Archives: Letters to the Editor

If only the Sudanese were being attacked by Jews they might have some Australians protesting. More than 150,000 Sudanese have been killed and more than 14 million displaced in the second Sudan War. The situation in el-Fasher is dire. The UN is pleading for support to help 30 million in desperate need in what the world body says the world’s largest hunger crisis.

This doesn’t deflect from the atrocities in Gaza and leaders from Ireland taking a stance, but it highlights how the public and the media select which issues to care about, and it’s not massacres and starvation of millions of Africans.

Pearls & Irritations has rightly covered the Gaza war in detail, yet published almost nothing about a situation the Sudan Doctors Network describes as “a true genocide”.

African civil wars are ignored because black lives don’t matter and most people are either too racist or ignorant to differentiate between perpetrators and victims.

“Remember, ladies and gentlemen,” I recall English comedian Max Miller saying, “it makes no difference whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor – it’s nice to be rich.” He could have been speaking of the Australian taxation system today.

Income-earners carry the bulk of the taxation load. Those owning capital get taxation relief with negative gearing for investment homes and a 50% discount on capital gains. The system is skewed in their favour. This is fundamentally inequitable.

Income tax will be a fundamental part of any taxation system, but the tax burden can be spread more widely to ease the employee’s tax load and foster benefits for society by:

Phasing out negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount;

Reforming the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax such that producers pay royalties in real time for the gas that they export;

And by introducing:

A carbon tax, so emitters pay for their pollution and its impacts.

An inheritance tax, generating taxation revenue without impacting anyone’s current financial position.

A sugar tax, to help address the growing issues of obesity and diabetes.

Those with wealth are getting an easy ride on the shoulders of wage-earners. Time to redress the fiscal balance for a fairer society.

For as long as I can remember, the story of lead levels at the Port Pirie smelters and the danger to children/residents in the area has been repeated over and over again with constant threats of closure and government handouts for cleaning up. They continued as recently as late last year and early this year.

Then it seems that lead smelting and rare earth mineral processing go hand in hand and off trots our prime minister to TRUMPtopia to join the “have-I-got-a-deal-for-you” queue.

The state premier was left behind to blow the TRUMPet. No mention of the health of Indigenous children or local children, the dangers of lead smelting at Port Pirie and no mention of the years of promised clean-up of lead or the adding to the existing lead levels.

Stella Yee says what others think but never have the courage to say. We are still, and always have been, a racist nation. That derives from imperial and aristocratic Britain which has for centuries sought to separate itself from the rest of humanity. That was after all the basis of the British Empire.

Those around the planet who had the misfortune to be colonised were regarded as lesser beings. That view justified what was done to those others as they were of lesser value.

It takes an emerging reality a hundred years of evidence to the contrary to rid those minds of that pompous self-belief. The emergence of a multipolar world that is simply no longer prepared to tug the forelock to that inflated collective ego that will render that belief the racial conceit that it is!

Sophie Vorrath is spot-on. Coal and gas in energy generation are the dinosaurs of our age. That doesn’t stop politicians like Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce promoting them as the future.

But, as always in politics, economics will eventually trump ignorance when the costs of backing those dinosaurs cannot be sustained any longer.

Coen Luettringhaus finishes his insightful piece by posing the right question: are you prepared to be lulled back to sleep?

Summer is coming in Australia. Many will already be turning their minds to the beach, to cricket and to travel. All well and good.

But in the interests of keeping Palestine top of mind, of never being lulled to sleep, make a list now. Write down everything Gaza has taught you and what you’re going to do differently as a result. Stick it on the wall, or on your desk. Being awake is one thing. So is acting. Keep talking. Never forget. Realised justice is the goal.

Robert Breunig needs a reality check. Every single older Australian I know is financially struggling. This includes self-funded retirees and pensioners. How dare this man talk about a retiree living on the income of a 40-year-old “without the pressures”?

