February 25, 2024

The pretense of justice meted out to Assange by the Rules Based Order has come undone

The approval of Julian Assange’s extradition is not only morally wrong, it appears to be wrong in law, and serious questions should be asked of the UK Home Secretary, as well as the Australian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and the former incumbents of those positions.

March 4, 2015

Graham Freudenberg. Gough Whitlam Commemorative Oration.

You will see below what I think is a remarkable speech by Graham Freudenberg about Gough Whitlam’s contemporary relevance. This oration is much longer than I normally post on this blog, but it is an outstanding oration which I am sure you will enjoy. The Whitlam Institute will also be publicising this oration. John Menadue

THE WHITLAM INSTITUTE

GOUGH WHITLAM COMMEMORATIVE ORATION

“Contemporary Relevance, comrade”:

Gough Whitlam in the 21st century

July 24, 2013

Galahs and princes. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

What was that about Australia and the Asian Century? The umbilical cords still tie us to the past. John Menadue

From Walter Hamilton:

I had a choice today on the ABC Online News website of reading a story about a galah plague in a Queensland outback town or viewing the ‘first pictures’ (breathless pause) of a certain baby born in London the other night. I chose the galahs. Earlier in the day, sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery, I kept my head down and read my Kindle book as Channel Seven’s breakfast show replayed a clip of London crowd noise at least three times. Shamefully, the television station ignored the galahs – though no less melodious and far more relevant to an Australian audience.

January 14, 2016

Dennis Hemphill. Essendon Football Club

Their club failed them, but Essendon players can’t excape blame for doping ban.

Fingers are pointing again at the Essendon Football Club for its failures in the long-running supplements fiasco. This follows the Court of Arbitration for Sport’s (CAS) decision to ban 34 past and present players for one year for contravening the World Anti-Doping Code.

A club’s coaches and other officials are supposed to have a duty of care to ensure a safe working environment and practices that are compliant with the anti-doping code. But the club’s failings in this area have already been dealt with. The AFL penalised Essendon heavily in 2013 for health and safety shortcomings that were judged to bring the game into disrepute.

September 28, 2014

John Tulloh. Australia could fight another far away war in a better way.

It is sobering to consider that the 21st century is only 15 years old and a geographically isolated and peaceful country like Australia has already participated in two major conflicts - Afghanistan and Iraq - and fought skirmishes in a lesser one, the birth of Timor Leste. Now we are preparing to join another one far away in Iraq and perhaps even extend that to Syria.

It is just as sobering to consider a number of other facts:

September 25, 2014

Walter Hamilton. A paranoid state?

The same question might be asked of many places on earth in these security-conscious times. On this occasion, however, the subject is Japan: a state several times removed, one would have thought, from legitimate concerns about an imminent threat from an alien creed enforced by a ruthless blood-cult. (Enough of that; you only have turn on commercial radio to know what I mean.)

Japanese paranoia comes to mind for several reasons. I could hardly believe my eyes when watching the main evening current affairs program on NHK (the national broadcaster) the other night. During a story on last week’s International Whaling Commission meeting, a graphic appeared giving the reason why New Zealand had brought a motion to impose stricter conditions on “scientific whaling”. The purpose, said NHK, was to “cause Japan international embarrassment.” It’s believed the program, News Center-9, is closely monitored by NHK’s conservative president––a man who on taking up his job stated that it was not the business of a public broadcaster to contradict the government of the day––and, under pressure from above, nervous editors can go to absurd lengths to toe the line. By the way, I can report that whale meat has just been added to the menu at the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s headquarters in Tokyo. If that is not a snub to the International Court of Justice, which this year ruled against Japan’s whaling program, I don’t know what is.

March 31, 2014

John Menadue. Pity our diplomats.

It is not often that our diplomats in foreign posts receive or need our sympathy in the work they do. But just think of their present plight in defending the Australian Government’s behaviour in foreign policy. What we are seeing across so many countries is alarming. With many key countries, we are skating on very thin ice – and the ice will probably crack fairly soon.

