July 25, 2025

As US warms up to Pakistan, India must refashion diplomacy

India’s multi-alignment strategy has been severely tested as it finds little support from the West.

July 19, 2025

Collateral damage? Focus on the principle, not the fallout

Among his many defects, Donald Trump is a vengeful obsessive. Which is why poor Indonesians (that’s about 40 million of the 285 million rice-eaters) could soon be paying more for their essential starches.

July 18, 2025

A memo to Albo on nuclear weapons

Sent by People for Nuclear Disarmament and the Human Survival Project To Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, the Parliamentary Committees on Foreign Affairs and Defence and DFAT.

August 9, 2025

Digital screen use by infants and toddlers risks long-term health and education outcomes

Greater public health awareness of the harms of digital screen use is needed to reclaim parents as their first and irreplaceable teacher.

August 16, 2025

Prefab housing evolution: Higher quality, greater affordability, broader acceptance

A new kind of residential landscape is taking shape, not with the chaotic clang of construction, but with the rhythm and precision of a symphony – each piece arriving on time, perfectly in tune and ready to play its part.

July 24, 2025

Cutting HECS debt is the least Albanese could do for young Australians. He should do more

It may seem an age since the federal election, but the new parliament has just convened for the first time. Anthony Albanese will be giving top priority to enacting his election commitments – “an honest politician? Really?” – and starting with his promise to cut uni graduates’ HECS debt by 20 per cent.

August 6, 2025

Economists want a carbon price comeback – but does Australia have the political courage?

Bold economic ideas are flowing ahead of this month’s roundtable convened by the Albanese Government, aimed at boosting Australia’s productivity and economy, and repairing the budget. Among the biggest ideas to emerge is: should Australia resurrect its carbon price?

July 30, 2025

No Indonesian high-speed rail wizardry for Oz

When PM Anthony Albanese was flying home after six days in Beijing, the Great Wall and a panda zoo, he told a newspaper that “Australia could learn from China’s fast-rail network". The People’s Republic already has _more than_ 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail connecting 500 cities. We have zilch.

January 17, 2018

MICHAEL KEATING. Trickle-Down Economics and a Company Tax Cut

Despite the evidence of the last few decades that trickle-down economics doesnt work, big business and its apologists in the media are calling for a company tax cut to stimulate investment. The reality, however, is that increased investment is principally in response to increasing aggregate demand. The required increase in aggregate demand in turn requires less inequality and faster wage growth, not bigger business subsidies.

August 1, 2017

ANDREW LEIGH. Why Scott Morrison isn't entitled to his own facts on inequality in Australia

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts, the great American professor-turned-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to enjoy saying to opponents.

June 13, 2013

The personal, public and social costs of mistakes in health. John Menadue

After examining more than 14,000 hospital admissions in NSW and SA, the national cost of harm from avoidable adverse events (mistakes) in our hospitals was estimated at just over$2 b pa in 1995/96. This study was undertaken by the Task Force on Quality of Australian Health Care which reported to Health Minister Carmen Lawrence. 51% of all mistakes were estimated to be avoidable and would represent nearly 500,000 preventable hospital bed days per year. The task force commented that these mistakes are a problem that overshadows all others in the health sector

July 24, 2017

GREG LOCKHART. What were we fighting for at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front? (Part 2 of 5)

Part 2. Empire against Asia

The imperial nature of Australias involvement in the Great War was distinctively Australian and, it should be said, a sign of the doubt white settler society had about its survival as a remote outpost of the British Empire in Austral-Asia.

August 9, 2025

Australia leads the world on rooftop solar, now it needs to catch up with how to manage it

It is an irony of no small significance that Australia, while leading the world in per capita uptake of rooftop solar, finds itself in 2025 well behind the pace on how best to manage this huge and valuable resource as part of a modern, increasingly renewables-powered grid.

