Category: John Menadue

A more dignified relationship between Australia’s governors-general and the Palace evolved in the aftermath of John Kerr’s sycophantic conduct. More than a year after the High Court’s decision in the “Palace letters” case, which said the Queen’s correspondence with Governor-General Sir John Kerr is not “personal”, more letters have now been

With international travel ramping up, changes to passenger visa checks should already be in place — and could’ve prevented the Djokovic debacle. Novak Djokovic’s visa saga would never have occurred if the Department of Home Affairs had checked his vaccination status, medical exemptions and anti-vaccination views before he was granted

Playing the Chinese card may be politically rewarding for some, but it is the ordinary people in the street who suffer the consequences of this Sinophobia.  I would like to ask my fellow Australians this: “Can you imagine what it is like to live under a pall of suspicion that

As the world’s nuclear arsenals build even more killing power, the need for Australia to abandon this perilous defence arrangement only increases. The conventional wisdom has it that in the matter of nuclear weapons Australia is an exemplary international citizen. According to the Standard Version, it diligently supports the various

Performers are right to protest when their performance is compromised through association, in this case by a government that has initiated apartheid.  Some topics have become so politically and emotionally charged that their very mention will cause the speaker to be subject to an avalanche of vitriol and assumed prejudice

The yawning gap between the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men and the people at the bottom has exacerbated the deaths from COVID-19. Oxfam International’s latest report on global inequality finds that while the 10 richest individuals in the world more than doubled their collective wealth since COVID-19 hit

What we have learnt from decades of experience about analysing what to do when things go wrong in healthcare should be applied to public health too. The public’s anger is palpable. Back in September the Prime Minister spruiked a near-normal Christmas when Australians would ‘be able to go to work,

Plenty of parliamentarians, mainly in the government, have made more incendiary statements against Covid vaccination than the tennis star ever did. Novak Djokovic fits the description of a scapegoat; someone who bears the blame for others, and/or is the object of irrational hostility. Not that his deportation wasn’t legal; the

A touch of the Balkans skulduggery has marked out our PM’s less than deft handling of the Djokovic deportation. Divided opinions about Novak Djokovic’s Australian visa and court cases aside, one fact cut through all the hoopla for me. On the day of the first federal hearing, in a pure Freudian

From my Omicron sickbed, I am watching my healthcare colleagues deal with a true disaster, writes Paul Komesaroff. Now that the disaster is upon us we can start to analyse how it happened. I am a front-line health worker, lying listlessly in bed battling an infection with the Omicron variant.

We need a statesman to recognise the opportunity to renew health services after the disruptions of the pandemic. This is the second of two articles. There will always be some politicians who will see healthcare as mere costs on the system, without appreciating that investing in, and maintaining a healthy

A small group of elites determines what ordinary people do not see or hear. Legendary broadcast journalist Bill Moyers has said: “We’ve got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country’s going to die of too many lies.” Moyers is an American journalist and political commentator. He served