Archives: Letters to the Editor

I’m writing to respond to the discussions surrounding Australia’s defense strategy, especially in light of Angus Houston’s comments in the Defence Strategic Review. While some argue that Australia faces minimal risk of a land invasion, we must consider historical lessons, particularly from World War II.

Japan’s decision not to invade Australia was a significant strategic error. Their resources were stretched, and focusing on Australia would have jeopardised their campaigns in Southeast Asia. Today, Australia’s enhanced military capabilities and strong alliances, particularly with the US, create formidable deterrents against potential aggressors.

However, we should contemplate unconventional threats, such as an invasion using aging cargo ships and China’s naval militia to facilitate the arrival of displaced refugees accompanied by armed insurgents. Intercepting such vessels before they reach our shores presents a serious challenge, especially given the moral dilemmas democracies face regarding humanitarian concerns.

Furthermore, reports of China conducting jungle warfare training in Brazil raise alarms about their strategic intentions. As we navigate these complexities, it is crucial to remain vigilant and prepared against both traditional and unconventional threats to ensure Australia’s security.

Yes, yes, antisemitism is an evil and must be eradicated. It has no place in a civil society. But at the same time it is not any greater evil than any other prejudice that besmirches our society.

For Jillian Segal to elevate antisemitism above all other evils like racism, Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination, which only those who have experienced can comprehend their widespread harm, is unbecoming.

In particular, it is unbecoming to associate antisemitism with criticism of the genocide perpetrated by the Netanyahu Government.

What is incomprehensible to most people is, knowing what the Jewish population has experienced during the Holocaust and before and beyond, that a government, the Netanyahu Government, a Jewish Government, can be responsible for what we are witnessing in Gaza.

There comes a time, there is a place and there are people who will, when what is unacceptable in civilised society, call out and demand a stop.

We are those people, this is the time and this is the place to say enough is enough.

All sentient, compassionate and justice-loving people can only hope that our prime minister will finally provide the same honour to the name Albanese as Francesca Albanese has done at enormous costs to herself and her family.

Courage can be infectious!

Fowler indeed did a wonderful job, as I have said in these pages in the past, but he also succeeds in evoking images of infantile cupidity and stupidity as so beautifully portrayed in the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.

“He is rather dunder-headed. Still distinctly, he’s a duck.” The Gondoliers. A perfect summary of the Dodgy Brothers character played by Scott Morrison.

This is a very informative and carefully thought-out article. The question of Chinese intentions is raised with respect to potential concerns of India and Bangladesh.

Those concerns can and will be dealt with by China as it deals with all such issues, by good-faith negotiations and through the five principles of peaceful co-existence that China has adopted in the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954.

These underlie China’s foreign policy generally.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. China has stuck pretty consistently to these principles despite constant provocations from the West.

Leonie has admirably summarised the facts that the Western media has been burying for the last 80 years.

Memory, as far as the persecution of the Palestinian people is concerned, is a very dangerous thing to possess. The Zionist cabal have spent that entire time erasing the memory of what they have been doing to the Palestinian people for that entire time. But truth in the end will out. as George Santayana so memorably wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In this case, the people who have been condemned to repeat their own appalling past have been condemned to repeat it every day for those last 80 years, and they remember it only too well!

I feel sure that most Pearls and Irritations readers are anti-war. P&I can make us more alert to insidious war propaganda and so better able to take a stand for peace and humankind’s survival.

Yet, P&I posted an article by Al-Jazeera’s Mat Nashed that dealt with the recent fighting in Suwayda, Syria, and the Israeli response.

When it comes to Syria, Al-Jazeera is basically a mouthpiece for the foreign policy of Qatar, whose royal family provided billions of dollars toward the “phony war” in Syria, as it’s described by Jeffrey Sachs.

Qatar is known for its links to the Muslim Brotherhood; Al-Jazeera was a platform for inciting sectarian hatred in Syria and for the fatwas of the late Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi who is said to have been the Brotherhood’s spiritual head.

On 23 July, Tony Zappia MP presented the concerns of Australia’s Druze community to federal parliament. He listed some of the barbaric attacks on Druze civilians in Suwayda.

The suffering and concerns of Syria’s Druze at the hands of regime militants who believe they have a God-given right to slaughter “heretics” is not going to be presented so sympathetically or sincerely by Al-Jazeera.

P&I has let its readers down.

It is difficult to disagree with Cynthia in her summary of the poison informing those who equate criticism of Israel with that much abused word, antisemitism. It is difficult for ordinary citizens of the world to grasp the depth and extent of the daily atrocities being carried out by the members of the “most moral army in the world”.

