Blog

I write about climate, human rights, biodiversity, and uncomfortable truths. From the wisdom of First Nations caring for Country to the global action needed to protect ecosystems and ensure intergenerational equity, these stories are personal, political, and urgent. They aim to inspire hope.

Explore my Yeah But... series for sharp takes on deflection, denial, and double standards. And scroll through Climate Conscious Man's reflections on what it means to live responsibly on a heating planet.

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Australians in the IDF and the War Crimes Questions We Can’t Ignore

Some disturbing questions are beginning to emerge in Australia. Ones that our political leaders, media and law enforcement agencies aren't talking about and seem deeply uncomfortable confronting. How many Australians are serving in the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza and what are they doing? And with credible evidence of abuse and war crimes continuing to mount, what responsibilities does Australia have for investigating our own citizens? These questions stopped being abstract

Gregory Andrews

19 hours ago3 min read

AUKUS, Port Kembla and why Gough Whitlam Would Roll in His Grave

Fifty years ago, Gough Whitlam finally put a stop to Australia’s nuclear plans at Jervis Bay. Known as Booderee by the Traditional Custodians, it’s now a national park and Aboriginal land owned by the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community. But less than 100km up the road at Port Kembla, Australian Labor is now proposing a nuclear submarine base. Port Kembla isn’t just an empty industrial sacrifice zone. It is a living community. It’s steelworkers and surfers, migrant families and ar

Gregory Andrews

7 days ago2 min read

The Climate Crisis is a Health Crisis

Climate change is usually talked about as an environmental issue. Coral reefs, glaciers, bushfires and endangered species etc. All of that matters enormously. But it's also increasingly missing the point. The climate crisis is now fundamentally a public health emergency. This week, a panel of leading international experts convened by the World Health Organization urged it to formally declare the climate crisis a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” - the same hi

Gregory Andrews

May 173 min read

Even Israel’s Leading Newspaper Is Sounding the Alarm

One of the strangest and most disturbing things about what’s happening in Gaza is how difficult it has become in countries like Australia to even discuss it without being attacked, smeared or accused of extremism. Yet some of the strongest warnings about Israel’s conduct are no longer coming from progressive activists or Arab media. They’re coming from inside Israel itself. This week, one of Israel’s most respected newspapers Haaretz published a lead editorial condemning Isra

Gregory Andrews

May 163 min read

The Aussie Bird That Outflies an Airbus A380

I first encountered Bar-tailed Godwits on Lord Howe Island. Later, I watched them again near Broome, probing mudflats with their long bills, seemingly calm and unhurried. I couldn’t stop thinking that I was looking at one of the world’s greatest endurance athletes. The Bar-tailed Godwit looks like a relatively unassuming shorebird. Brown and grey mottled feathers. Long legs. Long bill. Nothing about it screams “superhero”. But every year these birds undertake one of the most

Gregory Andrews

May 153 min read

Budget 2026: Nature Nowhere, Decline Everywhere

Last night’s Federal Budget was full of the things that usually dominate Australian politics: spin and taxes. The Government wants it remembered as one that rewarded workers and cooled speculative investment in housing. And superficially, that probably makes sense. But while the media panels discussed who will gain or lose a few hundred dollars here and there, and whether property investors are being hard done by, I kept looking for something else: Where is Nature in all this

Gregory Andrews

May 134 min read

Batteries Mean the “Base Load” Myth is Dead

For years, coal, gas and nuclear advocates have regurgitated the same argument: renewables can never replace “base-load” generation because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. That argument is now dead. Not because physics changed. Not because climate activists won a slogan war. But because batteries have changed the economics of electricity systems faster than governments, media commentators and energy companies have adapted. A major new report fro

Gregory Andrews

May 113 min read

Iran Is Not Venezuela

There’s a recurring pathology in US foreign policy that confuses moral condemnation with strategic understanding. Washington is remarkably good at convincing itself that because it dislikes a regime - and because American and allied media audiences dislike a regime - that regime must also be weak, brittle, isolated and close to collapse. Time and again, that assumption has proven catastrophically wrong. But Trump takes this long-standing American weakness and puts it on stero

Gregory Andrews

May 103 min read

Biofuels vs Solar: Numbers Don’t Lie

The biofuels proposition is basically this: use farmland, water, fertiliser, machinery and energy to grow crops, harvest them, transport them, process them into liquid fuel, then burn them in an inefficient internal combustion engine. Alternatively, we could put solar on a tiny fraction of that land, feed electricity into batteries, and drive. This is why biofuels sit in the same bucket as nuclear power, fossil hydrogen and carbon capture and storage as so-called energy solut

Gregory Andrews

May 92 min read

Flag shagging, free speech and the hypocrisy of Palestine policing

There's a strange kind of patriotism on display when people wrap themselves in the Australian flag while trampling on Australian values. At Coogee this weekend, I came across the end of a peaceful protest - of mostly elderly women and Jewish community members standing for Palestinian human rights - who were bullied by pro-Israel agitators carrying a bizarre hybrid flag: the Australian flag visually overwritten with the Israeli flag. That matters. The Australian Government’s o

Gregory Andrews

May 52 min read

What Happened to the EV Battery Apocalypse?

