Some described it as a great sigh of relief – the national exhalation of a breath we’d grown accustomed to holding. Others spoke of a weight lifted from our collective shoulders: we could walk freely again, stretching out carefully as the stoop straightened.
The wave of euphoria that flowed across the country on election night and its immediate aftermath was reflected in the enthusiasm even Labor doubters had for the incoming Government and its authentic workaday leader.
Australians should ask why this profitable company has paid no company tax here since at least 2013.
In the first months of the new government in Canberra, the age of legalized tax avoidance must cease. New ground rules are absolutely necessary to ensure that old practices are not continued in the 2022-23 financial year at a time when welfare agencies are issuing tents and temporary shelters to keep families off the streets and out of parked cars on these late winter nights.
This week, several of the largest companies that profit from Australia’s carbon market called for changes to the system. They said the rules that govern the issuing of carbon credits to some projects were too lax and the market’s integrity should be improved.
The round table keeps on passing it around win or lose
Qantas chairman Richard Goyder has moved to defend the airline’s chief executive Alan Joyce after the carrier revealed he received a pay increase and bonus shares worth millions last financial year despite widespread customer service problems that have infuriated passengers.
But the biggest scam came last week when Qantas handed down its profit results and declared a $400m share buy-back. The board apparently deems it okay for Alan Joyce and co to spend the airline’s excess cash – publicly subsidised cash – not on disaffected workers, not on tax, not paying back subsidies, not on services for customers but on … drumroll, buying its own shares in order to prop up the stock price and lift executive bonuses.
We are glorifying an individual when we should be denying the system of Imperial Colinisation she represented despite the Commonwealth.
In 1954, Elizabeth stood at Farm Cove in Sydney, where Captain Arthur Phillip landed in 1788, and celebrated it as the birthplace of the nation. Our consciousness has changed. The Queen saw Australia as a young nation. Now we boast of the oldest continuing occupation by a people.
The crowds got smaller and less voluble with every visit, but Elizabeth cemented the monarchy over the years. If it was not only showmanship, it was attention to detail. John Cain, Victorian premier 1982-90, met her during celebrations for 150 years of Victorian statehood in 1984. ‘’I knew your father,’’ she told him. That was John Cain senior, premier 1952-55. A young monarch might have had other things on her mind. Mind like a steel trap.
King Charles III is an underwhelming prospect for Australians. He is 73, but he could go 20 years. His mother would have ignored many a gentle hint (she was apparently a bit sniffy whenever a European queen would abdicate).
There will be another referendum on a republic, but when?
Elizabeth’s legacy: the enduring Australian monarchy – Michael West
During Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign, the UK witnessed immense social transformation. Throughout this tumultuous period, the monarchy served one purpose: suppressing Britain’s political divisions in the name of unity and deference to the Crown.
Rather than doing away with the old aristocracy, capitalism has found its own uses for the British monarchy. The two now function in tandem to preserve the status quo in Britain — and should be opposed together.
Today, Pakistan, the world’s fifth-most-populous country, is fighting for its survival. This summer, erratic monsoon rains battered the country from north to south – Sindh, the southernmost province, received 464% more rain over the last few weeks than the 30-year average for the period.
“Fifty-eight percent of respondents in the two-day poll – including one in four Republicans – said Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement is threatening America’s democratic foundations.
Is this a fight between two competitors where one, IA, fears it’s about to lose, and lose out big-time, the pot of gold- subscription money? According to them the crowdfunding of Crikey needs to be stopped why? Because they are already well funded? Well, there goes the Monthly or any other Independent publisher fighting to deliver better quality REAL News and Information. Are Murdochs funding IA or has AI merely jumped ship and joined the Murdochs of their own accord? What value is there when IA have turned to play the man and has taken it’s eyes off the ball and the man happens to be on their own team?
CRIKEY … “INDEPENDENT”?
Long before Crikey decided to stick its head above the parapet and issue this challenge to Lachlan Murdoch, Independent Australia was being mauled by Murdoch’s minions. We were being attacked, scorned and subjected to almost innumerable legal letters from News Corp, practically all of which threatened our very continuation as a publication. That’s because we were actually broke — not pretend poor, like Crikey. IA
The deeper you dig into Crikey’s crowdfunding in its defamation case against the Murdochs, the muddier it becomes.
Elizabeth took pains to shield the monarchy from politics, but its bloody, racist legacy can’t be erased.
For millions of people who lived through and still suffer the consequences of the Royal Family’s brutal colonialism and racism both abroad and in the U.K., the Queen’s legacy will live on in the form of the violent and lasting rule that the Royal Family has overseen and still profits from.
The British monarchy is a vestige of tyranny, a grand monument to hierarchy and plunder. As Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1911, the royals are for the other despots of society, the capitalists and landlords — not for the working class.
On Wednesday, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield castigated Russia for having deported large numbers of Ukrainians from the parts of Ukraine that the Russian military had occupied, referring to these as ‘filtration operations.’ She said, ‘Of course, I need not remind this Council that the forcible transfer or deportation of protected persons from occupied territories, to the territory of the occupier, is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians, and constitutes a war crime.’ She asked, ‘So why are they doing this?’ and answered her own
I have a serious question for people who have power in America and who continue to deny the outcome of the 2020 election and enable Trump’s Big Lie: What are you saying to yourself in private? How are you justifying yourself in your own mind?
I don’t mean to be snide or snarky. I’m genuinely curious.
Murdoch presents an Australia’s Shame Andrew Bolt even brought his notes
The IPA is a hidden voice to parliament. However, they were and have never been recognised as owners of this nation or it’s first peoples. Andrew Bolt personally endows the IPA with respect and with special rights accrued. The fundamental argument Andrew Bolt puts forward is “forget the past”. Indigenous Australians like the IPA already have the opportunity of forming a united voice to parliament but because they aren’t as special or exceptional they haven’t become another IPA. In other words, 1778 was year zero in Terra Nullus Australia when history began,
Fundamentally, Bolt’s attitude boils down to the message ” if they can’t organize themselves like the white colonizers, migrants and the IPA have it’s their own bloody culture’s fault and that needs changing.” Indigenous Australians don’t need special consideration they need a good and strong dose of whitewashing, re-education, policing and their cultural poverty erased. In many ways it’s what Bolt accuses China of doing to the Uyghurs is actually his solution here.
Unfortunately, while Bolt isn’t shy of pointing out that Indigenous Australians are “different” on every social metric. He blames them for it. He has difficulty explaining the systemic aspect racism built in over 220 years that helped create and then generationally maintain that state of difference. Lack of opportunity, Quick to criticise Andrew Bolt has never offered any explanation as to how to begin to bring about systemic change to his accepted and continued racism because refuses to admit it exists. Simply put he expects Indigenous Australians to change and be more like him White. Adam Goodes was always Bolt’s worst Blackman while Eddy Betts his best. Does that hold any longer since Eddy has stood up and pointed to the racism that Bolt denies exists?
Barbara Ehrenreich was driven by both her undying anger at the profound injustices of life under capitalism and a fervent hope that the world doesn’t have to be this way.
Bearing hallmarks of the 2019 Australia Federal Police raid on the ABC over its ‘Afghan Files’, Finnish journalists are on trial for treason after reporting on Finland’s national security, writes Dr Binoy Kampmark.
The conclusion of Israeli culpability is hardly news. What makes the announcement infuriating, however, is the way in which the Israeli army has casually confessed to the crime, knowing full well that the shooter will never be punished for the killing, nor will his superiors in government or the military pay a price for peddling falsehoods for months.
Tucker Carlson standards are set and approved by by Lachlan Murdoch and News Corp. Otherwise he’d simply not be there.
here’s a telling example involving Tucker Carlson, the Fox News prime-time host who stands above all others as the face of that network.
While other networks were carrying Biden’s speech on Thursday, Carlson lashed out at him, then mischaracterized the remarks to his viewers as the president claiming “anyone who disagrees with him is a threat to the country.” Based on that false characterization, Carlson termed Biden’s remarks “very dangerous,” “totally immoral,” and “truly nuts and threatening to the future of the United States.”
Carlson was still using his fabricated version of Biden’s comments to frighten and anger his viewers five nights later. On Tuesday, he lashed out at cable news commentators who had praised the speech.
The poll found that if the next presidential election “were held today,” 48% of registered voters would choose Biden, while 42% would choose Trump. Biden’s new 6-point lead is 3 points larger than his edge in the previous Yahoo News/YouGov survey from late August (Biden 45%, Trump 42%) and 4 points better than his average lead across all Yahoo News/YouGov surveys conducted between April and July (Biden 44%, Trump 42%). The poll’s margin of error is approximately 2.6%.
President Biden sits at a desk during a Cabinet meeting. President Biden during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images) The last time Biden led Trump in a Yahoo News/YouGov poll by 6 percentage points or more among registered voters was in March 2022 (Biden 47% to Trump 39%). The time before that was in May 2021 (Biden 48% to Trump 39%). Notably, Biden’s support today (48%) matches those previous highs.
Last month, Trump dismissed the idea that there were any nuclear documents in his possession. However, The Washington Post reported this week that the files seized from Mar-a-Lago included information about a foreign government’s nuclear defense capabilities.
