August 18, 2025

Boots on the ground: Why Australia must support a UN peacekeeper mission to Gaza

Living through a genocide is deeply traumatic.

July 19, 2017

IAN MCAULEY. The National Party’s Dämmerung – an awakening for representative democracy?

The National Party represents a declining demographic with values out of step with most Australians. In most democracies it would be sidelined as a fringe group. It holds disproportionate political influence only because we are not facing up to the need to break from our dysfunctional polarised political system.

August 12, 2025

It’s official: A cut in company tax will deliver little benefit at best

Be sure your dodgy modelling will find you out. I’m starting to think economists have become so used to pretending to know more about the economy than they really do, that they don’t notice the way they mislead the rest of us.

August 19, 2025

Bendigo writers' festival fiasco

If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. A code of conduct for a writers’ festival?

July 27, 2025

Kazuo Ishiguro said he won the Nobel Prize for making people cry – 20 years later, Never Let Me Go should make us angry

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was published 20 years ago. Since then, the Japanese-born English writer has been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017 and knighted for services to literature in 2018.

September 30, 2025

Recognition of Palestine: What follows?

If a pathway to translating Palestine into reality remains elusive, and the wounds of today are not healed, a grim future awaits – not only for Palestinians, Israel and Israelis, but for the cohesion of Australian society as well.

September 8, 2025

Yes, freedom of information laws need updating, but not like the government is proposing

The issue of open government and Freedom of Information (FOI) is again in the news, after the federal government proposed major reforms to the system.

September 6, 2025

What’s behind the rioting in Indonesia? And will the much-loathed political elite back down?

For many Indonesians, the violent riots currently wracking Jakarta and other cities across the archipelago are eerily reminiscent of the riots of 1998 that accompanied the fall of former dictator Soeharto and his New Order regime after three decades in power.

August 20, 2025

Productivity roundtable? Ignoring the elephants in the room won’t help. Let’s get them working for us

We are 105th for economic complexity. And without our incredibly productive mining industry we would be even lower down the scale.

August 14, 2025

Open letter to Israeli foreign minister Sa’ar

The great threat to Israel’s survival is not the Arab nations, the Palestinians, or Iran, but the policies of Israel’s extremist government.

July 19, 2025

12 years on, are we not yet tired of cruel policies towards asylum-seekers?

In Australia, 2025, Progressive Patriotism is now, apparently, our political modus operandi and, as Anthony Albanese ambitiously explained, it can be “a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward”.

October 1, 2025

Australia's decolonisation runs aground

When asked last week whether his government was still intending to reach for the goal of an Australian republic Prime Minister Albanese declared that he would not be progressing the cause while he was in office.

September 12, 2025

Australia’s business lobbies seem happy to let the country burn. What will federal Labor do?

It is the writer Oscar Wilde who is credited with the quote: “The cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Although I do have to admit the first time I came across it was in a Doonesbury cartoon in the 1980s.

August 27, 2025

As press freedom groups decry latest 'murder' of journalists by Israel, fury grows over impunity

“Israel’s broadcasted killing of journalists in Gaza continues while the world watches and fails to act firmly on the most horrific attacks the press has ever faced in recent history,” said one press freedom advocate.

August 23, 2025

Trump’s attacks on BRICS could strengthen its cohesion

President Donald Trump, exploiting US geopolitical heft and market power, has ushered in “ a new world order of tariffs”.

August 11, 2025

The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: Lessons for Australia

My new report prepared for Friends of the Earth Australia demonstrates that the development of a nuclear-powered, conventionally-armed nuclear submarine fleet entails multiple public health risks and would inevitably suffer from delays and cost-blowouts.

September 20, 2025

Fewer friends, more time stress: the essential charts from this year’s HILDA survey

Every year, one of Australia’s biggest longitudinal surveys provides a range of insights on how the nation is changing.

September 26, 2025

Lawsuits, cancellations and bullying: Trump is systematically destroying press freedom

US President Donald Trump is well advanced in his systematic campaign to undermine the American media and eviscerate its function of holding him and others in power to account.

August 28, 2025

Carbon bootprints: How war is fuelling climate catastrophe

The military-industrial complex’s vast carbon footprint is deliberately hidden from public view, while we get gaslit into using paper straws.

September 4, 2025

How to stop Israel from starving Gaza

Israel has crossed the clear line into the darkest crimes.

September 2, 2025

The one big reform not discussed at Labor's roundtable

Despite the strong support for tax reform at last month’s economic reform roundtable, perhaps the most important single reform hardly rated a mention: a carbon tax – or, in the economists’ preferred euphemism, “a price on carbon”.

July 17, 2025

An ambitious plan to combat antisemitism or an effective plan to silence Israel's critics?

I watched the 7.30 interview with the special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, with mounting alarm. By the end of the interview, I was afraid for the future of Australia.

July 19, 2017

LESLEY HUGHES. Solving the climate crisis: one city at a time

Although Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, many cities in the US (and in Australia) are taking climate change matters into their own hands, thumbing their collective noses at ideological-driven policy paralysis at the federal level.

November 29, 2018

TERRY FEWTRELL. Seems Pope Francis is with the People

The latest letter from Pope Francis greatly empowers Australia’s Catholics to use their influence and puts heat on the bishops to allow the voices and wisdom of Australian Catholics to be heard seriously.

January 10, 2018

UCANews. Democracy showdown looms in Malaysia

Approaching elections should act as a safety valve in the multi-ethnic nation.

July 26, 2017

FRANK BRENNAN, TIM COSTELLO, ROBERT MANNE and JOHN MENADUE. Stopping Boats and Saving Lives Four Years On ...

