Letters to the Editor
The mean spectre of Robodebt
September 23, 2025
Thank you to Michael Keating for his analysis of the basic flaws in Liberal strategy, raised by Sussan Ley, that too many Australians are dependent on government. According to its website, the Liberal Party’s primary “belief” is in “the inalienable rights and freedoms of all peoples; and we work towards a lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative”. The Australian Council of Social Service last week stated that the federal government “must substantially lift deeply inadequate income support payments. The routine indexation leaving 1.5 million people unable to afford...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The Liberal Party’s economic strategy
Foget your enemies, fear your friends
September 23, 2025
Kellie Tranter correctly identifies the bull in the china shop that our great and powerful friend has become as it rapidly approaches its expected end as the head of the herd. She also identifies clearly the need of our national leadership to end our infantile and bovine subservience to that increasingly diseased and demented animal. Can we expect that kind of leadership from a class of politicians who have, over the last half-century, come to believe that their own political survival depends upon them showing appropriate submission to a very bad tempered and vindictive herd leader? Unlikely, but...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Our belligerent, authoritarian AUKUS partner
Courage or humanity?
September 23, 2025
It’s not courageous to recognise Palestine – it’s humane, necessary and a long-overdue step toward equality. Australia has to go further, following the example of Spain and Italy, and show that real friendship between countries is built on justice, not silence in the face of oppression. Standing up for the rights of Palestinians is not about fear of “rewarding terrorism” – it’s about saying that no people should ever be denied dignity, safety or statehood. Real courage isn't measured by loyalty to powerful allies but by the willingness to defend humanity, even when it comes at political or other...
Meg Schwarz from Macclesfired, Adelaide
In response to: Recognising Palestine a long overdue act of courage
Colonialism garbed in 'national security'
September 22, 2025
An excellent summary of the truth that is becoming increasingly evident to the 88% of humanity outside the West. The West, failing as it is economically without more recent colonies to exploit and immiserate, has revived colonialism but needed a plausible excuse for doing so. What they haven't figured out is the implausibility of their plausible reason to a world that no longer buys the b****hit. Further evidence of the declining diplomatic and military power of the dying empire!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Gaza – a new springboard for Western imperialism
Does the ECAJ support Netanyahu’s Gaza ambitions?
September 22, 2025
Ian Dudgeon sets it out well. I recently provided Alex Ryvchin of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry with a parallel. In 1963, the governor-general, on the advice of the Federal Executive Council, excised 140 square miles of the Gove Peninsula from the Arnhem Land Reserve, the traditional home of the Yolngu, so that French firm Pechiney could mine it. The Yolngu were not directly consulted and this led to the famous Bark Petitions. Israel has just recently announced that it will build the E1 settlement on Palestinian land, as part of the creeping full takeover of Northeast Palestine,...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Recognition of Palestine: For and against
Positive news about China
September 22, 2025
Just read your short article as noted above. It's really good to read something positive about China in the Australian press. I look forward to reading your follow-up. I am so sick of reading nothing but negative stuff about China and the continual war mongering we get fed by mainly the right-wing nut cases in this country.
Brian Dwyer from Weston NSW 2326
In response to: Message from the editor
Save Australia. Cut the US ties that strangle us
September 22, 2025
If we accept there are no easy prescriptions for an Australian strategy for survival independently in a singularly uncertain world, aren't we better off if surrounded by friends, or at least countries which respect us? By removing US shackles which disempower us, we would reclaim our sovereignty, regain respect from our Pacific neighbours and stop being the country where the US fights its war against China, with the Pacific keeping the US itself safe. Ordinarily, these would be the only reasons we need to grow up and take adult responsibility for our own country. But now, the US...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Australia has no alternative to biting America’s bullet
A price on carbon would end the LNP
September 22, 2025
The recent federal election and and the LNP infighting tell the story. We constantly talk of two-party preferred results when it has always been three-party preferred. It has never been more obvious that the link between the Liberals and the Nationals is tenuous at the best of times, and for us these are the worst of times. The flood of votes lost by the Liberals and the retention of seats by the Nationals indicate the concern of city dwellers about climate change. Those from the bush continue to push the line that as farmers they are more in tune...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: Cut emissions 70% by 2035? There’s only one policy that can get us there
China and climate change
September 22, 2025
Stewart Sweeney's article is very helpful for understanding China's role in furthering global responses to climate change. And I'd like to submit the following as an addendum pathway to a further deep appreciation for action in relation to Chinese participation in those responses. China amended its Constitution (about 2018) to include therein a policy objective of aiming for itself as an ecological civilisation. And partly in pursuance of this objective, it entertains frequent and widespread conferences attended by hundreds of participants in various parts of the country. These conferences are arranged and presented under the auspices of the...
Len Puglisi from 1 Balmoral Court Burwood East
In response to: Why the planet now needs China
Murdoch ooze at the bottom of the human gene pool
September 19, 2025
An excellent summary by Fred of the facts about the vast efforts of China in preserving the planetary environment. Their achievements are truly on a heroic scale, unlike those of the faecal farm that is the Murdoch empire. It is a truism today that any relationship between the excrement emitted by that turgid and foul-smelling estate and the truth is purely accidental.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Blaming China won’t keep the lights on – or pay the power bill
Dying from malignancy of its controllers
September 19, 2025
The UN was set up at the end of World War II to create a better world, but almost immediately its purpose was turned to preserving the power of the West (specifically the US) over the vast bulk of humanity. There have been valiant fights by that bulk of humanity — some successful, many not — to give meaning to its charter, but always against the staunch opposition of the rulers of the world. So much is this true, and particularly with the calculated ignoring of it by the US and Europe, that the rest of the world is...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: UN at 80 – Rome is burning, governments are fiddling and the UN is ailing
Elites and the glorification of war
September 19, 2025
The commitment of our elites to a supposed commemoration of the sacrifice of the common soldier in their chosen wars is best reflected in the words of George Orwell: The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Flawed Hero, flawed decision: The War Memorial’s institutional cowardice
Beam me up, Scotty...
September 19, 2025
If there’s anyone left to write the history of the Anthropocene, it should begin with the lessons of the Polynesian voyagers who colonised Easter Island. In an ideological frenzy, they destroyed their god-given ecology and withered to a cargo cult based on stone images staring out to sea for salvation. John Shurmann’s right; ozone is a powerful cleansing agent and has been used in recirculation aquaculture systems and water purification plants for decades. Sure, it kills both good and bad bacteria, but until the toxic Karenia mikimotoi bloom is dispelled, there’ll be no recovery of the marine ecosystem anyway....
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: SA’s algal bloom and the big, beautiful, bureaucratic ballet
Just another technology
September 18, 2025
There was a time when I was at the forefront of installation of technology at a plant that operated 24/7 and employed more than 20 people. The shift workers manually penned in readings every four hours and very expensive paper chart recorders recorded data 24/7, information that was seldom looked at unless something went wrong. I'm told now that one person attends weekly to collect samples to deliver to an accredited lab and have a look around. All the data can be accessed in real-time anywhere in the world and, instead of boxes of expensive charts and paper,...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: ai-much-ado-about-something-that-one-day-ma
Fascism again!
