Archives: Letters to the Editor

Our “intelligence” establishment has managed to continue to produce a long line of Cold War clones without imagination, intellect or policy skills. They have survived by dint of simply repeating what they are told by their real masters, MI6 and the CIA.

They ably reflect the paranoid ignorance of those bodies that have failed almost completely to ever get any intelligence assessment anywhere near the mark.

But, of course, such people flourish in agencies that have no outside assessment and oversight. They cover their failures in secrecy justified by “national security”. Good luck to this new boss, she is definitely going to need it!

The control that the Zionists have established over public opinion in the West is not a fly-by-night affair. The history of that political movement over the last century and a half has been one that recognised the vital importance of controlling the narrative in the mainstream media.

It has spent the entire period concocting that narrative and placing key people in major mainstream outlets to ensure that narrative is the only one allowed.

Many studies by academics and policy experts testify to the success of that narrative in shaping the public mind. The narrative began to lose its influence as social media began to open the space for the truth to be told and displayed. That has led to the current takeover of major social media platforms by Zionist billionaires to retake that control. Hundreds of billions have been spent in doing so, much of the cost of which has been paid by the US taxpayers through the vast subsidies to Israel by the US.

But the narrative of Jewish victimhood is wearing thin, particularly with the young, as the truth becomes harder to hide. Sidoti and his committee are a vital part of the truth emerging!

For anyone with even the remotest claim to sanity and coherence, it is an immense task to sensibly compare Xi Jinping and the orange Donald. They appear to exist on entirely different planets, or more accurately to exist in two different eras.

The Donald would have fitted perfectly into the Dark Ages of Europe when superstition, fanatical religion, irrational violence and justice by the sword were the hallmarks of the age.

His infantile narcissism and psychotic and vengeful nature was common amongst the kings and emperors of the age. Xi, on the other hand, is the highly trained and competent leader in an age of reason, matched with order, stability, common sense and nuance.

Not that we in the West have got to that age, but China is setting the standard for that emerging multipolar age. We can only hope that the penny will finally drop for the West and our children and grandchildren will have a place in that better world.

It is impossible to evaluate the analysis carried out by the researchers who reported on the survey they carried out in the absence of the identity of the statements that they said were false, and which the respondents were asked to comment on.

I do not know how we the readers of this article can form any view about the value and usefulness of their survey, and the significance of the seriousness of the statements said in some way to be false or misleading.

This omission renders useless the publication of the report by the researchers in the form presented to the reader of your publication.

I have lived in hope that your publication would provide something that the general media is incapable or fails to provide – facts enabling the reader to form a judgment. I am very disappointed that the published material has failed to give sufficient information to allow a judgment about whether the survey has provided any information of substance

Michael Edesess’ uncritical review of Hannah Ritchie’s book on energy transition fails to back up their shared opinions on important issues:

1. Levelised cost of energy comparisons of energy technologies are not “flawed” when used and interpreted correctly; they are the standard method in electric power engineering.

2. World leading research groups on the energy transition, such as LUT and Stanford, recognise the land-use limitations of large-scale bioenergy and therefore do not include it in their scenarios.

3. Nuclear power failed to grow beyond its maximum global generation in 2006 because it’s too expensive, too dangerous, too slow to build and too inflexible in operation to be a good partner for variable wind and solar. Its percentage contribution has dropped from the peak of 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023, for good reasons.

4. The notion that a major accident at a nuclear power station “killed no one” is based on the fiction that no cancers are induced. Experts at the International Agency for Research on Cancer estimated 16,000 cancer deaths in Europe from the Chernobyl disaster.

5. Although “poor countries are going to need fossil fuels to develop”, many are already shifting to small-scale solar electricity.

Since 2010, we have known that 44% of Australians are not functionally literate; i.e. they do not have the skills to understand, let alone be critical of, what they are reading.

Is it any wonder that a significant segment of the population cannot identify election misinformation?

