Archives: Letters to the Editor

The best way Australia can defend the International Criminal Court is by complying with its decisions. Another way is to face some reality.

Calling Donald Trump the worst president America has ever had is akin to calling Adolf Hitler Germany’s worst ever chancellor. True, both were elected by popular and fair vote, but once in power, all semblance of democratic process was demolished and what those in power wanted, those in power got.

Moreover, they are not alone. Israel and Iran are nations divided, while poor old Russia, North Korea and China are countries under authoritarian regimes that have thumbed their collective noses at the ICC.

With any number of US citizens happy to follow Trump’s orders, the question becomes, how long before Trumpian America joins them on the ICC blacklist? Followed by the obvious ancillary question, what does Australia do about its alliance structured around American exceptionalism?

Gregory Andrews may not be aware that at the time Sir Isaac Isaacs opposed a Jewish state, the political background was that Palestine was under the British Mandate and so supporting the creation of a Jewish state meant being “disloyal” to the mother country.

His “civic conviction” was part of a political debate within the Jewish community that pitched British loyalists against those who supported the establishment of a Jewish state. That debate largely died once the British Mandate ended and Israel was created.

Greg Barns makes a clear call. It is worth viewing Donald Trump’s February diktat against members of the ICC.

A total of 125 nations are ratified parties to the ICC, while the US, Russia, China, Libya, Iraq, Qatar, Yemen and Israel are among those who are not.

As the ICJ has also delivered advisory opinions on the war in Palestine, Australia must stand up for both the ICC and the ICJ, action their decisions, and protect their judges and staff and their families from actions of the US, especially as our own Hilary Charlesworth is a judge on the ICJ.

An excellent article, setting out a lot of facts about China’s progress in clean energy that Western mainstream media never mentions, except when it can be attacked using some perversion of logic and common sense.

What is little known is that China has in recent years planted in excess of 13 billion trees on nearly five million hectares of previously degraded land and has a goal of planting 70 billion by 2030.

It is also re-claiming deserts as productive lands and leads the world in solar and wind power as well as electric vehicles. It makes sound common sense for Australia to work more closely on greening the planet with the country that is by far and away the leader in doing so!

And just think how stupidity and determination to be the “boss” caused all this. China was, and is, more than happy to continue to supply any country with the rare earths that they refine, so long as they refrain from breaching China’s five principles of peaceful co-existence. They are mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, equality and co-operation for mutual benefit, and peaceful co-existence.

These are the last commitments the West are prepared to make after 500 years of ignoring them around the world in pursuit of empire. China has made it clear that attacking China in any of these ways will bring a response. That is exactly what has happened.

The Donald, after failing to destroy Russia, is now moving on to do the same to China, but in both cases he will fail as America no longer holds the winning hand in the game of international poker. Efforts by the West to break this Chinese stranglehold on rare earths may bear fruit in five years, but has no chance in the short term as refining them is complex and requires decades of investment!

The overwhelmingly obvious question regarding these appalling statistics is whether it is deliberate or collateral damage as the Israelis claim. The best comparison is with the civilian death toll in the USSR in World War II, which was an intentional act to create “lebensraum” in the East for the German people. In total, 27 million people were killed in the USSR by Germany; of those nine million were military casualties and 18 million were civilians. That means two-thirds of those killed were civilians from a deliberate campaign of genocide against civilians.

The Nazi war machine was an elaborately constructed killing machine intended to wipe out large parts of the civilian population of various countries on the European land mass, and yet it failed signally to reach anything like the proportion of civilian deaths as that achieved by the even more depraved Zionist state.

To continue to suggest, as Israel does every day, that the civilian deaths are an unfortunate side-effect of their war on an imprisoned and helpless civilian population demonstrates that Zionism is an even more iniquitous political ideology than the political ideology regarded as the most barbarous in history. Governments of the West currently support it!

I’ve been rewriting this song since I’ve reached a mature age and been taunted by the derogatory word “boomer”. Still fiercely against injustice in the world, I’m in a choir of mostly women over 65.

We sing a lot of raunchy songs, many protesting against injustice. I’ve rearranged a few words to enjoy my present rage and I’ve changed the iconic “I hope I die before I get old” to “I hope you die before you get old” for those who blame “others” for their own inadequacies.

Thanks for a more considered assessment of the current leadership, Albanese style. If only more politicians could behave accordingly.

Might I offer an observation of a failure here and a solution? Rushing, even on the evening of his election, Albanese promised committed action on the Voice for Indigenous Australians. Unfortunately, he used a political, a numbers based, binary process which divided the nation.

Had he chosen a process of dialogue and consideration as another nation,Ireland, did, he could have achieved much more;but he thought like a numbers man, a politician. Ireland on the other hand, changed two matters concerning sexuality (Gay Rights and Abortion) in an ultra-conservative church-ridden state and achieved two reforms embedded in their Constitution. Who could have thought? But I suppose, like most of us, Albanese was just learning.

It is hardly surprising that the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference is silent on the genocide in Palestine. Why should the ACBC speak up for those half a world away when it failed to do so for Australia’s Indigenous population? Support the Uluru Statement from the Heart, Yes; support the Voice to Parliament referendum, No.

The Catholic Church has some wonderful moral leaders. A handful are ordained, most are not. Many who identify as Catholic, with the best of that tradition, no longer “practise” the Catholicism of the members of the ACBC. What remains of ACBC moral leadership is negligible and that is tainted by their many failures to practise gospel teachings, to be prophetic, to exercise “Christian” leadership.

What the ACBC is attempting to preserve has become a whited sepulchre. How long can it survive? There are so many now living the gospel outside the Church because of the meagre support within it, where tokenism suffices for action. Kudos to those like Caritas Australia and Catholics for Justice and Peace for Palestinians but they can’t realistically expect huge numbers to join them. We’ve already gone elsewhere. But see you at the next march. We can join together there.

Harold Zwier’s piece quotes a comment by Dvir Ambramovich, deriding the idea that the Jewish community would take aggressive, retributive action against those who criticise Israel.

Abramovich was wrong then and he is still. Its assault alone on art galleries, writers festivals, universities, media outlets — the list is endless — is proof enough that the mainstream Jewish lobby employs its outsized reach to intimidate and suppress, quite effectively, any dissenting view of the behaviour of Israelis.

Murdoch media/Gina Rinehart’s Bush Summit is part of stage II of a Big Tobacco-style disinformation campaign. The prime minister should not dignify the campaign or lend it credibility by his attendance.

Murdoch/Rinehart et.al. won stage I of the campaign by delaying responsible climate action for 40 years despite losing their factual argument (“Climate change isn’t real, see, it was cold last week”) to actual science.

(Big Tobacco) Stage II, “we can’t afford to address climate change” and “renewables don’t work” and “windmills are ugly” (Uglier than coal mines?) has been running for a few years now. I wonder for how much longer it will hold back responsible climate action.

Eventually, and when the serious and irreparable damage has been done, the truth and motivation for the campaign will emerge. The wealthy and powerful always knew the damage and suffering that climate change would cause, but believed that by preventing climate change action they could preserve the wealth and power with which to insulate themselves from its ill-effects (and damn the hoi-polloi).

I grieve for my grandchildren but cannot contain my schadenfreude. The wealthy and powerful are welcome to the dystopian remnants of the planet.

I have not closely followed the discussions of tax reform so maybe I missed it, but Michael Keating’s article presented itself as somewhat comprehensively covering the possible areas of reform.

While I consider myself to be well short of his economic knowledge, I was surprised to find no reference to taxing the resource sector for its ability to extract huge resource-generated profits at minimal benefit to our national budgetary position.

Having been in Norway last year and observed them gloating about the benefits of their sovereign fund, I despaired again about our failure to emulate such an approach.

When someone of Keating’s standing fails to even mention this, I can only wonder. Surely even at this late stage in our extraction history, we can use futures extractions to raise a few billion dollars.

In his critique of Leunig’s 2012 cartoon, Zwier refers to it as a parody — satirising or mocking — of Niemöller’s 1946 poem. For me, the 2025 immediacy and personal nature of Leunig‘s words was palpable – not a parody, but rather an adaptation true to the original intent of Niemöller’s poem. It spoke to me about the progressive… how can I say it, moral shrinkage that occurs, the lack of courage, sense of being overwhelmed and the impotence in us, preventing us from speaking up for truth.

Leunig’s very personal observation is evident in his choice of pronouns – “I did not speak out”. Given that the observation in this cartoon is still relevant in 2025, nearly 80 years on from the original poem, we can safely say that it is indeed an incisive expression of the human condition (a foundational topic for Leunig) rather than a political comment.

To me, the cartoon is not about whether we are antisemitic or not, but rather about whether we are properly human or not. I wonder what Michael Leunig would have had to say about this?

I took the trouble to look up who was at the roundtable and noticed it was the same well-paid people who either have benifitted from the mess we are in or those who want to benefit from the mess.

Not one without media training„ Nice to be with you Sarah„ No-one to point a finger.

Let’s say education, housing, health etc are in this mess because of a failed experiment of commercialising them.
Health is on the brink because of the profit before care model and private hospitals for those who can pay extra and ramping for the rest at public hospitals.

We need more, not less, regulation because you lot can’t be trusted not to cheat. Think taxes, pink batts etc.

Productivity won’t improve because eight greedy states demand and the feds hold the purse strings.

Every election is about how little tax we will pay, not about what we need to spend for the good of the planet. Australia and Australians. Money spent on sport and stadiums is used to divert attention from the actual problem.

No quibble at all with everything that Raghid Nahhas wrote – but I think he understated the heinous appropriation of a term generally approbative of a regime by the Zionist + IDF cabal to deflect criticism of their genocidal rampage.

The definition of “democracy” has no reference to the actions of a state in regard to any other state. By claiming Israel’s “democratic” status — which I assume is valid under the strict definition — Benjamin Netanyahu is employing a very limited political definition as a shroud to cover the iniquitous activity of the pack of inglorious bastards of which he is the precarious head.

Given the recently reported majority of Israelis opposed to the Zionist/IDF actions, Netanyahu’s claim is invalid. The majority of Jews worldwide are decent generous people who repudiate the wholesale slaughter by every means available being carried out by the Zionist monsters.

Any external state government — US, I refer specifically to you and Australia, you still have yet to properly stand as unambiguously opposed to genocide — that accepts the “democratic” argument declaimed by the proponents of the Zionist abomination as justification for the rape and pillage of Palestine, is guilty of willful ignorance of reality.

While Isaac Isaacs was the first Jewish governor-general, during my lifetime we had Zelman Cowan.

This fact does not change the intent or importance of the article, but is a glaring error that should have been picked up before publication.

Bravo to Fred Zhang for a brilliant article which is very much to the point.

It is high time we told the US to get lost. This is a nation that parrots itself as the “world’s greatest democracy” but, in reality, does not give a rat’s about democracy and never has.

It didn’t care about it when it put the 3/5ths compromise in its constitution, it didn’t care about it when, along with the UK, it destroyed Iranian democracy in 1953 for oil, or indeed, in 1956 when it egged on the Hungarians for months. They amazingly overthrew their Soviet puppet regime, with the USSR sitting on the border for a week waiting to see what the US would do. They did nothing and let the Hungarian rebels and Nagy slip quietly under the bus.

It then went on to overthrow multiple governments to its south, or support fascists and dictators for oil or bases.

There is an argument that for a period after World War II it was indispensable and anti-imperial but then it became an empire itself. US arrogance is beyond belief now, such as declaring they’ll send a deportee to Australia who has no connection with us.

In all likelihood, the statement on the Middle East dated 31 January 1970 was indeed drafted by Bertrand Russell. It has his characteristic clarity including typically succinct formulations such as ‘The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that the country was “given” by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state, and “What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy”. Russell personally signed a copy of the statement, which is now held at the Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Canada.

Christopher Farley, Russell’s representative to whom he had dictated the statement, delivered it to an international conference of parliamentarians in Egypt on 3 February 1970.

By this time, Ralph Schoenman had not seen Russell, or had direct contact with him, for nearly two years. On 13 January 1970, The New York Times had reported Russell’s brief public statement that he no longer had any contact with Schoenman.

Tony Simpson, secretary, Bertrand Russell PeaceFoundation, 5 Churchill Park, Nottingham, NG4 2HF, England

I am no particular fan of Leunig, but I found Harold Zwier’s assessment of Leunig’s four-frame cartoon self-serving and symptomatic of the sad conflict within global Jewry related to the genocide in Palestine.

As a non-Jew, I took it that Leunig spoke for all of us (aside from Bibi, his war criminal associates and and his youthful conscripted footsoldiers.)

Zwier’s self-indulgent intellectual doodle and its perceived antisemitism is a another crutch for his guilt-avoidant mates. It is a pathetic distraction from the mass murder for its two million victims and it shows no sympathy for them.

Not all of us are antisemitic, Harold, but many of us are well informed about Israel’s ongoing crimes. Maybe you should have kept your version of “silent reflection” out of the blogosphere.

Ralph Nader’s reportage on the undercounting of Gaza deaths is now on the US Congressional Record. From data reported in the leading medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere by a succession of expert epidemiologists (Dr Zeina Jamaluddine et al., Dr Rasha Khatib et al., Professor Devi Sridhar) 64,260 Gazans died violently by Day 269 of the Gaza Massacre (30 June 2024) 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.

Western mainstream media presently report about 60,000 Gaza deaths and thus under-report the carnage over 10-fold. In impoverished countries, about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of infants under five. (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”).

It is accordingly estimated from available data that by 25 April 2025, the 680,000 Gazans killed (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included 380,000 infants under five, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men. Interestingly, NSA-informed President Trump claimed 1.7 million Gazans were left, this implying 0.7 million were killed.

Humanity’s greed for material comfort seems unbounded, for the most part, by any sense of a need for boundaries. Our population grows ever larger, and those alive want a sense of comfort and provision that is as good as, or better than, that they grew up with. Understandable, at the individual scale, but unsustainable and a poisoned chalice for those who follow.

Julian Cribb paints a compelling picture of how humanity is hell-bent on self-destruction. Much attention has been given to the climate threat because this is both existential and imminent, but — as Cribb reminds us — we also face threats of famine, water scarcity, and resource depletion which carry terminal risks for many. And all this happens while we continue to deplete and degrade the environment on which all life depends.

With the global population that our planet now carries, and our fixation on growth, there will be no gentle resolution of this conundrum. We may have the technologies that we need for a sustainable future, but we lack the willingness to adopt them, or to accept the far-more-limited lifestyles that they demand. The politics of profligacy will prevail until the end.

“… My starting point is that Australia needs to raise more tax revenue. … budget will continue to be in deficit … by an average of 1.2% of GDP. This is a structural deficit which is a major risk to economic sustainability… This deficit needs to be corrected and sooner rather than later. Either taxation has to rise or expenditures need to be cut…”

Such advice is provably incorrect; the recommendation is the very essence of socially destructive neoliberalist austerity.

There was a time when the statements above were true, but not now. In gold-pegged days (pre-1971) an Australian pound on issue was exchangeable for an amount of gold held in CB reserve. Therefore each new pound issued required one be taxed back from circulation.

In Dec 1983, (1971 Bretton Woods, then various pegs) the Australian dollar was fully floated. From that point onwards, Australia’s monetary system became fully fiat, with no necessity for tax receipts to match currency issuance.

In fact, the dollar issuance was freed from the deflationary gold constraint to properly expand to accommodate national growth. A bigger economy needs more money circulating. Purposeful, near constant federal government. deficit spending is therefore essential.

The average deficit since 1901 Federation = 2.4%

To act with impunity as if the voices and needs of the other don’t matter, or don’t matter as much, seems to me to be at the heart of the mess we in the West now find ourselves in.

Two examples spring to mind, these being NATO’s eastward expansion and Israel’s absorption of Palestine. Both relied on the notion of exceptionalism to justify unilateral action. In neither case were the opinions of the other given equal weight. That light on the hill would seem to be shining for me, but not for thee.

To remove oneself from the collective unity of humanity, to claim to be exceptional, skirts perilously close to the original sin found in the parable of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise. Are we all really poorer without the city on the hill shining its light into our eyes and shoving its exceptionalism down our throats whenever it chooses to do so?

Or could it be that we would all be better off if that city on the hill would pull its head in and start acting like one of many in a multipolar, multifaceted world?

Neil, thank you for your welcome piece written from within the deterioration of educational integrity of an important post-secondary sector! Thank you. Such insider insight tracing educational decline in TAFE is helpful to sharpen our vision of the related spectacular decline within the “sector” of what are now called “universities”!

To investigate how TAFE was demeaned in public policy will mean revisiting the question of why Institutes of Technology and Colleges of Advanced Education were “reformed” by amalgamation with, and hence required by legislation to take on the labels of, “universities”? Are we to make the sad conclusion that TAFE was actually mangled by a process that viewed it in subsidiary terms within the higher educational sector?

Under the 1980s economic rationalist ideology of the Dawkins reforms, managed by the Federal Department of Employment, Education and Training, all education was subjected to rigorous commercialising policies, geared in a materialistic reductionistic way to GDP “productivity”.

Well written! Thank you, Patricia, for adding to our perception of a political reality which is also our own. And yet our ambassador and foreign minister attended the inauguration on our behalf! Ever since coming to the conclusion that they shouldn’t have done so, I’ve wondered how we Australians should justify such a signal of non-compliance with the Trump 2 delusionary insurrection.

The best I can come up with is to say we have too much respect for the US under its own constitution — which assumes the rule of law and proscribes insurrection — for us to indulge the concerted effort of one who is guilty of treason by perpetuating the “deal” of his insurrection. Thanks for your journalistic encouragement!

Greg Barns’ article should be compulsory reading for every chief editor and vice-chancellor.

Capitulation to the threats routinely delivered by the Zionist lobby industry, that demand kowtowing to standards of expression that support what are likely crimes against the “International Rule of Order” by the highest authorities in the world, is, quite simply, complicity.

Those who cringe in cowardly acquiescence to the utterly discredited definition of antisemitism delivered as the metric by the Segal report and reinforced by the flustercluck of Zionist protagonists from Netanyahu downwards to the sludge we have here in Australia that surface like a lumps in a sullage pond every time anybody appears to challenge their authority, there is a simple way to retrieve some shards of decency.

Simply, ignore the Zionist BS. Consider it to be a drive-by-shouting, blown away by humanity and the position of the ICC and ICJ.

Gain some damn backbone from the fact that more Australians marched over the Sydney Harbour bridge than there are self-identified Jews in Australia.

By such action, you will align yourself with the humanitarian concerns of the world and also support the future of Israel.

In answer to Margaret Callinan’s comment on my article, the current debate is not about recognising Palestine as a nation, but about recognising it as a state. There is a difference.

The Australian Government’s recognition proposal limits the borders of the state of Palestine to Gaza and the West Bank. That is what is wrong in principle and a “colonialist imposition”.

In response to my article, Simon Tatz writes, “The only resolution is one determined by the Palestinian and Israeli people”. That was my point. Please reread my articles.

Excellent article by Greg Barns. A science academic for four decades, I strongly objected to Codes of Conduct constraining academic free speech, and 25 years ago published a detailed critique entitled “Current censorship and self-censorship in Australian universities” that concluded “We should publicly insist that universities that constrain free speech are not fit for our children”.

As illustrated by the shocking Bendigo Writers Festival censorship debacle, free speech-constraining codes of conduct are now in place in Australian universities and threaten academic free speech and Australia’s $40 billion per annum education export industry. The Big Eight universities and numerous other Australian universities have disgracefully adopted a version of the highly flawed definition of antisemitism espoused by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance to which Australia and 34 other European countries belong and which has been condemned by scholars worldwide and, indeed, by more than 40 anti-racist Jewish organisations.

The IHRA is anti-Jewish antisemitic and anti-Arab antisemitic (by falsely defaming anti-racist Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim critics of apartheid Israel as assertedly “antisemitic”) and Holocaust-denying (by ignoring all WW2 holocausts other than the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and, indeed, some 70 genocide and holocaust atrocities).

This is one of the most perceptive and revealing examinations of the vast gap between our vaunted values and our real world practice that I have seen anywhere. Her analysis is couched in academic discourse and logic, but with the vital addition of the other human attributes that must exist together with it if reason is to be brought back to any objectively observable reality.

I am grateful to Pam for her clarity of thought and her willingness to deal objectively with the differences between who we claim we are and who we actually are! She unflinchingly examines the contrast between the values we claim against our lived history and, as George Santayana so perceptively observed, have failed to learn the lessons of that history and so are doomed to repeat it.

If we are to live up to the values that we say are the defining characteristics of who we are, we first need to accept our present and past abject failure to do so!