September 18, 2025
It is difficult to conceive of the sheer depravity of a culture that can be so deprived of a moral conscience that it could take nearly two years of open and massive genocide of a people and vast destruction of the place in which they lived, for that culture and its people to just begin to emerge from their moral degeneracy. Yet that is where we in the West stand, again it should be said not for the first time. The vast bulk of humanity, that we in the West have exploited, oppressed, colonised and debased for several hundred...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: ‘It is clear’: UN Commission finding confirms Israel committing genocide in Gaza
Guillotines to guns... that's progress!
September 18, 2025
I don't know what they called it in Marie-Antoinette's day, but in our day it's called neoliberalism and in the US we are seeing its natural endpoint, the implosion of a nation. When the top 1%, or even .1% garner so much of the common wealth unto themselves so that in their wealthy nation people are homeless and starving, then society becomes unstable. The greater the inequality, the greater the instability. And then .... whoosh! .... look what happens! It's not like history hasn't warned us.
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk
AUKUS versus sanity
September 18, 2025
An excellent summary by Nick Deane of the cunning, dissimulation and double-dealing encompassed by the scheme dreamed up by the Dodgy brother Scott Morrison to wedge the ALP on national security and the enthusiastic promotion of it by the gormless chicken-hawk Marles. Indeed, so successful is the scheme designed to wedge the ALP by that boneheaded and imbecilic fraudster Morrison that the ALP have allowed itself to be captured by it and have swallowed the bait of an impossible and vastly expensive fraud of an idea, that it will be held responsible for failing to achieve. Can anyone...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: AUKUS anniversary reminder to the prime minister
Doing politics differently
September 18, 2025
Stewart Sweeney wants an Australian version of Jeremy Corbyn's new party. In fact, we've got an almost, not quite version operating now. They are Community Independents – one person representing one constituency, but without a party structure. We just need more of them. We all know party structures render the direct wishes of an electorate null and void, supplanted by party uniformity. Not to mention careerism which leaves constituents with no representation worth the name. Community independents have shown they can pool the resources of their common interests while differing where their electorates share those differences. Every single...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Starmer’s collapse and the rebirth of a movement
Food insecurity one of the greatest climate risks
September 17, 2025
In reporting on the First National Climate Risk Assessment, Julian Cribb highlights a number of threats to Australia from a wild climate that is increasingly out of control. Among them is rising food insecurity which will result from falling crop yields, rising heat stress for livestock, increasing loss of water for irrigation, declining output from forestry and fisheries and biosecurity threats. This goes far beyond the worry that our wine industry will have to relocate to Tasmania as the mainland becomes too hot. It raises the question: Will we even be able to feed ourselves? Right now, we can...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Australia issues ‘terrifying’ climate warning
Confucius institutes
September 17, 2025
I really must respond to this article, as one of the two former academic directors of the Confucius Institute at the University of Melbourne, which we established in partnership with Nanjing University in the early 2000s. Nanjing University, by the way, was and is a highly reputable institution, judged at the time to be a fitting partner for the University of Melbourne. The CI was set up separately from the Chinese program in the Asia Institute, precisely in order to waylay any suggestions of interference. This did not stop some UoM academics from other departments from making unfounded allegations....
David Holm from Taipei
In response to: Confucius Institute decline signals China's soft power shift
Albanese is Billy Hughes and Joe Lyons, not John Curtin
September 17, 2025
Anthony Albanese styles himself as a recycled Curtin, and even as a recycled Whitlam. He is neither. He is more a combination of Billy Hughes and Joe Lyons, prime ministers who used the labour movement as vehicles, but whose ultimate ambitions to secure a place within the conservative Tory establishment, framed by loyalty to British imperial interests, “to King and Empire”, overrode all other considerations. Since 2022, Albanese has made loud and clear his loyalty to the British monarchy, his support for NATO extending its role into the Indo-Pacific, his extraordinary support for AUKUS, his determination to transfer massive...
Peter Henning from Melbourne
In response to: Australia needs to diplomatically disengage from our 'dangerous ally'
America, truly the 'farewell tour'
September 16, 2025
Chris Hedges is one of the most perceptive and concerned observers of US decline. As in his book, America,The Farewell Tour, he makes a compelling case for that decline driven by extremist religious ideologies, rampant individualism and a self-destructive economic ideology. It is a society with a history of widespread resort to inter-personal violence from its very beginning in the genocide of the native peoples and the enslavement of black Africans for personal gain. Hedges has an almost unique capacity to draw all that history together with the current consequences of it, to make sense of an otherwise chaotic...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk
A foreign policy based on facts, not fears
September 16, 2025
Geoff's article was a careful diplomat's assessment of how Australia might work more co-operatively with a rising, but peaceful China. It needs to be recognised that the vast increase in China's armed forces capabilities is a direct response to the decades-long encirclement of China by the US. It has no intention of allowing the US to begin another century of humiliation. It is adopting a sensible policy response to that effort by the US, by focusing on defence, not on the distant projection of military power. Its principal focus is the five principles for peaceful co-existence set out first...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s giant military parade didn’t surprise just the West
It won’t be a surprise
September 16, 2025
The 2020s will be known as the decade when global leaders, paralysed by weakness and lack of courage, turned their backs on the greatest threat to humanity — impending climate disaster — and instead beat the drums of offshore war, until they actually had a few. Prior to that, they were lining their pockets with dosh from weapons contracts entered into because of those wars. Meanwhile, the population, smelling the deception, and feeling the growing anxiety of millions, sensing impending natural disasters, scarcity, high costs, financial instability and government waste, decided to take to the streets and make clear...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Environment: Earth is getting hotter faster thanks to humans
Integration into US defence force (Department of War)
September 16, 2025
The question in my mind is, have we gone past the tipping point in our integration into the US defence force (Department of War)? I suspect that we have because the type and number of US bases in Australia and the greater importance of the functionality of these bases are to the US. We think that we have the US where we want them. They think the same of Australia. After all, the tail does not wag the dog. We have lost sovereignty to the US (gave it away, all our own work). In a war with China...
Peter Sheehy from Blackheath NSW
In response to: Australia needs to diplomatically disengage from our 'dangerous ally'
The inspirational leaders we need must step forward
September 16, 2025
The World Bank has joined the expert chorus accepting the confronting reality of humanity’s environmental predicament. We are killing the planet which hosts us — polluting the air, poisoning the land, and choking the seas with plastic — all to maintain continuing growth in both our numbers and prosperity. We are destroying our future to enhance our present. Julian Cribb asks: can we save a ‘liveable Earth’? Even at this late stage, we probably can. We have a clear, science-based understanding of our predicament, and of the imminent irreversible tipping points that give this challenge urgency. We have the...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: Can we save a 'livable Earth'?
