War is the greatest of all crimes; and yet there is no aggressor who does not colour his crime with the pretext of justice: Voltaire
John nails it again. I, too, was a lifelong member of the ALP but can no longer be a member of a party without a conscience!
I commend Kym Davey for making the case that Hamas should participate in future negotiations for a Palestine state, but what has been entirely absent from the discussion is, what state, where? Since 1948, the amount of land that Palestinians occupy has shrunk from 45% to less than 15% today, and Israel is determined to occupy and annex the rest.
As Craig Mokhiber, the former New York director for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has said: “The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
After 75 years of the Zionist project, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf to justify Israel’s apartheid regime and that the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards fundamental rights and provides equality for all of its citizens – Palestinians, Jews and Christians alike.
Everything John Menadue writes of the genocide in Gaza is true. I would add only a couple of things.
First, as 7 October 2023 didn’t come out of nowhere, neither did the Nakba. In 1948, Israel grew out of several terrorist organisations and its early prime ministers came from within those organisations, ie they were terrorists.
I couldn’t find a quote I remembered from Moshe Dayan on a TV show to the effect “Israel was taken at the end of a gun and will be kept the same way” but, in searching, found three others from him showing the original intention to clear Palestine of Palestinians.
1. “We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house.” (1956)
2. “There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. (1969)”
3. “[his] vision: “a new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan [river] to the Suez Canal.”(1973)
Second, anyone surprised by 7 October wasn’t paying attention or chose to ignore what they saw.
Re John Menadue’s criticism of the media in his article on the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza…
Since 1999 I wrote letters to and was regularly published in The Age. Those letters included some about Israel going back over the years. That changed on 7 October 2023. Initially, letters on the nascent days of Israel’s genocide went unpublished. All reporting was biased in favour of Israel and actively against Palestine.
As time has gone on, it became impossible to ignore what was happening and reports filtered through and letters appeared. As an avid reader and writer of Letters to the Editor, I was furious at the “balance” in the letters. Much like climate change, errors of fact were published supporting those in the wrong. I’d half given up on The Age after Peter Hartcher’s red-ink anti-China series. Giving up was complete with the abysmal reporting on Israel when many other sources showed what was really happening.
I rarely write to The Age now, and get published even less. Probably accounted for by my telling them in no uncertain terms what I thought of them publishing patently false content from readers. I’d have preferred they stopped publishing falsehoods. But c’est la vie.
By all means, criticise the ABC for its low-quality journalism. There are exceptions, but it’s never been the same since the Liberals got their hands on the ABC board.
However, we have to remember that our traditional, legacy media are no better. And not only on China. They all take their news with an American bias, and sometimes a UK bias. It is also US and Euro-centric. Our knowledge of countries outside those blocks is all but non-existent if we haven’t been dragged into a war there.
Alternative and new media does so much better. But the problem is it is so fragmented. I’ve got my go-to publications and then I hear others talking of what they learned elsewhere. There are not enough hours in the day …
For clarity’s sake, I do not include Sky News. It is both new and alternative… but news, it is not. It’s not journalism either, not even “bad” journalism. Yet that’s what much of rural Australia gets as an excuse for news. No wonder this country is dumbing down in many respects.
Some of our more devoted Anglophiles have made substantial careers in Australia out of taking the British Empire’s view of the rest of the world as threatening to the empire.
That view was adopted by the new American empire which succeeded the collapse of the British in the early part of the last century. Most of these Anglophiles were attracted to the Conservative and often racist side of Australian politics.
Paul Dibb fitted comfortably into this 18th century mould when associated with Beazley, who, even though in the ALP, shared the attachment to much of the US and Anglocentric world view.
Dibb’s preferences also fitted neatly with the desire of the US to control the rest of the world and to contain any country that might be able to escape that control. Thus began the Australian obsession with China. Fortunately more rational voices in recent times have begun the process of bringing common sense and reality to the West’s unhealthy China obsession.
Richard Marles, on the other hand, without the intellectual heft, could be seen as the continuation of the infection of our political class by the United States Study Centre which has always been a propaganda organ of US policy! An excellent article by Mike!
Re Paul Heywood-Smith’s article: US House of Representatives speaker Mike Johnson has just visited Northwest Palestine and declared that it should be called Judea and Samaria.
If we follow the current state of Israel’s logic based on ancient history, then Samaria belongs to the Samaritans, not to the Jewish state of Israel. Judaism stems from when Eli in the 11th century BC led a split in the people of the man Israel aka Jacob, leaving the Samaritans in Samaria. The Samaritans were not deported to Babylon by the Assyrians, unlike the Jewish people.
What would be Johnson’s reaction if a Palestinian turned up in his home state of Louisiana and declared henceforth it would be known as the land of the Choctaws, Coushatta, Chitimacha and Tunica-Biloxi, and its government handed to them? Bear in mind that that the French only seized it in 1682, so the European claim is far more recent than the current Jewish state of Israel’s claim to Samaria, and Judea, backed by Johnson.
The US claim to Louisiana dates from its purchase in 1803. Further, would Johnson back a claim by the Nacotchtank tribe to rename Washington DC, and take over its government?
Excellent article by Professor Henry Reynolds. Australians are subject to massive “antisemitism hysteria”.
Antisemitism occurs in two equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish antisemitism and anti-Arab antisemitism (including Islamophobia) but these three key terms (and indeed about 80 pertinent terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism”.
Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicates that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 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.
However, in Australia (as well as the US and UK), this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive, Zionist-run and hysterical “antisemitism” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia and in our universities in particular.
Anti-racist, anti-apartheid and anti-Zionist Jews such as myself and the wonderful Jewish Council of Australia are not just vilified by Zionists, but threatened by this Zionist McCarthyism. However, my repeated complaints to media and MPs are ignored.
What the court system did was not legalise the march but słow the steady march towards a police state.
Any attempt by the NSW premier to change that, by giving the police even more power, will bring us one step closer to a Trump-style dictatorship.
I can’t think of anything better than a reduction in the working week and an associated Universal Basic Income. People are working much too hard and there are too few people left to care for children, the elderly and the ill. It would be nice to have a world where children are brought up largely by their parents (doesn’t have to be just the mother beyond the breast-feeding stage) and not shoved into before school care at 7.30m and collected at 6pm and then out-of-school-hours care for the entire school holidays.
It would be nice to have elderly parents (who are mobile and not demented) live close by or under the one roof and not shoved into a nursing home at the first opportunity. It would be nice if you were ill and dying to have family members there to hold your hand and not have them rush off to work.
More importantly than all this though, must be the recognition that the world will still turn without an ever-increasing number of humans. There are too many of us; we need to get back to hunter-gatherer numbers. If not that, then maybe a quarter of what we have now.
To all signatories to the open letter to Mr Albanese, thank you. Perhaps the combined weight of your importance and words will put an end to this country’s unforgivable reluctance to do the right and just thing. As an average Australian citizen I have also written to our prime minister and foreign minister advocating the return of the hostages, the recognition of Palestine, the cessation of all war/weapons-related trade with Israel to no avail.
To see Australia’s politicians hand wringing, waiting for when the moment is right is not only disgusting, it is ethically and morally wrong.
Palestinians do not have the luxury of a “right moment”, truly a first world concept. Unless all Australian politicians grow a backbone and speak out against the reality that is genocide in Gaza we are perpetuating a crime and not seeking a solution. I, as an Australian mother and grandmother, do not want the blood of babies and families on my hands.
At its most fundamental, the US problem with China is that it has chosen a different road to economic security which the US has finally realised is working better than their model. The US model is untrammelled capitalism with vast expenditures on the military to retain hegemony over the world.
The Chinese system is “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
In the last 40 years, the wage of the average industrial worker in China has risen 130 times (not 130%). In that same period, the wage of the average US industrial worker has risen about 4 times.
China has also focused laser-like on education of its population. Each year, China graduates 4.5 million STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. The US graduates about 400,000. China spends the same on education as the US spends on the military. While the US spends four times more on the miltary than they do on education. China spends four times as much on education as they do on the military.
Not hard to guess who is winning the economic competition in a science- and technology-driven world. That is what some policymakers in the US have finally figured out!
Governments in a West declining in importance in an emerging multipolar world seem to see, at some basic level, that their time in the sun is now ending. The problem is they have no idea of how to respond to that reality. So they are reduced to gesture politics and to acting as though nothing has changed at a geo-political level.
