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…)
John Menadue
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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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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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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…) -
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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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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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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Putin interferes in US election. In the past the CIA interfered in Japan.
The following is a New York Times Report of October 9, 1994. In a major covert operation of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency spent millions of dollars to support the conservative party that dominated Japan’s politics for a generation. (more…)
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ROBERT MANNE. The Australian’s attacks on Gillian Triggs.
The attack launched by the Australian on Gillian Triggs and the Human Rights Commission has been obsessive, petty, relentless, remorseless and ruthless. (more…)
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DAVID CHARLES. The Re-emergence of Industrial Policy – Theresa May and Donald Trump Style
One of the consequences of the UK Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as the next US President is the association with the re-emergence of industrial policy in both countries which are important for the development of policy thinking in Australia. This comes at a time when Australia is dealing with the economic transition associated with the end of the mining boom. (more…)
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BRIAN McNAIR. The empire strikes back.
Just five short years after (literally) eating humble pie live on national TV for presiding over the most corrupt, criminally minded, bin-raking, sleaze-mongering crowd of press hacks ever to spread their poison in the English-speaking world, Rupert Murdoch is back at the door of Sky in the UK, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf of yore. (more…)
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STEPHEN GRENVILLE. Australia’s AAA credit rating under threat, but who cares?
Five year ago the Financial Crisis Enquiry Commission, set up by the US Congress following the Global Financial Crisis, described the rating agencies as ‘essential companies in the wheel of financial destruction’ and ‘key enablers of the financial meltdown’.
Closer to home, Stephen Grenville, a former Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, expressed similar reservations in this blog (see repost) John Menadue (more…)
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. Julie Bishop – supporting bad policies.
The Foreign Minister’s outrage was highly selective … her speech was indeed strong on talk, but weak on effective action. (more…)
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RICHARD WOOLCOTT. A declining Australia.
With dropping levels in education and a fading economy Australia is in a decline. What we need is a clear focus on our own area, Asia and the South West Pacific. (more…)