Peter Dutton portrays himself as a strong leader, capable of standing up to bullies abroad while contrasting himself to weak leaders at home. His stentorian posturing is underpinned by a grimly reactionary imagination. Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese quibbles and stalls as he tries unsuccessfully to fend off Trump’s tariffs, plaintively offering up access to Australia’s rare minerals as a bribe to get the transactional Trump on-side. (more…)
Allan Patience
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Is Peter Dutton the tip of a Trumpist foreign policy for Australia?
In 1951 Australia turned to its newfound “great and powerful friend” America, consummating the move by signing the ANZUS treaty. ANZUS remains seriously misunderstood by most Australians, especially among the ageing ranks of conservative aficionados in Australia where it has the status of a holy cow. This is despite the fact that the treaty is only an agreement to “consult” if ever Australia’s security is threatened. It is no guarantee that the US will come to Australia’s defence, whatever threat may arise. (more…)
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Joseph Camilleri and Allan Patience: Beyond the crises – How can we inspire people and institutions to take action?
Allan Patience and Joseph Camilleri discuss global crises — climate change, war, the mental health epidemic, and human rights violations — highlighting the lack of leadership across politics, business, media, education, and religion. The discussion encourages us to ask not only why we’re in this state, but how we can create a better future and overcome the obstacles in our path. (more…)
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Trump 2.0 and the crisis in Australia’s delusional middle power imagining
Politicians, media commentators and academics routinely assert that Australia is a middle power. They assume that while their country is not a great power, it has a loftier status than smaller states around the globe, enabling it to “speak louder than the latter and to exert some influence on the former”, as John Campbell once put it. In fact, Australia’s middle power imagining is delusional. This has always been the case, but Trump 2.0 is presenting Australia with a wake-up call about its middle power delusion. (more…)
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Australia’s hard culture and Great Replacement Theory
Racism has always been at the core of Australia’s hard culture. A hard culture is one which entrenches meanings of exclusiveness (or uniqueness), resistance to change, hostility towards outsiders, and acceptance of the status quo as normal. Any deviance from the status quo is seen as perverse, undermining “respectable” cultural beliefs. (more…)
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The problem of God
In a recent post Eric Hunter asked: “Why doesn’t God save the world?” (P&I, 10 February 2025). It’s an interesting question, usually framed under the rubric of “the problem of evil.” Hunter prefers to believe in science rather than to believe in God. So why did he post about God in the first place? (more…)
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Strong leaders versus inspiring leaders: Australia’s current dilemma
It’s said that what the world needs today are strong leaders whom social media and associated propagandists insist are the only ones who can bring order back into a dangerously chaotic world. Their strengths, it is claimed, outweigh their shortcomings. In Australia, attention is turning to Peter Dutton, who according to his supporters, is the epitome of a strong leader. (more…)
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The unravelling of Australian society
Australian society has never really been a cohesive entity. In the past its various socio-economic, religious, ethnic, cultural, and political factions have simply hung together largely through a sense of xenophobia about the outside world (read Asia) rather than a commitment to national unity based on shared values and mutually beneficial interests. But today xenophobia is compounding into fear and loathing on the campaign trail and in the interstices of a society that is in danger of unravelling.
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The disruptions to come: Australian foreign policy in the Trump era
As the Trump presidency looms across America and the world, Australia faces major foreign and security policy challenges on three fronts: (i) How would a Dutton government respond? (ii) How would a renewed Albanese government respond? (iii) How would a minority Labor government respond?
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On the gravy train: Venality and a misplaced sense of entitlement are corrupting democratic institutions in contemporary Australia
Crikey’s recent revelation that some 170 politicians and media commentators have had overseas trips fully or partly funded by particular interest groups, shines a spotlight on a deeply embedded problem in our political and media institutions. Coalition figures appear to be the most frequent beneficiaries of this duchessing. (more…)
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The hollowing-out of governance in contemporary Australia
Despite claims to the contrary, Australia is not a well governed country. At all levels of politics, in businesses large and small, and in the wider society, governance systems right across the country have been hollowed-out. (more…)
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Australia’s unfinished multiculturalism
Large-scale immigration programs have contributed substantially to Australia since 1947, bringing much needed skills and demand into the economy. They have also helped make Australia a more culturally sophisticated country. In the 1970s, the oppressive policies of assimilation and integration were replaced by the policy idea of multiculturalism. Today, Australian politicians boast that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. Their boasting is baseless. A combination of crass political opportunism and policy neglect mean that Australia’s unfinished multicultural project is floundering. (more…)
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Good teachers: how to ensure they remain within the system
The American poet e.e. cummings once observed that good teachers provide a mirror for their students, reflecting back to them valuable attributes that hitherto they’ve not been able to recognise for themselves. This precious pedagogical gift is treated with indifference — even contempt — by far too many Australian politicians, bureaucrats, opinionated media aficionados, and parents. (more…)
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The bleak picture of Australian politics: this is how we change
We are confronting a deep structural crisis in our society. We have confused the idea of democracy with the institutions of political parties and representative democracies. The major parties have become structures representing economic and security elites to which only second rate personalities flock, incapable of navigating the huge challenges we face globally. Meanwhile, the under resourced education system has become an iron cage, captured by industry, that we have been imprisoning young minds into, and from which they are now breaking free. (more…)
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The crimson thread of racism festers in the darker interstices of Australian culture
In 1890 Henry Parkes spoke of “The crimson thread of kinship running through us all.” He believed this “crimson thread” – evocative of blood – united all white people in the Australian colonies and bound them to Britain. The federation he was advocating for Australia was to be exclusively white and eternally British. (more…)
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The disintegration of party politics in contemporary Australia
The world today is disastrously misgoverned by a paranoid generation of ageing political leaders. There’s not a statesman among them, let alone a stateswoman. Meanwhile, the once dominant mainstream political parties are retreating into their bunkers, fearful of the exposure of corruption that has remained hidden in their ranks, terrified of malevolent media moguls, and scared of losing the support of big-monied backers whose identities they conceal. They are blind to the emerging generations of young people who are fed up with how the old generation is wrecking their futures. (more…)
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Australia’s middle power self-image is undermining the country’s security
Australian governments routinely assert that the country is respected as a “middle power” in regional and global forums. Meanwhile scholars increasingly agree that the middle power concept is more fantasy than reality. In Australia’s case, the uncritical assumption of the middle power self-image, by many politicians and commentators, is undermining the country’s security. (more…)
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It’s time for all good Australians to come to the aid of a new political party
Not long before his untimely death, Malcolm Fraser was canvassing possibilities for a new political party. He was absolutely right to note that the existing parties had lost their way. It’s time to take up Malcolm Fraser’s cudgels, to think again–and seriously – about creating a new political party. A new party would need to do what the existing parties are failing to do: to make the government more representative of, and responsive to, the needs of the electorate at large, and to bring Australia back from the brink of populist authoritarianism. (more…)
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Australian politics has reached a dead end
What the whole debate about an Indigenous Voice to Parliament demonstrated, with brutal clarity, is that Australia is a morally backward society. (more…)
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Albanese: The overseas Prime Minister
Prior to his most recent overseas trip to Jakarta, Manila, and New Delhi, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been abroad a dozen times. Not bad for a government that’s been in office for just on eighteen months. The next few months will see him flying off again for half a dozen more summits, head to head meetings with foreign leaders, and meetings with other official and ceremonial types. His latest trip first to Jakarta was to unveil his government’s policy on closer trade and security ties with the ASEAN states. How necessary are these trips? How may their success or otherwise be reliably measured? (more…)
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Nail in the coffin: Australia has run out of luck
Once an early experiment in democracy, Australia has declined into a quagmire of unrepresentative governments at state and federal levels. Power games are played obsessively by most members of a narrowly-recruited and self-serving political class whose only interest seems to be staying in power. Politics is not a vocation for these leeches on the Australian body politic, it has become their business. (more…)
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The political cynicism of Peter Dutton and the death of conservatism in Australia
The unplumbed depths of Peter Dutton cynical politics should be a matter of deep concern to genuine political conservatives across Australia. Whoever those people are (at present they appear to be in hiding), it’s time they distanced themselves from what the Liberal Party is becoming under Dutton’s leadership. (more…)
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Albanese and the ALP, running scared
Hard core supporters of Australia’s alliance with America – in Australia, the USA, and in the UK – were no doubt thrilled by Anthony Albanese’s full-throated defence of the AUKUS deal at the ALP’s national conference in Brisbane. It was as much playing to them that his speech was directed as it was to the conference delegates and Labor supporters at home. (more…)
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The moral emptiness of Albanese’s politics
These days the politics in the Australian parliament is little more than puerile game-playing, echoing what goes on endlessly and tediously in the undergraduate political clubs in our universities. It’s all about organising and winning the numbers. It lacks an ethical core, resulting in the country being paralysed by the politics of ennui and hopelessness. Prime Minister Albanese seems all at sea when it comes to changing this depressing political culture. (more…)
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White Australia’s moral backwardness
White Australians like to think of themselves as an egalitarian and frank people, despising pretentiousness, while basking in a reputation for larrikinism and mateship. But this is all a front, papering over a culture that is deeply racist, excessively masculinist, and incorrigibly populist. Indeed, from its very beginnings, white Australia has been a morally backward society. And there are no signs that this is abating. Its moral backwardness is disgustingly on show in the No campaign against the forthcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. (more…)
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Morrison is a symptom, not the cause, of the decline in Australian politics
In focusing on Scott Morrison’s shocking record in government, and/or on his pathetic and self-pitying response to Commissioner Holmes’ Robodebt report, we must not lose sight of the fact that Morrison is symptomatic of a great deal of what is so terribly wrong in contemporary Australian politics. He is not the cause of what is wrong. The focus on Morrison is deflecting attention away from the increasingly worrying conduct of the Albanese government and the alarming rate at which Australia is being entrapped into American militarism in the region. (more…)
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The Albanese Government’s craven desire to bolster the alliance with Washington
When will Australians realise, as Paul Keating has been unerringly consistent in arguing, that they are part of the cosmopolitanism and complexity of Asia, and not a Western imagined community presided over by a fast declining America? (more…)
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A new politics is coming, ready or not
Prime Minister Albanese’s commitment to the bogus AUKUS deal stands in stark contrast to the ethical leadership of the late Simon Crean. At the time, Mr Crean’s opposition to John Howard’s craven commitment to the Iraq war was a rare and beautiful exception to the tradition of old politics in Australia. Can the country find leaders who will free us from the old politics forever? (more…)
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The generational divide in Australian politics is widening
Opposition to the AUKUS deal among rank and file Labor supporters and similarly aligned voters is increasing by the day. (more…)
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The myth of Australian sovereignty
As AUKUS propagandising gathers pace, the Australian public is being softened up to believe that whatever else the arrangement entails (and that still mostly remains a mystery), there will be no compromising of Australia’s sovereignty – none whatsoever. History teaches us that such reassurances can be dangerously hollow. (more…)