Australian Governments of the past couple of decades are a good illustration of that, actually dealing with the clearly identified problems that we face at political, economic and geo-political levels with gestures that will meet with daily media and community approvals but simply fail utterly to deal with the problems they are supposedly addressed to, or even worse compound those problems.
You get the feeling that they know what the real solutions are, but know that they will be unpopular and therefore do not have the political courage to engage upon those solutions.
What Ross refers to is one of those problems, which on past experience will remain unaddressed. Hence the party platforms are simply window dressing to a cavalcade of leaders committed to achieving “power” without purpose!!
It is encouraging for all Australians who truly value whatever remains of our civilisational values, after decades of pathetic abasement of those values before the otiose criminality of the US, to see a group of eminent retired diplomats show their despair at the failure of our leaders to actually honour those values.
I admire their desire to speak out against failure to confront Zionist pressure to support genocide!
Paddy demonstrates a realistic view of the self-promotion of spooks. They are the least accountable public organisations as they cover their activities with a cloak of “national security” more often than not to prevent the public from seeing the vast waste of public funds involved.
Burgess deals in generalisations and vaguely worded, but titillating, assertions without ever being required to produce for the public paying for this any substantive evidence. It is the position many public servants envy. Much public money and no accountability for its use or misuse.
The estimates of savings that he suggests ASIO achieves are equally based on deliberate exaggeration, fantasy and wishful thinking. His statements, rather then confirming his necessity, suggest the need for the reallocation of the billion dollars he consumes to more useful public services.
A really heartwarming celebration by Alison of the solidarity demonstrated on Sunday by a massive and truly heterogeneous multicultural event. It represents civilisation at its best, compassionate, concerned, prepared to stand up for the values our leaders so often promote, but so much less frequently demonstrate.
Minns demonstrated those leadership failures pretty clearly in his opposition to the expression of the people’s will.
His position on the genocide occurring in Gaza has brought shame on the political party whose membership simply doesn’t share his timidity and lack of moral leadership. Thank you Alison for a wonderful summary of a vital demonstration of the civilisation that the people strive for.
Irene Watson quotes Aime Cesaire: “A civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilisation” to introduce her study of South Australia’s algal bloom.
The causes she cites are of pollution: carbon building in the atmosphere bringing increased water temperatures, and nutrient-laden run-offs in the water feeding algal growth. Enabled through weak environmental legislation which, as she says, is always subservient to economic interests, the over-exploitation of our natural environment foretells its continuing decline: floods, droughts, heatwaves, famines, fish kills, extinctions, and more.
The problems we face in South Australia are just the local tip of a global iceberg. Unless and until we have governments prepared to face environmental reality, and address it with science-based legislation which is enforceable and enforced, our global decline will accelerate. We have the knowledge to stem this decline, but lack the governmental will to apply that knowledge to the detriment of short-term economic interests.
Aime Cesaire’s words could be updated: A civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is doomed.
It is interesting that most Australian anti-genocide commentators, who have recently written about the shift in Western countries such as France, Canada and the UK to recognise Palestine, and urge Australia to follow suit, do not seem to consider the views expressed by non-Western commentators located on the ground in the Middle East, who discuss such issues in depth in publications such as The Cradle, Middle East Eye, Palestine Chronicle and Mondoweiss, for example.
These commentators, who have in-depth experience and detailed knowledge of regional affairs, are very wary of the fine print in the proposals of Macron, and the arrogant Western assumption that their sudden shift to recognition, in whatever they propose, will carry greater influence than the recognition of 147 states since 1988, and will serve the interests of Israel as their predominant motive.
There is little consideration either, that politicians like Macron, Starmer and Carney are concerned about themselves, above all else.
From the perspective of the weak Albanese Government, they’re scared witless by both Trump and the powerful Australian right-wing Zionist lobby, and seek safety in snuggling up to Trump, the UK and the EU.
Has the author, Stewart Sweeney, not heard of Competitive Neutrality? It is a policy adopted by all levels of Australian Governments — in the late 1990s — that prohibits us using such competitive advantages as we — through our governments — may possess in competition with the private sector; it would be “unfair”.
I believe that it was the adoption of this policy — backed by I know not what — that caused local authorities to stop providing social housing and today explains the convoluted finances of the Housing Australia Future Fund and the National Restoration Fund.
We fund the Productivity Commission to oversee this policy and receive and investigate complaints; it is one of the PC’s four core activities and particular mention is made on the PC website of the use of funds obtained at special rates. Why we should fund anyone to protect third parties from us doing our very best to meet our needs is beyond comprehension.
Until this policy is totally rescinded and this core activity of the PC defunded, there will remain this major obstacle to our government “coming back” to being a significant economic force for the public good, the Commonwealth.
The Northern Territory, like the past to which it belongs, is indeed another country. The barbarity with which children are treated there — incarcerated in large numbers from as young as 10 years old, tortured with spit-hoods and solitary confinement — shames us all. The Gooda/White Royal Commission called for the closure of the Don Dale youth detention centre by 2018 – yet it remains open to this day. The abominations simply continue.
It is a waste of time for “do-gooders from the South” to importune the Territory authorities. I have previously written to all doctor and nurse federal MPs, begging them to find common cause to take action federally – no response.
Apparently, we are powerless to intervene in the affairs of the Territory. Bunkum. If the Territory had an Aboriginal government which was incarcerating and torturing white kids, we would have no difficulty finding a way to intervene.
Many readers of P&I have influence in high places; I implore them to get influencing.
The article “Tax, productivity growth and equality” is based on the false premises that taxes directly pay for federal government spending and that federal government deficits have to be repaid.
Modern Monetary Theory informs us that all federal government spending is new spending and that federal taxation merely takes money out of the economy. There is no debt to be paid back by anyone to any other party in respect of the federal government deficit.
The federal government deficit is simply the currency that the Australian Government has spent into the economy that hasn’t yet been taxed out of it. It’s our savings.
It is false to equate federal government debt with personal or business debt. The Australian Government is the issuer of the Australian dollar. As such, it can never run out of AUD and can always afford to purchase whatever is for sale in that currency.
By contrast, we, all other levels of government, businesses and institutions are currency users. Therefore, that debt does need to be repaid to the lenders. Nobody “lends” AUD to the Australian Government. As the currency issuer, it doesn’t need to borrow AUD.
Eighty years ago, the American bomber the Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Why?
The aerial bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of whom were civilians, and remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.
During World War II, Allied air forces dropped approximately 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany, much of the intense bombing towards the end of the war, when the Allies already knew they had won the war. Cities like Dresden and Hamburg were flattened, most of those killed were civilians. Why?
War is a dirty business. In Japan, there was the choice of invading the Japanese mainland and continuing the burning of Japanese cities, killing thousands more civilians, or giving the Japanese the ultimatum to surrender, which they wouldn’t. So, Truman decided to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki. Was Truman right ? That has never been settled. But the nuclear age had started.
Over Germany, there was not a lot of necessity to burn and bomb the German cities. The Allies were making progress through Germany from the West.
I’m happy to correct Richard on the points he raised.
The US Navy describes the Catalina flying boat as an “antique” in a wartime newsreel;
The life of the Catalina was deemed over at the outbreak of WWII. Veteran Philip Dulhunty and others described it to me as doomed to the scrapyard before it was saved.
For colour, which you criticise, I refer you to RAAF Catalina gunner Cyril Payne’s hilarious description of his friend Lenny on an early flight using the wrong shute to poo down with the result spraying all over the interior.
This is in the 2017 film I made for the men and their families called Into the South China Sea. The link is back on our site today
And there’s plenty more from the crewmen! I’m surprised at just how restrained I was in the article’s colour.
I have admired the many pieces Paul Heywood-Smith has written on Palestine. And also the contributions of many others. I have hoped that John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations wasn’t just an echo chamber, but that its powerful facts and writings were influencing general public opinion.
But, alas, now I think we are watching Benjamin Netanyahu and the government of Israel preparing for the Endloesung (final solution) for Gaza and the West Bank. Some say the world won’t allow it. Well, it has allowed the 60,000 deaths of the last 20 or so months in Palestine to occur with no firm action beyond unenforced legal dicta and much handwringing (allowing that up to the first two months after 7 October could be considered a proportionate response by Israel).
The key to resolution of the conflict has always been held by the US, Biden, then Trump. But also many presidents before. Trump isn’t going to safeguard Palestine. Sadly, I believe modern-day Palestine, with its ethnic and religious diversity, and talent, is going to pass into history, its people dispersed far and wide. And people like Biden, Trump, Albanese, Starmer, Carney, Merz, Macron, and many Arab leaders would have allowed it.
Felicity Deane’s article repeats the familiar daydream of “economic experts” – carbon-pricing best tackles “climate change”. Case by case, it’s true carbon-pricing schemes can “reduce emissions” or at least reduce the “growth rate”. Back at macro level, so what?
Sure, the US has genuinely reduced emissions – largely via coal-to-gas switching. The EU has had an ETS since 2005, but it doesn’t even cover half their emissions. Their emissions-reduction factors are coal-to-gas and more renewables. The power of the ETS itself is debatable.
Meanwhile, China gets an indulgent UN pass to burn far more coal than the rest of the world combined, producing a third of all global emissions. Which, as we know, keep on rising.
Reports of 60,000 Gaza violent deaths ignore (a) those blown to bits, (b) those buried under rubble, and (c) the hundreds of thousands dying from imposed deprivation and disease but uncounted because barely surviving, ill, exhausted and traumatised relatives did not risk being killed or injured and carry the dead bodies tens of kilometres in the heat to physically register their deaths with authorities.
However, expert epidemiologists published in the leading medical journal The Lancet expertly assessed 64,260 violent deaths after nine months, and by 25 April 2025 about 136,000 violent deaths, this indicative of 544,000 deaths from deprivation (expertly and ”conservatively” assuming four non-violent deaths per violent death), and 680,000 total deaths, this including 380,000 infants under five, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men.
Scared by the electoral consequences of images of skeletal children, the Australian Labor Government is adumbrating possible conditional recognition of Palestine, mere words that won’t stop the starving, killing and war criminal occupation. The Labor Government, at the very least, must demand of genocidal apartheid Israel: stop starving, traumatising and killing Australians and their thousands of Gaza relatives or face dire diplomatic and financial retribution.
The danger that comes with activating cells of influence that have hitherto remained in the background is that those cells now have to reveal themselves. Zionism worldwide, but seemingly especially within Europe and the Anglosphere, is facing this problem.
To counter growing outrage over Israeli actions in Palestine, a small minority has had to reveal just how much lobbying power it has within most, if not all, branches of government. They have forgotten that leading from behind is only possible by remaining behind, and by maintaining an at least deniable, if not invisible, existence. By stepping forward, they take the lead.
It remains to be seen if Australia will follow that lead. I hope not.
Australia should immediately commit to recognise Palestine as a sovereign and independent state on pre-1967 lines, as almost 150 of the 193 UN countries have already done.
Recognition of a Palestinian state is solely a bilateral issue between Australia and Palestine. Israel itself does not declare its own borders; indeed, it claims the territory of other states.
As Francesca Albanese reminds us, the international community stands atop a precipice. The status quo since 1967 has been disastrous. For the last 668 days, we have watched a live-streamed settler-colonial genocide. Nothing will change unless we heed the clarion call for change.
Robert Cockburn is quite correct about the role of the Catalina flying boat as Australia’s long-range bombers in the Pacific. However, and with respect, some of his descriptions are rather more colourful than factual.
They were not “saved from the scrapyard”, nor were they antiques.
Their wings were not canvas – only the control surfaces (ailerons and flaps) were bagged, the rest was conventional aluminium construction.
But their exploits he has well covered and I recommend strongly Sir Richard Kingsland’s autobiography Into the Midst of Things for much more authentic information. Sir Richard flew the very first Catalina from the US to Australi via Hawaii, landing in Hawaii with less than 30 minutes of fuel left. He was the one who hit the docks at Rabaul with mines. Twice he evacuated 59 people ahead of the Japanese advance. The second time, the Cat was so heavy, it would not fly out of ground effect so he had to fly Rabaul to Sydney at around 20-30 feet above the water the whole way.
I agree with Cockburn that theirs is a war history that should never be forgotten.
Please reintroduce readers’ comments to your invaluable articles. I gather you treat such an initiative as a pain in the butt, because, as a longstanding consumer of P&I, I’ve noted this feature has come and gone at various stages in the growth of P&I.
In my humble opinion it adds significantly to the strength of an article. You only have to look at any edition of The New York Times — where there can be many thousands of comments on an article — to see how it adds to the story, both in terms of reader engagement and often adding greater detail to an article.