Letters to the Editor
The quantum leap
November 3, 2025
Sophie Vorrath is spot-on. Coal and gas in energy generation are the dinosaurs of our age. That doesn't stop politicians like Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce promoting them as the future. But, as always in politics, economics will eventually trump ignorance when the costs of backing those dinosaurs cannot be sustained any longer.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: 'Forget subsidies': Solar-battery hybrids can deliver 'incredibly competitive' power for big industry
Stay awake and act
November 3, 2025
Coen Luettringhaus finishes his insightful piece by posing the right question: are you prepared to be lulled back to sleep? Summer is coming in Australia. Many will already be turning their minds to the beach, to cricket and to travel. All well and good. But in the interests of keeping Palestine top of mind, of never being lulled to sleep, make a list now. Write down everything Gaza has taught you and what you're going to do differently as a result. Stick it on the wall, or on your desk. Being awake is one thing. So is acting....
Jaron Sutton from Melbourne
In response to: What Israel's genocide has laid bare
Our elders deserve respect
November 3, 2025
Robert Breunig needs a reality check. Every single older Australian I know is financially struggling. This includes self-funded retirees and pensioners. How dare this man talk about a retiree living on the income of a 40-year-old without the pressures? Breunig has neglected the fact these retirees have paid taxes for an average of 55 years, through many global crises and scrimped and saved to buy their home through the years when interest rates were 17%. I remind Breunig that superannuation only started in 1992, meaning many retirees do not have the amount of super that the young will have...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Taking from the young, giving to the old: How our tax system is letting us down
A succinct summary. Thank you!
November 3, 2025
I have read several books on the situation in occupied Palestine. I really appreciate this succinct summary of the history behind the current situation. Thank you.
Penny Lee from Western Australia
In response to: Gaza under siege: The continuation of Zionist demographic cleansing policies since the 19th century
Taiwan and China
November 3, 2025
An impressive and scholarly paper on Taiwan as an integral part of China; historical, legal and geopolitical analysis. However, I feel you did not give sufficient weight to the desires of the Taiwanese population which strives to maintain its democratic forms of government as opposed to the 5000 years plus history of China! The one-China policy did not work well for a majority of the Hong Kong community! You assert that peaceful reunification, consistent with both historical precedent and national law, remains the only viable path forward. This is most likely to preserve stability in the Taiwan Straits and...
Trevor Rowe AO from Sydney
In response to: Taiwan as an integral part of China: A historical, legal and geopolitical analysis
China's patience
November 3, 2025
I would appreciate James Wood's comments on how Beijing permits the US to manufacture chips at TSMC and to ban their sale to Beijing. To me, Xi seems remarkably tolerant and patient.
Selwyn Berg from Melbourne
In response to: Taiwan as an integral part of China: A historical, legal and geopolitical analysis
Gaza needs democracy
November 3, 2025
Gaza does not need leaders or rulers but democracy. Not a democracy like Australia, where government is controlled by party donors but democracy as in Switzerland or a democracy as the Kurds have developed. The people must rule directly.
Pat Madison from callala beach nsw
In response to: The leader most capable of governing a future Palestinian state is languishing in an Israeli jail
Housing for homes, not profit
November 1, 2025
Three thousand cheers for Stewart Sweeney. He says far more elegantly and knowledgeably what I've been saying for years: housing planning is non-existent. What we have is so-called developers spotting what they deem to be profitable sites — it doesn't matter what's there already — and they go for it. In Victoria, councils used to object but were overridden by VCAT and now even the right to protest has been abolished. Public housing is demolished and sites privatised (i.e. sold for a song) with the stipulation that a meagre 5% or 10 % of new apartments be affordable. With...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Game, set and match to the property industry – unless we change everything
Up the creek
November 1, 2025
Albanese high-fives himself about his rare earths deal with Trump. However, I can’t find any clarifying details about the deal. A few days later, Trump signs an unexpected rare earths mineral deal with China who, unlike Australia, has the means to process the minerals into a saleable product and deal with the toxic waste that results from processing. Someone tell me: does this deal, with our so-called ally, leave us up yet another a faecal resource creek without a paddle?
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Trump's rare earths deal to counter China was a badly needed 'Sputnik moment
In defence of David Marr
October 31, 2025
While I am an admirer of Chris Hedges and have read him at length, I have to disagree with Vivienne Porzsolt’s characterisation of his interview with David Marr (of whom I am also a fan). Marr seemed to me to bend over backwards to accommodate Hedges' viewpoint. Hedges, in my view, overstated his case and made it very difficult, frustrating I would say, for Marr , who acted very professionally at all times. To call the interview a “hatchet job”is simply wrong.
Barry Stevens from Tura Beach, NSW 2548
In response to: Open letter to David Marr on his interview with Chris Hedges
Marred interview
October 31, 2025
I strongly support the review of David Marr's interview with Chris Hedges. It was a disgrace and I have cancelled my subscription to Late Night Live's podcasts. I do take issue with her apology for the pun she feels she has made by saying that the interview was marred by his tactics as an interviewer. I think we should embrace the word as an apt descriptor of the techniques used by an aggressive journalist who hectors his guest and seems incapable of any self-reflection when the guest defends himself against invalid criticisms. The LNL interview was Marred for...
Geoff Bower from Gooseberry Hill, WA
In response to: Open Letter to David Marr
A windfall for Vic Labor's developer's mates
October 31, 2025
Stewart Sweeney’s essay on the Australia-wide abandonment of public housing, by Labor Governments in particular, is timely. Here in Victoria, following through on Dan Andrews’ departing thought bubble, the demolition of 44 public housing towers has begun. Literally as I write, a small but staunch group of protesters is picketing a tower in Flemington, Melbourne, where Housing Victoria (a misnomer if ever there was one) is evicting the remaining residents and moving them far from their community to “temporary” accommodation. The demolitions, and the building of “social and affordable” housing in their place, have been assessed by a...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: Game, set and match to the property industry – unless we change everything
Once upon a time, Iraq looked like a good idea, too
October 31, 2025
Yes, this is gunboat diplomacy at its most visible, and the spectre of drugs is nothing more than a fig leaf to cover a blatant war of aggression. Plenty of drugs make it into the US from Central and South America, but to my knowledge Venezuela has never featured prominently in that supply chain. Ever since Trump started his second term, he has been spruiking his ability to mix it with the other major world leaders and bend them to his will. He has been roundly rebuffed by Putin in Ukraine, Xi over trade and Taiwan, Iran over its...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Gunboat hypocrisy in the Caribbean
Consequences of genocide in Palestine
October 31, 2025
Julie Macken’s article raises the question so few are willing to confront: what does it mean for us, as Australians, if genocide can unfold in full view of the world and we respond with silence? Australia’s moral standing depends not only on what we say, but on what we refuse to ignore. By continuing to trade with Israel’s weapons companies and by avoiding the language of genocide, our government is effectively saying that international law is negotiable when it comes to the powerful. We can’t separate our politics from our humanity. If we accept impunity for genocide today,...
