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Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal
Politics
Policy
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Letters
April 13, 2025

Housing reform that pays for itself – and helps future generations

Tinkering around the edges isn’t helping. We need to reverse the commodification of housing with a model that puts people first.

July 14, 2025

Why the world needs renewable food

The future well-being and survival of civilisation rests upon a single, fragile assumption: that there will always be enough food.

June 7, 2025

Warren Report: Musk leveraged government access for personal gain

“Since Election Day, Musk’s staggering net worth has increased by over $100 billion,” the report states.

May 28, 2025

Our retreat from Asia has become a rout

On almost every measure, Australia has gone backwards on engaging with our region, and particularly with China, and it is time to do something about it.

May 17, 2025

Don’t stir Semar – He seeks harmony

Ancient Javanese mythology, often inherited from India and adapted to fit local culture, is rich with striking characters in the wayang kulit shadow puppet theatre. The fat-gut wise clown Semar is charged with maintaining stability.

April 25, 2025

Anzac voices – voices of warning

A shade over 110 years since the Gallipoli landings, Anzac Day is a day of mourning for many. Respect is due. And more. If we listen to the original Anzac voices, we may recognise voices of warning – relevant today.

May 18, 2025

Voice rejection sends Australia backwards

It was a dramatic return to the political stage! With the election underway, indigenous activist Noel Pearson broke a self-imposed silence which he had kept for 18 months since the failure of the referendum on the voice to parliament.

May 13, 2025

Politics courting religion: Religion courting politics

An open letter to the Coalition leadership

There has been a growing trend for Conservative politics in the US and in Australia to double down on support from conservative expressions of Christian religious faith. These religious views are not consistent with the values of most Australians, they are divisive. They do not represent the views of those with faith, like me, who find them at odds with the life and teaching of Jesus.

June 25, 2025

Our white man’s media shuns Asia

We talk glibly about our future in Asia, but we are stuck in a US and UK media cul de sac.

July 10, 2025

The story most Israelis are not allowed to hear

I write this in quite a distressed state. On Sunday, I watched the award-winning documentary film – “No Other Land”. 

June 28, 2025

The generational divide in the West over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: from a culture of loyalty to a culture of justice

A deep analysis of the growing generational divide in the West over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

July 12, 2025

Albanese’s visit to China is a moment for statesmanship

Membership of the Chinese Communist Party has just exceeded 100 million. It has long been the largest political party in world history.

April 30, 2025

Who will better manage the economy: Labor or the Coalition?

People are being asked to vote for the Coalition on the grounds that it is better at managing the economy. But the current evidence does not back up that claim.

April 11, 2025

If I were health minister…

Ministerial time is a scarce commodity. Hence setting priorities is critical. But, unfortunately, the minute I walk into my new office I will be assailed by the smell of a dead cat on my desk emanating from a stack of briefs on private sector issues.

April 9, 2025

Muslim voters: Don’t let rage cloud strategy

During our extended family gathering for dinner on Eid Day, Monday 31 March, hosted by my niece, Shakeeba Siddiqui, and her husband, Khalique Sajjad, in Edmondson Park, there was a robust discussion about the upcoming federal election with invited guests Nathan Hagarty MP, state member for Leppington and Charishma Kaliyanda MP, state member for Liverpool.

July 6, 2025

Gunning for the Greens over Gaza - Part 1

After the federal election on 3 May, dissection of the Liberals’ turmoil received top billing.

June 10, 2025

As Keating advised, it's time for Australia to seek its security in Asia

“The world America made for us is passing away. Its place is being taken by a new and harder post-American world, and we are at a loss to know what to make of it.”

June 9, 2025

More than 600 Australian Jews say 'no' to war in Gaza

More than 600 Jewish Australians have signed a statement calling on Jewish community and religious leaders to speak out against the atrocities of the Netanyahu Government in Gaza.

June 5, 2025

Inequality and inheritance taxes

With a few exceptions (such as Andrew Leigh, Nicki Hutley and Angela Jackson), “mainstream” Australian economists — including me — haven’t thought, spoken or written as much about the causes and consequences of increasing inequality as perhaps we should have done in recent decades.

May 5, 2025

Libs on life support after thumping

What kind of future does the Liberal Party have? Two elections and Peter Dutton’s leadership have reduced it to its lowest-ever level of support – fewer than one in three Australians gave it their first preference vote on Saturday. Its “small l” liberal component in the House of Representatives has been all but wiped out.

May 1, 2025

Voting for humanity should come first in this election

The following is the text of a speech given by Sue Wareham at a public meeting Why genocide is a key election issue held on 27 April under the auspices of Australians for Humanity. Wareham is president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War (Australia).

July 9, 2025

Missed opportunities in Japan

John Menadue points to the lack of Australian interest and involvement in Asia.

June 19, 2025

The hazards of Albanese's 'progressive patriotism'

John Menadue is absolutely right to point to regrettable omissions in Prime Minister Albanese’s 10 June speech at the National Press Club – its failure to say anything about reinvigorating a needy Australian democracy.

June 29, 2025

Starvation and profiteering in Gaza (with Francesca Albanese) | The Chris Hedges Report

Francesca Albanese joins Chris Hedges to break down the current starvation campaign in Gaza, and her upcoming report detailing the profiteering corporations capitalising on the erasure of Palestinians.

May 21, 2025

Time to change Australia’s grand strategies

As global power dynamics shift and traditional alliances fray, Australia’s current grand strategies are reaching their limits.

April 14, 2025

There is no future without children

Imagine a world without children, a world steadily depopulating like that in the dystopian novel by P.D. James, Children of Men.

July 2, 2025

How spending more on defence harms the nation

Anthony Albanese is taking a battering from ill-informed commentators for thinking Australia can be defended by spending a little over 2% of GDP on its military forces.