It is as difficult for them to comprehend the active participation in this daily barbarity by the mainstream media and their servile journalists and editors. In countries around the world, people have finally had enough and are massing in their millions to force their craven and complicit political leaders to search deep into the recesses of what passes for their minds to find a memory of whatever courage they might once have had.

Truly, this is what democracy in the Athenian tradition would teach. Go into the public square and teach their leaders that courage arises out of compassion for their fellows of whatever race, creed or religion. Yesterday’s Harbour Bridge march should teach them the wisdom of Voltaire when he wrote “Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”

Thank you, Hiba Farra. The Israeli Government warns against “rewarding Hamas”. What about “rewarding the perpetrators of 70 years of attempted ethnic cleansing”?

Rather than continue with the barbarism of ancient Middle Eastern religious disputes with their “chosen people” idiocies and holy texts that call for women to be killed for burning incense and fathers being told to kill their kiddies to prove their blind obedience to a jealous, homophobic God with anger management problems, it’s time to adopt the social values that are accepted around the world many thousands of years later.

Is it possible for the humane elements of today’s Judaism, Christianity and Islam to get together to annotate and contextualise their holy texts so that their texts cannot be used to justify committing atrocities in 2025?

A “one-state solution” to living in harmony would show that the Abrahamic religions still have merit.

In the conclusion of his profoundly significant article, Hiba Farra, noted that “The Australian Government has a choice: stand with justice, or stand in the way.”

The Albanese Government has never been interested in matters of justice on any matters, domestic or external. Its focus is entirely on “policy” and associated funding which serves its careerist interests, nothing else.

It has long since made a choice. It now seeks to protect that choice in its own interests by all means available in relation to evading accountability for complicity in genocide.

I am so tired of the Zionists claiming antisemitism where if they really looked at the term would realise what they are committing is antisemitic. It usually refers to the peoples of the Levant and includes Palestinians, as well as the ancestors of Noah.

Semitic people or Semites is a term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group associated with people of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, including Ethiopia.

Trump’s real estate dealmaker mate Witkoff completed his GHF-curated “no famine here” tour of Gaza last week, while NSW’s Chris Minns whinged about the the sheer inconvenience of Sunday’s pro-Palestine demo on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Meanwhile, Albo and Penny Wong are guardedly preparing to recognise Palestinian statehood, given the “state” is one of appalling human horror, rubble and expended American supplied ordinance. Hiba Farra eloquently and heart breakingly makes the point from the perspective of his own family’s experience.

Come on Albo, show us something resembling visibilty, courage and leadership on Palestine. By the same token, Penny could display a lot less verbal condescension and dissemblement to the people and a lot more honesty, clarity and action.

Is the tide turning or is this yet another example of political opportunism… wedge the other party?

We need to ask ourselves this question before we vote in a system where PR election promises are deliberately vague to limit criticism when they are not delivered.

My question has always been “why two bombs?” Even if the bomb had been the clincher, surely the evidence from one city should have been enough for the Japanese high command?

Was it because some in the US wanted to try both a uranium and a plutonium bomb, and here was the opportunity?

When you consider the number of Holocaust survivors still alive, what comes to mind is the feelings the Holocaust generates amongst those who didn’t directly experience the genocide and what actions the Holocaust generate and justifies.

Now add the time long ago when God promised a “homeland”.

Consider how many years of retaliation by Palestinian victims and survivors the world will suffer once the boot is on the other foot.

Even if Netanyahu’s grand plans succeeds, as history has shown, there are sufficient non-resident Palestinians scattered across the globe for these atrocities never to end.

Is another wave of Israeli refugees too horrific to contemplate?

Some interesting material here, but spoiled by the author swallowing the canard about China’s Belt and Road initiative being “better described as a debt trap” for countries taking part.

This suits the anti-China agenda of the US and others in the West, but is at odds with reality.

Any AI search will show how BRI has helped low-income nations in Africa, Southeast Asia and Central Asia build or upgrade roads, ports, rail links and power stations, helping accelerate economic activity, trade and connectivity.

Yes, there have been challenges, with for example some countries risking default, which critics call “debt-trap diplomacy”, but the evidence in most cases points to the impact of local mismanagement and global economic shocks, not the BRI concept itself.

Overall, BRI’s ability to finance critical infrastructure has been a great success in development terms. The fact that this provides some soft power reward to China seems to be the real reason critics oppose it. Savvy journalists should be aware of this and not just repeat the debt-trap trope.

Mark Diesendorf’s article The principal barrier to a rapid energy transition makes for sobering reading. With clear calculations, he shows that unless we significantly curb the growth of global energy consumption, renewables won’t replace fossil fuels fast enough to counter climate change. His solution? A steady-state economy based on reduced energy demand and planned degrowth.

The IEA says global energy intensity — energy used per unit of GDP — must fall 4% annually to reach net zero, double the 2010–2019 rate. But how do we get there?

In Pearls and Irritations (May), Diesendorf outlined five steps: demote GDP and promote universal public services; introduce a green jobs guarantee; apply modern monetary theory; develop policies that support sustainable goods and a circular economy; and significantly reduce energy use, especially in Global South manufacturing.

The biggest obstacle is our belief that economic growth is synonymous with progress and poverty reduction. While the pillars of the upcoming Economic Reform Roundtable have potential for a more sustainable future, talk of a steady-state economy is unlikely. But on a heating, finite planet, endless growth is not just unsustainable – it’s reckless.

Rather ironic for the British to send HMS Prince of Wales to project power into the South China Sea. That has been tried before in the 1940s, not too successfully.

Chris Young has helpfully reminded us of the splendid analysis of our climate crisis, Too Hot to Handle: The Scorching Reality of Australia’s Climate-Security Failure, published 15 months ago by the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. Presumably that analysis was too acute and its ramifications too compelling for the government to acknowledge publicly and respond to with a coherent set of policies.

But this sobering dose of reality is what the nation needs as panic sets in about the cost of shifting from fossil-fuel power generation to the transmission of clean energy. There’s no doubt that cost is daunting and increasing, but it needs to be seen against the price of delay and denial. The human and social cost of more frequent and ferocious floods, storms, fires and droughts far outweighs that of the energy transition. Soaring insurance fees are the canary in the coalmine.

It’s time our leaders wised the nation up about the disparity between the short-term pain of moving to clean energy and the debility we will suffer by not swallowing our medicine.

While the US war machine yet again loses more wars from afar, its tech industries continue to conquer the world, surreptitiously invade particularly the English-speaking world with their internet, movies, fads, maps and language etc.

The tech industries’ prime concern is that each advancement is built on those that went before and dare I say that there is another country that has been very good at that and continues to take the lead. This is one area where, for a relatively low cost (hackers do it all the time) with constant innovation, even the smallest of countries/people can be world leaders.

It has been a very big mistake to have outsourced all our technology innovation. In many ways, small government-sponsored innovation is better. Australia has proven in the past it is capable of innovation.

It is a very big mistake to lock ourselves into one brand of technology when another may well be the building block upon which the next leap forward is built.

I have been waiting in vain for something like a Four Corners investigative analysis of whether Israel is committing genocide in the Middle East.

No doubt the message has gone out from management, don’t ask such embarrassing questions – there are some things we don’t want to know.

Jennifer Goldie has highlighted one of the major security risks that we and other countries face from the consequences of our changing climate, bringing an immediacy to last year’s call from the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group. This risk of mass movement of people is also recognised in the UN’s 2025 Global Risks Report.

Currently, there are some 123,200,000 forcibly displaced people worldwide. This means 1 person in every 67 is displaced as the result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and more. Floods, droughts and rising sea levels are expected to increase the number of displaced people dramatically.

With our global population above eight billion and increasing by 70 million each year, this way of life is unsustainable in a world where rising seas and over-production are shrinking farmable land and where natural ecologies are being ever sacrificed for agricultural production.

There is speculation about no-growth economies, and renewable foods, and sustainable soil management. These could help, but seem unlikely to make substantial change to global sustainability in our immediate future.

As Goldie has noted, we may reach 2 degrees of warming in 10 years’ time. A global crisis may be imminent. We need moonshot ambition to transform.

“These evolving technologies have unprecedented capabilities to rapidly analyse huge volumes of information, often identifying unique new patterns.”

Why then are they not used to stop hackers and scammers attacking our everyday lives?

Why then aren’t they used to stop our children watching inappropriate material on the internet instead of passing ineffectual laws that will only serve to make lawyers rich and the courts full?

Are governments so scared of AI that they won’t use it for the good of society? What is the real story? What do they know? What aren’t they telling us?

Has the horse already bolted?

Bob Carr in his article suggests that Australia should follow the French in their stated plan to recognise Palestine in September. This ignores the reality that for Macron this is a combination of theatre and self-protection, not a serious proposal at all.

More than 140 nations already recognise Palestine, representing the vast majority of UN member states.

The fact that Macron has consulted closely with Mahmoud Abbas, the aged leader of the Palestinian Authority, an organisation which works closely with Israeli military forces against Palestinians in the West Bank, and an organisation which has no credibility among Palestinians in Gaza, raises the question of whether Macron’s proposal is designed to redefine “Palestine” by whittling it away to nothing.

It should be noted that France still supplies military support to the Netanyahu regime.

You don’t need a bulldust detector, Ross; a reality check would give the same result. Any economic modelling that doesn’t factor the impact of climate change is delusional. The almost seasonal floods and coral bleaching across tropical Queensland threaten the economic viability of that region’s tourism, agriculture, aquaculture and horticulture industries.

The South Australian algal bloom, now in its sixth month, has destroyed the commercial and recreational fisheries, along with the marine aquaculture industry of that state. Tasmanian salmon farms, along with the rest of the aquaculture sector is struggling with increasing water acidification and temperatures. On land, droughts and flooding rains threaten the viability of our agriculture, horticulture and viticulture sectors.

It’s more than bewildering that our thought processes have discounted the very thing that has brought us to this stage of our evolution, it’s downright dysfunctional. We are a direct product of the climatic stability of the Holocene. Without it our 21st century lifestyle doesn’t hold up and its economy collapses. Although, as far as the Canberra Roundtable is concerned, that probably won’t happen before the end of the current three-year cycle.

“The last quote was $30 billion for fast rail between Newcastle and Sydney.”

This is cheap for a rail link that would be used regularly and could be expanded, when you consider the cost of submarines and the fact that past Defence white elephants have never fired a shot in defence of Australia. That is, if they are ever delivered.

This figure would be cheap even if we don’t buy the latest from China for fear of them spying on our kangaroos and cows in the bush.

In 2013, Dutch environmental group Urgenda and 900 citizens sued their government to force stronger climate action. In 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled the government had a legal duty to cut emissions by at least 25% by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.

Since then, similar attempts in Australia — by eight children and two Torres Strait Elders — have failed. In both cases, judges said it was for governments, not courts, to act.

But the legal tide may be turning. The International Court of Justice recently issued only its fifth-ever unanimous advisory opinion, declaring that all nations have “an obligation to prevent climate change and redress damage” caused by emissions.

And just last week, the NSW Court of Appeal overturned approval for MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine expansion, ruling the project’s climate impacts — particularly “Scope 3 emissions” from burning exported coal — were not properly considered. While an appeal is likely, rulings like these, in Australia and abroad, are sending a clear message: governments and polluters must take climate impacts seriously. Courts may yet become a powerful lever in holding them to account.

The one point missing from this article is that Sussan Ley is a woman. A woman surrounded by old, white, male dinosaurs. As we saw when Julia Gillard was leader of the Labor Party, there was a lack of support for her, none of the old Union “one out, all out“ mentality.

Long after the unions had abandoned their “once they’re married, they should stay home and look after the kids“ position of the 1950s, the party allowed Tony Abbott to ambush her without the support they would have given even a prime minister from a different faction. Even so her government passed a significant amount of legislation.

Sussan Ley is in a more precarious position. I wish Ley success because Australia needs all the elected members to work for the good of the country and the world. May they not be an Opposition but constructive members of both Houses.

Gareth Evans, as usual, touches a nerve.

Universities often claim they are cancelling humanities courses to focus on programs that lead directly to employment. But this is misleading. Humanities enrich every kind of work. In some professions, they are not just relevant – they are essential.

One such profession is that of the civil celebrant. Celebrants must be skilled in public speaking and creative writing and possess a deep understanding of human nature. Their work draws on music, literature, poetry, story creation, storytelling, choreography, and symbolism – all core components of the humanities.

Ceremonies are fundamental to human life. For them to be psychologically effective, they must be shaped with understanding and creativity. When these skills are absent, society is diminished – both in its public rituals and its most personal moments.

Matt Kean’s UN climate-guru Simon Stiell is swanning around Australia again. Claiming his “blueprint” can unleash “colossal” rewards to “protect” workers. They and Jack Waterford badger Sussan Ley. Embrace the “science” of “net zero” or else.

Yet all the graphs confirm that population, GDP, consumption, emissions, CO2 levels, and land/sea temperatures are all growing. That the emissions of this perpetual-growth can miraculously “net” to zero is vanity not science – no friend of workers or equality. No brake on Australia’s perpetual war-on-the-environment.

Despite easily-protected borders and untold energy-riches, Australia delivers extreme population pressures, very high energy prices, and severely unaffordable housing. Ley should offer the opposite, instead of going woke for “net zero”.

Sure, renewables are important. First, stop giving our energy away for nix. Second, see Stiell’s net zero for what it is: Chinese growth – smirking at Western degrowth.