Meg Schwarz from Macclesfield
In response to: Getting away with murder
Albo's 'middle power' inertia
October 30, 2025
Alison Broinowski's 11 Opportunities piece was a blast of fresh air about the complete absence of any Australian sovereign identity or initiative from Albo's Government upon this sad planet. Our craven relationship with Trump's shambollic and vindictive America, along with our huge donations to the AUKUS farce, our indirect participation in the Gaza massacres and our absurdly conflicted relationship with China are just three key items. Albo wraps his poll-driven and timid government's inertia making the excuse that we are a middle power. Broinowski gives 11 actions a middle power can take if it had a leader with...
Donald Clayton from Bittern Victoria 3918
In response to: 11 Opportunities for Australia
Just who are the superior people?
October 29, 2025
As the common myth uttered by Gideon Levy, that Israeli ideology regards Palestinians as an inferior people remains to the fore, reading Ramzy Baroud (P & I's 29/10): The unvanquished will: Gaza’s triumph of spirit against the architecture of genocide one finds a more than arguable case that Palestinians are actually the superior people. To say that “Gazans are built differently” is a massive understatement... I still find their collective will astonishing. Why is five-year-old Maria Hannoun, one of Gaza’s many influencers, continuing to recite the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and sending fiery messages to US President Donald Trump...
David Thompson from CLAYTON
In response to: The three core myths driving Israel’s war on Palestine
Have a heart, Kos!
October 29, 2025
For pollster Kos Samaras, linking immigration to housing is to be patronised as a “casual narrative” of “cultural threat”, and in terms of voter profiles it is “structurally impossible” for the Coalition to offer low migration. It’s not just a cultural narrative, Kos. After a quarter-century of expansive real-estate incentives and endless mass migration (under Albo now, it’s 250,000-300,000 minimum annually), realistic capacity to pay off a house is becoming “structurally impossible” outside of the top 1-20% who both control and facilitate governments. Do you even care? Why aren’t you using your silky skills to urge any and...
Stephen Saunders from O'Connor
In response to: Why the Coalition can’t win without losing itself
The con of the rules-based international order
October 29, 2025
That anyone with a functioning brain cell can take seriously the ostentatious pomposity of the statements that emanate from the mouths of the servile politicians of the West, about the importance of the rules-based international order, is a tribute to the success of blatant dishonesty over patent reality . That is bad enough but the fact is the so-called Fourth Estate, that ostentatiously promotes itself as holding power to account, simply acts as a megaphone for the barefaced failure of the West to comply even with the rules that they have just made up, let alone completely ignoring international...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Failure to cover: A week of collective omission by the Australian media
Dirty doings finally exposed
October 29, 2025
I have long been an admirer of Jenny and her dogged and courageous attempt to expose the back-door dealings that exposed the fatal weakness at the heart of our democracy. The fact that we still call ourselves a democracy is a tribute to the continued fraudulent reasoning of our often hereditary elites to describe a system where the people's will is subject to the ultimate power of cancellation by a feudal sovereign of a long dead empire on the other side of the planet. If democracy is as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address government of the people,...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Whitlam dismissal secrets unearthed from the archives of the Canadian governor-g
Supporting the past, not the future!
October 29, 2025
Our fearful politicians, unwilling to challenge the distortion built into our housing system by the odious midget John Howard, that turned it into an investment rather than a place to live, continue to focus on the political safety of the demand side. That way they can avoid doing anything serious about the real issue,m which is the supply side. To ensure younger Australians can never afford a home and therefore continue to put off marriage and children in the interests of rentiers, they fiddle endlessly with methods of boosting demand with the logical consequence of continuing growth in prices....
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: As the home ownership dream fades, Australians may be open to a frank conversation about house prices
It's already happened, Michael
October 29, 2025
No need to worry Michael about the possibility of the Heath Robinson insanities of the Orange Donald destroying America's leadership of the world. It is happening now and has been since Clinton's presidency. The vast bulk of the world has begun to decisively move away from the selfish, self-centred, vicious and unprincipled leadership of the US. It has already lost its capacity to tell everyone else what to do and how to govern themselves as current geopolitical events clearly demonstrate. Fear not, Michael, a multipolar world is emerging that promises to adopt the five principles of peaceful co-existence....
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump’s risky American economy
Premature expostulation
October 28, 2025
Trump may just be half-witted enough to believe that by doing a few deals with countries, that have deposits or rare earths that are capable of being mined in an economic manner, he will help the US, but if so he has simply confirmed the worldwide belief that he is a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Mining ain't the hard part when it comes to rare earths. Refining and processing are the hard bits and China has those wrapped up, for at least the next five to ten years. These are incredibly complex processes that can be...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump's rare earths deal to counter China was a badly needed 'Sputnik moment'
The Enlightenment betrayed
October 28, 2025
The return of the Dark Ages of religious bigotry, superstition and unreason could not be better illustrated by the fact that supposedly intelligent people can take seriously the idea that a god, whose very existence is contested, has decided that the Jewish people are the chosen ones. What is even more extraordinary is that other supposedly sentient human beings from outside that self-interested group are prepared to give a moment's credibility to such a rationally and factually outrageous claim. What is never mentioned when this claim to being chosen is made is that the Torah is filled with...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The three core myths driving Israel’s war on Palestine
Moral blindness
October 28, 2025
Whilst Justin Glyn may be physically blind, he displays a moral clarity that is admirable and which our political leaders in Australia demonstrate a total incapacity to mirror. Their reflexive moral cowardice demonstrates the duplicity at the heart of a West that emptily lectures the rest of humanity about our moral superiority, while every day demonstrating its mendacity and fraudulence in our actions. It also clearly reflects our continued disgraceful racism as we fawn over European Zionist mass murderers and colonialists whilst ignoring an occupied and abused other. This is a superbly written J'Accuse that reveals the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Raise the double standard high
The importance of transparency in public discourse
October 27, 2025
John Anderson’s contribution to the Boyer Lecture series largely focused on diminished trust in government, lack of civility in public discourse and the threat to democracy. However, Anderson’s account has significant omissions. He fails to acknowledge widespread public policy failures, the corrosive impact of concentrated media ownership and the lack of transparency in decision-making at all levels of government. He laboured over the housing crisis and home ownership, but other policy failures were ignored. Perhaps this explains Anderson’s two most egregious omissions and which pose the biggest threats to democracy and social cohesion. Firstly, the rise in inequality...
