Archives: Letters to the Editor

It is no wonder that successive Australian Governments have been unable to reach an agreement on gambling advertisement reform. We, as a country, have a mug punter mentality, a culture of backing the wrong horse. We march blindly off to wars.

Once again we are heading down a very dangerous path, betting our houses in a housing crisis and backing the wrong horse trotters in a steeplechase. We need to stop sticking our noses into the internal affairs of other countries at the behest of waning powers.

We need to adopt a policy of friendship to everyone, helping where practical and when it is in our best interest.

Jaron Sutton asks if atrocities in Gaza will be “effectively suppressed”. If history is a guide, then yes.

For more than a century, most nations have been co-opted to effectively suppress the Armenian and Ottoman Christian Genocide (also called Assyrian and Greek Genocide). Between 1913-23, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians and 250,000 to 500,000 Assyrians were slaughtered, along with an estimated 300,000 Pontic and Anatolian Greeks.

Denial, including the refusal of mainstream media and policy commentators, reinforces the words of Adolf Hitler, who said on the eve of unleashing the Holocaust:

“I have placed my death-head formation in readiness — for the present only in the East — with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Although Anzac PoWs witnessed and recorded the first genocide of the 20th century, no one today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians. Despite repeated attempts, Australia’s collective media suppress the genocide following intense lobbying by Turkish interests.

Witheringly convincing. Electing a petulant, five-alarm snake oil salesman as President (who has assembled a like-minded governing cult within the White House) is not what has caused the dismal Western trajectory so well analysed in this article – but it has certainly accelerated this development.

The US — and its Global West posse — are steadily looking more mysteriously ill-starred (even doomed), rather than mysteriously superior.

I blame the ridiculous oscillation and indecision by our government and medical officers, and the unquestioning gullibility of our media during the pandemic, for the rise of the right-wing sovereign citizens, Australian Zionists and white fundamentalists.

If government officials oscillate during life and death moments regarding masks and vaccines, and make a health crisis all about personal rights, it inevitably gives rise to citizens who put themselves at the centre of their own universe.

You have rights, yes, but they go hand in hand with responsibilities ie your civic duty towards your fellow citizens. I fear many of those above have never heard of civic duty, nor realise they have responsibilities as Australian citizens.

We know selfishness is a precursor to collapse of a friendship, a marriage, a family, but it’s also at the heart of collapse to a society. It’s also reversible. But that takes examination of one’s values and ethics. And we know any such modelling from the top is thin on the ground in this country.

As we saw during the Australia-wide anti-immigration rallies, and more recently during the clash between the Sumud Flotilla supporters and Zionists on Bondi beach, the Australian flag is now being associated with the far right, white Australia pundits and genocide supporters.

The words “terrorist”, “terrorism” and “antisemitism” have been devalued beyond recognition. Now our flag is subjected to the same.

Are you ready for the future consequences of that, Anthony Albanese?

Henry V, Maggie Thatcher and the Indonesian president Sukarno knew that when they were in trouble at home, the thing to do was to attack someone else.

So killing others to protect your own skin is nothing new, is it Netanyahu?

Qatar is ostensibly a trusted US ally. It hosts the Udeid Air Base, the forward headquarters of US Central Command and headquarters of the USAF Central Command. You would think this gave it some protection when hosting a peace conference, a conference proposed by the US. Clearly this is not so, as the recent attack on Hamas delegates to that peace conference proved.

I hope the sycophants in Canberra realise the extent of the Faustian bargain they have made with the twined Zionist regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv. The message from Qatar is crystal clear. Deviate from the imposed narrative, or perhaps just because they can, and they will throw you under the bus in a New York minute. West Asia may not currently loom large on our foreign relations’ horizon, but China does.

It’s clear the geopolitical world is shifting on its axis. It’s equally clear that Australia has some serious decisions to make in the post-American world. The United States, split between the worldly and the godly, has elected a man whom history will judge as unhinged. It’s always been a task to hold half a heaving continent together in thought and purpose, and Donald J. Trump is in no way up to that challenge.

So where does it leave Australia? We inhabit an island continent with fewer people than some global mega-cities. Two-thirds of our land is desert or arid and the other third is dependent for its productivity on three, increasingly unstable, ocean weather systems.

Economically, our mineral wealth is prodigious. Politically, we’re a robust democracy with an open society. Demographically, we’re an open-door migrant nation. Geographically, we’re at the southeastern tip of an Asian continent that’s either in political flux or controlled by authoritarian and, in some cases, belligerent regimes with whom we must live and trade.

The decisions made over the next few years will determine Australia’s future across the 21st century. One thing is clear: steady as she goes is not an option.

Raghid Nahhas makes the excellent suggestion that we replace “multiculturalism” with “multiethnicities” in which “belonging rests not on ancestry, culture or religion, but on adherence to democratic norms, equal rights and the rule of law”. Or we could say: anyone is welcome to come here as long as they adhere to our liberal, democratic, egalitarian and humanitarian traditions.

Perhaps multiracialism might be a better term, though we don’t want people to abandon their cultures completely, only those aspects that are illiberal, undemocratic, unequal or inhumane. This may be difficult for those who come from cultures that are misogynist, where women are treated as second-class citizens. While this should not necessarily exclude people who do come from such cultures, there needs to be some form of education about our values for all potential immigrants. There could even be a requirement that they sign an affidavit that they will abide by such values.

This discussion should be held in the context of the need to limit numbers to levels that can be sustained ecologically. Many of the people marching in the recent rallies were not anti-immigrant, simply anti-hyper-immigration which is what we have experienced in the years post-COVID.

It seems to me that so much of the debate in this space is focused on the geopolitical and the military aspects rather than as a holistic discussion around the economic, political and military aspects as a whole. It succeeds in raising good arguments around a limited range of domains, but ignores the economic question and its impacts on capabilities. What we know is that the US has a national debt of more than US$37 trillion and a debt falling due for re-financing this year of US$9 trillion.

We also know that the US bond market is unable to attract anything like the amount of bids to raise that sum, let alone pay the more than US$1 trillion in interest on the existing loans. Bond yields are rising dramatically as the US desperately tries to fill its needs in a market that the rest of the world is deserting in droves, due to world central banks increasing doubts as to the US capacity to sustain its existing debt.

In those circumstances, it renders moot the geopolitical and the military aspects as the US is running out of capacity to fund its vast array of interventions, wars and regime change around the world.

If Duncan Graham was to trace the source(s) of the funding for the “Indonesia uprising”, he would find it very difficult to dismiss the notion this uprising is a “Hong Kong redux”.

I suggest Duncan and P&I get in touch with Nury Vittachi, who has traced that funding e.g. Trump didn’t “gut” all of the NED’s funding.

Not forgetting Nury has been published at P&I numerous times before.

A recent Lowy Institute poll shows 51% support to address the “serious and pressing problem” of global warming, even if it involves “significant cost”. However, this slim majority has dropped six points since last year.

One-third says the harmful effects will be gradual and we should take steps that are “low in cost”. The case for spending large amounts of money has not been well argued. Higher energy prices are repeatedly and falsely blamed on renewables; China’s emissions are raised as a reason for Australia to do next-to-nothing; and a movement (seemingly orchestrated by far-right interests) is growing in the regions where renewable infrastructure is needed.

The National Climate Risk Assessment, Labor’s 2035 target or the Pacific Islands‘ plight – none of these will see Australians demand the necessary steps, unless the economic case is made alongside the environmental one.

The IEA predicts worldwide demand for fossil fuels will drop to just 20% by 2050. More than two-thirds of our coal and gas revenue comes from Japan, China and South Korea; all are accelerating clean energy investment. As researcher Thom Woodruff puts it, “we risk driving off an economic cliff of our own making” if we fail.

Please read this article and, if any of it is even remotely true, ask yourselves how could you possibly award a Nobel Peace prize to an American president, any American president?

I know you are under pressure to award this president the Peace Prize, but perhaps the way to appease him is to rescind all previous presidential awards.

This didn’t start yesterday.

I was pleased to read Paul Malone’s criticism of Sarah Ferguson/the ABC regarding her glib statement that it was the Nationlist’s Kuomintang, not the Chinese Communist Party forces, that defeated the Japanese.

It is a long time (67 years) since I studied a bit of Chinese history as part of my Chinese language study at Sydney University, but my memory is still strong that it was the CCP forces that were most influential. The only “text” that I recall using is that by John K. Fairbank, The United States and China, first published in 1948.

Unfortunately, I have no copy and am distant from good libraries so cannot check on this well-known and respected Harvard scholar’s views. It would be good to see some other support of Malone’s views (I imagine Jocelyn Chey has a well considered view).

I share the distress identified by Dennis Altman.

“Something is unnerving about seeing people sitting in comfort in Australia denying the evidence of carnage and starvation,” Altman writes in a sentence that is also applicable to Syria, South Sudan, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali and a dozen other countries suffering carnage, starvation and war crimes.

The ignorance of many people about the Gaza conflict, and the many other ignored humanitarian crises, among “comfortable” Australians is lamentable. Maybe not for readers of this public policy journal, but in general I’ve been dismayed at the paucity of knowledge about the Middle East and history of this centuries-old conflict.

In my experience, few have actually been to the region, most don’t know that the modern Middle East (like Africa) was artificially created by European empires, which fomented this conflict; they’re unaware of the history and philosophy of Zionism, and embarrassingly ignorant of the history of the Palestinian people, and their fraught relationship with Egypt, Jordan, Iran and other Arab states; countries that are essential participants in reaching a sustainable peace agreement.

Refaat Ibrahim’s hope for a popular uprising by starving Palestinians against the rogue state, Israel, is unlikely to succeed without external pressure. So far, the Australian Government is avoiding actions of substance that could include the following:

• Ban export of weapons components to Israel and any military co-operation with Israel;

• Ban imports from Israeli settlements that are illegal under international law;

• Impose sanctions (e.g. asset freezes, travel bans) on all members of the current Israeli Government and military commanders;

• Greatly increase humanitarian funding to UN agencies and NGO groups providing food and shelter in Gaza;

• Publicly support investigations into Israel’s crimes by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, providing funding and forensic and legal assistance;

• Announce support for the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli politicians Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant;

• Demand safe access corridors for aid delivery; and

• Failing that, work through the UN General Assembly and coalitions to bypass any UN Security Council veto on a proposal for military escort for aid delivery to Gaza.

It is devastating to see my government’s cowardice which results from its fear of annoying the Israel and US Governments.

The Académie Française dictionary in 1798 defined terrorism as a “system, or regime of terror” and terrorist as “an agent or partisan of the Terror that arose through the abuse of revolutionary measures” (The French Revolution and Early European Revolutionary Terrorism by Michael Rapport) In other words, state terror came first, preceding any other kind, the very first example being the revolutionary regime in France, 1793-1794.

Ample examples exist today: the US drone warfare over NW Pakistan 2004-2018; Saddam’s mukhabarat; Assad’s torturers and Israel’s war on Gaza. All these, it might be thought, represent state terrorism – which is a concept that some states are sometimes in a hurry to forget.

So when a state extends the meaning of “terrorism”, then seeks to apply this to sanction a direct action group like the UK’s Palestine Action, for which ordinary criminal law would appear to be sufficient, a group whose avowed aim is to damage or disrupt property linked to Israel’s arms industry or to splash paint on aircraft suspected of involvement in assisting the war on Gaza, it may be worth remembering that originally “terrorism” was a system instituted by a bloodthirsty state, not an individual.

While it is hardly unexpected that accountants would focus upon pay and governance as the source of problems in Australian universities, these are superficial targets which mask determinants. The pay that vice-chancellors receive is a symptom, not a cause.

The central causes of what have become little more than state consultancies are that teaching students is now almost completely devalued. This began in the late 1970s-early 1980s and is now rife. Casual contract, part-time teachers are responsible for many first- and second-year undergraduate courses. If senior professors etc appear at lectures for these courses, it is in a Joan Sutherland-Nellie Melba at Sydney Opera House format of occasional guest performers with tutorials, marking etc left to the most junior staff.

Much research is directed toward future consultancies, largely uncritical, and should be carried out for commercial firms, not at universities.

Get rid of the non-teaching full-time professors and other managers. Make all promotions dependent on teaching performances and let the real flowers bloom.

The system of education and social conditioning set up by the US, in particular, since early last century and re-enforced throughout the last century has worked superbly well. It has ensured that those who do not give their assent to that conditioning are marginalised from polite society and only accidentally and temporarily occupy positions within the agencies of opinion formulation within our societies.

As George Orwell pointed out, those who make it to positions of prominence within the mainstream media actually believe the nonsense they are peddling and are where they are as they can be trusted not to go outside the accepted range of opinions.

In this case, the accepted opinions, generated by the propaganda mills of Mossad and the Israeli Government, are that all Palestinian journalists are members of Hamas and are therefore legitimate targets. That this is untrue is besides the point. Mainstream journalists recognise that it is career death if they go outside those accepted lies and so they convince themselves of those lies in order to assuage any feelings of guilt they may harbour. They, thus, keep their jobs but lose their humanity!

Thank you, Teow Loon Ti for your clear and well-formed response to the piece by Ju Hyung Kim titled “Asia must learn from SEATO and build its own NATO”. In truth, I read the title of the article mentioned and couldn’t read it as it is obviously an Uncle Sam homily.

Too bad our media is so saturated with such articles of faith, detached from reality, history and evidence. Teow has spoken to reality, a relief in troubled times.

This is a good summary of the truly insubstantially equipped Bolton. He hasn’t seen a war, actual or proposed, that he doesn’t like, from a distance of course. His later life bravado was preceded by a careful avoidance in his youth of any likelihood that he would actually serve anywhere near where the killing and the dying were taking place. His enthusiasm for war has been acquired along with an unerring capacity to avoid it in practice.

Like many of his ultra-conservative colleagues in Washington, he is more than happy to send other mothers’ children to fight and die in wars of empire with accompanying stirring speeches about promoting freedom and democracy while overturning democratic governments and replacing them with US puppets. The people of the US increasingly seem to see through this jingoism. That can only be a good thing for world peace!

As John Menadue correctly points out, the death toll in Gaza is far higher than those killed directly by Israeli bombs and bullets. A conservative multiplier of four indirect deaths to every one direct killing gives a minimum of 300,000.

But this overlooks the fundamental point: genocide is not simply about killing. Killing is but one of the depraved ways that Israel is committing genocide.

Israel’s Zionazi holocaust is about the destruction of the Palestinian People. A Semitic people, no less. To fully gauge that destruction, one needs to look to different research; Guillot et al, Lancet, February 8 2025, Life expectancy losses in the Gaza Strip during the period October, 2023, to September, 2024.

Their research determined that “In the central variant, life expectancy in the Gaza Strip decreased by 34·9 years during the first 12 months of the war, about half (–46·3%) the prewar level of 75·5 years.” That was before Israel’s criminally induced famine.

Today, the life expectancy of a Palestinian baby born in Gaza is about the same as a Jewish baby born in Auschwitz. They don’t have one. The destruction is absolute. Gaza is, like Auschwitz, at best, a land of standing corpses.

Julian Cribb potently describes the latest report, A Climate-First Foreign Policy for Australia, from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, as a “trailblazing vision of where an enlightened, informed, and caring humanity might go in the face of the brutal escalation in climate impacts”. Cribb would know the soon-to-be-released National Climate Risk Assessment has been evocatively depicted by insiders as “dire,” “diabolical,” and “extremely confronting”.

Fittingly, ASLCG calls on government to “mobilise the resources necessary to address this clear and present danger, and to decarbonise our economy to reach net zero emissions as close to 2030 as possible. Climate change must be the next government’s top priority”. While 2035 appears elsewhere in the report, the Group argues that because 1.5°C has already been reached, logically we must bring the net zero date forward if we are to stay under 2°C.

However, as Malm and Carton conclude in Overshoot, the temperature will keep rising unless the “demon of fossil capital” is defeated. Each of us can help by choosing fossil-free banks and super funds. Market Forces shows how. But what we also need is a fossil-free government.