The end of cruelty towards refugees
September 15, 2025
Sophie Singh calls for the end of cruelty towards refugees. Labor has done that in part, having transferred up to 19,000 people from TPVs to permanent residency. But we still have too many of the legacy caseload to process and they have been waiting too long. These are better circumstances for Labor. The fearmongering Peter Dutton is gone. But then we have the vitalisation of Nauru as a refugee colony of Australia if the Nauruans will let it happen. People from all parts of the world are taken to Nauru to start another life. If there are errors on...
Jennifer Haines from Glossodia
In response to: 12 years on, are we not yet tired of cruel policies towards asylum-seekers?
Armenian genocide has no comparison
September 15, 2025
Adrian Lipscomb is wrong to claim “similarities between the Armenian and Gazan genocides”. Anzac PoWs were witnesses and their uncensored accounts were recorded, as the Armenian National Committee of Australia explains: “Shortly after the Gallipoli campaign, Australian soldiers came into contact with the genocides of the Armenian, Greeks and Assyrians. Over 300 ANZACs were held as prisoners of war by the Ottoman forces. These ANZACs recorded their experiences in detailed diaries and memoirs with vivid accounts of the genocide. Many of these accounts are now stored in the archives of the Australian War Memorial.” For reasons only...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Genocide – Armenia (1915-16) and Gaza (2023-25)
Charlie Hebdo to Charlie Kirk – in a blink
September 15, 2025
Every faltering cause needs a martyr. Charlie Kirk is Trump’s Maga Movement sacrificial goat. The incandescent rage and the irrational response to Kirk’s assassination is not unexpected, but no less disturbing. While stifling public debate on criticism of Kirk’s aggressively expounded and controversial views is another step down the path of authoritarianism in the land of the free, extending visa bans on “foreigners” who may have expressed an adverse opinion to Kirk’s seems ludicrous, paranoiac even. While this shift from the America we grew up with seems relatively recent, in 1986 the controversial rock musician, Frank Zappa, said, during...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: US State Dept 'reviewing' foreigner comment on Kirk killing
A great resource for educators and students
September 15, 2025
The recent article by Peter Newman, Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University, and Ray Wills, Professor of Agriculture and Environment at the University of WA, was both timely and uplifting. In a global media climate dominated by crises, their account of humanity’s clean energy transition as “the fastest in human history” offers rare but essential optimism. The inclusion of extensive hyperlinks is a notable strength of online publishing, enhancing the article’s usefulness for educators seeking to engage an increasingly worried student cohort. Such resources may also encourage students to view the energy sector not only as a site...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Climate action can feel slow – but the fastest energy leap in history has begun
The hypocrisy of war
September 15, 2025
When two countries, who are not militarily matched, go to war we end up with a predictable outcome. In the case of Israel and Palestine, I have never seen any Palestinian tanks, jet fighters, bombers or soldiers in uniform. Maybe some Palestinian drones. And I have never heard rumours of the Palestinians having nuclear arms. Something other than just war must be happening. When I hear of hostage/prisoner exchanges, there seem to be a disproportionately high number of Palestinian prisoners released compared to the number of hostages released. And there are reports of prisoners being tortured in jail....
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: The politics of extermination
Absurd irony
September 15, 2025
Sovereign citizens attacking Camp Sovereignty. Can someone remind these sovereign seekers they —uncomfortably — have ideological ground in common? The Zionists standing side by side with white Australia pundits at Bondi Beach. Can someone tell this lot that they are traditional enemies? Your average Nazi sympathiser isn’t traditionally a fan of Jewish anything. I often wonder how Trump will reconcile the moment when the black-shirted skinheads realise they’re sharing the president’s metaphorical bed with the very ones Hitler targeted. There is an absurd irony here if it were so sickening. Can someone also remind Albo that...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: The retreat of social democracy and the rise of the hard right
Key climate mitigation issue overlooked
September 15, 2025
Like Peter Newman and Ray Wills, I’ve been a renewable energy researcher and campaigner for decades. But responsible boosting of renewables must recognise key barriers that Peter and Ray overlook. Growth in renewable energy, rapid though it is, is chasing growth in energy consumption. The result: in 2019, fossil fuels supplied 80% of global total final energy consumption, the same as in 2000. By 2022, renewables had reduced this to 78%. Even at several times their recent growth rate, renewables cannot overtake and replace fossil fuels by 2050. Yet a rapid transition is needed to avoid crossing climate tipping points....
Mark Diesendorf from Sydney, Australia
In response to: Climate action can feel slow – but the fastest energy leap in history has begun
Only you know if we did it
September 15, 2025
The year 2024 was when we exceeded 1.5 degrees, and on land this warming climbed to 1.8 degrees. Our carbon budget will be spent by October 2027. There is not enough suitable land on the planet for the necessary level of afforestation to offset fossil fuel emissions. At home, the Great Barrier Reef has suffered record losses of live coral cover. All this, again, made for difficult reading. All those with the power to make decisions to turn things around will all be gone by the time we genuinely acknowledge what needed to be done in 2025. Sainsbury concluded...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Environment: Earth is getting hotter faster thanks to humans
Truth will out
September 15, 2025
The news on 13 September confirms two extremely important developments in reporting on the genocide being inflicted by the ultra-Zionist government and the IDF on the Palestinian people. It reflects the accuracy of John Menadue’s article of 05/09 discussing the real number of casualties (deaths/injuries) from the Israeli atrocity. In official Israeli statements, the numbers of Palestinian casualties are rarely provided, but there is a continuum of protests that anything other than elimination of HAMAS terrorists is rare and sadly regretted. Unfortunate accidents; oversights, tragic mistakes… As for reports from Palestinian/UN/aid agencies etc. sources, these are discounted as propaganda....
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: The real death toll in Gaza
The real threat to the South Pacific
September 12, 2025
Cogent and clear analysis and recipe for appropriate Australian policy in the Pacific. If we truly had the best interests of the Pacific nations at heart, we would encourage appropriate Chinese help to them. By pitting ourselves with the US against China, we encourage inappropriate injections of Chinese money and trinkets like flash SUVs to dubious recipients to buy favour.
Rod Madgwick from Mt Victoria
In response to: Climate change, not China, is the real threat in the South Pacific
Australia backing the wrong horse
September 12, 2025
It is no wonder that successive Australian Governments have been unable to reach an agreement on gambling advertisement reform. We, as a country, have a mug punter mentality, a culture of backing the wrong horse. We march blindly off to wars. Once again we are heading down a very dangerous path, betting our houses in a housing crisis and backing the wrong horse trotters in a steeplechase. We need to stop sticking our noses into the internal affairs of other countries at the behest of waning powers. We need to adopt a policy of friendship to everyone, helping...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Climate change, not China, is the real threat in the South Pacific
Denying Armenian genocide sets the template
September 12, 2025
Jaron Sutton asks if atrocities in Gaza will be “effectively suppressed. If history is a guide, then yes. For more than a century, most nations have been co-opted to effectively suppress the Armenian and Ottoman Christian Genocide (also called Assyrian and Greek Genocide). Between 1913-23, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians and 250,000 to 500,000 Assyrians were slaughtered, along with an estimated 300,000 Pontic and Anatolian Greeks. Denial, including the refusal of mainstream media and policy commentators, reinforces the words of Adolf Hitler, who said on the eve of unleashing the Holocaust: I have placed my death-head formation...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: The suppression of the Arab voice and the genocide in Gaza
Mysteriously superior or mysteriously doomed?