Brenda Tait from Northcote, Victoria
In response to: John Anderson: Our civilisational moment
It depends who is doing the measuring
October 27, 2025
I thank Alex for his thoughtful analysis which summarises pretty well the fact that, as in so many other areas of life, the Western domination of the way progress is measured and who does it, leaves some pretty important questions about the accuracy of these measures unanswered. China graduates nearly four times the number of STEM students per year than the US and is now far and away the largest filer of patents. Currently, China files around half the world total of patents and increasingly more than the US since 2015. That has produced a significant leadership for...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: As Nobel laureates show, the US can’t take tech lead over China for granted
Congrats to John Schumann
October 27, 2025
I found this a beautifully written, clear and thus impressive article. Thank you, Mr Schumann.
Chris Halloway from Coral Sea (live in Wollongong)
In response to: Article on Trump's appropriation of Christianity
Misplaced nuclear optimism
October 27, 2025
Hannah Ritchie has great insights about using data to determine the best use of resources to lower emissions. Her optimism around nuclear is debatable. Most nuclear accidents go unreported. American engineer and historian Thomas Wellock has published an account of the seemingly casual attitude within the US nuclear industry called Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk. Analysts quoted by Wellock, and a 2016 study published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, all predict a serious accident quite soon. Wellock’s reviewer Daniel Ford did some similar calculations after Three Mile Island. “The numbers suggested that another...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Realism and optimism on energy transition
A bunch of redundant Cold War warriors
October 26, 2025
Our intelligence establishment has managed to continue to produce a long line of Cold War clones without imagination, intellect or policy skills. They have survived by dint of simply repeating what they are told by their real masters, MI6 and the CIA. They ably reflect the paranoid ignorance of those bodies that have failed almost completely to ever get any intelligence assessment anywhere near the mark. But, of course, such people flourish in agencies that have no outside assessment and oversight. They cover their failures in secrecy justified by national security. Good luck to this new boss, she...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: New Australian national intelligence chief faces a people challenge
Balance versus truth
October 26, 2025
The control that the Zionists have established over public opinion in the West is not a fly-by-night affair. The history of that political movement over the last century and a half has been one that recognised the vital importance of controlling the narrative in the mainstream media. It has spent the entire period concocting that narrative and placing key people in major mainstream outlets to ensure that narrative is the only one allowed. Many studies by academics and policy experts testify to the success of that narrative in shaping the public mind. The narrative began to lose its...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Chris Sidoti on the International Court of Justice Gaza ruling
Reason and rant
October 26, 2025
For anyone with even the remotest claim to sanity and coherence, it is an immense task to sensibly compare Xi Jinping and the orange Donald. They appear to exist on entirely different planets, or more accurately to exist in two different eras. The Donald would have fitted perfectly into the Dark Ages of Europe when superstition, fanatical religion, irrational violence and justice by the sword were the hallmarks of the age. His infantile narcissism and psychotic and vengeful nature was common amongst the kings and emperors of the age. Xi, on the other hand, is the highly trained...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump, Xi and the ‘green paradox’: How China is building a climate-proof future
Misinformation during the election
October 26, 2025
It is impossible to evaluate the analysis carried out by the researchers who reported on the survey they carried out in the absence of the identity of the statements that they said were false, and which the respondents were asked to comment on. I do not know how we the readers of this article can form any view about the value and usefulness of their survey, and the significance of the seriousness of the statements said in some way to be false or misleading. This omission renders useless the publication of the report by the researchers in the...
John Trew from Sydney
In response to: Misinformation was rife during the 2025 election. New research shows many people were unable to identify it
Unsupported opinions on the energy transition
October 26, 2025
Michael Edesess’ uncritical review of Hannah Ritchie’s book on energy transition fails to back up their shared opinions on important issues: 1. Levelised cost of energy comparisons of energy technologies are not flawed when used and interpreted correctly; they are the standard method in electric power engineering. 2. World leading research groups on the energy transition, such as LUT and Stanford, recognise the land-use limitations of large-scale bioenergy and therefore do not include it in their scenarios. 3. Nuclear power failed to grow beyond its maximum global generation in 2006 because it’s too expensive, too dangerous, too...
Mark Diesendorf from BEROWRA HEIGHTS
In response to: Realism and optimism on energy transition
Step 1: Pick up a book...
October 26, 2025
Since 2010, we have known that 44% of Australians are not functionally literate; i.e. they do not have the skills to understand, let alone be critical of, what they are reading. Is it any wonder that a significant segment of the population cannot identify election misinformation? Speaking as a former teacher, I maintain, one of the weakest links is the training, recruitment and ongoing up-skilling of teachers. I worked alongside teachers who thought Captain Cook bought the First Fleet to Australia, and that he personally slaughtered thousands of Indigenous Australians by his own hand. Also, these...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Misinformation was rife during the 2025 election. New research shows many people were unable to identify it
Clear and succinct
October 26, 2025
I would like to commend Michael Keating’s article to readers. It is clear, succinct, and taught me a lot – not just about Jim Chalmers’ changes but also about government concerns around equity in the superannuation scheme.
Constance Pond from Hornsby
In response to: Superannuation and the Canberra Press Gallery's fantasies
A just peace the only way to lasting security
October 26, 2025
Stewart Sweeney has reminded us of the important distinction between negative peace (the absence of violence) and positive peace (the presence of justice). Peace researcher Johan Galtung made a further distinction between direct violence (eg being killed by an enemy bullet) and structural violence, the harms that accrue from punishing social and economic conditions. While direct violence has been committed by both sides in the Gaza conflict, albeit hugely disproportionately, only the Palestinians have suffered long-term structural violence. Examples include the dehumanising impact of the “security wall” — declared a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law by...
