Blog

  • EMMA CARMODY. Murray, Darling, what’s all this 4 Corners fuss about?

    This article examines the contents of a recently aired 4 Corners episode, Pumped, which included allegations of water theft, corruption and regulatory capture in the Murray-Darling Basin. (more…)

  • FREYA HIGGINS DESBIOLLES. The politics of public monuments: It’s time Australians looked at what, and whom, we commemorate

    Recent events in the US have seen Confederate Civil War monuments pulled down and painful histories revisited. Comparing these acts to those of the Islamic State terror group, Spiked editor Brendan O’Neill evocatively called this an “Orwellian war on history” and a “Year Zero mentality” on the march.  O’Neill also took aim at Australia’s Yarra Council for its recent decision to no longer celebrate Australia Day on January 26.  This is a result of ongoing calls from Indigenous groups to change the date of the national day.  This is because it marks the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet at Botany Bay and is thus, in their view, “invasion day”.  O’Neill is wrong.  It is not a matter of erasing history but a question of whose history is told.  In Australia, it has been called the “the Great Australian silence”, following W.E.H. Stanner, as we stubbornly refuse to tackle these issues. (more…)

  • PETER JOHNSTONE. (Announcement) International Authority on the Church’s Governance to visit Australia

    Dr Richard Gaillardetz, an eminent lay theologian who raises some of the hard questions for the Catholic Church concerning its governance, is coming to Australia for the National Pastoral Leaders and Pastoral Planners Conference. This is a conference organised by pastoral associates, a challenging leadership role occupied mostly by women and increasingly important to the functioning of the Church. (more…)

  • MICHAEL McKINLEY. Pine Gap: A Case of Australia’s Reckless Endangerment

    The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap is a reproach to  Australian democracy, independence and government.  Over the years Australia has achieved its goal of being fully integrated within the operations of the facility to such a degree that it is significantly responsible for the consequences of those operations. Among these consequences are the facilitation of illegal modes of warfare and of illegal operations per se.  At the same time those responsible for this involvement have remained silent and allowed issues of fundamental importance to be ignored. (more…)

  • JOHN FALZON. Politics is concentrated economics

    Stark displays of inequality, such as the concentration of homeless people in Martin Place, challenge us to unite in solidarity with those who are oppressed by injustice – an injustice that is a deliberate aspect of our neoliberal economic system. (more…)

  • ADAM BROINOWSKI. Picking up the pieces amid the U.S.–North Korea nuclear stand-off

    North Korea is often righteously condemned for being the only nation to have conducted five nuclear tests and a barrage of missile tests in the 21st century. Led by a young chubby dictator with a bad haircut, we have long been told that the paranoid hermit kingdom known for its undeniably bombastic, intensely patriotic and anachronistic rhetoric is evil, unhinged and dangerous. (more…)

  • PAUL BUDDE. The end of the Foxtel wars

    The announcement of the proposed merger of Foxtel with Fox Sport Australia, combined with Telstra’s agreement to dilute its shareholding in the pay TV operator, paves the way for the end of the Foxtel war between News Corp Australia (formerly News Limited) and Telstra.  The decline in revenue and subscriber numbers will most certainly have provided News Corp with the ammunition it needed to break the stranglehold that Telstra has held over Foxtel for more than 20 years.   (more…)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. Debating the Burqa

    Brandis was wrong to harangue Hanson. A debate on banning the burqa in Australia is required and should address three questions: its origins in religious edicts and cultural practices; the current practice in Western liberal democracies; and the practice in Islamic countries. (more…)

  • John Menadue. The burqa and hijab – public space must be neutral and secular.-a repost

    The burqa and the hijab are stale news in France.

    There has been an important debate and discussion on Muslim head and body covering in France for many years. The simple head dress or hijab, turbans and kippas have been banned in French schools since 2004. The burqa has been banned in public spaces since 2010. The French approach has a wide consensus across the political spectrum.   (more…)

  • HENRY REYNOLDS. That day again

    Controversy about Australia Day intensifies. The ABC’s Triple J is consulting its listeners about moving the popular Hottest 100 Countdown from January 26th. Debate is taking place in council chambers across the country. Melbourne’s Yarra Council was savaged by Prime Minister Turnbull in parliament last week because the councillors had decided to cancel official ceremonies on January 26. But this week neighbouring Darebin Council voted 6 to 2 to follow suit to be similarly chastised by the federal government. (more…)

  • RICHARD BUTLER. Trump’s “Principled Realism” : details withheld

    President Trump’s speech on a new Afghanistan strategy was partly designed to mitigate the extreme harm he did by his Charlottesville outbursts.  Apart from claiming that the US would win in Afghanistan, no details were given.  He bashed Pakistan, embraced India and made clear that allies, such as Australia, would be expected to support the new tack by contributing military assets and money. (more…)

  • JOSEPH A. CAMILLERI. Australia’s engagement with Asia and the world has fallen on hard times.

    In the vain hope of minimising the catastrophic consequences of America’s 16-year long military intervention, Donald Trump has just announced yet another surge in its military presence in Afghanistan.  Australia, like other allies, will also be asked to do more, and will almost certainly agree to the request.  This is part of the now familiar pattern that has seen Australia despatch military forces to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.  It is a reminder of the same reflexive mindset that has prompted Malcolm Turnbull’s recent comments linking ANZUS to the Korean crisis.  In this case, the response is so ill-informed as to be comical, and so bereft of common sense as to be tragic.  Australia’s foreign and security policies, it seems, have now descended into pure farce. (more…)

  • GILES PARKINSON. Super cheap solar – and why that’s good for Australia’s mining sector

    Australia’s most pre-eminent solar researcher, Dr Martin Green, says the cost of solar PV technology will fall substantially in coming years, and while bad for the country’s thermal coal industry it will spell good news for other Australian mineral and materials exports.’ Any loss in thermal coal sales due to strong solar PV uptake will be offset 5 times over by increased demand for more valuable resources- coking coal,iron ore,alumina and copper’ (more…)

  • PHIL O’DONNELL. A Tale of Two Churches

    Threats by Catholic bishops to dismiss employees who marry same sex-partners reveal not only a lack of compassion, but also a deep gulf between the authoritarian and conservative concerns of the church hierarchy and the pastoral and justice concerns of many of its priests, religious and parishioners. (more…)

  • DENNIS ARGALL. Pine Gap and national strategic independence.

    For a long time people have focused concern on Pine Gap.  But Pine Gap is but an element of our entanglement with United States strategic policy, which is the big thing to be addressed and turned around.  (more…)

  • HUGH MACKAY. What the Census really said about religion.

    When the 2016 Census results were released, anti-religionists and anti-theists worked themselves into a lather of excitement about the apparent increase in the number of Australians ticking the ‘No religion’ box.  In the five years since 2011, that figure rose from 21.8 to 29.6 percent.  Or did it? (more…)

  • BOB CARR. Tribute to Johno Johnson. ‘Keep the faith…both of them’

    The separation of church and state was not a fetish of John Richard Johnson.  He adored the Cross on Calvary.  And rallied to The Light on The Hill. (more…)

  • SPENCER ZIFCAK. The Trouble with Section 44: the constitutional provision afflicting our Parliament

    It’s been quite a month. At least seven members of the Federal Parliament have been referred to the High Court to determine their eligibility to have been elected, and there is a real prospect of an outcome that could cost the Turnbull government its House of Representatives majority. The stakes are very high. (more…)

  • GEORGE BROWNING. Confession and Child Abuse

     The Royal Commission has made what most Australians believe to be a very reasonable and overdue request – that priests should be obligated to report evidence of child abuse no matter what the circumstance. Resistance from the Church will not be received sympathetically. (more…)

  • KIERAN TAPSELL. Sex Abuse and the Seal of the Confessional

    The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has just released its Criminal Justice Report in which it deals with many matters  relating to the way child sexual abuse within institutions is handled by the Australian criminal justice system. In the course of that report, it recommends mandatory reporting of all suspected child sexual abuse within institutions and the creation of new offences of failing to take proper care to prevent such abuse. (more…)

  • PAUL COLLINS. Marriage equality – some thoughts for the perplexed.

    Throughout human history all types of arrangements have evolved to nurture children, of which a common form is a reasonably stable relationship between woman and man. Whether or not this was seen as marriage varied widely.  So, use of the term “traditional marriage” is a misnomer.  What the Catholic hierarchy is presenting as “traditional” is really a romantic, bourgeois understanding of marriage.  (more…)

  • MUNGO MACCALLUM. The good news.

    The good news for Malcolm Turnbull is that his government is not in immediate danger of falling – at least, not any more than usual.   (more…)

  • RAMESH THAKUR. China and the North Korean nuclear challenge

    On a superficial reading, China is feeling the squeeze to take effective action to bring North Korea to heel over its rogue nuclear program. On a deeper reading, China’s gains from the crisis exceed the costs. On a wider reading, Washington daily vindicates Pyongyang’s nuclear choices. (more…)

  • ANDREW FARRAN. We should discuss Pine Gap!

    Whether the leaked documents from the US National Security Agency were revealing, as claimed by the ABC’s Background Briefing on Sunday morning (http://ab.co/2vSXdhD), enough has been known about the Pine Gap facility long enough for some searching questions about its accountability to be well overdue. (more…)

  • The Myth About Marriage

    Paul Collins’ recent article, An Open Letter to Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher, has attracted record numbers of readers for this blog.  The following article by Garry Wills elaborates on the ‘myth about marriage’.

    In his article in the New York Review of Books on 9 May 2012, Garry Wills writes:

    Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.  

    (more…)

  • TONY SMITH. In Defence of the Yarra Council

    Local government leading the way on an important political issue? Who would have thought it? Well, anyone with an eye to federal ossification on Indigenous policy will welcome the move to stop calling 26 January ‘Australia Day’ as a potential circuit breaker. (more…)

  • MACK WILLIAMS. The South Koreans are a critical part of the equation

    As the shouting match becomes more heated between Kim Jong Un and President Trump the role of the popular new President Moon has become more difficult. The most likely casualties in any outbreak of military exchanges would be the population of Seoul and would be very large. These must be considered properly in advance of military action. (more…)

  • ANDREW FARRAN. John Howard and the Coalition’s views on war powers could lead to conflict in South China Sea

    Recent comments by former Prime Minister John Howard is indicative of just how easily conflict situations can engage quickly and end badly in the hands of a ‘strong’ Prime Minister who takes the Howard view that the Executive alone has an unchecked power to commit to war. As Howard’s view on the ‘war powers’ is strongly held by the Turnbull Government his thinking on current conflict situations remains significant.  (more…)

  • MICHAEL LAMBERT. The shambles of Australia’s national electricity policy.

    Australia has rich energy resources, both fossil and renewable, and a well considered electricity market design, as evidenced by the National Electricity Market (NEM), so why is our electricity market policy overall in such a shambolic state?  Successive national governments have failed to address the core policy issues that are fundamental if the ‘trilemma’ of current challenges are to be resolved. (more…)

  • RANALD MACDONALD. ABC deal comes back to haunt the Government (Episode Two).

    Last week I began my summary of the Government’s complex negotiations aimed at getting its Media Reform Bill through the Senate with the words:   “Make a deal for political expediency and then unforeseen consequences usually follow.   The ABC and its future is not a ‘bargaining chip’ for the Government to use to pass legislation in the Senate.  Yet a deal brokered by Communications Minister Fifield to gain Liberal Democratic Senator David Leyonhjelm’s vote some months back, has already come back to haunt it……..”.  Well, the ‘haunting’ continues. (more…)