August 14, 2025

Dates are 'luxury' – and other ways Israel hinders aid trucks from reaching starving Gazans

From restricting truck crossings to preventing proper cargo securing, Israel has imposed layers of bureaucratic and physical obstacles that hinder every stage of delivering food and medical supplies to Gaza.

August 16, 2025

'Blatantly lying': Crime is falling in every single city Trump threatened with federal police takeover

Many Americans are persuaded by persistent claims that crime is rising, even when they are not. Critics say the media’s rampant coverage of violent crime has helped to warp their perceptions.

September 22, 2025

Message from the editor

I am in China for P&I this week, with a group of Australian journalists on a visit sponsored by the Chinese Government and will be very keen to share my impressions when I return.

May 22, 2025

Australia and China can power up Southeast Asia’s green energy transition

Australia and China share key interests in Southeast Asia in the context of a global green transition and great power rivalry.

September 11, 2025

Israel leaps over red lines in attack on Qatari capital Doha

The attack on Hamas leaders in the Qatari capital Doha shows Israel will keep escalating if global powers don’t stop it.

August 27, 2025

Redefining Hamas, pleading for a peace force

In conflicts, unless perception of opponents is re-defined, claims as to who is worthy, who unworthy are repeated and resolution remains elusive.

July 12, 2025

The Texas flood, Australia and the psychology of evacuation

The Texas flood on the weekend of 4 July has produced a shocking toll – probably well over 200 people dead, including many children.

April 7, 2025

Institutionalisation: Vice-chancellors’ cowardly collusion with antisemitism lobby

In response to a Senate inquiry into supposed antisemitism on Australian university campuses, the Group of Eight (Go8) vice-chancellors representing the Australian National University, Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, UWA, UNSW, Queensland and Adelaide have produced a definition of antisemitism which is to be enforced on all their respective students and staff.

August 1, 2025

Our media refuse to call out genocide in Gaza

Through its love affair with Israel and intimidated by the Zionist lobby, our legacy media has enabled the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s apartheid regime and the illegal occupation of Palestinian land over the past century.

July 25, 2025

'New era of climate accountability': ICJ says nations have legal duty to combat planetary crisis

“For the first time, it feels like justice is not just a dream but a direction,” said Flora Vano, an activist from Vanuatu.

June 13, 2025

Review: Perfect Victims

Mohammed El-Kurd is a poet, writer, journalist and organiser from Jerusalem in occupied Palestine.

August 29, 2025

Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our ‘partners’

Just when you think that the Australian Government cannot sink any lower, the prime minister still manages to surprise!_

August 8, 2025

The Segal report and the universities

The Segal report presented to Prime Minister Albanese on Thursday, 10 July, represents an unprecedented challenge to Australia’s 39 public universities – to their autonomy, their independence and to their reputation both here and internationally.

July 29, 2025

Mass Palestinian starvation used as a weapon of war – Bob Carr

Former Foreign Minister and NSW Premier Bob Carr has compared the situation in Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto, and urged the Government to move with the French on Palestinian statehood. He made his comments in an interview with ABC Radio National Breakfast host Sally Sara.

June 18, 2025

Social media takes over as main source of news as trust falls

A major global survey reveals that social media has overtaken news sites as Australians’ main source of news amid falling trust in news, growing concern over misinformation, and rising news avoidance.

June 8, 2025

Grounds for optimism over bilateral ties with China

As living in another country shows, mutual understanding is built on respect and openness.

May 15, 2025

An open letter to the Australian PM from a child of Holocaust survivors

Dear Anthony Albanese,

I am a child of Holocaust survivors. More than 95% of my extended family perished during World War II in Nazi extermination camps while others were killed by mobile death squads or through starvation in a number of ghettoes.

April 14, 2025

America's trade revolution: From architect to antagonist

Donald Trump called it liberation day, the day he chose to announce tariffs on most countries around the world. But there will be no liveration for Americans who will end up paying grossly inflated prices for goods from abroad.

April 10, 2025

How Australian education was captured by arms dealers

Australian universities, technical institutes and schools are becoming militarised. The power of defence industry money combined with government policy and public underfunding of education have created an avalanche of defence funding and profound influence over our education system and the people who emerge from it.

August 7, 2025

Open letter to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese MP from Australian former diplomats

As pressure mounts on the Australian Government over Palestine, a group of highly respected Australians, who have represented our nation overseas, have gone straight to the top with a letter to the prime minister.

July 26, 2025

Menadue on the dulling of the Australian conscience

Speaking with the Victorian Branch of Australian Fabians, P&I publisher, founder and editor-in-chief, John Menadue, reflects on the his life and work, the state of national leadership and public institutions including a debased mainstream media.

September 13, 2025

‘No safe place left’ as Israel moves to ethnically cleanse nearly 1m Gazans

“This is the latest chapter in the genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza and part of a broader campaign of ethnic cleansing engulfing the entire Gaza Strip,” said Oxfam International.

August 23, 2025

Time to get real on taxing cigarettes and restricting vapes

Australia’s cigarettes are now the most expensive in the world. Excise has been increased cumulatively by over 340% in the past 20 years, clearly helping to depress consumption for many years.

July 13, 2025

As Trump flip-flops on tariffs, what’s the point of negotiating at all?