Just consider what is happening.

April 14, 2013

Privatisation on the wane. John Menadue

From the days of Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and John Howard, the assumption has been that the private sector will grow in relation to the public sector because it is more efficient and contributes more to the public good. The political correctness of the political Right assumed that privatisation would carry all before it.

But not any more. The market failures of many key players in the private sector are clear. It is not just Wall Street, but our own local giants, BHP, Rio Tinto and others, who have lost tens of billions of dollars in shareholders’ funds in recent years. There has been clear company overstretch and management failures.

May 8, 2015

Joel Windle. School choice: parents follow the money.

If private schools offer little academic value over public schools, why do 35% of Australian parents continue to choose to pay the hefty fees rather than sending their child to the local state school?

Parents have a high regard for public schools

School choice is a dilemma for a minority of parents. My research with parents in Melbourne suggests that the preference for public schooling is strong even amongst those who end up sending their children to a private school.

November 30, 2015

Sebastian Rosenberg. Mental health changes.

Announcing the federal government’s response to the National Mental Health Commission’s review of mental health services today, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull emphasised the concept of patient choice.

The commission’s review was the latest in a long line of reports showing that for many Australians needing mental health care, their current choice is between getting no care or getting poor care.

The reforms announced today have the potential to change this appalling situation. But ultimately they should be judged on the outcomes they achieve for patients.

August 2, 2016

CAMERON DOUGLAS. The military coup and the Constitution in Thailand.

Thais will vote in a referendum on Sunday (August 7) to approve, or reject, a new constitution. This will be the post-coup government’s second attempt to implement a new national charter.

The constitution would usher in a form of parliamentary government but the military would retain the power of veto: the system could not be regarded as democratic as the word is understood elsewhere.

For Thais voting on Sunday, the effective choice is between more military rule and more military rule.

December 8, 2014

John Menadue. Tony Abbott did not stop the boats.

The data just does not support the never-ending claims by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison that they stopped the boats. The under-resourced and uncritical media accepts the Coalition’s line.

I will come to the recent data, but first the evidence is clear that action by the Coalition along with the Greens in the Senate to prevent amendments to the Migration Act greatly assisted people-smugglers and boat arrivals from 2011 onwards.

August 2, 2016

WALTER HAMILTON. Tokyo’s First Female Governor, and the disturbing state of Japanese politics.

The victory of 64-year-old Yuriko Koike in last weekend’s Tokyo gubernatorial election tells us a lot about the disturbing state of Japanese politics.

Hailing from the right wing of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Koike holds views on constitutional change, school textbook revision and other contentious issues that line up with those of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. How, then, did she manage to present herself to the electorate as a maverick, non-mainstream candidate and, despite claiming to be ‘fighting alone’, run the slickest campaign of all?

Seeking an answer, we need to recap events of recent years.

November 30, 2014

Michael Kelly SJ. Phillip Hughes: reality bites

Seeing Australia from outside the island continent offers some very strange views from time to time. The outpouring of grief over the tragic accident that took the talented life of cricketer Phillip Hughes went global within a very short time.

The home of cricket – England – was profuse in the time devoted to this sad event. While he was in hospital, Phillip Hughes was part of hourly bulletins on the BBC. On the day Hughes was declared dead, the BBC gave a full quarter hour of coverage from England and Australia involving players, administrators, medical doctors, sports physicians and engineers who design helmets. And all in prime time.

January 2, 2019

PETER SAINSBURY. Labor’s environmental policies: will the action match the rhetoric?

The ALP has released details of the environmental policies they will introduce if elected during 2019. Central to these are a new Australian Environment Act and a new Federal Environmental Protection Agency. Labor’s challenge will be to provide national leadership to tackle the wide range of environmental threats to human health and survival, while giving businesses the policy certainty they need but not the free-passes some want.

