Joseph A Camilleri. Australia’s handling of its relations with China is rapidly descending into farce. Geoff Raby’s excellent piece in Pearls and Irritations (30 April) makes abundantly clear the principal factor at work, namely a nostalgic attachment to the US-led regional and global order of earlier years. This is the mindset that drives our security […]
Bruce Duncan. Aid, church, and community groups have been aghast at Prime Minister Turnbull’s announcement in February to spend $3.8 billion to expand arms production seven-fold in order to make Australia one of the top ten global arms suppliers, up from number 20 on the present table of arms producers. He argued that this will […]
John Menadue. A revealing heading appeared in an article a while back by Ross Gittins, the economics editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Faster growth demands better chief executives. He concluded his article by pointing to the need for business leadership to seize the economic opportunities. “Our overpaid and underperforming chief executive officers are getting […]
Peter Whiting. At Social Policy Connections, we take as our main objective “to help bring the social involvements of the churches into contemporary policy debates, and shape a just society”. In Australia at this time of a declining influence of a Christian worldview in favour of an aggressively secular one, such an objective may seem […]
Spencer Zifcak. Nils Melzer is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment. Recently, he presented a damning report to the UN Human Rights Council on the subjection of refugees across the world to torture. Melzer’s fundamental contention was that the primary cause of the massive abuse suffered by refugees globally […]
Joseph A Camilleri. In the year that Trump has been in the White House, ministers have continued to repeat the well-worn mantra that we are committed to defending and upholding the international rules-based order and the web of norms, alliances, and institutions created over the last seventy years. Such glib rhetoric, a feature also of […]
Alison Broinowski. It’s unlikely that the Army will commission a further report following Albert Palazzo’s account of the ADF’s operations in Iraq. We have years to wait for Professor Craig Stocking’s official history. What Australia urgently needs is a full independent inquiry into our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Nearly a year ago, on […]
Allan Patience. The 2017 White Paper displays, yet again, Australia’s foreign policy complacency, its misplaced middle power imagining, and its awkward partnering in its region. It is a failure as a strategic map for advancing Australia’s security and prosperity in the ‘Indo-Pacific’ region and the world. The public policy miasma stupefying contemporary Australian politics is […]
Henry Reynolds Delivered this International Day of Peace Lecture at St John’s Cathedral Brisbane on 21 September 2017. It is republished from John Menadue’s blog 26 October 2017. In a letter written in August 1855 to his colleague John Bright, the great free trade liberal, Richard Cobden, expressed his hostility to Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War. “And […]
Nicholas Biddle Australian National University At first glance, the most recent review of government expenditure on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Australians is quite staggering. It estimates that direct expenditure was A$33.4 billion, an increase of around 23.7% since the first report in 2008-09 (taking into account inflation). This equates to A$44,886 per Aboriginal and […]
