The bias in the treatment of the Syrian conflict by the mainstream media is not accidental or due to laxity on the part of the media. Rather, it is the result of the opposition groups’ exclusion of independent reporting, coupled with western governments’ financial assistance to the opposition for media production. (more…)
John Menadue
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WALTER HAMILTON. The Sideline is Out of Play
‘Taking sides’ is a schoolyard conception of how a nation’s strategic interest is to be calculated and diplomacy shaped. Standing on the sidelines of a fight, pointing an accusing finger at other barracking spectators and crying ‘you’re taking sides’ is merely a way of avoiding the more challenging task of assessing the rights and wrongs of an issue and how it might, sooner or later, directly involve others. This is a repost from 20 September 2016. (more…)
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I am ashamed to be Australian.
I decided to become a photojournalist to help refugees tell their stories, and to show their plight. I was stunned by the lack of compassion and the outright racism I saw in my countrymen. I was angry as only a teenager can be with the politicians who fanned the flames of xenophobia. (more…)
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TIM COSTELLO. Abandoning generosity in Overseas Development Assistance.
Yet we are set to see our aid commitment as a percentage of national income drop to a record low level. Already since 2012 it has slumped from 0.36% of national income to 0.23%. This relegates us to the lower half of OECD countries in terms of generosity despite being near the top for economic capacity. In fact we were roughly three times as generous in the 1960s, even though today we are roughly three times as wealthy. (more…)
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TONY KEVIN. Henry Kissinger’s last hurrah!
Henry Kissinger‘s renascent role in US-Russian diplomacy
Remarkably, 93-year old Henry Kissinger is still making judicious and fruitful public and private interventions in Russia-US relations. It seems his moment may have come again to make a difference as an East-West peace-broker, as he did in the Nixon-Brezhnev years ( for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1973). (more…)
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Australia’s Death by Numbers
The dead refugee had a name. But even in death Australia did not want to humanize him. For years now he had been no more than a registration number — BRF063 — under the country’s cruel refugee deterrence system known as “offshore processing.” (more…)
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WALTER HAMILTON. Japan’s New Blood
The Australian servicemen who left behind mixed-race children during the postwar Occupation of Japan set in motion changes that are chipping away at a nation’s stubborn myth of racial homogeneity. (more…)
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WALTER HAMILTON. ‘Fighting Monsters’
Australians, Americans and Japanese have been ‘fighting monsters’––the monsters of war remembrance––since 1945. A high-profile visit to Pearl Harbor during the week seemed to suggest another monster was being laid to rest. But while that piece of theatre left much to be desired, especially in its aftermath, another recent attempt, away from the spotlight, gives us reason to hope. (more…)
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From the American Challenge to the Chinese Challenge?
The unfolding Western effort to preach to the Chinese and paint a picture of a shining and benign America and contrasting that with a threatening and malign picture of China is, among other things, a complete distortion of the historical truth.
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WAYNE SWAN. The blindness of affluence and the need for a more inclusive form of prosperity.
This is a repost from 15 November 2016.
Just over two years ago I was in New York working with Larry Summers and Ed Balls to prepare a report for the Center for American Progress on inclusive prosperity. One morning I had the opportunity to walk the High Line and on the side of an old brick building was a large advertisement which read “the French aristocracy never saw it coming either.”
It was yet another reminder of the ground swell of support sweeping around the world for a more inclusive form of prosperity and it’s been an image seared in my mind ever since.
In early 2015 the Inclusive Prosperity Commission Report was published. Its first paragraph concluded that growing inequality is a threat to “the political system and for the idea of democracy itself”. (more…)
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How inefficient private health insurance, drug manufacturers and distributors drive up costs.
In parliament, forty years ago on 27 September 1967, Gough Whitlam described the factors driving up the high cost of healthcare in Australia. The same vested interests drive up costs in Australia at the expense of the taxpayer and the community. John Menadue. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Who said this and when.
Private health insurance is unfair and inefficient. It was because of this that the Whitlam Government established Medibank/Medicare. (more…)
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End of an era in US-Thai relations!
In this article in the Bangkok Post, journalist Alan Dawson writes of a trend by the Thai government to improve relations with China at the expense of the US. Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ is having difficulties in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. See link below to Bangkok Post article.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/general/1167845/end-of-an-era-
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DANI RODRIK. Put globalisation to work for democracies.
A repost from the New York Times, Sunday Review, 17 September 2016.
A Chinese student once described his country’s globalization strategy to me. China, he said, opened a window to the world economy, but placed a screen on it. The country got the fresh air it needed — nearly 700 million people have been lifted from extreme poverty since the early 1980s — but kept mosquitoes out. (more…)
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Broken men in paradise.
‘The world’s refugee crisis knows no more sinister exercise in cruelty than Australia’s island prisons.’In this long, searing account in the New York Times, Op-ed columnist, Roger Cohen, describes what he found on a recent visit to Manus Island. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Cricket – alcohol and junk food.
Cricket has a dangerous relationship with alcohol and junk food.
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WILLY BACH. Australia’s Collaboration in the CIA’s Secret War in Laos
US forces left Thailand in 1975-76 at the request of Thai authorities. SEATO was disbanded in 1977. Australia’s forward defence doctrine was quietly forgotten.
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TILLY GUNNING. Gertrude Menear – My Great, Great Aunt-an early suffragette
A woman ahead of her time. (more…)
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ANDREW AILES. Peace on earth – the children of Aleppo.
Peace on Earth
Peace on earth. Goodwill to men,
Echoes like Sullivan’s Great Amen:
The chord he lost when sitting by,
His brother as he watched him die. (more…) -
JOHN MENADUE. Seasonal favourites.
I would like to share with you some of my favourites at Christmas, a time of hope.
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PETER DAY. Grandpa’s favourite Shepherd
This Christmas child won’t give you discounted goods … rather he’ll invite you to be humble, other-centred.
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GERALDINE DOOGUE. Connections in our lives.
Underneath the jollity and frantic end-of-year scurrying, I detect a wistfulness about the lack of certainty of connections in people’s lives these days. (more…)
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ROBERT MANNE. Yes Virginia, there is a solution to Australia’s asylum-seeker problem.
A new chapter of humanly decent policy with regard to asylum seekers, more reflective of the many fine and generous impulses in our history of welcoming refugees, can at long last be opened. For pity’s sake, let it be.
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HENRY SHERRELL, PETER MARES & ANNA BOUCHER. Another obstacle on the road to citizenship?
Making migrants ‘provisional’ risks Australia’s multicultural success. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. White man’s media – Rupert Murdoch’s faulty memory.
Rupert Murdoch has asserted again that he has never asked anything from any Prime Minister. (more…)
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Shakespeare on refugees, strangers and inhumanity.
In a series of speeches written by Shakespeare, Thomas More makes the argument for the humane treatment of those forced to seek asylum after being expelled from their homeland. This is a repost from August 23, 2016. (more…)
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JOHN MENADUE. Series: We can say ‘no’ to the Americans. How the Fraser Government said ‘no’ on Chile and El Salvador.
In 1982, when I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, the Fraser Government ignored the pressure from the US that we should not help people in South America suffering at the hands of US-supported military governments. (more…)
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JOANNE WALLIS. Hollow hegemon: Australia’s declining influence in the Pacific
Australia has vital strategic interests in the Pacific but comparatively less influence with which to pursue them. Pacific states are largely unwilling to accept Australian leadership.
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ROSS BURNS. After Aleppo.
The international community remains hopelessly divided and in many cases incapable of assessing the real dynamics of the conflict in the face of its gut-wrenching humanitarian dimensions.
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