February 10, 2015

Chris Bonnor. School funding and achievement: following the money trail

The recurrent expenditure on school education in Australia is over 44 billion dollars, around 36 billion of this provided by governments. These are considerable sums, more often than not expressed as a cost rather than an investment – especially when it doesn’t always seem to deliver noticeable improvements in student results.

But a closer look at where the money goes and what it delivers reveals many surprises. Schools are expensive places, some far more than others. But in recent years the biggest funding increases have gone to the most advantaged schools - and there is scant evidence of any difference in student results.

October 20, 2016

TONY KEVIN. Clinton-Putin-Trump: foreign policy dimensions of the final debate.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton trumped her contender on domestic economic and social policy issues, migration, and proper respect for women. She has neutralised the personal emails and Clinton Foundation questions. Barring the unforeseeable, she will cruise to victory next month.

On foreign policy, her words and what she left unsaid left many important questions: and Trump more often found himself on the right side of the foreign policy argument, for those who follow these things. Such debates proceed according to a free flow of their own and important issues easily get submerged and diverted as the caravan rapidly moves on. Here are my notes for what they are worth.

April 20, 2014

Kieran Tapsell. The war on drugs.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El Espectador, Colombia, 20 December 2013, http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/esta-babilonia-nuestra-columna-465199

Summary: The so called “War on Drugs” is an American invention from the time of Nixon. It has been a spectacular and costly failure. But the Puritans in the Americas do not want to even discuss the subject.

A year and a half ago, President Santos of Colombia said to Obama that the 40 year war on drugs had failed, and that perhaps it was time to look for alternatives.

April 20, 2014

John Menadue. The media, our region and the PM's visit.

The Prime Minister’s visit to Japan, the Republic of Korea and China, highlighted for me the problems of media reporting and understanding our region.

I have posted blogs on our media. See April 17, 2013, ‘Media failure: the tale of two bombings in two cities’; May 17, 2013, ‘Truth, trust and the media’ and January 31, 2014, ‘Murdoch and Abbott versus the ABC’. I posted a blog on April 10 this year, specifically on Tony Abbott’s visit to Japan and the political shortcomings of Free Trade Agreements which usually have more hype than substance. That continues to be the case.

January 27, 2024

Ignore Israel’s spin: ICJ HAS ordered a ceasefire – and much more than a ceasefire

Desperate damage control by genocidal regime can’t hide the facts – the ICJ has gone well beyond a mere ceasefire: Israel has been ordered to protect Palestinians in Gaza, not just stop shooting at them.

October 9, 2015

Bob Kinnaird. 750,000 temporary residents with work rights.

The recent Fairfax/ABC Four Corners reports exposing widespread exploitation and wage abuse of overseas students and other visa workers in 7-11 stores, horticulture and other sectors have been justly applauded as outstanding examples of investigative journalism.

Their impact has been immediate, forcing 7-11 to set up an independent investigation panel chaired by Alan Fels and 7-11 chairman Mr Russ Withers to resign.

The latest Fairfax report was titled ‘The Precariat’ (SMH, 3 October 2015). The term combines ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’ and was coined by British economist Guy Standing. It means broadly workers reliant on transitory and insecure work, though not necessarily low-skill.

September 8, 2015

Michael Kelly SJ. The challenge of people movements.

Great as the gesture of Pope Francis is to mobilize parishes in Europe to accommodate the influx of tens of thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East (they call them migrants), the problem is more complex than offering immediate support to needy people. The Pope knows that. He’s said so many times.

The Pope is drawing a line in the sand. He will be called naïve and “grandstanding". In a world where 60 million of the 7.3 billion humans on the planet are displaced, the cliché about protecting borders isn’t adequate to the challenge that confronts humanity now.

February 22, 2016

Jenny Hocking. ‘The Governor-General, the Palace and the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam: The Mysterious Case of “the Palace Letters”’

The dismissal of the Whitlam government by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was marked by secrecy and collusion on a scale that has only recently been uncovered. Its history has been no different. From the outset we were treated to a carefully constructed narrative that masked the Governor-General’s secret collusion with members of the High Court, with the leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser, and his acknowledged deception of Whitlam regarding the half-Senate election that Whitlam was set to announce on the afternoon of 11 November 1975.

February 23, 2016

Tessa Morris-Suzuki. The ever-shifting sands of Japanese apologies

On 16 February, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida signed a ‘Strategy for Co-operation in the Pacific’, in which both countries emphasised their shared values of ‘democracy, human rights and the rule of law’

As they were doing so, Japanese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Shinsuke Sugiyama was in Geneva addressing a meeting of the UN committee which oversees the implementation of one of the world’s key human rights accords: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). On the agenda was the Japanese government’s treatment of the problems of memory, justice and redress arising from the imperial military’s mass recruitment of women (the so-called ‘comfort women’) to military brothels during the Pacific War.

April 1, 2014

Walter Hamilton. The guts of a Free Trade Agreement with Japan.

Dolphin-culling and free trade agreements represent opposite sides of the coin of the relationship between Australia and Japan. Both are currently in the news, with Sea Shepherd activists hounding the fishermen of Taiji (where the documentary ‘The Cove’ was filmed) and Australian cattle producers in Tokyo trying to break down the last obstacle to a bilateral FTA. More than that, the two issues encapsulate the divided response among many in the West to Japan as a backward and insular nation, on the one hand, and a modern, global partner on the other.

February 23, 2018

GARY JOHNSTON. The Future Submarine: a technical problem

It is nearly two years since the government announced that the Shortfin Barracuda, to be designed and built by the French company, Naval Group, would be Australia’s future submarine (FSM). The proposed acquisition remains controversial. As an Australian citizen who has observed over many years the ongoing waste and incompetence exhibited in many Defence acquisitions, I have been concerned since the outset at the huge cost and immense risks around the FSM project. In this article, I describe what may be a major technical error on the part of the Defence department, with potentially far reaching consequences.

February 22, 2016

Evan Williams. Film review. 'Trumbo' (M)

Everyone remembers Psycho, in which Anthony Perkins played a knife-wielding weirdo obsessed with his dead mother, and most of us remember Rambo, in which Sylvester Stallone played a super-patriot action-hero fighting for truth, justice and the American way. We all know about Romeo, and some of us will remember Dumbo, Disney’s animated baby elephant with the big ears. But Trumbo? He’s not exactly a household name, and unless you’re something of a film buff you may never have heard of him. Trumbo is the hero of Trumbo, a wholly absorbing film from Hollywood director Jay Roach.

February 23, 2018

ANDREW GLIKSON. The price of the Earth.

“Dear Caesar, Keep burning, raping and killing, but please, please spare us your obscene poetry and ugly music” (From Seneca’s last letter to Nero).

Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin came up with a figure of €3000 trillion for the worth of planet Earth, given its breathable atmosphere—a shield from cosmic radiation. A close estimate is by Greg Laughlin at US$5000 trillion. By contrast Mars is estimated as a modest $16,000 while Venus is dismissed at about a penny (https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/new-formula-values-earth-at -50000000000000.html). Far from a joke, such estimates symbolize the religious worship of money, the loss of reverence toward nature and life and the reality of the Faustian Bargain in the roots of the seventh mass extinction of species. Once a species has acquired the power to destroy its environment, the species needs to be perfectly wise and in control if it is to survive.

February 23, 2018

Weatherill: Why state election will be a referendum on renewables

South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill might not be able to see much daylight between his Labor Party and the rival Liberals and SA Best, but he’s certainly making sure there is a big difference between his energy policy and those of the Opposition and the upstart party of Nick Xenophon.

June 19, 2016

JOHN MENADUE. Privatisation and the hollowing out of Medicare

Malcolm Turnbull says that the Coalition will ‘never, ever, privatise Medicare’. Given the wide public support for Medicare and Malcolm Turnbull’s way with words his attempted rebuttal is not surprising.

