Archives: Letters to the Editor

While not disagreeing with any of the five solutions to solving the housing crisis, I find it extraordinary that the issue of demand was not addressed. And yet, Australia has experienced significant demand in recent years because of very high population growth. About four-fifths has come from net overseas migration which even exceeded half a million in 2023.

The other aspect of demand, natural increase, is still over 100,000 but decreasing gradually. The maths is simple really; divide your total population growth by 2.5 (average number of people per dwelling) and that’s how many new homes you need that year. So, for every quarter million people, you need 100,000 new dwellings. And if your population growth is half a million, you need 200,000.

How many new homes were built in Australia in 2024? 177,000. That figure was not enough to meet new demand, let alone accumulated demand. So, by all means increase supply by the five means listed, but let’s work on demand as well, by reducing net overseas migration to at least a point where new housing matches new people. Better still, reduce it to a point where accumulated demand is also addressed.

Dear John, I want to thank you for your great piece in P&I. I, too, am horrified by Anthony Albanese’s silence and was confused until I found out that his lawyer Leibler is head of the Zionist Federation of Australia.

That itself should constitute an charge of undue influence and have him stand down. This is what I wrote. I was the first woman to sit on the National Asbestos Advisory Committee way back in the early 1980s.  Interestingly, I could not get it published in the MSM.

Take care.

I never thought I would say this but the world needs another level of courts wielding an appropriate level of punishment. We need a court system that rules on the inappropriate use of significant words and labels.

In the case of the US, it would start with the misuse of the words united and democracy, two words that seldom apply to America. Other examples would be worldwide the misuse of the words antisemitism and holocaust.

I would seek a ruling on the use of Christianity and quotes from Old Testament in the same sentence.

In response to Geoff Taylor’s letter on nuclear energy and his argument that the spread of generation is limited, I feel one must remember Australia, for many decades, relied on centralised coal power. Personally, I feel nuclear is unjustified due to waste management and costs. However, I feel there needs to be some changes to accommodate our needs with renewable energy.

I feel the transmission network could be installed underground at a level that allows normal farming above. The costs are higher, but I feel with greater use, the costs would drop. The advantage is that bushfire is less of a threat to energy supply and maintenance might be lower. Then, solar farms can be adapted for agriculture by panels being elevated and using semi-transparent panels. Also, panels can be mounted vertically and spaced further apart so crop agriculture can co-locate.

One advantage of sustainable energy is that the generation (and co-located storage) is distributed, so the threat of terrorism or attack during conflict is minimised. Personally, I think there should be far more solar PV in cities and towns. There are many areas beside rooftops that can be utilised: Walls in tall buildings, solar farms along road and rail corridors etc.

Full credit to John Menadue for this article. I found another short one that helps explain the geopolitical history of the region. Its history is long and confusing and heavily bloodstained.

This article offers some context: Philip C Almond, ‘Was Jesus a Palestinian?’, The Conversation, 22 November 2024.

Alex Lo draws attention to the economic dilemma in which our region finds itself: trade imbalances with China and the belligerence of Beijing. The focus on trade growth presumes a growth in consumerism. However, he fails to mention the growth of environmental instability this, often superfluous, consumption is creating.

The three basic economic needs, food, clothing and shelter, become impossible goals in the region, or globally for that matter, as an overheated atmosphere drives a degree of climate change humanity hasn’t faced since the end of the last glaciation.

The balance of trade shuffling Lo calls for is only shifting the deck chairs. From the scientific forecasts and the impact of increasingly extreme weather events, it would appear we’ve already hit the iceberg. It’s now just a matter of keeping the ship afloat until we make safe harbour.

The safety of that harbour will depend on the goodwill of all those involved, including a Trumpian America verging on civil war. Profits don’t come into it; survival and sustainability will have to replace growth if we’re going to re-float humanity. China can play a major role in that, but that won’t be possible under its current China-first policy.

I found this article a rather timid response to the challenges we are facing. The reality is that irrespective of whether a school is public or private the same curriculum is taught, employing people with the same qualifications.