April 29, 2025

If I were foreign minister...

I don’t want to be Australia’s foreign minister, and here’s why: I would not be good at promoting Australia’s current foreign policy to the world. That’s also why I stopped being a diplomat in 1996.

May 2, 2025

If I were attorney-general...

If I were attorney-general of the Commonwealth after Saturday’s election there is one person I would seek to emulate, the Whitlam era’s Lionel Murphy.

May 4, 2025

Trump’s unilateral tariffs have pushed ASEAN closer to China

President Donald Trump has achieved a ‘miracle’ in under 100 days. He suceeded in breaking diplomatic and trade relationships with neighbours like Canada and Mexico that took hundred of years to nurture. His unilateral tariffs have upset many including China, Japan, South Korea, and the ASEAN countries.

May 9, 2025

Labor says its second term will be about productivity reform. These ideas could help shift the dial

In his victory speech, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese highlighted social policy as a major factor in Labor’s electoral success, particularly Medicare, housing and cost-of-living relief. He was justified in doing so.

July 13, 2025

Abandoning our fears: how Australia should respond to US-China regional confrontation

A presentation by Professor Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister, to the University of Melbourne Australian Peace and Security Forum Webinar Abandoning our Fears: Finding Peace and Security in our Region, 8 July 2025.

May 26, 2025

Gaza’s endless genocide: When killing becomes policy and justice disappears

What is happening in Gaza today is not an incidental event nor the result of a “military error” as claimed by some media outlets supporting the occupation. Rather, it is a clear extension of a colonial approach built on the foundations of extermination, exclusion, and uprooting. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the Nakba in 1948, from the invasion of Beirut to the successive wars on Gaza, this genocide forms part of a clear colonial system that seeks to empty the land of its people by all means, the most horrific being the killing of children and civilians to make the Israeli settler project appear as if it faces no human obstacles.

April 23, 2025

Pope Francis dies at 88 after final appeal for Gaza ceasefire

“Will the millions who will mourn his death these coming days respect this wish of his? Will they care for Gazans and Palestinians the way he did?”

April 10, 2025

Federal election: Time to hold MPs accountable for stance on genocide

Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, and now its seizing of their land is the worst example of genocide since the horrors of the genocides of Darfur in Sudan in 2003 and Rwanda in the 1990s.

June 24, 2025

Regime change and blowback in Iran

According to US political scientist Chalmers Johnson, in the 1950s the CIA coined the term “blowback” to refer to “the unintended and unexpected negative consequences of covert special operations that have been kept secret from the American people and, in most cases, from their elected representatives".

July 7, 2025

National Anti-Corruption Commission is two years old – Has it restored integrity to federal government?

The  National Anti-Corruption Commission opened its doors two years ago this week amid much fanfare and high expectations.

May 12, 2025

Mark Leibler on his lobbying power

In a speech he delivered back in 2018, Mark Leibler lays out how he exerts influence, from trying to block Bob Carr’s efforts on recognition of a Palestinian State to “watching” ABC correspondent Sophie McNeill in order to change her coverage of the Middle East.

June 18, 2025

Australia: A sovereign continent not for Marles to gift away

Yesterday’s statement by Defence Minister Richard Marles that Australia’s geography and continent would be crucial to any United States prosecution of a war against China will go down as a dark moment in Australia’s history.

May 31, 2025

Gaza: The day of reckoning is coming

The attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023 licensed the very worst psychopathic tendencies, both within Israel and among its uncritical supporters throughout the diaspora.

July 16, 2025

Is Australia finally coming to terms with East Asia?

Comedy and economic development have one thing in common: timing is everything.

May 16, 2025

Sussan Ley and gender politics

Apart from a slight uptick of hope when Malcolm Turnbull gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in September 2015, promising to bring “emotional intelligence” to the role, I have never wished the LNP anything but defeat and oblivion.

October 14, 2018

IPCC -The various risks from global warming.

This a graph from the new IPCC report that the Coalition tried to sabotage. The below graph depicts a range of impacts to a variety of systems of different global temperature outcomes, from white (undetectable) to yellow (detectable) to red (severe impacts) to purple (severe and irreversible impacts with little adaptability):

It suggests we should book that trip to the Great Barrier Reef soon.

June 22, 2025

Chalmers hints at more tax reform – What should we do first? Part 1

In the first of a two-part series Saul Eslake examines what the top tax reform priorities should be.

May 27, 2025

The cost of conscience in post-October 7 Australia

Over the past 18 months, it has become harder and harder to speak publicly in this country if you are Muslim, brown, and pro-Palestinian.

April 27, 2025

If I were defence minister...

On becoming Australia’s new defence minister, I will advise cabinet at its first meeting that our nation is at a perilous, strategic crossroad.

May 19, 2025

Vale Ali Kazak

On Sunday afternoon, we received the very sad news that Ali Kazak has died in Thailand, en route to Palestine. An extraordinary campaigner and shaper of the Palestinian cause for all his almost 80 years, his loss will be sorely felt. Stuart Rees wrote this tribute to Ali for Pearls and Irritations last November. More will follow in coming days.

June 26, 2025

Lattouf’s win over ABC a big victory for freedom of expression

Journalist and broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf’s win over the ABC in the Federal Court is a significant victory for freedom of expression.

May 10, 2025

'This isn't me': Israeli war and healthcare collapse leave Gaza child unrecognisable

Under a tightening Israeli siege, Palestinian girl Rahaf Ayyad struggles with physical and emotional changes, as her mother fights for answers.

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We recognise the First Peoples of this nation and their ongoing connection to culture and country. We acknowledge First Nations Peoples as the Traditional Owners, Custodians and Lore Keepers of the world's oldest living culture and pay respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

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