If you are not convinced that the Australian government must dump AUKUS by

• The fact that the primary utility of the proposed AUKUS submarines is to augment a US attack force aimed at China, our major trading partner;

• The obvious ceding of sovereignty to the US empire that this entails;

• The questionable logic of acquiring a submarine fleet unsuitable for coastal defence of Australia;

• The certainty that the $368 billion budget will blow out, as illustrated by the fact that Australia has already paid a $5 billion instalment of a $47.8 Billion commitment to the US to shore up its ship-building capacity which is not a payment on account for the purchase of the submarines but an additional payment; and

• The unreliability of the US demonstrated by its flagrant breach of the Australia/US free trade agreement by the US imposition of tariffs and the Australian Government’s impotent response; then

Surely you must be convinced by Peter Briggs’ two-part article which lead to the conclusion that the deal will not be honoured,

I nominate Margaret Callinan, Bob Pearce and Les MacDonald to head our new government. They know the arc of our history; they see the repeated pattern of strategic errors successive Australian Governments have made; they each have brave innovative ideas, rooted in social conscience, and can articulate and educate in less than 200 words.

Bravo Margaret, Bob and Les. Your voices are so valued.

It’s not about decisions made by Hitler in 1939. It is no longer about decisions made by Hamas on 7 October. It’s about decisions made today, in this moment, by one’s own conscience.

It’s about setting aside economic contracts, monetary incentives, lobbyist influences, deals behind closed doors, and harkening to one’s own consciousness of what is right and what is evil. It couldn’t be simpler.

Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong, Tony Burke: it couldn’t be simpler.

The courageous Sarah Dowse may have been born in America, but she has evidently acculturated well into Australia, even to taking on the fabled Aussie “bullshit detector”. Add to this her insider view on Israel “the Jewish State” and she has the basic credentials for exposing perspectives avoided by the legacy media in the face of real or perceived pressure by the powerful pro-Israel lobby.

I appreciated, in particular, her scepticism about ASIO’s role in the Iran affair in which, (and in numerous other national security crises) no evidence ever comes under public scrutiny.

It is hard, if not impossible, to any longer believe that the vast bulk of our leaders in the West are fit for their leadership positions. When they not only turn away from the grotesque, genocidal activities of the Israeli Government, but participate in, and publicly support them, knowing the truth of what that support enables.

The truth about this vast criminal enterprise, and those without the moral courage to condemn it, are a rebuke to the view of Hanna Arendt about the “banality of evil”.

This evil is not banal. It is contemptible and abhorrent. It will lead, sadly, to real and renewed racism against innocent Jews around the world, despite the fact that the Israeli Government does not in any way represent the bulk of decent, honest and compassionate Jews.

This is an extremely important article by John Menadue demanding total trade sanctions against Israel because of hundreds of thousands of Gaza deaths. Dr Zeina Jamaluddine and colleagues estimated that 64,260 Gazans died violently by day 269 of the Gaza massacre (30 June 2024) (The Lancet) and hence 136,000 Gazans died violently by day 569 (25 April 2025) with a “conservatively estimated” four times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths from violence and deprivation by 25 April 2025.

That is 28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million, and 11 times the present mainstream media under-counted estimate of 62,000 deaths. Western mainstream media under-count indigenous deaths in US wars. Thus, in December 2011, the Australian ABC reported on Iraqi deaths: “The [US] withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4500 American soldiers dead.”

I estimated 2.7 million Iraqi deaths and seven million Afghan deaths from violence and war-imposed deprivation (Gideon Polya, US-imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide, 398 pages, 2020). The Brown University Costs of War Project: “At least 4.5 million people have died in the post-9/11 [US] war zones.” Iraq has five million orphans – go figure.

Gregory Clark writes well on the Palestine issue. As a result of FOI applications, I now know that up till about six weeks ago, Albo had had about 65,000 pieces of correspondence on Palestine since the Israel-Palestine war broke out, and had answered none. Penny Wong had had about 52,500, and had answered about 17% of them.

It is clear that governments of both persuasions largely believe that foreign affairs is not a suitable policy area for democratic control resulting from widely encouraged public debate. It has taken more than 22 months of weekly marches just to get Labor to implement its own policy on recognition of Palestine, so far without any really concrete response to mass murder, forced population transfer, and the deliberate low-calorie policy of the Israeli Government, even after it has now reached more than 50 eyes for an eye since 2023.

Rex Paterson, the transparency warrior, has just highlighted Labor’s plan to tighten the screws on FOI. So, it is going to be even harder to find out what the inexplicable hold that the Israeli Government clearly has over Albanese and Wong. Unlike Belgium, where a court case from Hind Rajab Foundation has seemingly emboldened it.