Not a quick fix for this crisis but the cost of fuel to the consumer has always been manipulated for the benefit of OPEC, shareholders and influential nations. How many times have we heard in plain sight that OPEC has raised or lowered its production to suit?
OPEC Like all businesses are primarily concerned with PROFIT and without proper intervention the consumer /taxpayer will always foot the bill and rouge states will not be tolerated.
Why are most Labor “leaders” in Australia implicitly and/or explicitly hostile to Palestinians and those who oppose the ethic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians?
There is an explanation in Vaclavel Havel’s 1979 meditation of political dissent – the nature of suppression and the falsehoods and intimidation that respond to dissent.
Havel argued that most of us live in a lie and that, instead, it is possible to live within the truth.
Most Labor “leaders” throughout Australia prefer to live in a lie – that there is international law, that Israel is exempt from this law and ethnic cleansing and genocide by Israel is not ethnic cleansing and genocide.
What enrages these leaders is those who challenge this lie and, instead, live in and demand truth – the reality of a dehumanising, apartheid and racist Israel Government. This truth is inconvenient.
Not only will we never get an apology from Scott Morrison and the ‘ruined weekend’ farce, an apology will never come from Tim Wilson, Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor who in 2019 posed gleefully in front of a hydrogen-fuelled car. Such was their contempt for electric vehicles (and the push for more renewables) that they instead promoted a most unlikely technology and promoted the myth that EVs (not petrol) would ruin our weekends. Nor will we see an explanation from Taylor or Joyce about the closing of Australian oil refineries. They could admit that, with the oligopolisation of oil, and our relatively small population, they made a decision based on business alone. To accuse Labor of being “asleep at the wheel” seemingly tracks well in this grievance-infested, ahistorical present. What of the future? John Blackman and other security experts have for decades warned of the dangers of oil dependence. The push for more local oil is coming from miners and those same ‘lost weekend’ elements in Canberra, still resisting the obvious: electrifying our transport system via renewables is urgent, (even more urgent than those energy-hungry data centres), doable, healthier and cheaper than oil will ever be.
Re Mike Gilligan’s article: Trump is now saying the US doesn’t need Gulf oil, so he says it is up to us to organise supplies ourselves. Pulling together, we, the EU, China, the GCC, Japan and Korea plus other willing parties could negotiate a satisfactory deal with Iran, using our highly experienced diplomats. Trump and his forces and group of inexperienced diplomats should vacate the field and leave it to us to reach a deal with Iran, just as he has suggested.
“What about free speech?” people of all stripes exclaim, in many and varied circumstances.
Free speech is not the absolute some proclaim.
Morally speaking, all speech carries responsibility with it. This is recognised in law. Our hate speech laws are far from perfect but even in making such laws there is the implied as well as expressed belief that free speech does not mean anything goes.
And so we have to ask, why did the National Press Club invite the Israeli Ambassador to Australia to speak on its usually respected podium? To listen to the ambassador’s denial that genocide is happening was stomach-turning. WE SEE GENOCIDE EVERY DAY ON OUR PHONES.
It’s no wonder we read so much pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian propaganda in the legacy media. Bought, conned, gullible, true believers? The National Press Club has tarred all journalists with the pro-Israel brush. We can but take whatever they report with very many grains of salt. A once respected profession now measures with used-car salesmen. Sad. Dangerous.
Albanese seems to be cautiously warming Australians up for war. Instead of reinforcing the US’ bungled efforts and sacrificing our defence personnel for the sake of Zion and Trump, Australia needs to resign from AUKUS and all other US entanglements right now. Here’s why:
1. All countries with US bases are complicit in US actions and obedient to US commands. Australia will never be free and independent till the bases are gone.
2. Much of our weaponry can only be used with US approval, as they can turn off the software. So our defence rests entirely on this untrustworthy former ally.
3. The US is headed for collapse, economically, politically, socially and militarily. We want to be well clear when that happens or we’ll go down with it.
