An interesting footnote is that the Mai Lai incident was investigated by Colin Powell, then a 31-year-old army major
His report white-washed the incident, endorsing the original cover up. No stranger to misinformation, later as secretary of state he infamously held up a sinister looking vial to support US claims of weapons of mass destruction.
I am finding the increasingly strident cries of antisemitism being levelled at anyone criticizing Israel or supporting Palestinians to be the height of hypocrisy. For 75 years, world Jewry has delighted in the state of Israel, a state built on the Nakba. Did you really think you would get away with it forever?
Only now with the advent of the internet and the proof found on smartphones are accusations of genocide being levelled at Israel, and these accusations are qualified. Supposedly radical Zionists have usurped power in Israel, and they alone are responsible for all the current carnage.
Nonsense! Israel was built on ethnic cleansing, and anyone supporting Israel since that founding has been complicit.
As former Israeli minister Shulamit Aloni has stated, the charge of antisemitism is a trick. It is used by supporters of Israel to silence any criticism of Israel. It’s time to end this rhetorical dodge.
And it’s high time for Israel and world Jewry to confront and own the monster they have created. Only then can they and their neighbours start to heal, start to mend from a century of murderous intent.
I congratulate Henry Reynolds for this article. It was important and informative. However, it also reveals how the best-intentioned authors and editors can undermine arguments presented. Reynolds described Indigenous people as “possessing” the country. This is not so.
However, modern English spell checkers no longer accept the word “ownee” to describe humans possessed by country. This is a more intimate and non-negotiable relationship that does not deny ownership. The editor reinforces the back-to-front counterproductive thinking with an acknowledgement to “Traditional owners”.
Please use the word “ownees” in the future, as I did on pages 163/4 in my 1977/8 parliamentary papers, which were republished in 1980. I cite my 1980 article in When Land Owns People. The words “custodians” or “stewards” degrade the now neglected term owneeship because they impute an interest for others. My 2022 article with ownee Anne Poelina discusses this on pages 12/13.
With a handsome majority assured, no excuse remains left for the Labor Government to not join the almost universal international community opposition to the appalling genocidal, war-criminal, murderous activities of the Zionist regime in Israel.
And that “no excuse” applies top our AUKUS partners. Trump, for one, will sell us out in a heartbeat when (not if) it suits his agenda on the day,
While the new Albanese Government wrangles with the issues of factional ambition, hundreds of children, women and men die every day in Gaza/the West Bank areas. Appeasement of the Zionist agenda will condemn the future of the Israeli people to the dual reactions of repulsion by the international community and an unquenchable burning for revenge in those whose society has been macerated by the Zionists.
As things stand, Anthony Albanese, Penny Wong et al. align completely with Robert Menzies, who admired Hitler, sold out material capability to the Japanese, and whose allegiances were far more oriented to the British Empire than the interests of the nation he led.
For every day of your new term of office, Albo, likely around 100 innocents have died at the Zionist hand.
Australia should be better than this.
It was a young John Howard who announced light rail connecting the east coast. While some in the know bought land in the proposed rail corridor, his idea has remained just that – an idea.
Given the politically-led resurgence of inefficient hybrid vehicles, as the article points out, why add a 50% efficient internal combustion engine to an electric motor as your mode of transport?
All the indications from the last election are that one side is still arguing whether women should remain barefoot and pregnant or be sacrificed as witches, while the other side is timid about Australia leading anything but sports and sports betting.
The evidence is out there that government makes a really deficient, and sometimes outright harmful, substitute parent. Children brought up in the foster system need the best parenting in order to live with and hopefully overcome early childhood trauma. Instead of which they receive some of the worst, usually not the fault of the foster carer.
An average of seven, yes seven, placements in their first year in “care”, the focus on reunification when parents never get the support they need in order to become “good enough” parents. The lack of vital background information to foster carers about the child and all the factors leading up to removal from their family. The splitting up of siblings into different placements with no recognition that the children who care best are those who are kept with their siblings. And so on and so on.
Should anyone be surprised that these children whom we let down so badly have far higher rates of drug and alcohol issues, mental health issues, incarceration and suicide and much poorer physical health alongside terrible educational outcomes? And significant numbers go back to their troubled families anyway, as soon as they turn 18. The answer? Perhaps open adoption.
Sawsan Madina – I wish, oh how I wish, you were still head of SBS Television. Your open letter to The Greens was superb.
Instead, in the television and radio space, we have propaganda puppets, ex-CEOs of Newscorp and advertisers pretending to be journalists.
As consumers, we must demand more of our media. Call them to account, via feedback on social media, via email, via whatever channel you can. The only way we can change the system is to demand better.
“In 2021, the Federal Court found Sussan Ley, as environment minister, owed a duty of care to future generations to avoid causing climate harm through her decisions.”
And here she is stating nuclear is a zero-emission option. Who is Sussan Ley kidding? Let’s debunk this myth once and for all. Nuclear is the most toxic form of energy. We will be leaving our descendants with a poison cocktail which has no answer.
The Coalition’s implied stance of , “Oh, we’ll let the future generations work that out” is pure negligence. Kicking the can down the road has been the Coalition’s mantra for the past 30 years. Since 2024, the Upper Hunter Shire has had 91 quakes of magnitudes up to 4.7, and this is one of the Coalition’s proposed nuclear reactor sites.
Have we really forgotten Fukushima? Certain politicians clearly have short memories. Many of us remember the horror of it as though it were yesterday. Let’s not make it our tomorrow.
If last night’s [14 May] ABC 7:30 report interview of Liberal Deputy Leader Ted O’Brien is any indication, the Liberals have learnt nothing from their heavy election defeat.
They will definitely have their policies available and costed ready for the week before the next election.
For the sake of the viewing public and ABC ratings, 7.30 presented Sarah Ferguson should never have him back
Caitlin Johnstone reports today that certain key newspapers have now swung on Gaza.
Great credit to Pearls and Irritations, Caitlin Johnstone and the authors of some other Substacks for the courageous role they have played over the 19 months since it became clear there was a disproportionate Israeli response to the sad event of 7 October.
And our thoughts are with those held hostage on both sides of the conflict, as well as those facing massive odds in Gaza.
The first thing Labor should do is scrap AUKUS. The very fact that Donald Trump played dumb when questioned about the deal at an early press conference should have rung alarm bells.
He knows a dumb deal (dumb for us) when he sees one. He also knows a “nice“ deal (read sucker) when he sees one.
That he didn’t scrap AUKUS at the beginning of his term should ring alarm bells for many Labor voters.
Keeping Richard Marles as defence minister, and dumping two others to appease the factions, indicates it’s going to be another long do-nothing threes years.
As a member of the Greens, I wholeheartedly support Sawsan Madina’s article in which she grieves over their losses in the House but applauds their excellent policies, not least on the environment and in trying to end inequality.
Yes, may the Greens come back stronger next election and, in the meantime, hold the Labor Government to account in the Senate in which they will alone hold the balance of power.
If there is one criticism to be made of them, however, it is their blinkered approach to mass immigration. They failed to acknowledge that the blowout (over half a million in 2023) in net overseas migration in recent years led to such an increased demand for housing that supply could not keep up. This exacerbated the housing crisis with a whole generation of Australians either unable to get into the market or faced with unaffordable rents.
By all means talk of supply and protecting renters, but our immigration levels should be no higher than the housing that can be provided. The Coalition, with its dearth of policies and most of them awful, got one thing right: cutting immigration by 100,000. It may have allowed supply to catch up with accumulated demand.
I questioned if the US was a democracy during Donald Trump’s first term.
I’ve seen nothing in this term to indicate the great defender of democracy, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the US, even vaguely resembles a democracy.
Duncan Graham writes, “In the 1965 coup, an estimated 500,000 were slaughtered in a military-organised genocide against real or imagined communists…”. Absolutely not.
His wrong-headed assertion is based on Jess Melvin’s “The army and Indonesian genocide”, which deliberately misinterprets the Convention and seeks to expand the legal definition of genocide to include mass political murder.
The Convention is clear: genocide is the intentional destruction of a national, ethnical, religious or cultural group, not the mass murder of political groups, ie, the PKI.
Do you really imagine that the same Western governments, that had laid waste to German cities, burned Tokyo to the ground and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were going to write the Convention to include their own mass murder? Nope. Political mass murder was deliberately excluded from consideration.
What Suharto and his generals, including his son-in-law Prabowo Subianto, did, in East Timor, was genocide. A third to half of the Timorese populations was annihilated. By comparison, 1965 was strictly political, targeting communists, socialists, human rights activists, lawyers, judges, trade unionists, etc.
Thanks to Sawsan Madina for her article today. I could not agree more with her feelings. She has hit the nail on the head. Her arguments are flawless.
Like her, I am deeply disappointed in the fact that we will not have a Greens presence in the House of Representatives after the recent election. Australia will be poorer for it.
I am hoping many more people will read her outstanding article today and in the days to come.
Thanks also, Pearls and Irritations, for being a breath of fresh air in our impoverished media scene.
Stay strong!
After a redistribution in 2024, the seat (Melbourne) was influenced by the Jewish vote. Labor won the seat in the recent 2025 election.
The Jewish population in the Kooyong area is a growing presence and the seat was won by Dr Monique Ryan financed by billionaire Simon Holmes à Court.
Dr Ryan said: “I have real concern about rising antisemitism since 7 October, it has been ‘awful’ and ‘distressing’ to witness.”
From the disrespectful heckling and intimidation in parliament when certain MPs are speaking, to the factional infighting and manoeuvering, tell me how this is different from a school playground?
I’ve worked in the latter for more than 20 years, and in all that time I haven’t seen children behave as badly as our politicians. No wonder teachers are reticent to put forward any of our leaders as societal role models.
I read with interest the article, “There is no Jewish vote in Australia nor is supporting Israel a vote winner”. I agree it was apparent that the election result indicated underlying support for the Palestinian people. It would be a shame for this support to “hibernate” until the next election.
It seems to me that there is a forthcoming opportunity – the UN 2 to 4 June conference on the two-state solution. There is an urgent need to mobilise the various bodies who have expressed support for the Palestinian cause into some kind of non-partisan “national day of protest” in order to influence the Australian Government vote in the UN.
A long stretch, but it may be possible to get people like Ed Husic or Labor Friends of Palestine involved.
Whenever I hear of productivity improvement, I think of slavery and the whip. Improved productivity assumes equality and, like slavery, improvement is always at the expense of the least equal in our society, be it the slavery of old or the wage slaves of today.
The whip, the loss of employment or the value of wages and conditions all are part of the productivity improvement story.
Those benefitting most from productivity improvement are not the ones most affected by our latest round of crises. They are the ones out of low-paid jobs, the homeless and those over-represented in our hospitals and jails.
We need to recognise that we are not equal and graciously adjust our modus operandi accordingly. Adjust our expectations so our society is not judged by productivity and the number of billionaires we have, but by the quality of our society.
That is not to say that we should be rewarded for sloth, but we, as a society, should recognise that we are not all the same.
Labor’s first term in office was risk-averse. As Peter Sainsbury observes, if Anthony Albanese’s primary aim was to stay in office he was very successful. But to what end?
If Labor’s second term will deliver essential major reforms, these should include vital environmental reforms detailed by Sainsbury, and reforms to taxation, gambling advertising, and more. The environmental reforms are critical because without substantial reinforcement of current regulations we shall see accelerating environmental degradation.
Should Labor do nothing on this — and continue to support new oil and gas and not make substantial tightening of our environmental protection laws — by 2028 our environment may be deteriorating to a point of crisis. Delaying major reform for a prospective third term would be high-risk procrastination.
Similarly major taxation reform is overdue to start reducing gross inter-generational financial inequity.
Will Labor stare down the powerful vested interests whose prosperity may be impacted by these essential reforms, or will they act as the government while those vested interests — fossil fuels, gambling, defence, pharmaceuticals, and more — pull the policy strings?
This next term of government will likely be long remembered as one presenting great opportunity: Labor’s legacy will hang on how well it uses it.
I am wondering if the ALP has made a strategic mistake in removing Ed Husic (who I have always found to be a reasonable politician).
In saying this, I look to Senator Fatima Payman, who has started a new party after resigning. My reason for wondering is the tendency these days to split issues instead of being inclusive.
In my personal judgment, I feel the person who should go is Richard Marles, who I have never been fond of. I feel he is not a particlarly effective politician, so give someone else a go at the Defence portfolio, please.
I am a barrister in Western Australia. I spent three years working as an adviser to the WA Attorney General, John Quigley, MLA, who recently retired.
I do not always agree with Greg Barnes. But his article on Mark Dreyfus KC is well thought out and an analysis that I hope our prime minister reads. It is almost certainly too late to change his pick for the next AG. I just hope he has it right this time.
We are all failing when it comes to incarcerating children. And the Legal Aid budgets are shameful.
Obviously, as a barrister at the independent bar, these are my personal views.
The McGowan/Cook Governments were very supportive of me as an adviser and both had/have good people with deep concerns about social justice.
Thank you for continuing to highlight critical issues many lawyers and others find frustratingly solvable.
Thanks to Edward Hurcombe for his clear analysis.
Legacy media have less relevance in affecting the flow of information, and subsequent opinion moulding, than before. Most certainly.
But those who want to play the game of sensationalist click-bait headlines will still get their stories published on Yahoo! news et al, especially if in the Chris Lorax league (“Mad As” Daily Telegraph character).
They still get to the 40-60-year-old bracket of disengaged-from-politics voters who make up their minds based on not very much.
Moreover the weighting of what constitutes “the centre” is heavily influenced by the extremists on SkyTV or The Nightly headlines, even if the ratings don’t make for good advertising dollars.
That would seem to be the point for owners of News Corp and 7West. They spend less than either Clive Palmer or Gina Rinehart, but get good bang for their buck.
Mark Diesendorf explains clearly and succinctly how we can save ourselves and our planet. If you skipped over it, I urge you to go back and read it in its entirety.
Central to it is the fundamental fact that “green growth” is and will remain impossible – at best a well-intentioned myth, at worst a malevolent lie.
The essay should be compulsory reading for all members of our new government, speaking as it does to every decision they will make. Perhaps it could be given a permanent place in the Pearls & Irritations “Top five”.
This superb article cut through all the trash hesitancy and denial of our Australian mainstream media and their political lapdogs.
We must finally debunk the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Even momentary intelligent application shows they are not one and the same.
This article shows the power that journalism has when wielded with integrity and courage. Bravo, Michelle Berkon.
Peter Sainsbury said it all. I share his scepticism that Labor will get the job done, not just on climate but on preservation of nature as well. The only hope are the 11 Greens’ senators who may be able to hold Labor to account and force stronger action on both climate and environment.
We should remember that Labor never was an environmental party. Yes, Bob Hawke saved the Franklin, but possibly only because he read the mood of the national electorate. Almost always, however, if there is conflict between saving jobs and saving environment, Labor will go with the former.
Having said all that, we should give Chris Bowen credit for a number of initiatives such as the reformed Safeguard Mechanism, vehicle efficiency standards and the Capacity Investment Scheme. These are welcome, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit they could quickly pick on efficiency and electrification that would not just help the climate, but also people’s hip pocket.
Let’s hope Bowen is able to exert his influence over the likes of Madeline King and the resources sector. We need someone of his ilk taking over the Environment portfolio as well.
Greg Barns’ article of May 10th 2025 titled “Dreyfus leaves little legacy” is very much to the point. As he points out, Dreyfus took the relatively uncontroversial step of ending the persecution of Bernard Collaery while allowing other egregious injustices to continue.
The most shameful of these would surely be the continued incarceration of Dan Duggan, a US-born Australian citizen and father of six, who has been held in maximum security since October 2022 despite having committed no offence under Australian law.
Outrageously, Duggan now faces the threat of deportation to the US and the possibility of spending the rest of his life in a US prison, a situation that Dreyfus could have prevented.
The imprisonment of Duggan again throws into sharp focus Australia’s longstanding craven subservience to the US, with the election of Donald Trump making the ending of this situation more urgent than ever.
Peter Sainsbury’s summing up of the Albanese Government’s number one, two and three priorities, to get re-elected and from the box seat, keep the horses calmed, is a strategy that, if pursued, promises Australia will be totally unready for the impact of the looming climate upheaval. A Labor hero after his bone-crushing, come-from-behind election win, inaction on climate will leave him reviled by future generations.
Having spent a lifetime earning a living dependent on the seasons, I have seen changes over more than seven decades that, quite frankly, terrify me. Apart from the geo-physical science so clearly explained in Sainsbury’s article, the impact on global food production chains will trigger societal disruption that will make the French Revolution seem like a fairytale. Unless we act wholeheartedly and immediately, no one’s going to live happily ever after for some time.
Albanese’s Government has three years to acknowledge the dire straits in which we’re sailing and carry those unwilling to accept that actuality with it.
Never mind the Paris Agreement; the environment and the laws of physics didn’t care two hoots about the dinosaurs, and there’s no reason they’ll make an exception for us.
Greg Barns is, perhaps, rather too gentle in his assessment of Mark Dreyfus. It is not often that I disagree with anything Paul Keating says, but on the Dreyfus affair, I feel he also has ascribed rather more honour to the man than he warrants.
I fail to understand how an attorney-general — no matter what his heritage may be — can blatantly ignore the messages coming from the ICJ and the ICC and still allow his government to claim that it “operates within the international rules-based order”, that chimerical being that appears every day (if our government is to be believed) to be comprised of values to be maintained according to whatever suits the mood of the time.
It is absolutely not the case that Australia marches in step with (most of) the rest of the world in the case of Israel – while claiming vociferously that it does so in the case of Ukraine. One right does negate another wrong: Dreyfus failed entirely to adhere to principles of justice in not declaiming Australia’s perfidy by appeasing Israeli genocide.
And by so doing, Dreyfus has joined the legion of agents who condemn the future Israel to pariah status indefinitely.
What an excellent article by Sara Dowse. It’s about time someone differentiated between the two.
The Zionists are the violent extremists who must be condemned for their actions and intentions.
A Semite, per se, is your average peace-loving Jew who, for the most part, is appalled by Netanyahu’s regime.
The same can be said for Hamas who don’t actually have a social licence with the average Palestinian that just want to live in peace.
However the actions of Israel against the Palestinians must be called out for what they are: apartheid and genocide. The Israel Zionists under the auspices of Netanyahu and his Likud extremists are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jewish population in Europe.
Nothing less.