Breunig has neglected the fact these retirees have paid taxes for an average of 55 years, through many global crises and scrimped and saved to buy their home through the years when interest rates were 17%. I remind Breunig that superannuation only started in 1992, meaning many retirees do not have the amount of super that the young will have when they retire.

I challenge him to manage on a pensioner’s wage of less than $500 a week — paying rates, house/car/health insurance, medical, electricity, not to mention food — then being lumped with a yearly tax bill of $2000.
It’s a disgrace an elder in our society has to pay $80 a hour to an aged care provider to have a shower or change a dressing.

But don’t worry, Breunig, you’ll know what it’s like to be hit with ageism, bias and the ignorance of young soon enough.

Our elders deserve respect.

I have read several books on the situation in occupied Palestine. I really appreciate this succinct summary of the history behind the current situation. Thank you.

An impressive and scholarly paper on Taiwan as an integral part of China; historical, legal and geopolitical analysis. However, I feel you did not give sufficient weight to the desires of the Taiwanese population which strives to maintain its democratic forms of government as opposed to the 5000 years plus history of China!

The one-China policy did not work well for a majority of the Hong Kong community! You assert that peaceful reunification, consistent with both historical precedent and national law, remains the only viable path forward. This is most likely to preserve stability in the Taiwan Straits and prosperity for Chinese on both sides but may be not for the Taiwanese side given the Hong Kong experience! Clearly, peaceful unification would be desirable if China adhered to the “one country two systems” policy adopted by the great Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping!

I would appreciate James Wood’s comments on how Beijing permits the US to manufacture chips at TSMC and to ban their sale to Beijing.

To me, Xi seems remarkably tolerant and patient.

Gaza does not need leaders or rulers but democracy. Not a democracy like Australia, where government is controlled by party donors but democracy as in Switzerland or a democracy as the Kurds have developed.

The people must rule directly.

Three thousand cheers for Stewart Sweeney. He says far more elegantly and knowledgeably what I’ve been saying for years: housing planning is non-existent. What we have is so-called “developers” spotting what they deem to be profitable sites — it doesn’t matter what’s there already — and they go for it.

In Victoria, councils used to object but were overridden by VCAT and now even the right to protest has been abolished. Public housing is demolished and sites privatised (i.e. sold for a song) with the stipulation that a meagre 5% or 10 % of new apartments be “affordable”. With so many of these projects being built in already expensive suburbs, the price reduction applying to “affordable” housing is laughable.

We must bring back government housing, remove the lust for profit and cap rents. We should take former treasurer Frydenberg at his word when he said, “Everything is affordable if it’s a priority.” (Radioactive: Inside the top-secret AUKUS subs deal, SMH 14/05/2022)

Housing is a priority, uber wealth isn’t. Construction workers won’t lose jobs. Add removal of negative gearing and scrap Howard’s CGT and we could securely house all Australians resulting in happier, healthier and more productive citizens. Wins all round!

Albanese high-fives himself about his rare earths deal with Trump. However, I can’t find any clarifying details about the deal.

A few days later, Trump signs an unexpected rare earths mineral deal with China who, unlike Australia, has the means to process the minerals into a saleable product and deal with the toxic waste that results from processing.

Someone tell me: does this deal, with our so-called ally, leave us up yet another a faecal resource creek without a paddle?

While I am an admirer of Chris Hedges and have read him at length, I have to disagree with Vivienne Porzsolt’s characterisation of his interview with David Marr (of whom I am also a fan).

Marr seemed to me to bend over backwards to accommodate Hedges’ viewpoint.

Hedges, in my view, overstated his case and made it very difficult, frustrating I would say, for Marr , who acted very professionally at all times.

To call the interview a “hatchet job”is simply wrong.

I strongly support the review of David Marr’s interview with Chris Hedges. It was a disgrace and I have cancelled my subscription to Late Night Live’s podcasts.

I do take issue with her apology for the “pun” she feels she has made by saying that the interview was marred by his tactics as an interviewer. I think we should embrace the word as an apt descriptor of the techniques used by an aggressive journalist who hectors his guest and seems incapable of any self-reflection when the guest defends himself against invalid criticisms.

The LNL interview was “Marred” for me. Many thanks to the writer for her open letter.

Stewart Sweeney’s essay on the Australia-wide abandonment of public housing, by Labor Governments in particular, is timely. Here in Victoria, following through on Dan Andrews’ departing thought bubble, the demolition of 44 public housing towers has begun.

Literally as I write, a small but staunch group of protesters is picketing a tower in Flemington, Melbourne, where Housing Victoria (a misnomer if ever there was one) is evicting the remaining residents and moving them far from their community to “temporary” accommodation.

The demolitions, and the building of “social and affordable” housing in their place, have been assessed by a range of experts. The project fails spectacularly on financial, social and climate grounds. Almost all the buildings could be retrofitted to bring them up to 21st century standards. (discussion here). In purely financial terms, the project will be a waste of $5 billion.

This destruction of the lives of 10,000 people by the Victorian Labor Government serves only two purposes: a windfall for the government’s developer mates and the effective end of the provision of public housing in Victoria by this radically centrist neoliberal government.

Yes, this is gunboat diplomacy at its most visible, and the spectre of drugs is nothing more than a fig leaf to cover a blatant war of aggression. Plenty of drugs make it into the US from Central and South America, but to my knowledge Venezuela has never featured prominently in that supply chain.

Ever since Trump started his second term, he has been spruiking his ability to mix it with the other major world leaders and bend them to his will. He has been roundly rebuffed by Putin in Ukraine, Xi over trade and Taiwan, Iran over its missile development and resistance to Israeli and pretty much everyone over his tariffs and sanctions.

Even the Houthis in Yemen stood up to him. Trump needs a win. What to do?

Suddenly, Venezuela looks like a good idea. Lots of oil for the taking, proximity to the US, a goodly remove from both Russia and China and apparently a weak leader with not much of a military force to support him. What could go wrong?

Let’s think about that. Once upon a time, Iraq looked like a good idea. Once upon a time, so did Afghanistan.

Julie Macken’s article raises the question so few are willing to confront: what does it mean for us, as Australians, if genocide can unfold in full view of the world and we respond with silence?

Australia’s moral standing depends not only on what we say, but on what we refuse to ignore. By continuing to trade with Israel’s weapons companies and by avoiding the language of genocide, our government is effectively saying that international law is negotiable when it comes to the powerful.

We can’t separate our politics from our humanity. If we accept impunity for genocide today, we invite moral collapse tomorrow. Julie is absolutely right, this is not only about Palestine. It is about who we are as a country and whether we still have the courage and moral backbone to uphold justice when it matters most.

Alison Broinowski’s 11 Opportunities piece was a blast of fresh air about the complete absence of any Australian sovereign identity or initiative from Albo’s Government upon this sad planet.

Our craven relationship with Trump’s shambollic and vindictive America, along with our huge donations to the AUKUS farce, our indirect participation in the Gaza massacres and our absurdly conflicted relationship with China are just three key items.

Albo wraps his poll-driven and timid government’s inertia making the excuse that we are a “middle power”. Broinowski gives 11 actions a middle power can take if it had a leader with the gumption to actually hold positions. The inevitable consequence of Albo’s inaction will be the arrival of the Stars and Stripes over Canberra or else an unwanted and already lost war with China.

As the common myth uttered by Gideon Levy, that Israeli ideology regards Palestinians as an inferior people remains to the fore, reading Ramzy Baroud (P & I’s 29/10): “The unvanquished will: Gaza’s triumph of spirit against the architecture of genocide” one finds a more than arguable case that Palestinians are actually the “superior people”.

“To say that “Gazans are built differently” is a massive understatement… I still find their collective will astonishing. “Why is five-year-old Maria Hannoun, one of Gaza’s many influencers, continuing to recite the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and sending fiery messages to US President Donald Trump that Gaza will never be defeated?”

Good enough for me to accept Palestinians are anything but inferior, particularly when compared to those who wish them gone from this life.

For pollster Kos Samaras, linking immigration to housing is to be patronised as a “casual narrative” of “cultural threat”, and in terms of voter profiles it is “structurally impossible” for the Coalition to offer low migration.

It’s not just a cultural narrative, Kos. After a quarter-century of expansive real-estate incentives and endless mass migration (under Albo now, it’s 250,000-300,000 minimum annually), realistic capacity to pay off a house is becoming “structurally impossible” outside of the top 1-20% who both control and facilitate governments.

Do you even care? Why aren’t you using your silky skills to urge any and every political artifice that might somehow reduce the voter pain? Or is your kind of “democracy” just a cruel zero-sum game, and you’re happy for Albo’s enduring legacy to be (as it certainly will) absurdly high immigration and miserable housing affordability?

That anyone with a functioning brain cell can take seriously the ostentatious pomposity of the statements that emanate from the mouths of the servile politicians of the West, about the importance of the rules-based international order, is a tribute to the success of blatant dishonesty over patent reality .

That is bad enough but the fact is the so-called Fourth Estate, that ostentatiously promotes itself as holding power to account, simply acts as a megaphone for the barefaced failure of the West to comply even with the rules that they have just made up, let alone completely ignoring international law that they have all signed up to at the UN.

It is difficult to conceive of a system that is so utterly corrupt where those holding the powerful to account for breaching the rules are facilitating the breaking of those very same rules by those in power, by ignoring those offences.

I have long been an admirer of Jenny and her dogged and courageous attempt to expose the back-door dealings that exposed the fatal weakness at the heart of our “democracy”.

The fact that we still call ourselves a democracy is a tribute to the continued fraudulent reasoning of our often hereditary elites to describe a system where the people’s will is subject to the ultimate power of cancellation by a feudal sovereign of a long dead empire on the other side of the planet.

If democracy is as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address “government of the people, for the people and by the people”, then our democracy has always been a fraud. It has been designed to provide ultimate power to decide how we are governed to a distant monarch whose principal role is the preservation of the power of a feudal aristocracy of a country 17,000 kilometres away from us. More strength to those who demonstrate our continued infantile incapacity to untie the apron strings.

Our fearful politicians, unwilling to challenge the distortion built into our housing system by the odious midget John Howard, that turned it into an investment rather than a place to live, continue to focus on the political safety of the demand side. That way they can avoid doing anything serious about the real issue,m which is the supply side.

To ensure younger Australians can never afford a home and therefore continue to put off marriage and children in the interests of rentiers, they fiddle endlessly with methods of boosting demand with the logical consequence of continuing growth in prices. That cycle simply repeats the stupidity created by Howard.

A government that was seriously concerned about fixing the problem would turn to the country that has dealt effectively with supply and ensured housing for everyone. The problem for our current lot of politicians is that to do so goes in the opposite direction to their attempt to frighten us all with the bogeyman of China, in order to keep us under control.

Invite China to bring its innovative modular housing to Australia; these units can be built fast, are of high quality and can be constructed at a reasonable cost. But it won’t happen.

No need to worry Michael about the possibility of the Heath Robinson insanities of the Orange Donald destroying America’s leadership of the world. It is happening now and has been since Clinton’s presidency.

The vast bulk of the world has begun to decisively move away from the selfish, self-centred, vicious and unprincipled “leadership” of the US. It has already lost its capacity to tell everyone else what to do and how to govern themselves as current geopolitical events clearly demonstrate.

Fear not, Michael, a multipolar world is emerging that promises to adopt the five principles of peaceful co-existence. Those are mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. And guess who enunciated them?
.

Trump may just be half-witted enough to believe that by doing a few deals with countries, that have deposits or rare earths that are capable of being mined in an economic manner, he will help the US, but if so he has simply confirmed the worldwide belief that he is a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Mining ain’t the hard part when it comes to rare earths. Refining and processing are the hard bits and China has those wrapped up, for at least the next five to ten years.

These are incredibly complex processes that can be environmentally disastrous. The Chinese have been through that phase and have solved the vast bulk of the problems associated with those processes. They are also understandably not keen in sharing that experience and knowledge with a country determined to neuter them.

The reality is that the Chinese desire for peaceful development, and respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity, will continue to suggest to them that keeping the supply of these metals away from the military-industrial complex of the most dangerous country on the planet is a pretty good idea.

The return of the Dark Ages of religious bigotry, superstition and unreason could not be better illustrated by the fact that supposedly intelligent people can take seriously the idea that a god, whose very existence is contested, has decided that the Jewish people are the “chosen” ones.

What is even more extraordinary is that other supposedly sentient human beings from outside that self-interested group are prepared to give a moment’s credibility to such a rationally and factually outrageous claim.

What is never mentioned when this claim to being “chosen” is made is that the Torah is filled with laws commanding justice, compassion, and moral rigour and is not a licence for unethical behaviour or exploitation.

Prophets like Amos and Isaiah fiercely condemn Israel when it fails to live up to these standards.

So the Zionists, in pursuit of their very earthly desires for a country confined only to them as the chosen, have selectively used un-contextualized extracts from a document written thousands of years ago by self-interested scribes, to justify genocide and ethnic cleansing of another people. And we are supposed to take these claims seriously?

Whilst Justin Glyn may be physically blind, he displays a moral clarity that is admirable and which our political leaders in Australia demonstrate a total incapacity to mirror.

Their reflexive moral cowardice demonstrates the duplicity at the heart of a West that emptily lectures the rest of humanity about our moral superiority, while every day demonstrating its mendacity and fraudulence in our actions.

It also clearly reflects our continued disgraceful racism as we fawn over European Zionist mass murderers and colonialists whilst ignoring an occupied and abused “other”.

This is a superbly written J’Accuse that reveals the moral vacuity within.

John Anderson’s contribution to the Boyer Lecture series largely focused on “diminished trust in government, lack of civility in public discourse and the threat to democracy”.

However, Anderson’s account has significant omissions. He fails to acknowledge widespread public policy failures, the corrosive impact of concentrated media ownership and the lack of transparency in decision-making at all levels of government. He laboured over the housing crisis and home ownership, but other policy failures were ignored.

Perhaps this explains Anderson’s two most egregious omissions and which pose the biggest threats to democracy and social cohesion. Firstly, the rise in inequality and the concentration of wealth and secondly, the existential risks posed by global warming and the collapse of ecological and climate systems.

These omissions can best be explained by considering Anderson’s connections to various entities including ARC, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Anderson regularly provides a platform in his podcasts for those casting doubt on climate science adding to the plethora of misinformation and confusion dividing communities across the country.

Many honourable and eloquent people could have spoken about the future of democracy in this country but Anderson has revealed he is not one of them.

I thank Alex for his thoughtful analysis which summarises pretty well the fact that, as in so many other areas of life, the Western domination of the way progress is measured and who does it, leaves some pretty important questions about the accuracy of these measures unanswered.

China graduates nearly four times the number of STEM students per year than the US and is now far and away the largest filer of patents. Currently, China files around half the world total of patents and increasingly more than the US since 2015.

That has produced a significant leadership for China in so many areas of technology. China currently has in operation a Thorium Reactor which the West has been trying to set up but failed to do for decades. In addition, it has, along with only Russia, small modular reactors in commercial operation. Western countries don’t.

China has also developed, and is testing now, a zero emissions plasma jet engine which uses no fossil fuels. No other country is even close to achieving this. China also has operational mag-lev super high-speed trains since 2004. It is also a leader in the development of personal quantum computers and low energy-use AI.