But the Coalition has been eroding Medicare from within for a decade and a half since John Howard. The vehicle for this erosion is private health insurance (PHI) and the government is facilitating this process with the $11 billion p.a. taxpayer funded subsidy to support private health insurance.

And the ALP does not seem to care. It scarcely ever mentions the damage of PHI. Is it scared of this vested interest?

April 1, 2014

Eric Hodgens. A new moral compass

The Church is not the best guide to moral values. That is the response of some Catholics to the questionnaire which the Vatican sent out in preparation for the October Synod of Bishops. Many practising Catholics do not agree with the official opinions of the Pope on moral rules associated with marriage and sexuality.

The disagreement list is long:

No living together before marriage;
No sexual activity except between a man and a woman officially married in the Church;
No contraception;
No masturbation;
No civil marriages or partnerships;
No re-marriage after divorce;
No sexual activity by homosexuals;
No homosexual partnerships, let alone marriage;
No IVF;
No refusal of sex to a reasonable request from a marriage partner;

Many Catholics would say that they used to believe everything on the list was wrong; but not now. The times have changed. Implicit in this is the judgement that what is right and wrong is determined not by the Church but by the surrounding culture. That’s why it changes.

April 13, 2013

Post card from Kyoto

Kyoto is both an historic and beautiful city. Fortunately it was spared allied bombing during the last war.

When our family first visited Kyoto and other parts of Japan in the 1960’s the exchange rate was about 400yen to the Australian dollar. It made for not only wonderful holidays, but cheap holidays as well. We usually stayed at Japanese minshuku for less than $A 10 for dinner, bed and breakfast for an adult.

May 4, 2014

Walter Hamilton. Yasukuni Shrine and why it matters.

Yasukuni–Japan’s Patriotic Lightning Rod

The Shinto shrine known as Yasukuni sprawls over ten hectares in the centre of Tokyo near the northern edge of the Imperial Palace grounds. Here are enshrined 2.47 million ‘deities’––the spirits of Japanese military personnel and civilians on war service from conflicts going back to 1853, including around 1,000 convicted war criminals. To its critics, Yasukuni is a bastion of historical revisionism, which denies that Japan waged a war of aggression between 1937 and 1945. Visits to the shrine by senior members of the government are an ongoing source of friction with China and South Korea.

December 4, 2013

Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. John Menadue

On December 9 the Royal Commission will commence public hearings into the role of the Catholic Church in Australia on this issue. Francis Sullivan the Executive Director of the Truth Justice and Healing Council of the Catholic Church said on 3 December that “Catholics and non-Catholics will be shocked and disillusioned when they hear the details of the four Queensland based case studies and how the Catholic Church handled the cases and treated the victims”.

October 3, 2014

David Stephens. Is this justifiable delicacy or insidious censorship?

The Battle of Bita Paka occurred in then German New Guinea on 11 September 1914. It saw the deaths of the first six Australians killed in the Great War, as well as the deaths of a German officer and 30 Melanesian soldiers. It was really a series of skirmishes rather than a battle.

On the eve of the centenary of the ‘battle’ the ABC presented evidence that the German and the Melanesians had been massacred by Australian troops. Two historians with relevant expertise were more cautious and readers of the Daily Telegraph were outraged. In the absence of further research it is difficult to know what happened at Bita Paka. Of immediate interest though are the remarks of the Minister for the Centenary of Anzac, Senator Ronaldson:

July 26, 2016

JOHN DWYER. Medicare and the 45th Parliament.

