Letters to the Editor
Led by the nose, again
August 29, 2025
Based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims presumedly made by someone with their own agenda, Australia has sent the Iranians home. This was a mistake with possible long-lasting consequences. While it was easy to send the Iranians packing, it might prove more difficult to get them back, providing they would even want to return. The idea that Iran, with troubles aplenty on its home front, would bother to send saboteurs all the way to Australia to set fire to a couple of synagogues doesn't make sense. Iran would gain nothing from such a foolish move, even if they did...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our ‘partners’
Coincidence? I think not
August 29, 2025
It beggars belief that the Australian Government has just expelled the Iranian ambassador based on intelligence provided by the Israeli intelligence services. Unbelievable. This expulsion happened at the same time that Defence Minister Richard Marles flew to the US for the meeting that was not a meeting, then suddenly validated as a meeting by US gaslighters, by a photo opportunity, posted on our government’s social media. Coincidence anyone?
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our ‘partners'
Ambassador's expulsion
August 29, 2025
I have to object to the thrust and tone of Cameron Leckie’s opinion piece “Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our partners”. Nothing happens in a vacuum. However there is credible evidence that Iran has paid criminal gangs to attack property in Australia. This requires a diplomatic response. It would be inappropriate to banish an ambassador for what another country is doing to its neighbours outside Australia, terrible though it is. We have not banished the Russian ambassador for its invasion of Ukraine, terrible though it is. I participated in the Sydney Harbour bridge walk, along with...
David Hind from North Sydney
In response to: Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our ‘partners’
Ambassador's expulsion warranted
August 29, 2025
I understand the public outrage at the government of Israel, but Cameron Leckie — who presumes Israel provided the intelligence without seeing it, or revealing any direct knowledge of the ASIO secret briefing to the government and Opposition — takes this one step further by conflating the war in Gaza with attacks on Australia’s Jewish community. Just because someone is of the Jewish religion, it doesn’t make them responsible or even associated with the actions of the Israeli Government. Yet Leckie, without access to classified intelligence briefings, reduces a firebombing of a synagogue to, “No one killed. No...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Gaslighting the electorate, virtue signalling to our ‘partners’
Our defence capability could be in better hands
August 29, 2025
There are few among us who could consider themselves even within shouting distance of the knowledge of Australia's defence policy background that John Menadue embodies – and I certainly am not among those. However, even a far lower-tier observer such as I could find great resonance with John's comment that: We would also get better value for our defence dollars if Anthony Albanese could find a pretext to shift Richard Marles to a new job that matched his abilities. As a probable win-win solution to this enigma, I believe that we could do well — particularly in the...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: For 35 years after Vietnam, we had a self-reliant defence policy. We need it again
For many, NDIS is a disaster
August 29, 2025
Bravo to Richard Bruggemann for saying the unacceptable – backed by his many years of experience and advocacy. It was entirely predictable that a privatised disability insurance scheme would be a disaster, with unsatisfactory services for many participants and massive exploitation by unscrupulous service providers. Those who created the scheme were, of course, well motivated. And there are undoubtedly many participants who have benefitted from it – in particular, those with significant physical disabilities, but both normal intellectual capacity and a degree of bureaucratic sophistication. But for many others and/or their loved ones, it is a bureaucratic and...
Richard Barnes from Melbourne
In response to: Why the NDIS inevitably went pear-shaped!
Failure of education policy
August 29, 2025
Whitlam created a rod for Labor with the decision to introduce state aid for private schools. At the time it secured the Catholic vote and reassured many Coalition supporters that Labor was not such a big threat. This has not fundamentally changed – Labor realises that any dimunition of funding to the private sector will be a threat to its re-election prospects. Even Albanese's substantial majority does not make the government immune. The challenge for the government is to find a way to support parental choice without exacerbating educational inequity.
John Tons from SA
In response to: How the ALP built the market that is destroying public schools
Mainstream media presents narrow, biased news
August 29, 2025
It reflects badly on what remains of Australia's mainstream media that more concern is shown for journalists in alternative media such as P&I. In the days of Peter Greste's imprisonment in Egypt, the MSM gave his plight regular coverage. There's nothing comparable about foreign journalists barred from Palestine nor the record number of native journalists deliberately killed by the IDF. Instead, our news comes with zero credibility from Israel, and the US whose complicity cannot be denied, nor its reports believed. Several thoughts come to mind: – Thankfulness for Australia's alternative media and remaining Palestinian journalists and...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The murder of journalists as an act of censorship
What democracy?
August 28, 2025
For every example of a succesful democracy, there are marginal/unsucessful so-called democracies. The latest and least dependable is the US, the democracy that has been proven to have interfered more times to undermine the democratic process of its own and other countries, including our own. The behaviour of the latest questionably democratically elected US president shows little regard for democracy and the civil liberties of US citizens. In our own country, those civil liberties are under threat from the state premiers (mostly Labor) in particular, who have been passing Trump-like laws. I doubt if those who...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Managing a mature Australia-China relationship
The tyranny of the rules-based international order
August 28, 2025
This article is a good summary of what could be a sane and balanced approach to China that does not pay homage to the absurd propaganda put out continuously by the US deep state that China is some existential threat to the democratic world. But to sensibly deal with China, we need to dispense with our fatuous dedication to a rules-based international order that appears to only exist in the minds of that US deep state and to those who have, as Gareth says, drunk the Kool-Aid of that deep state. If we are referring to international law...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Managing a mature Australia-China relationship
Rees correctly demands blunt honesty in language
August 28, 2025
Eminent and wonderfully resolute humanitarian Professor Stuart Rees correctly demands blunt honesty in language, for example: “At long last, an influential leader spoke truth to power. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of Malaysia described the actions in Gaza of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his regime as inhumane and beyond the bounds of sanity. ‘I have never seen read or heard in recent times people as cruel as this. Netanyahu and his ilk are truly deranged.’ Reality shown. No politeness. Nothing abstract. Language honest, appealing, humane.” The core ethos of humanity is kindness and truth, but this is grossly and...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Death or displacement, ‘Please no more polite language about the Netanyahu evil’
Australian kids don’t have to be nuclear targets
August 28, 2025
Excellent analysis by John Menadue, echoing the international law-cognisant and Australia-first wisdom of former prime ministers Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating. Indeed in the must-read The Big Fix: Rebuilding Australia’s National Security, Albert Palazzo argues that Australia should adopt a science-informed strategic defensive position as a truly sovereign nation to defend island continent Australia, rather than its traditional strategic offensive position since World War II as a minor partner in all US-Asian wars, paying an “insurance premium” in blood in the hope that the US will defend Australia from long-feared invasions by Asians. The racist and jingoistic Coalition blindly...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: For 35 years after Vietnam, we had a self-reliant defence policy. We need it aga
Assessment of the planet known as Earth
August 28, 2025
The Earth is sick. It is losing species to extinction at an accelerating rate. Its forests and grasslands are shrinking daily. Its environment exceeds safe limits in six of its nine key planetary boundaries. Irreversible tipping points are gaining strength – icecaps and permafrost melting, forests shrinking, coral reefs dying, ocean currents changing. This sickness has its roots in the planet’s dominant life-form – intelligent bipeds who have learned to exploit the planet’s natural resources. These beings have thrived over the last 12,000 years of exceptional climate stability, but in recent decades this life-form’s demands have grown to a...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The great dying
Impartiality and human values
August 28, 2025
In the dying days of the age of reason, we seem to cling to our belief that reason, disconnected from other human values such as ethics, common sense, intuition, humanism and a moral sense, is a sufficient guide to how we should act. Reason might, for instance, be said to dictate that both sides of any argument should be permitted expression and that to do so reflects impartiality. This implies that impartiality is a value that should predominate over others such as morality, law and humanity. The assumption underlying this approach is that both sides of any argument have...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: The ABC's public comment guidelines: A 'crackdown' on management, not workers
Common sense in an incoherent land of fear
August 28, 2025
When reading John's articles, I often find myself admiring their pith and substance, but naggingly wondering whether that is because he so frequently accords with my own views. I comfort myself with the thought that common sense can be a relatively common antidote to ideological incoherence. China has, since 1978, consistently acted upon a foreign policy guided by their five principles of peaceful co-existence. They are mutual respect for each others' sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each others internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence. More than any other country...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: For 35 years after Vietnam, we had a self-reliant defence policy. We need it aga
Do these times suit Albanese’s leadership style?