Colin Sindall from St Kilda, Victoria
In response to: War without end, peace without justice
At last! Some long-term thinking
October 24, 2025
Is Fred Zhang to become another frustrated citizen of the Lucky Country, or are we about to make an investment in a future that takes it beyond rolling over to have our belly scratched and our food bowl raided? The technology that has been determined on these shores and developed overseas is legendary. From the black box carried by every plane flying to the solar cell technology employed globally, we have squandered opportunities to make Australia a technology and manufacturing powerhouse. With the geopolitical order shattering and climate change about to not just shift the goalposts, but to...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: China, US or us? Australia’s Upper Path in the global minerals race
Manipulation defeated by the young
October 24, 2025
As an 80-year-old, I have an abiding belief in the young who may save the West from the consequences of the indifference and ignorance of us oldies! This article re-enforces that belief, as does the their actions in saving the environment. It has been said by someone wise that we do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children. They are going to make sure we give it back in a livable form!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The crumbling illusion: Why American public opinion on Israel is shifting
Decency and humanity – many Jews demonstrate that
October 24, 2025
I have never doubted the feelings of millions of Jews around the world towards the obscene criminality being committed in their names. This article is the best illustration of that humanity so far!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Hundreds of prominent Jews and Israelis urge world powers to hold Israel account
Daoism and diplomacy
October 24, 2025
Fred has explained well the subtlety of the Daoist philosophy which originated between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. It well illustrates the continuity and sophistication of Chinese civilisation over millennia. If Chinese culture is the great granddaddy, then the West is the wayward great, great, great, great grandchild that is yet to mature. The problem for the West is that we were the arrogant descendants of the primitive tribes roaming Europe in the Dark Ages when Chinese civilisation had been flowering for thousands of years and we retained the primitive instincts of fight or flight long after...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China, US or us? Australia’s Upper Path in the global minerals race
And Australia does same old, same old
October 24, 2025
We saw after the UN had identified more than 1000 Israeli actions that broke the [January 2025] ceasefire, Australia doing precisely nothing to recognise the offences. Now, with a widely-documented Israeli flip of the bird to the latest ceasefire conditions — and which contravenes, as usual, international law — we see Australia leaping into inaction. How soon will it be before our foreign minister issues a serious concern statement calling on Hamas to stop whingeing and get on with starving and dying from lack of aid as they are supposed to?
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: After ICJ ruling, can UN relief agency UNRWA resume full Gaza operations?
Handing over our lunch money
October 24, 2025
If you were unsure what gaslighting or coercive control was, you need only look at the Trump administration to receive a master class. Gaslighting: Trump declares at regular intervals, I am the peacemaker while funnelling billions to perpetuate a genocide that could not have happened without his ongoing support. I have created peace, he declares while still allowing Israel to starve and bomb innocent Palestinians because hostage bodies are still under rubble caused by his bombs. Coercive control: World leaders stumble over themselves to prostrate before Trump, to land a photo at the White House, believing that...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
Failure of water fluoridation
October 23, 2025
Clearly, the incorporation of dental health services into Medicare is long overdue. But Lesley Russell has glossed over the obvious question: “Why isn’t dental health better in Australia, one of the most extensively fluoridated countries in the world?” The answer is given implicitly in the scientific reviews by the Cochrane Library, the gold standard in impartial systematic reviews of medications and medical procedures. Cochrane’s latest report on fluoridation, published in 2024, reviewed 157 non-randomised studies. (There are no double-blind randomised controlled trials supporting claims of enormous benefits of fluoridation.) Cochrane found that fluoridation may reduce dental caries by...
Mark Diesendorf from BEROWRA HEIGHTS
In response to: Dental health – time for a small, cost-effective revolution
Sold out to capitalism
October 23, 2025
What we all need to learn from this latest round of arse-licking is that Trump is the end result when government sells out to capitalism. It has been obvious for a long time and Australian governments have foolishly followed the US lead like lemmings over a cliff. The Teals and the latest election result may well be an indicator that the electorate has woken up and had enough. With the LNP brawling among themselves, unlike the carbon tax and the No vote, they may not be able to get their millionaire/media mates together to win back their voters. ...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
The Americanisation of Australia
October 23, 2025
The insidiously overwhelming Americanisation of Australia is proceeding apace, but we cannot yet predict when our nation will be referred to as Southwest America (formally Australia) nor can we predict when China will be referred to as Northwest America (formally China). The increasingly despised and contemptible US has become a appalling moral wreck of a country, yet its drongo population has allowed Trumpian imbecility to worsen hourly without rejecting its administration entirely. Trump should never been elected.
Peter Bright from Tasmania
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
No one size fits all – a lesson for the West
October 23, 2025
A superb analysis of the dogged blindness of the West to the reality that their system is not only the only system, but potentially far from the best. But also a great illustration of the way history and culture determine what is best rather than having a system shoved down your throat which ignores that history and culture. This should be a text in every management and foreign policy course in the West.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: To avert war, the West must shatter the mirror by which it views China
Racism: Redux or just perpetual?
October 23, 2025
The most detestable characteristic of European Christian civilisation is its long-standing and almost genetic predisposition to a mindset of racial superiority. That is exercised serially on the chosen racial inferior people of the day. For centuries, it was the European Jews blamed for the death of Christ and thus to be removed or at the very least excluded from polite society. Then, during the long period of brutal and criminal imperialism and colonialism, it was the brown-skinned inhabitants of much of the rest of the world. We still inhabit that mean-spirited and vacuous space. That is easily demonstrated...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Islamophobia in Australian schools: What the Special Envoy’s report means for ed
Winter is coming in Gaza
October 23, 2025
Meg Schwarz makes a good point about women and the Board of Peace (what would Golda Meir think?) But I sense a lack of urgency with winter coming again in Gaza. Where are the six engined Antonovs which transported portable housing to Cambodia after the defeat of Pol Pot? Where is the move for a new prefabbed harbour on the Gaza coast better than the US constructed one 18 months ago which failed in a storm? Germany and China, for example, are good at modular housing and engineering; get them positively and urgently involved. Our government is contributing one...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Women are missing from peace negotiations, from strategic decision making
Labor's pusillanimity
October 23, 2025
This reminds me of what Cassius said to Brutus “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar). The problem is the whole West seems to be underlings to a clearly demented and power-hungry narcissist!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this week
Joining in the madness
October 23, 2025
Good article, Greg Barns! Would we have known about this outrage if we simply relied on the ABC to tell us? Thank you. Shouldn't we now also be asking why the ABC didn't embarrass the prime minister and ambassador by publicly boycotting the event? Once more the Australian Government's appeasement — like that of so many other governments — is simply endorsing the rogue régime this criminal now heads. This cannot end well. The prime minister and the ambassador, by their indulgence, are not only undermining their own standing in this polity but they erode our Commonwealth's dignified...
