One is constantly reading or listening to the loud declarations of eternal friendship – blood-brotherhood in so many words – of our Australian federal politicians and their US counterparts, including military leaders, generals and so forth. But what is the truth to these vows of undying promises to be all the way with the US of A? Where can we determine the hollowness to these protestations (leading inevitably to our engagement in the imperial wars of that great and powerful friend in parts of the world which have little importance to us – certainly do not threaten us – or else our rolling over to the establishment of US bases on our sovereign soil, or forcing such on our PNG neighbour). (more…)
John Menadue
-
IAN BURNET. ‘Friends in Australia’ – a message from Sutan Sjahir, the Prime Minister of the newly declared Republic of Indonesia, November 1945.
On 17 August 1945 and two days after the Japanese surrender, Soekarno and Hatta unilaterally declared Indonesia’s Independence and became the first President and Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia. (more…)
-
JOAN STAPLES: An Australian civil society success story.
Almost twelve months ago, I first wrote of threats to democratic advocacy from three foreign interference Bills. On Tuesday this week, the final most controversial Bill, the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Reform Bill, was passed with the support of civil society. The story of this transformation from horrified opposition to support for the Bill is a story of Australian civil society working together to influence legislation in a way rarely seen. It opens the way for future collaboration to proactively promote the strengthening of our democracy. (more…)
-
CHRISTIAN DOWNIE. Australian Energy Diplomacy.
In Australia, little attention has been given to the concept of “energy diplomacy”, including the way in which it might interact with foreign policy objectives. (more…)
-
WILL WILKINSON. Can Democrats Drain Trump’s Gilded Swamp? (New York Times, 27 November 2018)
Democrats are now preparing to assume control of the House. This offers many possibilities for oversight and investigation. For one, the House Ways and Means Committee has the right to inspect the president’s tax returns, and Democrats are sure to swiftly call on the Treasury to hand over President Trump’s tax records. (more…)
-
TERRY FEWTRELL. Seems Pope Francis is with the People
The latest letter from Pope Francis greatly empowers
Australia’s Catholics to use their influence and puts heat on the
bishops to allow the voices and wisdom of Australian Catholics to be
heard seriously. (more…) -
ALEXANDER KAUFMAN, CHRIS D’ANGELO. Federal Climate Report Predicts At Least 3 Degrees Of Warming By 2100 (Huff Post).
The White House’s decision to release the report over the holiday weekend is likely to bury the sobering new findings.
-
FRANK JOTZO. Labor’s policy can smooth the energy transition, but much more will be needed to tackle emissions (The Conversation).
The Labor party’s energy policy platform, released last week, is politically clever and would likely be effective. It includes plans to underwrite renewable energy and storage, and other elements that would help the energy transition along. Its approach to the transition away from coal-fired power is likely to need more work, and it will need to be accompanied by good policy in other sectors of the economy where greenhouse emissions are still climbing. (more…)
-
MARCIA ANGELL. Opioid Nation. (NYRB 6.12.2018)
In this article, Marcia Angell reviews four books on pain-killers, doctors ,drug overdoses and the drug companies. She concludes that alcohol and tobacco have far more serious health consequences than opioids.Opioids at least have the redeeming feature that they have a medical use as painkillers . She comments. “As long as this country [the US] tolerates the chasm between the rich and the poor and fails even to pretend to provide for the most basic needs of our citizens, such as health care, education and childcare, some people will want to use drugs to escape.”
Marcia Angell is a member of the faculty of Global Health and Social Medicine at the Harvard Medical School . She was former Editor in Chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. See article below.
(more…) -
TONY KEVIN. The Kerch Strait gambit
A Kiev-provoked Ukraine/Russia naval clash near the Kerch Strait, Crimea, threatens to derail the Argentina G20 Summit (30 Nov -1 Dec) and to worsen US-Russia bilateral relations. NATO allies are lining up behind a false Ukrainian narrative. The war in Eastern Ukraine could escalate now. (more…)
-
MEDIA ALERT. APPEAL IN ‘PALACE LETTERS’ CASE TO BE HEARD ON WEDNESDAY, 28 NOVEMBER 2018
Professor Jenny Hocking’s long-running legal action against the National Archives of Australia, seeking the release of the secret ‘Palace Letters’ about Gough Whitlam’s dismissal, heads back to court tomorrow. Professor Hocking’s appeal against the Federal Court’s ruling in March, which continued the Queen’s embargo over the letters, will be heard on Wednesday 28 November at 10.15 am in Court 1, Level 21, at the Federal Court of Australia, 184 Phillips Street, Sydney. The appeal will be heard by the Full Court of the Federal Court, before Chief Justice Allsop, Justice Flick and Justice Robertson. Professor Hocking’s case will be led by respected Sydney barrister Bret Walker S.C. with Tom Brennan, instructed by Corrs Chambers Westgarth.
Professor Hocking says; ‘The Palace letters case is of the greatest importance, not only because it brings into the open the secret letters between the Governor-General and the Queen at the time of Whitlam’s dismissal, but also because it reasserts the principle of open access to vital historical documents held by our National Archives, the most significant repository of our national historical memory.’
Read this press release for further quotes and information on the case.
Additional background to the case can also be found at: https://chuffed.org/project/release-the-palace-letters
-
ANDREW GREENE. Australian Defence Force’s Iraq war secrets revealed in newly declassified report (ABC News)
A secret Army study has detailed the widespread logistical problems faced by Australian forces in Iraq 15 years ago. ‘The Howard government had decided early in 2002 to begin planning the Iraq War, a year before John Howard announced Australia’s involvement….But it could not admit this to the public or even the ADF
-
TRAVERS MCLEOD. Australia will rue its decision on global migration compact
“Step up or step aside.” This was former Indonesian foreign minister Hassan Wirajuda’s warning to Australia and Indonesia, as Co-Chairs of the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons, and Related Transnational Crime, in January 2016. (more…)
-
JOHN MENADUE. Saturday postings
We are changing our Saturday postings.
We will continue to post hyperlinks to ‘good listening and reading’ that we feel will be of interest over the weekend.
We will also give timely notice of the contents of Geraldine Doogue’s Saturday Extra. Her program starts at 7.30 am, but our email has been going out on Saturday after noon.
We will now be posting the Saturday content at 7am each weekend.
-
JEREMY SALT. Yes, What About Yemen? (American Herald Tribune, 13.11.18)
After the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, many are asking ‘But what about Yemen?’ Yes, indeed, what about Yemen, but what about Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Somalia? What about Egypt in 1956, what about Iran in 1953 and what about Palestine from 1917 to the present day? (more…)
-
With the rise of China our failures in Asia are even more serious
We are so used to being conditioned ,told and doing what Washington wants that we find it hard to make up our own mind on what is in our national interest in our own region. And our failure to think for ourselves is going to become even more critical with a new powerful player in our region, China. For the first time in our history we will have a regional power that will become more powerful than our outside protector, the US. China is already a larger economy. (more…)
-
PETER VARGHESE. Australia and India: Navigating From Potential to Delivery.
In July I submitted to then PM Turnbull a report he had commissioned on an India Economic Strategy out to 2035. (more…)
-
C.J. POLYCHRONIOU. Noam Chomsky: Moral Depravity Defines US Politics (Truth Out).
The US midterm elections of November 6, 2018, produced a divided Congress and essentially reaffirmed the existence of two nations in one country. But they also revealed, once again, the deep state of moral and political depravity that prevails in the country’s political culture — at least insofar as political campaigns go. In the exclusive interview below, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky discusses how the major issues confronting the United States and the world at large were barely addressed by the majority of candidates of both parties. (more…)
-
ALEXANDER STILLE. The Sins of Celibacy.
This article was published by The New York Review of Books on the 25th of October 2018.
On August 25 Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published an eleven-page letter in which he accused Pope Francis of ignoring and covering up evidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and called for his resignation. It was a declaration of civil war by the church’s conservative wing. Viganò is a former apostolic nuncio to the US, a prominent member of the Roman Curia—the central governing body of the Holy See—and one of the most skilled practitioners of brass-knuckle Vatican power politics. He was the central figure in the 2012 scandal that involved documents leaked by Pope Benedict XVI’s personal butler, including letters Viganò wrote about corruption in Vatican finances, and that contributed to Benedict’s startling decision to abdicate the following year. Angry at not having been made a cardinal and alarmed by Francis’s supposedly liberal tendencies, Viganò seems determined to take out the pope. (more…)
-
ROD MITCHELL. A carbon price that curbs polluters and reduces inequality.
The federal government’s non-response to climate change has run its course and events are rapidly overtaking its startled members. And now, after years of resistance, Woodside, BHP and Rio Tinto have done an about face and are calling for a price on carbon. (more…)
-
HELEN CLARK. Another decade lost to the global war on drugs (The Hill, 20.11.18)
In my experience as head of my country’s government and previously a health minister, as a former senior official at the United Nations, and more recently as a member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, I’ve found debates on drug policy tend to be divisive and passionately ideological. On one point, however, there is a clear and growing consensus: Around the world, the so-called “war on drugs” is failing. (more…)
-
JOHN MENADUE. Health Reform Priorities
Health costs are rising through greater use of technology, ageing, lack of coordination and waste. Doctors provide many services that should be provided by others. Mental , indigenous and dental health have serious problems. Services are being delivered less equitably. There has been very slow progress, particularly in prevention of illness and disease .Our health system is provider not patient driven. (more…)
-
CAROLE CADWALLADR. Why Britain Needs Its Own Mueller (The New York Review of Books).
At the end of January 2017, days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, I sat in a busy Pret a Manger sandwich bar in central London, a stone’s throw from the mother of parliaments, and flicked through snapshots of Donald Trump on a mobile phone. (more…)
-
ADAM WAKELING. Tokyo Trial: how an Australian judge sentenced a Japanese leader to death (ABC NEWS).
“Accused Hideki Tojo, on the counts of the indictment of which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East sentences you to death by hanging.” (more…)
-
ROHAN FOX, MATTHEW DORNAN. China in the Pacific: Is China engaged in “debt-trap diplomacy”? A repost from November 12 2018
Recent media coverage has touted the rise of Chinese aid and lending as a threat to Pacific nations’ sovereignty and to the West’s influence in the Pacific. China, so the narrative goes, is aggressively lending to smaller nations who do not have the capacity to pay back the loans. Some commentators have even described such lending as “debt-trap diplomacy”, implying that lending forms part of an intentional strategy by the Chinese state to pressure Pacific island governments….Debt is a problem in the region and one that appears to be increasing in importance. But for most countries it is not debt to China that is of concern. Keep that in mind next time you hear that the Pacific is drowning in China debt.
This article was published by Development Blog, ANU Crawford School of Public Policy on the 8th of November 2018. (more…)
-
GARETH PORTER. America’s permanent-war complex. (The American Conservative, 15.11.2108)
What President Dwight D. Eisenhower dubbed the “military-industrial complex” has been constantly evolving over the decades, adjusting to shifts in the economic and political system as well as international events. The result today is a “permanent-war complex,” which is now engaged in conflicts in at least eight countries across the globe, none of which are intended to be temporary. The Department of Defence is no longer a war- fighting organisation. Its a business enterprise. War is being privatised. (more…)
-
Decoupling the US from Asia (ANU East Asia Forum).
Maybe US Vice President Mike Pence didn’t mean to fire the opening shots in a new Cold War with China in his 4 October speech at the Hudson Institute, but the global policy community can be forgiven now for taking the proposition seriously. (more…)
-
WILLIAM GRIMM. The Catholic Church’s one foundation (UCA News).
The entire Church needs a new Reformation, a new turning toward Christ. (more…)
-
TONY KEVIN. The diplomatic disaster that was APEC Port Moresby
There is still a lot we do not know about how and why the APEC Summit just ended in Port Moresby was such a diplomatic disaster, from which APEC may not readily recover anytime soon. (more…)
-
ERIC SIDOTI. Let the Privatisation Games Begin
Privatisation has been the source of ongoing debate in this country since at least the 1980s. For much of the intervening years though to question the virtues of privatisation – and the accompanying sanctification of competition and choice- has been treated as economic heresy. The threat of political excommunication strangled policy development. It’s to be hoped that we are witnessing the passing of those days as the welcome exchanges between John Menadue and Michael Keating in this revered blog might suggest. However, a genuine debate must go beyond the origins and the entrenched belief that privatisation is purely a matter of economic practice. (more…)