August 26, 2025
While this is an excellent opinion piece, it seems to assume that time is available to continue with “business as usual”. Unfortunately, science and physics do not appear to have been consulted in arriving at this assumption. Both are now abundantly clear that not only is “business as usual’ no longer sustainable, but that the actions now required to maintain a future for Homo sapiens and all other life forms on this planet are nothing short of revolutionary. Significant changes that have advanced the species, such as abolition of slavery, female franchise etc, were not achieved by continuing...
Peter Keightley from Mount Martha Victoria
In response to: Kate McGeorge’s Albanese's politics of patience: Democracy needs mature leade
Yes I can, yes I can, said the Little Red Engine
August 26, 2025
As usual, Julian Cribb presents us with a truly vivid picture of the mess we’ve made of our short tenure on Planet Earth. Gifted the twin miracles of perception and self-expression, a garden of abundance and clean air and water to breathe and drink, we’ve allowed our basest nature to prevail. It gives meaning to the ethics of the early Christians who featured the seven deadly sins in their theology. I suspect they adopted them, as they read like a universal roadmap for any organised society. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder where we’d be if we’d stopped to think...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The great dying
Contraction of the human enterprise must start now
August 26, 2025
In Julian Cribb's article, water scientist Peter Gleick is quoted as saying: “The size of the world’s population, the nature of our consumption and economies and our use of energy and water resources have combined to threaten our very existence. This basically sums up why we humans find ourselves in a state of overshoot. Our impact on the Earth is simply too great, thus contraction of our population and economies must start happening now. This is not to say that all aspects of our economies have to contract. Technological developments that lead to decarbonisation must be encouraged, not least...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The great dying
Renewable food
August 26, 2025
The planet is “now dominated by two species, cows and humans”. That is Julian Cribb's stark illustration of the consequences of planet-wide over-consumption. The Potsdam Institute’s latest report describes how this gross explosion in animal life “has come at the price of massive degradation of plant life”. What is to be done? In his article “Why the world needs renewable food (14/7), Cribbs set out the three pillars of a renewable world food supply: regenerative farming, urban food (sustainably using water and other resources with in urban environments) and deep ocean aquaculture. Some Australian farmers have adopted regenerative...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The great dying
Chopping the logging myths
August 26, 2025
Thanks to David Lindenmayer for his excellent piece destroying the conveniently contrived myths which offer the justification for logging Australia's native forests. The article's message to words ratio is powerful. Yes, David, there is no rational justification for the ongoing logging of these forests, now almost all woefully miserable echoes of what they once were. The state of the forests is repeated in the numbers and health of the species native to this habitat. David has produced a brief yet concise piece that should be overwhelmingly persuasive to clear-minded people. It deserves to be mass-copied and dropped in...
Bruce Foskey from Blackwood, Vic
In response to: Cutting through the spin - Ten logging myths in the new ABARES report
Really? Will Australia act against Netanyahu?
August 26, 2025
Jack Waterford says in connection with ICC warrants out for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would, for example, be arrested if he came to Australia. Really? Is Waterford that confident? I can't be the only one who isn't at all confident that would be the case. Given Australia's failure to take any concrete action to halt the genocide in Palestine, preferring instead to serve up word salads including, in this context, its belated plan to recognise Palestine, I can see that Australia's strongest action should Netanyahu land here would be to turn him back. Bravery has...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Peace in Gaza needs a full accounting by both sides
Trust, a commodity in short supply
August 26, 2025
A good article by James. He attributes to Michael Steele the most optimistic statement about trust that could possibly be made without prompting guffaws. Steele said: The core of our alliance for the last 80 years has been trust, and [Trump] has broken that trust. A more perceptive observation of US foreign policy goals and processes is attributable to Henry Kissinger when he said to be America's enemy is dangerous, to be its friend is fatal. He also said that America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests. To say that we have ever trusted the US...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australia and Taiwan caught between Trump and Xi’s great-man fantasies
Active forest management makes fire risk worse
August 26, 2025
Peter Sainsbury notes that while the world’s forests still act as a net carbon sink, their capacity to do so has fallen by 75% in just two decades. Some, such as the Bolivian Amazon and Canadian boreal forests, are now even net sources of carbon. The main cause of deforestation in North America and Asia is wildfire, while in Latin America and Southeast Asia it is permanent agriculture. In Australia, deforestation continues through land clearing for cattle and sheep grazing. In 2024, the Australian Conservation Foundation exposed 50 cases in one week, including the bulldozing of “20 rugby fields’...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Environment: Humanity’s big success: turning forests from saviours to spoilers
Labor and Coalition ignore anti-racist Jewish views
August 26, 2025
Excellent and timely article by eminent Indigenous Australian Gregory Andrews. Sir Isaac Isaacs (Australia’s first Jewish and first Australian-born governor general) carefully and expertly demolished racist Zionism in the brilliant, 61-page booklet entitled “PALESTINE: Peace and Prosperity or War and Destruction? POLITICAL ZIONISM: Undemocratic, Unjust, Dangerous” (January 1946). For details of this and other eminent anti-racist Jewish opinion Google “Jews against racist Zionism” from which one discovers the wisdom of numerous anti-racist Jewish writers from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn and including numerous anti-racist Jewish Australians (most notably today the humane and anti-racist Jewish Council of Australia). Sir...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Never underestimate the power of the mining lobby
August 25, 2025
Once again, we blame China for our own inadequacies. Sinophobia never gets its fair share of headlines. Just because they were smart enough to see this coming, we get upset China is only doing what is common for the mining companies in particular, and global bussiness in general: manipulating the market to maximise profit to their advantage What market forces you may ask. OPEC etc? In the case of China, they have ensured their own supply needs with a profit thrown in, while sucessive Australian Governments give our wealth away for some election funding and a few...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SA
In response to: China’s critical minerals chokehold sparks Quad action
Isaac Isaacs' legacy
August 25, 2025
Gregory Andrews outlines Sir Isaac Isaac’s opposition to political Zionism, a stance that has divided the Jewish community over many years. Writing shortly after World War II, Isaacs foresaw the ongoing conflict: “any attempt to establish Jewish dominance [in Palestine] would inevitably lead to bloodshed.” Isaacs was a staunch defender to Britain. “[A Jewish state would] threaten not merely the prestige but the integrity of the Empire,” he wrote, also noting that the region experienced a “marvellous transformation” under the British mandate. Historians would likely disagree at just how marvellous the British were after defeating the Ottomans, seizing the...