Are the tariffs a reality show aimed at Americans, a way to gain the upper hand on China, or just a distraction from sector-specific duties?

June 20, 2025

Patrick Lawrence: World’s most dangerous man and his enabler

Netanyahu has craved this war with Iran for decades, always justifying his psychotic lust by way of endless lies and an apparently bottomless paranoia.

July 15, 2025

NYT report says Netanyahu prolonged war on Gaza to stay in power

“He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing,” reports The New York Times.

August 20, 2025

Universities, free speech and the High Court

Greg Barns looks at the legal implications for universities, who last year adopted an IHRA-aligned definition of antisemitism, in wake of a large scale boycott of the Bendigo Writers Festival.

September 7, 2025

Greta Thunberg 'disgusted' by global silence on Gaza genocide

“I am ashamed as a human being,” said the Swedish human rights and climate activist.

August 4, 2025

Message from the editor

I spent some time in Parliament House last week and it was a delight to see the increased diversity of elected members.

July 20, 2025

An open letter from the presidents of Gaza universities

Our campuses may have been razed, but our universities continue to exist.

May 1, 2025

The fall of Saigon: From triumph to Trump (Part 3)

On 30 April 1975, Saigon fell, Vietnam rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all, but there is a great deal to celebrate.

April 30, 2025

Whither national urban policy?

Urban policy in Australia, despite our historically high level of urbanisation, has made only on-off appearances at the federal level of government.

July 4, 2025

What are police allowed to do at protests and who keeps them in check?

Earlier this week, former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas was hospitalised with serious injuries after being arrested at a protest in Sydney.

April 26, 2025

If Einstein spoke today, he would be accused of antisemitism

In 1948, as the foundations of the Israeli state were being laid upon the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, condemning the growing Zionist militancy within the settler Jewish community.

September 4, 2025

Global power shift on show at China summit

The sight of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi embracing Russian President Vladimir Putin, before the two walked over hand in hand to greet Chinese President Xi Jinping, with the three leaders then sharing a conversation marked by smiles, laughter and general bonhomie, will be one haunting many Western leaders.

June 19, 2025

Goodbye to all that? Rethinking Australia’s alliance with Trump’s America

Even the most ardent supporters of the alliance with the United States — the notional foundation of Australian security for more than 70 years — must be having some misgivings about the second coming of Donald Trump.

May 14, 2025

An open letter to The Greens

On election night, I sat glued to the TV, hanging on Antony Green’s every word. All I wanted was the defeat of the Liberals and huge gains for the Greens.

October 4, 2025

Bernie and AOC explain how Trump and GOP are about to double insurance premiums for millions of Americans

“This messaging is approximately 142 times better,” said one political observer, “than Democrats are getting from leadership.”

July 5, 2025

World Bank warns that changes are coming in the global economy

The World Bank’s just released flagship report Global Economic Prospects sounds a warning for the global economy, which is projected to slow dangerously through the next few years, while also showing substantial changes.

October 2, 2025

Sidoti and Saul on what we can and must do to stop the killing

Appearing yesterday at Canberra’s National Press Club, Chris Sidoti and Ben Saul laid out the things Australia can and must do to play our proper part to end the genocide. In coming days we will run the text of both speeches, and the questions that followed. For now it is well worth your time to watch two genuine leaders.

August 25, 2025

Message from the editor

Many of you would have heard P&I publisher, founder and editor-in-chief John Menadue in conversation with David Marr on ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live last Wednesday evening. If not you can catch it any time. We will publish a transcript.

May 3, 2025

Being a good international citizen in a Trumpian world

We live in troubling times, globally and regionally, with not the least of our troubles being the current occupant of the White House.

September 2, 2025

Re-engineering consciousness in Gaza: How the occupation is turning a structured, educated society into a fragmented and dehumanised one

Before the genocide unfolding in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian society was among the most educated and disciplined in the Arab world.

June 30, 2025

South Korea’s democracy in the shadow of the far-right

On 4 April 2025, South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously ruled to remove the impeached president Yoon Suk-yeol, claiming he “violated the constitutional order and posed a serious threat to the Democratic Republic”.

May 27, 2025

A defining moment for the future of Palestine

A United Nations conference in New York between 17 and 20 June will be a defining moment for the future of Palestinian statehood and the endlessly debated, but never resolved, policy known as the two-state solution.

May 10, 2025

The Racial Discrimination Act at 50

The passage 50 years ago of the Racial Discrimination Act, Australia’s first substantial piece of human rights legislation, laid the basis for the recognition of native title in the common law in the 1990s.

September 17, 2025

Vale Pat Power, a true minister

The Australian Catholic Church lost one of its genuine leaders on Monday morning with the death of 83-year-old Bishop Patrick Power, retired Auxiliary-Bishop of Canberra Goulburn.

August 11, 2025

Message from the editor

It has been difficult to focus on much other than the terrible events in Palestine in recent weeks. It is beyond comprehension that the Israeli Government could have made the war even worse, but with the announcement that it will attempt full occupation of Gaza it has done just that.

July 28, 2025

Message from the Editor

This week the news from Gaza has been so gut-wrenchingly awful that it is tempting to turn away. To stop reading. To stop looking.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal