The fascist trend in America’s politics portends a lasting erosion of the underpinnings of the ties which have bound Australia to its most important ally and provides a powerful reason for us to loosen these ties.
The back-to-back assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran were acts of either strategic folly or willful pyromania. While Israel has claimed responsibility for the former and remained cryptic about the latter, there is little doubt that it orchestrated both — and even some of its allies believe that, this time, the Israelis went too far.
Progressive Jewish group The Jewish Council of Australia has blamed “extremist” right-wing Zionist lobbyists such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for ‘weaponising antisemitism’ and therefore giving rise to antisemitism in Australia.
The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) is a constant presence in Australia’s mainstream media. Its predominant role is to defend the state of Israel come hell or high water.
Ironically, AIJAC complains about the Nine papers (Age, Sydney Morning Herald) not publishing one of its letters. It was sent in response to a column by Marc Purcell, CEO Australian Council for International Development (Age/SMH, 18 April 2024). Purcell claims that: ‘The evidence that the Israeli government is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza is unequivocal’. Evidence of media bias against Israel defenders? Rather, the denying of Israel’s Gazan starvation strategy (a longstanding affair) may have been too much for the normally acquiescent letters editors to bear.
No doubt, undaunted, AIJAC will continue to flood Australia’s ‘quality’ press with its defence of the indefensible.
We said No to indigenous Australia will we do the same to Palestinians?
Rashid Khalid, the eminent Palestinian intellectual has written: “there are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other”. We agree.
We urge the Australian government to maintain its support for Israel, for Palestine and a negotiated settlement to the conflict through recognition of Palestine.
The latest refusal from the Defence Department to disclose the Israel-Australian MOU to members of Parliament, a decision reached after discussions with a foreign power (that fact is staggering and disheartening in of itself), betrays much doubletalk regarding defence ties between Canberra, the IDF, and the Israeli government. More than that, it confirms that those in Canberra are being steered by other interests, longing for the approval of foreign eyes and foreign interests.
Foreign Minister Penny Wong has taken Australian policy a modest step towards embracing recognition of a Palestine state ahead of a two-state solution, as a pathway to a lasting Middle East peace.
“At the same time, [Opposition Leader Peter] Dutton reflexively dismisses concern for Palestinians as ‘Hamas sympathising’. On this, and in his approach to the world, Mr Dutton needs to decide if he wants to be a leader in difficult times – or if he wants to continue being a wrecking ball, making those times even more difficult.”
Pressure is growing on the British government to stop arming Israel after a leaked audio recording revealed that it is ignoring the advice of its own lawyers that Israel is breaking international humanitarian law and that Britain is in danger of also violating international law by continuing to ship Israel arms.
Chief of Air Force, Air Marshal Leo Davies, presents Sonnie Lipshut with an Air Force Commendation for the Lipshut Family Bursary
Australia giving Israel’s bomb-maker Elbit Systems a $917m defence deal is just the latest in a long and secretive history of military and aerospace activity. For the first time, Jommy Tee investigates Australian Zionist corporate connections with Israel which stretch to Australia’s most powerful lobbyist Mark Leibler.
However, the overlap between the Zionist representation role of the individuals concerned, the potential conflicts of interest between that role and the roles of the companies for which they acted, and how these were managed, and whether they were revealed to governments, suggests a more shadowy underbelly.
This is not a coincidence. Because News Corp is little more than a press agency for the Coalition, which reciprocates by unashamedly serving its interests. Coalition MPs, well and truly knowing who is buying their next round, slavishly supplicate themselves to News Corp and its vile former Australian proprietor — a nonagenarian crocodilian called Rupert. And indeed, to a lesser degree, every other well-heeled grifter who furnishes their electoral coffers. Because these MPs, most of whom are given every advantage by birth, know they are too lazy or lacking in talent – and potentially too pissed – to ever achieve much without gaming the system, preferencing the plutocrats, or ever exhibiting an iota of integrity.
Has this decision been foisted on them by the Australian Israeli Lobby, the LNP, Murdoch, or IPA? It’s certainly not a decision ALP voters would expect of their government. If Palestinian refugees came by boat would they find themselves in forced detention in open-air offshore concentration camps again? We know what Peter Dutton’s position is on that score Yes. While telling Australia it’s a holiday resort compared to where they are now. Israel will be the people smugglers and supply the boats with the foreign aid they already get from us no doubt.
There can be little more morally degenerate than the enabling of and cooperation with what the ICJ has warned is Israel’s “plausible genocide” in Gaza. Wong and Albanese have lost all moral authority and should prepare themselves for their every public utterance to be greeted with contempt, derision and scorn.
The Australian Government has paused contributing to the distribution of aid to Gaza, a decision likely influenced by our toxic allegiance to the USA. Dr Jennifer Wilson reports.
With reports of workers in media, government, business, academia and medicine coming under pressure from the Israel war lobby – some losing their jobs – Jommy Tee examines the power of the Zionist lobby groups.
The blockade of Australia’s biggest coal port Newcastle by climate protestors over the weekend resulted in 109 arrests. Wendy Bacon speaks with those arrested about the price of peaceful protest.
Israel has killed more than 7000 Palestinians since the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7 sparked the war on Gaza. Human rights lawyer Greg Barns SC examines Australia’s complicity in war crimes.
While Israel has the right to strike back at the Hamas organization in the wake of the latter’s hideous October 7 attack on Israel, it doesn’t have the right to do so in a way that recklessly endangers civilian lives. Beyond that issue, Israel is recognized by the United Nations at the occupying power of Gaza, and therefore has responsibilities under the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949 to preserve the lives and well-being of the occupied population. Finally, according to the Rome Statute that underpins the International Criminal Court, targeting a group such as “the Palestinians of Gaza” for death is a form of genocide, regardless of the number killed.
Australians have been able to witness the voter remorse that can arise when a nation votes on a specific question of policy in a referendum that has the potential to set their country on a new course. Referendum questions with that level of significance don’t come along very often for democratic nations but when they do the cost of getting them wrong can be far bigger than we might expect.
Last week the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet released a brief press release about Mr. Albanese’s forthcoming trip to Washington from the 23rd to the 26th of October which will be his first such visit since becoming Prime Minister. The enthusiasm of the members of Albanese’s staff seems to have run away with them. They declared that ‘the Australian-United States relationship is unique in scale, scope and significance reflecting more than 100 years of partnership between our nations’. They are very large claims but are they true?
Australia needs an arms industry like it needs a hole in the head. It will only contribute to flooding the world with more weapons of destruction when we are already being killed by floods, fires and irresponsible politicians through human induced global warming.
The Independent Australia ranking on economic management (IAREM) for 2023 shows Norway leading the world while Australia’s climb up the global ladder has begun. Alan Austin reports.
In order, the best-performed economies in 2023, with IAREM scores achieved, were:
Australia has been following in the footsteps of America and our Tertiary Corporatisation is just one proof. Degrees were once free, the government’s investment in our youth and our future, and health was a government responsibility, along with housing. Remember when the ALP promise was ” no child will live in poverty”( Bob Hawke)?
Today’s yardstick has slipped to “we will do better than the LNP” That yardstick has become an inch stick
Since the 1970s, many colleges and universities have become predatory financial giants, while mountains of student debt pile up and academic work becomes ever more precarious. An ascendant academic labor movement may be key to reversing these trends.
Due to the entrenched English class system, research has shown that the strong familial persistence of social status across generations has not changed in the UK across 400 years of accumulated data. With growing inequality and the emergence of ultra-wealthy and privileged classes in Australia – are we following the same path?
Meanwhile, Australia insists on forgetting rather than reinterpreting the past
Dutch King Willem-Alexander has apologised for the Netherlands’ historical involvement in slavery and the effects that it still has today.
The king was speaking at a ceremony marking the 160th anniversary of the legal abolition of slavery in the Netherlands, including its former colonies in the Caribbean.
“On this day that we remember the Dutch history of slavery, I ask forgiveness for this crime against humanity,” he said.
He said racism in Dutch society remains a problem and not everyone would support his apology.
The past five years of intensive anti-China propaganda, highly aligned as it is with government objectives, have been instrumental in propping up public support for AUKUS and the Australian government’s flawed foreign and defence policies. Why have Australians been so susceptible to the influence of that propaganda?
Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.
Carl Sagan said that in order to understand the present, it’s necessary to know the past. Nowhere does this apply with greater force than to the Australian media and its place in the nation’s power structure.
In The Palestine Laboratory, Loewenstein does not merely indict Israel for its failure to live up to the promise of its founding principles and its leading role in the supply, sustainment and normalisation of a border-industrial complex. He also condemns Europe, the US, Australia and the West for their politicisation of fear of the outsider, their receptiveness to divisive demagoguery, and their moral complicity in the immiseration of millions who live under occupation and oppression, and the millions more who roam the Earth in search of safe harbour. Israel may have lost its way, but once-civilised nations seem to be following it into the darkness.
Peter Costello’s Ch9, Murdoch’s News Corp, and Kerry Stokes… That 80%+ Oh, yes a very wounded ABC
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because the country has the most concentrated media ownership in the Western world, dominated by Nine Entertainment and the Murdoch-owned News Corp.
Hard-nosed billionaires like green energy champion Andrew Forrest, and his former venture partner Mike Cannon-Brookes, know that Australia’s future prosperity will come from sunshine and electrons.
But Australia has been thought to be a less equal society than many European ones, sitting somewhere in the middle between the United States and countries such as France.