Simon Tatz from Melbourne
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Start by calling Trump what he is: a dictator
August 25, 2025
The best way Australia can defend the International Criminal Court is by complying with its decisions. Another way is to face some reality. Calling Donald Trump the worst president America has ever had is akin to calling Adolf Hitler Germany’s worst ever chancellor. True, both were elected by popular and fair vote, but once in power, all semblance of democratic process was demolished and what those in power wanted, those in power got. Moreover, they are not alone. Israel and Iran are nations divided, while poor old Russia, North Korea and China are countries under authoritarian regimes that...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: Australia must defend international criminal court
Sir Isaac Isaacs
August 25, 2025
Gregory Andrews may not be aware that at the time Sir Isaac Isaacs opposed a Jewish state, the political background was that Palestine was under the British Mandate and so supporting the creation of a Jewish state meant being disloyal to the mother country. His civic conviction was part of a political debate within the Jewish community that pitched British loyalists against those who supported the establishment of a Jewish state. That debate largely died once the British Mandate ended and Israel was created.
Harold Zwier from Melbourne
In response to: Australia's first Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
Full text of Trump’s February diktat about the ICC
August 25, 2025
Greg Barns makes a clear call. It is worth viewing Donald Trump’s February diktat against members of the ICC. A total of 125 nations are ratified parties to the ICC, while the US, Russia, China, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen and Israel are among those who are not. As the ICJ has also delivered advisory opinions on the war in Palestine, Australia must stand up for both the ICC and the ICJ, action their decisions, and protect their judges and staff and their families from actions of the US, especially as our own Hilary Charlesworth is a judge on...
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Australia must defend the International Criminal Court
Exemplifying intelligent progress
August 25, 2025
An excellent article, setting out a lot of facts about China's progress in clean energy that Western mainstream media never mentions, except when it can be attacked using some perversion of logic and common sense. What is little known is that China has in recent years planted in excess of 13 billion trees on nearly five million hectares of previously degraded land and has a goal of planting 70 billion by 2030. It is also re-claiming deserts as productive lands and leads the world in solar and wind power as well as electric vehicles. It makes sound common...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Shared vision, greener together: China and Australia unlock opportunities in eco
Aggression and unintended consequences
August 25, 2025
And just think how stupidity and determination to be the boss caused all this. China was, and is, more than happy to continue to supply any country with the rare earths that they refine, so long as they refrain from breaching China's five principles of peaceful co-existence. They are mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence. These are the last commitments the West are prepared to make after 500 years of ignoring them around the world in pursuit of...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s critical minerals chokehold sparks Quad action
Gaza's civilian toll deliberate?
August 25, 2025
The overwhelmingly obvious question regarding these appalling statistics is whether it is deliberate or collateral damage as the Israelis claim. The best comparison is with the civilian death toll in the USSR in World War II, which was an intentional act to create lebensraum in the East for the German people. In total, 27 million people were killed in the USSR by Germany; of those nine million were military casualties and 18 million were civilians. That means two-thirds of those killed were civilians from a deliberate campaign of genocide against civilians. The Nazi war machine was an elaborately constructed...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Israeli data shows 83% of Gaza war dead are civilians: Report
I hope you die before you get old
August 25, 2025
I've been rewriting this song since I've reached a mature age and been taunted by the derogatory word boomer. Still fiercely against injustice in the world, I'm in a choir of mostly women over 65. We sing a lot of raunchy songs, many protesting against injustice. I've rearranged a few words to enjoy my present rage and I've changed the iconic I hope I die before I get old to I hope you die before you get old for those who blame others for their own inadequacies.
Diana Rickard from Tumbling Waters NT
In response to: Still talkin’ ’bout My Generation
Albanese's politics of patience
August 25, 2025
Thanks for a more considered assessment of the current leadership, Albanese style. If only more politicians could behave accordingly. Might I offer an observation of a failure here and a solution? Rushing, even on the evening of his election, Albanese promised committed action on the Voice for Indigenous Australians. Unfortunately, he used a political, a numbers based, binary process which divided the nation. Had he chosen a process of dialogue and consideration as another nation,Ireland, did, he could have achieved much more;but he thought like a numbers man, a politician. Ireland on the other hand, changed two matters...
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: Albanese's politics of patience: Democracy needs mature leadership
Gaza crisis and the Australian Catholic Church
August 25, 2025
It is hardly surprising that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is silent on the genocide in Palestine. Why should the ACBC speak up for those half a world away when it failed to do so for Australia's Indigenous population? Support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Yes; support the Voice to Parliament referendum, No. The Catholic Church has some wonderful moral leaders. A handful are ordained, most are not. Many who identify as Catholic, with the best of that tradition, no longer practise the Catholicism of the members of the ACBC. What remains of ACBC moral leadership is negligible...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: The Gaza crisis and the Australian Church
Is Leunig's cartoon antisemitic?
August 25, 2025
Harold Zwier's piece quotes a comment by Dvir Ambramovich, deriding the idea that the Jewish community would take aggressive, retributive action against those who criticise Israel. Abramovich was wrong then and he is still. Its assault alone on art galleries, writers festivals, universities, media outlets — the list is endless — is proof enough that the mainstream Jewish lobby employs its outsized reach to intimidate and suppress, quite effectively, any dissenting view of the behaviour of Israelis.
Daniel Saks from Daylesford, Vic
In response to: Leunig cartoon: Antisemitism or valid political comment?
Bush Summit baloney
August 25, 2025
Murdoch media/Gina Rinehart’s Bush Summit is part of stage II of a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign. The prime minister should not dignify the campaign or lend it credibility by his attendance. Murdoch/Rinehart et.al. won stage I of the campaign by delaying responsible climate action for 40 years despite losing their factual argument (“Climate change isn’t real, see, it was cold last week”) to actual science. (Big Tobacco) Stage II, “we can’t afford to address climate change” and “renewables don’t work” and “windmills are ugly” (Uglier than coal mines?) has been running for a few years now. I wonder...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: 'Who will look after the elderly?' Bush Summit is back, and so is Gina Rinehart’
Tax reform – what about resources taxes?
August 25, 2025
I have not closely followed the discussions of tax reform so maybe I missed it, but Michael Keating’s article presented itself as somewhat comprehensively covering the possible areas of reform. While I consider myself to be well short of his economic knowledge, I was surprised to find no reference to taxing the resource sector for its ability to extract huge resource-generated profits at minimal benefit to our national budgetary position. Having been in Norway last year and observed them gloating about the benefits of their sovereign fund, I despaired again about our failure to emulate such an approach....
Stan Rosenthal from CARNEGIE
In response to: The economic reform roundtable and taxation
Leunig's intention with his cartoon
August 25, 2025
In his critique of Leunig’s 2012 cartoon, Zwier refers to it as a parody — satirising or mocking — of Niemöller’s 1946 poem. For me, the 2025 immediacy and personal nature of Leunig‘s words was palpable – not a parody, but rather an adaptation true to the original intent of Niemöller’s poem. It spoke to me about the progressive… how can I say it, moral shrinkage that occurs, the lack of courage, sense of being overwhelmed and the impotence in us, preventing us from speaking up for truth. Leunig’s very personal observation is evident in his choice of pronouns...
Susan Germein from Sydney
In response to: Leunig cartoon: Antisemitism or valid political comment?
Same old, same old
August 25, 2025
I took the trouble to look up who was at the roundtable and noticed it was the same well-paid people who either have benifitted from the mess we are in or those who want to benefit from the mess. Not one without media training„ Nice to be with you Sarah„ No-one to point a finger. Let's say education, housing, health etc are in this mess because of a failed experiment of commercialising them. Health is on the brink because of the profit before care model and private hospitals for those who can pay extra and ramping for the...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
Israel claiming 'democracy' is moral blasphemy
August 25, 2025
No quibble at all with everything that Raghid Nahhas wrote – but I think he understated the heinous appropriation of a term generally approbative of a regime by the Zionist + IDF cabal to deflect criticism of their genocidal rampage. The definition of democracy has no reference to the actions of a state in regard to any other state. By claiming Israel's democratic status — which I assume is valid under the strict definition — Benjamin Netanyahu is employing a very limited political definition as a shroud to cover the iniquitous activity of the pack of inglorious bastards of...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Israel, the 'only democracy in the Middle East' – How to win elections and erase people
Our only Jewish governor-general?
August 25, 2025
While Isaac Isaacs was the first Jewish governor-general, during my lifetime we had Zelman Cowan. This fact does not change the intent or importance of the article, but is a glaring error that should have been picked up before publication.
Peter Grayson-Weeks from Beauty Point, Tasmania
In response to: Australia’s only Jewish governor-general would have stood with Gaza
High time we told the US to get lost
August 22, 2025
Bravo to Fred Zhang for a brilliant article which is very much to the point. It is high time we told the US to get lost. This is a nation that parrots itself as the world's greatest democracy but, in reality, does not give a rat's about democracy and never has. It didn't care about it when it put the 3/5ths compromise in its constitution, it didn't care about it when, along with the UK, it destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953 for oil, or indeed, in 1956 when it egged on the Hungarians for months. They amazingly overthrew...
Wes Mason from Gisborne
In response to: Pay up, shut up, speak up against China, or we won't get the subs (some wise Ame
Russell’s authorship
August 22, 2025
In all likelihood, the statement on the Middle East dated 31 January 1970 was indeed drafted by Bertrand Russell. It has his characteristic clarity including typically succinct formulations such as ‘The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that the country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state, and What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy. Russell personally signed a copy of the statement, which is now held at the Bertrand Russell Archives,...
Tony Simpson from Cornwall
In response to: Fifty-five years on, Bertrand Russell’s words are worth returning to
Leunig cartoon: antisemitism or valid political comment?
August 22, 2025
I am no particular fan of Leunig, but I found Harold Zwier's assessment of Leunig's four-frame cartoon self-serving and symptomatic of the sad conflict within global Jewry related to the genocide in Palestine. As a non-Jew, I took it that Leunig spoke for all of us (aside from Bibi, his war criminal associates and and his youthful conscripted footsoldiers.) Zwier's self-indulgent intellectual doodle and its perceived antisemitism is a another crutch for his guilt-avoidant mates. It is a pathetic distraction from the mass murder for its two million victims and it shows no sympathy for them. Not...
Donald Clayton from Bittern 3918
In response to: https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/08/leunig-cartoon-antisemitism-or-valid-political-comment/
10-fold MSM undercounting of 680,000 Gaza deaths
August 21, 2025
Ralph Nader’s reportage on the undercounting of Gaza deaths is now on the US Congressional Record. From data reported in the leading medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere by a succession of expert epidemiologists (Dr Zeina Jamaluddine et al., Dr Rasha Khatib et al., Professor Devi Sridhar) 64,260 Gazans died violently by Day 269 of the Gaza Massacre (30 June 2024) 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...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Open letter to journalists on the vast undercount of deaths and serious injuries
The politics of profligacy
August 21, 2025
Humanity’s greed for material comfort seems unbounded, for the most part, by any sense of a need for boundaries. Our population grows ever larger, and those alive want a sense of comfort and provision that is as good as, or better than, that they grew up with. Understandable, at the individual scale, but unsustainable and a poisoned chalice for those who follow. Julian Cribb paints a compelling picture of how humanity is hell-bent on self-destruction. Much attention has been given to the climate threat because this is both existential and imminent, but — as Cribb reminds us — we...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The great waste
Federal taxes do not fund federal spending
August 21, 2025
... My starting point is that Australia needs to raise more tax revenue. ... budget will continue to be in deficit ... by an average of 1.2% of GDP. This is a structural deficit which is a major risk to economic sustainability... This deficit needs to be corrected and sooner rather than later. Either taxation has to rise or expenditures need to be cut... Such advice is provably incorrect; the recommendation is the very essence of socially destructive neoliberalist austerity. There was a time when the statements above were true, but not now. In gold-pegged days (pre-1971) an...
