Last week the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet released a brief press release about Mr. Albanese’s forthcoming trip to Washington from the 23rd to the 26th of October which will be his first such visit since becoming Prime Minister. The enthusiasm of the members of Albanese’s staff seems to have run away with them. They declared that ‘the Australian-United States relationship is unique in scale, scope and significance reflecting more than 100 years of partnership between our nations’. They are very large claims but are they true? (more…)
Henry Reynolds
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Pearls and Irritations: A dissident challenge to the West’s narrative control
Pearls and Irritations has been a source of enlightenment since its foundation in 2013. It has progressively increased in importance. (more…)
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The Rights of Indigenous People
The 13th of September 2007 was an important day in the history of Australian diplomacy although few people have heard of it. That was the occasion when veteran Aboriginal activist Les Malezer addressed the U.N’s General Assembly as the Chair of the Global Indigenous Caucus and introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. (more…)
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The Voice: walking with the Australian people for a better future
“For me, indigenous recognition won’t be changing our constitution so much as completing it.” – Tony Abbot, 2015. (more…)
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The Voice and the problem of race
Defeat for the Voice referendum will reverberate internationally. Surviving suspicions about our racist past will be refreshed. It will come at the same time as our renewed embrace of our ‘forever friends’ in Britain and the United States and our growing enthusiasm for closer ties with NATO. (more…)
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Australia’s real test
A few days after coming to power in 1972 Gough Whitlam declared that ‘Australia’s real test as far as the rest of the world is concerned is the role we create for our own Aborigines’. More than foreign aid programmes, more than any role the country plays in agreements or alliances, treatment of the Aborigines will be the thing upon which the rest of the world will judge Australia and Australians ‘not just now but in the greater perspective of history.’ (more…)
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NATO and Australia: vital partners in a new world war?
Two recent news stories say it all. On the 4th of April the Sydney Morning Herald carried a report of an interview with Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, in which he claimed that Australia was a vital partner in the organisation’s campaign to confront the security challenges posed by China and in particular NATO’s plans to defend Taiwan. Quite clearly this came as a surprise to many Australians. (more…)
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Penny Wong’s faltering foreign policy
Little that was distinctive about Penny Wong’s foreign policy has survived the signing of the AUKUS agreement. (more…)
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Australia’s future in Asia: bridge or spear?
The perceptive Singaporian diplomat Kishore Mahbubani remarked recently that: ‘Australia’s strategic dilemma in the twenty-first century is simple: it can choose to be a bridge between East and West in the Asian Century—or the tip of the spear projecting Western power into Asia.’ He clearly believed that it was a matter of deliberate choice, a clear case of deciding on one course or the other. (more…)
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Australia Day: The contention is inescapable
Contemporary Australia is not the wayward step-child of Britain. It was created in our own country. Is it time to establish an Australia Day freed from the dark shadows cast by the now discredited British Empire? (more…)
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Australia is addicted to fighting other people’s wars
How do we explain that half the Australian community thinks we should go to war with China? After twenty years of conflict in the Middle East, will our addiction to war and our insouciance about its consequences finally catch up with us in an American war over Taiwan? (more…)
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AUKUS is breathing new life into our oldest relationships – Marles
It will come as no surprise to readers of Pearls and Irritations that AUKUS continues to arouse contention while organised public opposition mobilises. (more…)
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War Memorial pressured into recognition of Frontier Wars
A watershed moment for Australia as the War Memorial, caught in a confluence of events, is pressured to announce its plans for recognition of Australia’s brutal Frontier Wars.
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The Defence Strategic Review: What suffering will we accept to keep America in first place?
Do we want to risk incalculable suffering to prevent America from slipping to ‘second place’ among the nations of the world? Without serious assessment of what cost we are willing to pay in the Defence Strategic Review – how much death and destruction we can tolerate – planning for war is little more than a vacuous exercise.
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Geography or history in determining our defence and foreign policies
I was living in London and had been referred to an eye specialist in Wimpole Street. In conversation he remarked that the problem with Australia was that it had too much geography and not enough history. This observation came back to me when I was thinking about the evolution of Australian defence and foreign policy which has, for much of the time, privileged historical ties with great and powerful friends ahead of the opportunities and challenges of scale and location. (more…)
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The West is white
When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 Gorbachev’s vision of a ‘common European homeland from the Atlantic to the Urals’ did not prevail. Rather than retract ,NATO expanded. Russia was too weak to halt the process but was useful as a potential adversary. Suggestions that it could actually join the alliance were peremptorily dismissed. NATO was far too useful for the Americans as the means to perpetuate their dominance of Western Europe. And without the Soviet Union the members of the alliance could be called on to join the global campaign against terror and go to war in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, places in many cases they knew little about. (more…)
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Why we need a new Mabo case
The Sunday Age on June 5th carried an article by Justin McManus who had been on Murray, or Mer Island, to witness the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the High Court’s Mabo judgement. Discussions conducted during ‘yarning circles’ concentrated on finding a way forward from the 1992 decision. McManus reported that both Malcolm Mabo, Eddie’s son, and Kaleb Mabo, his grandson, believed that issues arising from the High Court decision remain unresolved. Kaleb explained that possession of the land ‘came with strings attached…..It’s still attached to the Commonwealth government’ and what he had found in his grandfather’s writings was that ‘his end goal was to see the Torres Strait be independent from the rest of Australia and I think that is where the fight is moving forwards.’ (more…)
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Peter Dutton urging war with China
Last week Defence Minister Peter Dutton announced that, what he called a Chinese spy ship, had been discovered off the Western Australian coast farther south than any similar vessel had ever previously been seen. He didn’t inform his public that it had been observed 250 kilometres offshore and therefore 50 kilometres outside Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone and in international waters. (more…)
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Competing sovereignties and the voice to Parliament
Policy towards the First Nations has attracted very little attention during the current election campaign. The Labor party has given a commitment to holding a referendum to enshrine the voice to parliament in the constitution as proposed by the Uluru Statement of 2017. (more…)
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ANZAC’s contested legacy
The evidence suggests that the Federal government sees Anzac as an attractive tool to open a new front in the culture wars and one where the Labor party might well be wedged. (more…)
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At war with the autocrats
‘ I think we are in a contest’ President Biden declared in June last year, ’not with China per se but with autocrats, autocratic governments around the world ,whether or not democracies can compete with them in this rapidly changing 21st century.’ (more…)
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The Americans are coming! ASIO looks away as hate groups gain foothold
What does our security agency have to say about an insurgency linked to local fanatics who take their cues from Trump and the Republican right? (more…)
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Conservatives venerate January 26. Do they even understand how it happened?
The British government knew almost nothing about Australia, assuming it was uninhabited and available to be exploited.
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Right-wing protesters in Canberra lit a fire under democracy, but did we care?
The assault on Old Parliament House in Canberra last month illustrated the depth of pernicious American influences on Australian public life.
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Britain’s ‘enduring stranglehold’ on Australia
Australia is still tied to British legal decisions from 1786. It should come as no surprise that the Uluru Statement of the Heart directly challenges Australia’s entrenched legal doctrine.
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History repeats as Morrison provokes China hostility
The official visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2014 was the high point in Sino-Australian relations. It has been all downhill ever since.
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The terrible effects and disastrous consequences of war. But we keep doing it.
The chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan coincides with a debate in the Senate on a bill which would curtail the unrestrained power of the executive to take the country to war.
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Anzac Day and the frontier wars
Anzac Day in Hobart in 2019 did not turn out in the way that participants expected. The Hobart Mercury explained why the following morning. The front page was dominated by a large and arresting headline. ‘Battle Cry’ it declared and went on to explain that ‘Anzac Day Marchers Highlight Black War.’ Underneath the headline was a picture of a large black, red and yellow banner which read: ‘Lest We Forget The Frontier Wars.’ (more…)
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Truth and Treaties: the ongoing legacy of the Uluru statement
The 27th of October 2017 was the most shameful day in Malcolm Turnbull’s tenure as Australia’s Prime Minister. It was the moment when he peremptorily rejected the Uluru Statement which had been addressed to the people of Australia five months earlier. He declared that the projected voice to parliament would not be ‘either desirable or capable of winning acceptance in a referendum.’ It was a stinging collective insult to the first nations’ leaders who had come from ‘all parts of the southern sky ’to draft the document. (more…)
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Book extract: It’s time for a new museum dedicated to the fighters of the frontier wars
Whether as paramilitary troopers, workers, trackers, guides, servants and sexual partners, many hundreds of Aboriginal Australians were participants in the outward thrust of the frontier. The implication is inescapable. Many Indigenous families have ancestors who were pioneers in the precise meaning of that term.