of a Hanoi sojourner

I sit in Hanoi, Vietnam, a friends 10th floor unit, from which the lights of the city gyrate before me. My mind wanders, ponders many things, my formative years having been enmeshed with the events of this country.

December 21, 2021

PM&C is damaging the integrity and reputation of the public service

At the heart of Senator Rex Patrick’s attack on a senior public servant was a call for the public service to be more independent and impartial.

November 16, 2021

In education we are now measuring motivation rather than learning

The international education juggernaut is under scrutiny for reliability as figures show some students make scant effort and there are implications for NAPLAN.

August 17, 2021

Will Australia learn from Saigon?

It is a few months more than 179 years since 4,500 British and ‘Native’ troops and 12,000 camp followers were forced to leave Kabul.

January 30, 2025

Hugh White is stirring the China pot again

For more than 40 years Hugh White has been an important analyst of Australian defence and foreign policy.

January 9, 2025

Tobacco prohibition by stealth?

Over the past five decades, drug policy in Australia has been contested between two main groups: the prohibitionists, who aim to ban social drugs by criminalising users and consumers, and the Harm-Reductionists, practitioners in the field who take a less censorious line on drug use and aim to educate users on how to minimise the harms associated with drug use.

December 15, 2023

Australia developing an impoverished, disconnected immigrant underclass - Weekly Roundup

Slow progress in cleaning up the mess after decades of Coalition neglect and economic mismanagement in immigration, labour relations, school education and economic structure, opinion polls reveal a restive electorate. Read on for the weekly roundup of links to articles, podcasts, reports and other media on current economic and political issues.

November 12, 2023

The relational consequences of October 7

Overhead, suddenly, there was a noisy helicopter. I didnt look up. Then I noticed that I hadnt looked up. If I was in a place of terror from the sky, I would have looked up.

December 1, 2022

Divisive China-threat politics deliver defeat in Taiwan

In 2019, President Tsai Ing-wen led the DPP to record-setting election victories in Taiwan by megaphoning the China-Threat. This same approach has crashed badly for the DPP in the recent local elections in what can only be read as a rebuke to US China baiting and a win for regional peace.

December 6, 2024

West Papua, an Australian and UN crime scene

I have a friend Julian King, who Duncan Graham reports has been subjected to a stun grenade as our Australian Federal Police burst through his door to seize his PhD research, phone and computers. Reportedly, the AFP are concerned about OPM (Organisasi Papua Merdeka _Free Papua Organisation), the indigenous independence movement in West Papua.

November 1, 2024

The lessons of the Queensland election

In last Saturday’s state election, the Liberal National Party of Queensland has decisively ended the ALP’s nine year run in office.

October 25, 2024

The price of poverty

Those who work in the social service sector in Alice Springs, as I do, know this fact intimately: there is an incredible amount of money funding our response to a community who have incredibly little.

October 11, 2024

East Timor is not Palestine

Peter Job’s article in P&I, ‘Palestine – The Lessons of East Timor’, is an interesting foray into the link between international law and moral condemnation as offering a possible insight into the future of Palestine. As Job argues, one generally does need international law to be on one’s side if a just resolution is to be possible.

December 27, 2023

A voice worth hearing: Australias unique brand of democracy

There is greatness in a system that tolerates public grumbling. Australias brand of democracy is a wonderful thing, in which the integrity of every referendum and election relies on the care, commitment and community spirit of thousands of ordinary citizens. People like you and me. It is citizen civics (expertly coordinated by the AEC) and something about which to be proud.

October 18, 2023

The Voice: caught between a socio-economic hammer and anvil

As the shock waves from last weekends Voice referendum reverberate, a deeper reality is beginning to more fully reveal itself. The division that Voice opponents claimed the proposition would create already exists among non-indigenous Australians and it is reshaping how politics is done in this country. We are moving ever closer towards a politics of grievance.

March 31, 2022

How Russia teaches China by counter example about the weaponisation of the global economy

_Moscow may have launched a hot war in Ukraine, but the West has declared total financial warfare on Russia. That is a unique learning experience for Beijing, one it will take full advantage of in the years ahead

March 29, 2022

The Ukraine - a decisive transfer of the balance of power from west to east

_The 2022 Russo-Ukraine is also a proxy war between Russia and the Western world. We should be prepared for a decisive transfer of the balance of power from West to East…The bulk of the fighting is in the Donbas where there are few or no Western journalists.

February 13, 2022

AUKUS exposes Australia's incoherent defence policy

Environmentally, the submarine acquisition could be a disaster. Where in Australia are the submarines to be based? Could their home ports become contaminated? Where do we dispose of their reactors at the end-of-service life?

November 15, 2021

AUKUS: Our newest member of the acronym insecurity landscape

AUKUS is just the newest acronym in our foreign policy vocabulary, but what does this alliance mean for all the others?

October 20, 2021

Hope springs eternal: The case for Catholic women priests

_It takes time for managers to acknowledge and appreciate change makers. The historical Jesus discovered this in his 30s. Even popes need remedial theological education.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal