Archives: Letters to the Editor

Sadly John, democratic socialism departed the Labor Party a decade or more ago. The party has not been exempt from the propaganda promoted as revealed truth, that our elite controlled media and our educational institutions have been dishing out for at least the last 30 years.

Education in Australia has become not the teaching of independence of thought that might question the rule of the elites, but a system of indoctrination in what it is acceptable to think. Rote learning rather than creative thought is prized above all.

Labor at all levels is now an integral part of that propaganda system that tells its acolytes that a failing private sector is the solution to an unequal society. The only significant party today that refuses to accept that nonsense are the Greens but Labor, along with the other instruments of power in our disintegrating communities, will make sure that such dangerous ideas as social democracy will always remain marginal. Hence the success of China as we sink into irrelevance!!

I understand what Peter Briggs is saying but beg to suggest that it is fantasy dressed up as strategy. Australia has one of the longest coastlines of any country on the planet. We also have a miniscule population compared to any likely adversary. We are also many thousands of kilometres from much of the world.

That means a herculean task that any tiny fleet of our nuclear submarines is required to address. The suggestion that whatever we can afford, and that in itself is an unresolved question, would have any deterrence of any consequence to a major power borders on the absurd.

Even if we could afford a fleet of 6 to 8 nuclear subs what we know about their availability would suggest that at most 2 would be available at any time to cover the millions of square miles of ocean surrounding us. What their usefulness would be against an opponent with many multiples of our financial and shipbuilding capacities, who could saturate the oceans surrounding our two submarines, can only be imagined.

Instead let us defer to Sun Tzu and Machiavelli in developing our diplomatic skills rather than wasting vast sums of our national wealth!!

Stewart Sweeney’s question of whether Farrellism is Labor’s solution or its problem, should more accurately be written as a statement: Farrellism is Labor’s problem.

The caution, or timidity of Labor policy-making that keeps it in power is actually contributing to its decline in support. Staunch Labor supporters are increasingly distressed that the willingness to compromise on strong measures, particularly by negotiating with the opposition rather than Greens and independents with real changes to offer, has disillusioned us.

The willingness to continue to support fossil fuel interests while weakening environmental controls, the unwillingness to take a stronger stance on getting a better return for our mineral exports, the unwillingness to confront gambling interests, seriously tackle wealth inequity, the spectacle of cracking down on welfare recipients, NDIS recipients or freedom of speech advocates while subservient to those doing the exploiting is disillusioning.

We want a government that uses its parliamentary majority to do what the prime minister promised in his election night acceptance speech – improve transparency, eliminate inequality and improve the lives of all Australians. Farrellism represents the lowest common denominator of political ambition. Labor should be aiming higher.

John Menadue’s article (P&I, June 24) is timely. The problem of timely access to non-GP specialist care is worsening. Medicare rebates have fallen so far behind inflation that increasing them with catch-up rises is politically unlikely. Capping fees will irritate non-GP specialists even if the caps have no impact on their current billing.

Increasing publicly funded services is the best option. Not only would newly-minted specialists take up the work, but many at the other end of their careers with vast experience may see such opportunities as a way to wind back from full-time work.

Providing services in community settings away from public hospitals is likely to be cheaper, and more effective. Whilst hospital executives might be sensitive to out-patient waiting times, elective surgery waiting lists and A&E waiting times more commonly capture the attention of the media and politicians.

Medicare Urgent Clinics are a costly precedent. Done properly Medicare Specialist Clinics could provide non-GP specialist services at a reasonable cost.

Indeed, co-locating services within GPs surgeries might help reduce the burden of referrals if GPs have near immediate advice available within their own four walls.

If you make a list of the services and rate them as fit for service as they once were you won’t be surprised to find that services that were once provided by government departments – schools, hospitals, health, highways, public transport, universities, banks, electricity supplies, water supply – rate low on service and high on profit, all as a result of the constant drive for NO taxes and the politicians’ need to hide what taxation is actually paid and by who. It should be no surprise that we still, and will always, need to fund those services.

Services like health now have a system where those that can afford to pay, pay plenty in the private system and the rest are in a variety of ramping in the public system.

Our schools system the same applies to our universities who are racing to the bottom when it comes to ranking.

There is no need to mention the housing problem – it has been done to death .

The failure of Americanisation of our public utilities should be a lesson for all.

Jack refers to the Iranian government as a ‘medieval theocracy’. That raised for me the comparison between it and Great Britain and other European feudal royalties. They appear to retain the outer trappings of feudalism with, at least in the British case, pretty significant powers of dismissal of the government.

Indeed, the King is required to be a member of the Church over which he has control. He also has the prerogative power to appoint to the House of Lords which in itself has the power to prevent legislation passed by the Commons to be enacted into law for a year.

Iran has an elected parliament where that parliament has the job of running the country, in accordance with any religious edicts issued by the religious leader. There is a widespread view in Iran about the need to change their form of government but 26 per cent support a secular republic, 21 per cent favour a return to a constitutional monarchy, and 22 per cent say they lack enough information to decide.

In the end it is for the Iranian people to decide what form of government they want. It is not for the two aggressors, the US and Israel, to make that decision for them!!!

Ross is of course completely correct. Gambling is a cancer metastasizing throughout the body politic. It seems modern Labor is no more immune than the Coalition to that particular malignancy!!

I comment in fear of being labeled antisemitic.

With only the nightly TV news to view I find it difficult having seen the devastation and the body count on both sides of the border how anyone could not conclude that the war is not one sided? Or how with all the resources of the UN and all the good will of every nation that this behaviour cannot be stopped? That all wars can’t be stopped.

Yet all I see is a huge amount of money and effort being used to not only try and prolong the too many conflicts already in progress but even more resources being put into preparing for wars that most of us haven’t even thought possible.

Could it be that accumulating of riches is the common antagonist?

Trump is but “a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” All his “yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death”. He is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing”. It is really hard to go past Shakespeare to summon the words to describe the futility of modern man.

That our government fails to react decently to the incontrovertible evidence we see daily of Israeli genocide is appalling, is in contravention of our commitment of more than 75 years ago to fight genocide and is an abrogation of decency for the people of Gaza and ALSO of any sensible support for Israel for the future.

Australia officially committed to preventing and fighting genocide on July 8, 1949, when it ratified the United Nations Genocide Convention. This legal commitment formally came into force in the country on January 12, 1951

Israel is already a pariah state for a growing number of nations. UN research has concluded that it is committing genocide now, formally, in multiple reports. The atrocities it is committing upon tens of thousands of children alone is almost beyond comprehension, yet our government cannot bring itself to do more to stop the slaughter than express ‘concern’.

Appeasement of genocide is known to be stupid and basically criminal in the context of humanity. Progressive Jews, such as represented by the Jewish Council of Australia, protest this government indifference.

Our government continues to capitulate humanitarian decency to Zionist influence. In this, we are being governed by foreign interests.

Michael asks the question of whether it is possible that the internal decomposition of it’s dubious democratic institutions can deliver Britain from ultimate necrosis. The answer is an unequivocal NO!

Britain rose as a martial power to dominate half the world in an empire that used mass murder, savage exploitation and deceit on a grand scale, all driven by a hereditary feudal class of inbred fatuities who believed, and still do, like the AshkeNAZI colonialists and genociders they now so enthusiastically support in Palestine, that they were born to rule.

The truth is that Britain is still a feudal class based and racist society that is utterly incapable of dealing with their now and future irrelevance in a world that has moved on past their puerile conceits.

Crispin Hull notes correctly that ‘High population growth puts strain on economies and people’s incomes and access to infrastructure and services’. It doesn’t matter whether high population growth comes from net migration or natural increase – it creates problems if the rate of growth exceeds the rate at which infrastructure and services can be provided. There are many countries, particularly in Africa and the Mid-East, where population growth is very high, but it mostly comes from high birth rates and not migration. Here in Australia, our fertility rate is low (just below 1.5 children per woman) but net overseas migration very high – at last count 301,000 per annum. So, our main lever for lowering population growth is to reduce immigration.

This week, the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council said we needed to have built 250,000 homes last year to keep pace with demand, but fewer than 200,000 buildings were commenced. It’s not just homes for the 400,000+ new people every year (net migration plus natural increase), we have to deal with 120,000 homeless and the backlog which is also in the tens of thousands.

Reducing net migration by a third immediately to 200,000 would take the pressure off.

How will Australia’s PM and/or Foreign Minister respond to the UN report concluding that Israel is deliberately killing children in Gaza? Will Australia regurgitate it’s usual concern? The election of three Congressional candidates in New York supported by Mayor Mamdani and Democratic Socialists of America is a warning to PM Albanese and Federal Labor – stand for something instead of nothing. Expressing concern is nothing. In a contribution to Destroying the Joint – Why Women Have to Change the World (2013) penny Wong concluded “complacency can become complicity if we do not speak out.” At what point did Penny Wong become complacent and complicit with the horror of Israel – and why?

Simplistically describing Iran as a “medieval theocracy”, as Jack Waterford does, is de rigueur across Australian mainstream media, in line with most western media in general where Murdoch and other powerful corporate oligarchs shape the political narrative for others to follow.

Australian media is thoroughly entrenched in a paradigm dependent on US-UK-Euro “news sources”, which refuse to hear anything else, even as – paradoxically – mainstream media becomes increasingly irrelevant as a source of reliable information or worthwhile discussion about anything.

In relation to Iran, Waterford – like the whole right wing Australian political class – for some reason has refused to even cursorily pay some attention to what highly credentialed western analysts across the highest levels of diplomacy, operational military and intelligence experience in West Asia, all with high level contacts in the region and within the US, China, Russia and elsewhere, have to say.

I would recommend Waterford extend his information base about Iran beyond facile propaganda. There are multiple avenues to do so, even within the highly censored Australian online media landscape.

Try Chas Freeman, Max Blumenthal, Alastair Crooke, Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, or Pepe Escobar for starters.

Could someone explore the idea that rich people pay tax, and workers pay non-tax revenue? Garry economics explains the reason why this should happen in this article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd0gmxd36FI

Thank you to Peter Sainsbury for accurately reporting on the accelerating heating that is taking place on our planet. Last week, many newspapers reported the record‑breaking winter warmth many Australians have been experiencing but failed to acknowledge the climate change causes and impacts.

Temperature records are falling across the globe: the UK recently recorded its hottest May day on record, with London topping 35 degrees; Sydney has just logged 10 straight winter days over 20 degrees. And back in January, Victoria saw its hottest temperature on record at 48.9 degrees.

The least we can do is acknowledge the role of climate change in these extremes. The best we can do is focus the Albanese government’s attention on winding back coal and gas pollution and preparing communities for the heat that’s coming. Climate change is the hot topic the weather keeps raising. We really should listen.

Sources:

Israel’s influence on the US is weakening but in Australia it has been strengthened, at least in the short term. First, Australia has appointed a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion to implement a Zionist Agenda. Second, the Royal Commission has adopted the Zionist IHCR definition of antisemitism. Third, the royal Commission has already excluded Jewish and others from presenting public submissions that challenge the IHCR definition and, instead, has canvassed Zionist hyperbole about alleged antisemitism e.g the implied and/or explicit assumption that pro Palestinian speech is antisemitism. Fourth, the Commission’s Interim Report failed to address why it adopted the IHCR definition and that this has been contested e.g. by The Jerusalem Declaration and has suppressed discussion of viewpoints in submissions on the contested meaning of antisemitism and the importance of free speech. The Royal commission is a Zionist propaganda coup perpetuated by Federal Labor and state Labor governments.

This was, as usual with Jack, a forensic disquisition on Australia’s continued infantile need for maternal or paternal approval. Whilst I disagree with some of Jack’s contentions the overall direction and conclusions remain valid.

The long standing assumption by the venal and corrupt US elites that they are somehow the “indispensable nation” continues to create massive suffering and pain to much if the world’s population. The self-serving assumption that whatever they decide about how the world should be run, must by its nature be good and wholesome fits poorly with their record of invasion, subversion, plunder and uncontrolled greed.

They continue to believe that it is for them to determine how the people of every country on the planet should be governed and little toddler Australia meekly goes along with the fraudulent assumption. The truth is that the US has never believed in national sovereignty and territorial integrity that are the founding principles of the UN Charter, excpt where they relate to the US itself.

That national conceit has rendered the US as an uncontrolled beast that has caused world-wide havoc and disaster. Its many military failures since 1945 simply presage its empire’s decline. Thank god for that!!

Since the presentation of the budget which, by the way, hasn’t been passed until the completion of normal Parliamentary processes, we have heard nothing but negativity from the opposition for opposition sake and the media moguls.

Following the never-ending saga of young people not being able to get into the housing market, interest rates up / interest rates down, and the impacts on inflation it is now time for sympathy for the long vilified older people (boomers) wanting to down-size and get into retirement villages etc, and the impact lowering of house prices with barely a mention of falling inflation which, by the way, seems to be achieving the RBA goal (controlling inflation) .

In light of the world-first highly successful internet ban for teenagers we need to consider the amount of news screen time per person with a declaration if the content is Opinion or News (Perhaps a Minister for opinion/news?) This may achieve a reduction of gambling advertisements without the need for legislation (market forces).

Political analysis of public governance in parliamentary democracy should note the failure of political parties to adequately explain to electors their party’s view of the task of the political party. Political science will struggle to explain the popularity of a party that wants to consign the bipolar “uni-party” to the fringes if it ignores this deep failure of our political discourse.

One Nation, like befuddled political science and apologists for Labor, Liberal and National parties, continue to avoid explaining how their own party views itself within Parliamentary Democracy. Why do the policy platforms proffered at election time forego genuine appeal in terms of the party’s open respect for the political party itself in our system of Parliamentary democracy?

Like the zero-sum clown show now dominant in the US, votes are harvested by simply dismissing candidates of the other side, leaving leading citizens who seek to be responsible electors concluding that “both sides” view a political party as merely an electoral combine harvester to satiate individual and corporate self-interest and so voting itself becomes viewed as an assertion of self-interest. One Nation rides on the back of this entrenched failure in our political discourse.

Menadue is such an elder! This piece is topical, well researched, well argued and thorough. It has the public good at its heart, and even calls out a greedy interest lobby. Five stars. For the veteran method as much as for the piece.

To invest, businesses must expect growing demand. For wages to grow, we need productivity growth from investment. A conundrum. Government is admittedly essential in reigniting this dynamic at the low point of a business cycle, but Graham instead focuses where public expenditure is not up to task: carrying the burden of growing aggregate demand while the private sector is shedding labour.

Total government spending is 39 per cent of GDP in Australia. 60 per cent of that is non-discretionary: public wages; healthcare; schools; welfare etc. Maybe these need greater funding to meet needs – but not for unrelated macroeconomic goals, leaving 16 per cent of GDP to be grown arbitrarily. Wages are over half of GDP – jumping much higher including pensions and other transfers that must maintain some relation to wages. A much smaller growth in wages has a much bigger impact on aggregate demand than a much larger growth in public discretionary spending.

The solution: ensure wages grow with national productivity, and the demand will be there for the private sector to reemploy the labour they rationalise. Recent support for wage growth and protecting of multi-enterprise bargaining by the Albanese government are greater steps to secure full employment than fiscal policy ever could be.

The structural points made in explanation of Hansons durability apply to both public service and universities for very similar reasons: these are described in The Expertise Deficit: Wigan and Andrews.2025. Mandarin. Freely available online. When we wrote it we had not had the opportunity to include university malfunctions, but it is now clear that the same disease has taken root in universities right down to overuse of big4 consultants instead on in-house expertise and the increacing losses of confidence by both staff and the public: the lack of meaningful engagement of the public’s – especially the expert public’s – has become endemic in Australia. Expect more hosts for disaffection in both domains.

Varoufakis misses an opportunity to state clearly the source of this dependence: a negative and deteriorating current account balance since 1986. How could a sovereign ever be dependent on lenders in his own currency? The answer is he never is: he is dependent on them bringing foreign currencies to exchange for his currency. The debt is just a show – it is the foreign reserves that are key.

The UK’s massive trade in commodities deficit is almost made up for by its surplus in services trade. The bulk of those services sold are however ‘financial services’ from the City. Further, the balance on primary income (earnings from direct investment overseas) tends to surplus – a further bulwark against the trade deficit provided by the financial class.

The UK is not dependent on anyone because of financial shenanigans – they are dependent on the financial shenanigans because their industrial base is been destroyed. Their economy isn’t competitive. We in Australia face a similar logic. Government deficits are fine – but the growth in the trade deficit is food for speculators.

An overvalued currency also isn’t helping Australia. But most of all we too need an industrial policy to re-balance value-added trade.

I share Catriona Jackson’s desire to counter Ms Hanson and her props from Murdoch media and as a wholly owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart. But I doubt that legacy media people appreciate the new tools and potency of ‘social media’. Agrotainment experts explain – you need an online following. Publishing a matter for rage and resentment is central. Anger gets clicks, more followers and attracts more adherents than reason, common sense and compassion. This is an emotional, epistemological matter. Leadership is finding a procession to get in front of and anger/resentment is/are king. The full understanding of this and how to manage it is for sociological media specialists not political scientists who count numbers or trust legacy media. The gullible don’t see Pauline they click on her and her followers’ messaging and share her rage.

Catriona nails it with her analysis of the appeal of Pauline in attributing it to the failure of Labor and the remnants of the Coalition to even recognise the issues of concern to ordinary Australians, let alone address them. As Keynes so aptly wrote “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back!”

That seems to summarize the intellectual vacuity and dysfunction of any observable moral compass in the policies of those parties. Also the lack of leadership in addressing the matters that concern the people has provided the perfect opportunity to a main-chancer like Hanson to leap in and capitalise on the vacuum by exploiting the fears and prejudices of the people to divide the nation.

In that sense she is an equally intellectually challenged and rat cunning con artist as the dunce she so worships, the Orange Donald. It would be a critical failure of these mainstream parties to underestimate her appeal in the current uncertain times!!

What Yanis describes is the inherent danger in an already failed empire basing its continued survival on being the catspaw of the current declining and financially hollowed-out empire. The rapid increase in the rate at which the current empire disintegrates makes the dependence of the already failed empire a trap that it cannot escape. Good riddance to both I say!!

Allan Patience, you are a knowledgeable and thoughtful political commentator. But on the Greens you have an absolute blind spot. You rightly excoriate the politicians of the “timorous” Labor party and the now remnant Liberal and National parties, whose four decades of “neoliberal evangelism” have brought us to levels of societal inequality and poverty not seen since the 1930’s.

Yet you turn to the independents to provide the “intelligent policy options” we so desperately need, while entirely ignoring the policy offerings of The Greens. Two of the independents you laud have actually pushed back against the government’s limited proposals to redress some of the worst tax inequities we face.

Have you actually looked at The Greens’ economic policy? It isn’t sexy stuff, but it is the sort of coherent policy which a party without vested interests and lobbyists to appease has the ability and the resources to create:

You will find within it principles such as

“Responding to the scale of our inequality and climate crises requires a transformation of our economic institutions and measures of economic value.”

“Wealth inequality is fundamentally unjust and requires structural economic change and wealth redistribution.”

What more do you want?

Thanks for Abul Rizvi’s article in P&I about the number of migrants. It was very helpful, but I think it would have been even better if it had spelt out the reasons for the difference between net migration and NPLT. In particular I am curious as to why NPLT is larger than net migration.

Pearls and Irritations editor, Catriona Jackson, deserves a row of medals, most for trying to change Pauline Hanson’s mind over the years, and another one for her “Pauline’s poisonous politics” piece, which should be national reading. Jackson exposes Hanson for what she really is – a manipulator and a con artist. While her message is “I’m here for ordinary Australians”, in reality, she’s here to wreck institutions and discriminate against people she doesn’t like.
Her wealthy mate Gina Rinehart sees Hanson as a convenient mouthpiece with aligning views. Not only did Hanson call climate change a “hoax”, but she also proposed to scrap net zero and renewable energy programs, and abolish the federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. All music to Rinehart’s ears. Australians must defeat this toxic convergence of money and populism at the ballot box.