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).

September 24, 2025

How important is an Albanese-Trump meeting?

Trump’s record suggests that meetings with him frequently fail. Instead, Albanese has an important agenda to pursue at the UN in New York, and when dealing with the US better outcomes are more likely if Australia develops its own policies in its own interests.

July 9, 2025

Missed opportunities in Japan

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

September 29, 2025

What should Australian Governments do about ‘mental health’?

Along with climate change and ecological damage, Australians face an equally important challenge of exposure to stressful social conditions leading to declining psychological health for millions.

September 21, 2025

Australia has no alternative to biting America’s bullet

John Menadue argues it is time for Australia to separate itself from US policy and preparations to confront China militarily.

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.

September 20, 2025

What game is he playing? The PM and AUKUS

As the Australian prime minister prepares for his visit to the UN in New York next week, Robert Macklin looks into what Anthony Albanese might be hoping for on the trilateral security deal.

August 23, 2025

The Gaza crisis and the Australian Church

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has illustrated once again that Australian Catholics should not look to their church for high-level collective moral leadership.

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 26, 2025

Israel has succeeded in starvation, and the global moral edifice has collapsed sharply

I step out of my tent every morning, burdened with exhaustion, drenched in sorrow, searching for anything I might be able to buy for my family, a family worn down by hunger. Their bodies are too weak to move. Their faces have turned pale, drained of all signs of life. For two months, not a single grain of flour has entered our tent. My children still go to sleep every night with empty stomachs and unbearable pain.

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.

August 16, 2025

Economic reform and the productivity slowdown

The productivity slowdown is mostly due to slower technological progress. The economic reform agenda should focus on measures to improve competitive pressures for firms to innovate and improve.

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.

July 20, 2025

How deals are trumping port dispute on Australian PM Albanese’s China visit

Source says the two sides have decided to step back from Darwin Port controversy amid trade tensions with US.

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.

September 8, 2025

NATO in Asia-Pacific: Dragging us into a fight we can’t win

Is the future of Australia and New Zealand really as NATO forts, armed to the teeth glaring menacingly at an ever-rising China?

August 26, 2025

John Menadue in conversation with David Marr

In a wide-ranging discussion, P&I editor-in-chief John Menadue discusses a life full of achievement driven by conviction, and nominates seeing off the White Australia policy and establishing P&I as highlights. He is speaking with David Marr on ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.

September 13, 2025

Can we save a 'livable Earth'?

In reshaping the world for prosperity, humanity has undermined the very foundations of progress.

August 18, 2025

The Ukraine war after the Alaska summit

The Trump-Putin encounter in Anchorage has angered some, disappointed others and baffled many more. Yet it has told us much about the state of the war in Ukraine, and the obstacles to the ending of hostilities.

July 24, 2025

National security 'experts' go ga-ga over China

There was a time when Australian writings on China were first-class._

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.

October 5, 2025

Dementia president: Could it be that Trump has truly lost his mind?

Given his behaviour, it could very well be that the president of the United States is going nuts.

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.

August 22, 2025

The US can end the Gaza genocide now

An immediate UN Security Council vote to grant Palestine permanent membership in the UN next month would put an end to Israel’s zealous delusions of permanent control over Palestine. It cannot happen without US backing.

August 11, 2025

Starvation is the constant companion of children in Gaza

Dear Child, I am the nothingness that will kill you. You do not know it, but you will feel the heaviness of your fate seep into your bones and flesh.

August 9, 2025

From Hiroshima to Gaza: Eighty years of failing to contain violence

Note from the editor: For months Refaat Ibrahim has been writing for P&I from the centre of Gaza in unimaginable conditions. Today I add the note he sent with the piece, so you can see the sacrifice he makes every day.

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?”

September 2, 2025

Avoid Bali and the rest of Indonesia

Cashiered former general Prabowo Subianto was elected president of Indonesia last year on a contradictory campaign image.

July 28, 2025

Israeli Knesset hosts conference on plan to 'Occupy Gaza' and 'Relocate Gazans'

“There is a purpose to this war, and it’s a criminal one,” wrote Israeli journalist Gideon Levy in Haaretz this past weekend.

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.

August 19, 2025

Saving Marwan Barghouti is our duty

Seeing video evidence this week of the physical and psychological mistreatment of the great Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti sickened me.

August 13, 2025

Tributes, condemnation pour in over slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza

Israel’s killing of five Al Jazeera staff in Gaza prompts global outrage and calls for accountability.

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.

August 8, 2025

Layered perversion of Australia's defence policy

An amazing thing has happened. Our taxpayer-funded think-tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has commissioned analysis by Robert Macklin which shows that the public debate on Australia’s defence has been biased.

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.

September 15, 2025

Australia needs to diplomatically disengage from our 'dangerous ally'

It seems likely that our prime minister will meet Donald Trump at the United Nations General Assembly later this month.

August 12, 2025

Why Western hegemony is over

The tariff truce between China and the United States is set to end in August. What do you forecast will happen after that? And what will happen to trade relations between China and the US for the rest of US President Donald Trump’s second term?

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.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal