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…)
Allan Patience
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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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Trump is not the only issue, America is too
The Chicken Littles wallowing in the Augean stables of the Murdochracy are obsessing about whether or not the sky will fall if Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump is unquestionably a squalid creature – personally, morally, politically. However, he is by no means the whole story. (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…)
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Paul Keating excoriates AUKUS as exercise in security policy stupidity
There are few who think as clearly, who are as articulate, and who are prepared to speak out in the face of incredible stupidity in Australian politics as Paul Keating. And, as he made clear in his address to the press club this week, AUKUS is nothing if not an exercise in security policy stupidity.
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Unbalanced and unwise: Labor and the politics of warmongering
Where does Albanese stand when it comes to the latest attempts by The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to manufacture a new wave of anti-China hysteria in Australia? Is he amenable to the beating of the drums of war? Or does he have the intelligence to resist this dangerous nonsense? The omens are not good. (more…)
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It’s time to clean up the mess that is Australia’s higher education system
In recent Pearls and Irritations posts, James Guthrie, Adam Lucas and Alessandro Pelizzon have signalled the need for a Royal Commission into higher education in Australia. Their advocacy could not be timelier. (more…)
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Can Australia become a confident, independent country?
Caroline Bouvier Kennedy’s arrival as America’s ambassador in Canberra has thrilled Australians who think of her as American royalty. However, her appointment is small comfort for those Australians concerned about the future of the country’s alliance with the USA. (more…)
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The Turnbull and Morrison governments and the breakdown in Australia’s relations with China
The breakdown in relations between Canberra and Beijing during the years of the Turnbull and Morrison governments illustrates the emptiness of Australia’s claims to be a middle power in regional and global affairs. (more…)
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History repeats: Billy Hughes on Japan and now Scott Morrison on China
Our leaders are uneducated on history. They’re repeating mistakes that had catastrophic consequences for Australia in the Pacific in the 20th century. (more…)
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School curriculum overhaul needed for Australia to find its place in Asia
The failure to properly resource Asian studies in Australian schools and universities is a problem for Australia’s long-term security.
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It’s time for good independents to come to the aid of the country
It’s beginning to dawn on the Coalition that it’s perilously close to losing government. Labor MPs are also terrified by the thought of failing to win government.
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AUKUS confirms Australia as a forever colony
Since World War II, almost all independent states in South-East Asia have been shaped by successful anti-colonialist movements. Australia stands alone in the region, marked by a dominant political culture fixated in a colonial mind-set.
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Is Australia’s grand experiment in multiculturalism failing us all?
One of the greatest public policy innovations in Australia’s political history has been the large scale immigration programs commenced in 1947 under the Chifley government. The Menzies government grudgingly inherited the policy on the understanding that all immigrants would be assimilated into the community as “New Australians.” (Meanwhile, Prime Minister Menzies preferred to think of himself as “British to the bootstraps.”)
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Allan Patience: Is the Australian federation in danger of balkanisation?
The Morrison government’s dishonesty about obtaining sufficient anti-COVID vaccines and its reluctance to provide the nation with dedicated quarantine facilities threaten the cohesion of the Australian federal system. Is the historical shift of power to the federal government reversing as state premiers do their own thing in response to the immense public health crisis now confronting the nation?
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Now is the time for all good women to come to the aid of the country.
About their forthcoming book, Enough is Enough, Kate Thwaites and Jenny Macklin state: “… the underlying problem of men’s attitudes towards women, of men believing it is their right to assault or harass women, remains. For this to change, men will have to give up some of the harmful ways in which they use power – in the parliament and in our community.” They are right! In the federal parliament this means more women in more powerful positions arguing for major reforms that are now needed as never before. (more…)
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From multicultural Australia to cosmopolitan Australia?
One of John Howard’s more petty acts was to belime the idea of multiculturalism. Subsequent political leaders have been less cynical about the term. Malcolm Turnbull even boasted that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. However, Howard did succeed in relegating multiculturalism to being a lower order issue on the country’s public policy agenda.