(2023) ABC Radio Interview on the Whitlam Book
Interview between Tom Switzer and Michael Easson broadcast on Friday 9 June 2023 on the ‘Between the Lines’ program on ABC Radio National.
Interview between Tom Switzer and Michael Easson broadcast on Friday 9 June 2023 on the ‘Between the Lines’ program on ABC Radio National.
Two launches of my monograph, Whitlam’s Foreign Policy, occurred in early May.
Israel is in the midst of unprecedented political turmoil. Three alarms are sounding.
Notes “dipped” into in delivering remarks at the Whitlam Institute, Western Sydney University, on 21 February 2023 at the launch of Scott Prasser & David Clune, editors, The Whitlam Era.
This book of essays, The Superpower Transformation (2022), elaborates, expands, debates, and raises difficulties associated with Ross Garnaut’s pioneering study, Super-Power. Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity, published in 2019 by the same publishers.
All of us knew Owen Harries, the three instigators of this book, Tom Switzer, Sue Windybank, and me. We admired his thinking, his ideas, the craft he applied to wordsmithing, the jesting and jostling in debate, the integrity he displayed respecting others’ viewpoints, the originality he brought to important questions.
On one view, Gough Whitlam was a passing flash, whose government was not around long enough to have had an appreciable impact on Australian foreign policy. On another, Whitlam’s foreign policy changes were immense and long lasting. This chapter, necessarily briefly, discusses the promise, creativity, problems, and influence of Whitlam’s foreign policy. Through such analysis, mature reflection on Australia’s legacy in relation to its obligations to and treatment of our alliances, commitment to the region, and human rights is enabled.
Rare is the book that with verve, clarity, enthusiasm, and authority establishes the claim that a thinker demands reappraisal and even celebration.
Of course, everyone wants better relations with China.
There is a widespread conceit that, because Australian Jewry is largely economically successful, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) can write them off as unlikely supporters of progressive candidates in elections. This is egregious nonsense — for at least four reasons.