Speaking as a former teacher, I maintain, one of the weakest links is the training, recruitment and ongoing up-skilling of teachers.

I worked alongside teachers who thought Captain Cook bought the First Fleet to Australia, and that he personally slaughtered thousands of Indigenous Australians by his own hand.

Also, these days schools are frightened to ask parents to participate in their child’s education. While 20 years ago, encouraging reading and writing at home was a role parents were expected to play, now, any mention of homework literacy is non-enforceable and left to the school. In my experience, those children whose parents truly value education by encouraging literacy at home consistently maintain excellent results.

How can an Australian population critically assess any election material, any news, any political policy, let alone contemplate its consequences, without these basic skills?

Paul Keating’s banana republic is fast becoming a reality.

I would like to commend Michael Keating’s article to readers.

It is clear, succinct, and taught me a lot – not just about Jim Chalmers’ changes but also about government concerns around equity in the superannuation scheme.

Stewart Sweeney has reminded us of the important distinction between negative peace (the absence of violence) and positive peace (the presence of justice). Peace researcher Johan Galtung made a further distinction between direct violence (eg being killed by an enemy bullet) and structural violence, the harms that accrue from punishing social and economic conditions.

While direct violence has been committed by both sides in the Gaza conflict, albeit hugely disproportionately, only the Palestinians have suffered long-term structural violence. Examples include the dehumanising impact of the “security wall” — declared a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law by the ICJ in 2004 — and the devastating Gaza blockade from 2007.

The Universal Declaration on Human Rights affirmed that “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law”. This was not heeded by Israel or the Western powers and the inevitable consequences followed.

To ensure the current ceasefire transitions to a just peace is now a moral imperative for the international community, and the only way to a secure future for Palestinians and Israelis.

Is Fred Zhang to become another frustrated citizen of the Lucky Country, or are we about to make an investment in a future that takes it beyond rolling over to have our belly scratched and our food bowl raided?

The technology that has been determined on these shores and developed overseas is legendary. From the black box carried by every plane flying to the solar cell technology employed globally, we have squandered opportunities to make Australia a technology and manufacturing powerhouse.

With the geopolitical order shattering and climate change about to not just shift the goalposts, but to remove them altogether and put a good part of the playing field under water, we’re going to need to be economically strong and resourceful.

Independence doesn’t just come from having a powerful military presence. It comes from being an indispensable part of the global economy and a reliable member of the global rule of law.

A future without control of our sovereign wealth is a future of dependency and subservience. With this golden opportunity, let’s hope our commercial and political leaders have the gumption and the smarts to avoid what has been our MO since 1788.

As an 80-year-old, I have an abiding belief in the young who may save the West from the consequences of the indifference and ignorance of us oldies!

This article re-enforces that belief, as does the their actions in saving the environment. It has been said by someone wise that we do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children. They are going to make sure we give it back in a livable form!

I have never doubted the feelings of millions of Jews around the world towards the obscene criminality being committed in their names.

This article is the best illustration of that humanity so far!

Fred has explained well the subtlety of the Daoist philosophy which originated between the 6th and 4th centuries BC. It well illustrates the continuity and sophistication of Chinese civilisation over millennia.

If Chinese culture is the great granddaddy, then the West is the wayward great, great, great, great grandchild that is yet to mature.

The problem for the West is that we were the arrogant descendants of the primitive tribes roaming Europe in the Dark Ages when Chinese civilisation had been flowering for thousands of years and we retained the primitive instincts of fight or flight long after they had been tamed.in China.

Until we learn the subtlety of a mature civilisation, we are doomed to repeat the primitive instinctual fight or flight that gave us a brief time in the sun, but is now our fatal shortcoming when we deal with a culture that is vastly our superior.

We saw after the UN had identified “more than 1000 Israeli actions that broke the [January 2025] ceasefire”, Australia doing precisely nothing to recognise the offences.

Now, with a widely-documented Israeli flip of the bird to the latest ceasefire conditions — and which contravenes, as usual, international law — we see Australia leaping into inaction.

How soon will it be before our foreign minister issues a “serious concern” statement calling on Hamas to stop whingeing and get on with starving and dying from lack of aid as they are supposed to?

If you were unsure what gaslighting or coercive control was, you need only look at the Trump administration to receive a master class.

Gaslighting: Trump declares at regular intervals, “I am the peacemaker” while funnelling billions to perpetuate a genocide that could not have happened without his ongoing support.

“I have created peace,” he declares while still allowing Israel to starve and bomb innocent Palestinians because “hostage” bodies are still under rubble caused by his bombs.

Coercive control: World leaders stumble over themselves to prostrate before Trump, to land a photo at the White House, believing that grovelling to him will mitigate his desire to humiliate them in front of the cameras. “You do what I want, or you’ll regret it.”

As a sweetener, these “leaders” give him whatever he wants. Our prime minister has promised not only billions in yearly AUKUS down payments, but signed over our critical minerals to the US.

History will record Trump as all that is abhorrent with our era. How will history remember those leaders, who stumbled over themselves to shake his hand and get a photo opportunity?

Australia had such an opportunity to be a leading light of integrity, and we failed dismally.

Clearly, the incorporation of dental health services into Medicare is long overdue. But Lesley Russell has glossed over the obvious question: “Why isn’t dental health better in Australia, one of the most extensively fluoridated countries in the world?”

The answer is given implicitly in the scientific reviews by the Cochrane Library, the gold standard in impartial systematic reviews of medications and medical procedures. Cochrane’s latest report on fluoridation, published in 2024, reviewed 157 non-randomised studies. (There are no double-blind randomised controlled trials supporting claims of enormous benefits of fluoridation.)

Cochrane found that fluoridation may reduce dental caries by one-quarter of a decayed, missing and filled deciduous tooth on average. But, considering the poor quality of the studies, it stated “we were very uncertain of these findings”.

The poor quality of pro-fluoridation studies has been pointed out for many decades by a few scientists and heterodox dental researchers, but ignored by dental and medical associations and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

This is not surprising because fluoridation has been supported financially by the sugar and processed food industries, which gain from the notion that there’s a magic bullet that prevents tooth decay whatever junk food our children ingest.

What we all need to learn from this latest round of arse-licking is that Trump is the end result when government sells out to capitalism. It has been obvious for a long time and Australian governments have foolishly followed the US lead like lemmings over a cliff.

The Teals and the latest election result may well be an indicator that the electorate has woken up and had enough. With the LNP brawling among themselves, unlike the carbon tax and the No vote, they may not be able to get their millionaire/media mates together to win back their voters.

That leaves the Labor Party. Who will vote for them now that they have wasted a substantial majority? Will climate change continue to win over voters? Will voters finally recognise that the selling off of all things public has been a disaster and only benefitted shareholders?

Will the voters recognise that during floods, fire and famine, plus aging infrastructure and poor service, without taxation the private sector will have no one to bail them out?

The private sector exists to make a profit. The government exists to regulate and ensure that all benefit.

The insidiously overwhelming Americanisation of Australia is proceeding apace, but we cannot yet predict when our nation will be referred to as Southwest America (formally Australia) nor can we predict when China will be referred to as Northwest America (formally China).

The increasingly despised and contemptible US has become a appalling moral wreck of a country, yet its drongo population has allowed Trumpian imbecility to worsen hourly without rejecting its administration entirely.

Trump should never been elected.

A superb analysis of the dogged blindness of the West to the reality that their system is not only the only system, but potentially far from the best.

But also a great illustration of the way history and culture determine what is best rather than having a system shoved down your throat which ignores that history and culture.

This should be a text in every management and foreign policy course in the West.

The most detestable characteristic of European Christian civilisation is its long-standing and almost genetic predisposition to a mindset of racial superiority. That is exercised serially on the chosen racial inferior people of the day.

For centuries, it was the European Jews blamed for the death of Christ and thus to be removed or at the very least excluded from polite society. Then, during the long period of brutal and criminal imperialism and colonialism, it was the brown-skinned inhabitants of much of the rest of the world.

We still inhabit that mean-spirited and vacuous space. That is easily demonstrated by the governmental response to the release of the report on Islamophobia in Australia. Unlike the report released by the Zionist lawyer Jillian Segal, which was done to death in all mainstream media and the political class, it has sunk virtually without trace.

There is no logical reason for this as Islamophobia in Australia is far more rancid and virulent and firmly planted in the political class through right-wing extremists from the likes of One Nation and Advance Australia to the Liberal and National parties.

Our growing white racism does us no credit and ensures our exclusion from the emerging world.

Meg Schwarz makes a good point about women and the Board of Peace (what would Golda Meir think?) But I sense a lack of urgency with winter coming again in Gaza. Where are the six engined Antonovs which transported portable housing to Cambodia after the defeat of Pol Pot? Where is the move for a new prefabbed harbour on the Gaza coast better than the US constructed one 18 months ago which failed in a storm?

Germany and China, for example, are good at modular housing and engineering; get them positively and urgently involved. Our government is contributing one man to the monitoring group; is that group the nucleus of the Board of Peace? Why don’t we land urgent medical teams and temporary hospitals?

I note that China brokered a key interest group to set up a post-war Palestine Government in July 2024. Why has that been ignored? (sorry, silly question). The US’ Morton Ortagus ought to be briefed to get UN backing for future plans in Palestine.

So much to do. Maybe it is happening and just isn’t reported. I hope so. Oh, and for our government of excuses, Israel does have an Indo-Pacific shore.

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This reminds me of what Cassius said to Brutus ““The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar).

The problem is the whole West seems to be underlings to a clearly demented and power-hungry narcissist!

Good article, Greg Barns! Would we have known about this outrage if we simply relied on the ABC to tell us? Thank you.

Shouldn’t we now also be asking why the ABC didn’t embarrass the prime minister and ambassador by publicly boycotting the event? Once more the Australian Government’s appeasement — like that of so many other governments — is simply endorsing the rogue régime this criminal now heads. This cannot end well.

The prime minister and the ambassador, by their indulgence, are not only undermining their own standing in this polity but they erode our Commonwealth’s dignified standing internationally. Our international standing is not safeguarded just because so many other government leaders are cringing and having selfies taken with this crooked, self-serving “deal maker”.

And were there any other Australian journalists who, following the example of their Pentagon colleagues the other day, joined John Lyons in solidarity to boycott the occasion? If there were, we should commend them and would very much like to hear from them. Well done, Pearls and Irritations! Such articles are very much needed now as we confront this many-sided deterioration away from the political effort to form an open, just society.

In spite of the fact that global ice melting is happening with shocking speed, future melting is unpredictable enough for it to be left out of key IPCC calculations. The sea level rise figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only reflect the expansion of warming water.

AdaptNSW, a branch of the NSW Government, says, “include processes associated with the melting of ice sheets (and) NSW could (see) sea level rises of up to 2.3 metres by 2100 and 5.5 m by 2150”.

It is not just the clear denial of people such as Barnaby Joyce preventing us saving ourselves. Scientific reticence, the reluctance to spell out the full risk implications in the absence of perfect information, has left us uninformed, and ill prepared, for the true risk we face.

John Schumann is frustrated because the church doesn’t articulate a case against Trump. Fair enough, though he may be surprised at how many parish pulpits are careful to apply the gospel to Trump and all his works.

My frustration is that the song writers have not given us some protest songs. We are so grateful to musicians who did so much to unite opposition to the Vietnam War. But where are the songs of protest against Trump and Trumpiness?

John, please help.

Chas Keys was remarkably sanguine in addressing climate denialism. Along with the biodiversity crisis, climate change is the greatest threat the planet faces. Those who deny the massive evidence surrounding climate change, deserve public condemnation and ridicule because they threaten the quality of the future of our children and grandchildren, indeed their very existence.

What Trump has done in the US in removing even the mention of climate change in some government departments, in abandoning the Paris Agreement, and bolstering the fossil fuel industries while throwing a spanner in the works of the renewable energy transition, is profoundly irresponsible. Indeed, it’s wicked.

Here at home, what is galling about Barnaby Joyce and his fellow Nationals threatening to back out of net zero by 2050 is that they somehow think they have taken the high moral ground. On the contrary, it is extremely immoral because it creates uncertainty and reduces investment in the necessary energy transition. It is also just plain ignorant and stupid. If there is to be any change to the target of net zero by 2050, it is the date. It needs to be 2035, not 2050, if we are to stay as close to 1.5°C as possible.

Requiem for Gaza could just as easily be reimagined as Requiem for the Rules-based International Order. Desperation is the driving force. Here in the West we are beset by desperation on so many levels. There is the desperation of climate change, a looming development we do our best to ignore. There is the desperation of a debt-driven financial collapse, another looming development we are also doing our best to ignore. And there is the desperation of military inadequacy which the wars in Palestine and Ukraine have shown.

In Israel, the desperation is fuelled by the above compounded by the knowledge that Israel is predatory by nature, and history does not forget.

Our actions give the lie to our lofty pronouncements of human rights and equality. So much bluster! Assurances are evaporating. People are scared, and being scared, they embrace the illusion of force and lash out in all directions.

Absent in the West’s approach is dialogue. I can detect much less desperation in those countries which have aligned themselves with BRICS and/or the SCO. Perhaps we could initiate a good-faith dialogue with these bodies. Perhaps, heresy of heresies, they know something we don’t.

Chas Keys poses an interesting question. If it’s not human activity causing the increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, we’re in more trouble than we realise. Not that we aren’t already facing enormous difficulties. The climate data being collected makes it abundantly clear the planet is entering the feedback climate loop peer-reviewed science has warned of since the 1970s.

We’ve had half a century to validate we’ve fully evolved as thinking hominids. That we haven’t is confirmed by the depth of climate denialism across the world. Whether it’s compelled by greed, ideology or ignorance is immaterial, the outcome’s the same; we find ourselves in useless debate when co-ordinated action is required.

At this moment in human evolution, let’s not confuse sophistication with wisdom. It’s the material cleverness of man the toolmaker that’s got us to where we are now; able to destroy the stable climate that sustains us. And it’s selfishness that’s driving our actions, or non-action, to deal with the main issue on which we should be focusing, and that’s preparing humanity for a future beyond its Holocene experience.

I love Peter’s reference to Heath Robinson in this article. I have always looked, after over 50 years involved with governments in Australia, at the similarity of much government policy formulation and implementation as an excellent simile with the wonderfully complicated structures that he was an expert in.

Trump’s plan — and it is a great exaggeration to call it such — not only has the imagination of Heath Robinson in its gratuitous complexity, but also encompasses Humpty Dumpty’s propensity to invent new meanings for words.

While the devastated landscapes may look similar, the difference between a post-nuclear Japan and Palestine could not be greater apart from the fact that US bases are still located on Japanese soil.

The issue in Gaza is where to relocate the Palestinians because the Israelis don’t want them on their “God-given” (including Jerusalem) land and the religious right need the return of the the Jews so they can benefit.

This article is a brilliant catalogue of the continuation of the centuries-long history of the atrocities committed by the allegedly Christian US in spreading the exact opposite of what it claims to stand for.

Democracy doesn’t get a guernsey anywhere in this history of invasion, subversion, theft and mass murder. But as the US empire deservedly crumbles, the rest of the world, excluding the European and Australian satraps, begin to resist.

Russia, Iran and China look like helping the Venezuelan people to guarantee that this attempt at overthrowing an elected government will not succeed. More power to their arms!