Clearly the future of Medicare was the election issue of greatest importance for most Australians. Community concern was focussed on the possibility that the primary care they receive from their general practitioner might be privatised such that a superior service would be available to those who paid more, either directly or though the extension of private hospital insurance to allow for coverage of GP services. This was never going to happen but its important to understand what it was that had stimulated discussion of the possibility. Private health insurers, who are not permitted to cover services provided with Medicare dollars, are frustrated as community health services are not reducing the number of their insured who need hospital care. Many insurers see 60-70% of their costs generated by 5-10% of their insured who need frequent stays in hospital. As there is much evidence that primary care systems elsewhere are better than us at reducing the incidence of hospital care, they would like to provide these superior services to those they insure. To do so would cost a fraction of the expense needed for hospital care.

April 26, 2016

John Menadue. Defence White Paper. US, China and Barracuda – class submarines.

Rather than acquiring military off-the-shelf (MOTS) submarines, the Australian government has committed us to the French submarine that will be built to Australian specifications. It will be a ‘unique’ build, non-nuclear and very expensive

The Defence Minister says that the Barracuda submarine will meet Australian Government ‘requirements for a submarine with considerable range and the capacity to remain undisturbed and undetected for extended periods’.

The government hopes that this submarine will be able to operate in the South China Sea without running unacceptable risks for the crews lives,

June 25, 2024

After 13 years, Julian Assange walks free

Julian Assange is expected to be in Australia late tomorrow, a free man.

July 26, 2016

PETER DAY. The Lord’s Prayer: beyond lip service

Diego’s phone rang, said the voice in Spanish ‘I am Pope Francis’.

“Our Father in heaven; hallowed be your name …”

How well we know these words - perhaps too well as they slip off our tongues like a perfunctory “How are you going?”

March 3, 2016

Terry Laidler. What George Pell Might Have Said

What George Pell Might Have Said

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe …

“Your Honour

Please could I start by making a statement that I hope will help the Commission and that I pray will give some solace to so many people I now know to have been traumatised by abuse suffered on an horrendous scale.

I have no wish to put people who say they told me about sexual abuse that was occurring in a position where their recollections need to be tested in minute detail against mine. They have gone long enough with their voices not being heard by powerful figures in the Church and in society generally. I can accept that, despite differences of recollection between me and some of them, there is already enough evidence before the Commission that many tried to tell me from the time I was a junior priest in Ballarat and that I seemed to them to be dismissive or lacked compassion or took no action. For that, I apologise to them profusely: I did not do enough and more people were abused by the same priests and brothers complained about.

March 2, 2016

David Isaacs. As bad as Guantanamo

If I liken the immigration detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island to the US facility on Guantanamo Bay, even passionate advocates for those seeking asylum such as human rights lawyer Julian Burnside dismiss my concerns: “Oh we’re not as bad as that.” I will argue that we are indeed as bad as that, possibly worse.

Many people fleeing persecution to seek asylum have been subjected to psychological trauma in the countries they are fleeing and in the often highly traumatic journeys they take to reach ‘freedom’. However, people seeking asylum who are subjected to prolonged immigration detention are significantly more likely to suffer severe mental health problems than people seeking asylum who are not detained. Furthermore, the incidence of mental health problems increases with duration of incarceration. The United Nations defines torture as “…any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions”. Since prolonged detention without trial is unlawful under international law, Australia’s immigration detention policy clearly fulfils the key elements of the UN definition.

March 5, 2018

DAVID ZYNGIER. Spending more on private schools doesn't guarantee success!

It is often claimed as fact that private schools outperform public schools. New analysis of MySchool data and 2017 Victorian Certificate of Education year 12 results shows that public schools with similar Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) rankings or Socio-Economic Status have very similar or even better VCE results than private schools. However, these public schools achieve these results with far less funding per student.

October 14, 2013

The eye of the needle, politicians, and Confucius. Guest blogger: Milton Moon

Milton Moon is an eminent Australian potter. A Master of Australian Craft.

My current reading is dominated by the superb collected essays of Simon Leys, under the title The Hall of Uselessness. (An indication of just how small the world has become it was recommended to me by a Jewish friend, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst living in New York who also uses Zen meditation as part of his therapy.)