How much longer will we continue to punish proven refugees who are our responsibility while they await interminable, uncertain futures in Nauru and Manus Island? Everyone knows that not all the proven refugees will be resettled in the USA even once the USA resumes taking refugees in October 2017. Kevin Rudd first announced the most recent plan for removing unvisaed asylum seekers offshore on 19 July 2013, seven weeks out from the 2013 election. Richard Marles helped with the negotiation of the deal.

July 18, 2017

LAURIE PATTON. NBN: How many more surveys before they get it? We are not impressed!

A raft of surveys have confirmed what everyone knows. We’re increasingly unhappy about the rollout of a technically inferior National Broadband Network.

August 1, 2017

JOHN TULLOH. "Hell on earth" lies just across the Indian Ocean

If you travelled from Western Australia north-west across the Indian Ocean, the first country you would encounter has been described as ‘Hell on Earth’. You will find there civil war, famine, drought, refugees, destruction and a blockade for starters. Now it has a cholera epidemic. No wonder it has been called the worst story in the world which nobody is talking about.

September 18, 2025

This report measures our national well-being across five key areas. Health trends are not improving

In 2023, Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced the government would measure what matters to the well-being of Australians as a complement to the traditional economic measures in the national accounts.

July 24, 2025

Albanese’s China trip shows ‘stiffening of Canberra’s spine’ in face of US pressure

Beijing rolled out the red carpet for the Australian leader this week and the two sides appeared to keep a lid on tensions.

September 10, 2025

Why we'd be mugs to cut the company tax rate

Ask any businessperson if we should cut the rate of our company tax and, almost to a pale and stale male, they’ll unhesitatingly tell you we should.

August 5, 2025

Why every China watcher must be on WeChat

None of this is to glorify WeChat itself – it’s simply the reality of China’s digital ecosystem today.

July 30, 2025

Thai-Cambodia clash and the Thai military’s short leash

The flare-up in fighting between Thailand and Cambodia in the Dangrek Ranges reflects a longstanding disagreement about border demarcation.

October 3, 2025

Is this the beginning of the end for US democracy?

In Portland, in 2025, we hear echoes of the same beginnings of dictatorships everywhere: protesters recast as “terrorists,” and enemies within, and federal troops poised to turn against us.

September 29, 2025

Justice over comfort – Rethinking DEI across borders and battles

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are often defunded, dismissed as divisive, symbolic, performative, or reduced to box-ticking exercises, but in the shadow of the genocide in Gaza, we need to ask ourselves – what is DEI really about?

September 6, 2025

Kathleen Folbigg and the failures of the justice system

Two remarkable women, Kathleen Folbigg and Tracy Chapman were applauded in a room so crowded that only a little standing room was left at the back.

September 25, 2025

UN intervention is essential to stop genocide and establish peace in Gaza

The United Nations General Assembly must activate its “Uniting for Peace” mechanism to bypass the UN Security Council veto and establish an armed interventionary force to establish peace and end the genocide in Gaza.

August 22, 2025

Cancelling the ethnic cleansers: Australia revokes Simcha Rothman’s visa

It is a curious feeling to see a government, let alone any politician, suddenly find their banished backbones and retired principles.

July 29, 2025

How Chinese diaspora voters reshape Australian and US politics

Chinese diaspora communities in Australia and the US both face racism and loyalty suspicions under “China threat” narratives, yet their voting has diverged.

August 4, 2025

China is building the world’s biggest hydropower dam. Why is India worried?

China breaks ground on what Premier Li Qiang has called the “project of the century”, but some fear a water conflict and ecological effects.

October 2, 2025

Trump says climate change is a hoax. Are we in safer hands with the ‘commos’?

When you hear that malevolent old fool Donald Trump tell the United Nations that climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, it’s hard to resist throwing up your arms in despair. If mighty America won’t set a good example, what hope is there for the rest of us?

August 2, 2025

No-one is okay

When you ask me how I am, I will answer with a lie because the truth is too painful to convey.

August 13, 2025

Recognition of the State of Palestine must be combined with principled action to stop Israel’s intensifying genocide in Gaza

The Jewish Council of Australia affirms the Palestinian people’s fundamental right to self-determination – a right that has been systematically denied by the Israeli state.

August 6, 2025

Is the ‘China threat’ real or trumped up?

In recent years, the ‘China threat’ theory has become a prominent theme in Western political discourse.

August 11, 2025

Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable

In June 2025 I wrote about the National Well-being Budget and Measuring What Matters. Since then, a lot has happened that deserves attention, particularly with the government’s planned Productivity Roundtable in August.

August 25, 2025

Forgotten but not gone: The Rohingya crisis in Cox’s Bazar

As we mark the eighth anniversary of the Rohingya genocide on 25 August, we remember the horrific violence that forced more than 700,000 people to flee their homes in Myanmar.

October 1, 2025

Andrew Forrest makes big bet on self-lifting turbines in landmark 'real zero' deal with Envision

Iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest appears to have gone all-in on a radical new “self-lifting” turbine technology that will underpin the development of his first major wind project and underpin his green energy ambitions.

September 20, 2025

How China’s green energy edge puts it in position to shape the future

As China’s lead expands, so will its geopolitical influence through traditional channels of power and the appeal of energy self-sufficiency.

August 15, 2025

Clinton to Trump: How Putin has met, courted and frustrated US presidents

Vladimir Putin has met five US presidents over 25 years. But jazz and fishing have given way to threats and tension. The Alaska summit will be the Russian leader’s 49th meeting with a US counterpart.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal