Archives: Letters to the Editor

Colin Mackerras is very civilised in his refusal to comprehensively criticise the cultural failings of Australia with respect to China. His criticisms are restrained but very clear in their noting of the all-embracing nature of those failures.

He could have further noted that, despite the decades since the abolition of the White Australia policy, the virulent racism that underlay that policy remains just below the surface of daily life.

Our overweening beliefs in the superiority of white cultures over all others has been a clear driver of the willingness of even much of the Left to willingly swallow the racist gibberish that emanates constantly from that turgid sinkhole of racialism that is the US.

Our utter infantile inability to untie the apron strings that have tied us to the rapidly declining US empire suggests a failure of us ever reaching maturity.

Asia is the centre of world development in the 21st century and if we don’t get on board soon, we will remain a lick-spittle remnant of a past Western empire that is an object of curiosity and pity to the dynamic new world!

Voltaire got it right when he wrote that, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”. The absurdity in this case is to believe that legitimate criticism of Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people constitutes antisemitism. Then you would also have to believe that any criticism of the policies of any country means that you are by definition anti the people of that country.

Yet, no reasonable person believes that, as it would make free communication impossible. However, Zionists, unlike any other political group, are entitled to make such a claim about Israel, and the legal system utterly fails to see the idiotic exceptionalism of that claim.

We are led to believe that Zionists, under this absurd interpretation of words, have this right above every other political group.

Yet it is this absurd claim they make that, according to them, renders them exempt from international law that applies to everyone else regarding atrocities they commit. Whatever legal gymnastics that the Zionists engage in local courts around the world, it will not save them from the consequences of their criminality. At least the International Court of Justice has avoided the absurdities of local jurisdictions!

Editor’s note: The actual quote by Voltaire “Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde, est en droit de vous rendre injuste“, translates into English as “Certainly, whoever has the right to make you absurd has the right to make you unjust”.

One is inclined to think of the duke’s lines in the Merchant of Venice when reflecting on the common Western prejudice and racism in the comments of Van Jones. “I am sorry for thee: thou art come to answer. A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch. Uncapable of pity, void and empty. From any dram of mercy.”

Seems to sum up the views of US elites pretty succinctly!

It is important to remember that Benjamin Netanyahu did not come from nowhere. He is a born and bred Israeli, a sabra, and is merely the latest in a long line of ethnic cleansers who have been running Palestine since its partition in 1947. The history of Israel is one of continuous dispossession and murder.

“Something has to change so everything can go on as before.” This quote, from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, is exactly what this article is warning against.

Netanyahu might make an easy target for change. He is proudly visible, unrepentant and boastful. But the whitewash is fading. The monopoly on the narrative is slipping. The truth is available to anyone curious enough to look. Netanyahu didn’t “do” Gaza. Israel did.

David Spratt notes that the recent National Climate Risk Assessment underestimates projected sea-level rise. It suggests a one-metre rise by the end of the century, but evidence now suggests, because of tipping points, it is likely to be two metres and possibly much more. Just looking at the last Interglacial, for instance, when temperatures were a mere 1°C above pre-industrial levels, sea levels were 5-10 metres above those of today.

The State of the Cryosphere report spells out why even 2°C warming is too high. “2°C will result in extensive, potentially rapid, irreversible sea-level rise from Earth’s ice sheets … 2°C is far too high to prevent extensive sea ice loss at both poles, with severe feedbacks to global weather and climate.” Such feedbacks include dark oceans absorbing heat rather than reflecting it back into space as ice does, causing other ice sheets such as Greenland to melt more rapidly. The report suggests between 12–20 metres sea-level rise if 2°C becomes the new constant Earth temperature.

This is terrifying. Two metres would be bad enough, but 12-20 metres? So many major cities and food-producing deltas would be underwater. So many people would be displaced with nowhere to go.

The only solution is to limit warming to 1.5°C.

Simon Tatz refers to the Bali bombings, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse, all terrible things, and all completely irrelevant to this topic.

What is not irrelevant, as I mentioned and which he and many others choose to ignore, is the long list of extremely hateful, racist and deplorable statements by members of the Israeli Government, both current and previous.

So, confected outrage, double standard or hypocrisy? Maybe all three.

He seems to imply I, and others, have no experience of prejudice, racism, etc. and have no right to comment. I have every right, as we all do.

He should refrain from making assumptions about people and their lives, as I can guarantee him he will have egg on his face.

Racism and prejudice are to be condemned, whoever promotes it and whoever receives it, a concept Tatz appears not to adhere to.

Last night (12 October), on SBS World News they showed Prime Minister Netanyahu visiting a refitted facility for the returned hostages after their horrendous ordeal at the hands of the Hamas terrorists.

I could not help but note the contrast between that hospital and the bombed and under-supplied, under-staffed sometimes tent hospitals in Gaza seen on the nightly news and wonder how can this ever end.

It is only one tit-for-tat atrocity from starting it all again.

Singapore has been getting it right for many decades now, standing up for yourself, not unnecessarily making enemies and dealing with all on an equal basis.

If we could only stop learning our lessons on power, diplomacy and geopolitics from the dying empire and get with the rising one!

Security for Australia within Asia is really quite simple. Join BRICS and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

We already have membership in the New Development Bank and the Reserve Contingent Arrangement. This will integrate us into the region which will dominate the world this century. Membership of all these guarantees our security in the region.

Then all we have to do is navigate the US covert and criminal efforts, as in 1975 with Gough, to overturn our government and bring us back into being another bitch for the US!

Graeme Stewart is absolutely right on shark nets. My long career as an environmentalist has convinced me that sharks don’t want to eat you. But attacks do happen – with terrifying results.

It concerns me that nets are a blunt instrument that catches other sea creatures as well as sharks. But it also concerns me that people are killed by sharks. The current orchestrated campaign against nets claims they don’t work and even that nets attract sharks. Professor Stewart has cut through this debate with an excellent summary of the scientific evidence – which clearly shows that shark nets save lives.

Nine young swimmers were mauled to death in the 10 years before Sydney beaches were netted – and none in the following 88 years. Similar findings have been reported from South Africa – which shares our gruesome history of shark attacks. If people want to put the protection of sea creatures ahead of our safety, that’s their right. But it’s not OK to pretend that science is on their side. It clearly isn’t!

Jerry Cartwright thinks pro-terrorist graffiti is a trivial matter. Imagine if, after the Bali bombings, similar messages supporting those who killed many Australians were sprayed around our cities?

Perhaps Cartwright would find it confected outrage if messages supporting domestic violence and killing of women were painted near his home, or support for child sexual abuse. Would that elicit “confected outrage” too?

Here’s a truth bomb – it’s only people who will never experience antisemitism, Islamophobia or racism who dismiss vilification as trivial.

Militantly begging the authorities to “do something” about the widespread mess the species finds itself in is as ineffective as scapegoating them or happily acquiescing to the blue-sky tokenism they always offer up as “solutions”.

This mutually convenient dance between the governors and the governed has been with us since the beginnings of our so-called sapience and shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

Let us be clear, we will not solve the problems of our world with the same psychology that created them.

An evolved and radical adaptation of our thinking is urgently needed, but highly unlikely…

In his article on the possibility of Teals getting Senate seats, Bob McMullan crunches only one of the two lots of vital numbers – votes. He ignores or doesn’t appreciate the three-step process of getting an MP elected.

First, local people decide they want a better MP than the one they’ve got. They form a group to discuss what sort of person this might be and what they want of them. Second, they advertise for a candidate and choose whom they think will meet their aspirations. Third, they recruit as many volunteers as they can to get the message out. There is a possible, not a definite fourth step (which critics who call Community Independents the puppets of Simon Holmes à Court choose to ignore): Climate 200 choose to support a candidate, or not, based on their own assessment of a candidate’s chance of success.

McMullan ignores all those volunteers, from those forming the initial planning group to the thousands who would be needed to get the word out – and put their money in. Because, also ignored, although Climate 200’s funding is generous, unfortunately much more than their contribution is needed in today’s political climate. Good luck, but …

Sawsan Madina is dubious about the peace plan for Gaza. But at least for now, the daily carnage stops. The interview on ABC’s 7.30 on Thursday 9 October with the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel showed that she cannot see that Israel’s actions over the last 70 years of continuing Nakba might be partly responsible for the rise of Hamas as a group using terror tactics. Haskel simply does not support there being a state of Palestine and criticised all those who do.

The UN has been totally sidelined, with Trump able to say recently that it was impotent, even though he knew that the US had rendered it so by vetoing any Security Council action. So he emerges as the peacemaker, notwithstanding the US financial, armaments and diplomatic support for Israel.

Because any peacekeeping forces from places such as Indonesia will take time to move in, Hamas will have to have at least an interim continuing role in governing southwest Palestine. Haskel is understandably very upset about 7 October 2023, but she must see that she and others in her government should now be prepared to move beyond that if peace is to be given another chance.

As they say, history is written by the victors. If it were a Palestinian writing, rather than Stuart Rees, they would have started the story of deceit a couple of years earlier. It gets a bit repetitive because he leaves no stone unturned, but it’s still worth reading Peter Shambrook’s Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939 which details how Britain promised the Arabs an independent state, including Palestine, after the war, in exchange for an Arab alliance with Britain against the Ottomans in World War I. Remember … this came “before” the Balfour Declaration.

It’s also worth noting that Britain was not only a passive observer of the actions of pre-Israel Jewish terrorist gangs against Palestinians, it was a victim of those gangs and in the end withdrew, leaving Palestinians to their fate.

Given the anti-Arab history since then and the British role in it, while the Israelis might welcome Britain these days, it’s hard to see the Palestinians doing so. If the Palestinians do accept Tony Blair’s proposed involvement, we must recognise what a bitter pill they will be swallowing to do so.

The US loves to lecture the world on the indispensability of its political system which supposedly encapsulates freedom and democracy. That system is deliberately designed to be extraordinarily vulnerable to manipulation by their wealthy elites.

Two hundred years of efforts to prevent a high standard of public education, to enable the control of the “bewildered herd” as those elites describe the people, has rendered the US more susceptible than any other country to irrational fears and created panics. The efforts of the Orange Donald are simply a part of that 200 years of social manipulation.

McCarthyism was just another example of those detestable and shabby efforts in what those same conservatives like to describe as the “indispensable country”. So is the Donald. As this truly dysfunctional empire dies, it seems unlikely that an utterly compromised and dishonest Supreme Court will save anything that even begins to look like free speech.

It seems US indispensability is only displayed as an example of how not to be an exemplar to the world!

An incisive analysis of the fraudulent use of the idea of balance to avoid addressing the herd of elephants in the room.

Just as with the Nazis in Warsaw, the current unquestionable genocide in Gaza by Israel is incapable of defence as international law has spoken with clarity and certainty.

One would have thought that a journalists association would understand that. Apparently not!!

As an older woman, Misha’s story really hit home. The older women facing retirement today with little or no super are the same women who gave up their own lives and careers to raise families, care for others and hold communities together.

Women constitute the highest percentage of carers, they always have. Their sacrifices made life easier for everyone else, particularly men. They’re now being left behind.

We need workplaces that support younger women with children now, fairer pay and super for all and affordable housing for older women. Most of all, we need to value care — past and present — as real work that deserves security, dignity and respect.

Julian Cribb mentions a number of megacities, including New Delhi. I visited the city in 1969 and found it a pleasant place in contrast to various poverty-ravaged cities within the country, most notably Calcutta, now Kolkata. There, half a million slept on the streets at night, often with only a dirty newspaper for a pillow. In contrast, New Delhi was free of the chaos that bedevilled other cities in India.

Back then, 56 years ago, New Delhi’s population was 3,381,000 people, less than a tenth of what it is today, namely, 35 million. It is anticipated to be 39 million within five years. Are they completely mad?

According to the Times of India: “Pollution levels in Delhi, especially in winter, reach dangerously high levels, turning its air toxic and covering its rivers in foam. This season’s familiar sight — a thick haze that blankets the city and thick layers of white, foamy scum floating on the Yamuna River — has become a grim reminder of the city’s environmental decline…Delhi’s air pollution is among the most hazardous in the world…”

It’s not just numbers of people, of course, but such problems would be easier to solve were there fewer people living there.

Someone painted “God bless Hamas” on a billboard, and all the usual suspects were screaming from the rooftops and tearing their hair out, calling in the federal police (who, I’m sure, have more important things to worry about).

If it had said God bless Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich or Netanyahu? All are either under sanction, convicted criminals or wanted for war crimes.

Do you think there would have been an outcry as we have seen over this? As happens with all graffiti, paint over it and forget it.

The best president the US never had, the late Adlai E. Stevenson II, offered one of the best descriptions of journalism: “An editor is a someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.”

It appears that our political leaders have lost their moral compass – if they ever possessed one.

They hide their moral vacuity behind empty posturing around a slogan (antisemitism) that has been so misused by the Zionists they appear to love, that it no longer has any meaning or content.

These moral midgets will be remembered by history, but not in the way they hope!

When watching current political cowardice, one is powerfully reminded of George Orwell and his “memory hole”.

This is the place for confining events that are not helpful to those in power as they seek to convince the populace that everything is fine.

Current Western leaders have become masters at consigning Israeli depravity to that memory hole to convince themselves that they retain some kind of moral legitimacy.

The bulk of us just don’t buy it!

I don’t recall in my lifetime — and that is 80 years — another period when our so-called democracies in the West have demonstrated such a disconnect between the people and our alleged leaders.

Billions of decent people around the planet have demonstrated unequivocally that they do not believe the rancid criminals in Israel when the latter claim to be supposedly just defending themselves.

Yet our Western leaders appear to be utterly unaware of the abhorrence and detestation with which their support for genocide is viewed. They demonstrate, if it were ever necessary to say so, a craven subservience to the most disgusting regime of the century. Their moral cowardice is a betrayal of their citizens, who display the moral courage they utterly lack.

Today (7th October 2025), our prime minister stood in parliament and lamented the death of one dual Australian/Israeli citizen who died two years ago at an Israeli music festival.

He did not mention, nor it was ever mentioned in the last two years, a genocide that the state of Israel has been committing on the Palestinian people. Nor has the government or our prime minister mentioned the more than 67000 predominantly women and children who were killed in the Israeli-committed genocide (possibly some of them also Australian dual citizens).

Finally, Australia is complicit in this genocide, directly and indirectly any way you put it, but our establishment (government, media et al) still do not acknowledge it and try to suppress any opposing voice.

Further, Australia, and its successive governments, have abandoned its own citizens (women and children) who still rot in the refugee camps in Syria without any attempt to repatriate them or provide them consular assistance.

So the question needs to be asked, what is Australian citizenship worth? And who is more worthy of it? It seems that Australia has become an Orwellian Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some are more equal then others”.

Misha Schubert could be writing about me. I’m in my 50s and after two decades as a teacher, I gave up work to look after my parent. Out of necessity I had go on the carers pension. Now on $30,000 a year, I pay $2000 tax. Even on this low wage, I cannot claim a cent to alleviate the tax burden, not the modified shower seat, not the petrol nor the parking tickets for the three weekly hospital visits… nothing.

On a carers pension, I pay more tax than a property investor or gas corporation. As a school teacher I did the same. Any retired pensioner too, after years of paying tax while working, also gets lumped with a hefty tax burden each year. This is ludicrous. No pensioner, on such an incredibly low wage, should have to pay tax. Especially when property investors, mining & gas corporations offset their tax, and pay nothing.

Carers alleviate an enormous burden on government resources. We would rather our loved ones be healthy and, by extension, not be doing this job. But as we are, we need to be paid so that we, and those we care for, do not slip into poverty.

Yes, the inadequate aged pension and the shortage of affordable housing affects many older women.

A friend in her late 70s is renting an affordable flat from an organisation that informs her that this accommodation is temporary and she will soon be again on the move. She regularly visits the local Housing NSW office, where there is a constant turnover of clearly demoralised staff and many requests for duplicate documentation, especially for copies of her most recent bank statements.

When she produces one statement they ask for statements from her “other” banks, and she has to inform them, yet again, that she has only one bank account. She sees little point in this exercise, as she is told repeatedly that the waiting list for government housing is 10 years. That recently increased to 14 years. She expects to be dead by the time accommodation becomes available. “What is the point of Housing NSW?” she asks. Her GP suggests her symptoms might be due to “stress”. Exactly.

I wrote to the National Press Club chief executive Maurice Reilly to protest his decision to cancel the address scheduled for Chris Hedges to speak on the situation in Gaza for journalists. I read the NPC media statement on the matter published in P&I on 5 October. There I noted Reilly’s assertion that the decision to withdraw the invitation was made on the basis that (when) “more details of the address were made available we decided to pursue other speakers on the matter”.

I contacted Reilly and asked him to explain what that means. He referred me back to his media statement. Hedges was going to highlight the issue of the 278 Palestinian and foreign journalists targeted and murdered by the IDF in Gaza. I understand he wanted to point to the responsibility for journalists everywhere, including Australia, to speak up and oppose this horrific attack on journalism.

The NPC needs to explain what other speakers they have scheduled to speak on this important topic – and why they would look elsewhere if Hedges were available to present to the Press Club. Are they avoiding criticism from the Zionist lobby and/or the government by voluntarily initiating this cancellation?

This won’t appear before we enter the second anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. We can expect an explosion of anti-Hamas sentiment.

We can expect a seismic level of regurgitation of gruesome allegations of Hamas atrocities, some of which will be true but there is a growing body of evidence that much of what is routinely spewed by the plethora of Zionist spokespeople is simply lies. Mussolini would be envious of their success.

We need more well-researched, definitive, irrefutable, factual accounts such as Eugene Doyle’s work of what happened in order to base proper judgment. We have been bombarded with the statement that Hamas, in the 7 October attack, “killed 1200 people”.

It may well be correct that 1200 people died as a result of the Hamas attack – but evidence is mounting that a significant proportion of the deaths were the result of IDF acting under the “Hannibal Directive” to sacrifice its own people for propaganda advantage.

Truth in reporting is its own objective – but the repetition of this “Hamas killed 1200” has been adopted as a talisman by the media to protect it from lawfare from the Zionist industry.

This perversion must stop.

After reading Chris Hedges’ article in Pearls and Irritations, I was angry and disappointed with the National Press Club. Ready to write an angry letter. Then today I read the response from the NPC. I am now angry and disappointed with Hedges for misrepresenting the situation. I feel like Donald Trump. I end up believing the last person who had my ear.

If this disagreement exists over the facts of a fairly straightforward situation — and both parties are considered honest and trustworthy — where does that leave me in deciding what to believe about more complicated and more important issues? How should I spend my energy? How should I vote? Where should I send my meagre donations and contributions?

And where does that leave the working population, who can barely keep their heads above water, much less try to get to the bottom of every news story before jumping on a particular bandwagon, or deciding no bandwagon is better than the wrong bandwagon?