If people want to have choice for their children, then they can be given that choice. A transition program could be set up where all private schools are given the choice of being either completely private or being 100% publicly funded.

To make the transition we would need to explore overseas systems where there are publicly funded faith-based schools. Pinch the best ideas that reflect our values.

Taking such an approach would spell the end of a system where the public purse is used as a means of providing facilities that can then be used to justify their fees.

The writer refers to Zionist nazis. A term preferred by some is einsatzgruppen who have been, allegedly. stomping around Gaza and the West Bank, chanting “Blut und Boden”.

Not a nice thing to say about “the most moral army in the world”!

Yes, challenging the behaviour of a sovereign nation requires “courage plus a belief that protecting human life is more important than respect for state sovereignty”. But we also need to challenge the consequences of inter-generational trauma, particularly re the Holocaust, and the false history re the establishment of Israel.

Jewish people’s fears existed long before 7 October 2023, as shown by various Jewish institutions adopting security practices decades before society more generally. That was largely based on past fears, not current threats at the time.

Ironically, now the IHRA definition of antisemitism actively promotes blurring the distinction between the activities of a nation state and the ethnicity/religion of its citizens and supporters making Jewish people less rather than more safe since 7 October 2023.

We need to challenge that inherited fear and the promoted false history that Israel is “people for a land for a land without people”. We should not be protecting objectively over-reactive Jewish sensibilities at the cost of free speech about genocide in Palestine. And we need to challenge the “Holocaust guilt” that has given the violent establishment of Israel and this genocide a free ride.

Please don’t include images of the Pole Benjamin Mileikowsky (AKA Netanyahu) in your articles. The image of that person gives me the creeps.

The artifice, chicanery, deceit, dishonesty, falsehood, hypocrisy, artifice and double dealing of the Western empire that sees itself, as all past empires have, as “indispenseble”, reveals it as the most dispensable of all.

The boasting, hubris and braggadocio of the last few hundred years has hidden a culture devoid of an ethical sensibility and a moral compass. We have not only stood by as another genocide is carried out but have assisted it and condoned it. We deserve to suffer history’s condemnation and damnation!

I am writing to you to plead that the slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank be stopped. Please pity the children, save them and for God’s sake, don’t be afraid!

I am surprised that the UN now seems powerless to intervene. There must be a way that the UN can firstly get humanitarian aid into Gaza and support the distribution of this aid. As well, there needs to be an international force placed between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

As a senior Australian, I have seen many operations of the UN, but it only seems in the last few years that the UN has become powerless. It seems the US will not ratify many UN proposals and the issue is that now other countries (including Israel) are following the US lead.

Australia was one of the foremost leader countries after World War II when Doc Evatt assisted with a lot of the humanitarian legislation. I feel that Labor again could foment change, but in my opinion, Australia needs to step away from US dominance. My feeling is that there is a lot of support now for Australia to re-assert its independence.

It was Marx who said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce! Gaza is both, as the Zionists have been involved in perpetrating in Palestine for the last 80 years what the Nazis did to the Jews in Warsaw.

It started as tragedy and has morphed into farce, but with tragedy expanding exponentially as the Zionist nazis continue with their attempt to eliminate the entire population of Gaza. The West repeats their deliberate looking away from the persecution and slaughter of the Jews throughout the 1930s, with our deliberate looking away from the Zionist slaughter of the Palestinians.

It makes a flagrant mockery of the Western conceit that we are the moral exemplars to the world. In fact, we are detested by the vast bulk of humanity for our complicity in another Western colonialist atrocity heaped upon those who we, in our disgraceful racism, regard as our moral inferiors.

We are close to being regarded by that bulk of humanity as an empire and culture that has lost all rights to be regarded as civilised at all when we cannot only stand by, but participate in the butchery of tens of thousands of innocent children.

The Holocaust was, and is, a horrendous part of world history and the Jews carried a disproportionately high burden of the atrocities, but they weren’t the only people targeted.

I am not going to begin naming atrocities for fear of missing even one, and all should be called out.

Like all wars, atrocities were carried out by both sides and until we acknowledge all the atrocities in all the wars, history will continue to repeat itself as it is now in Gaza.

While defence is a major talking point in elections, while we train people to kill and put submarines ahead of homelessness, we won’t have any difficulty finding excuses for yet another holocaust, yet another killing, yet another big bomb, yet another tyrant to press the button.

As a home gardener, at present surrounded by muddy pools from last night’s driving rain, aware of others fleeing surging flood waters, I read Kari McKern’s call for us to “build the garden” with a stirring sense of recognition. Yes, it’s the gardeners who know life’s systems.

I find myself humming a tune from The Hymns of God’s Gardeners, ‘The Earth Forgives‘, words by Margaret Atwood set to music by Orville Stoeber.

Now I am going to search my shelves for The Year of the Flood, a book to read on this gloomy, wet day to remind myself . . .

Both the Liberal and National parties are in unsustainable energy policy positions. The Liberal leader labels the government’s policy “a reckless race to renewables”; the urgency of our shift to renewables is largely due to the Coalition’s decade-long denial and delay.

It remains to be seen whether the Liberals can see their way to a “mature debate” now that they are unencumbered by the anti-renewable Nationals members. The Nationals advocate more coal until nuclear fills the gap.

As John Quiggin points out, “the earliest possible start date for nuclear is after the 2028 election. This means plugging nuclear plants into the grid as coal-fired power stations retire and becomes virtually impossible”.

One nuclear power plant produces 1GW of electricity. To put this in perspective, the Clean Energy Council 2024 report found that “renewables overall accounted for nearly 40% of Australia’s total electricity supply in 2023 at 39.4%, while figures for generation capacity added were strong at 5.9 GW, up from 5 GW in 2022”.

Nuclear, whether privately or publicly funded, is not a serious proposition in an environment where renewables plus storage will provide most of our energy needs in the next decade.

Thank you Richard Bean. Yesterday the ABC lied by omission. Having told us that Israel was allowing food and medicine supplies into Gaza, they failed to tell us that only five trucks were allowed to enter. A totally meaningless token.

Yet the ABC made it look like Israel was actually doing something. Benjamin Netanyahu is treating the media and supine governments with contempt, and the West is just pathetic.

Universities are another victim of the failure of privatisation. Universities should be a place of higher learning and students should have to qualify to enter. If they successfully complete their degrees, they should be free.

I went to a technical school, a pathway to a trade or becoming a mother. Down the road was a high school which was better regarded and a pathway to university.

I became a tradie and built a wonderfull life from that base, but I was just a tradie working for some time in sewer treatment. How much lower than that can you get? Then we went through a phase where “everyone should go to uni”.

Then there was a phase when unis had to be self-funding/privatised. The value of a degree has been lost to the cost of a degree and we have a shortage of tradies and many unemployable people with degrees and large HECS debts.

We are now trying to modify the apprenticeship system to fast-track trade training to fix the tradie shortage and stop the capitalist style supply and demand tradie wage boom.

Does anyone actually learn ?

In Bob Douglas’ article, he reminds us of the 10 threats to human survival as listed by Julian Cribb in his 2023 book, How to fix a broken planet.

It is hard not to stave off despair when faced with such a long list, so I chose the three that are most likely to keep me awake at night. They are: climate change; a threat to the world’s food supply; and growth in the human population.

The question is: will we be able to feed everyone in the face of climate change? We have 8.2 billion people in the world, a figure that still grows by 70 million a year. The rate of sea level rise has doubled over 30 years to 4.5mm/yr in 2023. People in low-lying islands in the Pacific, such as Kiribati, are already experiencing salt-water incursions into their gardens, killing breadfruit and other trees that have sustained them.

Likewise in deltas such as the Mekong. Climate change will improve yields in some crops like wheat and rice and lower others such as maize, though changes to the seasons may lead to crop loss and famine. There is no room for complacency.

Democratic governments rule through popular consent. They can only expect to obtain that consent for tackling the climate crisis decisively if they demonstrate that their actions will be fair – a concept captured in Paris 2015 as “Just Transition”. The nature of that transition, as Peter Sainsbury notes, is more than simply finding new jobs for displaced workers, and will vary according to each democracy’s needs. These may encompass distributive justice, procedural justice, or restorative justice.

To make the progress we now need to secure our liveable environment, we must work together: the whole must become greater than the sum of its parts. We must see again the spirit of give and take; accepting that no-one gets all that they want. We must eschew machismo and brinkmanship, step back from “success” and “failure” in negotiations, restore mutual trust and goodwill. The underlying principle of the Just Transition must be a restoration of the primacy of the common good.

Australia incorporated reference to Just Transition in our Nationally Determined Contributions — the national climate action plans submitted to the UNFCC — in June 2022. We have publicly committed to make this transition. Now we must deliver it.

Minister Wong:

I refer you to the detailed and generously polite letter from Dr Sue Wareham, of the MAPW. In just a few days, the situation in Palestine has degraded, with the Netanyahu Zionists declaring planned new atrocities in its appalling rape and pillage of the whole of Palestine.

I note you have flaccidly traipsed along with other nations, waving a withered lettuce leaf of angst intended to satisfy the hopes of Australians for a decent humane response from this country.

Not good enough.

You are not stupid, and you were once the most trusted politician in Australia; yet you fail to deliver anything beyond contemptible platitudes where the most serious, urgent, positive action is so obviously required.

While you slept last night, Palestinians were being slaughtered at a rate of around 100/day. While you had your morning coffee, more than one Palestinian would have died (on average) and during your morning, 25 to 50 – including tiny children, months or even weeks old, were massacred like troublesome insects under the onslaught of a terrible enemy.

How can you justify failing to strive effectively to end this obscene denial of basic humanity?

Do you sleep well at night?

I lived through Gough! He was a Labor leader with a vision. We may not now agree with everything he achieved, but without his leadership we would not have Medicare. (Imagine us like Norway, where we actually owned all our resources!, but I digress.)

I feel Albo needs to grow a backbone. Stewart Sweeney, I feel, is correct to say that Labor needs to grab the bull by the horns and make some real changes. Personally, I feel as well as his list, they should add dental to Medicare. This could be added gradually, with an annual check-up added first, with basic maintenance work covered (fillings and dental hygiene).

My other wish is to get tax income from the multinationals: if nothing else, a small tax on money movements out of Australia (one reasonable idea from Parliament!) This would at least give Australia some income from multinational companies using dodgy tax minimisation techniques.

As far as housing goes, I remember public housing being about 18% of properties. One thing I worry for the future is the illusory notion of allowing developers to sell off rent-controlled housing after 10 years. The government should buy these houses!

By far my biggest concern with “the vanishing elders” is that none of our politicians have any experience with a world that is not dominated by neoliberal economic theory.

In the US, prior to the early ’70s, wage rises and growth in corporate profits grew at about the same rate. Wages had to rise to make sure that the workers could afford the goods that were produced.

The world then gradually discovered the credit card. This meant that workers could keep buying consumer goods without needing a pay rise. It was at this point in the early ’70s that wages largely stagnated and corporate growth accelerated.

The same pattern has been repeated around the world. This is why we get so nervous if interest rates go up – the growth in household debt means that far too many people live on the brink of penury.

The current crop of politicians cannot imagine a world where the top marginal tax rate was at the levels that enabled the government to adequately fund education, our health system and our social services – yet that was the world my generation experienced.

A great man has died. Ali Kazak was a voice of sanity and reason about Palestine. A voice for justice and peace. A writer of great clarity and integrity. He will be missed by all who want freedom for Palestine. It is tragic that we will no longer hear his voice.

Sincere sympathy to his family, friends, colleagues and all who knew him personally.

Henry Reynolds writes:

“The decision made in Britain during the reign of George the third that the Indigenous Australians did not exercise sovereignty over their homelands remains in place and cannot be questioned by the national courts. The Empire prevails. Decolonisation remains out of reach.”

How utterly absurd.

Thank you, Henry, for again bringing our hidden history out into the light.

I would like to thank the management of Pearls and Irritations for publishing the article from November last year by Stuart Rees on Ali Kazak, following Ali’s passing away last Sunday in Thailand on his way to Palestine.

No person in Australia has worked harder for truth and justice for Palestine than Ali, a man I was pleased to call my friend for more than 50 years, and from whose writing and advocacy, which took many forms, was able to show the real truth in Palestine,

He has tried to encourage the Western media to show the real truth in regards to his country of birth, such untruthful coverage being the reason why Israel has been able to mercilessly continue its genocidal crimes.

There has been a need for people like Ali and so many others and publications like P&I to devote their efforts to call for some form of international justice and/or intervention by the United Nations, neither of which has been forthcoming.

So thank you P&I. Your efforts and honest support have been appreciated by so many Australians. Ali and his cause will never be forgotten

What better time for Australia to demonstrate our multiculturalism than now?

What better way than to have representatives of both sides of the conflict working harmoniously in the governing party?

Instead, we have warring factions and inaction by the prime minister.

Given what has transpired and his previous lack of performance, Richard Marles should be dumped !

As a 73-year-old, I do believe that we become invisible and should not be forgotten. We should have a representative say in how the country is run.

I do, however, think that ex-politicians and, in particular, ex-prime ministers and their staffers have far too much to say and are given far too much airtime.

That is, in part, due to the generosity of their parliamentary pension. They can afford to spend their time running a freelance commentary on everything under the sun.

Perhaps if they were like the rest of us and had to wait until 68 to access their pensions, they would be gainfully employed elswhere.

While moving to a sustainable future, we need to ensure a balance between emerging forms of energy supply and use, and existing ones, primarily fossil fuels, in Australia. One key aspect of this, though, is the need for back-up (redundancy).

There has been a relatively recent volcanic eruption in Lombok, one in Iceland and one in Tonga. In 1275, a volcano in Lombok, Samalas, erupted with a force eight times that of Krakatoa in 1883. Dust from 1275 has been found in Svalbard in the Arctic. The climatic aspects of the 1275 eruption were still being felt in not just the Southern but the Northern Hemisphere in 1315.

There was a mini ice-age. Temperatures had fallen, crops had failed, there were famines. If we now put too many energy supply eggs in the solar and wind baskets, another Samalas would make the four years of COVID seem as nothing by comparison. Layers of cloud and ash for months, if not years on end, rendering solar panels ineffective due to lack of sun and constant need for dust removal. Wind patterns might shift, affecting wind turbines, not to mention caking of dust on the blades, requiring them to be somehow cleaned often. Biofuel production would also be affected. So we need to retain a mix of energy sources. Large batteries wouldn’t offset months of no sun or to a lesser extent changed wind patterns,

So I think we need to continue a discussion about some nuclear power, because we urgently need to reduce carbon combustion. I wonder what it is about Australia that we talk of 15 years to build a nuclear plant. The first one in the UK took only four years to build and that was with 1950s knowhow. Mind you, 3½ years into AUKUS, it seems that design of the SSN nuclear-powered craft hasn’t even begun. As to cost of reactors, China has just built the Linglong modular reactor in Hainan, but I have been unable to get cost figures from the Chinese nuclear authority, the CNNC.

Sue Wareham deserves widespread support for her letter calling on Penny Wong to step up. Allowing for a month to get the US administration organised, the murders in Palestine over the last three months can be sheeted home to Donald Trump, thus continuing Joe Biden’s role as an active accessory of Benjamin Netanyahu, with financial, diplomatic and weapons support.

Since then he has had the insider knowledge and power to stop the massacres in Gaza. Every day the US president procrastinates on saying “our support for the pogrom is over”, 50, 100, or 150 Palestinians are murdered.

Let’s hear what he means by a “freedom zone”, and if it means a beginning to the end of the murder, misery and starvation in Gaza, then we all await his next urgently necessary move.