September 11, 2025
Witheringly convincing. Electing a petulant, five-alarm snake oil salesman as President (who has assembled a like-minded governing cult within the White House) is not what has caused the dismal Western trajectory so well analysed in this article – but it has certainly accelerated this development. The US — and its Global West posse — are steadily looking more mysteriously ill-starred (even doomed), rather than mysteriously superior.
Richard Cullen from Middle Park, Victoria, 3206
In response to: Trump: Russia, India are ‘lost to deepest, darkest China’. Guess who did this, Donald?
Your right versus responsibilities
September 11, 2025
I blame the ridiculous oscillation and indecision by our government and medical officers, and the unquestioning gullibility of our media during the pandemic, for the rise of the right-wing sovereign citizens, Australian Zionists and white fundamentalists. If government officials oscillate during life and death moments regarding masks and vaccines, and make a health crisis all about personal rights, it inevitably gives rise to citizens who put themselves at the centre of their own universe. You have rights, yes, but they go hand in hand with responsibilities ie your civic duty towards your fellow citizens. I fear many of...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Courts brace for next wave of 'sovereign citizens'
Devaluing the Australian flag
September 11, 2025
As we saw during the Australia-wide anti-immigration rallies, and more recently during the clash between the Sumud Flotilla supporters and Zionists on Bondi beach, the Australian flag is now being associated with the far right, white Australia pundits and genocide supporters. The words terrorist, terrorism and antisemitism have been devalued beyond recognition. Now our flag is subjected to the same. Are you ready for the future consequences of that, Anthony Albanese?
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: A good captain can stop this Senator’s social cohesion ‘Titanic
Ploy: when in trouble, attack someone else
September 11, 2025
Henry V, Maggie Thatcher and the Indonesian president Sukarno knew that when they were in trouble at home, the thing to do was to attack someone else. So killing others to protect your own skin is nothing new, is it Netanyahu?
John Michael Diehl Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: Israel leaps over red lines in attack on Qatari capital Doha
A New York minute
September 11, 2025
Qatar is ostensibly a trusted US ally. It hosts the Udeid Air Base, the forward headquarters of US Central Command and headquarters of the USAF Central Command. You would think this gave it some protection when hosting a peace conference, a conference proposed by the US. Clearly this is not so, as the recent attack on Hamas delegates to that peace conference proved. I hope the sycophants in Canberra realise the extent of the Faustian bargain they have made with the twined Zionist regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv. The message from Qatar is crystal clear. Deviate from the...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Israel leaps over red lines in attack on Qatari capital Doha
We can’t stop here, this is bat country
September 11, 2025
It’s clear the geopolitical world is shifting on its axis. It’s equally clear that Australia has some serious decisions to make in the post-American world. The United States, split between the worldly and the godly, has elected a man whom history will judge as unhinged. It’s always been a task to hold half a heaving continent together in thought and purpose, and Donald J. Trump is in no way up to that challenge. So where does it leave Australia? We inhabit an island continent with fewer people than some global mega-cities. Two-thirds of our land is desert or arid...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: Trump and the post-American world
Replace multiculturalism with multiethnicities
September 11, 2025
Raghid Nahhas makes the excellent suggestion that we replace multiculturalism with multiethnicities in which belonging rests not on ancestry, culture or religion, but on adherence to democratic norms, equal rights and the rule of law. Or we could say: anyone is welcome to come here as long as they adhere to our liberal, democratic, egalitarian and humanitarian traditions. Perhaps multiracialism might be a better term, though we don't want people to abandon their cultures completely, only those aspects that are illiberal, undemocratic, unequal or inhumane. This may be difficult for those who come from cultures that are misogynist, where...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: 'Like us': Australia’s uneasy dance with immigration
Policy in silos
September 11, 2025
It seems to me that so much of the debate in this space is focused on the geopolitical and the military aspects rather than as a holistic discussion around the economic, political and military aspects as a whole. It succeeds in raising good arguments around a limited range of domains, but ignores the economic question and its impacts on capabilities. What we know is that the US has a national debt of more than US$37 trillion and a debt falling due for re-financing this year of US$9 trillion. We also know that the US bond market is unable to...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Xi’s parade tips the diplomatic balance sheet in Asia
The Indonesia 'uprising'
September 10, 2025
If Duncan Graham was to trace the source(s) of the funding for the Indonesia uprising, he would find it very difficult to dismiss the notion this uprising is a Hong Kong redux. I suggest Duncan and P&I get in touch with Nury Vittachi, who has traced that funding e.g. Trump didn't gut all of the NED's funding. Not forgetting Nury has been published at P&I numerous times before.
David Thompson from CLAYTON
In response to: Xi targets Prabowo and ditches Trump
Is climate action too expensive?
September 10, 2025
A recent Lowy Institute poll shows 51% support to address the “serious and pressing problem” of global warming, even if it involves “significant cost”. However, this slim majority has dropped six points since last year. One-third says the harmful effects will be gradual and we should take steps that are “low in cost”. The case for spending large amounts of money has not been well argued. Higher energy prices are repeatedly and falsely blamed on renewables; China’s emissions are raised as a reason for Australia to do next-to-nothing; and a movement (seemingly orchestrated by far-right interests) is growing in...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: Albanese’s sliding doors moment on climate
Open letter to Nobel Peace Prize panel and Donald Trump
September 10, 2025
Please read this article and, if any of it is even remotely true, ask yourselves how could you possibly award a Nobel Peace prize to an American president, any American president? I know you are under pressure to award this president the Peace Prize, but perhaps the way to appease him is to rescind all previous presidential awards. This didn't start yesterday.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The price of genocide: How US funding sustains an unravelling Israeli economy
The Japanese in China
September 10, 2025
I was pleased to read Paul Malone's criticism of Sarah Ferguson/the ABC regarding her glib statement that it was the Nationlist's Kuomintang, not the Chinese Communist Party forces, that defeated the Japanese. It is a long time (67 years) since I studied a bit of Chinese history as part of my Chinese language study at Sydney University, but my memory is still strong that it was the CCP forces that were most influential. The only text that I recall using is that by John K. Fairbank, The United States and China, first published in 1948. Unfortunately, I have...