August 4, 2025

A fairer tax and welfare system for Australia 2025 with no-one left behind? Only if we act now

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s re-election speech brought a promise many of us hold close to our hearts: “together we are turning the corner, and together we will make our way forward with no-one held back and no-one left behind.”

August 13, 2025

The Great Barrier Reef is the litmus test for the forthcoming 2035 emissions reduction target

Coral reefs are highly vulnerable to climate change. That’s why, for years, conservationists have advocated that Australia’s climate policy be tied to the future of the Great Barrier Reef.

July 11, 2025

What are the chances for peace in Ukraine right now?

What makes it so difficult to find a solution? Is Russia a threat to Europe? Five questions for Eurasia expert Anatol Lieven.

February 7, 2018

IAN VERRENDER. Why global markets are in free-fall

It was always going to be a tough ask. How to remove all that stimulus, all those trillions of freshly minted dollars in emergency money from an economy, without causing conniptions on financial markets?

August 2, 2025

Australian media persists with a misguided and tragically ineffectual strategy – the way to prevent suicide is not to talk about it

Statistics are cold-hearted methods to gauge the “success” of suicide prevention strategies, yet they are the only tool available to measure the number of Australians who take their lives each year.

August 6, 2025

Syria’s minorities under siege

The drive by Syria’s Sunni Islamist rulers to stamp their authority over religious and ethnic minorities has hit a stumbling block in the southern province of Suweida.

July 22, 2025

Out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. Let me meet you there (Part 2)

Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field.

Let me meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass,

The world is too full to talk about. (Rumi)

August 12, 2025

Ukraine must be included in Trump-Putin peace talks, says Sanders

The senator said the negotiations could be “a positive step forward” after three-and-a-half years of war.

July 21, 2025

Orientalism and casus belli in the Middle East

There can surely have been few times in recent history when Edward Said’s seminal notion of Orientalism has had more tragic and pointed immediacy and relevance than now.

July 28, 2025

Francesca Albanese’s bravery merits the Nobel prize

Richard Falk, international law scholar and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Since 1967, talks about the July 2025 U.S. sanctions imposed on current Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Well known for her criticism of Israel’s Gaza offensive and her classification of genocide which now includes wilful mass starvation, Albanese has become the most embattled Special Rapporteur to date. Falk himself was no stranger to such pressures during his own 2008-2014 tenure.

August 7, 2025

The end of jobs?

By the 2040s, half to three-quarters of human society may be out of work, replaced by AI and sleepless robots.

July 26, 2025

Lies, damn lies and Zionist lobby pronouncements

Reaction to the release and the contents of the Segal report on antisemitism in Australia is at the level of existential damage to social cohesion in Australia.

August 5, 2025

Is the Northern Territory Government knowingly endangering First Nations children and young people?

It should be impossible to ignore heartbreaking evidence of the effects of structural racism on Aboriginal children and young people, particularly those caught in a fully discredited punitive system in the NT that now includes “torture” plus risks of death as well as trauma.

August 8, 2025

Call for national action to prevent 'torture' or death of incarcerated First Nations children

Paediatricians in the Northern Territory see the dire effects of entrenched structural racism on Aboriginal children on a daily basis.

August 16, 2025

Where is the outrage? Israel's systematic mass assassination of journalists

The killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif is shocking but that it is a culmination of planned mass assassination of journalists by the Israeli Government is an outrage.

July 29, 2025

The new Commonwealth office of Multicultural Affairs unveiled

A new Commonwealth Office of Multicultural Affairs has been established within the Department of Home Affairs.

July 25, 2025

The Australia Group at 40

By the end of World War 1, more than a million people had become victims of chemical warfare and more than 100,000 of these casualties died shortly after their exposure to CW agents.

July 30, 2025

The essential reader on Donald Trump

To learn the whole dreadful story of Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, one could not do better than to read Thom Hartmann’s forthcoming book, “The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink”.

July 23, 2025

Effective philanthropy: A model partnership

Effective philanthropy is hard to achieve. It’s difficult to access money for a worthy cause but also difficult to give money away effectively with impact.

