Archives: Letters to the Editor

As a long-time reader and occasional contributor, I have valued Pearls and Irritations for its breadth, politics, policy, economy, climate, defence, religion, arts, Asia, Palestine-Israel, the United States and more. That diversity gave the publication a unique richness and influence, connecting Australia’s domestic challenges with international realities.

Since the change of editor in March, there has been a clear and signalled shift. The site has given greater space to foreign affairs, defence and the moral dimensions of global conflict, especially Gaza, AUKUS, and shifting power balances. These are important issues, but the narrowing has sometimes come at the cost of the domestic balance that once distinguished the publication.

My concern is not with the quality of the foreign affairs coverage, which is consistently strong, but with the risk that a retreat into one policy domain may limit Pearls and Irritations’ reach and influence. At a time when Australia faces converging pressures, housing stress, educational inequality, climate change and economic concentration, the public square needs outlets that keep breadth as well as depth.

I remain a committed reader and contributor, and I offer this observation in the hope that Pearls and Irritations continues to host wide-ranging conversations.

As I write, I hear the garbage truck on its weekly run and I think would I really be wanting to be ringing Canberra because my bin wasn’t emptied, because the trees on the street need pruning or about the pothole out the front? The answer is no.

Therefore I conclude that the biggest productivity gains, miles of duplicated red tape gone, would be to remove one level of government and logically that must be the state government.

But in my heart, I’m a South Australian and there is nothing I like better than beating a Victorian.

Excellent analysis by Paul Heywood-Smith. However, crucial to any Palestine-Israel “settlement” is irrevocable application to all Palestinians of all 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, notably (1) “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”, (2) “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind…”, and (3) “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person”.

Pre-war, Indigenous Palestinians represented 50% of the subjects of Israel. However the Occupied Palestinians (5.6 million pre-war, with only 4.9 million now alive) are excluded from all these human rights. Unlike the sorely oppressed Occupied Palestinians, the 2.1 million Israeli Palestinians can vote for the government ruling them, albeit for vetted candidates, but are subject to 65 race-based discriminatory laws. Seven million exiled Palestinians cannot live in the country continuously inhabited by their forebears in an important 4000-year civilisation.

The Israel-Palestine “conflict” can be ended immediately by making Zionist Israel grant all Palestinians all their human rights under threat of draconian global sanctions like those that eventually freed South Africa from evil apartheid – but genocidally racist apartheid Israel simply won’t. Global inaction is complicity.

Fiona Colin is absolutely correct in identifying “deliberate, concerted denial” as one of the gravest threats to humanity.

After more than quarter of a century of research into the science underlying the human predicament, I have concluded that, of the 10 catastrophic threats to humanity, misinformation is the most dangerous. More so than climate, nuclear bombs or famine, because it precludes action on any of the threats.

A species that cannot face the truth, cannot survive the outcome of its own self-deception.

Further to Jack Waterford’s recent article regarding PwC’s atonement, it is worth reiterating the thoughts of the late US supreme court justice, Thurgood Marshall:

“The Ku Klux Klan hasn’t gone away. Its members have just stopped wearing the white robes and capirotes because the material became too expensive.”

Bruce Wolpe needs to catch up. Many Australians realised some time ago that Australia needs to distance ourselves from the US. The US has become unreliable and fickle. It is not just Paul Keating saying that we need to engage more with Asia. Take notice of the reader comments in mainstream papers plus in various podcast and you will see that that is exactly what is already happening.

One comment that is becoming more persistent is that Australia should revisit AUKUS with a view to considering an alternative. There is a strong view that AUKUS is not the direction that Australia should go to become more self-reliant and independent from the present policy of integration into the US defence forces.

This also means government being more transparent in defence matters unlike AUKUS, which was, and still is, totally opaque.

Perhaps it is time for Wolpe to catch up because the talk of changing the relationship with the US has been going on for some time. The country looks a bit different when you get out of the United States Studies Centre.

As the years pass, those who thought the rumours surrounding the Whitlam dismissal were most likely a bit paranoid are having to rethink.

Decades of US regime change and wars provide a devastating insight into their modus operandi and it ain’t pretty.

Tony Lawson’s piece invites new approaches to productivity challenges in the health sphere. I invite readers to view this news from China.

It certainly promises productivity gains, but there will be a need to discuss the ethical and other concerns that such an approach poses.

Excellent article by Dr Jeremy Webb. The recent Zionist murder in Gaza of journalist Anas al-Sharif and four of his colleagues has sparked outrage around the world. Thus the UN: “The secretary-general calls for an independent and impartial investigation into these latest killings. At least 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Journalists and media workers must be respected, they must be protected and they must be allowed to carry out their work freely.”

Likewise Free Palestine Melbourne (that helps organise huge Sunday Rallies for Gaza): “Killing journalists, nurses, and civilians will not erase the truth – it will expose their crimes to the world even faster. We demand the Australian media break its silence, abandon its complicity, and take moral responsibility to show the reality on the ground. We demand the Australian Government: Sanction Israel immediately. Cut all diplomatic, economic, and military ties with the terrorist regime. Join ICJ and ICC efforts to prosecute Israeli leaders”.

“Journalists killed per year per million of population” is now a shocking 64.5 for Gaza as compared in recent years to 0.5 (Syria), 0.3 (Afghanistan) and 0.01 (the world). Inaction is complicity. Silence is complicity.

What we need is reform of the way we report taxation. All the major projects in Australia have been financed by public money of one form or another and continue to be.

When there is a disaster like a bush fire, flood, drought etc we expect a prompt response in the form of rescues, handouts, fire-fighting equiptment, boats etc.

That has to be financed somehow.

The taxation debate is usually driven by those who can most afford to pay and benefit most from not paying a share. Like most economic debate, the interchanging of dollars and percentages is used to muddy the waters.

In an attempt to get elected and keep taxation low, sucessive governments have sold off infrastructure built with public money and that infrastructure has reached its use by date. Having benefitted from the profit, the private owners are looking for public money to upgrade and the government has now to find the taxes required to finance those upgrades. If we upgrade coal power stations, go nuclear or go to renewables, the government has to find the money. The debate is about who benefits the most and anything attached to mining benefits mining companies.

In all likelihood, the letter was not written by Russell but by Ralph Schoenman who dishonestly presented it as written by Russell. On this see Bryan Mabee’s book, Confessions of a Philosopher.

Thank you, Peter. I “stand with Mary”. I am old, I do not know/trust how to use any social media so I cannot contact her to give her my support. But you and Pearls and Irritations are enabling me to do that. Thank you, Pearls and Irritations as well.

Jeff Kildea admits to being “an outsider with no skin in the game”, yet nonetheless feels qualified to profess his criticism and solutions to the centuries old geopolitical and religious conflict in the Middle East.

The most important lesson I learned from my visits to the region (Israel and the occupied territories) was from a local who, in essence, said: you don’t live here, you don’t live with war, terrorism, threats every day, be it from right-wing settler extremists or Hamas terrorists. If you want to decide our future, then live here.

This was said by a left-voting Jewish person who owned a business with his Palestinian friend and colleague, a story unlikely to be reported on.

The only resolution is one determined by the Palestinian and Israeli people, as happened in Northern Ireland, not from those living peacefully a half a world away.

“One by one, Australia, Britain, France and Canada say they will recognise the Palestinian state in September. They are not being brave or moral. Their governments have been complicit in the genocide. But their leaders have enough sense not to go down in history with their names etched in eternal infamy.”

Ain’t that the truth?!

But aren’t these belated words their own type of infamy? Watching after their own backs rather than any genuine concern for Palestinians and Palestine. Only caring about genocide when it might hurt them at the polls. Those marching for Palestine have no reason to stop calling “Shame!”

Nothing will change in practical terms until these leaders stop their arms trade, including components. Penny Wong and her “non-lethal parts” would be laughable if not so sickening, both physically and morally. Only a full BDS regime against Israel will be effective. We did it for South Africa. Why not Palestine?

I agree with the author that recognition of Palestine “provides no tangible benefit to the people of Gaza”. But I do not agree that it is “wrong in principle”. I believe recognition acknowledges that the century-long Palestinian struggle is legitimate and puts a moral imperative before us to do more to bring about justice.

Israel declared itself a nation without specifying its borders and has been accepted as a nation by most other countries regardless. I see no “colonialist imposition” in recognising Palestine as a nation since that’s how Palestinians see themselves already. Of course, borders remain problematic and something to be settled. But without recognition that a nation exists, borders are irrelevant.

Prime Minister Albanese’s recognition of Palestine is an important step, but it has come far later than it should have. Albanese has long been on the record as supporting Palestinian rights, co-founding the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine in 1998 and acknowledging that peace depends on a two-state solution. Yet when he became prime minister, that conviction gave way to caution.

For many months of the Gaza war, as civilian deaths mounted and hospitals were destroyed, his government argued that the “right conditions” were not yet in place. Those conditions, tragically, never appeared. Instead, the world watched as children in Gaza began to suffer from hunger and disease under a blockade that prevented food and medicine from reaching them. Only when the humanitarian crisis became undeniable, and when global partners like France, Spain and Ireland had already acted, did Australia move.

Recognition of Palestine is consistent with Labor’s long-held ambition and is the right course. But, regrettably, it took such immense suffering to bring about this decision. Now that recognition has been announced, the government should use Australia’s voice to press for justice, humanitarian relief, and a genuine path to peace.

Julian Cribb rightly cites “Soaring populations which strain cities, their food and water supplies, to their limits” as a major challenge to our survival “that even good people choose to ignore”. Back in the 1970s, thanks largely to Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, people rightly saw overpopulation as a major environmental issue. Most of my contemporaries limited the number of children they had to two, or at least felt guilty about having a third. Then a combination of misplaced feminist rhetoric plus the Catholic Church conspired to discredit the movement, not helped by coercive birth control policies in India.

Now the global population has more than doubled to 8.2 billion and, as Cribb notes, we face rapidly rising temperatures, accelerating collapse of the Earth’s life-support systems, extinction of species, spreading deserts and ocean dead zones, and growing scarcities of water, forests, topsoil, fish and other life-sustaining resources.

Of course, rising consumption — a good thing in poorer countries and bad in wealthy ones — is as much to blame. Nevertheless, consumption and population are simply two sides of a rectangle, the area within being the impact on the Earth. Restraining both are critical to our remaining within resource limits.

We don’t need another highly-paid headline-grabing divisive envoy. What we need is to prosecute the media outlets, journalists and shock-jocks who are applying these labels in a racist way. If the race relations laws are not fit for purpose, then they need to be fixed and quickly.

Also there should be a penalty for blocking up the court system with expensive defence of frivoulous claims. I suspect they are tax-deductible, otherwise why go to the expense?

Here is an example of a real pathogen about which we definitely do know the origins. The pathogen is virulent and deadly as it has brought about death on a previously unimaginable scale throughout the 20th and now in the 21st centuries and across the planet.

The pathogen was first developed deliberately in political laboratories in the UK and the US early last century and was released to infect the world. The name for the pathogen was developed by its creators and became a by-word for its use as a weapon of war. Propaganda was the name and it has metastasized throughout country after country, aided and abetted by the infectious slime that festers in the dregs at the very bottom of the human gene pool and that is commonly known as the mainstream media.

Like the poverty-stricken sex workers in Medieval Europe who spread syphilis across the continent and beyond, the modern mainstream media has been even more successful at spreading the more deadly propaganda virus across the entire planet. They have produced unimaginable death and destruction without a hint of conscience or guilt. No effective vaccine has yet been developed to halt its destructive potential!

As Robert Graves put it, “Truth loving Persians do not dwell upon a trivial skirmish fought near Marathon. School children in France are not taught about the battle of Agincourt.”

The Black Hole of Calcutta is taught one way in the UK and another in India. When Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind, she was unaware that the South had been defeated. John Howard complained about the black armband of history that attempts to set the record straight about the modern history of Indigenous Australia. Popular history has become little more than a national hagiography. How far the popular history of the US departs from reality is placed under the microscope in Greg Grandin’s book America, America (Penguin 2025).

But when you read that, reflect that the history that most people have of their nation is really no different to that reflected in Grandin’s book.

In Julian Cribb’s well-annotated piece on the self-generated vortex Homo sapiens sits at the lip of, he attributes a laughing-out-loud quote to one of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.

It doesn’t matter if Einstein didn’t say it; it underlines humanities boundless pushing of the envelope. It summons a scenario of Mrs God asking God what he’s doing in the shed that has kept Him late for dinner the last five nights. He proudly described His creation of Earth, the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air and the creatures that walk upon the land. When he explains that He’ll be late again tomorrow night, because he’s creating mankind, She queries the wisdom of such a rash step. She’ll be apples, Love; I’ve built in a self-destruct mechanism.

And that’s about where we find ourselves as we sleepwalk into the 21st century.

According to the negative Nancies in the West, the author of this article should be in serious trouble for his criticisms of government in China.

Of course, that view has not been true for nearly 50 years as China encourages vigorous debate about directions and issues, so long as it is constructive. That truth, of course, can be ignored in the interest of promoting anti-China memes.

Cribbs describes a bleak future, a “loss in human cognitive ability”. We may well have reached a point “where our technology has outpaced our ability to comprehend what it delivers, let alone do anything purposeful to correct it”.

Science historian Naomi Oreskes writes that as early as the 1950s, scientists were warning about the dangers of human-made climate change. By the 1970s, the scientific community was highlighting the potential impacts of human activities on global temperatures. ExxonMobil scientists projected that fossil fuel emissions would lead to .02 degrees of global warming per decade, with a margin of error of 0.04 degrees. James Black, a senior Exxon scientist, informed the company that the “most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels”.

Our ability to act collectively on our dire climate position has been hampered by a deliberate cover-up, dis- and misinformation campaigns, waged and orchestrated by fossil fuel industries for more than half a century.

We have the knowledge and technological knowhow to turn things around, but our lack of urgent action stems in part from this deliberate, concerted and long-term strategy of denial.

Conservative Australian Governments have been purchased by the big largely overseas gas extractors and in the case of Labor have been, at least in recent years, scared witless of them. Unlike the Norwegians who have built the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world, by ensuring gas and oil companies pay for the resources they have extracted, Australia has allowed itself to be either bought or frightened into handing over the patrimony of the Australian people to rapacious multinational companies with hardly a whimper. Now there is a surprise!

As a 70-plus individual in rapid decline, I find believable and interesting that all this is happening at a time of comercialisation of the education system, with record school and university attendance, and a preoccupation with data collection.

I left school after year 11 and our large technical school barely had enough students to fill a year 12 mixed class. The class sizes would be envied today and only the “best” went on to university.

Now most go on to higher education and university and we have a shortage of tradies and truck-drivers. Taxi-drivers are completing university in their cabs and cleaners and takeaway food delivery people.are financing our universities. All the while, there is a failure to recognise that stockmarket forces and Robodebt are examples of a failed tecnology we can’t wait to embrace.

Chris Sidoti’s commentary on the much-belated and pitifully weak statement of intention to recognise the State of Palestine by the Albanese Government is, in the existing circumstances, restrained almost to the point of a fault.

Whacko-the diddle-oh for a baby step forward for Albanese and Wong, even though it contains restraints and limitations that make it only one step above tokenism.

Have they not noticed that as the international community becomes more restive, the Netanyahu and IDF activity has expanded into an orgy of both highly targeted and also random bastardly killing? We are getting into the area of hundreds of new murders daily.

Leave action sufficiently late, Albo and Penny, and there will be no Palestinians left to help, just to mourn. It will not return one innocent life crushed, one child left to live with horrific injuries and the after effects of starvation, monumentally inadequate medical support, genocidal action, or a family.

But pathetically limited as the Albo/Wong response is, it is at least a tiny step towards human decency. Which is way more than we see in the proclamations of Cash, Ley, Patterson, Leeser, Sharma, the Israeli ambassador and the miasma of Zionist lobby groups.

Anyone who’s studied philosophy would know that Zionism is a matter of policies intended to create and maintain a “Jewish” state (definition of “Jewish” is a rabbit hole); antisemitism is the hatred and fear of Jews for merely being Jews. Conflating Zionism with the Jewish people should be repudiated on all occasions – one of Zionism’s major policies is the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish people, which puts the lives of Jewish people on a level with the policy of ethnic cleansing.

I’m not Jewish myself, but some of my ancestors were — putting policies like ethnic cleansing on a level with my distant relatives in Krakow, ethnically cleansed during the 1940s, is frankly, antisemitic — and that’s the consequence of using the IHRA “working definition of antisemitism” (which conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism) as the Australian antisemitism envoy Segal is doing. So basically Segal is working from an antisemitic basis.

For almost two years, our government has watched the Palestine people bombed, crushed, torn, starved and shot, and it has moved our government to do the sum total of nothing. Footage coming out of Gaza from heroic journalists made clear that all this destruction was in the cause of a Greater Israel. The intent of the Israeli occupation was not hidden – it was crystal clear. We all knew that Israeli talk amounted to committing genocide on the Palestinians to steal resources, and expand into Syria and Lebanon.

Our government pontificates that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But tell me exactly how many mouths will that feed? How many of the dead will that bring back after two long years of your silence?

The Elders, Mary Robinson and Helen Clark, travelled to the Rafah Crossing this week to speak to the Red Crescent and the truck drivers turned back by Israel, to draw attention to the deliberate starvation of Gaza. That these elders can take meaningful action speaks volumes, when our government is impotent, waiting for others to act.

That such horrific cruelty moved our government to do nothing practical to save lives shows a failure of leadership.

Julian Cribb’s statement in his article, “Most poignant of all is the fact that parents, everywhere, seem content to ruin their children’s future for the sake of their own present comfort, convenience and luxury. Their claim to ‘love their children’ is a false narrative, contrived to exculpate their own childlike self-centredness” is one of the most powerful I’ve ever read.

As a school teacher, for more than 20 years, I’ve seen this exact sentiment play out in all its variations. Its consequences on the ground in the classroom never ceased to astonish me. I can’t tell you the amount of times I had to remind a parent what their parental responsibilities were – that they had a duty of care, and that children can’t just fend for themselves.

This is an area where our government refuses to look. They don’t want to offend parents; come election time, they are in the business of buying parental votes. But it’s become very clear to me, that there are oceans of parents out there who need reminding that their role not only has rights, but expansive responsibilities.

As the government’s 2035 emissions reduction target looms, Imogen Zethoven nominates the Great Barrier Reef as its litmus test.

With global warming at 1.5 degrees for 2024, ocean temperatures have become an existential threat to coral. The Reef may recover if action is taken urgently to reduce or remove its threats within the next few years, as outlined by the International Coral Reef Initiative. Underpinning this protection must be a substantial reduction of fossil fuel use, and the establishment of an independent authority overseeing legally enforceable national environmental standards.

If we — and many others — can take the urgent, major steps needed to stifle the fossil fuel sector’s demands for more and bigger projects then we might start towards lowering global temperatures quickly enough to save our reefs.

As Nick O’Malley observes: “Australia is almost uniquely vulnerable to climate change, and has more to gain than most nations by helping to accelerate the global decarbonisation effort rather than abandoning it.” If we set an ambitious, science-based 2035 target, and commit to its attainment, our coral could revive. If we fail, the coral will die, and a lifeless Barrier Reef would become the harbinger of a hothouse Earth.