Jan Cooper from Terrigal
In response to: The ABC is inventing China's war history
Too many in comfort denying atrocities
September 9, 2025
I share the distress identified by Dennis Altman. “Something is unnerving about seeing people sitting in comfort in Australia denying the evidence of carnage and starvation,” Altman writes in a sentence that is also applicable to Syria, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali and a dozen other countries suffering carnage, starvation and war crimes. The ignorance of many people about the Gaza conflict, and the many other ignored humanitarian crises, among comfortable Australians is lamentable. Maybe not for readers of this public policy journal, but in general I’ve been dismayed at the paucity of knowledge about the Middle...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: The Liberal Party and Israel
Stopping Israel's genocide
September 9, 2025
Refaat Ibrahim’s hope for a popular uprising by starving Palestinians against the rogue state, Israel, is unlikely to succeed without external pressure. So far, the Australian Government is avoiding actions of substance that could include the following: • Ban export of weapons components to Israel and any military co-operation with Israel; • Ban imports from Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law; • Impose sanctions (e.g. asset freezes, travel bans) on all members of the current Israeli Government and military commanders; • Greatly increase humanitarian funding to UN agencies and NGO groups providing food and...
Mark Diesendorf from Sydney
In response to: Seven hundred days of genocide
State terror came first
September 9, 2025
The Académie Française dictionary in 1798 defined terrorism as a system, or regime of terror and terrorist as an agent or partisan of the Terror that arose through the abuse of revolutionary measures (The French Revolution and Early European Revolutionary Terrorism by Michael Rapport) In other words, state terror came first, preceding any other kind, the very first example being the revolutionary regime in France, 1793-1794. Ample examples exist today: the US drone warfare over NW Pakistan 2004-2018; Saddam's mukhabarat; Assad's torturers and Israel's war on Gaza. All these, it might be thought, represent state terrorism – which is...
James Schofield from London
In response to: Who is a terrorist?
Vice-chancellor pay
September 8, 2025
While it is hardly unexpected that accountants would focus upon pay and governance as the source of problems in Australian universities, these are superficial targets which mask determinants. The pay that vice-chancellors receive is a symptom, not a cause. The central causes of what have become little more than state consultancies are that teaching students is now almost completely devalued. This began in the late 1970s-early 1980s and is now rife. Casual contract, part-time teachers are responsible for many first- and second-year undergraduate courses. If senior professors etc appear at lectures for these courses, it is in a Joan...
Scott MacWilliam from Amaroo, ACT
In response to: Reining in vice-chancellor and executive pay
Products of the system
September 8, 2025
The system of education and social conditioning set up by the US, in particular, since early last century and re-enforced throughout the last century has worked superbly well. It has ensured that those who do not give their assent to that conditioning are marginalised from polite society and only accidentally and temporarily occupy positions within the agencies of opinion formulation within our societies. As George Orwell pointed out, those who make it to positions of prominence within the mainstream media actually believe the nonsense they are peddling and are where they are as they can be trusted not to...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The betrayal of Palestinian journalists
Thank you, Teow Loon Ti
September 8, 2025
Thank you, Teow Loon Ti for your clear and well-formed response to the piece by Ju Hyung Kim titled “Asia must learn from SEATO and build its own NATO”. In truth, I read the title of the article mentioned and couldn't read it as it is obviously an Uncle Sam homily. Too bad our media is so saturated with such articles of faith, detached from reality, history and evidence. Teow has spoken to reality, a relief in troubled times.
Mark Bulluss from Dalmeny
In response to: Seeing truth through the fog of war mongering
Bolton, the archetypal chickenhawk, all squark!
September 8, 2025
This is a good summary of the truly insubstantially equipped Bolton. He hasn't seen a war, actual or proposed, that he doesn't like, from a distance of course. His later life bravado was preceded by a careful avoidance in his youth of any likelihood that he would actually serve anywhere near where the killing and the dying were taking place. His enthusiasm for war has been acquired along with an unerring capacity to avoid it in practice. Like many of his ultra-conservative colleagues in Washington, he is more than happy to send other mothers' children to fight and die...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Southeast Asia pragmatic on China's rise
A land of standing corpses
September 8, 2025
As John Menadue correctly points out, the death toll in Gaza is far higher than those killed directly by Israeli bombs and bullets. A conservative multiplier of four indirect deaths to every one direct killing gives a minimum of 300,000. But this overlooks the fundamental point: genocide is not simply about killing. Killing is but one of the depraved ways that Israel is committing genocide. Israel's Zionazi holocaust is about the destruction of the Palestinian People. A Semitic people, no less. To fully gauge that destruction, one needs to look to different research; Guillot et al, Lancet, February...
Rick Pass from Home Hill FNQ
In response to: The real death toll in Gaza, John Menadue
We must defeat the demon of fossil capital
September 8, 2025
Julian Cribb potently describes the latest report, A Climate-First Foreign Policy for Australia, from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, as a “trailblazing vision of where an enlightened, informed, and caring humanity might go in the face of the brutal escalation in climate impacts”. Cribb would know the soon-to-be-released National Climate Risk Assessment has been evocatively depicted by insiders as “dire,” “diabolical,” and “extremely confronting”. Fittingly, ASLCG calls on government to “mobilise the resources necessary to address this clear and present danger, and to decarbonise our economy to reach net zero emissions as close to 2030 as possible. Climate...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Military experts warn of climate wars
Dump AUKUS
September 8, 2025
If you are not convinced that the Australian government must dump AUKUS by • The fact that the primary utility of the proposed AUKUS submarines is to augment a US attack force aimed at China, our major trading partner; • The obvious ceding of sovereignty to the US empire that this entails; • The questionable logic of acquiring a submarine fleet unsuitable for coastal defence of Australia; • The certainty that the $368 billion budget will blow out, as illustrated by the fact that Australia has already paid a $5 billion instalment of a $47.8 Billion...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: SSN AUKUS – Heading for a quagmire
I nominate you
September 8, 2025
I nominate Margaret Callinan, Bob Pearce and Les MacDonald to head our new government. They know the arc of our history; they see the repeated pattern of strategic errors successive Australian Governments have made; they each have brave innovative ideas, rooted in social conscience, and can articulate and educate in less than 200 words. Bravo Margaret, Bob and Les. Your voices are so valued.
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: The real death toll in Gaza
It couldn’t be simpler
September 8, 2025
It’s not about decisions made by Hitler in 1939. It is no longer about decisions made by Hamas on 7 October. It’s about decisions made today, in this moment, by one's own conscience. It’s about setting aside economic contracts, monetary incentives, lobbyist influences, deals behind closed doors, and harkening to one’s own consciousness of what is right and what is evil. It couldn’t be simpler. Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong, Tony Burke: it couldn’t be simpler.
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Greta Thunberg 'disgusted' by global silence on Gaza genocide
Aussie scepticism
September 8, 2025
The courageous Sarah Dowse may have been born in America, but she has evidently acculturated well into Australia, even to taking on the fabled Aussie bullshit detector. Add to this her insider view on Israel the Jewish State and she has the basic credentials for exposing perspectives avoided by the legacy media in the face of real or perceived pressure by the powerful pro-Israel lobby. I appreciated, in particular, her scepticism about ASIO's role in the Iran affair in which, (and in numerous other national security crises) no evidence ever comes under public scrutiny.
Vince Corbett from Essendon
In response to: Israel, hasbara, antisemitism and Iran
Leaders who have lost their moral compass
September 5, 2025
It is hard, if not impossible, to any longer believe that the vast bulk of our leaders in the West are fit for their leadership positions. When they not only turn away from the grotesque, genocidal activities of the Israeli Government, but participate in, and publicly support them, knowing the truth of what that support enables. The truth about this vast criminal enterprise, and those without the moral courage to condemn it, are a rebuke to the view of Hanna Arendt about the banality of evil. This evil is not banal. It is contemptible and abhorrent. It will...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The real death toll in Gaza
MSM under-count indigenous deaths in US wars
September 5, 2025
This is an extremely important article by John Menadue demanding total trade sanctions against Israel because of hundreds of thousands of Gaza deaths. Dr Zeina Jamaluddine and colleagues estimated that 64,260 Gazans died violently by day 269 of the Gaza massacre (30 June 2024) (The Lancet) and hence 136,000 Gazans died violently by day 569 (25 April 2025) with a “conservatively estimated” four times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths from violence and deprivation by 25 April 2025. That is 28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million, and 11...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: The real death toll in Gaza
Labor’s de-democratisation of Australian politics
September 5, 2025
Gregory Clark writes well on the Palestine issue. As a result of FOI applications, I now know that up till about six weeks ago, Albo had had about 65,000 pieces of correspondence on Palestine since the Israel-Palestine war broke out, and had answered none. Penny Wong had had about 52,500, and had answered about 17% of them. It is clear that governments of both persuasions largely believe that foreign affairs is not a suitable policy area for democratic control resulting from widely encouraged public debate. It has taken more than 22 months of weekly marches just to get Labor...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Canberra and Gaza
Urgent action required to stave off collapse
September 5, 2025
The latest report by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group warns that climate change may lead to widespread food insecurity, economic destabilisation, large-scale people displacement, war, failed states and social collapse. If ever there were a better collection of people to make the connections between climate and security, it is the ASLCG led by Retired Admiral Chris Barrie. We must heed their warnings and pull out all stops to mitigate climate change. Possibly the most worrying, apart from widespread food insecurity, is large-scale people displacement. Some suggest a billion displaced by 2050. How on earth will the world cope...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Military experts warn of climate wars
Climate criminal Australia's huge CO2 emissions
September 4, 2025
Important and revealing article by Peter Sprivulis. I have been a career biochemist for the last 50 years and researched energy transduction in plants that over hundreds of millions of years generated huge fossil fuel resources. The atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases (GHGs; notably CO2, CH4, and N2O) from unrestrained fossil fuel and other exploitation are at record highs, are increasing at record rates (notwithstanding “we are tackling climate change” political rhetoric), and existentially threaten humanity and the diosphere (see Gideon Polya, “Climate Crisis, Climate Genocide & Solutions”, 843 pages, 2020). Yet the Australian Government’s “Australian Energy Statistics...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Sprinting to stand still: Still no progress in Australia’s energy transition
The fog of espionage
September 4, 2025
The fog of war plays a distant second to the fog of espionage. We are witnessing this writ large in the unfolding drama being played out over the alleged Iranian involvement in the recent terrorist attacks against Jewish targets here in Australia. When considering the pros and cons of the arguments being presented, it is important to keep in mind one crucial truth. The various Zionist/Israeli lobbying groups, voicing their opinions and attempting to influence both public opinion and state policy, have a long and proven record of framing the narrative. Saying something first, and loud enough and often...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Messiness in spookdom: Australia's Iran Contra deal
Labor sets sail in the same policy boat
September 4, 2025
Thank you, Annabel Hennessy, for calling out the persistent policy cruelty of our political “leadership” and its impact upon many stateless refugee neighbours in our midst. The legislation referred to, as background to the Nauru deportation proposal, presents us with the same lethargic compliance we have endured from Liberal-National Coalition hard-heartedness. Are we to allow Australia to take the same new normal path pioneered by the Trump administration to “win” by withholding justice from Kilmar Abrego Garcia? How long will it be before the Labor Party (and its equally lethargic Parliamentary opponents) realise that a healthy Australian democracy has...
Bruce Wearne from Ballarat Central
In response to: Australia should halt plan to deport refugees, migrants to Nauru
Subs deal
September 4, 2025
Noel Turnbull certainly sets out a valid alternative, but I would have thought the whole submarine saga is going to be undermined by drones in any case as the Navy is already developing long-range underwater drones! They will certainly be fully developed well before we ever see the mythical AUKUS subs, or at least my grandchildren see them!
Max Bourke AM from Campbell ACT
In response to: If you really want some subs – try this
When is it time for the climate rebellion?
September 4, 2025
I am so grateful to the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group for their complete commitment to our ongoing well-being and their respect for our intelligence and capacity to deal with the terrifying truth. Both this commitment and respect appear to be somewhat half-hearted from our government. The latest evidence of disregard for our climate occurred on 28 August. That day, the Albanese Government quietly granted approval for Glencore to expand its Ulan thermal coal mine near Mudgee in NSW. Meanwhile, the government steadfastly refuses to share the contents of two apparently terrifying documents detailing the security threat posed...
Lesley Walker from Northcote
In response to: Climate-first foreign policy essential for Australia and regional security
Thanks
September 4, 2025
What a privilege to read such an insightful article by someone with such a pedigree of both experience and principle, not to mention a global citizen's lifestyle. Thank you.
Bede Doherty from Melbourne
In response to: What goes around, comes around
'Turn back the boats' – tell them they're joking
September 3, 2025
The recent protest marches in Australian capital cities shows the ignorance of the protesters in basing their protests on the colour of people's skin and their religion. They should have instead protested about the climate, because rising sea levels alone in our vicinity will affect tens of thousands (17,000 in Indonesia). Many thousands of Pacific Islanders will lose their island homes and many million Indonesians will look South due to inundation of low-lying coastal areas. At present, the UK is trying to stop the refugee trickle across the Channel which will be nothing compared to the flood...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Climate-first foreign policy essential for Australia and regional security – top security leaders
Discernment and nuance: Victims of AI
September 3, 2025
Many are under the illusion that AI chatbots like ChatGPT are objective sources of information, having collected data across multiple sources. But they are not. AI chatbots, like ChatGPT, are designed to sycophantly agree with the user. This means that whatever you ask, these AI chatbots are designed to encourage, and agree with, your bias. This was demonstrated when a teenager contemplating suicide, was actively encouraged to do so by ChatGPT. That these AI platforms are designed to sycophantly agree with the user, makes them, due to our human nature, highly addictive. What human being doesn’t want someone...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: I'd rather a bloodied shark than AI
St Albo of the lost cause
September 3, 2025
Let’s get real about greenhouse gas emissions; they are a damper on productivity. They are instrumental in the function of the global ecosystem. As things stand today, the taxpayer is picking up the cost of the destruction, caused by an unstable environment, as well as the toxic pollution from the forever chemicals that actually present a bigger threat to life on our planet than rising temperatures and sea levels. From lost lives, homes and livelihoods to inflated prices and insurance premiums, they shell out while the corporations creating them are laughing all the way to the bank. Then there’s...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The one big reform not discussed at Labor's roundtable
Common sense versus fear of uninformed criticism
September 3, 2025
This is a common sense and intelligent approach towards attendance at these important celebrations. It is unlike the federal government which continues to pander to how they think the US and Rupert Murdoch will feel about such attendance. Hopefully Bob Carr's attendance will keep those important diplomatic channels open until our governments regonise the reality of the new power dynamics at work geopolitically!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Beijing invited me to their special celebration. Here's why I'm happy to go
Bob Carr’s rational approach
September 3, 2025
Congratulations to Bob Carr for attending the 80th anniversary celebration by China of the end of World War II. And it’s hardly surprising that Vladimir Putin is attending. Without the Soviet Union, China, we (and the people of Germany, Italy and Japan) might have lost the battle against German, Italian, and Japanese fascism. The Spanish and the Portuguese had to wait well beyond World War II for an end to fascism. Carr quite rightly reminds Andrew Hastie that only weeks ago Vladimir Putin was in the United States. If you want to solve problems between nations you have...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Beijing invited me to their special celebration. Here's why I'm happy to go
Swearing in schools and community
September 3, 2025
While I agree with Samantha Helps that teachers punishing children for swearing puts the teacher in a different space to the community from which the children come, what she seems to miss is that there are multiple levels of swearing. One is when the swearing is aimed at the teacher or another pupil. This is where the teacher has a responsibility to stop this behaviour. It is clear that swearing is now endemic in our communication to add emphasis or to express emotions such as when you hit your thumb with a hammer. Such swearing is now on TV...
Richard Swinton from NSW Northern Rivers
In response to: For the sins of the father
Wanning Sun correct re over-interpreting attendance
September 3, 2025
Wanning Sun is correct in pointing out that it would be unwise to read too much into what countries have been invited and the relative seniority of those representatives. There is clearly some guidance that can be obtained from it, but there are a host of factors that shapes such attendance that are specific to the individual nations concerned. It would also be unwise to use that attendance list to draw conclusions about the relationship between China and the vast bulk of the global South. More telling are the substantive actions of that South in their enthusiasm to enter...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: A tale of two lists: How geopolitics shaped the attendance of China’s parade
Labor should, and could, introduce a price on carbon
September 3, 2025
Thanks to Ross Gittins, economics editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, for so clearly outlining Rod Sims’ five reasons why a carbon price is both “necessary and urgent”. Sims, now chair of Ross Garnaut’s Superpower Institute, argues that Australia needs a carbon price “so effective climate action can be taken, so our targets can be met, and so we can more than fully compensate households for the price effects” while also strengthening public budgets. These outcomes would be well received by Australians and should give the Albanese Government courage in its second term. There is also international precedent....
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: The one big reform not discussed at Labor's roundtable
You don't find truth or the full story in the mainstream media
September 3, 2025
The mainstream media has had years of practice ignoring reality in Palestine, not only since 2023. But if you want to argue the toss about prior to 2023, the MSM have had undeniable decades of practice reporting on climate change. Whenever it suits them, the liars, the deluded and the vested interests denying truth and science must be given equal space to spread their falsehoods. Why does anyone pay for legacy media anymore? The sooner it finally dies out, the better. We already have quality alternatives.
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The media’s Israeli atrocity treadmill
Chinese, Bengali and Gaza holocausts
September 2, 2025
Important article by Professor Jocelyn Chey. In the 1937-1945 Chinese holocaust 35-40 million Chinese died from violence and deprivation under Japanese occupation (15% of the pre-war population). Australian attorney-general Robert “Pig Iron Bob” Menzies made Australia complicit by permitting iron exports to Japan. Michael Portillo included me in a 2008 BBC program Bengal Famine that included comments from Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya (Welcome Institute, London): “That six to seven million [World War II Bengal famine deaths] figure includes the deaths that happened in let’s say the provinces of Bihar, Orissa and Assam”, economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen (Cambridge, Harvard): “Famines...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Marking September 2: Lest we forget
It is the (capitalist) system that is the problem
September 2, 2025
I like, and usually agree with, much of what Caitlin Johnstone has to say about world affairs. However, in her latest piece — on the demerits of Western civilisation — she is wrong to ascribe to all Westerners responsibility for the grave wrongs that have been carried out in effect by small concentrations of government and corporate power in the capitalist societies of the West. To conflate the sins of this small, grasping, self-interested minority with Western civilisation and with what most Westerners believe is a mistake. Indeed, it might be said that Caitlin has fallen victim to...
Peter Blunt from Siem Reap
In response to: Western civilisation is not worth saving
How to create fear in the Australian Jewish community
September 2, 2025
Jack Waterford's article fails to mention one pertinent aspect of the bombing of the Melbourne synagogue. That aspect is crucial, namely that the Adass branch of Jewish Orthodoxy is anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. The Israel lobby feasts on this lack of transparency and uses it to further its attempt to make Australia focus on so-called antisemitism, instead of the real issue, which is Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In other words, if, as ASIO blandly declares, Iran is responsible for the attacks, then ASIO implies that Iranian Government officials are as uneducated and stupid as Australians who don't know...
Dieter Barkhoff from Melbourne
In response to: When spying is subcontracted to gangsters
Western civilisation is not worth saving
September 2, 2025
I agree with Caitlin Johnstone that Western civilisation has come to a very bad pass, especially in terms of politics and colonial thinking. However, I'd like to defend another aspect of Western civilisation, namely the music, art and literature it has produced. I would regard it as a crime to throw away the music of Mozart or Bach. I even think some of the Enlightenment values that originated in Western civilisation, even though they are not necessarily part of it, are worth preserving. It's right to attack values of people like Trump and others we associate today with...
Colin Mackerras from Capalaba, Queensland
In response to: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/09/western-civilisation-is-not-worth-saving/?u
Consultant culture at universities
September 2, 2025
It's not only at universities, our politicians have also outsourced their resposibilities. What government services are left are controlled by mostly large overseas corperations. When the roundtable discussion about regulation took place, they never mentioned that they are happy and instrumental in writing those regulations so as to exclude small to medium Australian bussiness from the honey pot.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Reining in the consultant culture in Australia’s public universities
Two world health threats
September 2, 2025
Julian Cribb's professional and prescient article shows we have two serious problems. There is the well-founded threat of lethal pathogens and also the threat from the militant, irrational groups opposed to immunisation and masks. Lately we have seen the power and rage of a resentful minority, seriously uninformed, igniting the fuse of fear and pushing an aggressive barrow. It is to be hoped there is sufficient potent research into these groups to enable myth and terror management, rather than attacking them head-on and empowering the work of the fearmongers thus granting them more potency as they will claim to...
