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Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal
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September 30, 2025

Scarborough collision triggers Beijing’s strategic hardening

On 11 August 2025, Chinese law enforcement and naval vessels reportedly collided during an interception of a Philippine coast guard ship near Scarborough Shoal.

September 4, 2025

Canberra and Gaza

It’s time to stop just talking about the Gaza atrocities. It is time to do something about them.

August 1, 2025

‘Are you joking, mate?’ AI doesn’t get sarcasm in non-American varieties of English

In 2018, my Australian co-worker asked me, “Hey, how are you going?”. My response — “I am taking a bus” — was met with a smirk.

September 12, 2025

Aged care crises continue under Labor

It has been four years since the final report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety was tabled in federal parliament.

July 28, 2025

Gender politics and right-wing politics clash in South Korea

South Korea’s gender divide has become a flashpoint in its democratic evolution. Amid economic stagnation and rising disillusionment, young men increasingly view feminist policies as threats to fairness, fuelling anti-feminist populism. Yet the roots of this divide run deeper — into the Confucian familism embedded in welfare structures, selective workplace norms, and a military culture that reinforces hegemonic masculinity. While women face structural inequalities, young men confront shifting expectations that clash with traditional roles.

August 30, 2025

Israel’s assassination of memory

The razing of Gaza is not a crime only against the Palestinian people but against our cultural and historical heritage. We can’t understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestine and Israel, if we don’t understand the past.

July 15, 2025

Why any strategy to combat antisemitism must also address Islamophobia

Australia’s newly released Plan to Combat Antisemitism has sparked strong debate and rightly so.

October 4, 2025

What do Palestinian Australians think of the Trump peace plan?

Irrespective of what Hamas’ decides, Trump’s peace plan is a bitter pill to swallow. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

September 27, 2025

Free speech and Palestine: Time to push back

The finding in the Federal Court that Antoinette Lattouf’s sacking from the ABC was unlawful is a great win the for the Free Palestine movement in Australia.

August 5, 2025

The US is a very foreign country

The Albanese Government has recently handed over a second tranche of some $800 million Australian tax-payers’ dollars to the United States, with the total now more than a billion dollars. This is part of the most woeful con job ever in the grim history of Australia’s defence procurement record – AUKUS.

September 10, 2025

Xi’s parade tips the diplomatic balance sheet in Asia

Beijing’s rapid military transformation and capacity to ultimately confront the US and its allies in policy and military terms was on full display recently.

August 2, 2017

MUNGO MACCALLUM. Time to take Bill Shorten seriously.

It is time, perhaps past time, to take Bill Shorten seriously.

September 18, 2025

Israel’s failure: From the claim of 'existential threat' to genocide and global isolation

In the history of human wars, outcomes are always measured by the degree to which predetermined objectives are achieved.

July 22, 2025

The war on US science

The US was already having problems with the performance of US academic institutions in scientific areas when Donald Trump arrived with the mission to nobble universities.

August 25, 2025

The smart home energy burden: How AI is driving up power bills globally

Artificial intelligence is no longer just a buzzword – it’s part of our daily lives.

August 23, 2025

The BBC helped kill Anas Al-Sharif

The media are legitimising Israel’s murder of journalists – and they are doing it because they are racist propagandists for a system of Western colonial control in the Middle East.

September 24, 2025

‘Release the tapes’: Lawmakers demand answers over alleged US$50,000 bribe of Trump border czar Tom Homan

“Seriously though, has anyone ever been handed US$50,000 cash in a paper bag for something legit?”

October 2, 2025

The Apocalypse and the Antichrist

For US multi-billionaire Peter Thiel, 23 September must have been a rather disappointing day.

August 14, 2025

China’s consumption weighed down by weak expectations

China’s economy registered a respectable GDP growth rate of 5.3% in the first half of 2025.

September 8, 2025

New NAPLAN results demand better deal for public schools

The latest NAPLAN results reveal the size of the challenges facing Australia’s school system.

September 13, 2025

SA’s algal bloom and the big, beautiful, bureaucratic ballet

The café owner at Edithburgh gave me a wintry smile. We were on Yorke Peninsula to play a concert as part of the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Walk from Coobowie to Edithburgh.

August 19, 2025

First they came for the Palestinians

A Michael Leunig cartoon from 2012, that holds its relevance.

August 27, 2025

Don't mention the war's end

Only the very alert readers of Australian media have discovered this is the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and more importantly, the defeat of fascism. There is the odd whisper, a low key event in Townsville, a fleeting acknowledgement and little else.

July 29, 2025

Activists read out names of 17,000 Palestinian children killed by Israel in Gaza

The names of the 17,000 Palestinian children who have been killed in Gaza by Israel over the past 22 months were read aloud outside Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday.

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 22, 2025

The question that wasn't asked

Australian support for the US alliance is progressively evaporating. The longer Trump remains in the White House the greater the separation grows.

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.

October 3, 2025

Trump-Netanyahu plan: Reproducing occupation under the name of 'peace'

What was recently proposed by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under the title “peace deals” is nothing but a rearrangement of the cards of power in the region, far from addressing the core of the Palestinian issue: justice.

September 15, 2025

US State Dept 'reviewing' foreigner comment on Kirk killing

“The US Government, seeking to punish those who make light of the incident, is a complete betrayal of the First Amendment and spits in the face of the principle of free speech and debate,” said one lawyer.

September 16, 2025

What will happen if/when the AI bubble bursts

Is the AI boom heading towards a bust – just like many other boom and bust cycles of the past?

August 20, 2025

Australia has 120 health workforce policies. But with no national plan, we’re missing the big picture

Australia’s health workforce is under pressure.  Wait times are growing.  Burnout is rising. Yet the country is awash in policy – just not the kind that solves these problems at the root.

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?

August 29, 2025

Absent – The 3D essentials: Discipline, direction and determination

Why did the Jakarta student riots of 1998 succeed in ousting President Soeharto while this week’s public displays of outrage seem doomed to fail?

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.

September 11, 2025

Climate change risk to our coastal cities

Confronting the nation’s coastal urban cities as it approaches 2055, 30 years on, will be both higher sea levels and air and water temperatures.

August 21, 2025

Know thy neighbour – he's getting gun-happy

What does Australia’s legacy media think you want to know about Indonesia?

September 1, 2025

A Rohingya mother’s ordeal of rape, loss and survival

In recent times, we have heard many stories of hardship and displacement among the Rohingya people of Arakan State.

January 18, 2018

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

Despite the evidence of the last few decades that ‘trickle-down’ economics doesn’t 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 2, 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 14, 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 25, 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 Australia’s 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 29, 2025

Taking a win from Alaska

On 15 August, US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in Alaska, the first head-of-state meeting between the two countries since the Ukraine War began.

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.”

September 23, 2025

Royal banquets, political scripts and the Gaza tragedy

When King Charles III hosted President Donald Trump at a state dinner, the evening was, at least formally, meant to celebrate the bond between two allies.

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