It had been little over a week since President Joe Biden called Donald Trump and his supporters “semi-fascist” when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon of Florida, proved Biden’s point. While most Americans were too busy enjoying Labor Day cookouts to pay much attention to the news, Cannon let loose with a decision breathtaking in its disregard for both the law and the judicial branch’s legitimacy.
Australians have begun to see the new face of extreme religion in our “conservative” politics.
It is not just the rights of individuals but the (flawed) democracies that have gradually made room for civil rights for more groups than just property-owning White men that is at stake in the rise of the authoritarian Religious Right. These democracies are more likely than authoritarian regimes to protect the equality of Others, preventing the persecution and even the atrocities that religion-infused extremism can foster. Without data-driven secular governments, our capacity to tackle the climate emergency is crippled. It is critical that we perceive the risk that is reflected in the speeches of Scott Morrison to his Pentecostal audiences. It is not merely a foreign faith movement uncomfortably shoe-horned into our secular state; it is a threat of incalculable scope. We must work together to keep authoritarian religious radicalism out of our government.
Nor is this limited to the West or is Christianity the only faith drawn into the nativist nationalist trend. In India, the Hindutva movement aims to subdue all Indians within a Hindu nation with one faith and language. Shinto is central to a Japanese nationalist movement. Buddhism is key to Myanmar and Sri Lanka’s nationalist movements. Israel is self defining as a Jewish nation and imposing second class status on non-Jews within its borders.
Fossil fuel subsidies from major economies including Australia reached close to US$700 billion in 2021, almost doubling from 2020, according to new analysis by the International Energy Agency and OECD.
The Sunday Mirrorhas reported that 12 Tory MPs are willing to submit letters to the 1922 Committee to express no confidence in the incoming prime minister – and this, even before Truss sets foot in 10 Downing Street. For Jake Berry, MP for Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire, such a move was “certainly suicidal”, while former Conservative chancellor Lord Hammond warned Johnson not to linger like a “malevolent shadow”.
The Truss factor has also given British Labour a boost of seven percentage points. Party strategists, as part of this bounce, have already readied a campaign in the so-called Red Wall seats, using previous, leaked remarks from Truss about how British workers produced “less per hour” than their foreign equivalents, “and that’s a combination of, kind of, skill and application.” But opinion polls do not deliver election victories. The Tory party machine, cunning, ruthless and mendacious, does at least know something about that.
The Israeli military issued a brazen whitewash of its killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and its shooting of her colleague Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi, on May 11 of this year. Using weasel words, the report admitted that it was “likely” that an Israeli sniper shot her dead. Since extensive video and eyewitness evidence proves that there were no militants in the area at the time of her killing, CNN had already concluded after an extensive investigation that the Israeli military killed Shireen “in a targeted attack.”
Morrison speaks on Paul Murray’s Murdoch platform to less than 50,000 Australians and remains symbolically and seemingly blameless and shameless but we know the opposite to be the case. His Pentecostal invasion of the Australian Liberal Party will have long-lasting effects all of which were triggered by John Howard. What has taken over 2 decades will now take just as long if not more to repair. Democracy is a multicultural and secular value. Morrison, the Pentecostalists and LNP betrayed that.
Morrison’s whole employment history has been a closed book. The pages of which he doesn’t want read let alone discussed. What we do know is it’s been one of blunder after blunder, and broken contracts due to failed promise. The failure on Morrison’s side rather than on those who employed him and were left painfully disappointed holding NDAs.
Despite three weeks in which his political legacy has collapsed and his personal character condemned, Scott Morrison is showing no signs of remorse.
It is heartwarming to watch the stories of people embracing the Canadian nation which has worked so efficiently to grant them safe haven, to reunite them with their family, to make them part of community. As an Australian, it hurts to see our failures thrown into stark relief by the contrast.
The Commonwealth has settled with Rachelle Miller over complaints she first made in 2020
Ms Miller, a former staffer, claims she was bullied and harassed while working for Alan Tudge and Michaelia Cash
Mr Tudge and Senator Cash deny the allegations
A former Coalition staffer who claimed she was abused while working for the former government has released details of her settlement, as she writes to the new parliament.
Sports figures the world over should be soul wary about a regime that uses cash to conceal the bodies of protesters thrown into prison, activists tormented and disappeared, and murdered journalists. But Riyadh have their number, cunningly seductive, and aware of perennial weakness. With its vast sovereign wealth fund, the Kingdom is willing to splash out, and sports figures are willing to be bought. They know the harlot’s score.
Members of the Conservative party – the approximately 180,000 people who elected the new leader – will be delighted that the continuity candidate got over the line. Similarly, strategists for the opposition parties – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish National Party – will also be delighted that the continuity candidate got over the line. In electing Truss as leader, Conservative members have increased their party’s chances of losing the next general election.
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