4. The US has tied itself to a dying, stranded technology, oil. The future is all with renewable electricity, as China shows. Australia has a choice – and more sunlight than anyone else!
I write to congratulate and thank John Frew for so skilfully and succinctly articulating the missing gap in talking about education and learning. For years in senior education positions, I tried to counter the neoliberal arguments about measuring learning and have done so repeatedly and unsuccessfully. John has captured the essence of context, cultural variation and measurement.
Well done John for your magnificent enunciation of the complexity and cultural non-uniformity of teaching and learning in schools that we continue to ignore in our planning.
Best wishes
Dr Gerald White
We had a 50 year lead in time, but we built border walls instead of fire breaks and water desalination plants. We bombed oil rich countries instead of switching to renewables to make oil theft unnecessary. We stockpiled weapons instead of digging dams for water storage. We subsidised miners instead of supporting our farmers. We allowed politicians to distract us with false narratives instead of pushing their noses into the issues that matter, because it was easier and we thought it was ‘their job’. We sowed resentment and division amongst ourselves over immigration when it will be ourselves, our children and grandchildren who will become the future migrants forced to move due to climate disaster…along any minute now.
It’s almost laughable how humanity can turn its back on the existential threat presented by our dependence on fossil fuels, our pandering to our baser nature, and our worship of technology for technology’s sake.
Once again Julian Cribb draws our attention to the dire straits into which we’ve blithely sailed. Maybe it was always going to be the conclusion of the human experiment. As Peggy Lee hauntingly asked back in the 1960s: Is that all there is? Now we’ve explored deep into the universe and touched the edge of infinity, is our role here on Earth done? Now we’ve exchanged our spirituality for materialism, has the miracle of life been denied us? Now we’ve surrendered our intellect to AI for a fistful of baubles will our instincts become superfluous?
Or was oblivion always the expected outcome for a species unable to manage its innate disposition for aggression?
Whatever the reason, it’s not in any way laughable; it’s as serious as it gets. The shift in weather patterns is clear for all to see and the scientific cause is irrefutable. We ignore both at our peril. Sadly, we appear contented to accept them as our destiny.
Australia’s well known reliance on diesel fuel for long haul transportation and, its remote location at the end of global supply chains has me wondering what governments of all persuasions have been doing in recent years?
Surely, with the advent of Covid, the global shocks of the Ukraine War and the increasingly erratic, shoot from the hip style politics coming out of Washington would have been red flags for someone in Canberra that we need to “war game” a range of catastrophic scenarios so if one does, God forbid, occur, there is a national blue print that can be immediately implemented by all levels of government?
It might be an old fashioned idea but plans work because people have had the time to think all the contingencies through without being under pressure. In times of increasing uncertainty it does seem sensible to me to have some detailed plans in place around areas such as fuel, water and food security.
Before the current stage of the Yankee/Zionist war against Iran kicked off, the Straits of Hormuz were open to tankers regardless of their origin. All the big companies mentioned in the article were thriving. The US military umbrella was deemed sufficient to protect that status quo.
Then the Yankee/Zionists attacked Iran for no good reason, killing Presidents and school children alike. Immediately Iran closed the Straits to all but non-belligerents, bombed those Gulf monarchies hosting US military bases causing a massive exodus of companies and their money toward Hong Kong, and exposed that military umbrella as being leaky.
After one month the Gulf monarchies are mostly in ruins, the vaunted might of the US lies in tatters, the House of Saud looks vulnerable and Israel lies exhausted through hubristic overreach. Israel still has nuclear weapons, a prospect terrifying to all but the most demented Zionists.
As for President Trump, does anyone think he either knows or cares what he has done?
The gas and oil crisis facing Australia today could end tomorrow if we lifted any sanctions we have on Russia and invited Iranian diplomats to return. And stop being such pathetic Yankee/Zionists tools.
As Jack so beautifully puts it, in an era of political banality we need examples of what it means to be a decent, honourable and exemplary Australian that is something for us all to strive to emulate. Mickey J was just such an Australian, as was Fred and as is Gabi. May their legacy continue to enrich us culturally, politically and socially!
It should never be forgotten that the government now in Iran that Trump seems so frivolously to wish to change is a direct result of US actions to overturn the first democratically elected government in Iranian history. The US and its ailing satrap the UK overturned the government of Mossadegh in 1953 and imposed their selection on the Iranian people.
That selection turned out to be one of the most vicious and violent regimes in the world at the time with its infamous SAVAK secret police who slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Iranians. Indeed so bad was it that the Theocratic government that has ruled since the 1979 revolution against that Pahlavi dictatorship was seen as by far preferable by the Iranian people.
Whatever we or anyone else outside Iran may think of it, it is a creature of the Iranian people forced upon them by the US and UK as their way of continuing to steal the Iranian peoples oil.
If we are to successfully deal with current events it is vital that we understand their context and who brought those events about. Part of that learning has to be leave the governance of Iran to the Iranians!
Surely it can no longer be contested, apart from the MAGA tin-hat brigade, that the Trump Presidency is a combination of a demented infantile psychopath leading a group of incompetent, alcoholic, misogynistic, brutal religious extremists. Its capacity for rational judgement and coherent thought is literally non-existent. Hegseth is simply the archetype of this band of products of the rapidly increasing fall of the American empire!
James Curran of the US Studies Centre sounds like he was born yesterday. Though making the right noises re the madness of the US/Israeli campaign, he qualifies that by pointing to the “mendacity” of Iran in the region. Iranian leadership , according to Jim, is “sordid”, “poisonous” and “demented”, quite unlike the west’s ally Saudi Arabia apparently.
Presumably, such impressions, and the general public shares them, are formed by the media, how else? And in that regard the idealism of the Lipmann quotation should make us all smile if not guffaw:
“[T]he news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumour, suspicion, clues, hopes and fears…….The task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct”.
Jim lives in Australia, is he havin’ a lend?
The news from the Senate inquiry on climate change and energy, that four senior government ministers in a position to take a climate lead are declining to present the climate challenge openly, provides confirmation that the Albanese government is reluctant to make clear the threats that we, as a nation, face.
It’s not as if they needed to fear mass resistance to the idea of climate crisis: Spratt cites reports that confirm that the majority think government must do more. It’s as though the government is avoiding any sort of confrontation. We are being swept headlong towards a climate crisis, led by a government that seeks to minimise the public’s view of that crisis, while the opposition – in both government and the media – seek daily to belittle that threat, to undermine the science that explains it, to deny its very existence. So the majority supporting stronger climate action is gradually shrinking as it is starved of leadership from the top.
It is so sad, at this most critical juncture, to see the party once led by Whitlam and Hawke, and in such a strong parliamentary position, so unwilling to accept the mantle of climate leadership that government bestows.
The article states that those most vocal/committed to opposing genocide in Gaza in Australia, in Britain and elsewhere are not antisemitic, but are instead anti-zionist. Yet the article seems to slide into repeating the accusation that such people are antisemitic. There is reference to surveys produced by pro-Israeli lobby groups with data claiming that “antisemitism is on the rise”. This is propaganda which unaccountably is not refuted nor analysed. It ignores the reality that the pro-Israel lobby claim all anti-genocidal expression as antisemitism, not as anti the actions of successive Israeli governments.
Pearls and Irritations readers might be interested to know that the Australian Trucking Association (11 industry associations representing 60,000 trucking businesses and 200,000 people working in the road freight sector) backs the move to electric trucks.
Before last year’s election the ATA wrote: “The science is in. The world’s greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate, and a global effort is needed to reduce emissions. . . That’s why the next Australian Government should (among other things) encourage new truck purchasers to buy electric with a voucher scheme covering half the price gap between comparable electric and conventional truck models. The incentive would be available through dealerships to any truck purchaser, including small business buyers.”
It is a shame the government has not so far taken up this excellent suggestion. Maybe if they got proper payment for our gas, reduced fossil fuel subsidies or demanded fair compensation for climate pollution they could afford to help decarbonise and improve our trucks.
While the Coalition may be “building their own irrelevance”, perhaps it is not via its climate-change denial, as this did not deter last weekend around 22 per cent of South Australians voting One Nation first. The fact that SA is a global leader in renewable energy was not on the minds of voters, just ‘the vibe’ of Pauline Hanson’s politics of grievance. She utterly rejects the science of climate change, believing there is insufficient evidence on which to base catastrophic predictions – never mind overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary.
The 2025 Senate inquiry on Information Integrity on Climate Change and Energy found that misinformation and disinformation are widespread across Australia, and that this both undermines trust in science and delays effective policy development.
We are indebted to Chas Keys and the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action for their work in warning governments and the public of the dire security threats posed by climate change. They and many other climate action groups around the country keep working to counter the seemingly growing grievance politics which seeks to bring the house down without any plan to build anew.
Once again i find myself yelling at the TV and Netanyahu .
When the much praised Israeli missile defence system allowed “not one but two” missiles to hit the ground in Israel Mr Netanyahu was highly critical of the Iranians targeting civilian infrastructure he threatening retaliation I could not help but help but question when retaliation started. Pots calling kettles black .
Using a team sport analogy If the other side has found a regular way past the Iron Dome defence system maybe we have gone into extra time and the other side has the ball .
Nail biting times especially with D. Trump on their side .
Just a note to say thanks for all your great work. It occurs to me that this article on the Iran War may be of interest to P&I readers.
best wishes
Pete
How unfortunate that the only view of the ACT justice system is given to us by one of the people to profit from its existence. Andrew Fraser (barrister) should declare his interest, and P&I would do well to balance Mr Fraser’s views with those of an independent and trained investigative journalist.
Governments encourage students to participate in higher education. The rationale is expressed in terms which highlight the benefits to the economy and employers. More simply put all of us benefit from a well educated and well qualified workforce. Given that we all benefit does it not follow that we should all contribute to the cost? Furthermore those who benefit most are the corporations or more crudely put those who hold 1 per cent of the wealth. It follows therefore that they should contribute the most. In an ideal world all education is 100 per cent free from cradle to grave. We could do worse than revist Whitlam’s trial of community education centres – at the time we were not ready for that model but reworked it could drive our long term prosperity
I’m 87 yrs old, Sydney born, now a Canberran. Re world affairs, I cannot overstate my disgust at the sycophantic Australian support (by both ALP and Coalition) for the US / Israeli invasion of Iran. The Netanyahu intent (US backed) seems to be the conversion of the entire Arab region, including Iran, into Israeli / US military dependency.
Aus is a Southern continent, geographically remote from Arabia – so why is Albo so desperate to please the US by giving the US and Britain billions of non-refundable Aus $ ? Has our current crop of political “leaders” been quietly reminded of what happens to those who resist US pressure ? Whitlam attempted to give Aus some international independence. His reward – the sack.
Where today are the Whitlamesque Aus pollies ? Are today’s crop silent, fearful such thinking will again bring US retribution ?
Also, are we being quietly reminded of what happened to the Kennedy brothers ?
Aus has surrendered its sovereignty and territory – we’ll automatically be drawn by the US into military conflict with its next enemy China, a major Aus trading partner.
Our future, and that of the world – who knows ?
This war has been planned for some time with Australia implicitly involved. We could trace back our recent involvement to the visit of Herzog, Israel’s President, whose stated purpose was to provide support to Australia’s Jewish community. I suggest that rather than coming as Herzog stated,“in goodwill and with a message that the people of Australia and Israel are close friends and allies since the days of old,” his visit was much more clandestine.
It has been confirmed that Herzog, had a secret meeting with Australian Security Intelligence Organisation [ASIO] and Australia’s director general of security, Mike Burgess. ASIO and the Pine Gap joint defence facility share a central role based on national security, surveillance, and US-Australia intelligence sharing. Senator David Pocock said that granting a foreign head of state access to the domestic intelligence agency ‘unprecedented’.
Tanter reminds us that Pine Gap is fully involved in Iranian surveillance and any zone of active US military interest has long included Iran with the objective to provide data to the US National Security Agency. One could conclude that Herzog had ulterior motives, garnishing support and collecting data for the attack on Iran by the Zionist regime and the US.
Many would agree with Bruce Hardy’s assertion that to achieve non carbon energy independence Australia “is to draw upon the natural resources we have an abundance of. it’s natural resources.”
However, to limit these to solar and wind is myopic, prejudiced and ignores other important and relevant resources such as hydropower, green hydrogen & geothermal amongst others .
Recognition and promotion of these alternatives, particularly green hydrogen where is Australia is making substantial contribution, development and progress. Atomic energy is the most obvious but unbalanced and unjustified hysteria needs to be revisited and objectively debated and assessed.
Perhaps the EEF could allocate some focus and promotion of these other worthy alternatives.
Peter Helene
Joe-Public
Clean energy disciple
On nowhere near the scale and at a local level but I draw your attention to the victory speech of the Premier when he said that his govt was pro business, his govt was committed to collaboration with the private sector. Like AUKUS this is a loss of sovereignty that has lead to all the problems that Australians now face – crisis’ in schools, hospitals, aged care, public transport, health insurance, power generation, banking, social housing etc. All sacrificed on the alter of PROMISED lower taxes and improved services only to achieve far worse services, higher public costs, poverty and greater state debt .
Mr Labor Lite should however be commended on his ability to divert public attention from the problems at hand to his newest sporting fixture .
The author has hit the nail on the head by suggesting the Singapore model. It offers the fair dinkum choice in the truest sense of the free market while affording total control by the citizen.
What we have is a guided and pseudo choice(s) to benefit vested interests and lobby groups. In addition,our system has the support of the political class who misguidedly subscribes to extremist free market idealogy without pragmatism.
The politicians are uncomfortable learning good and beneficial ideas from ASEAN (non-western) countries despite making statements (lip service) that Oz is part of Asia and are friends with Asia. Hence, the status quo will continue.
Thank you, Andrew Fraser, for tickling the old memory bank.
As a very young junior member of staff at the National Library, I was tasked to take and manage the NLA’s bound copies of the Canberra Times to Court in the Gorton defamation case – nothing less than originals was acceptable.
Barrister for the plaintiff was Tom Hughes QC – a man whose pomposity exceeded even the best of Charles Laughton in full flight. Hughes played the gallery shamelessly, with palpable arrogance.
David Solomon in the witness stand; Hughes leaned forward, his robe and QC dribble-bibble swinging in the breeze, like a vampire on the hunt. Put to Solomon a ‘gotcha’ question, stood back, pushed his glasses that he had lowered in glaring attack on the witness back up his nose, grasped his lapels and turned to view the gallery with ineffable smugness.
Solomon leaned forwards, pushed his own glasses down his nose in superb parody of Hughes’s action, said: ‘NO’, leaned back, replaced his glasses, grasped his lapels and then turned to view the gallery with the exact smugness of his predecessor.
The mockery of the pompous idiot Hughes was utterly, deliciously complete.
Viva David Solomon.
Producing a daily newsletter 24/7 is an enormous task and I am an admirer. However, I do not expect to read in Pearls and Irritations the same type of inaccuracies that appear in the legacy press. The following article should have received a minor edit. George Browning’s article The dangerous stories driving war in Iran contained the following statement:
The stories that people and nations tell themselves have enormous consequences.
Vladimir Putin tells himself that the natural jurisdiction of the Russian communist party is the area that approximates to the old Soviet Union. Anything less than that is, in his story, a diminution of the rights and identity of the Russian people
The last time I looked Russia had a thriving Communist party and Vladimir Putin was not a member.
The second part of the quote is probably debateable but Putin has been openly critical of the idea of restoring the Soviet Union. He has frequently quoted Alexander Lebed (1990)
Whoever does not regret the destruction of the Soviet Union doesn’t have a heart, whoever wants to recreate it doesn’t have a head