Bruce Wearne from BALLARAT CENTRAL
In response to: Albanese and Rudd sold out freedom of the press this weekAlbanese and Rudd
Global warming still not scary enough
October 23, 2025
In spite of the fact that global ice melting is happening with shocking speed, future melting is unpredictable enough for it to be left out of key IPCC calculations. The sea level rise figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only reflect the expansion of warming water. AdaptNSW, a branch of the NSW Government, says, “include processes associated with the melting of ice sheets (and) NSW could (see) sea level rises of up to 2.3 metres by 2100 and 5.5 m by 2150”. It is not just the clear denial of people such as Barnaby Joyce preventing...
Lesley Walker from Naarm (Northcote)
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
We need a song
October 23, 2025
John Schumann is frustrated because the church doesn’t articulate a case against Trump. Fair enough, though he may be surprised at how many parish pulpits are careful to apply the gospel to Trump and all his works. My frustration is that the song writers have not given us some protest songs. We are so grateful to musicians who did so much to unite opposition to the Vietnam War. But where are the songs of protest against Trump and Trumpiness? John, please help.
Stephen Williams from Newcastle NSW
In response to: Muted response to Trump's appropriation of Christianity
Climate change: It's time to panic
October 22, 2025
Chas Keys was remarkably sanguine in addressing climate denialism. Along with the biodiversity crisis, climate change is the greatest threat the planet faces. Those who deny the massive evidence surrounding climate change, deserve public condemnation and ridicule because they threaten the quality of the future of our children and grandchildren, indeed their very existence. What Trump has done in the US in removing even the mention of climate change in some government departments, in abandoning the Paris Agreement, and bolstering the fossil fuel industries while throwing a spanner in the works of the renewable energy transition, is profoundly irresponsible....
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
Desperation is the driving force
October 22, 2025
Requiem for Gaza could just as easily be reimagined as Requiem for the Rules-based International Order. Desperation is the driving force. Here in the West we are beset by desperation on so many levels. There is the desperation of climate change, a looming development we do our best to ignore. There is the desperation of a debt-driven financial collapse, another looming development we are also doing our best to ignore. And there is the desperation of military inadequacy which the wars in Palestine and Ukraine have shown. In Israel, the desperation is fuelled by the above compounded by the...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Chris Hedges' Edward Said memorial lecture: ‘Requiem for Gaza’
Climate change is real alright, and it’s us causing it
October 22, 2025
Chas Keys poses an interesting question. If it’s not human activity causing the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re in more trouble than we realise. Not that we aren’t already facing enormous difficulties. The climate data being collected makes it abundantly clear the planet is entering the feedback climate loop peer-reviewed science has warned of since the 1970s. We’ve had half a century to validate we’ve fully evolved as thinking hominids. That we haven’t is confirmed by the depth of climate denialism across the world. Whether it’s compelled by greed, ideology or ignorance is immaterial, the outcome’s...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The problem of climate change denialism
Heath Robinson and Humpty Dumpty
October 22, 2025
I love Peter's reference to Heath Robinson in this article. I have always looked, after over 50 years involved with governments in Australia, at the similarity of much government policy formulation and implementation as an excellent simile with the wonderfully complicated structures that he was an expert in. Trump's plan — and it is a great exaggeration to call it such — not only has the imagination of Heath Robinson in its gratuitous complexity, but also encompasses Humpty Dumpty's propensity to invent new meanings for words.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: At best, a respite for Gazans
Palestinian dispossession
October 22, 2025
While the devastated landscapes may look similar, the difference between a post-nuclear Japan and Palestine could not be greater apart from the fact that US bases are still located on Japanese soil. The issue in Gaza is where to relocate the Palestinians because the Israelis don't want them on their “God-given” (including Jerusalem) land and the religious right need the return of the the Jews so they can benefit.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: It's too early to discuss 'what next' for Gaza
Bastardry on steroids
October 22, 2025
This article is a brilliant catalogue of the continuation of the centuries-long history of the atrocities committed by the allegedly Christian US in spreading the exact opposite of what it claims to stand for. Democracy doesn't get a guernsey anywhere in this history of invasion, subversion, theft and mass murder. But as the US empire deservedly crumbles, the rest of the world, excluding the European and Australian satraps, begin to resist. Russia, Iran and China look like helping the Venezuelan people to guarantee that this attempt at overthrowing an elected government will not succeed. More power to their...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump CIA intervention in Venezuela risks another US war of choice, experts warn
Science and stupefaction
October 22, 2025
At its base, the anti-climate change idiocy of Trump and those who share his scientific philistinism is inherently illogical, uninformed and plainly stupid. To say, as he often does, that the work of tens of thousands of highly qualified climate scientists is simply not believable carries some far greater implications, either about his purchase by the oil, coal and gas corporations or his utter incapacity for logical thought. The scientific method is now understood and supported by the vast bulk of humanity. That scientific method is common across literally all areas of human knowledge, with the notable exception of...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Trump is pushing allies to buy US gas. It’s bad economics – and a catastrophe for the climate
Lies, damned lies and statistics
October 21, 2025
This is the phrase that sprang to mind on reading Michael Keating's article on migration in Australia. While not really accusing him of lying, I would suggest he is cherry-picking data to support his case, which is basically to maintain high levels of population growth in Australia. According to the latest figures from ABS, population growth was 1.6% in the year to March this year, an increase of 423,400 people, of which net overseas migration was 315,900 or about three quarters. Yes, 1.6% is a lot better than the Third World rates of 2.5% we saw in 2023, but...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The migration debate in Australia
It's too early to discuss 'what next' for Gaza
October 20, 2025
It is far too early to even begin to contemplate what next for Gaza, which is now the theme of much well-intentioned commentary. There is barely a ceasefire, with Israel killing dozens of Palestinians over the past few days, and looking for every Hamas did it pretext to kill more. People are still starving to death, with the arrival of only limited food supplies. There are no functional hospitals. There are no foreign press to witness the carnage. And it is utterly unclear what the Trump plan now envisages. Now more than ever we should be applying all...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
Beyond delusional
October 20, 2025
Are we still entertaining the delusion that the suffering of the Palestinian people is over? Are we still believing that a ceasefire is intact when, as I write, Israel has just dropped scores of bombs on the Gaza Strip in violation of the barely two-week-old agreement? Are we still deluded that Trump and Netanyahu’s plan to create a new Miami in Gaza has changed into an altruistic endeavour? It is sheer denial to now write about reconstruction and rebuilding when Palestine is still being bombarded, innocent Palestinians are being torn apart by tank and drone fire and mothers are...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: As Gaza starts to rebuild, what lessons can be learned from Nagasaki in 1945?