For years, EV critics have repeated the same warning: “What happens when the battery dies?” It’s usually delivered with the confidence of someone revealing a fatal flaw. The implication is clear: EVs are ticking time bombs waiting to strand owners with a catastrophic repair bill. But here’s the thing. They’ve been around for over 15 years now, and the data tells a very different story. A recent report tracking battery health across more than 30,000 EVs found battery replaceme

Gregory Andrews

Apr 303 min read

How Australia Became The Resource-Rich Country That Acts Poor

Here’s something I can’t get my head around. Australia is one of the largest gas exporters in the world. We let huge foreign companies pump it up, liquefy it, ship it offshore, and sell at enormous profit into global markets. But somehow, as a country, we act like we’re poor. That’s not rhetoric. That’s the numbers. The tax we collect from this industry is tiny. Aussies pay more more in beer excise each year than the gas industry pays in royalty taxes. And students’ universit

Gregory Andrews

Apr 264 min read

“From the River to the Sea”: Why Banning a Phrase Is a Bad Idea

There’s something deeply unsettling about a government deciding that a particular political phrase is illegal to say. Not because the phrase is harmless. It isn’t. It’s contested, provocative, and emotionally charged. But that’s precisely why banning it is a mistake. This week in Queensland, people were arrested for displaying the phrase “from the river to the sea.” One of them was a Jewish man, wearing a shirt calling for a free Palestine. That fact alone should give us paus

Gregory Andrews

Apr 223 min read

Block the Strait, Starve the World

Most people understand the Strait of Hormuz as an oil story. Tankers, petrol prices, geopolitical brinkmanship. Petrol and diesel drivers feel it at the pump. But something my friend Allan Behm from the Australia Institute recently reminded me is that, if the Strait and the Middle East stay disrupted, the real story is not just energy. It’s food. Allan prompted me to do a deeper dive and here’s what I found. Modern agriculture doesn’t run on soil, sunlight and rain alone. It

Gregory Andrews

Apr 163 min read

These tiny little fruit stickers are not tiny little problems

I spend a ridiculous amount of time peeling these plastic stickers off fruit and vegetables before they go anywhere near my compost. And even then, while preparing my veggie beds for winter garlic this weekend, I found a pile of old ones in the soil - stubborn relics of supermarket convenience. That's the point. They look inconsequential. But they are anything but. A South Australian Government review described plastic produce stickers as a "widespread and persistent contamin

Gregory Andrews

Apr 142 min read

Yeah, but EVs expose you to radiation…

I hear this one a lot. Usually delivered with a conspiratorial tone, as if electric vehicles drivers are trapped inside a microwave getting their brains fried. So let’s deal with it properly. Yes - electric vehicles do produce electromagnetic fields (EMFs). So does your phone, your laptop, your TV, your fridge, your house wiring, your hair-dryer, and your electric toothbrush. If you’re worried about “radiation” from an EV, you should probably start by throwing your iPhone int

Gregory Andrews

Apr 132 min read

The Aussie Parrot That Needs Taylor Swift-Level Attention

A decade ago, when I first learned about them, Swift Parrots were in trouble. Swifties were rare, beautiful, and declining. They were in trouble, but with a population of over 2,000, they didn’t yet feel, at least to me, like a species right on the brink of extinction. Now they are. Work cited by ANU and BirdLife Australia suggests there are now fewer than 500 Swifties left in the wild. That’s a catastrophic collapse in only a decade. BirdLife warns they could be extinct in f

Gregory Andrews

Apr 103 min read

Enough Is Enough: Australia Must Stop Enabling Trump’s America

I’ve been writing for more than a year that Australia needs to find new friends. When Trump returned, I argued that America’s democratic decay meant our reliance on Washington was no longer tenable. In January I wrote that so-called “shared values” aren’t proved by rhetoric, and that Pine Gap isn’t symbolic but operational. Everything that’s happened since has only strengthened that case. Donald Trump is no longer merely reckless. He’s unfit for office. But this is not just a

Gregory Andrews

Apr 73 min read

Illegal War, Illegal Methods

When Trump boasts about destroying bridges, threatens to wipe out power systems, and talks about sending an entire country “back to the Stone Age”, most people don’t need an international law degree to know something’s wrong. Their instincts are sound. International law exists precisely to restrain this kind of conduct: wars launched without lawful justification, and methods of warfare that treat civilian suffering as a tool of strategy. That’s why Trump and Netanyahu’s war a

Gregory Andrews

Apr 43 min read

Climate change is pushing even common birds towards extinction

For this week’s #FloraAndFaunaFriday, I want to talk about one of Australia’s most beloved little birds: the superb fairy-wren. It’s bright, busy, cheeky, beautiful - and still common enough that most people assume it will always be with us. But that assumption now looks dangerously naïve. New research led by the Australian National University and based on 31 years of intensive monitoring of a population in Canberra, warns that this familiar little bird could become extinct

Gregory Andrews

Apr 33 min read