another excerpt from
#ThingsYouLearnAlongTheWay
#JohnMenadue (1999)

“Working for Murdoch, I learned about business and networks. Most starkly I saw power and the way it is exercised. It left an indelible impression on me. The need for decentralisation of power, not just politically but in the economic and social fields has stayed with me ever since. Today there is not a significant politician who will raise his or her hand against Rupert Murdoch. That says a lot about politicians. Secure people with strong core values would not want to ingratiate themselves in this way.
After I left I could see more clearly his power at work and I was confident that I knew what made him tick. In the early days it was recognition by the person on the throne. Later, as he became bolder, it was to be influential or even instrumental in deciding who sat on the throne.”

#Auspol #Calwell #Vietnam #BlindAllegianceToUSPolicy

“While we were developing domestic social programs, Australia was becoming engulfed in the Vietnam War. The greatest speech I heard in the Parliament was Calwell’s opposition in May 1965 to the commitment of Australian troops to Vietnam. The moral passion was electrifying. Graham Freudenberg asked Jim Cairns and me for comments on the draft. Whitlam was deliberately not consulted. His relationship with Calwell was increasingly difficult. The division between the two was popular knowledge, for which an electoral price would be paid.
In announcing the ALP position to ‘firmly and completely’ oppose the sending of 800 men to fight in Vietnam, Freudenberg had drafted that the decision was made after ‘earnest and prayerful’ consideration. I suggested that calling on God with such a rhetorical flourish be deleted. It was my only suggested change. He agreed. Addressing ALP supporters in the country, Calwell said:
I offer you the probability that you will be traduced, that your motives will be misrepresented, that your patriotism will be impugned, that your courage will be called into question. But I also offer you the sure and certain knowledge that we will be vindicated: that generations to come will record with gratitude that when a reckless Government wilfully endangered the security of this nation, the voice of the Australian Labor Party was heard, strong and clear, on the side of sanity and in the cause of humanity and in the interests of Australia’s security.”

#Reading
Things You Learn Along the Way
#JohnMenadue

#Reading #ThingsYouLearnAlongTheWay #JohnMenadue
#ToiletTalk #Straya

“Long-drop toilets away from the house were common, with their cut newspaper and lime bucket. A new pit was dug before each summer. Usually it was quite a walk and, at Ardrossan, we were swooped by magpies in the season. Laurie got out his rifle and shot them. The toilet was often near the woodheap and under a pepper tree or a dollacus creeper, with a blue-mauve flower growing over it. Back lanes for toilet bucket removal were more common in the newer country towns. We enjoyed the fun of the night-soil truck running out of control at Naracoorte, down the hill from the Presbyterian church and into the Lutheran minister’s house at the bottom of the hill. We always thought that Presbyterians believed they were better than the rest of us—even their night-soil. Years later, when Gough Whitlam spoke about the ‘effluent society’ and the need to sewer the outer suburbs in the big cities, I knew exactly what he meant.”

Auspol #GoughWhitlam #JohnMenadue #TheDismissal
#Zionism #TheLoansAffair #PinceKingCharles #PineGap
#ForeignInvestments #Power #TheLoansAffair

What would Whitlam think of the Albanese Government?
an interesting conversation between John Menadue and Bart Shteinman about whitlam’s style, compared to that of albanese
—-a mid length but rewarding read covering a range of topics

“John Menadue: On the American relationship, it would be very, very different. Whitlam showed his colours about a month after his election by criticising the American bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Americans were terribly upset with that, because we were supposed to be a locked-in ally. People around the White House with Nixon were calling us — or at least the Australian Government, the prime minister — “North Vietnamese collaborators”. And there were some rude words that Nixon said about Whitlam – that they were “peaceniks” or worse!”

and
“Whitlam was the first person who explained to me the difference between Judaism and Zionism. As a young man I hadn’t appreciated the difference. He explained it to me, and it was quite a revelation.”
———
an interjection from maude:

incidentally, 🤔 iirc, israel in the 60s & 70s had the west’s sympathy (“remember the holocaust”, and Leon Uris books)… the reaction in 1978 after the oscars where Vanessa Redgrave spoke in favour of Palestine was huge

anyway, back to the article discussing whitlam and albanese
————-

“John Menadue: Most people would agree the politics of the Connor fundraising left a lot to be desired. It was messy, very difficult. Gough expressed a lack of confidence in Treasury and Treasury paid it back in spades, leaking a lot of information about the loan raising. So it was politically very damaging.
But what drove Rex Connor and was supported in the Labor Party generally was lost sight of in the whole “loans affair”. It was an attempt by the government to address the problem of foreign ownership of our resources. Now, around 80% of our resource industries are owned offshore: BHP, Rio Tinto, and so on, and Rex Connor was trying to head that off. Instead of selling off our companies, we would borrow but retain ownership in Australia. That would have been difficult to achieve, but that’s what drove Rex Connor, and most Australians would applaud that now.”

and
“We often hear Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but it was Robert Caro who made the point that power reveals what people are really like…”

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/11/what-would-whitlam-think-of-the-albanese-government/

@feather1952

Explainer for USians. #TradeDeficit #profligateconsumption

You have been living beyond your means. Don’t blame the rest of the world, tax the billionaires.

“A country’s trade deficit (or more precisely, its current account deficit) does not indicate unfair trade practices by the surplus countries. It indicates something completely different. A current account deficit signifies that the deficit country is spending more than it is producing. Equivalently, it is saving less than it is investing.

“America’s trade deficit is a measure of the profligacy of America’s corporate ruling class, more specifically the result of chronically large budget deficits resulting from tax cuts for the rich combined with trillions of dollars wasted on useless wars. The deficits are not the perfidy of Canada, Mexico, and other countries that sell more to the US than the US sells to them…

…
“The budget deficit is not due to the salaries of civil servants, who are being wantonly fired, or due to the government’s R&D spending, on which our future prosperity depends, but rather due to the combination of tax cuts for the rich, and reckless spending on America’s perpetual wars, US funding for Israel’s non-stop wars, America’s 750 overseas military bases, the bloated CIA and other intelligence agencies, and interest payments on the soaring federal debt.”

#USTrade #TradeImbalance #USA #Tariffs #TrumpTariffs
#USPol #JohnMenadue #IndependentMedia

Things You Learn Along the Way

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.

https://johnmenadue.com/precis/

https://johnmenadue.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Menadue.pdf

[FREE DOWNLOAD, 304 pages]

@bookstodon
#books
#nonfiction
#memoir
#Australia
#JohnMenadue

Ehud Barak a former Prime Minister told John Lyons. ‘I once was asked some 30 years ago what I have been doing if I were a Palestinian and 30 years ago I was new enough in politics to tell the truth that if I were born Palestinian probably would’ve joined one of the terror organisations.’

https://johnmenadue.com/resistance-a-terrorist-state-and-a-declining-us-empire-wage-genocide/

@palestine
#Palestine
#EhudBarak
#JohnMenadue

Coalition politicians are embracing far right Orbanist ideology

“…Abbott has a history of appearing on the Orban speaking circuit. Joining him there are several other Liberal Party grandees and apparatchiks. It is important to note that the infiltration into News Corp is present too with Foreign Editor Greg Sheridan as the most prominent connection.”

#auspol #MurdochGutterMedia #TonyAbbott #JohnMenadue #FauxNews #Extremism #MurdochSewerageCo #NewsCorp #Orban #DanubeInstitute

https://johnmenadue.com/coalition-politicians-are-embracing-far-right-orbanist-ideology/

"What the Voice challenges us to do is finally to engage in truth telling and transcend the profound differences between the cultures. That is why the issue is beyond politics. First Nations peoples in the Uluru Statement from the Heart requested that the Voice be enshrined in the Australian Constitution.

But the process symbolises something much deeper – an acknowledged reconciliation between two groups of peoples who have reached across a divide to share a unique place together – Australia."

#Indigenous #VoiceToParliament

Link to the Voice and Reconciliation opinion piece by #PaulCollins on the #JohnMenadue's Pearls and Irritations website: https://johnmenadue.com/the-voice-and-reconciliation/