John Bloomfield from Roselands NSW
In response to: The economic reform roundtable and taxation
Shining for me, but not for thee
August 21, 2025
To act with impunity as if the voices and needs of the other don't matter, or don't matter as much, seems to me to be at the heart of the mess we in the West now find ourselves in. Two examples spring to mind, these being NATO's eastward expansion and Israel's absorption of Palestine. Both relied on the notion of exceptionalism to justify unilateral action. In neither case were the opinions of the other given equal weight. That light on the hill would seem to be shining for me, but not for thee. To remove oneself from the...
Hal Duell from Alice Springs
In response to: The city on a hill
TAFE and the commercialisation of education
August 21, 2025
Neil, thank you for your welcome piece written from within the deterioration of educational integrity of an important post-secondary sector! Thank you. Such insider insight tracing educational decline in TAFE is helpful to sharpen our vision of the related spectacular decline within the sector of what are now called universities! To investigate how TAFE was demeaned in public policy will mean revisiting the question of why Institutes of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education were reformed by amalgamation with, and hence required by legislation to take on the labels of, universities? Are we to make the sad conclusion that...
Bruce Wearne from Ballarat Central
In response to: The quest for 21st century australian productivity [and] TAFE
And yet...
August 21, 2025
Well written! Thank you, Patricia, for adding to our perception of a political reality which is also our own. And yet our ambassador and foreign minister attended the inauguration on our behalf! Ever since coming to the conclusion that they shouldn't have done so, I've wondered how we Australians should justify such a signal of non-compliance with the Trump 2 delusionary insurrection. The best I can come up with is to say we have too much respect for the US under its own constitution — which assumes the rule of law and proscribes insurrection — for us to indulge...
Bruce Wearne from BALLARAT CENTRAL
In response to: Understanding Donald J. Trump
Neutering the Zionist lobby's pernicious Influence
August 21, 2025
Greg Barns' article should be compulsory reading for every chief editor and vice-chancellor. Capitulation to the threats routinely delivered by the Zionist lobby industry, that demand kowtowing to standards of expression that support what are likely crimes against the International Rule of Order by the highest authorities in the world, is, quite simply, complicity. Those who cringe in cowardly acquiescence to the utterly discredited definition of antisemitism delivered as the metric by the Segal report and reinforced by the flustercluck of Zionist protagonists from Netanyahu downwards to the sludge we have here in Australia that surface like a...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: Universities, free speech and the High Court
Recognition of Palestine matters-II
August 20, 2025
In answer to Margaret Callinan’s comment on my article, the current debate is not about recognising Palestine as a nation, but about recognising it as a state. There is a difference. The Australian Government’s recognition proposal limits the borders of the state of Palestine to Gaza and the West Bank. That is what is wrong in principle and a colonialist imposition.
Jeff Kildea from Sydney
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
Outside interference-II
August 20, 2025
In response to my article, Simon Tatz writes, The only resolution is one determined by the Palestinian and Israeli people. That was my point. Please reread my articles.
Jeff Kildea from Sydney
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
Uni codes of conduct versus academic free speech
August 20, 2025
Excellent article by Greg Barns. A science academic for four decades, I strongly objected to Codes of Conduct constraining academic free speech, and 25 years ago published a detailed critique entitled “Current censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities” that concluded “We should publicly insist that universities that constrain free speech are not fit for our children”. As illustrated by the shocking Bendigo Writers Festival censorship debacle, free speech-constraining codes of conduct are now in place in Australian universities and threaten academic free speech and Australia’s $40 billion per annum education export industry. The Big Eight universities and numerous other...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Universities, free speech and the High Court
Forensic examination of Western duplicity
August 20, 2025
This is one of the most perceptive and revealing examinations of the vast gap between our vaunted values and our real world practice that I have seen anywhere. Her analysis is couched in academic discourse and logic, but with the vital addition of the other human attributes that must exist together with it if reason is to be brought back to any objectively observable reality. I am grateful to Pam for her clarity of thought and her willingness to deal objectively with the differences between who we claim we are and who we actually are! She unflinchingly examines the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Requiem for liberalism: Palestine and the exposure of Western ideals
A narrower lens in a time that demands breadth
August 20, 2025
As a long-time reader and occasional contributor, I have valued Pearls and Irritations for its breadth, politics, policy, economy, climate, defence, religion, arts, Asia, Palestine-Israel, the United States and more. That diversity gave the publication a unique richness and influence, connecting Australia’s domestic challenges with international realities. Since the change of editor in March, there has been a clear and signalled shift. The site has given greater space to foreign affairs, defence and the moral dimensions of global conflict, especially Gaza, AUKUS, and shifting power balances. These are important issues, but the narrowing has sometimes come at the cost...
John Frew from Woolooware
In response to: Requiem for liberalism: Palestine and the exposure of Western ideals
Head v heart
August 20, 2025
As I write, I hear the garbage truck on its weekly run and I think would I really be wanting to be ringing Canberra because my bin wasn’t emptied, because the trees on the street need pruning or about the pothole out the front? The answer is no. Therefore I conclude that the biggest productivity gains, miles of duplicated red tape gone, would be to remove one level of government and logically that must be the state government. But in my heart, I'm a South Australian and there is nothing I like better than beating a Victorian.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: australia-has-120-health-workforce-policies
Israel: grant all Palestinians all human rights
August 19, 2025
Excellent analysis by Paul Heywood-Smith. However, crucial to any Palestine-Israel “settlement” is irrevocable application to all Palestinians of all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notably (1) “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”, (2) “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind…”, and (3) “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”. Pre-war, Indigenous Palestinians represented 50% of the subjects of Israel. However the Occupied Palestinians (5.6 million pre-war, with only 4.9 million now alive) are...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: The response to recognition
The deadliest measure
August 19, 2025
Fiona Colin is absolutely correct in identifying deliberate, concerted denial as one of the gravest threats to humanity. After more than quarter of a century of research into the science underlying the human predicament, I have concluded that, of the 10 catastrophic threats to humanity, misinformation is the most dangerous. More so than climate, nuclear bombs or famine, because it precludes action on any of the threats. A species that cannot face the truth, cannot survive the outcome of its own self-deception.
Julian Cribb from Canberra, ACT
In response to: Cognitive dissonance
A leopard does not change its spots
August 19, 2025
Further to Jack Waterford's recent article regarding PwC's atonement, it is worth reiterating the thoughts of the late US supreme court justice, Thurgood Marshall: The Ku Klux Klan hasn't gone away. Its members have just stopped wearing the white robes and capirotes because the material became too expensive.
Bernard Corden from Spring Hill Brisbane QLD
In response to: Finance’s bleeding hearts think PwC has suffered enough
Australia is moving away from US
August 18, 2025
Bruce Wolpe needs to catch up. Many Australians realised some time ago that Australia needs to distance ourselves from the US. The US has become unreliable and fickle. It is not just Paul Keating saying that we need to engage more with Asia. Take notice of the reader comments in mainstream papers plus in various podcast and you will see that that is exactly what is already happening. One comment that is becoming more persistent is that Australia should revisit AUKUS with a view to considering an alternative. There is a strong view that AUKUS is not the direction...
Peter Sheehy from Blackheath NSW
In response to: The US has changed. Australia hasn’t. It’s time to talk about where the relation
Whitlam dismissal
August 18, 2025
As the years pass, those who thought the rumours surrounding the Whitlam dismissal were most likely a bit paranoid are having to rethink. Decades of US regime change and wars provide a devastating insight into their modus operandi and it ain’t pretty.
Pamela Curr from Brunswick
In response to: 1975: The Whitlam dismissal’s smoking gun
Disruptive doctoring
August 18, 2025
Tony Lawson’s piece invites new approaches to productivity challenges in the health sphere. I invite readers to view this news from China. It certainly promises productivity gains, but there will be a need to discuss the ethical and other concerns that such an approach poses.
Geoff Taylor from Borlu (Perth)
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
At least 242 journalists killed: Inaction is complicity
August 18, 2025
Excellent article by Dr Jeremy Webb. The recent Zionist murder in Gaza of journalist Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues has sparked outrage around the world. Thus the UN: “The secretary-general calls for an independent and impartial investigation into these latest killings. At least 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Journalists and media workers must be respected, they must be protected and they must be allowed to carry out their work freely. Likewise Free Palestine Melbourne (that helps organise huge Sunday Rallies for Gaza): “Killing journalists, nurses, and civilians will not erase the...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: Where is the outrage? Israel's systematic mass assassination of journalists
Narrative reform is what we need
August 18, 2025
What we need is reform of the way we report taxation. All the major projects in Australia have been financed by public money of one form or another and continue to be. When there is a disaster like a bush fire, flood, drought etc we expect a prompt response in the form of rescues, handouts, fire-fighting equiptment, boats etc. That has to be financed somehow. The taxation debate is usually driven by those who can most afford to pay and benefit most from not paying a share. Like most economic debate, the interchanging of dollars and percentages...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Economic reform and the productivity slowdown
Was this written by Russell?
August 18, 2025
In all likelihood, the letter was not written by Russell but by Ralph Schoenman who dishonestly presented it as written by Russell. On this see Bryan Mabee's book, Confessions of a Philosopher.
Thomas Mautner from Griffith A.C.T.
In response to: Fifty-five years on, Bertrand Russell’s words are worth returning to
Stand with Mary
August 18, 2025
Thank you, Peter. I stand with Mary. I am old, I do not know/trust how to use any social media so I cannot contact her to give her my support. But you and Pearls and Irritations are enabling me to do that. Thank you, Pearls and Irritations as well.
Judith Gamper from Kambah ACT
In response to: Stand with Mary
Outside interference
August 18, 2025
Jeff Kildea admits to being “an outsider with no skin in the game”, yet nonetheless feels qualified to profess his criticism and solutions to the centuries old geopolitical and religious conflict in the Middle East. The most important lesson I learned from my visits to the region (Israel and the occupied territories) was from a local who, in essence, said: you don’t live here, you don’t live with war, terrorism, threats every day, be it from right-wing settler extremists or Hamas terrorists. If you want to decide our future, then live here. This was said by a left-voting...
Simon Tatz from Newport
In response to: Recognition of Palestine a neocolonial-feel good gesture
No heroes among these leaders
August 18, 2025
One by one, Australia, Britain, France and Canada say they will recognise the Palestinian state in September. They are not being brave or moral. Their governments have been complicit in the genocide. But their leaders have enough sense not to go down in history with their names etched in eternal infamy. Ain't that the truth?! But aren't these belated words their own type of infamy? Watching after their own backs rather than any genuine concern for Palestinians and Palestine. Only caring about genocide when it might hurt them at the polls. Those marching for Palestine have no reason...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Our bravest journalists today are all working and dying in Gaza
Recognition of Palestine matters
August 18, 2025
I agree with the author that recognition of Palestine provides no tangible benefit to the people of Gaza. But I do not agree that it is wrong in principle. I believe recognition acknowledges that the century-long Palestinian struggle is legitimate and puts a moral imperative before us to do more to bring about justice. Israel declared itself a nation without specifying its borders and has been accepted as a nation by most other countries regardless. I see no colonialist imposition in recognising Palestine as a nation since that's how Palestinians see themselves already. Of course, borders remain problematic and...
Margaret Callinan from Hawthorn VIC 3122
In response to: Recognition of Palestine: A neocolonial, feel-good gesture
Albanese’s missed chance at moral leadership
August 18, 2025
Prime Minister Albanese’s recognition of Palestine is an important step, but it has come far later than it should have. Albanese has long been on the record as supporting Palestinian rights, co-founding the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in 1998 and acknowledging that peace depends on a two-state solution. Yet when he became prime minister, that conviction gave way to caution. For many months of the Gaza war, as civilian deaths mounted and hospitals were destroyed, his government argued that the “right conditions” were not yet in place. Those conditions, tragically, never appeared. Instead, the world watched as children in...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: Albanese’s recognition of a Palestinian state implements a long-held Labor ambit
Population growth is now a menace
August 18, 2025
Julian Cribb rightly cites Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits as a major challenge to our survival that even good people choose to ignore. Back in the 1970s, thanks largely to Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, people rightly saw overpopulation as a major environmental issue. Most of my contemporaries limited the number of children they had to two, or at least felt guilty about having a third. Then a combination of misplaced feminist rhetoric plus the Catholic Church conspired to discredit the movement, not helped by coercive birth control policies in India. ...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: The great human brain fade
We don't need another envoy
August 15, 2025
We don't need another highly-paid headline-grabing divisive envoy. What we need is to prosecute the media outlets, journalists and shock-jocks who are applying these labels in a racist way. If the race relations laws are not fit for purpose, then they need to be fixed and quickly. Also there should be a penalty for blocking up the court system with expensive defence of frivoulous claims. I suspect they are tax-deductible, otherwise why go to the expense?
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
The cancer from the US and Britain
August 15, 2025
Here is an example of a real pathogen about which we definitely do know the origins. The pathogen is virulent and deadly as it has brought about death on a previously unimaginable scale throughout the 20th and now in the 21st centuries and across the planet. The pathogen was first developed deliberately in political laboratories in the UK and the US early last century and was released to infect the world. The name for the pathogen was developed by its creators and became a by-word for its use as a weapon of war. Propaganda was the name and it...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Breaking: Chilling ‘News Virus’ sweeps Australia
A duty of care to Torres Strait Islanders
August 15, 2025
As Robert Graves put it, Truth loving Persians do not dwell upon a trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. School children in France are not taught about the battle of Agincourt. The Black Hole of Calcutta is taught one way in the UK and another in India. When Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, she was unaware that the South had been defeated. John Howard complained about the black armband of history that attempts to set the record straight about the modern history of Indigenous Australia. Popular history has become little more than a national hagiography. How far the...
John Tons from Flinders University
In response to: White House to vet Smithsonian exhibits to ensure they 'align with Trump's interpretation' of US history
Humanity’s never-ending absurdity
August 14, 2025
In Julian Cribb’s well-annotated piece on the self-generated vortex Homo sapiens sits at the lip of, he attributes a laughing-out-loud quote to one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers. It doesn’t matter if Einstein didn’t say it; it underlines humanities boundless pushing of the envelope. It summons a scenario of Mrs God asking God what he’s doing in the shed that has kept Him late for dinner the last five nights. He proudly described His creation of Earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air and the creatures that walk upon the land. When he explains...
John Mosig from Kew, Victoria
In response to: The great human brain fade
China's internal critics open and transparent
August 14, 2025
According to the negative Nancies in the West, the author of this article should be in serious trouble for his criticisms of government in China. Of course, that view has not been true for nearly 50 years as China encourages vigorous debate about directions and issues, so long as it is constructive. That truth, of course, can be ignored in the interest of promoting anti-China memes.
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: China’s consumption weighed down by weak expectations
Cognitive dissonance
August 14, 2025
Cribbs describes a bleak future, a “loss in human cognitive ability”. We may well have reached a point “where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let alone do anything purposeful to correct it”. Science historian Naomi Oreskes writes that as early as the 1950s, scientists were warning about the dangers of human-made climate change. By the 1970s, the scientific community was highlighting the potential impacts of human activities on global temperatures. ExxonMobil scientists projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to .02 degrees of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04...
Fiona Colin from Melbourne
In response to: The great human brain fade
Courage missing in action
August 14, 2025
Conservative Australian Governments have been purchased by the big largely overseas gas extractors and in the case of Labor have been, at least in recent years, scared witless of them. Unlike the Norwegians who have built the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world, by ensuring gas and oil companies pay for the resources they have extracted, Australia has allowed itself to be either bought or frightened into handing over the patrimony of the Australian people to rapacious multinational companies with hardly a whimper. Now there is a surprise!
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Albanese is crying poor, but we’re losing billions a year from untaxed gas
When the education system can't learn about itself
August 14, 2025
As a 70-plus individual in rapid decline, I find believable and interesting that all this is happening at a time of comercialisation of the education system, with record school and university attendance, and a preoccupation with data collection. I left school after year 11 and our large technical school barely had enough students to fill a year 12 mixed class. The class sizes would be envied today and only the best went on to university. Now most go on to higher education and university and we have a shortage of tradies and truck-drivers. Taxi-drivers are completing university in...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The great human brain fade
Opposition obduracy to recognition of Palestine
August 14, 2025
Chris Sidoti's commentary on the much-belated and pitifully weak statement of intention to recognise the State of Palestine by the Albanese Government is, in the existing circumstances, restrained almost to the point of a fault. Whacko-the diddle-oh for a baby step forward for Albanese and Wong, even though it contains restraints and limitations that make it only one step above tokenism. Have they not noticed that as the international community becomes more restive, the Netanyahu and IDF activity has expanded into an orgy of both highly targeted and also random bastardly killing? We are getting into the area...
Richard Llewellyn from Colo Vale
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?
The conflation, thus confusion, of anti-Zionism with antisemitism
August 14, 2025
Anyone who's studied philosophy would know that Zionism is a matter of policies intended to create and maintain a Jewish state (definition of Jewish is a rabbit hole); antisemitism is the hatred and fear of Jews for merely being Jews. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people should be repudiated on all occasions – one of Zionism's major policies is the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish people, which puts the lives of Jewish people on a level with the policy of ethnic cleansing. I'm not Jewish myself, but some of my ancestors were — putting policies like ethnic cleansing on...
Wesley Parish from Tauranga, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
In response to: The Segal report and the universities
Mere words don’t feed
August 14, 2025
For almost two years, our government has watched the Palestine people bombed, crushed, torn, starved and shot, and it has moved our government to do the sum total of nothing. Footage coming out of Gaza from heroic journalists made clear that all this destruction was in the cause of a Greater Israel. The intent of the Israeli occupation was not hidden – it was crystal clear. We all knew that Israeli talk amounted to committing genocide on the Palestinians to steal resources, and expand into Syria and Lebanon. Our government pontificates that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: Dates are 'luxury' – and other ways Israel hinders aid trucks from reaching star
Rights come with responsibilities
August 14, 2025
Julian Cribb's statement in his article, “Most poignant of all is the fact that parents, everywhere, seem content to ruin their children’s future for the sake of their own present comfort, convenience and luxury. Their claim to 'love their children' is a false narrative, contrived to exculpate their own childlike self-centredness” is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. As a school teacher, for more than 20 years, I’ve seen this exact sentiment play out in all its variations. Its consequences on the ground in the classroom never ceased to astonish me. I can’t tell you the amount...
Alyssa Aleksanian from Hazelbrook
In response to: The great human brain fade
Reef – or grief?
August 14, 2025
As the government’s 2035 emissions reduction target looms, Imogen Zethoven nominates the Great Barrier Reef as its litmus test. With global warming at 1.5 degrees for 2024, ocean temperatures have become an existential threat to coral. The Reef may recover if action is taken urgently to reduce or remove its threats within the next few years, as outlined by the International Coral Reef Initiative. Underpinning this protection must be a substantial reduction of fossil fuel use, and the establishment of an independent authority overseeing legally enforceable national environmental standards. If we — and many others — can take...
Chris Young from Surrey Hills, Vic
In response to: The Great Barrier Reef is the litmus test for the forthcoming 2035 emissions red
The defusing of political anger
August 13, 2025
It was with a sense of resigned dismay that I read the prim statement about Gaza in the Sidoti interview you posted on 13 August: Well, so far we’ve not used the term genocide. This is an issue that we’re looking at. I take it that we refers to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, of which Sidoti is the commissioner. It reminded me of something that Arundhati Roy said some years ago about NGOs, which are meant to act independently of governments. Her comments apply with even greater force to inter-governmental...
Peter Blunt from Siem Reap
In response to: What will Australia's recognition of Palestine mean in practical terms?
Low fertility and national happiness aligned
August 13, 2025
Thanks to Noel Turnbull for directing attention to the annual UN-backed World Happiness Report. It's worthwhile going to the bottom of the table and comparing the ten unhappiest with the ten happiest at the top. Just as happiness appears to be associated with a cold climate, unhappiness could be loosely associated with a hot one. Nevertheless, a closer association can be found with fertility rates (the number of children per woman). With the exception of Israel, (2.92), all the happiest countries have fertility rates between 1.43 (Costa Rica) and 1.97 (Iceland). Apart from Israel, all are below replacement (2.1)...
Jenny Goldie from Cooma NSW
In response to: Are you happy?
Cut the Yanks loose!
August 13, 2025
As Michael intimated, I feel the US economy has been bankrupt (in more ways than one!) for some time. The US has proven that it does not want any other currency to be elevated (eg oil sales in euros instead of US dollars). However, I feel the world will experience instability until a form of international currency that is not dependent on the American dollar (or any other country's currency) is generated. The dollar would then float and settle to a level that was sustainable. Until that time, the US can print money that devalues dollars held by other...
Doug Foskey from Tregeagle
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Bear witness: Remembering heroic Anas al-Sharif
August 13, 2025
Heroic Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif was recently martyred in Gaza with four other journalist colleagues and left us a final inspiring message: “Yet I never stopped telling the truth as it is, without falsification or distortion – so that God may bear witness over those who stayed silent, accepted our killing, and did nothing to stop the massacre our people have endured for more than a year and a half”. Similarly, the key imperatives from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and indeed from all genocide and holocaust atrocities are “zero tolerance for lying”, “zero tolerance for racism”, “bear witness” and...
Gideon Polya from Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria
In response to: ‘I entrust you with Palestine’: The final testament of Anas al-Sharif
Opinions and headlines
August 13, 2025
This article reinforces my opinion that it is full of opinions, not facts, and what we know about opinions is that everybody has one. As fast as one opinion is given, many others appear. For example, on Tuesday, the RBA interest rate cut went in the space of one interview from a bonus for homeowners with a mortgage, to a problem for people with savings in the bank. Then it went to inflation, which wasn't said to be the problem, it was productivity. Again, the talk went from being a win for the government to a RBA vote of...
Bob Perace from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Trump's fantasies and the American economy
Our image reflected back to us
August 13, 2025
The Israeli state has learned well the lessons of the US and British experiences of war. They have learned from all the aggressive wars, that the US and before it the UK have launched since the beginning of the information age, that control of the narrative is vital if they are to get away with mass murder. The principal problem in doing that is either capturing or killing those who tell the truthful stories of the crimes as they are committed. Hence the deliberate, calculated assassination campaign against those truth-tellers. The UN, controlled as it is by the...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Tributes, condemnation pour in over slain Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza
At last, a legal fightback
August 13, 2025
The corrupt, criminal and scandalous Zionist Government and its many co-conspirators around the world have developed the technique of using the law to bury critics of their genocidal activities. Because they are so well funded by US taxpayers and various complicit Jewish oligarchs around the world, they have used threats of lawfare to silence the Western world. Thank God, we are now beginning to get some courageous people who are prepared to use the law to fight back against this silencing of dissent and exposing the mass murder being perpetrated daily in Gaza and the West Bank. It...
Les Macdonald from Balmain NSW 2041
In response to: Australian Jewish Association accused of hate campaign: Landmark legal action launched
The long hand of building your kingdom
August 13, 2025
Jack Waterford's article on the complexities of security and protest, as usual, is a great read. I thought that Burgess had a vested interest in scary threats to get more funding. Fear facilitates funding, though I was scared of the mention of Mike Pezzullo having another go. Thanks Jack and P&I.
Michael Breen from Robertson NSW
In response to: The long hand of your country of origin
Tools for fighting disinformation
August 13, 2025
In 2023, Lucy Hamilton, writing in Pearls and Irritations, revealed that Advance Australia, a conservative lobbying group, has links to the US-based Atlas Network, described as a front for fossil fuel corporations that “blocks climate action and attacks democracy globally. An anonymous whistleblower on Advance’s email list claims its latest goal is to “raise $450,000 by August 31” to campaign against net zero in Australia over the next “two-three years.” The International Panel on the Information Environment, in Facts, Fakes, and Climate Science, warns that “powerful actors … intentionally spread inaccurate or misleading narratives about anthropogenic climate change”, eroding...
Ray Peck from Hawthorn
In response to: Secrecy and the climate disinformation industry
Twelfth opportunity
August 12, 2025
The twelfth opportunity would be to stop scaremongering over the Port of Darwin which was leased as an economic opportunity and remains an economic opportunity though the expansion is being hamstrung by uncertainty. China and other countries in general have enough hardware surveilling the world to not require a person with binoculars and a mobile phone to report ship movenents out of Darwin and what brand of wipes the American Marines are using.
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: Eleven opportunities for Australia
Palestine recognition
August 12, 2025
The Australian Government’s conditional proposal for the recognition of Palestine is untenable for both reasons of principle and practical reasons. “Hamas” (like the ANC in South Africa) took part in armed resistance of an oppressive regime as years of failed negotiations presided over by Western Governments facilitated the ongoing oppression. How is a peaceful transition to occur without Hamas involvement? If members of Hamas are to be excluded from involvement in the negotiations for the establishment of the government of Palestine, why are not the members of the genocidal Israeli regime similarly excluded? Exclusion of “Hamas” confers a...
John Curr from MANLY
In response to: The occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza was always Netanyahu’s intention
Labor needs a leader who listens – Chris Minns isn't that person
August 11, 2025
Premier Chris Minns has become a liability to NSW Labor. His refusal to listen — whether to his own MPs, unions, or the party’s grassroots — shows a stubborn arrogance that has no place in a Labor leader. As John Menadue observed, Minns is “out of step with the values of the Labor movement and the principles of democratic participation. His championing of heavy-handed anti-protest laws, with penalties of up to two years in jail and fines of $22,000 for peaceful demonstrators, betrays Labor’s proud history of standing up for civil liberties and the right to dissent. Senior...
Sam Abdul from Queensland
In response to: NSW Premier and the right to protest
What happens if we shift the paradigm?
August 11, 2025
This is only the latest in an endless series of articles on what government needs to do to fulfill its raison d’etre, facilitating the improved well-being of the nation. Few ever question the paradigm that was adopted globally in the 1980s that replaced the once-clearly understood role with one that says the public sector is best seen as a profit-making business competing for customers’ dollars. Few ask what turned the problems of the last quarter-century into seemingly intractible ones that are implied as permanent features of our supposedly best-ever economic system. I’m talking about what George Monbiot termed...
Terry Constanti from Annandale NSW
In response to: Well-being, health and the Productivity Roundtable
Australia soon to become a nuclear waste dump
August 11, 2025
Finally, after all the chatter about the cost of AUKUS, delivery, manning, deployment etc somebody is talking about what has been my concern all along: the radiation effect and nuclear waste disposal. I seem to recall reports of beached Russian nuclear submarines rotting away and polluting the Arctic seas and also reports of higher levels of nuclear-related deaths of submariners worldwide. I am concerned that with the usual practice of secrecy on US and UK bases on Australian soil, we will quietly become an unregulated nuclear waste dump for the world, probably without the benifit of cheap storage...
Bob Pearce from Adelaide SĄ
In response to: The British experience with nuclear-powered submarines: Lessons for Australia