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: The next pandemic is 'an epidemiological certainty'
Overcrowding and overpopulation a health issue
September 1, 2025
Julian Cribb cites overpopulation and overcrowding as the two major causes of a pandemic. Thus, cruise ships and high-rise buildings must be regarded as giant petri-dishes, facilitating the growth of micro-organisms that cause disease. This is a problem because, while populations grow, we do need to densify our cities. We have to stop urban sprawl, that is, the encroachment of cities onto natural bush or farmland, the latter needed to feed people. The only solution is to stop further growth of human numbers. Cities can't go out without destroying other species' habitats or our food base, and they...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The next pandemic is ‘an epidemiological certainty’
The circle of death
September 1, 2025
The story of what John Darby saw didn't end there. Eighty-plus years on, some of the victims of the Holocaust, some children of Holocaust survivors and some grandchildren of Holocaust victims are seeking revenge using the Holocaust to justify any and all actions. In 100 years, will the great-grandchildren of the Holocaust still be at war with the Palastinian survivors of the genocide and their offspring? Will the Palistinians be using the genocide as a justification for any and all retribution? Some of them will. The arms industry will continue to benefit from it.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide Są
In response to: The gates of Gaza
Submarines, nuclear or otherwise, are obsolete
September 1, 2025
Expensive manned submarines are a relic of past world (meaning European) wars! Just like aircraft carriers, infantry wars and manned aircraft. If the special military operation in Ukraine and the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank have taught our military leaders anything — and that is questionable — it is that the fundamental nature of war has changed. UAVs, accurately guided missiles and bombs, along with accurate detection of underwater threats and use of underwater unmanned drones using AI and quantum computing, have dramatically cheapened the fighting of wars and have increased its lethality substantially. That...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Ditch AUKUS Pillar One. It involves Australia too much in US strategy
Never again – but for whom?
September 1, 2025
I commend George Browning, former Anglican Bishop, for his valiant fight for the rights of Palestinians and for Jewish, Armenia, Rwanda, and Gaza holocausts to be remembered and not repeated. However, there appears to be an unconscious disremembering, as shown by the absence of even a cursory mention by Browning of the horrors suffered by people in the Far East (a somewhat pejorative Anglo-Saxon term). Across East and Southeast Asia, tens of millions suffered untold brutalities under World War II Japanese imperialism. Notably, the horrific Nanking Massacres and Unit 731 (Imperial Japanese Army chemical and biological warfare research unit,...
Jeffrey Chew from Melbourne
In response to: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/never-again-so-the-world-pledged/
The Holocaust industry
September 1, 2025
I agree with George Browning's article; however, the horrific things perpetrated by Hitler's consort on European Jews, not to mention millions of others, do not mean Judaism has a claim on the word holocaust. Up to 10 million Congolese died under Belgian rule, Shashi Tahoor claims 120 million Indians died under British rule, and there have been countless other massive numbers of victims of European colonisation. Norman Finkelstein wrote the book The Holocaust Industry after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel began refining its River to the Sea Crusade, all the while hiding its atrocities behind the Holocaust cloak....
Dieter Barkhoff from Melbourne
In response to: Never again – so the world pledged
Iran, or Israel false flag operation?
September 1, 2025
Michelle Grattan should be far more critical in her approach to Mike Burgess and the Iran affair. There has not been a shred of evidence presented to prove Iranian sponsorship of terror acts in Australia. Suggesting that Iran's motive is to cause disharmony is asinine to say the least. Clearly and logically, the only country that would gain from these terror acts is Israel. These gains include: shifting public opinion away from a free Palestine, the Palestine Resistance and its allies; emboldening the Zionist lobby in Australia at a time it is increasingly becoming isolated; elevating Iran to the...
Fergus Robinson from Melbourne
In response to: Grattan on Friday: Mike Burgess, the spycatcher who gives ASIO a very public face
Reviewing poll findings on US alliance
September 1, 2025
One striking aspect of year-to-year changes in Lowy Institute polling figures, covering the popularity among Australians of Australia-US relations reported on by Jaron Sutton, can perhaps be explained by a differing interpretation of the response to one particular question in the poll. Sutton reports that in the polls between March, 2024 and 2025, Australians' trust in the US to act responsibly in the world had plummetted from 64% to 44%, yet despite this, a whopping 80% of Australians felt the US alliance was very or fairly important for our security, down just three points from 83% in 2024. ...
Bruce Foskey from Blackwood, Vic
In response to: Time to dial back the Australia-US alliance
Australia is one trade deal away from backing authoritarians
September 1, 2025
I understand that Taiwan feels threatened by China. However, the arguments in the article I feel are not substantiated. China now has the expertise and capability of surpassing Western chip capabilities, perhaps not as yet achieved, but in development. I feel this is shown in part by the speed that China developed AI capability in such a short time. The West appears under the misapprehension that China needs chips from Western manufacturers, but I feel the reality is that China will use Western technology when it is cost-effective and available. The idiocy of forcing Dutch manufacturers to stop...
Doug Foskey from Tregeagle
In response to: Australia is one trade deal away from backing authoritarians, says Taiwan
Will the Albanese Government listen?
September 1, 2025
I commend Usman Khawaja for his principled stand on Gaza. Given his elevated position in the Australian sporting firmament, he managed to gain an audience with senior members of our current government. To his great credit, he did not waste this chance. Will the Albanese Government listen? The short answer is no. Thinking in Canberra has been captured by the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council. This is a great shame, especially as better advice is readily available from the Jewish Council of Australia, an organisation founded in February 2024 specifically to represent non-Zionist Australian Jews and to counter, or at...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Usman Khawaja urges Albanese to sanction Israel over Gaza genocide
Blurring the line between sport and politics
September 1, 2025
Usman Khawaja is claimed to have blurred the line between sport and politics, but what concerns me is that Australians don't have the same access to the prime minister as lobbyists and high-profile sportspeople. Even after the resounding victory in the federal election and a series of marches around the country, the government and, in particular, the Opposition require high-profile lobbying to see what is obvious to a large portion of the population. No matter what your nationality, religious affiliations or sporting obsession, it has become obvious that what is happening in not just Gaza and the Ukraine...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Usman Khawaja urges Albanese to sanction Israel over Gaza genocide
Unmasking propaganda
September 1, 2025
Thank you, Jeffrey Sachs. “Russians invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was thoroughly provoked by the West.” I have long held this view. The Western media’s propaganda was never enough for me to swallow Russia as the enemy. Russia lost 27 million people during World War II. The Allies wouldn’t have defeated Hitler without Russia’s staggering sacrifice. As Sachs makes clear, every war Russia has been involved in the past two centuries has been defensive. The Western narrative does not acknowledge these facts. Just as Western leaders and media have skewed their propaganda in defence of Israel’s horrific crimes, so...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: A new foreign policy for Europe
Genocide denial and Spanish Jewish organisations
September 1, 2025
In 1985, an Auschwitz survivor sued a prominent Holocaust denier in the Spanish courts for libel – and won. The result of that victory and public demand was that the Spanish penal code was amended to make genocide denial a criminal offence. An article in Spain's El Pais by Federico Zukierman Merlin, a member of JCall Spain-Another Jewish Voice, points out that the secretary-general of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain, has effectively denied that genocide is taking place in Palestine. Its board of directors did not dissociate itself from his statement. It is quite possible that...
Kieran Tapsell from Stanwell Park
In response to: Never again – so the world pledged