A step in the right direction
October 20, 2025
I think Michael McKinley's idea has merit. This doesn't mean the politicians will buy into it... how after all, could anyone question their decision-making capability? They are the government after all. The article reflects the lack of independent strategic thinking at government level, which the government, on first reflex at least, will be likely to deny or ignore, but which, in my view is the case. Michael's idea may not be the final version of what is required, or of what may possibly evolve... but it is a step in the right direction.
Peter Kent from Melbourne
In response to: An immodest proposal for an ideal source of strategic policy advice
Another brick in the wall
October 20, 2025
John Frew's recent fine polemic reiterates much of the frustration described by the late Sir Ken Robinson. What gets measured gets manipulated and learning has degenerated into indoctrination. Even our red brick universities have degenerated into ideological battlegrounds and inculcated graduands are just another brick in the wall.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill, Brisbane QLD 4000
In response to: Counting what doesn’t count:
Delusional world
October 20, 2025
As proven by today's headlines, anyone who thought that Israel could be trusted to abide by a lasting peace is as delusional as the president who thinks he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for organising it. Israel won't stop until they alone own the land that “God” gave them, including Jerusalem.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Gaza has a ceasefire, now Palestine needs self-determination
Climate tipping points
October 20, 2025
It seems our governments lack the moral courage to do what the sciences, both physical and economic, demand to stave off Julian Cribb’s spine-chilling list of imminent climate tipping points. So, we, the people, must force the issue. If we can activate some social tipping points, people pressure might still help us rapidly spread the technologies, behaviours, social norms and structural reorganisation we need to delay the physical tipping points. If enough people start to demand, among other things, the removal of fossil fuel subsidies and divest from assets linked to fossil fuels, we may still move...
Lesley Walker from Naarm (Northcote)
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
The Apocalypse is coming
October 20, 2025
According to the Global Tipping Points Report 2025: “Already warm-water coral reefs are crossing their thermal tipping point and experiencing unprecedented dieback... This is sickening news, not just because so much beauty and biodiversity is being lost, but also the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people who depend on coral reefs. The world is likely to hit 2°C warming between 2034 and 2052. According to New Scientist (28 May), the world could experience a year above 2°C of warming as early as 2029. The chances are slim, but it's only four years away. What happens at 2°C?...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Israel and the ICJ
October 20, 2025
To add to the argument of Paul Heywood-Smith, the prophet Jonah was sent to preach repentance to the people of the city of Nineveh (Mosul). The people did repent, a response cited by Jesus as exemplary. Nineveh was a long, long way beyond even the Euphrates River, which the blasphemous political readings of Judaism might fancifully assert is part of a God-given Israel. (And by the way, how does God caring so much for the non Jewish people of Nineveh square with the political chosen people interpretation of Jewish fundamentalists? Or with the numerous prophetic references in the Old...
David Moloney from Seaford
In response to: Israel’s response to the International Court of Justice
Popular action can overcome existential despair
October 20, 2025
Julian Cribb has, in recent articles, summarised with authority the dangers we now face with our oceans , with our forests , and with our water. His summary of imminent tipping points encapsulates the urgency of our predicament. David Spratt has highlighted the shortcomings of the National Climate Risk Assessment. Cribb details the risks of misinformation. Our future looks grim, but policymakers — disproportionately influenced by vested interests — seem reluctant to explain this clearly to the electorate. Popular scepticism continues to hamper effective environmental protection. Despair reflects the sense of an individual’s incapacity to generate change in...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: Tipping, tipping, tipping... the dominoes fall
Speak up, Australia
October 17, 2025
Appreciation to Wayne McMillan who, in praising Greta Thunberg, calls for Australians to “write to their politicians and wake them up from their moral and ethical slumber of inaction”. We may live in a democratic country but most of our politicians are captured by gambling, fossil fuel and other lobbying groups. We can’t sit back and allow these industries to pursue profit at all cost. Speak up Australia.
Amy Hiller from Kew, Melbourne
In response to: Is Greta Thunberg the lone voice for justice in our world?”
Killing with chooks
October 17, 2025
Mark Macdonald is perfectly correct that antibiotic resistance (ABR) is a major threat to the human future. Unfortunately, even with the generous allocation of word space in Pearls & Irritations, it is not possible to enumerate every case of purblind, human stupidity. Some have to be taken as read! That said, ABR is sure to kill an awful lot of people come the mid-century, especially if we continue to use antibiotics just to create heavier chooks and fatter pigs, while carefully nurturing the zoonotic pestilences of the future. Indeed, we could regard ABR as a byproduct of...
Julian Cribb from Canberra, ACT
In response to: Global collapse
Nothing to see here
October 17, 2025
Some Australian ministers are now saying the Palestine war is over, nothing to see there. So we can still ship weapons parts to Israel even though the IDF is supporting settlers attacking Palestinian farms in northeast Palestine. We can ignore the slow Hiroshima carried out by the US and Israel over two years. I see too that the RAAF had a surveillance plane in the Ukraine, which our government seemingly believes to be closer than Palestine, at a time when the government was asked to provide aerial assistance to Australians and others in the Sumud aid flotilla. Oh,...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Denial and amnesia: Is the global community ready to welcome Israel back?
No 'just peace' without due diligence
October 16, 2025
Peter Slezak demands sincere attention and a fair, just and strong response from our flaccid government leaders, Albanese and Wong. It has taken — what? — little more than 48 hours from the signing of the Trump Peace Plan (TPP) for the Netanyahu Government and the IDF to resume killing Palestinians with the same gratuitously offensive excuses that have been such a predominant feature of their entire genocidal campaign. We wait for Albanese and Wong to change from calling on Hamas to abide by the terms of the TPP and apply the same pressure on the Zionists' genocidal...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Time for a 'just peace' for all peoples in Palestine
Will we out Advance?
October 15, 2025
We are indebted to investigative writers like John Queripel, Anthony Klan and Michael West Media, to name a few, who provide forensic exposes of elite-funded Advance. As in the US, the funders of Advance are far from household names but are nevertheless deeply invested in policy areas, especially climate action. They, and members of the Coalition, claim they are fighting a “woke elite”. They attempt — sometimes successfully — to divide and distract by igniting spot fires around which bathroom to use or what books children should or shouldn’t read. Donor Gina Rinehart claimed earlier this year that...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Who are ‘Advance’ and what are they doing to our politics?