For those who don’t know, Simon Leys is the pen-name of Belgium-born Pierre Ryckmans, a sinologist and long-time resident of Australia. In the 1970‘s he taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University, and later was Professor of Chinese Studies at Sydney University. He lives in Canberra.)

March 2, 2016

What has gone wrong with Malcolm Turnbull's NBN?

In a column in The Drum on the ABC, Paddy Manning comments that

‘Malcolm Turnbull’s version of the NBN is proving to be much more expensive to deliver than was originally hoped. Remember that the only merit of Turnbull’s “multi-technology mix” (MTM) was that it would be cheaper to build …’

See link to article below:

http://ab.co/1Sef8pS

January 8, 2016

Edmund Campion. Homily for the funeral service of Brian Johns.

Family, friends, colleagues of Brian Johns.

The other morning, after Brian had died, it came to me, so this is the end of a conversation that endured for more than sixty years. Then I recalled that one name had dominated our earliest talks together, all those years ago, the name of Dorothy Day. Dorothy Day? Who was she? She was an American Catholic radical who, when she died in 1980, was given lengthy obituaries in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and all the other leading papers. A significant figure in American culture. I can tell you her life in one sentence: she believed literally in those words of the Lord Jesus I have just read from the 25th chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: feed the hungry; give a drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; give the poor a home; visit them when they’re in hospital or prison. It’s Christianity in its purest form. So during the Great Depression she did just that; set up houses of hospitality (as she called them) where the poor could find a home and food and drink, houses of hospitality that spread across the United States; she started a monthly paper, The Catholic Worker and a movement around it. She did jail time for protesting against American militarism and promoted an ethic that said everyone was worthwhile. Dorothy Day.

March 2, 2016

Evan Williams. Oscars and other frivolities

My vote for best performance by an actor in this year’s Oscars goes to Leonardo DiCaprio – not for his much-touted appearance in The Revenant, but for his rousing speech at the presentation ceremony. I don’t know if he scripted it himself – if he did he deserved a screenplay Oscar as well – but I rate it the most powerful contribution to the climate debate delivered from a public platform in recent memory. His passionate plea to “save the planet” drew cheers from the crowd. Yes, I know showbiz luvvies tend to be self-indulgent lefties and climate alarmists, but what an audience he had! By all accounts he was heard by 80 million people around the globe. What politician could wish for more?

September 19, 2013

Frontier War and asylum seekers. John Menadue

Launch of the 2013-14 Catholic Social Justice Statement by John Menadue 11 September 2013

This statement follows the proud tradition of the Catholic Church in Australia since 1940 of calling Catholics and all Australians to act for social justice. The 65 statements issued over the years cover a great range of social justice issues – poverty, violence, peace, environment, indigenous people, ageing and inequality. Many years ago GK Chesterton referred with admiration to the practice of Australian Catholics in their Justice Sundays and annual statements.

March 2, 2016

John Tulloh. Springtime - the season of alarm and disharmony in Europe.

United in diversity. EU’s motto**.**

If ever there were a line in a report to alarm European leaders, it might have been one buried in a 204-page document on the EU economy last November. It predicted that up to three million additional asylum seekers could enter the 28-nation bloc by the end of this year, according to the Washington Post.

If the influx should come to pass, it is about now when the surge will begin. It is springtime in Europe when the Mediterranean and Aegean storms abate and the seas become a tempting risk for those seeking a new and safe home. Already 110,000 have endured a winter crossing to Greece and Italy so far this year. That is 10 times the number for the corresponding period last year. Four hundred of them perished at sea.

December 21, 2016

ROBERT MANNE. Yes Virginia, there is a solution to Australia's asylum-seeker problem.

A new chapter of humanly decent policy with regard to asylum seekers, more reflective of the many fine and generous impulses in our history of welcoming refugees, can at long last be opened. For pity’s sake, let it be.

Pearls and Irritations

John Menadue's Public Policy Journal