July 18, 2025

Even Ken Henry’s best ideas can’t fix a system addicted to growth

“Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.” – Edward Abbey

July 15, 2025

Karmel, Gonski and the private school ascendancy

The 1973 Karmel report and the 2011 Gonski report helped drive Australia’s internationally exceptional private school ascendency.

July 24, 2025

The woman everyone loves to hate: Erin Patterson and the danger of certainty

Like Lindy Chamberlain before her, Erin Patterson has become the woman everyone loves to hate.

August 14, 2025

Recognition of Palestine: UN challenges

During the past weeks, media coverage of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, including the creation of widespread famine and instances of starvation, has motivated a majority of Western countries to support a permanent end to the war in Gaza, potentially through a UNGA-endorsed Palestine/Israeli two-state solution.

August 1, 2025

Appeal to Parliamentarians: Resist Israel/US thuggery, be advocates for peace

As though infected by a chronic illness, news of unending death and destruction in Gaza and on the West Bank leaves millions feeling frustrated, angry, despairing and powerless.

July 26, 2017

MICHAEL THORN. The cricket pay dispute and how broadcast deals drive unhealthy product marketing

After the series of serious drug and alcohol incidents involving rugby league players and officials in May, some quite reasonably made the argument that sports that so closely embrace alcohol brands can hardly be surprised when the behaviour of players clothed in these brands act badly. This was cited in support of the argument that alcohol and sport are not a good mix.

August 18, 2025

Labour market data: Complex, imperfect and politically convenient

Labour market data is politically potent, technically complex and often imperfect. Recent US events are a reminder that Australia’s own systems deserve closer scrutiny.

July 14, 2025

APU Media Release: Macquarie University announces plans to axe Sociology

Macquarie University announces plans to axe Sociology and cut jobs and courses in other humanities and social science disciplines.

July 19, 2025

Antisemitism, free speech and a dangerous redefinition: How one envoy is rewriting the rules

The recent synagogue fire in Melbourne is being used as a blueprint for sweeping changes to Australian law.

August 15, 2025

As deadline looms, advocates call plastics treaty draft 'nothing short of a betrayal'

“The process has been completely captured by swarms of fossil fuel lobbyists and shamefully weaponised by low-ambition countries,” said the chief executive of the Environmental Justice Foundation.

August 11, 2025

Reflections: public education past, present and future

Readers of Pearls and Irritations may be aware of the Public Education Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation which turns donations into life-changing scholarships for students and others in around 200 NSW schools.

July 16, 2025

Jillian Segal 'won’t dictate' to husband over $50,000 to Advance

The special envoy seeking to dictate the nation’s speech has suggested it was her husband who was responsible for $50,000 given to far-right group Advance — and that she won’t “dictate” his actions.

July 31, 2025

The productivity paradox

A century ago, industrialists measured economic virility by tonnes of coal hewn per shift. Today, Canberra’s spreadsheets obsess over “GDP per hour worked”.

July 12, 2025

Gaza: There comes a time when silence is betrayal

Last week I spent a day fasting, joining medical colleagues and other healthcare workers in a rolling hunger strike to protest what is happening in Gaza. Why are we doing this?

August 1, 2017

Minimising existential threats of our own making

Events that could permanently and drastically curtail humanity’s potential or even cause human extinction are often referred to as existential threats. A moderate sized asteroid hitting our planet is a prime example. It could wipe us all out in a flash, as apparently happened to 75% of the species on earth at the time a 10 Km diameter asteroid hit the Earth about 65 million years ago.

July 10, 2017

MUNGO MacCALLUM. 'The gentleman you describe.'

We can at least talk about it without pretending it isn’t really there.

August 6, 2017

CHARLES LIVINGSTONE. Pokies, sport and racing harm 41% of monthly gamblers: survey

For the first time, the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey has turned its attention to gambling, revealing that around 1.4 million Australians are directly harmed by the activity.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal