John Menadue

  • GARRY EVERETT. Consultation as seduction.

    The Catholic Church in Australia is about to engage in a major consultation of its members. This is the first such consultation in almost 70 years. Why now? There could be any of a number of reasons. Nationally, Mass attendance has dropped from over 50% in the 1950s to about 10% today.  Many parishes are struggling financially. The Royal Commission into institutional responses to the sexual abuse of minors in the Australian Catholic Church, delivered a caustic report revealing that the very culture of the Church is now toxic. (more…)

  • DAVID JAMES. Governments have stopped governing and financiers have become our de facto rulers.

    Perhaps the biggest surprise about the reaction to the Royal Commission into the banks is that anyone is surprised. Banks are by their nature parasitic, and the discovery that they are treating their customers as prey to be exploited whenever possible should shock no-one. It is the institutional position of power that financial institutions enjoy – and we put them there. (more…)

  • GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND …

    The ABC’s Spirit of Things has woven together several ANZAC stories, including the revelation that the puggaree on our slouch hat is a variant of the Sikhs’ turban. The program starts with presenter Noel Debien interviewing Marist Brother John Lutterll, who has written a biography of an Australian who served in the Gallipoli campaign as a radio operator on the troopship Hessen – Norman Thomas Gilroy.  The interview is about the life, politics and theology of Australia’s first cardinal. It also provides insight into the enduring differences between the NSW and Victorian branches of the Labor Party.

    The most eloquent and moving Anzac Day speech was from French Prime Minister Édouard Phillipe at the opening of the Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux.

    To understand current developments in North and South Korea, a little history is useful. The New Yok Times has provided a two minute video of the history of the Korean War. In that context these photographs on the ABC website are extraordinary, because technically the two sides are still at war after 68 years

    Don’t believe the official narrative in the Syrian chemical weapons controversy – Truthdig.

    Can Anzac Day now return to a day of solemn reflection – Paul Daley, the Guardian.

    Japan demands that the Koreas pull a dessert from summit menu because it mentions disputed islands – South China Morning Post.

    The secrets of old parliament house revealed – Canberra Times

    The demise of the nation state – Rana Dasgupta in the Guardian

    The diggers built a proud banking culture and the suits ruined it – The New Daily

    Never mind Fox: Trump’s most reliable media mouthpiece is now Christian TV – Politico

    Why Trump Is Winning and the Press Is Losing – New York Review of Books.

    Caritas and other Catholic agencies divest from fossil fuels – La Croix International.

    On Saturday Extra with Geraldine Doogue this 28th April,  former ALP Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson discusses the livestock export  industry; Alan Kohler on the pay structure of financial advisers; veteran middle east analyst, Anthony Bubalo discusses potential good news coming out from the Middle East; A Foreign Affair with guests Alan Dupont, Jonathan Pearlman and  Gorana Grgic and former ambassador to China, Geoff Raby on his travels along the Silk Road. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/

    Defend the ‘rule-based’ order in Asia at any cost?  Hugh White

     

  • PETER MARTIN. How the Coalition ran interference for the banks.

    The Coalition wasn’t merely asleep at the wheel when it came to the practices being exposed at the banking royal commission: it pulled out all stops to allow some of them to continue, including attempting to circumvent the will of parliament, in an extraordinary 12-month burst of activity that began within weeks of its election.

    It had inherited Labor’s Future of Financial Advice Act, legislated in 2012 but not due to take full effect until mid-2014, 10 months after the election that swept it to power. (more…)

  • EMIRZA ADI SYAILENDRA. Indonesia’s elite divided on China

    The diffuse nature of policymaking in Indonesia discourages its leaders from departing from the country’s status quo policy towards Beijing. The status quo aims to allow Jakarta to have its cake and eat it too — that is, enjoy close relations with Beijing while preserving its strategic autonomy in ASEAN. (more…)

  • ROGER COHEN. The insanity along the Gaza fence

    Israel has the right to defend its borders, but not use lethal force against unarmed protesters. (more…)

  • JUSTIN GILLIS and HAL HARVEY- Cars are ruining our cities

    We give up our public space, our neighbor-to -neighbor conversations and ultimately our personal mobility for the next car, and the next one. More and more countries and cities are turning to congestion taxes. (more…)

  • SAM BATEMAN. South China Sea Encounters

    Australian and Chinese warships recently had what has been called a robust but polite encounter in the South China Sea. This was always likely and the Australian Government has been correct in not over-reacting. Rather than unnecessarily confronting China, Australia should be sensitive to the views of its Southeast Asian neighbours. (more…)

  • LINDSAY MURDOCH. Former Islamic cleric could be Malaysia’s kingmaker.

    Unlikely election alliance between PAS and UMNO could result in the country taking a stronger Islamic direction.

    (more…)

  • VIC ROWLANDS. Reclaiming Democracy

    Liberty and Equality are simple characterisations of the right and left in politics and Fraternity is what enables the two to co-exist productively. A substantial moderate centre still represents the best chance of resolving difficult and contentious issues, and achieving a consensus.  (more…)

  • TIM COLEBATCH. Why is unemployment still so high?

    In the first three months of this year, the official jobs figures tell us, 400,000 more people were in work in Australia than a ear earlier. And roughly 300,000 of them were in full-time work. (more…)

  • MARGARET O’CONNOR. Institutional reform following the Royal Commission on child sex abuse is women’s work.

    Women – from those who quietly brought pressure on parliamentarians through to the Prime Minister and Governor General – brought about the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Yet the response to the Commission is being handled as if it is all blokes’ business. (more…)

  • ELIZA BERLAGE. Our flailing aid created a Pacific problem.

    The report by Fairfax’s David Wroe of a potential Chinese military presence on Vanuatu sent alarm bells ringing for many. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said a Chinese military base in the region would be ‘of great concern’ and Australian diplomats met with Vanuatu officials last week to find out more details.

    (more…)

  • Media Watch. How News Corp and The Australian mislead us on climate change.

    Great Barrier Reef coral bleaching

    The Australian and Cairns Post highlight a dissenting view on whether global warming is the cause of mass coral bleaching. 

    (more…)

  • PETER MARTIN. We need to stop spending billions on things we don’t really need.

    I am going to say it. We are spending too much on infrastructure – on roads, railways, bridges and the like. We don’t try the cheap things first. And we are spending too much on the NBN.

    You probably disagree, especially if you are waiting for a train, or in a car with a driver who is stuck in traffic. If you go to the footy you would prefer a better stadium, if you use the internet, you would like it faster. (more…)

  • DAVID JAMES. The big, bad business of America’s war industry.

    The spread of militarism does not just involve creating the specific apparatus of war.

    As the Western allies flirt with starting World War III in Syria, it is worth examining some of the financial and business dynamics behind the United States’ ‘military industrial complex.’ (more…)

  • JULIE P SMITH. Live sheep exports are not worth the moral cost.

    Growing up near Midland on the outskirts of Perth during the 1960s and 1970s, I endured the weekly stench from the local abattoir. It was the price we paid to get meat to population centres. My first job was in the local meat processing plant, working with people described as “salt of the earth, working class”, who had historically toiled in appalling conditions because they had no choice.

    Pressured by unions over postwar decades, Australian governments eventually stepped in to enforce decent standards for work and wages. Compelled by those who saw the immense cruelty involved, animal welfare laws were also imposed. Meat industry employers objected to red tape and higher labour costs, but community standards were enforced, most operators complied, and the worst operators eventually left the business. (more…)

  • RICHARD FLANAGAN. Freedom means Australia facing up to the truth of its past. (Part 2 of 2)

    We should, of course, question these things more. We could ask why – if we were actually genuine about remembering patriots who have died for this country – why would we not first spend $100m on a museum honouring the at least 65,000 estimated Indigenous dead who so tragically lost their lives defending their country here in Australia in the frontier wars of the 1800s? Why is there nowhere in Australia telling the stories of the massacres, the dispossession, and the courageous resistance of these patriots?  

    (Second Extract from a speech by Richard Flanagan to the National Press Club on 18 April 2018)   (more…)

  • JIM COOMBS. Crime and Punishment: Who do we do first, the Banks (and “financial advisers”) or “dole bludgers”?

    I was horrified today to hear that the coalition government this week wants to step up its pursuit of “welfare cheats”, a few millions of dollars chasing the poor, disabled and ignorant. Then Treasurer Scott Morrison is impelled to say, the government “might” gaol the execs who defrauded bank customers of what may well prove to be billions, not due to impoverishment (quite the reverse), disability (lets grab the loot) and we know it’s illegal (but that’s business, isn’t it ?) A further Memo to Kenneth Hayne: Proportionate punishment, enshrined in law, should mean that if a dole cheat manages a few thousand and gets two years, then a crook banker who engineers billions should get a life sentence. Has anyone even been charged ? Until “equality before the law” becomes a reality rather than a legal fiction, now we know that they knowingly engaged in systematic theft, the managers , if the principle holds, should have a severe criminal penalty imposed, and the bank should have its licence revoked, on the basis of clear breach of trust.  All those shareholders who thought banks were a licence to print money ( i.e., steal), should wear the risk they took in buying the shares. Isn’t that what capitalism is all about ? (more…)

  • RICHARD FLANAGAN. Australians in WWI didn’t die for Australia. They died for Britain. (Part 1 of 2)

    And so, the Monash Centre, for all its good intentions, for all the honour it does the dead, is at heart a centre for forgetting. It leads us to forget that the 62,000 young men who died in world war one died far from their country in service of one distant empire fighting other distant empires. It leads us to forget that not one of those deaths it commemorates was necessary. Not 62,000. Not even one.

    (The following are extracts from Richard Flanagan’s address to the National Press Club on 18 April 2018. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.)  (more…)

  • ERIC WALSH. Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un.

    The highly- important upcoming meeting between North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un and America’s Donald Trump  could hopefully  settle one of the world’s red-hot trouble spots. (more…)

  • ROBERT MANNE. How we came to be so cruel to asylum seekers.

    This is an edited extract of a talk delivered to the Integrity 20 Conference at Griffith University on October 25, 2016

    If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed. (more…)

  • GARRY EVERETT. Importance of seeing the ‘big picture’.

    Failing to see or accept the big picture is a condition that is currently affecting many organisations in our world, says Garry Everett, and four particular organisations stand out as having significant problems in this regard. (more…)

  • EMMA CARMODY. Lack of transparency in irrigation efficiency programs

    An article by Kerry Brewster in the Guardian this week reports on a significant fraud investigation by Queensland’s Major and Organised Crime Squad (Rural) into subsidies granted to a landholder under the Healthy Headwaters Water Use Efficiency Program. (more…)

  • GREG HAMILTON. Not much ado about a helluva lot.

    A stage play that wouldn’t make it into an Australian theatre today caused a helluva stink back in 1962 and said some wise and courageous (aka shocking) things about the ‘most sacred day’ in our national calendar. The reasons it wouldn’t make it today say something tragic about us as a society of people. (more…)

  • GREG HAMILTON. Dying for nothing, a-la-Australienne.

    According to the oldest surviving veteran of The Great War, Sgt Ted Smout, dead at 106, our war dead died in vain. In his words, ‘they died for nothing’. He must have known something most of us don’t know for him to make such a terrible claim. What could he possibly have known? (more…)

  • GOOD READING AND LISTENING FOR THE WEEKEND …

    Australia gets a mention in The Atlantic, but probably not the kind we wanted.  It’s a review of the work of Terry Hughes (of James Cook University) and others who have had a paper published in Nature on the effect of global warning on the Great Barrier Reef. Atlantic staff writer Robinson Meyer writes:  “The Great Barrier Reef will continue to collapse and die until humanity stabilizes the amount of greenhouse-gas pollution in the air. But fixing that problem will require remaking the energy system, moving away from oil and gas and to solar, wind, and other renewable sources.”

    Katie Acheson, Chair of the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, writes in the Canberra Times about a war being waged in Canberra. It’s a war against young people, subjected to unaffordable housing, high unemployment, expensive education and inaction on environmental damage that will become manifest over their lifetimes.

    Foreign Affairs allows non-subscribers to access one free article per month. In an article “Eastern Europe’s Illiberal Revolution: The Long Road to Democratic Decline” Ivan Krastev,  of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia analyses the decline of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe.  “A new illiberal consensus is emerging, marked by xenophobic nationalism and supported, somewhat unexpectedly, by young people who came of age after the demise of communism. If the liberals who dominated in the 1990s were preoccupied with the rights of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities, this new consensus is about the rights of the majority.”

    On the ABC’s  Rear Vision Annabelle Quince has assembled an  impressive collection of gambling experts  in her program Australia: the world’s biggest gamblers.  It’s a history of gambling in Australia, leading to the post 1970s fiscal pressure on the states to raise funds through taxes on poker machines.  By now Australia has 76 per cent of high-intensity poker machines (200,000 machines) and we spend $23 billion a year on gambling ($3000 a household). (29 minutes)

    Whichever way you cut it, Turnbull’s climate policy is still a sham – Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy

    Senator Rand Paul suggests the chemical weapons attacks in Syria  could have been false flag, unless Assad is the dumbest dictator on the planet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=K4V3jQCi8-o

    And Admiral Lord West wonders the same thing in the UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIA_dNkscsw

    In Syria, the fog of war, Ross Burns

    Scandal pursues Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe – New York REview of Books.

    The President Is Not Above The Law. The constitutional order may soon be at stake in the investigation of Donald Trump – The New York Times editorial.

    Politics with Michelle Grattan: “Clive Hamilton and Richard Rigby on Chinese influence in Australia”

    Clement Atlee, the mouse that roared – New York Review of Books.

    On Saturday Extra this 21st April, Geraldine Doogue speaks with James Eyers from the AFR on this week’s Royal Commission into the banks and a discussion on the default life insurance built into our superannuation funds with minister for financial services, Kelly O’Dwyer as one of the guests.  The disturbing rape stories coming out of India but is this more about a growing division between Hindus and Muslims in that country and navigating freedom of the press in this era of fake news with foreign correspondents Peter Greste and Salil Tripathi. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/saturdayextra/

     

  • MARILYN LAKE. ANZAC from a Turkish point of view.

    As Anzac Day comes round once more so we must prepare for the accompanying bombardment of nationalist myth-making. Our sense of national consciousness, so the story goes, was born on 25 April 1915. A nation was born on that day of death. The Anzacs fought for ‘freedom and democracy’. They died so that we might live. 

    Mythologies serve to comfort and console. They smooth contradictions and reduce historical complexity. They make meaning of events that might otherwise be senseless or unbearable.  (more…)

  • DAVID BLOWERS. Australia’s slow march towards a National Energy Guarantee is gathering pace.

    The finer policy details of the of the proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG) have begun to leak onto newspaper front pages and websites, ahead of Friday’s crucial meeting of federal and state energy ministers.

    The good news is that the leaked information suggests solid progress has been made over the past couple of months on both the emissions and reliability components of the policy. (more…)

  • SCOTT BURCHILL. What The West Really Thinks About Chemical Weapons Attacks.

    How genuine is the West’s concern about the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria last week? Did they constitute a “line in the sand”, a crime so egregious that military strikes by Washington, London and Paris were necessary and morally justified? The historical record would suggest exactly the opposite. (more…)