By working with AUKUS partners, such as the UK, or with Japan, Australia is betting on the past. It’s certain that the future will be different. The time has come for Australia to make cold and rational calculations on how to adapt to this Asian century, which will bear no resemblance to the American century. AUKUS is a walk back to the past, not the future.
The Athenian citizens were the controllers and the engine room of their own democracy. They made laws, administered them and decided when they had been breached. No one, irrespective of wealth or power, had any more influence than anyone else.
This week 2GB Radio in Sydney got knocked off its number one perch. This right-wing gabfest has been at number one in the Sydney marketplace since 2004. It lost its spot to KIISFM which is an entirely non-serious enterprise. This is an important milestone. It marks a shift in the reading/listening/watching habits of the Australian populace; a change that will become ever more notable in the coming months and years.
The US has big plans for Australia in its preparations for a future war with China. US Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro recently said that he envisions AUKUS will turn the country into a full-service submarine hub that can oversee all allied underwater activity in the Asia-Pacific. Naturally, China views AUKUS as a major provocation as the submarines will be used to patrol waters near its shores.
One might well ask if Jacinda Ardern saw her anti- nuke stand as an “aftermath” of the 1985 Rainbow Warrior event after 35 years. I believe her response would have been “bullshit”.
As for Morrison’s Aussie and now Albo’s “tolerance” that seems like “gilding the lily” to the ALP’s misfortune. It has inherited some very damaging perspectives from a decade of the Abbott/Turnbull/ Morrison LNP that can’t be simply be turned around after 9 months.
During this time the Murdochian/ Conservative/Mainstream media stamp and influence has been in place for well over ten years telling us Muslims and China are the enemies. Something that hasn’t been the case in NZ. The Australian LNP depends heavily on cultural “fear” to maintain its status as a government and “win” at all costs, their sole strategy. Culture and identity politics was the focus of a government that didn’t want a magnifying glass put on its economic management for the interests of a particular class rather than the nation. Indigenous Australia and Robodebt ( kicking dole bludgers) are just proof that enemies had to be found or rather fabricated in every aspect of our white Christian European monarchist colonist lives. The Albanese government must find a diplomatic way to dig us out of the hole the LNP created in the eyes of the world and at home this past dark decade.
There was not a ripple of public dissent between the two leaders over NZ’s continuing ban on the entry of nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered vessels into NZ ports. This policy was restated by the visiting NZ Prime Minister. Prime Minister Albanese remained committed to Australia’s participation in AUKUS and to negotiations over the acquisition of nuclear submarines from the US and Britain.
The United Nations this week slammed corporate “greenwashing” and said organisations cannot claim to be net-zero while supporting fossil fuel projects.
Since the 1980s, workplace law in Australia has crippled the union movement. Today, it’s a finely tuned machine that exacerbates inequality in order to enrich a small minority of bosses.
Anthony Albanese’s Labor government claims that it views Australia’s neighbors in the Pacific as “partners.” For this to be more than hollow rhetoric, Australia must face up to the injustices it has committed as a colonial power in the region.
Australia can show the way You might not think it, given the decade of political climate wars, but Australia is the world leader in terms of solar electricity produced per person.
Toward the end of 2019, an article titled Lessons in how to hate China was published in Pearls and Irritations. Those lessons have been learned and learned well. Three years is a short time but the collective memory is also short. China is now the accepted enemy and the likelihood of war is spoken of more openly.
climate crisis and of a hegemonic shift from the US to China. It was an uncertain time and fear was being promoted. Those conditions still exist. The only difference is that the threat from the US and its allies has become more intense. We have learned to hate China and may well suffer from the education we have received.
True to its word, the Albanese government has announced an inquiry into War Powers. Dr Alison Broinowski looks at the politics and the players, and the chances of reform so the decision to take Australians to war requires a vote of Parliament, rather than a one-man-call.
Truss is, as the 2021 essay forecast, entirely immersed in the world and personnel of the billionaires’ ultra free market lobby groups masquerading as thinktanks. Her Chancellor is an ideologue and true believer in the message. The “thinktanks” face the moment of testing: who was the liberty for that they championed? Only the Ultra High Net Worth class and their High Net Worth enablers? Both the UK and the US stand on the brink of something unthinkable a decade ago. Australians must fight to ensure that our radicalised right (and the “thinktanks” that foster the internationally-networked radicalisation) don’t take us back down that path. We have a chance to rebalance the playing field. Will our right resume playing the game as a contest, or continue to try to trash the field?
Australia’s elites not only believe but speak much the same as do Newzealanders with one exception they have no treaty with their Indigenous peoples, no Bill of Rights and believe neither is needed.
Even though most Canadians would prefer an elected head of state, Charles III is the country’s new king. But enduring monarchism does suit Canadian elites, whose worldview is sustained by the idea of inherited privilege and power embodied by the crown.
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
olddogthoughts 
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