No more killing in Palestine
October 15, 2025
I note Ramzy Baroud’s article. I hope our faith in the ability of the Palestinian people to govern wisely is not dimmed by more reports of extrajudicial killings in Gaza, channelling Donald Trump in the Caribbean.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: From Gaza, Palestinians have reasserted their agency on the world stage
The big con from a lame government
October 15, 2025
Take the backdown on super after the approval of NW Shelf gas drilling out to 2070, throw in tightening of FOI for good measure, and community Independents have been handed a gift to mobilise for 2028. The only, but major, problem they'll have is disabusing aspirants that they will ever have $3 million, let alone $10 million in super. It will also be an uphill battle getting them to realise that, without tax reform, they will forever be stuck with crumbling public health, education, transport and privatised child and aged care where costs go up as quality goes down....
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Keating welcomes changes to taxation of super
FOI a problem for Labor
October 15, 2025
It is a truism of so-called Australian politics that accurate information for the public constrains political skullduggery. It is interesting to see that Labor, who have campaigned over the decades on ensuring an informed public, tend to change their tune when in government. My own experience is revelatory. In a recent role running a state charity, a consultant employed by the Department of Health engaged with that Department in an underhanded and possibly illegal conspiracy to take over that charitable body and used public funds to further that design. FOI was crucial in enabling that body to...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A deserved defeat for Albanese on freedom of information
Extremism and fanaticism of every kind
October 14, 2025
I hope that Amelie has an enriching experience at the UN and strongly support the intent of her work to eliminate extremism and fanaticism of every kind on social media. The most serious kind is that promoted by various regimes around the world, not the least of which are Israel and the US. The algorithms that allow this state-sponsored extremism are far and away the most dangerous. That is because the wealth and influence of these state sponsors vastly outweighs that of the many invaded and occupied communities and cultures around the world marginalised by the Western-created algorithms...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Disarming extremism in the algorithmic age
The abiding consequences of criminality
October 14, 2025
This is a careful and comprehensive analysis of why those invaded and bastardised by the West in the apocryphal name of spreading democracy remain unconvinced by the fraud!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The half-life of humiliation and the hunger for revenge
Neoclassical pseudo-science
October 14, 2025
Further to Evan Jones’ sensible defence of the political economy versus neoclassical economics, he quotes neoclassicist Warren Hogan Jr implying the positive role of the scientific method for the latter. I spent four decades as an actual scientist (studying the Earth) and more time digging into the horrors of mainstream economics. Hogan’s claim is laughable. Neoclassical economics is built on flagrantly unrealistic assumptions, such as that we can all predict accurate probabilities of all future possibilities, that we are selfish competitors and there are no social interactions (in fact, humans are highly social), and that there are no economies...
Geoff Davies from Braidwood NSW
In response to: Fifty years of political economics at Sydney University – what has it meant for
Eugene Doyle: Magisterial analyst
October 14, 2025
May I compliment you for your superior analysis of 7 October 2023? I have not read of movements of Hamas in Israeli territory before. Hamas killed Israeli soldiers while overwhelming military bases, and some were also killed when kibbutzim and Nova Rave were attacked. Yet, if the more than 3000 Hamas insurgents could overwhelm the IDF bases so comprehensively, so quickly, and if murder was their intention, surely many more Israeli deaths could have resulted. Similarly, the unknown thousands (?) of Palestinians also did not murder. They were all very inefficient killers. Likely, Hamas came to capture Israelis...
Keith Mitchelson from brisbane
In response to: 7 October 2023: What really happened? Part 1
Will Katz or Trump prevail?
October 13, 2025
Ziyad Motala deserves congratulation on his article, as a key piece of American commentary right now is from Donald Trump: “The war is over. But, sad to say, then we have Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz just now in a tweet: “Israel’s great challenge after the phase of returning the hostages will be the destruction of all of Hamas’s terror tunnels in Gaza, directly by the IDF and through the international mechanism to be established under the leadership and supervision of the United States. This is the primary significance of implementing the agreed-upon principle of demilitarising Gaza and...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: The moral vacancy of American commentary on Gaza
Trump should never get the Nobel Peace Prize
October 13, 2025
Jeff McMullen eloquently presents the case that Donald Trump runs a violent country and is strongly inclined to violence himself. Thus, it is abhorrent that he should even be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize, whatever his involvement in the Israeli/Hamas peace deal. By all means, give credit where credit is due — and some is probably warranted in this case — but a Nobel Peace Prize recipient should be a person of peace, not a warmonger. The fact that Trump renamed the Department of Defence as the Department of War says it all. McMullen spells it out....
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: These are fighting words
Global collapse
October 13, 2025
The Julian Cribb article made for an interesting read. I think there is one more factor he has left out. This is the potential loss of antibiotics in the future. This will mean a natural increase in the death rate unless alternatives are found. Everyday common diseases and surgery will become increasingly dangerous. If the world can get over the population peak later this century without major collapse, then there is still hope.
Mark Mcdonald from drysdale
In response to: Died of a delusion' – the fate of modern civilisation?
