The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have published serious allegations about millions of dollars of Australian government funding for Offshore Processing Centres finding their way through contractors to bank accounts controlled by South Pacific politicians. This comes on top of a history of criticism by the Auditor-General on how providers were selected and contracts Continue reading »
Top 5
If Albanese is such a buddy of Biden’s, why is Assange still in jail? Especially after our titanic strategic favours. Julian Assange is in his fourth year in Britains Belmarsh Prison. If the current appeal fails, he will be shackled and driven off in a prison van and flown across the Atlantic on a CIA Continue reading »
One morning in February 2021, I was woken by a WeChat call from my brother in China. Mum had died the previous night, he told me. I wasn’t shocked to hear about Mum’s death – she had been very ill for a couple of years. In fact, for months before she died, our weekly WeChat Continue reading »
The world stands in urgent need of a universal accord to ensure it remains a Planet that our children and grandchildren can inhabit and enjoy, far into the future. At present the Earth system is breaking down, due to ten massive threats that are the direct result of human activity, our excessive numbers, over-consumption and Continue reading »
The Royal Commission into Robo-debt has provided significant insights into how a cavalier government can ignore fundamental processes of good governance by ignoring accepted standards of decision making to pursue its ideological agenda. Commissioner Catherine Holmes is to be congratulated for her comprehensive consideration of the Robo-debt scheme which “lacked a legal framework and revealed Continue reading »
Uzupis, a historic district of Vilnius, Lithuania and a vibrant artistic community, had unilaterally declared its independence from the rest of the country. It adopted three mottoes: “Don’t Fight,” “Don’t Win” and “Don’t Surrender.” These seem particularly apt for the ambiguous status of Taiwan with its anomalous international status and phantasmic national identity. Lithuania, the Continue reading »
Lord Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-general (SG), famously said the purpose of NATO was to ‘keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down’. The end of the Cold War raised hopes of significant changes to the basis of international relations and world order. Yet the idea and possibility of war were not eliminated Continue reading »
The Robodebt scandal reflects badly on the Australian Public Service generally, and not just on those immediately responsible. The main focus of the Report by the Royal Commission into Robodebt and subsequent publicity and comment has been on the illegality of the scheme. But as has been observed by some Liberals, the illegality could readily Continue reading »
Journalism is tough at a time when many topics could be seen through a political lens. Hong Kong provides an interesting case, although it is not the only place where journalism is having to navigate shifting geopolitics and social developments that divide countries and communities. Pearls and Irritations, created by Australians in Australia, is a Continue reading »
When will Australians realise, as Paul Keating has been unerringly consistent in arguing, that they are part of the cosmopolitanism and complexity of Asia, and not a Western imagined community presided over by a fast declining America? During the maligned years of the Morrison-Turnbull-Abbott governments, Australia’s international reputation fell on a number of significant measures Continue reading »