Recent Notes 7: Pacific's not happy, Albo
Recent Notes 9: Oz-USA troubled love-in

Recent Notes 8: We're not so bloody good

NOT AT ALL WHAT WE’RE CRACKED UP TO BE

“White Australians like to think of themselves as an egalitarian and frank people, despising pretentiousness, while basking in a reputation for larrikinism and mateship. But this is all a front, papering over a culture that is deeply racist, excessively masculinist, and incorrigibly populist. Indeed, from its very beginnings, white Australia has been a morally backward society. And there are no signs that this is abating. Its moral backwardness is disgustingly on show in the No campaign against the forthcoming referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.” Link here to Dr Allan Patience’s challenging analysis of the Real Australian.

WONG ON NUCLEAR FREE & NUCLEAR FRIENDLY

“Australia’s Pacific neighbours deserve much better from our foreign minister,” writes Ainsley Barton (pseudonym of a Canberra consultant not interested in losing clients). “Australia is becoming a de facto nuclear armed state…. Yet last weekend foreign minister Penny Wong took to Twitter proclaiming: ‘Australia joined Pacific partners in signing the Rarotonga Treaty, establishing a nuclear weapons free zone in the South Pacific, on this day in 1985. Nearly 40 years later it’s still a regional cornerstone as we work towards a world without nuclear weapons’.

“It beggars belief that a senior member of our executive government could make such a boast,” rages Ainsley. “Wong, defence minister Richard Marles and prime minister Albanese have almost completely ceded our sovereignty to another nation. A nation armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons deployed across the Pacific and North Asia.” More in similar vein here. Paul Keating isn’t the only one who believes Wong, Marles and Albanese have sold out to the Yanks.

FEELING YOUR AGE? HERE’S MORE BAD NEWS

A research team at Nottingham Trent University in the UK has discovered how muscle cells deteriorate with age, affecting their ability to regenerate and recover after injury. The researchers analysed the genes inside muscle cells, and found the different ways genes work together to regenerate muscle become weaker in older cells. Full drama here for the pleasure of our younger readers.

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Bernard Corden

Recent Notes 8: 'We're not so bloody good - Not at all what we're cracked up to be'

The 49th Australian Labor Party national conference 2023 at the Brisbane Convention Centre coincides with the annual Royal Queensland Show (Ekka) at the nearby Brisbane Showgrounds and makes it extraordinarily difficult to establish the origin of the nauseating waft of horse manure and cow dung.

Philip Fitzpatrick

Allan Patience and 'Ainsley Barton' both make pertinent observations about the appalling state of politics in Australia.

I don't know much about Mr Barton but I've followed Allan's writing for quite a while and agree with everything he has written. He wrote a very nice review of my book 'Bamahuta: Leaving Papua' in 2005, so perhaps I'm biased.

Anthony Albanese has been a huge disappointment and is now selling our sovereignty to the Yanks. Peter Dutton is an absolutely loathsome creature.

At this stage I don't think either Labor or the Coalition is worth voting for. As for the opportunism of the Greens I don't think I'd vote for them either.

We really need a new party in Australia.

Lindsay F Bond

For goodness yet to be measured, and of PNG, take a read here:
https://johnmenadue.com/australia-cant-forget-the-damage-we-caused-to-former-colony-png/

A generation of younger men of PNG are testing flaws, laws and cause.

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