The Lord of the Flies revisited
October 13, 2025
The sheer racial infantilism of the Anglo-Saxon elites and their security service underlings put me in mind of Golding's Lord of the Flies. Maybe there is a beast… Maybe it's only us!, seems to summarise the childish brutishness of our so-called security services. They seem to spend their entire lives projecting their own vacuous and depraved predispositions onto racially less worthy opponents, that they have confected in their fevered imaginings. Their lives seem to reflect the barbarity of the playground as they look all around them and see themselves reflected back to them in all their childish fantasising. ...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: How anti-China witch hunts in Canada and the UK ruin lives
Subtlety and nuance versus arrogant stupidity
October 13, 2025
A very well put together and thought out article. The problem for the Yanks is that they have, over the last 30 years at least, lost the arts of subtlety and nuance entirely from their diplomacy. Asia, by contrast because of its need to appease the Western beast, has developed these arts to a fine degree. South Korea is an excellent example as are Singapore, Malaysia and China.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: South Korea's caution on US Iran aims
Deforestation a climate and biodiversity calamity
October 13, 2025
When it comes to deforestation, it's hard to decide which is the worse consequence: climate change or biodiversity loss. As Julian Cribb notes, the Earth’s depleted forests are becoming a major contributor to Hothouse Earth. Deforestation is driving climate change. Yet forests are the habitat for countless species. All too often, to lose the forest is to lose the species that depend on it. According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, deforestation is a key threat to 60% of Australia’s listed threatened species. At least 1100 native vertebrate animals are forest-dependent. Species threatened by deforestation include the koala, swift parrot,...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The Earth uncloaked – A catastrophe in slow motion
Retire our unfair superannuation system
October 13, 2025
Misha Schubert's essay should resonate with anyone who cares about equity and justice. As she so eloquently reminds us, care is predominantly provided by women. Its value is inadequately recognised: to a huge degree it is hidden and unpaid; when it is paid, the pay and conditions are poor. This is an important reason — but far from the only reason — for the alarming rate of poverty among older women. Changes to the nation's superannuation system will not, however, achieve more than minor improvements. Our much-lauded super system is in effect a revers Robin Hood scheme: it...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: Australia faces a looming crisis of older women retiring in poverty
Cultivated China phobia
October 13, 2025
Colin Mackerras is very civilised in his refusal to comprehensively criticise the cultural failings of Australia with respect to China. His criticisms are restrained but very clear in their noting of the all-embracing nature of those failures. He could have further noted that, despite the decades since the abolition of the White Australia policy, the virulent racism that underlay that policy remains just below the surface of daily life. Our overweening beliefs in the superiority of white cultures over all others has been a clear driver of the willingness of even much of the Left to willingly swallow...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Lack of China capability can only do harm to society: Our current situation is a disgrace
Absurdities and atrocities
October 13, 2025
Voltaire got it right when he wrote that, Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. The absurdity in this case is to believe that legitimate criticism of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people constitutes antisemitism. Then you would also have to believe that any criticism of the policies of any country means that you are by definition anti the people of that country. Yet, no reasonable person believes that, as it would make free communication impossible. However, Zionists, unlike any other political group, are entitled to make such a claim about Israel, and the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,”
Van Jones and the Merchant of Venice
October 13, 2025
One is inclined to think of the duke's lines in the Merchant of Venice when reflecting on the common Western prejudice and racism in the comments of Van Jones. I am sorry for thee: thou art come to answer. A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch. Uncapable of pity, void and empty. From any dram of mercy. Seems to sum up the views of US elites pretty succinctly!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Van Jones and the moral vacancy of American commentary on Gaza
Netanyahu didn't 'do' Gaza. Israel did.
October 13, 2025
It is important to remember that Benjamin Netanyahu did not come from nowhere. He is a born and bred Israeli, a sabra, and is merely the latest in a long line of ethnic cleansers who have been running Palestine since its partition in 1947. The history of Israel is one of continuous dispossession and murder. Something has to change so everything can go on as before. This quote, from Giuseppe di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, is exactly what this article is warning against. Netanyahu might make an easy target for change. He is proudly visible, unrepentant and boastful....
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: How the West will package the genocide after Netanyahu
Prospect of sea-level rise is terrifying
October 13, 2025
David Spratt notes that the recent National Climate Risk Assessment underestimates projected sea-level rise. It suggests a one-metre rise by the end of the century, but evidence now suggests, because of tipping points, it is likely to be two metres and possibly much more. Just looking at the last Interglacial, for instance, when temperatures were a mere 1°C above pre-industrial levels, sea levels were 5-10 metres above those of today. The State of the Cryosphere report spells out why even 2°C warming is too high. 2°C will result in extensive, potentially rapid, irreversible sea-level rise from Earth’s ice sheets...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Australia’s climate assessment fails on sea-level rise risks and vulnerable comm
Graffiti is a hate crime, by anybody
October 13, 2025
Simon Tatz refers to the Bali bombings, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse, all terrible things, and all completely irrelevant to this topic. What is not irrelevant, as I mentioned and which he and many others choose to ignore, is the long list of extremely hateful, racist and deplorable statements by members of the Israeli Government, both current and previous. So, confected outrage, double standard or hypocrisy? Maybe all three. He seems to imply I, and others, have no experience of prejudice, racism, etc. and have no right to comment. I have every right, as we all...
Jerry Cartwright from Perth
In response to: Graffiti-is-a-hate-crime-too
Stark contrast
October 13, 2025
Last night (12 October), on SBS World News they showed Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting a refitted facility for the returned hostages after their horrendous ordeal at the hands of the Hamas terrorists. I could not help but note the contrast between that hospital and the bombed and under-supplied, under-staffed sometimes tent hospitals in Gaza seen on the nightly news and wonder how can this ever end. It is only one tit-for-tat atrocity from starting it all again.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Childhood on hold: Growing up too soon in Gaza and beyond
Singapore does it right
October 10, 2025
Singapore has been getting it right for many decades now, standing up for yourself, not unnecessarily making enemies and dealing with all on an equal basis. If we could only stop learning our lessons on power, diplomacy and geopolitics from the dying empire and get with the rising one!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A masterclass in agency: What Singapore can teach Australia about China
Security through diplomacy
October 10, 2025
Security for Australia within Asia is really quite simple. Join BRICS and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. We already have membership in the New Development Bank and the Reserve Contingent Arrangement. This will integrate us into the region which will dominate the world this century. Membership of all these guarantees our security in the region. Then all we have to do is navigate the US covert and criminal efforts, as in 1975 with Gough, to overturn our government and bring us back into being another bitch for the US!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australia’s next big bet lies East, not West
Shark nets save lives
October 10, 2025
Graeme Stewart is absolutely right on shark nets. My long career as an environmentalist has convinced me that sharks don’t want to eat you. But attacks do happen – with terrifying results. It concerns me that nets are a blunt instrument that catches other sea creatures as well as sharks. But it also concerns me that people are killed by sharks. The current orchestrated campaign against nets claims they don’t work and even that nets attract sharks. Professor Stewart has cut through this debate with an excellent summary of the scientific evidence – which clearly shows that shark nets...
John Dengate from Sydney
In response to: Shark nets do protect human life
Graffiti is a hate crime too
October 10, 2025
Jerry Cartwright thinks pro-terrorist graffiti is a trivial matter. Imagine if, after the Bali bombings, similar messages supporting those who killed many Australians were sprayed around our cities? Perhaps Cartwright would find it confected outrage if messages supporting domestic violence and killing of women were painted near his home, or support for child sexual abuse. Would that elicit confected outrage too? Here's a truth bomb – it's only people who will never experience antisemitism, Islamophobia or racism who dismiss vilification as trivial.
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Confected outrage
Evolved thinking needed to solve human problems
October 10, 2025
Militantly begging the authorities to do something about the widespread mess the species finds itself in is as ineffective as scapegoating them or happily acquiescing to the blue-sky tokenism they always offer up as solutions. This mutually convenient dance between the governors and the governed has been with us since the beginnings of our so-called sapience and shows no sign of abating anytime soon. Let us be clear, we will not solve the problems of our world with the same psychology that created them. An evolved and radical adaptation of our thinking is urgently needed, but highly...
Andrew Stretton from Fingal, Tasmania
In response to: Is Greta Thunberg the lone voice for justice in our world?